Good morning.

It’s Friday, March 13. It’s also Women’s History Month, which means for the next few weeks everyone will be loudly celebrating women… while still scheduling meetings that could have been emails. Progress is complicated.

Meanwhile March is doing what March does best: acting like a confused intern. One day it’s spring, the next day it’s winter again, and nobody knows what coat to wear. If you left the house this morning dressed correctly for the weather, congratulations. You’ve achieved something most meteorologists still can’t.

Anyway. Grab your coffee, pretend you’re organized, and let’s get into the news.

Today’s stories:

Stocks fell Thursday as oil prices surged and the Iran conflict continued to rattle markets. The Dow Jones dropped 739 points (1.56%), the S&P 500 fell 1.52%, and the Nasdaq slid 1.78%. All three closed at their lowest levels of 2026, with the Dow slipping below 47,000 for the first time this year.

Oil drove much of the selloff. After Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, suggested keeping the Strait of Hormuz closed as leverage, West Texas Intermediate jumped nearly 10% to $95.73, while Brent crude rose 9.2% to $100.46 — its first close above $100 since August 2022.

U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said the Navy isn’t ready to escort tankers through the strait yet. For now, traffic through one of the world’s most critical oil routes is nearly stalled — and markets are reacting accordingly.

_____

YouTube just quietly became the world’s largest media company, which is slightly funny considering it started as a place where people uploaded shaky videos of cats and skateboarding accidents. The platform made more than $60 billion in revenue in 2025, officially passing Disney’s media business. Yes, the same Disney that owns half of your childhood. YouTube now makes over $40 billion a year from ads alone, plus billions more from subscriptions like YouTube Premium, YouTube Music, YouTube TV, and even NFL Sunday Ticket. The company is now valued somewhere between $500 and $560 billion, comfortably ahead of traditional media companies and even ahead of Netflix. So after years of Hollywood trying to pretend the internet was just a phase, the internet has officially won, and its name is YouTube.

_____

Google just spent $32 billion on cybersecurity. Google just closed the biggest acquisition in its history, buying cybersecurity startup Wiz for $32 billion in cash, which is the kind of number that makes normal people double-check how many zeros are in a billion. Wiz builds software that protects cloud systems from cyberattacks, and the company recently crossed $1 billion in yearly revenue, which explains why Google suddenly became very interested. The startup will now join Google Cloud but keep its own brand and continue working across different cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and Oracle, because big companies love using five different systems at once and then wondering why security becomes complicated. Google first tried to buy Wiz for $23 billion last year, but the company said no and waited, which turned out to be an excellent strategy because Google came back with another $9 billion on top. So yes, sometimes patience pays off, especially when the reward is nine billion dollars.

Oil jumps toward $100. Stocks slid on Thursday while oil prices jumped close to $100 a barrel as Iran continued attacks on shipping and U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf. Oil markets reacted quickly because the Strait of Hormuz is one of the most important routes for global energy, and when tankers start getting attacked there, investors suddenly remember how fragile the whole system is. Governments are now trying to calm the market. The International Energy Agency said it will release 400 million barrels of oil, the largest release in its history, while the U.S. is adding another 172 million barrels from its Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Despite those efforts, oil prices still jumped as investors worry the conflict could disrupt global supply even more. In other words, when the Middle East sneezes, oil markets immediately catch a very expensive cold.

AI coding startup Cursor is already worth $50 billion. Cursor, a startup that builds an AI assistant for writing and debugging code, is reportedly raising new funding that could value the company at about $50 billion. The tool launched in 2023 and quickly became popular with developers who want AI to help write software faster, because apparently even programmers would prefer a robot to handle the boring parts. Cursor is now used by more than 30,000 developers at Nvidia, and its revenue has reportedly doubled in just the last few months, which is exactly the kind of growth that makes venture capitalists start writing very large checks. Just last November the company was valued at $29 billion, meaning the price tag may nearly double in less than a year. Welcome to the AI boom, where startups go from “interesting tool” to $50 billion company in about the time it takes to update your laptop.

Another AI startup raises a billion dollars. A new AI startup called AMI Labs, co-founded by AI pioneer Yann LeCun, just raised $1.03 billion, giving the company a valuation of about $3.5 billion before the money even arrived. The company is working on something called “world models,” which means AI that learns from real-world data instead of just reading mountains of text like today’s chatbots. The idea is still early and could take years to turn into actual products, which is very unusual in today’s AI world where startups usually promise a billion-dollar business before lunch. Still, investors are already throwing huge checks at the concept, because in tech the rule is simple: if a new buzzword appears, funding quickly follows. And according to AMI’s CEO, don’t be surprised if in six months every AI company suddenly claims it’s building “world models.” Funny how that works.

Every year a group called the Unicode Consortium meets and decides which new emoji humanity apparently cannot live without. The newest batch is now arriving with iOS 26.4 and includes things like ballet dancers, a distorted face, a fight cloud, a hairy creature, a landslide, an orca, a trombone, and a treasure chest. Yes, someone somewhere debated all of these seriously. Even though iPhone users can now generate their own custom “Genmoji,” these official emoji still matter because they work across every platform, meaning Android, iPhone, and everyone else will all see the same tiny cartoon. So once the update arrives, expect to start seeing distorted faces and treasure chests in your group chats immediately, because that is how technology progresses now.

_____

Uber adds women drivers filter. Uber rolled out a new feature across the U.S. that lets women riders match with women drivers through an option in the app called “Women Drivers,” because sometimes people prefer not to get into a car with a random guy from the internet at night. Women can request a female driver, reserve one ahead of time, or set it as a preference in the app, which increases the chances but does not guarantee anything because only about 20% of Uber drivers in the U.S. are women. Women drivers can also choose to accept mostly female riders if they want. Naturally, the feature is already tangled in lawsuits from drivers who say it discriminates against men, proving once again that even adding a button in an app can somehow end up in court.

Perplexity introduces a digital worker that never sleeps. Perplexity just announced something called Personal Computer, which is basically an AI worker that sits on your computer and handles tasks for you like a very efficient digital assistant that never gets tired. Instead of giving detailed instructions to different AI tools, you just tell this AI the final goal and it breaks the job into smaller tasks, sends those tasks to other AIs, collects the results, and brings everything back to you like a tiny project manager living inside your machine. The system can access your local files and apps, meaning it could organize photos, rename files, resize images, or help build things like websites without you manually doing every step. Perplexity says the main AI processing still happens on its servers, while the local app runs on a nearby computer, with the Mac mini already being mentioned as a popular setup. The idea sounds powerful and a little scary at the same time, because giving an AI constant access to your computer files is either the future of productivity or the start of a very interesting tech support call.

Google is using old news to predict flash floods. Flash floods kill more than 5,000 people every year and are extremely hard to predict because they happen quickly and in very small areas. So Google tried something unusual. It gave its AI model Gemini about 5 million news articles to read and asked it to find reports about floods around the world. The AI ended up identifying 2.6 million flood events and turning them into a global dataset called “Groundsource,” which researchers then used to train a model that estimates where flash floods might happen. The system is now flagging flood risks in 150 countries through Google’s Flood Hub platform and sharing the information with emergency agencies.

At this year’s Oscars, the best picture winner will likely be either “One Battle After Another” or “Sinners,” and neither one looks anything like the traditional Hollywood prestige movie. “One Battle After Another” is an absurd anti-fascist comedy where a huge movie star spends much of the film wandering around high in a bathrobe. “Sinners,” meanwhile, is a vampire movie that is also a dark musical about the history of Black artists being exploited by the industry. So yes, the biggest award in Hollywood might go either to a stoned comedy or a vampire musical, which tells you a lot about how weird the movie business has become. Part of the reason goes back to recent chaos inside Warner Bros., where controversial decisions about streaming releases and canceled films upset many filmmakers and pushed some big directors to take their projects elsewhere. The result is a movie industry that looks a lot less traditional than it used to, and now the Oscars are about to reward it.

_____

Free parking in NYC could soon become a myth. New York City officials are now discussing an idea that used to be basically political suicide: charging drivers for street parking that is currently free. Right now the city has more than 3 million curbside parking spots, and only about 80,000 of them actually have meters, which means the rest are technically free, assuming you are willing to spend 25 minutes circling the block like a confused hawk. City Hall is looking for ways to deal with a $5.4 billion budget hole, and one idea floating around is expanding parking meters or introducing “dynamic pricing,” which is a fancy way of saying the price goes up when everyone wants the spot. Some estimates say metering more spaces could bring the city up to $1.3 billion a year, which suddenly makes those little pieces of curb look like very valuable real estate.

_____

TikTok of the day: watch here

Share Increadible Newsletter (increadible.com) with your friends and stay informed anxiety-free together