🛰️ Down to Earth

👋 Rise and shine. We’ve got quite the mix today: Zuckerberg joins the $200B club, a satellite (purposefully) crashes to Earth, and MeMooners book their solo trips.

🎧 On the pod: DirecTV’s $1 Dish Network deal.

NEWS FLASH

💰 You’re still scrambling to finish your 2024 resolutions. You know who isn’t? Mark Zuckerberg. He grew his wealth by $73.4B in 2024 to a total of $201B, making the Meta CEO the fourth-richest person in the world. The exclusive $200B club has only three other members: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Bernard Arnault.

📄 Back to the drawing board: California Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed SB 1047, a controversial bill requiring large AI model developers to implement safety guardrails, saying it was too broad and neglected “smaller, specialized models.” While some AI experts and business leaders supported the bill as necessary, others argued that the sweeping regulations would stifle innovation.

📱 No one can hear you now: A massive Verizon outage Monday resulted in 100k+ reports on DownDetector. Many affected users claimed their phones were in SOS mode, meaning they weren’t connected to a network but had some satellite connectivity for emergency services. Reports were nationwide, but especially prevalent in New York, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, and North Carolina.

MORE NEWS TO KNOW

AT&T is selling its 70% stake in DirecTV to PE firm TPG for $7.6B. Plus, DirecTV is paying EchoStar $1 — and assuming $9.75B in debt — to acquire Dish Network.
Epic is suing Google, again, and this time it’s including Samsung, too. The game developer filed an antitrust lawsuit against both companies alleging that they illegally conspired to keep third-party app stores off Samsung phones.
Levi’s latest campaign features Beyoncé in new spins on old ads, starting with a famous 1985 commercial in which a laundromat customer waits in his underwear for his fave jeans to wash.

TOOLBOX

Lots of good stuff coming out of our media network lately. Here’s what we’re guessing you’ll find most helpful:

📅 Got a new job? Take this wisdom to lay out a clear course of action for your first 30, 60, and 90 days of a fresh gig.
🤖 There’s always an AI one: This time it’s about whether AI is actually ready to revolutionize the way we work, and if a helpful program can deliver on that promise.
📦 So, you want to buy ads on Amazon? Here’s what you need to know, as told by someone who has “Amazon DSP” in his job title.

THE BIG IDEA

A satellite engulfed in flames with Earth in the background.

Forecast calls for raining satellites

There are ~10k active satellites currently orbiting Earth— but what happens when they start dropping on us?

That’s what the European Space Agency (ESA) hopes to find out with a new project called the Destructive Reentry Assessment Container Object (or DRACO, with that handy acronym explaining why it’s both a “container” and an “object”).

DRACO will be a 441-pound, washing-machine-sized box of sensors and cameras.
The ESA will launch it into orbit in 2027 and watch as DRACO plummets to Earth ~12 hours later.
DRACO will deploy a parachute during reentry, slowing down just long enough to transmit data about its brief and painful life.
Scientists will use the data to design future satellites that don’t break up.

This is all in pursuit of the ESA’s goal to eliminate the creation of space junk by 2030. There are ~30k pieces of trackable garbage floating around in space, any one of which could hit something important and cause problems.

This isn’t the first time…

… that people have watched something fall from orbit with baited breath.

In 2001, Taco Bell offered to give everyone in the US a free taco if a piece of the Russian space station Mir landed on a target near Australia.

The station’s core hit somewhere closer to Chile, saving Taco Bell ~$10m.

Hopefully a brave European fast-food chain will make a similar offer and try to catch part of DRACO.

🔗

DATA POINT

The honeymoon period never has to end if there’s no one around to pick a fight with. That could be why there’s a new travel industry buzzword popping up in Hilton’s 2025 Trends Report: MeMooners.

Nearly half (47%) of travelers say they often travel by themselves, and the trend is even more popular among Gen Zers, 55% of whom say they regularly travel alone.

Most travelers bring some form of companionship along for the ride, though: 64% of solo travelers say a good book is their favorite travel buddy while 25% bring their pet on vacation.

While solitude sounds blissful, 44% of MeMooners say they appreciate activities and events where they can meet up with other solo travelers.

You know what’s scarier than feeling lonely on vacation? The other new buzzword mentioned in Hilton’s report: Frolleagues — “friends who are also colleagues.”

AROUND THE WEB

💳 On this day: In 1958, American Express launched its first credit card, geared toward US and Canadian travelers.

🪦 That’s interesting: The first pet cemetery.

🧠 Game: Guess the animal.

📖 That’s cool: If you’ve ever wanted to browse Radio Shack catalogs dating back to 1939, here you go.

🦆 Aww: Whee!

WEIRD PATENTS

In for a wild ride: At first glance, a tricycle with square wheels seems like an obviously bad idea. And for the normal purposes of a tricycle, it is. But for the five inventors who patented the “square wheel tricycle” in 2016, the weird contraption was actually the answer to making learning more fun — it was designed for educational exhibits, where visitors could ride on a special indented track to illustrate mathematical concepts in real life.

SHOWER THOUGHT

Technically, your alarm tone is your theme song as it starts every episode. SOURCE

Today’s email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah, Sara Friedman, and Sam Barsanti.
Editing by: Ben “Not your Frolleague” Berkley.

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