👋 It pays to be the GOAT: Just ask Tom Brady, whose “GOAT Collection” of 41 items fetched $9m at auction for Sotheby’s. A 1969 Rolex was the top-selling item at $1.1m, while the Michigan jersey he wore in his final college game sold for $792k. And Brady brought fresh blood to the auction house: Of the 800 people who registered for the auction, 34% were new customers and 40% were under 40 years old.
🎧 On the pod:Why Spotify Wrapped missed the mark this year.
NEWS FLASH
🚕 General Motors is throwing in the towel on its robotaxi: GM announced that it’s calling it quits on building a fleet of driverless Cruise taxis, and will instead pursue driver-assistance features for its cars, like Super Cruise, a hands-off driving feature that’s already offered in 20+ GM vehicles. GM’s robotaxis — which would have cost the company $10B+ to develop — also needed to compete with Google’s Waymo and Tesla’s recently announced driverless vehicles and robotaxi service.
💰 Remember the Macy’s employee who hid $151m in expenses? Turns out they weren’t just trying to pocket the money, but had a more relatable reason: trying to cover a mistake. The company said the employee acted alone over three years to create erroneous cost entries and falsify underlying documents to hide an earlier accounting mistake — all of which they did by using “manual journal entries.” Macy’s CEO said the company is implementing “additional controls” to make sure no more millions go missing. Macy’s also slightly raised its full-year sales forecast to $22.3B-$22.5B.
🤖 RIP, Moxie: Robotics startup Embodied is shutting down, citing a failed funding round. This means Moxie — its $800 robot companion for children ages 5-10 — will stop working. Worse, Embodied claims it’s “unable” to offer refunds to most customers. What’s most depressing, however, are all the parents sharing how bummed their kids are to know that their robot friend is leaving. We’ve previously reported on the instability of digital assets, including lost media, AI companions, and virtual meeting places — but the fact that Moxie served kids makes it especially sad.
MORE NEWS TO KNOW
A federal judgeblocked the sale of Alex Jones’ Infowars to The Onion, ruling that the court-ordered bankruptcy auction of the website “lacked transparency.” Jones was forced to sell Infowars to pay the $1.5B in damages he owes to families of the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.
Apple launched iOS 18.2, which comes with Apple Intelligence features like ChatGPT integration and Genmoji, which lets users generate new emoji-like images.
Kroger and Albertsons’ $24.6B merger was blocked by both federal regulators and Washington state’s attorney general on Tuesday. Now, Albertsons is suing Kroger, alleging it failed to “divest assets necessary for antitrust approval.”
BUDGET BETTER
Improve how you govern your green
These are sheets for tracking your expenses — we made them so you can spend less time fancifying cells, and more time doing literally anything else.
Grab the pack for free. Inside are eight templates to help you organize your finances for content, paid ads, public relations, product marketing, and more, just in time for 2025.
Look, I did listen to Bruce Springsteen in 2024, but mostly in November, when I was looking for a song for a karaoke night that required singers to choose sad songs. “The River” is sad!
Yet when my Spotify Wrapped dropped, it placed a different Springsteen song in my top five — a song I knew I didn’t play more often than several others this year.
Turning to — Where else? — Reddit, it seemed I wasn’t alone. Several users expressed:
Disappointment in Spotify Wrapped’s lackluster presentation, which skipped previous fave features like genre data and “Sound Town,” which connected users to cities with similar tastes.
Confusion at weird genres like “pink pilates princess” and “vampire football rap.”
Suspicion that their listening data was off, including top artists they never listened to.
One user suggested checking this website instead, which, at least in my experience, does offer a far more realistic picture of my top listens over the past 12 months.
So, what happened?
Users speculate that Spotify’s reliance on AI combined with layoffs that impacted 25% of its staff had something to do with it.
Instead of beloved features, Spotify partnered with Google to offer a poorly received Wrapped AI podcast featuring two bots rambling about users’ listening habits. Some users claimed theirs were wrong or offensive.
Glenn McDonald, a former Spotify engineer, toldBusiness Insider that Wrapped had always been a marketing exercise. He’d pushed for more human elements, but suggested that after layoffs, remaining engineers didn’t bother.
Yet if what Spotify wants is social media virality, it succeeded: This year’s Wrapped scored a “record number of individual shares,” per a company spokesperson.
But…
… while Wrapped has served as a clever way to gain brand awareness and new users — it led to a 21% jump in app downloads in the first week of December 2020 — it has competition from the likes of YouTube, Apple, Amazon, and smaller platforms, like Tidal and Deezer.
Spotify still rules the streaming music market. But if Wrapped leans into AI slop over communal listening experiences users want to share, they could be swayed to alternative platforms that pick up the slack.
The days of being ruled by Google algorithms are over, according to HubSpot’s head of global growth. Find out what’s next in SEO.
Can you double your email conversion rates overnight? Yup. Here’s how to use AI to do it.
DATA POINT
Give the gift of solitude — it’s what most people want this holiday season, anyway.
The majority of Americans (56%) consider alone time vital to their mental health, according to a new survey of 1k+ US adults from the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and College of Medicine, with just 7% saying they somewhat or strongly disagree. However, the study also found that nearly half (46%) don’t get enough of it around the holidays.
For some, merrymaking can be particularly difficult without the proper space to recharge: 36% of respondents said not having enough alone time makes them more irritable.
But there’s no need to skip out on festivities entirely — Ohio State psychology professor Sophie Lazarus says even a few minutes alone can help you get back into the holiday spirit.
AROUND THE WEB
⚖️ On this day: In 1989, real estate mogul Leona Helmsley, was sentenced to four years in prison and fined $7.1m for tax fraud. When she died in 2007, she left $12m to her dog.
🗞️ Newsletter:Subscribe to Scott’s Newsletter and join 332k+ readers, discussing mental models, performance, business, and entrepreneurship.
🎛️ That’s cool: The most iconic EDM samples from 1990 to 2024.
📨 Useful: Got someone’s email? Use this site to find their LinkedIn.
Yesterday, we took a pulse check on how you’re feeling at work. It was a pretty mixed bag.
While 50% said they’re almost paid fairly, 23% said their comp doesn’t even come close and 21% said they’re perfectly paid. A lucky 6% said they are overpaid.
Nearly half (49%) said their level of contentment with their job is “eh,” and 44% said it remains to be seen if they’ll be job hunting in the new year.
One reader really summed it up: “I’d like to find a new job with better growth opportunities, but stories of people spending months looking for a job with companies ghosting them sounds worse than staying at my current job.”
SHOWER THOUGHT
There’s probably someone in the world right now who is living the perfect day, but you’ll never know about it because they’re too busy enjoying it to post about it.SOURCE
Today’s email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah and Sara Friedman. Editing by: Ben “Top 1% of all Weird Al listeners” Berkley.
