The Verge’s latest insights into the ideas shaping the future of work, finance, and innovation. Here you’ll find scoops, analysis, and reporting across some of the most influential companies in the world. Our coverage also includes interviews with innovators and policy makers at the frontiers of business and technology on Editor-in-Chief Nilay Patel’s Decoder; a behind-the-curtain look at Silicon Valley with Alex Heath’s Command Line; and exclusive reporting on Microsoft’s strategy in Tom Warren’s Notepad.
The Reddit co-founder is now part of “The People’s Bid for TikTok,” a consortium of investors who want to buy TikTok’s US assets and put it on a decentralized, blockchain-based platform. The group, led by real estate billionaire Frank McCourt, submitted its bid for TikTok earlier this year.
This Wall Street Journal report looks into Apple’s history of spending to give some context to its half-trillion-dollar Monday morning announcement.
There’s a note from a UBS analyst outlining that the firm is a “skeptic” because coming up with new funds to invest would mean increasing Apple’s balance sheet leverage or reducing the cadence of stock buybacks. Otherwise, despite accounting for “some new, incremental spending domestically,” the report finds that based on analysts’s existing projections, “Apple’s announced figure is in line with what one might expect the company to be spending anyway, given its financials.”
AI tools are here to stay, Moyer says, but Vimeo wants to build on ‘authenticity.’
And things can still get worse.
What’s even more wild: Marvel Rivals was almost cancelled. That’s according to a new report in Bloomberg highlighting NetEase founder and CEO William Ding. According to the report, jobs are being cut, investments are slowing down, and the company is shifting its development focus to casual games stuffed with microtransactions.
This Wall Street Journal reports that beyond suing an ad group for an “illegal” boycott, X lawyers and executives have indicated that brands need to spend more on the Elon Musk-owned platform “or else.”
Ruben Schreurs, the CEO of an ad consulting firm, Ebiquity, is quoted saying the reason brands are choosing the route of spending a minimum viable amount on X is “Not because they want to advertise there and run their ads adjacent to the content on X, but because they are afraid of legal and political ramifications of not doing so.”
The recently rebranded Mozilla organization announced leadership changes that include Baker, who ended her run as CEO last year, also stepping down as chair and board member. In an interview two years ago on Decoder, Baker suggested AI could reset the browser landscape as Mozilla announced investments to develop trustworthy, open-source AI.
Now, the organization’s leaders say they’re still focused on that, as well as investing in privacy-respecting advertising and increasing the reach of their online fundraising campaigns.
Following reports that TSMC is considering buying Intel’s chip manufacturing business at the Trump administration’s encouragement, The Wall Street Journal writes that Broadcom is separately kicking Intel’s tires, but a bid is only likely “if it finds a partner for Intel’s manufacturing business.”
WSJ’s anonymous sources say Intel interim executive chairman Frank Yeary is leading talks with possible buyers and the Trump administration, but is saying his focus is “maximizing value for Intel shareholders.”
Keep your eyes on the money. That’s where the power is. Henry Farrell, an expert on economic weaponization, is concerned about the Trump Administration clawing back EPA money. To him, it suggests a very troubling precedent.
[programmablemutter.com]
Earlier this week, the White House tried to pressure the Associated Press into referring to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” in its coverage; the AP said the move “plainly violates the First Amendment,” noting that Donald Trump doesn’t have the authority to unilaterally rename the body of water.
Nieman Lab asked major newsrooms what language they’d use. Most are sticking with Gulf of Mexico, unlike tech companies.
Sony sold 9.5 million PlayStation 5 consoles worldwide during the final three months of 2024, more than a million up on the previous year, bucking its downward trend. It’s now shipped over 75 million PS5 consoles since launch. Software sales and subscriber numbers are up too, with profits at the gaming division up by 37 percent overall.
Sony didn’t announce how many of those sales were the $699 PS5 Pro, which launched in November.
[sony.com]
The two Japanese automakers said the deal had been terminated to prioritize “management measures in an increasingly volatile market environment heading into the era of electrification.”
The merger plans were signed in December, but discussions reportedly soured in the past few weeks. Today’s announcement suggests the issues centered around disputes over how the new company should be structured.
Notes from another week of Musk’s coup.
Donald Trump suspended a 100-year-old law this week that companies shipping online orders directly from China depended on. The de minimis exemption was used as a loophole by Temu, Shein, Amazon, and countless drop shipping operations. Check out my explainer below.
CEO Peter Stern made his public debut in today’s Q2 2025 earnings call. It was mostly a ho-hum affair relating Peloton’s ongoing recovery, but he did drop this tidbit about tariffs:
“The good news here is that no Peloton-branded hardware products are subject to the tariffs from China or if they were to re-emerge from Mexico or Canada. And of course, most of our revenues come from subscriptions.”
CFO Liz Coddington added that tariffs for Mexico, China, and Canada would only impact Peloton’s connected fitness products by about 1 percent.
The merger deal that was set to create the third-largest global automaker is now in jeopardy, with dealings between the two companies complicated by their “growing differences” according to Reuters.
While Nikkei Asia reports that Nissan has suspended the merger talks, an unidentified Honda spokesperson told Reuters that it hadn’t heard anything from Nissan about withdrawing from the agreement and that a final decision is expected to be reached by mid-February.
[reuters.com]
While discussing Q3 2025 earnings results, EA CEO Andrew Wilson laid out the future of Apex Legends for investors six years after its surprise launch. With “tens of millions” of regular players, there’s a significant update planned once the new Battlefield launches (it’s due out before April 2026), but that’s not all:
Our expectation is that Apex will be also one of those franchises [that last 10, 20, 30 years], and that some time, on a longer term time horizon, there will be an even bigger more meaningful update to that experience, an Apex 2.0 if you will. This will not be the last incarnation of Apex.
Elon Musk, running amok in American government, is attempting to dismantle USAID, taking an interest in federal real estate, and “reveling in the trappings of the opulent Secretary of War Suite in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.” His goons are also attempting to access Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services systems.
The company is amping up its fight against Amazon with a new frontier: ebooks.
Now that Donald Trump has issued tariffs on products from China, Canada, and Mexico, Canada responded with tariffs of its own, and China’s Ministry of Commerce said in a statement (via Google Translate) that it “will file a lawsuit with the WTO for the wrong practices of the United States and will take corresponding countermeasures to firmly safeguard its own rights and interests.
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued its own statement, saying (translated), “The United States should view and deal with its own fentanyl problem objectively and rationally, rather than threatening other countries with tariffs at will.”
For the past couple of years, Walgreens has been locked in a legal battle with CoolerX, a startup founded by the pharmacy chain’s former CEO, according to a report from Bloomberg. CoolerX replaced glass refrigerator doors with digital screens inside hundreds of Walgreens stores, but frequent glitches reportedly led Walgreens to attempt to exit its 10-year contract.
However, Bloomberg reports that CoolerX responded with a $200 million lawsuit over breach of contract and “secretly cut the data feeds” to dozens of stores, leading customers unable to see what’s inside of the fridges.
