The pending US$83 billion deal is being described as an upending of the existing entertainment order, a sign that it's now dominated by the tech platforms rather than the traditional Hollywood power brokers. Maybe so. But what are those rules' And are they being rewritten, or will moviegoers and TV audiences simply find themselves back in the early 20th century, when a few powerful players directed the fate of the entertainment industry' He used Wall Street financing to acquire and merge his film distribution company, Famous Players-Lasky, the film production company Paramount and the Balaban and Katz chain of theaters under the Paramount name. Together, they created a vertically integrated studio that would emulate the assembly line production of the auto industry: Films would be produced, distributed and shown under the same corporate umbrella. Meanwhile, Harry, Albert, Sam and Jack Warner ' the Warner brothers ' had been pioneer theater owners during the nickelodeon era, the period from roughly 1890 to 1915, when movie exhibition shifted from traveling shows to permanent, storefront theaters called nickelodeons....

' Hey, Linas here! Welcome back to a ' weekly free edition ' of my daily newsletter. Each day, I focus on 3 stories that are making a difference in the financial technology space. Coupled with things worth watching & most important money movements, it's the only newsletter you need for all things when Finance meets Tech. Revolut's trillion-token reckoning signals a new era of AI Economics in FinTech '' [what it's all about & what it indicates about how FinTechs will be using AI in the future + bonus deep dive into Revolut inside] Stripe's strategic bet on becoming the financial backbone of the AI economy '' [what the acquisition of Metronome is all about & how it stacks into Stripe's bigger strategy, why the FinTech giant wants to own the full AI stack of financial services + bonus dives into Agentic Payments/Finance & the ultimate list of M&A resources to save you $$$] From $5 billion to $11 billion in 60 days: inside the most aggressive valuation jump in FinTech history '' [latest $1 billion fundraise & what it indicates, what to expect next + bonus deep dive into Robinhood and how it's building the Nasdaq of Reality]...

Good morning & happy Tuesday! Today, we're looking into Revolut, whose recent operational milestone with OpenAI signals a new era of AI Economics in FinTech (what it's all about & what it indicates about how FinTechs will be using AI in the future + bonus deep dive into Revolut inside), and Sony, which is about to issue a USD stablecoin to reshape entertainment payments (what's the USP here & why it makes sense + bonus dive into Klarna & recently announced KlarnaUSD & the ultimate list of stables resources inside). So let's just jump straight into the good stuff '' Rather than celebrating the milestone, Nesterov publicly labeled the achievement a waste on LinkedIn, revealing that Revolut had actually burned through several trillion tokens. His message included a direct call to engineers: help us reduce our dependence on external AI vendors....

On September 28, 1.1 million Americans tuned in for the 37th season premiere of the groundbreaking animated sitcom The Simpsons. A little more than a week later, another groundbreaking animated sitcom had its season premiere: The Will Stancil Show debuted on X, where it accumulated 1.7 million views. Since then, three more episodes have been released, piling up more than 3.5 million additional views and generating seemingly as many memes. The show, which was created by a provocateur-cartoonist named Emily Youcis, is notable for at least two reasons. It appears to be one of the first popular online television series made with the assistance of artificial intelligence'Youcis drew the cartoon and wrote the script, then used OpenAI's Sora to bring the animation to life. And also, The Will Stancil Show is neo-Nazi propaganda. The Will Stancil Show is all but impossible to explain to someone who is not addicted to The Website Formerly Known as Twitter, but I'll do my best. The real-world Will Stancil is a 40-year-old Minneapolis lawyer and minor social-media celebrity who once ran for the Minnesota House of Representatives (and has written for The Atlantic). He has become a favorite target of the far right for being something like the Platonic pure form of the Trump-era liberal wonk. He is enthusiastic about policy minutiae, perpetually irate at various MAGA-world characters, and prone to brawling with racists online, and he has a lot of graduate degrees....