In today’s issue we discuss Mark Cuban is selling the Dallas Mavericks, Apple becomes a $3 Trillion dollar company, Elon Musk’s X.AI is raising $1 Billion dollars, Nicolas Cage is done with movies and wants to move to the TV screen, and the trailer for the new Grand Theft Auto VI leaks resulting in 100 Million plus views

irl Media NEWS YouTube Channel

We’ve just launched our new irl Media NEWS YouTube Channel @irlMediaNEWS

Do us a solid and subscribe to our new channel, and check out our latest videos:

The Battle Of Business Empires: LeBron vs Jordan - Part 1

Business

Apple has done it again! Forty-seven years after being founded by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, Apple has become the 1st company to be valued at $3 Trillion dollars!

I’m not sure what people will find most interesting about that sentence; that Apple is now worth $3 Trillion dollars, or that there was a 3rd co-founder of Apple that no one ever talks about?!?!

But it’s true, Ronald Wayne co-founded Apple along with the more famous “Steves”, but he barely made a penny from Apple’s historic journey. He has a fascinating back-story that we’ll definitely have to do a video on in the future. But back to this story.

Apple has become the 1st company to be valued at $3 Trillion dollars!

Apple has been listed among Fortune's 50 Most Powerful companies in the world for several years running. In August of 2018 they became the first company EVER to hit a $1 Trillion dollars valuation. From there they just hit the accelerator and speed toward August of 2020 when they became the first company EVER to achieve a $2 Trillion dollar valuation. Now in December of 2023 they’ve achieved a $3 Trillion dollar valuation.

Want to hear an insane fact? Apple's market valuation is now higher than the GDP of entire countries including Italy, Canada, Australia, or Brazil.

So What’s next for Apple? I’m not talking about what number comes after 3 (even I can do the math). I’m talking about how long until they add another Trillion dollars to their valuation, and where can they go from here?

Well, if you look at the trend they seem to be adding Trillions to their valuation at an accelerating velocity. A $4 Trillion dollar valuation might only take them another year to 18 months, but what I can tell you is it’ll happen well before any other company on the planet can reach the same valuation. Apple truely is in a league of their own!

Apple’s market cap closes above $3 trillion

Tech

I’ll bet you didn’t know Elon Musk has his own AI company. With his penchant for the letter X, want to guess what he named it? 

Elon Musk is a busy guy. There’s no debating that this genius isn’t limited by the Earth’s gravity (literally), and there's little he can’t do. With an IQ of 160, Elon Musk pretty much achieves anything he sets his mind to.

I mean, this guy is running more than 5 companies right now including Tesla, SpaceX, Boring Company, Neuralink, and most recently Twitter (which he renamed X). He’s been been a founder over 10 times, including a couple of companies he’s started and sold like Zip2 which he sold for over $300 million in 1999 to Compaq Computer Corporation, or X.com which he merged with another software company called Confinity that would rebrand at PayPal that IPOed in 2002 and was acquired by eBay in 2015.

And we don’t even have time to talk about how he helped co-found OpenAI, and all the drama that has turned out to be.

So what’s the name of Elon Musk’s new AI company? Well, obviously he named it X.AI (no one ever accused him of being original).

Now X.AI is looking to raise $1 billion dollars in capital. Apparently he’s a little jealous of OpenAI’s success, which as we mentioned earlier he was involved in co-founding before that relationship went to hell (I’m starting to see a trend with business ventures Elon Musk enters into with other people, but I digress).

One thing I find interesting about X.AI is how he’s structured it. Usually when an entrepreneur starts a new company the capitalization table (called a cap table for short) lists the founders of the company as owning 100% of the shares before we start slicing that up to be divided between an employee pool of stock option holds, and future investors in the venture. When X.AI was founded Elon Musk gave the current shareholders in X (formerly known Twitter) a 25% stake in X.AI.

So why would he do that? Well, he’s mentioned in the press that X.AI’s first product, that they launched in October, is called Grok, which he said is modeled after “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” Grok is an AI chatbot, that X.AI launched after 2 months of training, and says it has real-time knowledge of the internet.

Where do you think that “training” and “real-time knowledge of the internet” are coming from? Twitter, I mean X, of course! So that’s why current shareholders of X are receiving a 25% stake in X.AI. Elon Musk needed an extensive dataset he could train his chatbox Grok on, and have the ability for it to have access in real-time to what’s going on in the world and online.

The average person can’t just start a new AI company? The costs would be measured in the Billions with a capital B. And even if you had access to billions of dollars you need 2 things in order to train an AI model: access to huge amounts of data to train your LLM (Large Language Model) on, and an insane number of high-powered graphics processing units (GPUs).

X.AI has already raised $134.7 million out of the company’s $1 billion target, so they are definitely on their way to reaching their goal, but what’s all the money for?

Now you can see why Elon Musk’s X.AI gave the investors in X/Twitter 25% of the company for access to X/Twitter’s data, and earlier this year Elon Musk mentioned that he had secured thousands of high-powered graphics processing units (GPUs) from Nvidia. The exact kind of chips necessary to build a LLM. Once again Elon Musk must have foreseen where the AI industry was headed, ordered those GPU chips from Nvidia before they became nearly impossible to buy now, and set in motion his plans for X.AI. Genius!

So now that X.AI has launched it’s chatbox Grok, and trained it on X/Twitter historical and real-time data, it needs to raise funding to continue it’s training with what I imagine to be Elon’s end goal of world domination (this world of planet Earth first, then Mars next I’m sure).

Elon Musk’s AI startup — X.AI — files to raise $1 billion in fresh capital

Entertainment

#sadface. Nicolas Cage says he’s done with movies, and wants to try out TV for a change. Citizens of the world, rise up, and explain to Nicolas Cage that he’s a Hollywood icon who needs to continue making amazing movies like Gone In Sixty Seconds, Face/Off, The Rock, and all of the National Treasure movies!

Nicolas Cage has “acted”in more than 100 films, and I use air quotes there because sometimes he just phones it in in his performances like in the 2014 movie Left Behind or the or the 2019 movie Grand Isle which I’ll bet most people have never even heard of, but I digress. Other times he absolutely crushes it, like in the 1995 movie Leaving Las Vegas which Nicolas Cage won an Oscar for.

In a recently published interview with Uproxx Nicolas Cage said “I feel I’ve pretty much said what I’ve had to say with cinema.” I would say, ‘Adios.’ I did what I had to do with cinema and I want to move on now.”

Nicolas Cage is contracted to act in 4 more movie projects, then he said he’s hopeful for a post-film career that will allow him to switch formats and go into some other way of expressing his acting.

On the topic of acting on TV he went on to say “I am very interested in immersion streaming with episodic television. I have seen things that can be done now with characters and the time they’re given to express themselves. I might have something to learn in television”

So there you have it. Nicolas Cage might be hanging up his movie acting career, but the way I look at it, we still have over 100 of his movies he’s acted in that we can enjoy binge watching, and just thinking of how good TV shows he chooses to act in will be. I’m so pumped for Nicolas Cage’s future career in TV. 

Nicolas Cage wants to say ‘adios’ to movies and try out TV

Sports

Is Mark Cuban selling the Dallas Mavericks?

Mark Cuban has entered an agreement to sell a majority stake in the Dallas Mavericks to the Adelson and Dumont families, while still continuing to own a “significant share” of the basketball franchise and most important to Mark Cuban continue to have a say over the basketball operations side of the business.

So who are the Adelson and Dumont families that will be taking over the Dallas Mavericks? The Adelson and Dumont families own and operate the Las Vegas Sands casino company, which had revenue of $8.57B in the 12 months ending September 30, 2023, while enjoying a 114.30% increase in year-over-year growth. The Las Vegas Sands has a market cap worth $34.7 billion dollars as of November 2023, and has enjoyed a 7.40% increase in their valuation in the last year. Not bad!

The Adelson and Dumont families have also been lobbying the state of Texas to legalize gambling in the state, and since they already own a wildly successful casino in Las Vegas I just have to imagine they are angling to open a casino in Dallas, Texas. So this deal to buy the Dallas Mavericks is probably as much about owning a successful and profitable NBA team as it is about a real estate play and the future of gambling in Texas.

Why would Mark Cuban want to sell the Dallas Mavericks now of all times, with the NBA’s TV rights set to expire at the end of the 2024/25 season with the NBA aiming for a massive 10-year $75 billion TV rights deal. The rumored valuation of the Dallas Mavericks in this deal is estimated to be $3.5 billion dollars, which is below what some analysts estimate that the team is worth as much as $4 billion dollars, but what $500 million dollars between friends right?

To get inside Mark Cuban’s head it helps to remember that he bought the team for $285 million 23 years ago back in 2000 when basketball and the NBA were very different, and now he’s selling Dallas Mavericks at a valuation of $3.5 billion. I don’t care who you ask, that’s an insane return on investment (ROI)! They say timing is everything, and I’m guessing Mark Cuban is just looking to cash out his chips now that a good deal has come along that allows him to continue to focus on the things about owning the Dallas Mavericks that he loves. This news is hot on the heels of reports that Mark Cuban will be leaving the TV show Shark Tank that he has starred on for 14 years since it debuted in 2009.

So what does all this mean for the fans of the Dallas Mavericks? I’m guessing not much. There’s that old adage “If it ain't broke, don't fix it.” Fans will still be about to watch their NBA championship winning team at their Dallas, Texas arena which I’m guessing may get a pretty sweet upgrade in the next decade or so, and I’m sure we’ll continue to see Mark Cuban rack up fines for arguing with the refs. Some things will never change.

Mark Cuban enters agreement to sell majority stake of Mavericks

Video Games

The trailer for the next Grand Theft Auto VI (known to its fans as GTA) dropped, or should I say leaked, on Monday and fans have been going wild. I used to play this game literally 20 years ago, and was actually surprised it’s still such a hit. Then I realized Americans have an infinite amount of sellothing that they usually take out by playing violent video games, so then it all made a lot more sense to me.

The trailer revealed that GTA 6 will be dropping in 2025. Why so far away? Well, let’s just say GTA is a little ambitious is what they’re trying to do for this new version. GTA 6 will introduce a female protagonist named Lucia you’ll be able to control in the game as she goes on a crime spree through crowded beaches, city highways and clubs with her partner in a Bonnie-and-Clyde type scenario. Ok, you’ve got my attention. Tell me more you might be thinking.

Well, it's been like a decade since the last Grand Theft Auto game came out, and fans have been itching for their GTA fix. The story line of this new game “will return to Vice City, a hedonistic Miami-inspired hotspot filled with neon colors, wild nightlife and plenty of "Florida man" energy”, according to a story on NPR of all places which I would have never imagined would be covering the trailer launching for a violent video game, but I digress.

The last version in the franchise was Grand Theft Auto 5, which came back in 2013. The entire franchise has sold more than 190 million units since first debuting in November of 1997. It went on to sell $800 million copies in its first day of release, which is an industry record that still stands today, like by a lot! Adjusted for everyone’s favorite inflation that’s $1 billion in today’s dollars. That’s just insane for one day of sales! The entire Grand Theft Auto franchise has made an estimated $7.7 billion in sales to date.

Can you guess the only other game to have sold more copies? Minecraft! 

Grand Theft Auto 6 Will Be The Most Florida-Ass Game Ever

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

— Chris