billion

Santander and BBVA co-finance Netflix’s cash offer with 3.8 billion

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Santander and BBVA have doubled their financing to Netflix to $3.8 billion to support the acquisition of Warner Bros. for $27.75 per share in cash. The Spanish bank is thus positioned as a key actor in the most significant consolidation operation for the global audiovisual sector, in the midst of a battle to reconfigure the streaming market. How it works. The financial structure rests on a trio of international banks. Wells Fargo leads the credit union with the highest documented individual commitment for an investment grade acquisition, accompanied by the French BNP Paribas and the British HSBC. Between the three of them they have extended the initial bridge loan up to 42.2 billion dollars. What do the Spanish do? In this context, Santander commits to 2,672 million dollars divided into two blocks: 1,360 million in the bridge loan and 1,312 million in the long-term financing agreed in December. BBVA, for its part, offers 1,088 million: 510 million in the transitional loan and 578 million in the permanent lines. Other entities. Along with the Spanish entities, there are the French Société Générale, the German Commerzbank, the Canadians RBC, Banco de Montreal and Scotiabank, the Japanese Mizuho and MUFG, as well as Morgan Stanley, PNC Bank and Standard Chartered. The union brings together fifteen institutions that share the risk of an operation without comparable precedents in the recent history of the audiovisual industry. The Spanish participation, although secondary compared to Wells Fargo, BNP Paribas and HSBC, consolidates the presence of both entities in the corporate financing segment in the US. Seeking internationalization. The presence of Santander and BBVA in financing Netflix illustrates the internationalization strategy of both entities in large-scale operations linked to technology and media. For example, Santander announced in December 2025 a strategic alliance with MoffettNathanson to strengthen its sector analysis in technology, media and telecommunications (TMT) in the United States. and BBVA closed 2024 with record revenue of 3,194 million euros in the first half of 2025, driven by investment banking and corporate financing operations. All in cash. On January 20, Netflix modified the initial structure of its offer for the purchase, which combined money and shares of the platform. Now, Netflix values ​​the operation at 83,000 million dollars through an all-cash offer of $27.75 per share. Paramount, meanwhile, maintains a hostile offer of 108 billion dollars at $30 per share. Netflix wants exclusively the movie studios and HBO Max, excluding the cable TV business. This division will create an independent company, Discovery Global, which will be listed on the stock exchange and whose shares will be delivered to current Warner shareholders. When will we know something? Warner’s board of directors has rejected Paramount’s proposal eight times, calling it “insufficient value”. Netflix’s offer, on the other hand, has the unanimous support of Warner management. Shareholders must vote by April 2026, according to the accelerated schedule following the conversion of Netflix’s proposal to cash. In Xataka | All the unanswered questions left by Netflix’s purchase of Warner: a huge mess

Micron has emulated TSMC and is spending $1.8 billion on a RAM factory. Don’t clap yet

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Taiwan is becoming one of the technological hotspots worldwide. If the country was already at the center of the technology sector because it is the home of TSMCwill now take on more prominence in the new era of AI. Your crown jewel is investing an astronomical sum in the United States and, now, the American Micron ends to close a $1.8 billion deal in Taiwan. And you can guess the goal. Keep feeding the data centers based on RAM memory. Micron. In recent weeks, Micron has been one of the big names in the technology sector. However, Crucial may sound more familiar to you. It is, or was, Micron’s brand for consumer RAM, but also for storage. Their products are very well regarded when it comes to assembling a PC in parts, but They turned off the tap at the end of last year and the last shipments will occur in February 2026. Now, Micron is shifting its focus to something much bigger and more lucrative: artificial intelligence. Specifically, supplying those same components, but to large companies that are setting up gigantic data centers. In the end, a data center It is made up of hundreds of “computers” that need both storage and RAM. The operation. Given the context, we come to the news. As the company itself has confirmedhave just signed an operation worth $1.8 billion to take over the P5 factory of the Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation -PSMC- company in Tongluo, Taiwan. An operation like this must pass several filters, but the company’s intention is for the transaction to be closed by the second quarter of this same 2026. They have stepped on the accelerator, and as soon as they can, they will begin to do one thing: increase the production of DRAM memory. clean room. Micron has confirmed that it is just one of the operations it is contemplating in a global expansion movement “to meet the long-term demand of its customers,” and acquiring a semiconductor factory makes perfect sense. Beyond the fact that the components and machines are different, there is something that factories of this type share: clean rooms. It is an extremely… well, clean facility stripped of any external elements. Suspended particles are kept at extraordinarily low levels, temperature, humidity and pressure are highly controlled parameters and the air is filtered numerous times per hour. Static electricity is reduced as much as possible and, ultimately, it is a clinical space so that no impurities interfere with something as sensitive as the manufacturing of semiconductors. It is, in short, like an operating room (or stricter if possible). Example of a clean room “All in one hour“Creating something like this requires a considerable investment (which is why new companies are entering to compete in the RAM segment, as rumored with Asusit is tremendously complicated), and that is why Micron has taken over existing facilities that they will only have to adapt to their activity. Besides, take the example of TSMC. In Taiwan, all components TSMC needs are “an hour” away. This allows the assembly line to be efficient, minimizing time, maximizing production and saving money. The new Micron factory will be very close to the one they already have in Taichung, being able to emulate that way of working that has led TSMC to excellence. Consumption RAM for when. Micron is expected to begin optimizing the manufacturing process in the new plant by the second half of 2027, but thanks to the context we gave before, we know that these “customers” are not those who want to assemble a PC in parts or even assemblers such as Asus, MSI, Lenovo or Gigabyte: they are the ‘Big Tech’ that are setting up data centers. In a recent interview, Christopher Moore, vice president of marketing for Micron’s client and mobile business, said the problem and the RAM bottleneck is elsewherebut also stated that this growth in data centers has gone from representing 30% of its market to 60%. He also stated that, although Crucial has disappeared, Micron will continue to supply memory to OEM manufacturers, but it is evident that the bottleneck is affecting, that prices are through the roof and that things are not looking good if you had to renew PC.E And, according to Micron’s vice president, it will continue until 2028. At least. Images | Maxence Pira, Hunter Trick In Xataka | Google doesn’t have rockets, but it is going to install data centers in space. SpaceX and Blue Origin rub their hands

Saudi Arabia just opened a $1 billion theme park with a 4.2 km roller coaster and 160 m drop

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The Formula Rossa of the Ferrari World Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, has just been dethroned a few days ago. podium of the most spectacular roller coasters in the worldand with a drop of 127 meters and up to 240 kilometers/hour as top speed, these were shocking figures. But you don’t have to go far to find the new queen: it’s called Falcon’s Flight and it’s the jewel in the crown of the astronomical amusement park in Qiddiya City, in Saudi Arabia, which has just opened its doors. The first Six Flags outside North America. Six Flags Qiddiya City is a massive 320,000 square meter amusement park located on a mountainous desert cliff just outside Riyadh. It has 28 attractions, of which five break records as we will see. Likewise, it is the first of the franchise outside the United States, Canada and Mexico, but despite the distance from the parent company, it is a full-fledged Six Flags respect to brand standards. The person who has provided the more than one billion dollars necessary to pay for the project is the Public Investment Fund (PIF), the kingdom’s sovereign investment fund. Behind him, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, with a very specific goal: diversify the country’s economy, thus reducing the weight of oil. The park It is one of the five gigaprojects of Saudi Vision 2030its roadmap for diversification into emerging sectors such as tourism and entertainment. Falcon’s Flight shatters all records. The technical sheet of the Six Flags attractions in Riyadh leaves milestones such as the Sirocco Tower, the tallest free fall tower (145 meters); the Gyrospin, which by rising 53 meters has become the highest pendulum in the world or the Iron Rattler, the type roller coaster. tilt highest on the planet (63.4 meters), but if there is one that leaves your mouth open, it is Falcon’s Flight. We are facing the highest, fastest and longest roller coaster in the world. It is capable of reaching 250 km/h, rises up to 195 meters high and uses the edge of the Tuwaiq cliff to achieve a vertical drop of 158 meters. 4.2 kilometers long to trigger the adrenaline during the almost four minutes it lasts. This is the awesome Falcon’s Flight. Grantime, Wikimedia The impressive figures of Six Flags Qiddiya City. As Abdullah al-Dawood, CEO of Qiddiya Investment Company, explained, in a local programthey expect the project to generate 7,000 jobs and provide some $686 million to the kingdom’s GDP this year. According to its forecasts, these figures will increase to 85,000 employees and 11,733 million US dollars (at the exchange rate) and will attract 48 million visitors a year by 2030, as the project moves through phases. Much more than an amusement park. Literal. The Six Flags Qiddiya City opened on December 31, 2025 for the New Year, at which time it opened its doors to the general public who came and shelled out the $87 adult admission fee. Although the park is already open, from now until 2030 the project will expand to the environment by building transport infrastructure, the imminent Aquarabia water park, large-scale sports facilities such as a Formula 1 circuit, a stadium for the World Cup, cultural areas such as a performing arts center and residential areas. The amusement park is just the tip of the iceberg. With the fall in oil prices in recent years, the Saudi authorities have had to recalibrate plans and review their budgetary priorities, with unavoidable events on the horizon such as the Expo 2030 or the 2034 FIFA World Cup. In addition, several gigaprojects such as the futuristic city of Neom have suffered delays and cost overruns. Qiddiya has also suffered delays, but with the Six Flags Qiddiya City as the first operational asset in the macrocity, those responsible they are optimistic in its objective of attracting tourists. In Xataka | Saudi Arabia wants to become a world tourism power. First you have to fix something: the alcohol In Xataka | Saudi Arabia’s impossible bridge to join Africa and Asia: a 32-kilometer megastructure over the Red Sea Cover | Quiddiya

a good part of its billion in revenue comes from the only market that still goes to the movies

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If we are ever going to have a negative answer to the question of “Can James Cameron stop killing it at the box office?” It certainly won’t be in the short term. ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ has once again swept theaters, and although perhaps a couple of aspects of the triumph need to be pointed out, it is indisputable that we are facing a new success: it has already exceeded one billion dollars. The figures. The third installment of ‘Avatar’ has reached 1,083 million dollars at the global box office after 18 days in theaters. The figure is divided into 306 million dollars in US territory and 777.1 million in international markets, confirming the traditional foreign dominance of the franchise created by James Cameron. The milestone comes slightly later than its predecessors (‘Avatar‘He achieved it in 17 days and’The sense of water‘ in just 14), which makes us wonder if ‘Fire and Ashes’ will manage to replicate the extraordinary long-term performance of its predecessors, which remained in first place at the box office for seven consecutive weekends. Gear change. The rhythm of ‘Fuego y ash’, as we have commented, contrasts with that of its predecessors. The 2009 film ended its run with a historic gross of $2.9 billion, while ‘The Sense of Water’ ended with $2.32 billion. Both films demonstrated exceptional resilience, remaining at number one in the ranking for seven uninterrupted weeks, an increasingly unusual phenomenon in the streaming era. The big question now is whether ‘Fire and Ash’ will manage to join the exclusive club of 2 billion movies. The first indicators suggest a decrease compared to the second installment, which in turn had already experienced a drop of 580 million compared to the original. If this trend is confirmed, ‘Fire and Ash’ would be the first ‘Avatar’ installment to stay below the two billion threshold, which could redefine the commercial expectations of the franchise, which as we already saw It is not enough to be one of the hits of the year to be profitable. The importance of China. As has been usual in the franchise, the success of ‘Fire and Ash’ depends largely on the foreign market: for example, in this installment 71.7% of revenue comes from outside the US: China leads the list with 138 million dollars, followed by France with 81 million, Germany with 64 and South Korea with 44. Only in China, the third ‘Avatar’ got the best premiere of the saga in the countrywith $57 million in its opening weekend. The IMAX format was crucial: generated 23.5 million dollars23% of the total Chinese collection. A success that is more significant considering that the Chinese market has remained practically closed to foreign productions in recent years. By the way, has already been dethroned. Disney sweeps away. One more year, this is not news, but let’s confirm the Disney’s absolute dominance at the box office. This third ‘Avatar’ is also the studio’s third film to surpass $1 billion this year, following the live-action remake of ‘Lilo & Stitch‘ (1,030 million) and ‘Zootopia 2’ (1,420 million, at the moment). That is, more than $6.58 billion at the global box office, a figure that has not been reached since before the pandemic. And without the need for Marvel (with three premieres that did not reach the expected figures nor the collections of other times) nor ‘Star Wars’. No other study has managed to produce a single billion-dollar movie since 2023 but it is worth remembering, of course, that Disney has not been short of failures at the box office: ‘Snow White’, ‘Tron: Ares’ and ‘Elio’ were well below expectations, which poses a paradox. Disney scores the biggest hits and the main failures of the year, making it clear that Disney has the blockbuster formula, but its brand is no longer infallible. Prudent Cameron. Despite the success, James Cameron maintains a cautious stance on the continuity of the saga. Before the premierealready said that “first, we have to make money from this. We each have to prove this absurd business case again.” Cameron recognizes that the industry has changed and that the theater market is going through a moment that makes any forecast possible. As revealedwould call a press conference to reveal the complete plots of ‘Avatar 4’ and ‘5’ if they were not finally made. Another option would be to novelize the scripts, a project for which he maintains a certain enthusiasm. In Xataka | James Cameron has committed to the 48fps format for ‘Avatar 3’. Many viewers find it disturbing

Researchers extracted photos and statuses from 3.5 billion WhatsApp users. Meta didn’t react until they told him.

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Between December 2024 and April 2025, a team from the University of Vienna identified 3.5 billion active phone numbers on WhatsApp (practically its entire user base) from a single server and without encountering too much technical resistance. They processed more than a hundred million numbers per hour and extracted not only the existence of accounts, but also public keys, profile photos, status texts, and device metadata. They did it without having to hide, from the same university IP, same server, five accounts. For four months, no one in Meta noticed. Why is it important. This is not the first time that this vulnerability has been demonstrated, as it has already occurred in 2012 and 2021but the first at this scale and speed. The finding exposes a structural contradiction in WhatsApp: Your architecture should show whether a number is registered to enable contact discovery… …but that functional need collides with the privacy of its users. Knowing who uses WhatsApp in countries where it is prohibited, such as China, Burma or North Korea, can have serious consequences. There they detected 2.3 million, 1.6 million and five accounts respectively (not five million, just five). The investigation, published a few weeks ago in NDSS 2026shows that this crack not only persists, but has widened. The context. The researchers developed ‘libphonegen’, a tool that reduces the search space from billions of theoretical combinations of possible mobile phone numbers to “just” 63 billion real candidates for 245 countries. Using unofficial WhatsApp clients that directly access the XMPP API, they queried these numbers at a rate of 7,000 per second. Neither his IP was blocked nor his accounts sanctioned. Meta did not respond until researchers explicitly reported the finding in March of this year, and countermeasures did not arrive until October, just a couple of months ago. The figures. He dataset resulting five times higher the scandal of scraping from Facebook 2021: India leads the document with 749 million users (21% of the total), followed by Indonesia and Brazil. In Spain, 46.5 million accounts. 81% use Android. More than half have a public profile photo. 29% have the status text visible. Between the lines. The researchers were able to infer the operating system by analyzing initialization patterns of the cryptographic keys. Android starts certain identifiers at zero. iOS does this in random values. This detail matters because iPhone users are higher-value targets for attackers. They also detected that public keys are reused. They found 2.3 million different keys used on 2.9 million different devices. In Burma and Nigeria, tens of thousands of numbers shared the same key, pointing either to faulty implementation or outright fraud. They even found twenty American numbers that use a private key composed only of zeros. In detail. The method is not limited to confirming the existence of the accounts. For each one they extracted public keys, timestamps and the list of linked devices. This allows you to build detailed profiles without accessing the content of the messages. The age of the device can be estimated by counting key rotations. The “popularity” of a user is inferred by the frequency of depletion of their prekeys single usewhich are consumed every time you start a new conversation. Researchers downloaded 77 million profile photos of the +1 rank (prefix for the United States and Canada) in a matter of hours. 66% of them contained recognizable faces. They also found disturbing status texts, such as those from traffickers listing prices, accounts business advertising drugs or publicly visible corporate emails from governments and armies. And now what. Meta has deployed probabilistic cardinality counters to limit how many unique accounts a user can query without blocking legitimate contact discovery. It has also restricted bulk access to status photos and texts. The researchers confirmed that the measures work in subsequent tests. But no countermeasures protect those who were already listed during the months in which the system has been wide open. The big question. For four months, from a university server without even hiding their identity, they looted practically the entire user base of the most used application on the planet without anyone at Meta realizing until they were explicitly told. If these researchers were able to do it under these conditions, who else did it before without telling anyone? In Xataka | WhatsApp brings the big update of the season: the most important change is not on the mobile, but on the computer Featured image | Dimitri Karastelev

NVIDIA has paid $20 billion to “license” Groq’s technology. He actually bought it

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NVIDIA has reached an agreement to “license” assets from Groq and will pay 20 billion dollars for said assets. The company—not to be confused with Elon Musk’s chatbot, Grok—has been designing and manufacturing AI chips for model inference for years. The quotes around “licensing” are important, because this is not a deal: it is a stealth acquisition. what has happened. on Wednesday the news appeared that NVIDIA had agreed to sign a licensing agreement with AI startup Groq. This news was confirmed by those responsible for Groq themselves. on your blogin which they talked about a “non-exclusive license agreement for inference technology to accelerate AI inference on a global scale.” But what both companies say is one thing and what this really is is quite another. How to buy a company without buying it. As part of the agreement, the company’s CEO and co-founder, Jonathan Ross, will go to work for NVIDIA, as will Sunny Madra – its current president – and other senior executives who “will join NVIDIA to help NVIDIA advance and scale this licensed technology.” At Groq they point out that they will continue to operate as an “independent company” led by Simon Edwards, who was their chief financial officer (CFO) and will now become the CEO. NVIDIA keeps (almost) everything. In September Groq raised a financing round of 750 million dollarswhich placed its valuation at $6.9 billion. Disruptive, Blackrock and other companies participated. Alex Davis, CEO of Disruptive, indicated on CNBC that NVIDIA will keep all of Groq’s assets except for one: Groq’s newly launched cloud business. NVIDIA’s biggest “pseudo-acquisition”. This operation is by far the most important for NVIDIA, which bought the Israeli company Mellanox —which designs chips—for $6.9 billion in 2019. In an internal email obtained by CNBC, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang explained that “although we are adding talented employees to our ranks and licensing Groq’s intellectual property, we are not acquiring Groq as a company.” The phrase is significant but sensitive, and NVIDIA may want to escape regulators’ scrutiny with this type of pseudo-acquisition. They already made another pseudo-acquisition before. Last September NVIDIA made an identical move by “betting” 900 million dollars by server startup Enfabrica. As in this case, they called to that operation a licensing agreement for its technology, but as in this case what happened is that the CEO of Enfabrica, Rochan Sankar, and other employees, ended up being part of the NVIDIA staff. What is Groq?. Although the name is confused with that of the xAI chatbot, this AI startup does something very different from that model. Groq was founded in 2016 by a group of former Google engineers led by Jonathan Ross and Douglas Wightman. Ross was one of the designers of Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), and Wightman was part of the Google X team and would end up becoming Groq’s first CEO until his departure in 2016. What Groq does. The company has designed AI chips that are specifically specialized in inferring AI models, or in other words, accelerating the execution of those models. While NVIDIA and other companies are especially focused on chips for model training, an equally critical phase, they are not as prepared for inference. Chatbots at full speed. That’s where Groq comes in, who allows extraordinary acceleration of inference and ensure that when we chat with models they “write” at very high speeds. This is when very high token/s speeds are obtained, far above other infrastructures. Not only that, Groq is also cheaper thanks to its specialized chips, so if you want your chatbot to respond at full speed, Groq chips are a fantastic option. How to be a monopoly without saying it. This investment by NVIDIA demonstrates its intention to diversify its business and not stay stuck in its own solutions. The huge operation gives it a major competitive advantage because none of the big AI companies today had focused specifically on inference chips. Groq did from the beginning, and with this “deal” it seems clear that NVIDIA’s dominance in this sector can be strengthened. Is, some analysts saya defensive move rather than a strategic one, and they may be right: Google is getting stronger and stronger with its TPUsand that now Groq is basically part of NVIDIA – although they don’t want to say it that way – will allow it to compete better against the aforementioned Google and the rest of the rivals that are beginning to challenge that dominance. Image | Groq | NVIDIA In Xataka | AMD’s problem is not that it doesn’t make good GPUs for AI. It’s not even close to NVIDIA

Amazon is preparing an investment of 10 billion in OpenAI because if you can’t beat your enemy, the best thing is to join him

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Leonidas, had six-pack or not, he died at Thermopylae, but what is curious for our history is exactly what happened afterwards. Xerxes’ Persians had devastated Attica, and faced with the threat that all of Greece would fall, the Spartans—who deeply distrusted the Athenians—agreed to join forces with them. War makes strange allies, they say, and this story is not even close to explaining what is happening with AI. Everyone is joining forces. Then I’ll tell you how it ended with the Spartans and the Athenians. what has happened. OpenAI is negotiating an alliance with Amazon according to which the latter would invest around $10 billion in OpenAI. In The Information They were the first to reveal that negotiation, now confirmed by sources close to the conversations that have been cited on CNBC. What do each other gain?. Thanks to this agreement, Amazon will sell OpenAI its Tranium chips and will also rent more computing capacity in its data centers so that OpenAI can further expand the execution of its AI models and services such as ChatGPT. What OpenAI gains is, once again, economic resources to continue growing. Or what is the same: money to burn on that bonfire that AI has become. A strange agreement. The alliance is surprising, especially considering that Amazon had already put its eggs in another basket. Specifically, Anthropic, OpenAI’s absolute rival in the AI ​​race. It is estimated that Amazon has invested a total of 8 billion dollars at Anthropic, but now there is another reality: that everyone invests in everyone. Anthropic, the best example. The truth is that in recent months we have seen more and more circular financing agreements. Microsoft, which had invested 13 billion dollars, announced last month that would invest $5 billion in Anthropic, and NVIDIA also signed up, doubling that amount: it will invest $10 billion in it. And already, Even Google has teamed up with Anthropic. Long live circular financing. But of course the main protagonist of these agreements is OpenAI, which has been receiving blank checks (or almost) from giants like NVIDIA —100,000 million-, with Broadcom or with amd. We are facing a gigantic house of cards which is in danger of collapsing. But while it doesn’t, players continue adding floors. Or what is the same, money. Win-Win? The agreement is certainly interesting for Amazon, which has been working on its own AI chips since 2015. Trainium are the latest expression of that effort, and the fact that OpenAI is going to use them to train its models—along with those of its competitors, for the record—is good support for that development. In fact, there was perhaps more interesting support recently for those chips: Apple’s. And of course, AWS. In reality, this agreement is a continuation of that (temporary?) love affair between Amazon and OpenAI. The latter, once its ties with Microsoft were released, began to look for new girlfriends in the field of infrastructure, and a little over a month ago announced an agreement with Amazon Web Services worth 38 billion dollars. This is about preservation. All these agreements between big technology companies are not about money, because these circular investments are nothing more than exchanges of kind that compensate each other. What they are about is being stronger and protecting themselves. And if they fall, yes, they will all fall together. Let’s go back to Greece. The alliance between Sparta and Greece crystallized in the naval battle of Salamis (also in 480 BC, shortly after Thermopylae), one of the most important in human history. Sparta reluctantly ceded naval command to Athens, but the strategy worked. That union of forces achieved a decisive victory that saved Greece from being conquered by Persia. Alliances that end as they end. After that battle and that of Plataea a year later, the alliance began to deteriorate and ended up breaking up. Athens and Sparta were enemies again. In fact, 50 years later (430 BC) both would face each other for more than a quarter of a century in the Peloponnesian War. It was totally logical, as it will be that all these alliances end as they should: with each company going about its own thing. Image | OpenAI In Xataka | NVIDIA and OpenAI have just made a masterstroke. One that strengthens them and weakens everyone else

James Cameron has always played heads or tails with his films. Cinema has returned him a fortune of 1.1 billion

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Imagine shooting movies that cost hundreds of millions, dive into the impossible and play it all on one card: that the public likes them. James Cameron has done it for four decades and that bet on heads or tails in each film has helped him enter a select club: that of the billionaires list Forbes. At 71 years old, the director of titles such as Titanic and Avatar has achieved an estimated net worth of $1.1 billion, thanks to a balance between box office revenue, profit-sharing agreements and the exploitation of licenses for his most profitable franchises. Some hard beginnings. Cameron’s path was neither immediate nor easy. Before becoming a successful name in Hollywood, he worked as a truck driver and production assistant with modest salaries. His first feature film as a director, ‘Piranha II: The Vampires of the Sea’ in 1982. A creative setback that hardly brought him any income, but it helped him gain a foothold behind the cameras. The real turning point in his career came with ‘Terminator‘ in 1984. The filmmaker claimed that he had dreamed the apocalyptic story during a feverish night and, to ensure creative control, he sold his script for one dollar, a bet that resulted in a “low-budget” film ($6.4 million), but which represented a return of $78 million at the box office and the definitive boost for his career as a director. There is no easy movie: everything is heads or tails. Camerón risked his salary to carry out the project the way he wanted, and he came out of that adventure very well. That triumph led him to continue risking immediate benefits in exchange for control and participation in future income. In ‘Risky lies’the director went overboard with the production budget, becoming the first film to exceed $100 million. To avoid ceding creative control, Cameron renegotiated his agreement with FOX, allowing the studio to recoup its investment by ceding part of its profits to him. Finally, it was not necessary since the film grossed $378 million worldwide. Another example of this dynamic was ‘Titanic. When the budget exceeded $200 million, Cameron voluntarily gave up his salary as director and producer. The studio, resigned to rising costs, prepared for a financial debacle. However, the result was a success that grossed more than $1.8 billion at the box office and more than $800 million in VHS sales, making Cameron one of the highest-paid filmmakers of his generation after receiving a percentage of the profits. Avatar and his great gold mine. However, despite having a track record full of titles that are already part of the history of cinema, its real gold mine It’s the saga ‘Avatar‘. The first film, released in 2009, grossed nearly $3 billion worldwide and generated more than $350 million directly for Cameron from its box office rights, physical sales and licensing fees. Your producer, Lightstorm Entertainmenthas contributed to his fortune with parallel income derived from the saga through theme parks, merchandising and technological agreements. The sequel’Avatar: The Sense of Water’ It totaled more than 2.3 billion at the box office, with Cameron obtaining around 250 million dollars for its box office and production rights. Just a few days before the premiere of the third installment with ‘Avatar: Fire and Ashes’Forbes already takes its box office success for granted and estimates that Cameron could add at least $200 million more to his pre-tax assets if the film meets commercial expectations, as it did. the second installment of the saga. A legacy that goes beyond money. Throughout his career, Cameron has been known for both his perfectionism and his willingness to give up short-term benefits in order to maintain creative control or improve the end result. That approach has led him to technological and business projects outside of cinema: from immersion in digital effects with ‘Terminator’, to underwater exploration after ‘Titanic’ and the environmental activism at the end of the first installment of ‘Avatar’. Cameron doesn’t usually talk about wealth. In a recent interview with Puck, the director said that “I wish I were a billionaire.” According to Forbes, his salaries as a director, participation in the profits of his productions, income from theme park and toy licenses and the value of his production company, raise James Cameron’s fortune to over $1.1 billion. At least until the premiere of his new installment of ‘Avatar’. In Xataka | The “100 billion dollar club” has added a new member: for the first time, the new member is a woman Image | The Walt Disney Company, Flickr (SMPTE)

he exchanged ballet for a fortune of 1.3 billion

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At just 29 years old, Brazilian Luana Lopes Lara has become the youngest self-made billionaire on the planet, with an estimated net worth of $1.3 billion. She is not the youngest millionaire, but she is the one who has achieved it on her own merits, and not as fruit of an inheritance. The rapid rise of her Kalshi betting platform has seen her co-founder surpass figures like Taylor Swift and the entrepreneur Lucy Guo in the ranking of the youngest millionaires in the world. Younger and younger millionaires. According to ForbesLuana Lopes Lara is the youngest self-made billionaire in the world with an estimated net worth of $1.3 billion. This fortune comes from his direct participation in the company he co-founded with Tarek Mansour, at a time when the valuation of the betting platform that rivals Polymarket has reached $11 billion. In this new map of great female fortunes, Luana has displaced Lucy Guo30-year-old co-founder of Scale AI, who had previously taken the title from Taylor Swift who surpassed the billion barrier at the age of 34 thanks to her tour The Eras Tour. Extreme discipline and turn towards technology. Luana Lopes Lara was born in the state of Santa Catarina, Brazil, into a family closely linked to science: her mother is a mathematics teacher and her father, an electrical engineer. Since she was little, she combined intensive study with classical dance, until she reached the prestigious Bolshoi Theater School in Brazil, where she combined academic studies with a strong discipline in dance. according to what he said People. After finishing high school, she worked for nine months as a professional dancer in Austria before “hanging up her shoes” and betting on her other great passion: computing. She moved to the United States to enroll at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she was able to do internships at financial firms such as Bridgewater Associates and Citadel, experiences that brought her closer to the world of markets and quantitative risk management. At MIT he met his current partner Tarek Mansour, also a computer science student. Kalshi’s big bet. The idea for Kalshi began to take shape in 2018, when Luana and Tarek did a summer internship at the investor Five Rings Capital. There they began to give shape to their idea of ​​creating a platform that allows operating directly on the probability of certain real-world events occurring, from elections and macroeconomic phenomena to sports results or pop culture topics. Convinced that there was room for a regulated prediction market, they submitted their project to Y Combinator, Sam Altman’s accelerator, and were accepted in 2019. As and how do they count On its website, in November 2020, Kalshi obtained the license from the Futures Trading Commission of US Commodities (CFTC) to operate as a Designated Contract Market (DCM), which allowed its products to be classified as event contracts and separated from unregulated betting, unlike competitors like Polymarketsanctioned with 1.4 million dollars for operating without federal registration. That regulatory difference gave Kalshi a strategic advantage over its main rival. The figure of Luana: leadership, resilience and vision. Beyond the figures obtained by his startup, Lopes Lara’s story has become a story of personal resilience and young leadership in the technology and financial sector. His time in professional ballet, marked by extreme discipline and training that left no room for error. “We saw that most stock trading occurs when people have a vision of the future and then try to find a way to translate it into the markets,” the millionaire businesswoman told Forbes. transform that bet on future events in a million-dollar business has been what has turned Lopes Lara into one of the new stars of Silicon Valley. In Xataka | “I’ve worked every day for the last three years”: the price of becoming the youngest AI millionaire Image | Flickr (Ronald Woan), Kalshi

AI needs 650 billion a year to sustain itself. The problem is who will put them on the table

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Those responsible for the JPMorgan banking entity they have done numbers. For AI companies to achieve a 10% return on their capital expenditure In 2030, they will need to collectively earn $650 billion. That’s like saying that the 1.4 billion iPhone users will pay $400 a year to use those models. It’s not impossible, but certainly it doesn’t seem simple. Many use it, few pay. Above all, because today the number of paying users is very small. According to the data from the consulting firm Menlo Venturestoday 1.8 billion people use AI around the world, but only 3% of them (54 million) are paying customers of some subscription. ChatGPT as an example. OpenAI esteem that in 2030 that percentage will rise to 8.5% for its user base, which they project will be 2.6 billion a week. That is to say: 220 million people will be subscribed to one of ChatGPT’s payment plans, which will probably have different prices than the current ones in 2030. They do not seem sufficient, at least a priori, to make the firm profitable as promised. Advertisements. It is more than likely that the advertisements they end up being the other great resource to earn revenue from AI models. Although Sam Altman indicated in the past that advertising would be “the last resort” to monetize, recent data reveal that those ads are about to be part of the user experience on ChatGPT. A very risky bet. JPMorgan’s estimate points to a future in which billions of people will pay a lot of money a year to use the best AI. Apple account with 1 billion subscribers to its services, Netflix with 300Spotify with about 280and Google account with 150 million subscribers on Google One alone. It is evident that there are many users willing to pay for services that are useful and entertaining. The question is whether AI will be for so many people. And AI companies, of course, are confident that they do. The non-surprise of the bubble. In The Economist indicate that a potential explosion of the AI bubble already it’s not going to surprise anyone. The curious thing is that there is no excessively notable concern for the consequences. In recent years the economy seems to have recovered surprisingly well from disasters such as the European energy crisis after the start of the Ukrainian War or the tariffs imposed by the US. Recessions, this economic newspaper points out, they are becoming rarer. Everyone has jumped on the bandwagon. Mass vulnerability exists, however. Stocks today represent 21% of Americans’ economic wealth —more than in the dotcom bubble—, and investment in AI companies is responsible for half of the increase in that wealth over the past year. And therein lies the danger. Recession in sight? People have earned more money and saved less: if the bubble bursts in a similar way to what it did with dotcoms, The Economist believes that net worth will fall by 8%. That in turn would cause a notable decrease in consumer spending. It is estimated that the US GDP would decline by 1.6%, enough to push the country into recession. The difference with dotcoms. In this case that global recession It might not be so deep for a clear reason: the root would be in the investment markets, and therefore it could be overcome with a little more room for maneuver. Central banks could cut interest rates to boost consumption, a good thing on that front but dangerous for vulnerable economies. The shock wave of the explosion. If the bubble bursts, what could also occur is a painful reconfiguration of global trade. Lower US demand would reduce its trade deficit, but would worsen the excess China production capacity. By not being able to sell (as much) to the US, it would flood other markets with its products, which would probably cause some protectionism in Europe and Asia. The world is preparing for the stock market crash, but not so much for the economic and geopolitical consequences that will follow. In Xataka | OpenAI has no problem inflating the AI ​​bubble – it has a problem with it bursting too soon

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