Good morning.

It’s Tuesday, December 9. Gift-giving season is here, which means everyone is about to receive something deeply uninspired from a person who “swears they put a lot of thought into it.” If your present feels suspiciously like a regifted bath set, just smile. It’s the holidays. We lie.

Thanks for being here, you’re helping shape this beautifully unhinged little newsletter into its final form. Enjoy today’s read, and may all your gifts be better than yet another pair of fuzzy socks “because you seemed cozy.”

Today’s stories:

• Starbucks pays record settlement for chaotic scheduling

• Luxury Montana resort redefines curated outdoor living

• NYC deploys hardware warfare against fare evaders

• Shingles vaccine surprisingly lowers dementia risk

• Netflix and billionaires brawl over Warner Bros

• Billionaires multiply as markets rocket upward

• Claude brings full coding workflows into Slack

• Meta swaps metaverse dreams for AI reality

• IBM buys Confluent to supercharge AI data

• ChatGPT now shops your groceries for you

• New hair-loss drug delivers huge regrowth

• Pantone’s new “color” is basically white

  and more…

Stocks dipped Monday as Wall Street hit pause ahead of the Fed’s final rate call of the year. The S&P 500 slipped 0.35%, the Nasdaq eased 0.14%, and the Dow dropped 0.45%—a mild red day driven less by panic and more by pre-meeting jitters.

The real mood-killer? The 10-year Treasury yield kept climbing, defying expectations of a rate cut this week. Investors are now wondering if 2025 inflation will play nice—or force the Fed to tap the brakes on easing before it even begins.

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Meta Finally Admits the Metaverse Isn’t Happening

Meta is quietly backing away from the metaverse — the $77 billion sinkhole Zuckerberg once rebranded the whole company for. Turns out no one wanted to live in a laggy cartoon office, so Meta’s 2026 budget is shifting toward AI wearables, which are actually selling and not embarrassing. Investors loved the move. Shares jumped 3% the moment Meta admitted reality: AI is hot, the metaverse is… not. Zuck is now handing out $100 million pay packages to AI researchers like party favors and building his shiny “Superintelligence” empire. Meanwhile, Reality Labs is getting the financial equivalent of a timeout. Zuckerberg still swears the metaverse will “pay off,” but the world moved on. AI glasses are booming, VR is collecting dust, and Meta is finally spending money on something people might actually use.

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Hollywood’s latest drama: billionaires fighting over Warner Bros. On Friday, Netflix agreed to buy Warner Bros.’ TV, film, studios, and streaming empire for a casual $82.7 billion: a mix of cash and Netflix stock that values the company at about $27.75 per share. But before Netflix could even celebrate, Paramount Skydance kicked the door down with a hostile bid. David Ellison — billionaire heir, tech royalty, and apparently bored — is throwing an all-cash offer directly at Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders. The deal is backed by Jared Kushner, and Trump has already said he’ll be “involved” in reviewing Netflix’s plan. Exactly what every merger needs: politics and vibes.

Welcome to the billionaire boom. The world is officially overflowing with billionaires. UBS says we’ve now got about 2,900 of them holding $15.8 trillion. Tech valuations soared, markets kept climbing, and billionaire portfolios rode the wave like it was their birthright. This year alone welcomed 287 new billionaires, the second-biggest jump on record. Some built companies, some inherited empires, some just picked the right stock at the right time — billionaire origin stories really do come in all flavors.

Starbucks hit with NYC’s biggest labor settlement ever. Starbucks is writing a very expensive apology letter to New York City. Mayor Eric Adams announced a $38.9 million settlement, the largest worker-protection payout in city history, after investigators found that Starbucks broke the city’s fair-scheduling law more than 500,000 times. Yes, half a million. Over 15,000 hourly workers will get restitution after years of complaining about chopped hours and chaotic schedules. The city said Starbucks “arbitrarily cut schedules” and prioritized profits over people across more than 300 stores. Adams called the settlement a win for workers and a reminder that New Yorkers deserve stable hours, predictable work, and basic dignity — even when their employer is a global caffeine empire.

IBM expands its AI empire with $11B deal. Confluent stock jumped 29% after IBM announced an $11 billion all-cash deal to buy the data-streaming company. IBM says real-time data is now essential for AI, and Confluent gives them the tech to move it fast and securely. IBM will pay $31 a share, well above Confluent’s $23.14 close on Friday. Analysts called it a strong move that deepens IBM’s AI strategy and fits its recent billion-dollar shopping streak. Confluent brings 6,500 clients and integrations with every major cloud player — AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft, Snowflake, Anthropic, and more. IBM is clearly building its AI empire one acquisition at a time.

Balding Men, Your Comeback Season Is Here

Huge news for men whose hats are doing all the heavy lifting: a new hair-loss drug just delivered wild results in Phase 3 trials. Cosmo Pharmaceuticals tested a topical treatment on 1,465 men — the biggest hair-loss trial ever — and one study showed a 539% boost in hair growth compared to placebo. The drug, clascoterone 5%, blocks DHT right at the hair follicle without messing with the rest of the body — meaning none of the “fun” side effects that make men bail on existing meds. Safety looked basically the same as placebo, and men actually reported seeing and feeling more hair, not just counting follicles like sad scientists. Basically: a hair-loss treatment that works, doesn’t ruin your hormones, and might finally retire the baseball cap as emotional support.

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Instacart moves into ChatGPT. OpenAI and Instacart are launching grocery shopping inside ChatGPT, so you can plan dinner, make a list, and check out without ever leaving the chat. It’s part of OpenAI’s big push into “agentic commerce,” where AI doesn’t just answer questions but actually shops for you. ChatGPT is already linking up with Booking.com, Canva, Zillow, Spotify, Target, Intuit, and more. Holiday shopping is about to be one long AI hand-hold. OpenAI still isn’t profitable — running these models costs a small fortune — so these in-chat purchases come with a tiny fee for OpenAI. Cute idea, but it’ll take a mountain of grocery orders to put a dent in that burn rate.

Shingles vaccine cuts dementia risk by 20%. A new Stanford-led study found that the shingles vaccine may lower dementia risk by 20%. Researchers looked at health records in Wales and saw that older adults who got the shot were significantly less likely to develop dementia over seven years. Not bad for a vaccine originally meant to stop a painful rash. The theory: the chicken pox virus hides in your nerves forever and may mess with your brain later in life. Keeping it quiet could help protect memory. Another study even suggests the vaccine might slow dementia in people who already have it. It’s early, but the idea that a routine shot could protect your brain is… kind of iconic.

Claude code pushes AI deeper into slack. Anthropic is bringing Claude Code into Slack, and it’s a bigger shift than it sounds. Developers can now tag @Claude to kick off full coding tasks directly from a chat thread. Claude reads the conversation, picks the right repo, writes code, posts updates, and delivers pull requests — all inside Slack. AI coding tools are moving out of IDEs and into the places teams actually work. Cursor’s already there. GitHub Copilot is generating pull requests from chat. Slack wants to be the AI command center, the place where work and workflow merge. Claude Code is still in beta, but the strategy is clear: the future of coding assistants isn’t just the model — it’s who owns the workflow.

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New Resort for People Who “Camp” in Cashmere

One&Only is making its U.S. debut, and they picked Montana. The new Moonlight Basin resort in Big Sky opens this month with designer cabins, a private gondola, and 8,000 acres of “I’m outdoorsy, but in a curated way.” Guests get all the luxury hits: skiing, fly fishing, golf, mountain biking, and six bars and restaurants so no one has to suffer a normal meal. Chef Akira Back is running the fancy Japanese spot, and of course there’s a spa and gym for people who like their nature with heated floors.

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NYC arms its subways against fare beaters. New York is pulling out every medieval-looking gadget it can find — spikes, fins, taller gates — to stop the subway’s favorite sport: fare evasion. Last year, 330 people per minute hopped, ducked, or wriggled past turnstiles, adding up to 174 million free rides and nearly $1 billion in lost revenue. The M.T.A. says the problem has tripled since 2019 and now threatens its budget. With fares covering more than a quarter of operating costs, the agency is treating fare beating like an existential crisis. Paying riders are annoyed, critics call the system lawless, and the M.T.A. is out here installing hardware that looks like it belongs on Jurassic Park fencing.

2026’s Color of the Year is basically just white. Pantone revealed its 2026 Color of the Year, and the internet immediately entered chaos mode. The chosen shade, Cloud Dancer, is essentially fancy white with a poetic caption. Pantone describes it as a “lofty neutral” bringing “calm and peace in a noisy world,” which is a dramatic way to present the color of hotel linens. Pantone insists the annual pick is an educational program meant to connect culture and color. According to them, global turmoil translates to… white. Designers are debating it, the internet is mocking it, and Pantone is proudly standing by its minimalist masterpiece.

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TikTok of the day: watch here

Shoppers are adding to cart for the holidays

Peak streaming time continues after Black Friday on Roku, with the weekend after Thanksgiving and the weeks leading up to Christmas seeing record hours of viewing. Roku Ads Manager makes it simple to launch last-minute campaigns targeting viewers who are ready to shop during the holidays. Use first-party audience insights, segment by demographics, and advertise next to the premium ad-supported content your customers are streaming this holiday season.

Read the guide to get your CTV campaign live in time for the holiday rush.

Learn more.

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