Tootfinder

Thank goodness for Smokezilla, an ethical cigarette company that advocates for healthier living funded by billions from Philip Morris.

Saudi Arabia's PIF is transferring ~$12B worth of gaming company shares, including Nintendo, to Savvy Games; PIF transferred 11M Take-Two shares in December (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-14/sau…

Penske Media sues Google for allegedly monopolizing the digital ad market and depriving publishers of billions in revenue, following a 2025 US court ruling (Josh Dickey/The Wrap)
https://www.thewrap.com/industry-news/public-polic…

Penske Media Sues Google Over Accusation of Digital Ad Market Manipulation
Penske Media Corp., the publisher of major entertainment and culture brands including Rolling Stone, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, sued Google on Monday, accusing the tech giant of illegally monopolizing the digital advertising market and depriving publishers of billions of dollars in revenue.

Trump is on a campaign to blame all 80,000 Somali descendants in Minnesota for “billions of dollars” in pandemic rescue fraud. The leader of the fraud ring is here. Notice anything about her?
PS: It was $250M, not billions. Trump has trouble with numbers.

An inside look at a Myanmar online scam center that opened in 2024 with 3,500 workers from ~30 countries and closed in November 2025 after rebels captured it (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/world/a

At This Office Park, Scamming the World Was the Business
Times journalists got a rare look inside one of the compounds where the online fraud industry makes its billions. Inspirational slogans (“Keep going”) were just the start.

Trump admin blocked from freezing billions child care funds, judge rules
https://www.axios.com/2026/01/10/trump-child-care-fund-freeze-billions

The European Union on Friday
indefinitely froze Russia’s assets in Europe
to ensure that Hungary and Slovakia,
both with Moscow-friendly governments,
can’t prevent the billions of euros from being used to support Ukraine.
Using a special procedure meant for economic emergencies,
the EU blocked the assets until Russia gives up its war on Ukraine
and compensates its neighbor for the heavy damage that it has inflicted for almost four years.
EU Cou…

EU set to lock up Russia's frozen assets so Hungary and Slovakia can't veto their use for Ukraine
The European Union is set to lock up Russia’s assets in Europe until Russia ends its war on Ukraine and compensates for the damage. The move expected on Friday would allow EU leaders to decide how to use Russian Central Bank assets to support Ukraine financially and militarily when they hold a summit next week. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán opposes the decision. He has accused the European Commission of “raping European law.” The EU has frozen $247 billion in Russian assets. Most…

10 Years of Let's Encrypt #Certificates
https://letsencrypt.org/2025/12/09/10-years
Mindblowing statistics of this extremely important project, delivering

From 350.org
We’re calling on governments to send ministers to the first-of-its-kind international summit in Colombia this April and turn words into concrete road maps that end fossil fuels for good. Public pressure can move the needle. Let’s make the transition to renewable energy inevitable so that even Trump and the oil lobby can’t save fossil fuels.

End Fossil Fuels Forever
Time is running out. Our planet is hitting record temperatures, while coal, oil and gas giants rake in billions, and our energy bills skyrocket. But we finally have a chance to break the cycle. Over 80 countries are joining forces to phase out coal, oil, and gas. This is a historic opportunity to end the fossil fuel era and ensure a transition away from dirty fuels that protects communities, workers and the planet. But to win, we need more world leaders on board. We’re calling on governments …

'Sort of blackmail': Billions in rural health funding hinge on states passing Trump-backed policies (Politico)
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/07/sort-of-blackmail-billions-in-rural-health-funding-hinge-on-states-passing-trumps-policies-00679082
http://www.memeorandum.com/251207/p53#a251207p53

Right now in Budapest, these posters are hanging everywhere, claiming that "they" would raise taxes and throw our money at a Ukrainian golden toilet.
Yet #Hungary is clearly a net beneficiary of the #EU, receiving billions in funding every year and paying in significant…

In another about-turn, Trump has approved Nvidia H200 chip sales to China. It will make the chipmaker billions of dollars, but Democrats say it risks eroding America’s edge in the AI race and strengthening Beijing’s military and cyber capabilities.
https://www.…

Trump changes direction on Nvidia exports to China
In another about-turn, Trump has approved Nvidia H200 chip sales to China. It will make the chipmaker billions of dollars, but Democrats say it risks ...

Nice blog in the discussion about AI & coding,
"AI can replace most of programming, but programming isn’t the job.
Programming is a task. It’s one of many things you do as part of your work. But if you’re a software engineer, your actual job is more than typing code into an editor."
https://<…

AI Can Write Your Code. It Can’t Do Your Job.
The companies building AI are spending billions to acquire engineers, not replace them. Here’s why your job is safer than you think.

Just heard a story on the Indiana Senate showing some spine in the face of violent threats, it occurs to me that if one had billions of dollars, one could probably buy a LOT of untraceable threats. There doesn’t need to be a mass populace making threats, just a paid staff.

Excellent read: why growth stock companies are always desperately pumping up one bubble or another, spending billions to hype the pivot to video, or cryptocurrency, or NFTs, or Metaverse, or AI?
https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/

A profile of David Ellison, who is trying to build a media empire that could dwarf even the Murdochs' with help from his father and Oracle founder Larry Ellison (Reeves Wiedeman/Vulture)
https://www.vulture.com/article/larry-david-e…

Can Larry and David Ellison’s Oracle Money Buy Hollywood?
With help from his father, Larry, and their billions in Oracle money, David Ellison is trying to become the biggest studio mogul in Hollywood history.

It's wild to me how funding in our country works. Untold billions (if not trillions) for police and ICE. Billions in funding for the dumbest of AI ideas. But basic science? My wife is scrambling to get less than a million dollars of funding to do studies on heat waves that could help save millions of lives.
Remember heat waves? The kind of thing that will only become more frequent and deadly as we fail to curb our carbon emissions?

'Congress went to great lengths': Trump administration cannot strip billions in funding from NIH research grants, appeals court affirms | Law & Crime
https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/congress-went-to-great-lengths-trump-administration-cannot-strip-billions-in-funding-from-nih-research-grants-appeals-court-affirms/

My city is being invaded by outsiders.
They weren’t invited, and they’re not wanted. They don’t share our culture, and they don’t share our values. They took billions of dollars from us. They are violent criminals. They are ruining our community.
I’m talking about ICE.
They should go back where they came from.

Ukraine needs billions in US arms as Greenland dispute pushes alliance to breaking point, documents reveal: https://benborges.xyz/2026/01/19/ukraine-needs-billions-in-us.html

Trump Admin Suspends 111,620 'California Borrowers' For Allegedly Committing Billions in Pandemic-Era Fraud (Ireland Owens/The Daily Caller)
https://dailycaller.com/2026/02/06/kelly-loeffler-sba-california-borrowers-billions-pandemic-fraud/
http://www.memeorandum.com/260206/p114#a260206p114

"I'm a technology writer, which means I'm supposed to be encouraging you to throw hundreds of billions of dollars at the money-losingest technology in human history, AI. No one has ever lost as much money as the AI companies."
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/13/not

The US CBP signs a one-year Clearview AI deal, granting access to its facial recognition tool for "tactical targeting" and "strategic counter-network analysis" (Dell Cameron/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/cbp-signs-clea

CBP Signs Clearview AI Deal to Use Face Recognition for ‘Tactical Targeting’
US Border Patrol intelligence units will gain access to a face recognition tool built on billions of images scraped from the internet.

"Wind is now one of the world’s biggest electricity sources. So why are we switching turbines off?"
#WindTurbines #Energy #Renewables

Switching off wind turbines cost Britain €1.6bn this year. Here’s why
Wind power has surged across Europe, sparking concern that billions are being wasted due to "insufficient" grid investment.

Federal judge orders FEMA to restore billions in canceled disaster mitigation funding (Gabriela Aoun Angueira/Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/fema-bric-funding-disasters-trump-restore-50def95a599645b4fa3062c6547c6a3d
http://www.memeorandum.com/251211/p157#a251211p157

"this new arms race is halting attempts to tackle the climate crisis as countries scramble to secure critical minerals for the next generation of weapons.
The study found that at least 38 minerals and metals, including lithium, cobalt, graphite and rare earth elements that form the basis of the energy transition are being stockpiled by the Pentagon with potentially devastating effects on climate action"
1, 2, 3, 4, WAR! What is it good for?

World enters 'era of global water bankruptcy': UN scientists formally define new post-crisis reality for billions https://phys.org/news/2026-01-world-era-global-bankruptcy-scientists.html
UN report declares global state of 'water bankruptcy…

World enters 'era of global water bankruptcy': UN scientists formally define new post-crisis reality for billions
Amid chronic groundwater depletion, water overallocation, land and soil degradation, deforestation, and pollution, all compounded by global heating, a UN report today declared the dawn of an era of global water bankruptcy, inviting world leaders to facilitate "honest, science-based adaptation to a new reality."

This fall, Americans got to see what it’s like to go without a safety net for the hungry.
With the U.S. government shut down for multiple weeks
and Donald Trump refusing to fund SNAP, the federal food stamp program,
a panic set inamong the more than 40 million people who rely on it.
Families skipped meals,
and babies went unfed.
Food banks ran out of food, and some people turned to dumpster diving.
It was just a glimpse of what’s to come.
Start…

Wave of Tax Cuts Has Left Many States Vulnerable to Trump SNAP and Medicaid Crisis
President Donald Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act will shift billions in costs for SNAP and Medicaid to states. But with 26 having cut or eliminated state income taxes just since 2021, they may not have the money to continue the programs.

he's one of gen z's memetic totems and brings joy and prosperity into every hearth and home his image is displayed in

30 years ago the #HubbleDeepField was published: https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/hubbles-deepest-view-of-the-universe-unveils-bewildering-galaxies-across-billions-of-years/ - other Hubble deep fields followed, and now ALMA and Webb have investigated one of them ... JWST Spectroscopic Census of ALMA Faint Submillimeter Galaxies in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.18149

How far have you come? This page will show you how far you’ve traveled since you were born.
The Cosmic Odometer calculates how far you've traveled through space just by being alive. Even if you've never left Earth, you've orbited the sun, rotated with the planet, and embarked on both solar and galactic travel — all while sitting on your couch. https://…

AI Forensics: 354 AI-focused TikTok accounts pushed 43K posts made with GenAI tools that hit 4.5B views, including posts with anti-immigrant and sexual material (Dan Milmo/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/202

AI Forensics: 354 AI-focused TikTok accounts pushed 43K posts made with GenAI tools that hit 4.5B views, including posts with anti-immigrant and sexual material (Dan Milmo/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/202

This sums the #VENEZUELA situation up nicely:
For anyone questioning the legality of attacking Venezuela and abducting their leader:
Remember we're talking about a highly corrupt leader, a known criminal who used his high office to make billions for himself, and has manipulated elections to stay in power, has used his military against his own citizens, has protected his corrupt friends and punished his political enemies.
And the President of Venezuela did some bad things too.

Washington's cap-and-invest auctions have raised billions now funding transit, heat pumps, and clean energy projects. Japan is activating multi-trillion-yen green finance for resilience and transition. China commissioned a 1 GW floating solar farm paired with aquaculture.
Policy meets practice, at scale.
Sign up for the For People And Planet climate solutions digest:

Weekly Climate Solutions Digest
Welcome First light of the year rises thin and tender, and somewhere a wren stitches the cold air with a single bright note. It feels like a cue to pay attention to what is being quietly built. This week gathers a clear theme of capacity made real. Money meets materials,

I told my friend @… about academic journals and the fact they cost money to publish in and that the biggest ones have higher profit margins than Google and make billions and he almost broke down crying

I just realized the profit end game for AI. It's the same thing that fueled Facebook, Google and all the other tech behemoths: Advertising.
As Internet search shifts from search engines to chatbots, this is the next frontier for AI companies.
Chatbots will be paid untold billions to tell you what to buy, where to go, what to watch.
And with the billions of SuperPAC money - who to vote for.

The Grinch did nothing wrong. He wasn't *stealing* #Christmas, he was just gathering a corpus for training his #AI model. Investors are already lining up with their billions to fund the construction of the Whoville Data Center, ignoring concerns from residents.

Cory Doctorow, uncharacteristically humorous (rather than just sarcastic).
Also, as an American, I support his proposal.
https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2026-01-13-not-sorry-mere-billions-40dd2b261390

One Generation Runs the Country. The Next Cashed In on Crypto. (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/finance/currencies/trump-sons-crypto-billions-1e7f1414?st=wNsJyT&reflink=article_copyURL_share
http://www.memeorandum.com/260208/p8#a260208p8

Finally! Dutch parliament votes not to spend billions on a few extra lanes for highway A27 near Utrecht, at the expense of our centuries old Amelisweerd park. It was a useless, expensive, damaging and risky project.
Maintenance of highways and railways is a good proposed use of the money freed up.

Tweede Kamer wil toch geen verbreding A27 bij Utrechts natuurgebied Amelisweerd
De verbreding van de snelweg is omstreden omdat er opnieuw een stuk bos bij Amelisweerd voor gekapt zou moeten worden.

“And the cost of credit default swaps, which protect bond investors from losses, has surged in recent months on some A.I. companies’ debt.”
Cool cool So like a dot-com boom-bust with mortgage crisis characteristics?
https://www.

As A.I. Companies Borrow Billions, Debt Investors Grow Wary
Artificial intelligence companies looking to raise funds are being made to pay lofty interest rates, as debt investors become cautious.

Why You Don’t Really Have a Billion Ancestors https://edintone.com/billion-ancestors/ Or pedigree collapse and the hidden web of shared ancestry. Not billions of strangers. @…

Why You Don’t Really Have a Billion Ancestors - Miscellanea Edintone
Explore pedigree collapse and the hidden web of shared ancestry, revealing millions of ordinary ancestors whose lives continue to shape us today.

By plugging tens of billions of phone numbers into WhatsApp’s contact discovery tool, researchers found
“the most extensive exposure of phone numbers” ever—along with profile photos and more
A Simple WhatsApp Security Flaw Exposed 3.5 Billion Phone Numbers
https://www.

A Simple WhatsApp Security Flaw Exposed 3.5 Billion Phone Numbers
By plugging tens of billions of phone numbers into WhatsApp’s contact discovery tool, researchers found “the most extensive exposure of phone numbers” ever—along with profile photos and more.

I need to read it properly, but this looks 🔥 https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16652

Evolution Strategies at the Hyperscale
We introduce Evolution Guided General Optimization via Low-rank Learning (EGGROLL), an evolution strategies (ES) algorithm designed to scale backprop-free optimization to large population sizes for modern large neural network architectures with billions of parameters. ES is a set of powerful blackbox optimisation methods that can handle non-differentiable or noisy objectives with excellent scaling potential through parallelisation. Na{ï}ve ES becomes prohibitively expensive at scale due to the…

"Russian oligarch, Mikhail Fridman... [may] use the tribunal to challenge the sanctions the UK levied against him after the invasion of Ukraine. He has already started suing Luxembourg for this reason, demanding $16bn (£12.1bn): half that government’s annual revenue. Among the lawyers representing him there? Cherie Blair, wife of the former British prime minister"
#Kleptocrats<…

🙋‍♂️ What the fuck is wrong with you?
❓ Have you ever seen a bandwagon you didn’t want to jump on?
💩 Can you please be less shit? https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/@EUCommission/115643458015221823

Trump does not understand simple #business #economics. He wants to reduce the price of #oil to $50 a barrel. Well, OK.
To achieve that, he wants oil companies to invest untold billions in

Sources: OpenAI has held preliminary discussions with investors about raising tens of billions of dollars, and as much as $100B, at a valuation of around $750B (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-discuss…

OpenAI Has Discussed Raising Tens of Billions at Valuation Around $750 Billion
OpenAI has held preliminary discussions with some investors about raising new funding at a valuation of around $750 billion, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions. It could raise tens of billions of dollars, and as much as $100 billion, according to two of the people. Talks ...

From ⁨⁨⁨⁨⁨#AnnafromUkraine⁩⁩⁩⁩⁩ @AnnafromUkraine@youtube.com
#PUTIN’S WAR FAILED ON CORRUPTION: #BRIBES, STOLEN BILLIONS, #WEAPONS

🧫 Alkaline-loving microbes could help safeguard nuclear waste buried deep underground for thousands of years
https://phys.org/news/2025-12-alkaline-microbes-safeguard-nuclear-deep.html

Alkaline-loving microbes could help safeguard nuclear waste buried deep underground for thousands of years
Billions of alkaline-loving microbes could offer a new way to protect nuclear waste buried deep underground. This approach overcomes the limitations of current cement barriers, which can crack or break down over time.

A metal free galaxy doesn't sound like somewhere I'd wanna live. Glad our galaxy has lots of metal in it
https://www.sciencealert.com/strange-metal-free-galaxy-may-hide-the-universes-first-stars

Strange 'Metal-Free' Galaxy May Hide The Universe's First Stars
Over the course of billions of years, the Universe has steadily been evolving.

Washington's carbon market is proving climate policy can pay for itself—literally.
In just two years, it's generated $4.3 billion, with $2.8 billion already funding hybrid ferries, free transit, and other green projects. The best part? Over half the money goes to lower-income communities.

Washington carbon market generates billions for climate projects
Nearly $2.8 billion is set for state projects ranging from hybrid ferries to bicycle rebates.

Judge Blocks Trump Officials From Freezing Billions in Social Services Funds (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/09/us/politics/trump-child-care-funding-freeze.html?unlocked_article_code=1.DVA.Gj-Z.TMeU5aDGxdPm&smid=nytcore-ios-share
http://www.memeorandum.com/260109/p133#a260109p133

I’m not saying that this is good, but it recalled for me the ancient times when the phone company (there was only one) sent everyone a fat (in urban areas) book in tiny type on thin paper with everyone’s phone number, alphabetically by surname. Businesses were in their own book. You could also go to the reference section of the public library and use the book with all of the numbers in your area in numerical order.
Ancient times. The 1990s @…

Analysis: World Liberty Financial has earned the Trump family at least $1.2B in cash since its launch, while the Witkoff family has earned at least $200M (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/finance/currencies/tru

Hungarians rebel against Putin’s ally! Russia burns billions overnight as its own regions decay: https://benborges.xyz/2026/01/27/hungarians-rebel-against-putins-ally.html

Trump promises Schumer funding for NY tunnel project — if Penn Station and Dulles Airport are renamed after him
But who would go to "Pedophile Station" or "Bigot-Grifter Airport"?
https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/05/politics/schume…

Trump promises Schumer funding for NY tunnel project — if Penn Station and Dulles Airport are renamed after him
President Donald Trump told Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer last month that he was finally prepared to drop his freeze on billions of dollars in funding for a major New York infrastructure project.

A profile of VC firm Index Ventures, which saw billions in gains from exits in 2025, including Figma, Scale AI, and Dream Games, as it looks ahead to succession (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-01-08/inde…

How difficult would it be for Elon Musk to liquidate all of his hundreds of billions of $? Or for someone who had almost magic-like access to his assets and could do whatever it took to accomplish that, as quickly as possible. And reinvest it in crypto. And then anybody with an SSN and access to the internet can sign up for an MBI card and get a monthly stipend, amount to be determined later. How long would it last?

Trump Officials Bypass Congress to Push Billions in Weapons Aid to Israel - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/30/us/politics/trump-congress-weapons-aid-israel.html

Overuse is pushing the world toward ‘water bankruptcy’ https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2026/01/overuse-is-pushing-the-world-toward-water-bankruptcy/

Overuse is pushing the world toward ‘water bankruptcy’
Overuse and climate change are driving global “water bankruptcy,” with aquifers declining, glaciers disappearing and billions facing water scarcity, a UN report finds.

Google has one enormous advantage over all other AI players in the industry. It can offer "AI-modus" to the billions of people already using Google Search. And yes, AI-modus can be bad, full of faults, but it improves and gets better. For many questions it is "good enough" probably. Also it is just one-click away for most people on a site they already visit regularly. This way Google will create another unhealthy market dominance i am afraid.

Billions we have spent on speeding up our computers and our internet connections, just to sit and look at "checking if you are a bot" animations two microseconds earlier.

Sources: Netflix has filed a new bid for Warner Bros. that is mostly cash, and is working on a bridge loan that totals tens of billions of dollars (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-01/warner-bros-get…

 Under the cover of a looming partial government shutdown and a nation reeling from immigration agent-involved killings,
⚠️the Department of Homeland Security is quietly supercharging its detention infrastructure.
A massive Navy contract vehicle, once valued at $10 billion, has ballooned to a staggering
💥$55 billion ceiling
to expedite Donald Trump’s
“mass deportation” agenda.
The mechanism for this expansion is the "Worldwide Expeditionary Multiple …

How the Pentagon is Quietly Building Trump’s Concentration Camps
SCOOP: A repurposed Navy contract is funneling tens of billions into a "ghost network" of detention camps that can materialize anywhere in America overnight.

Researchers demonstrated a major WhatsApp flaw that exposed 3.5B users' phone numbers, with 57% also showing a profile photo; Meta fixed the enumeration problem (Andy Greenberg/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/a-simple-whatsapp-security-flaw-…

A Simple WhatsApp Security Flaw Exposed 3.5 Billion Phone Numbers
By plugging tens of billions of phone numbers into WhatsApp’s contact discovery tool, researchers found “the most extensive exposure of phone numbers” ever—along with profile photos and more.

Meta tolerates rampant ad fraud from China to safeguard billions in revenue (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-tolerates-rampant-ad-fraud-china-safeguard-billions-revenue-2025-12-15/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251215/p42#a251215p42

The January wildfires that ripped through Los Angeles forced the state to spend billions in disaster aid
-- and delay tax filings for LA residents.
The cost of Medi-Cal,
the state-run health insurance program for low-income residents, ballooned to $6 billion more than anticipated.
Donald Trump’s on-again-off-again tariff policies rocked the stock market,
which California heavily relies on for tax revenue.
And the state lodged a flurry of lawsuits again…

Your one-minute guide to California’s budget outlook this year
Spoiler alert: California’s deficit grows, uncertainty looms, and state leaders may have fewer options than before to tackle it.

How TSMC, Intel, and Amkor are transforming Phoenix into the US' chip hub, investing tens of billions and showing the difficulties of large-scale US projects (Peter S. Goodman/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/04/business/tsmc-phoenix-fab.html

18,000 Reasons It’s So Hard to Build a Chip Factory in America
The transformation of Phoenix into a semiconductor hub by Taiwan’s TSMC illustrates the difficulties of large-scale projects in the United States.

Washington's cap and invest program is turning polluter payments into billions for transit and air quality projects.
In Kenya's drylands, builders are using compressed earth blocks that keep homes cooler while cutting emissions and costs.
Real progress, happening now.
Sign up for the For People And Planet climate solutions digest:

Weekly Climate Solutions Digest
Welcome In the north, the morning light rests on frost like sugar on cedar needles. Far south, cicadas stitch a warm hum through eucalyptus shade. Nature holds its own quiet poise, and that balance is our theme this week. So many of these stories are about keeping what matters and

A look at India's push to become a major provider of AI services, as US tech companies pledge tens of billions in Indian data center investments (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/world/india/why-big-te…

Nick Shirley, a MAGA-friendly YouTuber, goes viral with video reports about alleged fraud in Minnesota, provoking approving responses from the FBI and JD Vance (Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/12/29/nick-shirley-minnesota-fraud-vance-fbi-somali

YouTuber Nick Shirley gets FBI response to Minnesota fraud probe
Shirley alleges billions were stolen in state scams.

Sources: Amazon and OpenAI are discussing a deal that could require OpenAI to dedicate researchers and engineers to developing customized models for Amazon (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/amazon-discusses-getting-special-a…

Amazon Discusses Getting Special Access to OpenAI Tech
As Amazon weighs an equity investment of tens of billions of dollars in OpenAI, the companies are also discussing a commercial agreement that could require OpenAI to dedicate its own researchers and engineers to developing customized models for powering Amazon’s own AI products, according to a ...

Even as he leverages his presidency to make himself millions, even billions of dollars,
Donald Trump is also funneling Republican donor money into his own cash registers
through the political committees he controls

"“Selling stolen oil and putting billions of dollars in a bank in Qatar to be spent without Congressional approval is not Constitutional,” the lawmaker wrote. ”Only Congress can appropriate money.”
Rep. Thomas Massie criticizes Donald Trump on Venezuela oil sales
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5697347-thomas-massie-donald-trump-venezuela-oil-sales/

Source: the NFL won't allow prediction-market ads during Super Bowl LX on February 8, but sports betting ads are allowed, reportedly limited to six total ads (Ben Horney/Front Office Sports)
https://frontofficesports.com/nfl-wont-allow-prediction-ma…

NFL Won’t Allow Prediction-Market Super Bowl Commercials
Prediction-market platforms have exploded in popularity and raised billions of dollars. But they’re not allowed to buy Super Bowl ads.

In an interview, Dario Amodei suggests some AI companies are taking on too much risk by "YOLO-ing" and committing to spend hundreds of billions on data centers (Shirin Ghaffary/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Trump Officials Bypass Congress to Push Billions in Weapons Aid to Israel (Edward Wong/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/30/us/politics/trump-congress-weapons-aid-israel.html
http://www.memeorandum.com/260131/p1#a260131p1

AWS launches Nova Forge, a $100,000/year service allowing clients to customize Amazon's AI models at various stages of training and refine open-weight models (Jordan Novet/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/02/amazon-nova-forge-le…

Amazon to let cloud clients customize AI models midway through training for $100,000 a year
It can cost hundreds of millions or even billions to build a large language model from scratch, and this process is more affordable, Amazon said.

Walmart, McDonalds and Amazon are the largest employers of people who require SNAP assistance.
The CEOs earned between 18-40 million last year, 1000x their median employee income.
They took billions in profits, while their workers relied on SNAP to survive.
Wanna fix fraud and abuse?
Fix that.

Ilya Lichtenstein, sentenced in Nov. 2024 to five years in prison for hacking Bitfinex, has been released early due to First Step Act, Trump's prison-reform law (CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/02/bitcoin-hacker-ilya-lichtenstein-bitfinex-razz…

Ilya Lichtenstein, Bitcoin hacker behind massive crypto theft, credits Trump for early prison release
Ilya Lichtenstein had been sentenced to five years in prison after pleading guilty and admitting to the hack of crypto assets valued in the billions of dollars.

ServiceNow announces a deal to acquire identity security startup Veza, sources say for between $1B and $1.5B; Veza had a private valuation of $808M in March (Valida Pau/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/servicenows…

ServiceNow’s $1 Billion-Plus Acquisition Aimed at Winning Agent War
Dealmakers apparently did not get much of a break over the Thanksgiving weekend, as a flurry of recent merger announcements showed. In just the last day, The Information broke the news that Marvell Technology was buying photonics startup Celestial for billions of dollars and Anthropic was making ...

Germany is facing calls to withdraw its billions of euros’ worth of gold from US vaults,
spurred on by the shift in transatlantic relations and the unpredictability of Donald Trump.
Germany holds the world’s second biggest national gold reserves after the US,
of which approximately €164bn (£122bn) worth
– 1,236 tonnes
– is stored in New York.
Emanuel Mönch,
a leading economist and former head of research at Germany’s federal bank, the Bundesbank,

Sources: Marvell is in advanced talks to buy chip startup Celestial AI in a cash-and-stock deal that could top $5B; Celestial was valued at $2.5B in March 2025 (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/marvell-advanced-talks-b…

Marvell In Advanced Talks to Buy Celestial AI in Multibillion Deal
Marvell is in advanced talks to buy Santa Clara-based chip startup Celestial AI in a cash-and-stock deal worth multiple billions of dollars, according to people with knowledge of the deal. Under the deal they’re discussing, Marvell would pay several billion dollars upfront for the startup, which ...

A languid spiral galaxy appears draped against deep space in a stunning new image from the European Space Agency’s Euclid telescope.
Euclid launched in 2023 on a six-year mission to map the cosmos at scale,
observing billions of galaxies stretching as far away as 10 billion light-years from Earth.
The effort could reveal how galaxies form and evolve and how the universe has expanded over its 13.8-billion-or-so-year history.

Sparkling Galaxy Merger Shines in New Euclid Space Telescope Image
The Euclid Space Telescope is decking the halls with boughs of starlight

Meta says it will continue to operate and sell the Manus service, and Manus' talent will join Meta to deliver agents across Meta products, including Meta AI (Meta)
https://www.facebook.com/business/news/manus-joins-meta-accelerating-ai-in…

Manus Joins Meta: Accelerating AI Innovation for Businesses
We are excited to announce that Manus is joining Meta to bring a leading agent to billions of people and unlock opportunities for businesses across our products.

Elon Musk ultimately presided over a $220 billion increase in federal spending this fiscal year, excluding interest, The Wall Street Journal reported last month.
DOGE in May, was tasked with rooting out waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government
but fell well short his goal to slash $2 trillion in government spending.
Now a new report estimates DOGE actually wasted billions.
Musk was tasked with rooting out waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government but f…

Musk’s DOGE Quietly Killed Off After Delivering Almost Nothing
The agency disbanded eight months ahead of schedule.

Donald Trump is trying to
take revenge
on financial institutions
that dropped him
after the January 6, 2021
Capitol insurrection.
The president filed a lawsuit
against JPMorgan Chase
and its CEO Jamie Dimon
Thursday in Florida state court,
seeking $5 billion in damages
and accusing the bank of ending its business with him
for political reasons.
The lawsuit claims that Trump,
his family, and different busin…

Trump Sues JPMorgan Chase for Billions as Revenge Quest Continues
The bank says his lawsuit has zero merit.

Despite Palantir's high trailing P/E ratio of ~450x, retail traders have poured billions of dollars into the stock, which is up ~3,000% in the past three years (Alex Harring/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/25/palantir-retail-investors-valuation-karp.html<…

Wall Street wrote off Palantir as too expensive. Retail investors can't get enough
The stock, which made its market debut in 2020, is an indisputable star of the retail investing world.

TSMC's conservative capex approach is resulting in supply-demand imbalances and foregone revenue, and hyperscalers must build up Samsung or Intel as its rivals (Ben Thompson/Stratechery)
https://stratechery.com/2026/tsmc-risk/

TSMC Risk
If hyperscalers and chip companies don’t build up a TSMC competitor they are set to forego billions of dollars in revenue and stunt the AI revolution.

The Trump administration on Monday said it would
pause leases for five #wind #farms under construction off the east coast
🔥essentially gutting the country’s nascent offshore wind industry
in a sharp escalation of Trump’s crusade against the renewable energy source.
The decision injected uncertainty into…

Trump Halts 5 Wind Farms Off the East Coast
The Interior Department said the projects posed national security risks, without providing details. The decision imperils billions of dollars of investments.

Refinitiv: AI infrastructure companies borrowed $100B in 2025; small companies face higher interest rates given investor wariness over unproven AI businesses (Joe Rennison/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/26/busines…

As A.I. Companies Borrow Billions, Debt Investors Grow Wary
Artificial intelligence companies looking to raise funds are being made to pay lofty interest rates, as debt investors become cautious.

Ubisoft says it intentionally shut down Rainbow Six Siege and its in-game Marketplace to resolve an "incident"; reports say hackers breached internal systems (Lawrence Abrams/BleepingComputer)
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/secu

Samsung, SK Group, and others announce billions in domestic investment after US-South Korea trade deal; Samsung plans to invest $310B and SK Group pledged $88B (Kim Tong-Hyung/Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/south-korea-samsung-…

Samsung Electronics leads new domestic investment plans in South Korea
Samsung Electronics and other major South Korean companies have announced new domestic investment plans. This comes after a meeting with President Lee Jae Myung, who hopes to counter concerns about prioritizing U.S. investments under a recent trade deal. Samsung plans to invest $310 billion over five years to expand domestic operations, including a new production line at its Pyeongtaek hub. Hyundai Motor Group also plans to invest $86.3 billion from 2026 to 2030 in research and development. SK …

OpenAI plans to test ads below ChatGPT replies for users of free and Go tiers in the US; source: it expects to make "low billions" from ads in 2026 (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/ec1656cd-e07b-48ed-92a8-26c7fe517899

Internal documents: Meta earned $18B in annual ad sales from China in 2024, making up 10% of its global revenue, with $3B linked to fraudulent ads like scams (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-tolerates…