In today’s newsletter we discuss Bill Ackman is buying 5% of the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, OG of NFT trading exchanges OpenSea is facing competition from Blur, did Elon Musk help MrBeast’s video get 150 Million views and make $263,000, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is joining the board of the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), and OpenAI is partnering Arizona State University to create more Prompt Engineers

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Jay-Z Just Won An Emmy For Rihanna's 2023 Super Bowl Halftime Show

Business

It sounds like the rich are about to get even richer as there’s news that Bill Ackman and his wife Neri Oxman are buying a nearly 5% stake in Tel Aviv Stock Exchange for around $17.3 million.

For those of you that aren’t finance geeks like myself, Bill Ackman is the Founder & CEO of the New York-based Pershing Square Capital Management, and his net worth is estimated to be around $4.1 Billion with a capital B!

In an article on CNBC Bill Achman, who is Jewish, describes himself as both pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli, saying “it is not inconsistent to be pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian.”

In a post on X/Twitter in October 2023 Bill Achman wrote “I am pro-Palestinian. Some might be surprised by this due to my recent advocacy on @X for Israel, but you shouldn’t be. I am anti-terrorist, not anti-Palestinian. It is not inconsistent to be pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian.”

“My pro-Palestinian perspective began more than 30 years ago when I was introduced to the Palestinian community and their plight in the early 1990s. I invested millions in helping promote Palestinian economic development and peaceful coexistence.”

Bill Achman’s wife Neri Oxman is an American-Israeli architectural designer and a professor at MIT where she holds the roles of a Sony Corporation Career Development Professor and Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab. The couple got married in January 2019 at the Central Synagogue in Manhattan, and had their first child together in Spring of 2019. They are both co-trustees of The Pershing Square Foundation (PSF), which is a family foundation established in 2006 to support exceptional leaders and innovative organizations that tackle important social issues and deliver scalable and sustainable global impact.

Bill Ackman and wife Neri Oxman buy nearly 5% stake in Tel Aviv Stock Exchange

Crypto

Even as we slowly exit Crypto Winter, the OG of NFT trading exchanges OpenSea is facing it’s 1st real competition from upstart NFT platform Blur, which has marketed itself as a platform for people just looking to make money flipping NFTs (aren’t they all?!?!).

Despite the poor performance of NFT in the last few years, the NFT market say $11.8 billion in volume across for all of 2023.

OpenSea went through a round of layoffs in November of 2023 when they laid off around 50% of their staff.

Ouch!

At the time OpenSea’s CEO Devin Finzer said in a post on X/Twitter "We’re building a new foundation so we can innovate faster and we’ll have some experiences to share with you soon. We will change how we operate - shifting to a smaller team with a direct connection to users."

OpenSea’s CEO Devin Finzer is now positioning the company for when (or in my words “if”) the NFT market takes off again then OpenSea will be “in the pole position as the prime spot for drops — a first sale in the NFT world — a promising potential revenue stream for the company.” according to an article on Axios.

OpenSea aims win NFT market by bringing more people in

Entertainment

Did Elon Musk put his finger on the scale and help MrBeast’s video make more money on his X/Twitter platform?

There’s a lot of conspiracy theories going around on X/Twitter this week after MrBeast reported that the video he uploaded to the platform a week ago had already received over 150 Million views, and that he made $263,000 from the video.

Other content creators on the platform are crying foul!

It seems that MrBeast’s video may have gotten some help from X/Twitter by displaying the MrBeast video as if it was an unofficial advertisement that was suggested in people’s feed for them to view. The X/Twitter platform typically does this for big brands

Other content creators are noting that they saw the video in their feed multiple times as an unmarked advertisement.

MrBeast has his own theory. He believes his video was boosted by advertisers, who saw how successful his video was doing and then paid for their ads to be shown in pre-roll spots, which manifested an additional boost in views.

"Advertisers saw the attention it was getting and bought ads on my video (I think) and thus my revenue per view is prob higher than what you’d experience," MrBeast said in a X/Twitter post.

However you slice this experiment, it does show that at least MrBeast has been able to successfully monetize a video on the X/Twitter platform. So hopefully this is the beginning of content creators like me being able to draw a revenue stream from Elon Musk’s radically redesigned advertising platform.

MrBeast made $263K from a video on X, but calls the payout 'a bit of a facade'

Sports

Apparently the WWE can smell what The Rock is cooking.

The board of directors of TKO Group, which consists of the UFC and WWE, has appointed Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson to their board.

And the news for Dwayne Johnson gets even better - he’s getting his name back!

As a part of the agreement Dwayne Johnson has been granted full ownership of "The Rock" trademark, which had been owned by WWE. It turns out for all these years the WWE has been making money off their ownership of “The Rock” trademark, but no more.

Now Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has signed a new services and merchandising agreement with WWE "that provides for his promotional, licensing, and other services" according to the press release.

In a way too long of a statement if you ask me, Dwayne Johnson said:

"Being on the TKO Board of Directors, and taking full ownership of my name, 'The Rock,' is not only unprecedented, but incredibly inspiring as my crazy life is coming full circle. At my core, I'm a builder who builds for and serves the people, and TKO CEO Ari Emanuel is building something truly game-changing.”

He want on and on and on saying "I'm very motivated to help continue to globally expand our TKO, WWE, and UFC businesses as the worldwide leaders in sports and entertainment -- while proudly representing so many phenomenal athletes and performers who show up every day putting in the hard work with their own two hands to make their dreams come true and deliver for our audiences. I've been there, I'm still there and this is for them."

So there you have it. “The Rock” is getting his name back, and Dwayne Johnson is now a part of the board of directors who oversees the World Wrestling Entertainment where he got his start in the entertainment industry.

So just like all wrestling is made up, I guess this story has a happy ending.

'The Rock' appointed to UFC, WWE's TKO Group board of directors

Tech

OpenAI is in the news again, and this time it’s for something positive.

OpenAI has announced its 1st partnership with a university to offer their full enterprise offerings to Arizona State University beginning in February 2024. The school “will have full access to ChatGPT Enterprise and plans to use it for coursework, tutoring, research and more.” according to an article on CNBC.

Arizona State University plans to build a personalized AI tutor for students, which will allow them to create AI avatars for help studying and to expand the university’s prompt engineering course.

Prompt Engineers is one of the newest careers to come out of the AI industry in the last year. 

McKinsey & Company defines Prompt Engineering “the practice of designing inputs for generative AI tools that will produce optimal outputs.”

Prompt Engineers make an average annual salary of $62,977 a year on the low-end according to ZipRecruiter, and in some cases up to $300,000 a year in cities like San Francisco and NYC.

According to McKinsey’s latest research, generative AI “could add up to $4.4 trillion annually to the global economy, across sectors from banking to life sciences.”

So I guess I know what I should tell my kids to study in college when they grow up.

OpenAI announces first partnership with a university

So much news, so little time. Until tomorrow we’re signing out.

— Chris