Good morning,
Global phenomenon and billionaire Taylor Swift is at it again: Her 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, is dropping tomorrow. And in true Swift fashion, she’s been dropping lots of hints as to what it could include, with the help of major streaming and social media companies.
Apple Music, for example, changed its bio on X, and has been encouraging users to decode one word per day based on randomly capitalized letters hidden throughout the lyrics to her old songs on the platform. Spotify also organized a pop-up in Los Angeles featuring a poetry library with clues about the album.
It makes sense that music streamers are eager to take part in the rollout—so far six of Swift’s albums have sold more than 1 million copies in just one week.
Google fired 28 employees on Wednesday after a number of workers participated in a sit-in protest against its cloud contract with the Israeli government, a day after nine staffers were suspended and then arrested for participating in the protest. In a memo, the company alleged the protesting workers “took over office spaces” and “defaced our property,” while the group behind the protests, called No Tech for Apartheid, said that the firings were “clearly retaliatory.”
Indonesian authorities ordered the evacuation of thousands of people on Thursday after the Ruang volcano in the country’s North Sulawesi province erupted at least five times in the previous 24 hours, triggering a tsunami warning. The nearest international airport in the city of Manado has been temporarily shut down, as large columns of smoke and ash continue to billow from the volcano.
The highly-anticipated bitcoin halving event is set to occur within the next few days, a phenomenon built into the bitcoin ecosystem every four years to reduce its supply. Some expect the halving will drive demand for bitcoin, and therefore increase its price, which happened in the immediate aftermath of the three other events.
MORE: The easiest way to play the halving is to buy the cryptocurrency through an intermediary like Robinhood or Coinbase, or buy shares in one of the 11 new SEC-approved spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds being offered from the likes of BlackRock, Fidelity, Invesco and Ark Invest. But there are other ways to profit: It stands to reason that other cryptocurrencies will benefit as well—especially those related to bitcoin.
Despite Tesla’s dismal start to 2024, at the electric vehicle maker’s annual meeting in June, shareholders will vote on reinstating billionaire CEO Elon Musk’s historic pay package months after a Delaware judge ruled it was excessive. In a report filed with the SEC, Tesla’s chairman of the board Robyn Denholm outlined her and the board’s support for the proposal as it will compel Musk to “continue to be driven to innovate and drive growth at Tesla because the value of his shares will depend on it.”
Since Larry Connor cofounded real estate firm The Connor Group in 1991, its investments in luxury apartments have generated an annual rate of return of 30.4%, which is almost unheard of in the industry. Connor, who has traveled into space and flown a fighter jet, says the key to his winning strategy is being “willing to take calculated risk, not stupid risk.”
A Forbes review found that Google hosted over 100 YouTube videos that were advertising how quickly AI apps and websites can remove clothes from images of women, as AI-generated deepfake porn, including of children, is on the rise. After Forbes asked if the videos, advertisements and apps ran afoul of Google policies, the company removed all 27 ads, and YouTube took down 11 channels and over 120 videos.
In 2022, AI entrepreneur Benjamin Harvey sent a LinkedIn message about his startup AI Squared to former TIAA CEO Roger Ferguson. Two years later, the company has just closed on a $13.8 million Series A funding round, with Ferguson as one of the key investors. Founded in 2019, Al Squared is a third-party software company that extracts data from AI models and machine learning and calculates real-time business outcomes.
With MMA, wrestling and boxing all becoming more mainstream, they’re fighting for much of the same audience and have been making a dash for cash to fuel growth. UFC is the most valuable combat sports promotion for 2024, worth $11.3 billion, followed by WWE, worth $6.8 billion, which merged last year under the name TKO Holdings.
Toronto Raptors forward Jontay Porter received a lifetime ban from the NBA on Wednesday, after an investigation revealed he bet on NBA games and gave information about his health to other gamblers. As sports betting has rapidly become legal in many states, it has led to concerns about its impact on pro sports.
United Airlines lost $200 million from the Federal Aviation Administration’s grounding of the Boeing 737 Max 9, which forced the airline to cancel thousands of flights over several weeks. United and Alaska Airlines are the only two U.S. airlines to operate the Max 9, and even though the aircraft is back in the air, Boeing’s problems continue to hamper United.
DAILY COVER STORY
TOPLINE Veradigm, the struggling electronic health records company formerly known as Allscripts, is betting its future on a small AI startup.
After reaching a $145 million settlement with the Department of Justice over receiving kickbacks from an opioid manufacturer, selling off its money-losing hospital business and failing to file financial statements for a year and a half, 38-year-old Veradigm was delisted from Nasdaq in February. The $820 million market cap company is still awaiting the results of an independent audit into a $20 million revenue misstatement, which it said was caused by a glitch in compliance software from an outside vendor.
Veradigm’s $140 million acquisition of ScienceIO in March forms the centerpiece of interim CEO Yin Ho’s answer to the company’s woes: using ScienceIO’s generative AI models to give new life to Veradigm’s trove of medical data.
ScienceIO’s models can reduce the labor intensive process of cleaning and structuring hastily written, abbreviation-filled doctor’s notes from months to days. Veradigm plans to apply them to three decades worth of data: 200 million patient records and 5 billion notes generated largely by independent doctor’s offices. Unlike other datasets that come from large academic medical centers in major cities, Veradigm’s data includes substantial swaths of the rural U.S. Veradigm plans to sell millions of de-identified records about patients’ health to pharma companies, who want to understand how people react to drugs outside of carefully orchestrated clinical trials.
ScienceIO’s models paired with Veradigm’s greatest and largely untapped asset—medical record data rights —could prove to be a potent combination. Most medical records companies don’t own the patient data that flows through their software; their health system customers do.
Veradigm’s setup is different because it owns the data rights, ScienceIO cofounder Will Manidis told Forbes. Because of these rights, the company can link patients between different doctor’s offices over long periods of time. Once it has linked those records together, then it de-identifies the information to protect people’s privacy.
WHY IT MATTERS Recently the FDA has started allowing real-world data from patients outside clinical trials to speed up the drug approval process, which also has the potential to significantly reduce costs. The market for this type of data is expected to hit $7.5 billion this year, according to investment advisory firm Beecher and Co, and is growing at a rate of over 20%. Ho hopes ScienceIO’s AI models will be able to structure, de-identify and package Veradigm’s data to sell to pharma companies starting in 2025, projecting a 10% growth rate.
MORE Why $4.6 Billion Health Records Giant Epic Is Betting Big On Generative AI
FACTS AND COMMENTS
Russia’s influence campaign for the U.S. presidential election is underway, according to Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center, though it’s off to a slower start than in past election cycles, likely due to the less contested primary season:
At least 70: The number of Russian actors using both traditional media and social media to spread Ukraine-related disinformation over the last two months
Russian Presidential Administration: The group that the “most prolific” of these actors are affiliated with, which Microsoft says highlights “the increasingly centralized nature” of their influence campaigns
‘Simple digital forgeries’: Rather than any AI-deepfaked content, audiences were more likely to fall for fake news stories with fake logos, which influence actors have used for years
STRATEGY AND SUCCESS
While sites like LinkedIn and Indeed are great resources for finding jobs, plenty of opportunities aren’t posted there. If your industry sees a lot of venture capital or private equity activity, register with the in-house talent networks of the two or three most active firms. Also check local and state government websites, and register with your alumni network, as they often include a jobs portal. And don’t forget to look at trade publications for your industry, too.
VIDEO
QUIZ
Billionaire Elon Musk polled his followers on X asking whether the company should bring back another once-popular social media platform. Which platform is it?
A. Vine
B. MySpace
C. Omegle
D. Friendster
ACROSS THE NEWSROOM
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