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A company from Valencia manufactures Mercadona mochis. They have grown to 165 million euros

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Who is the company behind Mercadona’s addictive dochis? From battle ice cream to vegan mochis and plants in Cheste, if you have heard of Estiu you will have heard of a success story to be very proud of. Helados Estiu went from being the typical discreet cheap ice cream factory to a central player in the most powerful supermarket in Spain. “Estiu” is summer and in the summer was when they moved, one from 1997, to the highway Manises-Ribarroja km 11.1. From there they sell dozens of liters of ice cream every year and now they are destroying that Trojan horse that is “dochis”, their own version of mochis with crushed cookies. Yes, I have two boxes in the freezer. The white label has known how to bet on the Japanese dessert and has been eaten, in industrial volumeto other legendary companies in the sector such as Frigo or La Lechera. Manufacturing for the leader. Helados Estiu was born in 1983 with a clear idea of ​​producing battle ice creams, a summer campaign and always low prices. During the first decades it worked with various partners, national and European, without completely taking off. It is in 2013 when the large injection of capital begins to expand lines and improve structures: warehouses are expanded, water efficiency is improved, formats are diversified and logistics automation is implemented with Pallet Shuttle. Not for nothing was the ‘mini chocolate cookie’ a hit that ate Maxibon’s toast. But the turning point came in 2002, when they closed their supply agreement with Mercadona and entered the circuit of “screw supplier” by Hacendado. From that turning point today come things as different as chocolates, sandwiches, frozen cakes and the coconut and mango mochis that serve as a bridge between Japan and the supermarket aisle. Can a single manufacturer really shape what a country eats? It seems so. And they are addictive. Or that’s how their numbers explain it. In 2019 it had a turnover of around 61 million euros and sold 27.7 million liters of ice cream. In 2023 it was already at 138 million euros (+30% over 2022), 44 million liters and a average staff of 473 people51% more than the previous year. In 2024 it will reach around 150 million in turnover, 45 million liters and 8.8 million in profit. In 2025 it will reach 165 million, with more than 46 million liters sold and exceeding the 9 million in net profits. The white label, the cat in the water. In the Spanish ice cream market, white label rules. In 2024, Kantar estimated the value share of private labels in ice cream at 68.5%, compared to names that previously seemed untouchable such as Frigo, La Lechera or Häagen-Dazs. In mass consumption, private label has gone from representing 20% ​​of the value in 2003 to touch 44% in 2024and experts see room for it to approach 70% in many categories. And Mercadona is the epicenter of this shift, with a food distribution share that represents a third of the Spanish market, and with those Hacendado ice creams with a wide and very high rotation of styles and flavors. And its price has cost it: the plant in Cheste cost more than 31 million euros, with specific lines for mochis and vegan ice creams, and another 26 million investment is expected in three years. In exchange, of the 65 types of ice cream that Mercadona sells in Madrid, 22 are manufactured by this Valencian company. 34% of the ice cream catalog of the giant Juan Roig. Mochi is the passport. It is true that for the average consumer, Estiu does not exist. What you see is a black cream-flavored chocolate, the mini-sandwich (so you don’t feel so guilty consuming twice as many calories as the standard format) or the coconut mochi at 2.90 euros for a box of six. Estiu entered this format eleven years ago, replicating the Japanese sweet with rice dough and filled with coconut, mango or pistachio ice cream under the Hacendado brand. The invention worked so well that they ended up exporting it: Wao Mochi is the own brand that, in 2019, began selling in Holland, Ireland, Ukraine, Finland, Latvia, Germany and Armenia. At first it was almost an experiment, a small fraction of the business. Vawaii, its vegan ice cream brand, occupies the plant-based niche and today more than 26,000 boxes of frozen mochis are sold daily in its three main flavors, and with that surprise called Dochi Cheesecake. Although the favorite of many is still the banoffee: banana, the crunchy cookie and the dulce de leche filling. The best of the flash remains. Growing by selling cheap, this has been its key. None of this would make sense without a very aggressive pricing policy. All their ice creams are systematically below the benchmarks of famous manufacturers, between 2 and 4 euros for complete boxes of 6 products. A frozen hook, a treat for the after-dinner meal that has built a small empire and aims to continue growing. Ironically, mochis travel from hot Spain to Finland. Images | Summer Ice CreamFlickr (Nina Ding) In Xataka | Fernando Sáenz, one of the best ice cream makers in the world, puts the dots over the i’s: “Mercadona has changed the palate of the Spanish people” In Xataka | Italy has taken the “gourmetization” of ice cream to the extreme with a €95 cone. Now the country debates whether that is “idiots”

In 2004, 15 driverless cars competed in the desert for a million dollars. None of them ended, but they changed the industry forever

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On March 13, 2004, at dawn, fifteen vehicles left Barstow, California, heading for the Mojave Desert. They did not have a driver. Their mission was to travel more than 200 kilometers of hostile terrain to Primm, Nevada, without anyone at the wheel or remote control in between. The first to do it would win a million dollars. No one got it. Objective: operate without a driver. The DARPA Grand Challenge It was a competition organized by the United States Advanced Defense Projects Agency, the same organization that once laid the foundations for the Internet. Congress had set a goal that, by 2015, one-third of military ground vehicles could operate without drivers, thereby reducing the risk to soldiers on resupply and transportation missions in war zones. To accelerate that research, DARPA decided to open the door to anyone, whether they were universities, hobbyists, or independent engineers. It was enough to present a vehicle capable of driving itself. In detail. Twenty-one candidates passed the previous qualifying tests, held at the California Speedway circuit, and fifteen vehicles arrived at the starting line of the desert. There was everything from SUVs, to pickup trucks, and even modified motorcycles with computers, radar, cameras, and GPS receivers to “see” the terrain and decide for themselves how to navigate it. The route, about 228 kilometers, was not revealed until two hours before departure, precisely to check that the systems were capable of interpreting the environment in real time and not memorizing a route in advance. ORAn almost comical disaster. one of the cars it capsized as soon as it started and had to withdraw before the official start. Two others did not even start the test. Three hours into the race, out of a limit of ten, only four vehicles were still running. The rest fell due to mechanical failures, blocked brakes, broken axles or navigation systems that lost direction. According to collect the specialized magazine IEEE Spectrum, the image offered by the exit was “the most diverse collection of vehicles gathered in one place since the filming of Mad Max 2.” Who went further. The vehicle that advanced the most It was Sandstorm.a 1986 Humvee modified by Carnegie Mellon University’s Red Team. It traveled 11.9 kilometers before getting stranded on a slope in the terrain after exiting a horseshoe curve, according to the university itself. The impact broke front axles and burst wheels, and fuel began to spill from the tank. Its manager, robotics professor William “Red” Whittaker, acknowledged that the car arrived “injured” to the test, as it had overturned during a test the previous week and the team barely had time to fully repair it. Shortly after, another of the vehicles, nicknamed DAD (Digital Auto Drive), became immobilized. and it caught fire before those responsible for the event deactivated it remotely. No team exceeded 12 kilometers of a route that was supposed to exceed 200. It wasn’t entirely a failure.. Although the million dollars remained without an owner, DARPA considered that the experiment had fulfilled its real function: to demonstrate that there was a community of engineers, students and programmers willing to solve a problem that until then seemed like something out of science fiction. The day after the disaster in the desert, the agency announced that it would repeat the test a year and a half later, this time with two million dollars. And the revenge arrived. On October 8, 2005, in a new edition on a 212-kilometer route, five vehicles completed the route for the first time in history. The winner was Stanley, a modified Volkswagen Touareg by the Stanford University team led by German engineer Sebastian Thrun, who crossed the finish line in 6 hours and 53 minutes. Sandstorm itself, now repaired, came second. The real impact came later. That race through the desert ended up being the seed of the autonomous car industry as we know it today. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin They came in disguise to witness the 2005 test and, shortly after, Thrun was hired to lead Google X, the company’s experimental projects laboratory. There, along with other DARPA test veterans such as Anthony Levandowski, Chris Urmson and Mike Montemerlo, Thrun launched in 2009 the secret project that would eventually become Waymo, today one of the main autonomous car companies in the world. Stanley itself, the 2005 winning car, is currently preserved in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. And now what. Two decades after that first failed test in the desert, driverless cars They are already circulating through the streets from cities like San Francisco, Phoenix or Shanghai, and companies like Waymo or Tesla are committed to autonomous taxis becoming commonplace. In Spain we will briefly see some doing tests this year in Madrid. Although the really curious thing was that, a test in which most of the cars made fools of themselves, ended up being the real starting point of a technology that today moves billions of dollars. Cover image | Lemonodor In Xataka | China has an amazing 10-kilometer underwater tunnel and 200,000 LED lights with one goal: to keep you from falling asleep

When Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, no one dared to cross it. Nobody except a 300 million Russian superyacht

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For months now, the Strait of Hormuz has been one of the places more dangerous of the world to navigate. Oil tankers anchored for weeks, freighters turning around with their empty warehouses and marine insurance with unattainable prices due to the high risk of receiving a missile strike from the coasts of Iran. No one wants to cross those waters while Iran and the United States launch cross-threats and naval mines at each other. In the midst of this chaotic scenario and without warning, a superyacht shaped like a futuristic submarine set sail from Dubai. It crossed one of the most guarded maritime stretches on the planet at the moment and, as if nothing had happened, set course to the paradisiacal coasts of the Maldives islands. A yacht with a single letter. The ship that challenged the maritime blockade of the ayatollahs and the United States is called Motor Yacht A or simply TOin honor of the initial of its owner: the Russian coal oligarch Andrey Melnichenko and that of his wife Aleksandra. The superyacht does not exactly go unnoticed. It measures 129 meters in length and its designer Philippe Starck, who also designed he Venus by Steve Jobs, he had in an interview for Boat International which took just a few seconds to sketch the first strokes of the yacht’s futuristic design TO. “Sometimes a design takes me only 30 seconds,” the designer acknowledged. A floating mansion with all the luxuries. He Motor Yacht A It combines a futuristic exterior with an interior of excessive luxury with capacity for 14 guests in seven cabins and up to 42 crew members. As and how he shelled Robb Reportthe superyacht has three outdoor pools in the aft area (one of them with a glass bottom over its own yacht club), a jacuzzi with aqua massage seats and a helipad. Inside, a large silver-lined staircase with a railing valued at $60,000 stands out, while the master suite, measuring more than 240 m2, incorporates televisions that descend from the ceiling, a rotating bed and bulletproof glass in the windows. In addition, the owner’s suite includes a private bathroom with a bathtub and shower also covered in silver. Altogether, a 2,200 m2 floating mansion worth approximately $300 million, according to the specialized medium SuperYatch Fan. The feat that no one saw coming. As indicated by the last location of your AIS beaconhe Motor Yatch A still was found at Dubai’s Rashid Port on July 4. Something that confirms the specialized YouTube channel The Yacht Reportwhich tracked his movements. According to the information obtained, the TO It sailed along the coast of the United Arab Emirates and took the safe corridor provided by Omani waters, not the Iranian corridor used by tankers and cargo ships, to reach an Omani port the next day. He stayed there for ten days. On July 14, he set sail again, crossed the US military blockade and entered the open waters of the Arabian Sea. Their declared destination, according to your AIS signal, They are the Maldives. The choice of destination is not accidental. In addition to transparent waters and fine white sand, the country serves as a refuge for the yachts of Russian tycoons who want to avoid confiscation of your assets due to sanctions for the war in Ukraine. He Motor Yatch A He was saved, his brother was not.. Melnichenko and his wife They were sanctioned by the European Union in March 2022, just days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Although, according to what was published by Reutersthe millionaire managed to circumvent the blockade by protecting his assets abroad. However, the older brother of Motor Yatch Athe 142 meter sailboat Sailing Yatch Awas trapped in the port of Trieste where still in dispute with the Italian government and today is, almost unintentionally, a tourist attraction of the city. He is not the first millionaire to gamble. It is not the first time that a Russian yacht defies Tehran’s missile batteries or the US blockade by flouting prohibitions. In April, the Northowned by tycoon Alexei Mordashov, followed almost the same route to Oman. He TO has used the same formula based on the unexpected presence of a luxury yacht tiptoeing across the most stressed area of ​​the planet for a geopolitical conflict what has in a lifelessness to energy markets around the world. In Xataka | Anti-drone systems, swimming pools, jacuzzis and live lobster tanks: the price of the most expensive yachts in the world Image | Wikimedia Commons (MatthiasKabel), Superyatch Fan, Boat International.

there are already 265,000 million dollars for 2 nm

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TSMC is going to invest an additional $100 billion in the US to build at least four more factories and several advanced packaging plants in Arizona. It CC Wei announcedthe president and CEO of this company, during the second quarter results conference held in Taipei (Taiwan). The new facilities they will produce chips at the 2nm node and later generationsand confirm a rumor that was already circulating in February. TSMC’s total commitment in the US now amounts to $265 billion. However, the company has not offered a specific construction schedule. And, according to Wei, the pace of the works will depend directly on the evolution of market demand, not on a commitment with a date fixed in advance. The announcement also comes accompanied by another historic quarter for TSMC, with a net profit of $22.35 billion between April and June (77.4% more year-on-year), its fifth consecutive quarterly record. The figures and background of this bet Equipping and building a state-of-the-art 2nm semiconductor fab with capacity for about 20,000 wafers per month costs between $25 billion and $35 billion. With this reference, the 100,000 million announced fit with the four minimum plants that Wei mentioned. The most revealing data, however, is provided by Bloomberg: The expansion would bring TSMC’s US footprint to 10 factories and two advanced packaging plants, about half of the final 12-factory plan announced in April. TSMC’s revenue has grown by 36% between April and June and its gross margin has reached 67.7%, also a record figure This scenario invites us to stop at the packaging, probably the most relevant part of the ad. CoWoS capability, and not wafer production itself, remains the real bottleneck for manufacturing accelerators for artificial intelligence (AI). Count on advanced packaging in Arizona would give TSMC’s American customers, for the first time, a complete supply chain within the country, from wafer processing to the packaged and ready-to-assemble chip. TSMC’s revenue has grown 36% between April and June and its gross margin has reached 67.7%, also a record figure. This company now forecasts revenue of between $44.6 billion and $45.8 billion for the third quarter, and has raised its annual growth forecast to slightly above 40%. Another note: the capex of 2026 will rise to between 60,000 and 64,000 million dollars, compared to the 52,000 and 56,000 million dollars initially budgeted. Be that as it may, this announcement cannot be separated from the trade agreement between the US and Taiwan, which reduced tariffs on Taiwanese products to 15% in exchange for 250 billion dollars in Taiwanese investment in the US. As can be expected, the execution of the plan in Phoenix will continue to be conditioned by the availability of labor, water and visas, three of the great challenges that TSMC is facing in Arizona. Image | TSMC More information | Reuters | Bloomberg In Xataka | The war in Iran and the Chinese veto redraw the world map of helium for semiconductors

A professor from Malaga decided to rewrite ‘Don Quixote’ in Gothic calligraphy. Now he says it’s worth a million euros

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Manuel Marín Navarro, artistic drawing teacher from Vélez-Málaga, had an idea. “A madness”, rather, as he himself says: rewriting the entire great work of Miguel de Cervantes using Gothic calligraphy. By hand, dedicating between 7 and 8 hours a day. It’s been six years, seven months and 26 days and he still hasn’t completed the 344,000 words that make up the, why not say it, best book in the history of universal literature. Anyone would say of ‘The Quixote’ rots sanity. Wait, I emphasize it well, then Jesús G. Maestro gets angry: ‘The ingenious gentleman Don Quixote of la Mancha’. Miguel de Cervantes gave birth to a textually transmitted virus and, four centuries later, the pathogen is still free. Rewriting the 2.1 million characters in a Gothic font, letter by letter, ink on paper, is his great dream, the legacy of a life. A retiree doing lettering with the pulse of a teenager on TikTok? The difference here lies in the commitment. His company borders on the wild: the final book is on its way to weighing 20 kilos and, if it goes on sale, the author values ​​this monstrosity at one million euros. Shooting low. That million euros is a calculation that obeys pure labor arithmetic. Marín Navarro added hours, days and years, after such a monastic confinement in front of the folio, he estimates a salary equivalent to that of a medieval copyist in the current market. Not in vain has he drawn two million one hundred thousand characters with a pen. Pens that he has made himself. It has filled one thousand three hundred and five giant-sized (A3) pages. His cellulose monster is called ‘El Quixote Axárquico’, an orthographic nod to the princes edition of 1605. A geographical tribute to his native Andalusian region. The best book, the neatest edition. “I play music from the 17th century, I get into the character, I read the chapter first, I get the idea and then I start writing. I’ve enjoyed it a lot.” The devotion of this professor and writer for the work of Cervantes is indisputable. Of his personal library, which houses more than 4,000 volumes, three hundred of them are different editions of the hidalgo from La Mancha. At home he keeps eccentric jewelry and pays fortunes at closed auctions. Its most expensive copy cost 6,000 euros. It treasures absurd physical oddities, like a miniature tome printed on a single sheet. That is, the reader needs a powerful magnifying glass in front of that tiny paper. But his recent Gothic manuscript breaks any balance. The dimensions of the work require a brutal binding, so the professor is looking for a brave craftsman. It will take the entire skin of a cow to cover the caps. From prison to museum. And anyone who knows the biography of the writer from Alcalá de Henares well will know that he set foot on the cobbled streets of Vélez-Málaga. The roots go back a long way: he walked there in the hot summer of 1594, acting as a tax collector for King Philip II. He collected money and wheat for the coffers of an insolvent and corrupt empire. And the crown excommunicated the novelist twice for his zeal. What’s more, Cervantes collected debts from the all-powerful Church and it is said that the priests kicked him out of the atriums. A Sevillian bank went bankrupt with the royal collections deposited and that is how Cervantes ended up in a damp and gloomy cell in Seville. And there the figure of the crazy gentleman was born, influenced by Italian literature. Andalusian tradition venerates this prison origin of the work. And of course, Marín Navarro has decided to return the geographical favor to his land, giving his manuscript to the city Museum. The old San Juan de Dios Hospital will host this literary mammoth as long as no one sells the original volume to private funds, nor prints cheap copies for clueless tourists. He reserves a personal and final facsimile: the mother manuscript will sleep under institutional lock forever. Why gothic letters and not Comic Sans. It’s not because Marín Navarro is reviewing HIM or the work of Bauhaus and The Cure. On the contrary, the man from Malaga listens to lute and harpsichord madrigals locked in his study, assimilating tragedy and comedy in silence, using the best black Chinese ink, writing slowly. It takes a whole day to fill out a single page—the first page took a full week of trial and error. To avoid frustration with marks, ten handmade pens were made from reed and metal and it was imposed not to use modern white correctors, scraping the paper with a sharp blade if a mistake was made. As for the use of Textura font, which imposes straight lines and sharp angles, it is simple: history. Johannes Gutenberg applied it in his first printed Bible and German monks perfected it in monasteries. It is not the natural calligraphy of the Spanish Golden Age but it is the one associated with arcane knowledge. The Gothic line provides a brutal dramatic weight and requires much greater physical rigor in the wrist. Navarro does not give up: infected with COVID-19, during confinement the fever kept him in bed. Giving classes with a webcam, he pondered whether to give up or what, but in the end he pulled through and returned to writing the hard way. Between dirty cottons and blows, he already accumulates typos for the interior endpapers of the book. Illustrated by the best. Pictorial art always attacked the Cervantes novel with obsession. It was Gustave Doré who established the visual image in the 19th century—he traveled through Spain in 1861 and drew 370 detailed engravings. Many others wanted to repeat the play. Pablo Picasso sketched the starving silhouette in 1955, using the same black India ink. Salvador Dalí did the same with an American edition in 1946. And ignoring the works of Salvador Tusell, even the comedian Antonio Mingote contributed his … Read more

Disney faces losing more than 100 million dollars with Moana because it has not been able to read the signs of an announced failure

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Unlike another similar film with comparable results, ‘Snow White’, ‘Moana’ has neither a controversial actress, nor a cultural war behind it, nor a disastrous trailer to blame for a gross of just $95 million in its world premiere. Against a budget of 250to which we must add marketing expenses that could reach 145 million additional. We are facing one of the Disney’s biggest box office blows in recent times, and one that can put in check one of the company’s most profitable strategies. What there is to lose. With those numbers on the table, it is projected that Disney could lose between 100 and 125 million dollars in the theatrical exploitation of ‘Moana’, and that is assuming it manages to gross 250 million worldwide before closing its run in theaters. Not exactly a small disaster for a company that has just experienced a big disappointment with the weak collections for ‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’. It looked good. The fact is that ‘Moana’ started with very flattering expectations for the company: A- in CinemaScore, between 90% and 91% of the public in Rotten Tomatoes which has finally dropped to 89%, a 63% “definitive” recommendation according to PostTrak… Critics, on the other hand, have sunk it with just 31% on Rotten Tomatoes for considering it, basically, a shot-by-shot carbon copy of the 2016 animated version. It is one of the most pronounced gaps between critics and the public of the summer, but it is not a completely unusual phenomenon. Who is to blame then? The success of ‘Moana’ and other problems. As we told a few days ago, the original animated film of ‘Moana’ is the most watched movie in the history of Disney+with more than 1.5 billion hours played. ‘Moana 2’, released in November 2024 after being converted from a series planned for streaming, broke the Thanksgiving premiere record with 225 million in five days and ended up surpassing 1 billion worldwide. And there may be a reason for the failure: families had seen ‘Vaiana 2’ less than two years ago and were certain that this version, clearly derivative, would soon arrive on Disney+ (and it could have been worse: when Disney announced ‘Vaiana 2’, it delayed the release of this live-action version by a year so that there would be at least two years between the two). In addition, the premiere occurred on a particularly competitive weekend: Disney itself had ‘Toy Story 5’ in theaters, and there was also ‘Minions & Monsters’. Competition everywhere: Disney’s own streaming offering, traditional rivals and a sequel that was still fresh. Little time. Some media point because nostalgia is the real driving force behind Disney’s most profitable remakes, and Moana arrived too early to activate it. ‘Lilo & Stitch’ It raised more than 1,000 million with a hiatus of more than twenty years compared to the 2002 original, but ‘Moana’ has tried to repeat the formula with only a decade in between and a recent sequel competing for the same audience. Disney opted for a property that did not yet need a relaunch and that the public did not demand with such urgency. In Xataka | The failure of ‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’ is something more worrying for Disney: what the hell is it doing with Star Wars

the five million dollar birthday party of a millionaire who went down in history

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It was February 2007 and in a former military barracks on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, nearly 600 guests toasted with champagne while Rod Stewart sang at a private concert marking the 60th birthday of one of the most powerful men on Wall Street. That man was Stephen SchwarzmanCEO and founder of Blackstone. Nobody at the party knew that, months later, that same night would go down in history as the symbol of everything that was going to go wrong on Wall Street. A party that marked an era. That was not just any birthday party. Almost two decades later, there are still many who remember her as one of the most ostentatious. Schwarzman, founder of Blackstone, rented the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan, filled it with orchids, palm trees, and a life-size portrait of himself. According to the book ‘Davos Man‘ by Peter S. Goodman, comedian Martin Short entertained the evening, singer Patti LaBelle sang happy birthday and even Rod Stewart gave a private concert. Among the almost 600 attendees were bankers, politicians and even a certain Donald Trump, then just another New York businessman. An unforgettable party. HE esteem that the party cost between three and five million dollars. Today that figure seems modest next to other waste the kind that millionaires boast about, but in those years it was a significant waste. Schwarzman later justified it as “a celebration with six hundred people we cared about.” Peccadillo for someone who had just pocketed $398.3 million in the 2006 fiscal year. The expensive thing was not the party. However, the party came just four days after a key announcement. Blackstone had just closed the biggest real estate purchase in history until that moment, for 39,000 million dollars. Months later, the company went public. Schwarzman he pocketed nearly 700 million in cash, and was awarded a stake valued at about 9,000 million. That cocktail of luxury and easy money caught the attention of the Senate. Legislators Max Baucus and Chuck Grassley presented what the press dubbed the “Blackstone Bill”. A regulations tailor-made for Schwarzman’s company that sought to raise taxes on private capital. With the subprime crisis already upon us, Schwarzman ended up admitting that that party was “a little exaggerated”. He assured that he never wanted to become the symbol of the opulence of an era. “I’m not rich,” he only had a net worth of 8 billion. With such a fortune, anyone would expect a certain comfort with the label of rich. But that wasn’t the case with Schwarzman. As and how I collected The Wall Street JournalEven after the millionaire’s ostentatious birthday party, when asked about his lifestyle, the Blackstone CEO responded without hesitation: “I don’t feel like a rich person. Others see me as such, but I don’t. I feel the same as when I was a fifth-year associate and aspired to be a partner at Lehman. I haven’t changed… I’m still trying.” The old excesses that no longer return the same. Perhaps displaying a certain nostalgia, ten years after that memorable party, Schwarzman celebrated his 70th. On this occasion, he did not skimp either. There were camels, trapeze artists and a private concert by singer Gwen Stefani in Palm Beach, near Mar-a-Lago. The party almost happened without noise from the front pages of the newspapers. It was the Trump era and luxury no longer shocked anyone like before. Their neighbors Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner were among the guests. The king of parties at 79. Today, with a fortune of 48 billion dollars, Schwarzman prepares a Halloween party at his English estate in Conholt Park. No camels or temples: just fireworks and two days of private meeting. Something quiet. chill. The excesses of yesteryear, those that made Congress tremble, they no longer scare so much today. The billionaires of this decade are more discreet with their forms, although their wealth has increased tenfold. Today’s billionaires they spend the same or more than Schwarzman in 2007, they just don’t do the same ostentation. The difference is in the noise, not the money. In Xataka | A Swedish millionaire lent money to European governments in exchange for matches. Nobody suspected that his finances were pure smoke Image | Unsplash (Ophélie Bonavita), Flickr (World Economic Forum)

The AP-7 has not had tolls for four years. Now the Government is studying whether to recover them or spend 500 million to expand it

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The AP-7 is once again at the center of the debate on mobility in Catalonia. And just as share El Periódico, the Ministry of Transport and Sustainable Mobility has four projects underway to widen the highway with new lanes, a joint investment that exceeds 500 million euros. The works will affect almost a hundred kilometers spread between Vallès, Penedès and Terres de l’Ebre. Why it is important. Since tolls were eliminated in 2021the AP-7 has ceased to be a highway designed primarily for long journeys and has become a road that also supports a good part of the daily traffic of the Barcelona metropolitan area, in addition to an intense passage of trucks of all kinds. This has led to almost daily traffic jams in the most densely populated sections and recurring collapses every summer. In detail. The four projects are: Third lane between L’Hospitalet de l’Infant and Ampostajust over 38 kilometers. It is the most advanced, with the drafting of the project underway since 2023. Fourth lane between the B-23 and Martorellabout nine kilometers, in one of the main accesses to Barcelona, ​​with an estimated cost of 94 million euros. Fourth lane between Sant Celoni and Montornès del Vallèsapproximately 30 kilometers. Fourth lane between Martorell and Vilafranca Centerabout 25 kilometers. These last two are, as far as possible confirm ACN and El Periódico, which until now were not publicly known. Each project is in a different phase of processing, from preliminary studies to final drafting, so none of them yet have a closed execution date. Between the lines. The problem is not just with private cars. Of the 41,000 vehicles that cross the border through La Jonquera on average every day, 15,000 are trucks, according to data of 2025 collected by El Periódico. The Ministry and the Generalitat agree that the railway should absorb a greater part of this freight traffic, but the lack of capacity of the railway network and intermodal terminals, together with a Mediterranean corridor still uncompleted, leaves the road as practically the only competitive option. Meanwhile. Expanding lanes requires years of environmental and administrative procedures, so both administrations have chosen to also act where the highway loses fluidity without the need to build anything new. An agreement of 250 million euros Annually between the Ministry and the Generalitat will allow the remodeling of fifteen links (including Girona Nord and Sud, Maçanet de la Selva, La Roca del Vallès, Montmeló-Parets, the connection with the B-30 or Vilafranca del Penedès) to eliminate the so-called “braided”, the conflictive crossings between vehicles that enter and leave in a few meters and that generate a good part of the delays. And now what. It is also still on the table limit truck overtaking in some sections, an option that the Servei Català de Trànsit is studying to reduce accidents while the works have not yet begun. In parallel, the debate has also resurfaced about whether it is appropriate to introduce a toll or a vignette on high-capacity roads, although both the central government and the Generalitat have ruled out recovering any means of payment for now. The Minister of Territory, Housing, Ecological Transition, Sílvia Paneque, already claimed a few days ago in an interview with El Periódico to advance in these expansions to prevent the same image of collapse on the AP-7 from being repeated every summer. Cover image | Costa Brava In Xataka | “The recharging excuse has its days numbered”: the Government confirms that 90% of the main roads already have fast charging nearby

Volkswagen lost 6.24 million with each one it sold

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On the walk of fame of luxury supercars, there is a star reserved for a car that, despite the fact that its wealthy buyers had to put 1.7 million dollars on the table to get it from the dealership, every time a unit was sold, its manufacturer lost 6.24 million dollars: the Bugatti Veyron. Bugatti Veyron: an icon of luxury and speed The Bugatti Veyron born in 2005 of one ambitious idea: create the fastest, most powerful and luxurious car in the world. And boy did they succeed. Ferdinand Piëch, the visionary architect of the current Volkswagen group and grandson of Ferdinand Porsche himself. The passion for speed and luxury was in his DNA. This supercar had one of the engines that has given Bugatti the most joy but, unfortunately, in 2024 it became part of the engine history since the brand stopped manufacturing it. It is about its brutal W16 8.0 liters and four turbos, with which it was capable of accelerating like a rocket and breaking top speed records above 406 km/h. This figure became almost a requirement for the desire for “revenge” of the brand for a speed record at Le Mans. The name of the Veyron is also closely linked to the Le Mans race, as it pays tribute to the Bugatti driver and engineer. Pierre Veyronwhich in 1939 won the 24 hours of Le Mans with one of the brand’s cars. The brand took six years in development of the Veyron for the challenge of implementing an engine capable of developing 1,001 HP of power and 1,400 Nm of torque. To keep the temperature of such a beast at bay, engineers had to integrate 10 radiators. The exclusivity of the Bugatti Veyron was not only noticeable when paying the 1.7 million dollars that it cost each unit. Each set of tires, especially designed for the Veyron by Michelin, cost a whopping $38,000 and had to be replaced every 4,000 km. On the track and at maximum speed, the life of the tires was limited to about 15 minutes before disintegrating. Something that they would rarely do, since the 106 liters of their tank were enough for 12 minutes. Without a doubt, a car with maintenance out of reach of many pockets. The Veyron wasn’t just about speed. It was also extreme luxury. Every detail, from materials to workmanship, was of the highest quality. Owning a Veyron was like owning a artwork on wheelsa demonstration that you could afford the best of the best. aspire to one of the special editions The Veyron was already another level, and meant paying more than 2.7 million for some of them. A ruinous business for Volkswagen But here’s the surprising part: despite its million-dollar selling price, Volkswagen lost money on every Veyron it sold. And not a little, precisely. As and how they counted in Technology.orgthe Wall Street financial research firm Bernstein Research, published a report in which they claimed that the Volkswagen group lost about $6.24 million for each Bugatti Veyron that was sold. However, the authors of that report later admitted that this figure should be taken with caution because it was based on rough estimates. Paradoxically, the explanation for this financial fiasco is given by its engineering and design success. Volkswagen spared no expense to create the perfect car and for this They invested 1,620 million of dollars in its development. Latest prototype of the Bugatti Veyron The negative part is that Bugatti only sold 450 units of its Veyron in the 10 years it was on sale, so the investment in R&D was greater than what the brand recovered by selling the cars, which turned out to be a financial fiasco. However, although in absolute terms, the Veyron’s development effort was greater than the income from its sale, the technology that was developed for that engineering gem later served as the basis for the entire a lineage of supercars. His legacy has served to break all speed records one by one until reaching the 490.48 km/h reached by the Bugatti Chiron Super Sport 300+ in 2019, as how I collected Car and Driver. Volkswagen was willing to take those losses because it wanted to demonstrate its ability to create the best supercar in the world. Although the Veyron was not a financial success in itself, it managed to position Bugatti as a reference brand on the map of luxury supercars. A “failure” that, in the end, turned out to be a great triumph, although very expensive. A version of this article was published in March 2025. In Xataka | For years no one knew who had bought the most expensive Bugatti in the world: until it became part of an inheritance In Xataka | Mate Rimac takes the first Bugatti Tourbillon to the road: he has fitted it with winter tires to use it as a snow plow Image | Unsplash (Vlad Grebenyev)

It’s been 20 years since we saw its last episode but audiences have not fallen, and 5.9 million viewers continue to watch it every month

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On July 6, 2006, Antena 3 broadcast the last episode of ‘There is no one who lives here‘. Two decades laterthe comedy by Alberto and Laura Caballero gathers a monthly average of 5.9 million unique viewers in streamingon platforms like Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, Atresplayer and Movistar+with peaks of 8.8 million and a cumulative audience of 10.4 million in the last year. The consulting firm ranks it as the most viewed content in the OTT market in six of the last twelve months. The distribution of that audience between platforms says a lot about where the series is growing today. Prime Video leads with 2.2 million viewers and Netflix follows closely with 2.1 million, ahead of Atresplayer (0.9 million) and Disney+ (0.7 million). The study also wonders about the reason for this sustained success: 37.2% of the viewers surveyed say that the series “disconnects, entertains and never tires”, compared to 15.7% who appeal to nostalgia and 12.9% who consider its plots valid. 72.4% already saw it in its original broadcast, but more than a quarter discover it now. Before being a phenomenon in streamingthe Desengaño 21 building had already achieved marks that were difficult to match. Throughout its 93 episodes, it brought together more than 40 million unique viewers, and its most viewed episode was close to 8.4 million on average with a 43.1% screen share. From that same creative tandem was born ‘The one that is coming‘, which is still broadcast and shares its catalog and number of viewers with its predecessor. There is a very simple logic behind this success, beyond the quality of the series. An already known title saves on marketing and comes with proven success, at a much lower cost than original production. It is the reason why classics like ‘Friends’, ‘The Office’ or ‘Seinfeld’ continue to boast multimillion-dollar licenses: continue to attract people. Added to this is the unequivocally local component of ‘No one lives here’, which after television went to reruns on TDT, especially on FDF, before making the leap to the streaming. And from there, generation after generation continues to be hooked on our most Bruguera series. In Xataka | This remake of a classic on Prime Video is the science fiction premiere of the summer: ‘The Matrix’ or ‘Cyberpunk 2066’ owe it all

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