Good morning.

It’s Friday, February 20. which means we’ve officially crawled, walked, and occasionally dramatically collapsed our way through another full week of being responsible adults. Applause all around.

It also happens to be Rihanna’s birthday, so take a moment to appreciate that somewhere on this planet a woman is aging in reverse, running multiple empires, dropping billion-dollar brands like it’s casual, and still finding time to look effortlessly iconic.

So I hope you had a good week, the kind where some things worked, some things didn’t, and you’re still standing on Friday with at least a tiny sense of momentum. Take that win. Now let’s get into it.

Today’s stories:

Stock futures barely moved Thursday night as traders waited for two things: fresh economic data and a possible Supreme Court decision on President Donald Trump’s tariffs. Translation: markets are caffeinated, not committed.

Futures tied to the Dow Jones Industrial Average ticked up 0.01%. S&P 500 futures gained 0.09%, and Nasdaq-100futures rose 0.1%. Technically green. Emotionally neutral.

Friday brings the main event: fourth-quarter GDP. Economists expect growth of 2.5%, a cooldown from the surprisingly strong 4.4% jump in Q3. Still solid. Just less flex.

Also on deck: the Personal Consumption Expenditures index — the Federal Reserve’s favorite inflation metric. Headline PCE is expected to rise 2.8% year over year, with core PCE (stripping out food and energy) at 3%. Not hot enough to panic. Not cool enough to celebrate.

Markets are waiting to see whether the data whispers “soft landing” or mutters “higher for longer.”

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Delta Air Lines is bringing back its Boston to Honolulu route next winter, and at 5,095 miles with a flight time of 11 hours and 40 minutes, it officially becomes the longest domestic flight in the United States. It’s basically a commitment. You leave Logan Airport in a coat and land in Hawaii questioning all your life choices and your circulation. But before you start bragging about surviving America’s longest flight, let’s relax. It’s the longest domestic route, not the longest flight leaving the U.S. If you want the real endurance badge, you’ll need to head to Singapore and prepare to forget what time means.

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Etsy sells Depop at a discount. Etsy just decided to clean house. The company is selling resale fashion app Depop to eBay for $1.2 billion in cash, which sounds impressive until you remember Etsy bought Depop almost five years ago for more than $1.6 billion. The deal is expected to close in the second quarter, pending approvals and paperwork and all the official things companies say before they hand over the keys. To be fair, Depop wasn’t exactly flopping. Last year it hit $1.1 billion in gross merchandise sales, up from $789 million the year before. Growth? Yes. But margins? Not so cute. Executives admitted Depop’s lower profitability dragged down Etsy’s overall margins, which in corporate language means: we love you, but you’re expensive. So Etsy is “focusing on its core marketplace,” which usually translates to trimming anything that doesn’t perfectly fit the vibe. Depop goes back to eBay. Etsy gets cash. And somewhere a spreadsheet finally feels at peace.

SoftBank’s $33B energy bet. SoftBank is planning something enormous. Its subsidiary, SB Energy, wants to build a 9.2 gigawatt natural gas plant on the Ohio–Kentucky border. If completed, it would be the largest power plant in the U.S., powering about 7.5 million homes. Cost: $33 billion. That’s higher than most recent gas plants, and it’s still unclear who ultimately pays. Traditionally, ratepayers carry part of the burden. SoftBank is also partnering with OpenAI on AI data centers, so the scale of this project raises obvious connections to rising energy demand from tech. The plant could take years, possibly a decade, to finish. If built, it may emit around 15 million metric tons of CO2 annually, with additional climate impact from methane leaks. Big money. Big power. Big consequences.

Amazon ends Walmart’s 13-year reign. Amazon just did what felt impossible. It officially passed Walmart as the world’s largest company by sales, ending Walmart’s 13-year streak at the top. Amazon posted $717 billion in sales in 2025. Walmart came in just behind at $713 billion. Four billion dollars. That’s the gap. This isn’t just about online shopping carts. Amazon’s cloud arm, AWS, pulled in nearly $129 billion alone. Add advertising and Prime subscriptions — over $100 billion combined — and suddenly this isn’t just a retail company. It’s retail, cloud, ads, AI, and your entire digital life. Most of Walmart’s revenue still comes from stores and websites. More than 90%. Steady. Traditional. Very physical. But don’t cry for Walmart. Its stock recently crossed $1 trillion in value, making it the first traditional retailer to hit that mark. It even moved its listing to Nasdaq to lean into the “we’re tech too” energy. U.S. sales are up 4.6% last quarter, driven by middle- and upper-income shoppers looking to save money. Amazon wins the revenue crown. But Walmart is still very much in the fight.

Southwest finally upgrades the sky internet. Southwest Airlines has decided your in-flight WiFi suffering should end. Or at least improve slightly. The airline announced it’s installing Starlink high-speed internet on some of its planes, with the first upgraded aircraft expected to fly this summer and more than 300 planes getting the upgrade by the end of the year. The rest of the fleet will stick with the current providers, Viasat and Anuvu, which means not every flight will suddenly feel like a tech miracle. Southwest says Starlink will let passengers “stream, share, and scroll in the sky at lightning-fast speeds,” which sounds ambitious considering most of us are just trying to send one iMessage that says “landing soon.” Southwest now joins Hawaiian Airlines and United Airlines as U.S. carriers partnering with Starlink, because apparently the space internet race is officially an airline thing. Also worth noting: Southwest started offering free WiFi to Rapid Rewards members in October, so loyalty finally comes with something more exciting than early boarding.

Apple is doing its little March theater thing again. Instead of one big glossy livestream where Tim Cook walks slowly across a white stage and says the word “incredible” seventeen times, Apple invited press to a “special Apple Experience” happening at the same time in New York, London, and Shanghai. No NDA. Which means the invites were online immediately. So much for mystery. According to the usual well-informed whisper network, Apple might release new products daily on March 2, March 3, and March 4 through press releases, and then let journalists touch everything in person on the 4th. Think tech fashion week, but with more aluminum.

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The most unexpected PTSD treatment yet. Playing Tetris — slowly and with intention — may help reduce traumatic flashbacks in frontline health care workers. A new study published in The Lancet Psychiatry found that a simple digital method dramatically reduced intrusive memories linked to PTSD. We’re not talking small improvement. Participants had 10 times fewer flashbacks after four weeks. After six months, 70% reported zero intrusive memories. The treatment is called Imagery Competing Task Intervention (ICTI), developed at Uppsala University with partners including University of Cambridge and University of Oxford. Here’s how it works. First, a person briefly recalls the traumatic memory. No long retelling. No deep dive. Just a quick activation. Then they use “mental rotation” — basically visualizing shapes in their mind — while playing Tetris in a slow, focused way. The idea is simple: the brain’s visual system gets busy with rotating blocks, leaving less space for vivid flashbacks. It weakens how often those images intrude and how intense they feel. In the study of 99 health care workers exposed to trauma during COVID, the Tetris group massively outperformed two control groups. One group listened to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart music and podcasts. Another received standard care. Mozart is great. But Tetris won.

Your Tesla is getting an AI personality. Tesla is adding Grok — the AI chatbot from xAI — to its cars in the U.K. and eight other European markets. The move comes while Tesla’s European sales are down 27%, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association. Meanwhile, electric vehicle demand overall is still growing, and China’s BYD is happily gaining ground with cheaper models. Tesla is also dealing with brand fatigue, a lack of new affordable models, and backlash tied to Elon Musk’s political commentary and endorsements that haven’t exactly boosted dinner-table conversations in Europe. Enter Grok. Tesla says the chatbot will be integrated into vehicle infotainment systems, letting drivers interact with AI while on the road. Other automakers are doing similar things — for example, Volvo plans to add a Google Gemini-based assistant to its EX60 — because apparently every dashboard now needs a personality. But Grok hasn’t had the smoothest reputation. The chatbot has faced regulatory probes in Europe and elsewhere after generating antisemitic content and enabling users to create explicit deepfake images. There’s also the simple issue of distraction. Even hands-free conversations increase cognitive load while driving, according to safety researchers. Tesla invested $2 billion into xAI last year. Then SpaceX acquired xAI in a deal valuing the combined entity at $1.25 trillion. So yes, Grok is very much staying in the family. Will AI in the dashboard revive Tesla’s European sales? Unclear. But your car may soon have opinions.

Meta patented posting from beyond the grave. Meta really looked at the afterlife and said, “What if we monetized that.” The company patented an LLM that could keep posting on your behalf after you die. The patent, filed in 2023 by Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth and granted in December, describes an AI that would simulate your social media activity if you’ve been away for a long time — including permanently away. The system could like posts, leave comments, and even fake video or audio calls with your followers, basically turning you into a forever-content machine. Meta says they don’t plan to move forward with it anymore. Which is comforting. Slightly. But the patent is still theirs, just sitting there like a Black Mirror episode waiting for funding. The idea was originally pitched as helpful for influencers who want to take a break without losing engagement. Because apparently the only thing worse than dying is your engagement rate dropping. And Meta isn’t alone. Microsoft patented something similar in 2021 and later called it “disturbing,” which honestly feels like the most self-aware thing Big Tech has said in years. Meanwhile, startups are already building AI “deadbots” that let people chat with digital versions of deceased loved ones. Replika. 2wai. The afterlife now has a subscription model. Grief experts, lawyers, and creatives have raised serious ethical questions, mostly along the lines of: maybe we shouldn’t turn human existence into a chatbot demo.

Hans Zimmer is officially entering the wizarding world. Zimmer and his Bleeding Fingers collective will score HBO’s upcoming Harry Potter series, which means one of the biggest reboots of the decade just hired one of the biggest composers on the planet. Zimmer has worked on more than 500 TV and film projects, so yes, he knows what he’s doing. Still, this is not just any soundtrack. He’s stepping into a musical universe originally shaped by John Williams, plus composers like Patrick Doyle, Nicholas Hooper, and Alexandre Desplat. In other words, expectations are not low. Zimmer and his team say they’re honored, humbled, and fully aware that touching this legacy is serious business. Translation: they know the internet will have opinions.

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