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Ten Streaming Services Disappeared Last Quarter. None of Them Took an Audience With It.
Oura's Listing Raises $532 Million for the Company. It Keeps About $6 Million.
Google Knew for Seven Weeks. Its Customers Found Out From a Newspaper.
Xbox Is Three Quarters of the Way Through Its Reset. Halo Changed Hands on the Way.
Fox Paid $440 Million for a Library of Cheap Films. It Now Bills More Than $1 Billion a Year.
A Student Loan Refinancer Now Holds the 47th Largest Deposit Base in America
Apple's Second Round of Cuts Went After the Content It Has to Keep Making
The Cinema Ad Company Just Borrowed More Than the Stock Market Says It Is Worth
Stocks Had Their Best Day Since August. The Two-Year Treasury Did Not Move.
Paramount Settles With the States Nine Days Before the Meter Starts
Three Newsrooms Lost Their White House Passes on Saturday. No One Named a Story.
The Big Read
The NumbersThirty-Three Hours, Then a Board of Four. Automattic's Control Structure Was Never in Doubt.
Mullenweg has said publicly that he controls 84 per cent of Automattic's votes. That number, not the September board meeting, is the story. It sits upstream of the exclusive commercial licence to a trademark attached to software running on 40.2 per cent of the world's websites.
A meeting room seen from outside. Neither Automattic nor any of the four directors who voted on 9 September has said publicly what the resolution was about. File photograph.
Automattic Inc. told its staff on Friday that it has a new board of directors. There are four names on it — the novelist Hugh Howey, the author Amy Chan, and Henry Khachatryan and Krutal Desai, who together founded the social app IRL. None of them was a director three weeks ago. Three new advisers were named alongside them: Jaime Waydo, formerly chief technology officer at Whoop; Matt Van Horn, a co-founder of June; and Hiten Shah, a co-founder of KISSmetrics.
The directors they replace left in the space of a fortnight. Toni Schneider, Automattic's founding chief executive and now chief executive of Bluesky, resigned. Sue Decker resigned. General Ann Dunwoody was removed. Mark Davies, the chief financial officer, and Andy Missan, the chief legal officer, were terminated.
What connects the two lists is a meeting on Wednesday 9 September, at which the first group formed a special committee and voted to place Matt Mullenweg, the founder and chief executive, on a paid leave of absence, with Davies to serve as interim chief executive. Automattic's statement at the time was brief and supportive of the arrangement: Davies "will lead the company as interim CEO. The Board has full confidence in Mark's leadership."
The Numbers
Fox Won August by One Measure and Lost a Fifth of Its Audience by the Other
The ratings table now produces different champions depending on which column you read.
The Long View
Saudi Arabia Spends $83 Billion a Year. Its Pipeline Is Burning and It Has Not Answered.
The question is not whether Saudi forces can fight.
Weather
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Infrastructure Everybody Depends On Should Not Be Owned by a Competitor
Coverage Should Follow the Approval, Not the Advice
You Cannot Delegate the Thing You Have Never Done
Explainer
Eight-Tenths of a Foot Below Sandy: The Nor'easter, Product by Product
The Weather Prediction Center's 4.27am discussion calls for major coastal flooding over multiple high tide cycles.
$30 a Seat and a Meter Behind It. What Microsoft's One-App Copilot Actually Costs a Buyer.
The vendor's story is consolidation.
Claims Fell to 197,000 While Tech Announced 155,126 Cuts. Check the Denominator.
Technology holds 1.7 per cent of American payroll jobs and produced 29 per cent of this year's announced job cuts.
Beyond Dental Work, Mexico Is Drawing a Different Kind of Medical Tourist
Some Americans are staying for weeks rather than days, seeking intensive programs for chronic conditions that have resisted conventional treatment.
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How to submitThe Picture
The EU Cannot Admit Canada, So It Has Invented a Category Instead
The Machine
A Factory in Liuzhou Now Builds a Humanoid Robot Every Ten Minutes
The Money
OpenAI Is Sounding Out a $1.5tn Valuation and Putting Off the Listing
The Numbers
The House Voted a Third Time to End the Iran War, and Is Still About Seventy Votes Short
The Long View
The Doors Closed at Half Past Four, and Two Thousand Performances a Year Closed With Them
Editor's Choice
Kosovo's Former President Was Convicted by a Court Kosovo Agreed to Create
Thousands watched the verdict in Pristina, where the defendants are widely regarded as founders of the state.
Latest News
Everything we have published, newest firstPrivate Credit's Default Rate Hit a Record the Week Before the Fed Raised Rates
Fitch put the trailing twelve-month default rate across 1,300 private credit borrowers at 6.3 percent at the end of August, a record, with 14 default events in the month. Healthcare providers and industrial manufacturers are both running near 10 percent. On Wednesday the Federal Reserve raised the rate almost all of that debt is priced against.
State Capacity
The Government Paid $6.7bn Last Year for Work Nobody Did
The Government Accountability Office estimates the deferred resignation programme cost $6.7bn in 2025, about 70 percent of the $9.5bn the federal government spent on paid administrative leave that year. Roughly 144,000 employees drew salaries while on leave before separating. GAO also says nobody can verify the savings, because the payroll data is not tracked that way.
Pennsylvania Has 693 Measles Cases, 133 Hospitalisations and a Third Death Under Review
The state health department reports 693 confirmed measles cases across 38 of Pennsylvania's 67 counties, with 133 hospitalisations and two confirmed deaths. A third death reported by a county coroner on Sunday is under review. Fewer than one percent of cases were in vaccinated people.
The Board Voted to Close the Kennedy Center Hours After a Judge Refused to Let It Carry Trump's Name
Two things were decided on Tuesday. A court said who owns the name of a national memorial, and a board said the doors close.
A Comedy Nobody Had Heard of Last Year Won Six Emmys, Including the One That Counts
A first-season show sweeping the comedy categories is rare, and it says something about an industry where almost nothing reaches everybody any more: the awards are one of the few places the business still agrees on what it watched.
The Labs Asked for Rules. The President Says the Guardrail Is Him.
Three rival chief executives spent the weekend agreeing that AI development should slow down. On Sunday in Ireland the president dismissed the idea, saying there are "a lot of negative forces" behind it and that "whoever wins AI wins." The White House's former AI czar said the industry can pace itself without being made to.
A strike on a rail line to a NATO capital, timed close to a visiting delegation, is not the same kind of event as a strike on a Ukrainian city, and every government involved knows the difference.
Five Percent. The Monday the Price of Money, Energy and the Future Moved Together.
On Monday the 10-year Treasury yield touched 5 percent for the first time since 2023. Brent neared $110 before settling back. Diesel set a record at $6.23 a gallon. Chip stocks fell almost 6 percent. By the close, markets put the odds of a Federal Reserve rate increase on Wednesday above 90 percent. Each of those has its own story. Together they describe one: the end of the assumption that the shocks of this year would pass on their own.
The Former Rebels Are Losing Bangsamoro's First Election to Other Former Rebels
With nearly all votes counted in Bangsamoro's first parliamentary election, the Bangsamoro Federalist Party leads on 35.2 percent against 32.4 percent for the United Bangsamoro Justice Party, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front's own party. The leader in front is the region's chief minister, himself a former MILF commander. Turnout passed 82 percent. Proclamations are delayed.
The Kennedy Center Says It Cannot Make Payroll, and Its Board Has Named One Way Out
A performing arts centre runs on three kinds of money: tickets, donors and grants. All three fell at once, and the proposed rescue is tied to the dispute that drove some of them away.
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The Story So Far
The AI Buildout19 stories
- 26 Sept $30 a Seat and a Meter Behind It. What Microsoft's One-App Copilot Actually Costs a Buyer.
- 14 Sept The Market Read the Essay as a Forecast for Chip Demand
- 10 Sept The $875m Bet Is That Inference Is a Memory Problem
- 10 Sept The Deal Was Structured to Avoid a Filing. The Filing Is Now the Investigation.
- 9 Sept The Clause That Matters Is the One Sending Data Back
- 8 Sept Two Thirds of the Chip Money Went to Running Models, Not Training Them
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The Ports Fixed Themselves. The Roads Behind Them Did Not
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Everyone Diversified Their Model Suppliers. Almost Nobody Diversified the Layer Underneath
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The Equipment Lease Was the Last Easy Credit. It Is Not Any More
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The Delivery Room Is the First Thing a Rural Hospital Closes
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The Quiet Revenue Line in Your Index Fund
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School Districts Are Budgeting for Students Who Never Arrived
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The Cranberry Brief