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Bob Iger doesn’t understand generative AI. He thinks it is good for the quarterly bottom line. He believes a corporation can control it and that lawyers and agreements can bind it. He is clueless. Generative AI is here to kill Hollywoodincluding the company hes now leaving to Josh DAmaro, the new heir to Disney’s throne. This became painfully clear to me during Disney’s recent first-quarter financial call. Taking a victory lap for his modernization efforts, he briefly laid out the road map for the company’s partnership with OpenAI, announced in December 2025. Under the agreement, Disney would invest $1 billion in the artificial intelligence company and let it tap Disney’s IP crown jewels so Sora users can make clips of Donald Trump wearing an Iron Man suit battling Jafar dressed as an Iranian Ayatollah. Heres Igers plan as stated: Step oneflood Disney+ with Sora 2 generated vertical videos capped at 30 seconds. Iger views this as a positive step that will jump-start the platform’s ability to compete with the dopamine-loop short-form content of TikTok and YouTube. There is no Step 2. At least not yet. For the last 15 years, Iger has been on a quest to find the silver bullet that keeps Disney relevant deep into the 21st century. He bought Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, and Fox. Now, as he leaves Cinderellas castle behind, he clearly views this Sora partnership as the final move that allows him to leave the company future-proofed. During the call, Iger all but carved this philosophy in stone for DAmaro. I believe that in the world that changes as much as it does that in some form or another, trying to preserve the status quo is a mistake, and Im certain that my successor will not do that, Iger said. Theyll be handed, I think, a good hand in terms of the strength of the company, [and a] number of opportunities to grow. But to say curated AI slop provides a number of opportunities to grow is an Epcot-sized ball of naiveté. Iger’s intention to evolve Disney is correct; stagnation is indeed death, as any Harvard Business School freshman will recite. But his strategy fails to understand the nature of the beast he has invited into the Magic Kingdom. Iger is talking about generative AI like a new distribution channel or a camera lensa tool that can be kept in a walled garden to serve a corporate master. But AI is not a tool; it is a solvent. It dissolves the barriers between creator and consumer, between professional and amateur, and ultimately, between value and noise. A new plan for Disney D’Amaro is walking into a wall of noise that is going to get increasingly harder to break through as generative content continues to take over our feeds. Disney’s saving grace could be that D’Amaro, a man who built his career overseeing the company’s theme parks and experiences, likely understands the value of true physical, human-driven innovation. Expanding those experiences, as Iger said on the call, will be Disney’s focus in the years to come. It makes perfect sense. Disneys Experiences segment outperformed the Entertainment segment in Q1 2026 by a factor of almost three. While entertainment revenue reached $11.61 billion, high content production and marketing costs for major releases caused its operating income to plunge 35% to $1.1 billion. In contrast, the Experiences segment posted record revenue of $10.01 billion with an operating income of $3.31 billion, accounting for roughly 71% of Disney’s total segment operating profit for the quarter. Its telling that the physical experience and its human factor, beat the cumulus of film and TV re-fried franchise releases. D’Amaro has the opportunity to set a strategy that could make Disney thrive. He has the track record to do it. D’Amaro’s experience isnt limited to running a theme park. He secured the throne partly because he championed Disney’s $1.5 billion investment in Epic Games and Fortnite. He seemingly understands the digital generation. Now the question is, will he see the Sora deal for what it is? Disney’s agreement with OpenAI is a three-year deal, with a one-year exclusivity clause that opens Disney to close deals with, say, Kuaishou Technology, the Chinese makers of Kling. In corporate time, three years is a blink. But for Generative AIwhere time is measured in yellow dogs yearsit is an epoch. By the time this contract expires, the havoc AI will have wreaked on the entertainment industry won’t be something you can negotiate away. This is a pivotal moment that DAmaro needs to address now, even if it goes against the stock market algorithms and the vision of a Wall Street-revered old man now sailing into the sunset on his gilded version of the Black Pearl. Iger’s AI strategy Iger outlined three pillars for this AI strategy at his call: Creativity (assisting the process) Productivity (efficiency, read: cost-cutting) Connectivity (a “more intimate relationship” with the consumer). His vision is a Disney+ where you don’t just watch Frozen; you generate a 30-second clip of Olaf dancing in your living room. Exciting. The financial sector, predictable as ever, applauded at the mere thought of Disney embracing AI. When the Sora deal was announced, many analysts like Citi Research Media Analyst Jason Bazinet called this a masterful move: A strategic defense, and a way to monetize IP that would otherwise be scrapped for free. Bazinet believes this agreement codifies what specific IP can be used (animated characters) and what form the output can take (i.e. short-form video). This will both protect actors/actresses in Hollywood and prevent cannibalization of Disneys long-form Film and TV output. Outside the boardroo, things arent so La La Land. The unions that work in the “Creativity” pillar view Igers AI strategy as a betrayal, framing it as a Trojan Horse that normalizes the technology that is intended to replace them. The Writers Guild of America said that [the partnership] seems to endorse the platform’s appropriation of their work while diminishing the value of their creations for the benefit of a tech corporation. Igers idea of “Productivity” is just corporate speak for employing fewer humans. Jobs are going to be lost, as filmmaker Tyler Perry said after the news. Perry saw the writing on the wall a long time ago, halting an $800 million studio expansion after seeing the first version of Sora. If you can generate a location, you don’t need to build it. If you can generate a performance, you don’t need to film it. Disney has been cutting jobs in the film, television, and finance department, but none related yet to its AI initiatives, mainly in post-production.. And as for Connectivity, consumers are all well served, thank you very much. Anyone who has surfed YouTube, TikTok, Discord, Instagram, X, or Reddit, knows they are overflowing with AI-generated videos. There are not enough Avengers, Baby Yodas, and Mickey Mice in the world to win this war of content. And the more time that passes, the less chance Disney has at winning that war with the same tools as the enemy is using. Disney is adopting Sora to fight a battle in its own walled garden, limited to its famous-but-limited IP. By definition, it cant compete against the entire planet creating universes of infinitely-expanding generated content. Horizon events Iger seems to believe that by partnering with OpenAI, Disney has bought safety. Somehow, he thinks this buys Disney control over the beast. But OpenAI does not control generative AI. Altman is a chump compared to the combined power of the companies cooking generative AI video technology in China. Generative AI is, right now, an all-powerful being who doesnt care about corporate deals. Igers remarks remind me of that viral 1999 Newsnight interview with David Bowie, where he laughed at the interviewer who thought the Internet was just a tool. No Bob, Bowie would have told Iger today, AI is not a tool. Its an alien lifeform. Experts warned me of this moment in 2023. Tom GrahamCEO of Metaphysic, a firm dedicated to protecting actors and regular people against AI clones told me that we were approaching a horizon of events where reality would evaporate. Gil PerryCEO of AI avatar firm D-IDpredicted that within one or two years, we wouldn’t be able to distinguish truth from lies. Emad Mostaqueco-founder of Stability AItold me that within a decade, wed create anything in real-time with visual perfection. They were all correct, but far too conservative. We didnt need a decade. We barely needed three years. Which, in itself, is a testimony of the true power of AI and its ability to change reality and content as we know it. Today, early 2026, we have crossed that horizon. The uncanny valley, which allowed us to instinctively distinguish fake AI from real, is permanently closed. Models like Sora 2 and Googles Veo 3 more than often produce video indistinguishable from reality for short clips. But the real threat to Disney isn’t the partner they paid $1 billion to; its the technology they didn’t buy. Open-source platforms like Wan 2.6made by Chinese company Alibabaare already running on consumer hardware, offering multi-shot storytelling and character consistency that rivals the closed systems of Silicon Valley. The technology is wild, uncensored, and free. It doesn’t care about Disneys copyright. It doesn’t care about walled gardens. It is creating a Big Bang of content where a teenager in a basement can generate a film that looks as expensive as a Marvel blockbuster. The dilution of magic And this is where Igers gamble truly falls apart. He assumes that in this world of infinite, picture-perfect content, Disneys IP will remain king. And why? Disney has spent the last decade systematically exhausting its brand equity. We are drowning in the umpteenth Star Wars spinoff and the 50th Marvel phase. The brand fatigue is palpable. Why would people, except the hard-core fanboys, choose to consume frozen-TV-dinner clips of the same old stuff again and again? How can the acceleration of this IPs exhaustion, allowing users to churn out AI-slopped versions of these characters, help Disney? Iger thinks adding curated user-generated noise to Disney+ is a value-add, failing to see it for what it is: the final commoditization of its former magic. Why would the current and future generations care about a sanitized, 30-second Mickey Mouse clip on Disney+ when they can go to an open platform and generate their own universe, tailored specifically to their own desires, with characters that feel just as real but are completely new? Change course or sink If theres anything I can be sure of is that the history of the internetfrom YouTube to TikTokteaches us one thing: The audience craves the new, the raw, and the personal. They are moving away from the polished, corporate monoliths. By integrating Sora 2, Iger isn’t saving Disney; he is training his audience to accept synthetic media, accelerating the very shift that renders legacy studios obsolete. Bob Iger is right that you have to change or die. But by betting that he can ride the tiger of generative AI without being eaten, he may have just opened the cage door for good. Perhaps D’Amaro, the man of the physical Disney, can save the House of Mouse from the digital trap Iger has set for him. If the future of content is infinite, cheap, and synthetic, the only true luxury left is the human touch. D’Amaro has the chance to zag where the rest of the industry is zigging. He can double down on the one thing AI cannot simulatethe spark of human genius that birthed this company in the first place. Instead of competing with teenagers in garages on AI speed, hire them to do what Walt Disney himself did: Invent new mythologies. Create your own technologies. Craft truly new, bold stories born from the messiness of the human spirit, not the probability curves of a model trained on the past. Reclaim the experience not just as a theme park ride, but as the act of witnessing something undeniably, beautifully human. That is the only magic trick left that an algorithm cant replicate.
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For many women in the U.S. and around the world, motherhood comes with career costs. Raising children tends to lead to lower wages and fewer work hours for mothersbut not fathersin the United States and around the world. As a sociologist, I study how family relationships can shape your economic circumstances. In the past, Ive studied how motherhood tends to depress womens wages, something social scientists call the motherhood penalty. I wondered: Can government programs that provide financial support to parents offset the motherhood penalty in earnings? A motherhood penalty I set out with Therese Christensen, a Danish sociologist, to answer this question for moms in Denmarka Scandinavian country with one of the worlds strongest safety nets. Several Danish policies are intended to help mothers stay employed. For example, subsidized child care is available for all children from 6 months of age until they can attend elementary school. Parents pay no more than 25% of its cost. But even Danish moms see their earnings fall precipitously, partly because they work fewer hours. Losing $9,000 in the first year In an article to be published in an upcoming issue of European Sociological Review, Christensen and I showed that mothers increased income from the statesuch as from child benefits and paid parental leaveoffset about 80% of Danish moms average earnings losses. Using administrative data from Statistics Denmark, a government agency that collects and compiles national statistics, we studied the long-term effects of motherhood on income for 104,361 Danish women. They were born in the early 1960s and became mothers for the first time when they were 20-35 years old. They all became mothers by 2000, making it possible to observe how their earnings unfolded for decades after their first child was born. While the Danish governments policies changed over those years, paid parental leave and child allowances and other benefits were in place throughout. The women were, on average, age 26 when they became mothers for the first time, and 85% had more than one child. We estimated that motherhood led to a loss of about the equivalent of US$9,000 in womens earningswhich we measured in inflation-adjusted 2022 U.S. dollarsin the year they gave birth to or adopted their first child, compared with what we would expect if they had remained childless. While the motherhood penalty got smaller as their children got older, it was long-lasting. The penalty only fully disappeared 19 years after the women became moms. Motherhood also led to a long-term decrease in the number of the hours they worked. Studying whether government can fix it These annual penalties add up. We estimated that motherhood cost the average Danish woman a total of about $120,000 in earnings over the first 20 years after they first had childrenabout 12% of the money they would have earned over those two decades had they remained childless. Most of the mothers in our study who were employed before giving birth were eligible for four weeks of paid leave before giving birth and 24 weeks afterward. They could share up to 10 weeks of their paid leave with the babys father. The length and size of this benefit has changed over the years. The Danish government also offers child benefitspayments made to parents of children under 18. These benefits are sometimes called a child allowance. Denmark has other policies, like housing allowances, that are available to all Danes, but are more generous for parents with children living at home. Using the same data, Christensen and I next estimated how motherhood affects how much money Danish moms receive from the government. We wanted to know whether they get enough income from the government to compensate for their loss of income from their paid work. We found that motherhood leads to immediate increases in Danish moms government benefits. In the year they first gave birth to or adopted a child, women received over $7,000 more from the government than if they had remained childless. That money didnt fully offset their lost earnings, but it made a substantial dent. The gap between the money that mothers received from the government, compared with what they would have received if they remained childless, faded in the years following their first birth or adoption. But we detected a long-term bump in income from government benefits for motherseven 20 years after they first become mothers. Cumulatively, we determined that the Danish government offset about 80% of the motherhood earnings penalty for the women we studied. While mothers lost about $120,000 in earnings compared with childless women over the two decades after becoming a mother, they gained about $100,000 in government benefits, so their total income loss was only about $20,000. Benefits for parents of older kids Our findings show that government benefits do not fully offset earnings losses for Danish moms. But they help a lot. Because most countries provide less generous parental benefits, Denmark is not a representative case. It is instead a test case that shows whats possible when governments make financially supporting parents a high priority. That is, strong financial support for mothers from the government can make motherhood more affordable and promote gender equality in economic resources. Because the motherhood penalty is largest at the beginning, government benefits targeted to moms with infants, such as paid parental leave, may be especially valuable. Child care subsidies can also help mothers return to work faster. The motherhood penaltys long-term nature, however, indicates that these short-term benefits are not enough to get rid of it altogether. Benefits that are available to all mothers of children under 18, such as child allowances, can help offset the lon-term motherhood penalty for mothers of older children. Alexandra Killewald is a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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E-Commerce
Elon Musk just created the worlds most valuable private company. And he didnt do it through rapid growth or a new product launchat least not directly, anyway. Instead, as reported this week, Musk merged his artificial intelligence startup xAI into his wildly successful rocket company, SpaceX. Combined together, the two companies are now valued at an estimated $1.25 trillion. Its the biggest merger in history. And because Musk controls both companies, he calls most of the shots when it comes to the deal. A sci-fi twist At first glance, the connection between rockets and AI seems tenuous at best. But dig deeper into Musks big picture goals, and the merger starts to make a lot more senseeven if theres a decidedly sci-fi twist. SpaceX has made a name for itself by building gigantic, reusable rockets that deliver satellites into orbit for cheap. The company also delivers people and cargo to the International Space Station on behalf of NASA. Thats a lucrative business. SpaceXs rockets are now Americas main method of getting things into orbit, and its cheap satellites have fueled the success of Starlink, Musks space-based Internet service. Fully 95% of the things America launches into space are now put there by SpaceX. Simultaneously, Musks xAI has been hard at work building Large Language Models, like its core Grok model. Although xAI isnt as well known or widely used as dominant players like OpenAI, its models still perform well in industry benchmarks, putting the company on the Large Language Model leaderboard. Training models is expensive, though, not least because of the cost of electricity, and the challenges of finding room in data centers here on planet earth. That challenge likely hints at Musks deeper reason for merging his two companies. Musk has previously pushed for the idea of launching data centers into space, a long-held, sci-fi-escque dream of his. This sounds outlandish, but its becoming a surprisingly mainstream concept. Computers on satellites in orbit would benefit from plentiful, free solar energy. They could also potentially cool their chips by transferring heat into space, avoiding the insane power (and water) usage of terrestrial data centers. The lack of cooling equipment and grid infrastructure means these orbital data centers could be smaller than those on earth. And they wouldnt need to take up valuable real estate here on the ground. By beaming their data back to earth, a constellation of data center satellites could greatly reduce the cost of training and operating Large Language Models. That could give a third-tier LLM company like Grok a huge advantage over its competitors. Musk may also have an easier time recruiting talent for the well-respected SpaceX than for xAI. And he could use lucrative government contracts for orbital launches to fund AI development. All of this will take time to develop, of course. But given Musks track record (for engineering at least, if perhaps not social network administration), the idea of flying data centers could come to fruition sooner than imagined. When Musk said he would build reusable rockets that could land themselves upright, people mocked him. Today, thats a key part of what makes SpaceX successful, and its being widely copied by companies and governments. The same rapid development cycle could apply to orbital supercomputers, too. In the short term, there are other advantages of merging the companies. Starlink customers will likely see more AI tools built into their Internet subscriptions. Musk might also be planning to build more AI into his government contracts, including those in the defense space. Companies like Palantir make billions by selling AI services in the defense sector. Musk may be looking to use his existing SpaceX connections to get in on the opportunity. Not a done deal The deal isnt officially done yet. Regulators could still balk at the idea of creating a mega company at Musks desired scale. And because the X social network sits under the xAI umbrella, concerns about Musks control of both information and access to space could crater the deal on national security grounds. Still, assuming the merger goes ahead, Musk could have an unprecedented level of control over two of the 21st centurys most promising technologies. And, he would have an unprecedented ability to combine those technologies together.
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