She has a net worth of $100-$200m dollars. I doubt she wants $5-10m more.
OpenAI cannot hurt her standing in the industry— in fact, “ScarJo takes on Big Tech and wins”, in an era after the Hollywood unions called a strike and won protections from studios using generative AI for exactly this scenario, is ironically probably one of the best thing she can do for her image right now.
She is also one of the most litigious actresses in the industry, taking on Disney and winning what’s estimated to be 8 figures.
Midler won, it’s a cornerstone case in protecting image/likeness.
In tech we’re used to IP law. In entertainment, there is unsurprisingly a whole area of case law on image and likeness.
Tech will need to understand this—and the areas of domain specific case law in many, many other fields—if AI is really to be adopted by the entire world.
She has a personal net worth of >$100m. She’s also married to a successful actor in his own right.
Her voice alone didn’t get her there — she did. That’s why celebrities are so protective about how their likeness is used: their personal brand is their asset.
There’s established legal precedent on exactly this—even in the case they didn’t train on her likeness, if it can reasonably be suspected by an unknowing observer that she personally has lent her voice to this, she has a strong case.
Even OpenAI knew this, or they would not have asked in the first place.
The Paramount Decrees way back in the 1940s/1950s: that's why Hollywood studios cannot produce movies and own the theaters which exhibit them. It's also similar to the (much more complex) reasons TV Service Providers (DirectTV, Spectrum, XFinity et. al) are separate from TV Networks, and why you don't see Disney trying to buy, say, DirectTV. Of course, streaming upended almost all of that.
> It’s also similar to the (much more complex) reasons TV Service Providers (DirectTV, Spectrum, XFinity et. al) are separate from TV Networks
Tell me more about how the “TV Service Provider” Xfinity (a subsidiary of Comcast) is separate from the various TV networks run by NBC Universal, LLC (a subsidiary of Comcast).
If you look at many older anti-trust cases from before 1970s, the bar for successful enforcement often seems unbelievably low when comparing it to how things are today. Take a look at this, for example: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/370/294/
But then there was a drastic change in approach to anti-trust during the Reagan era:
"Bork argues that the original intent of antitrust laws as well as economic efficiency makes consumer welfare and the protection of competition, rather than competitors, the only goals of antitrust law. Thus, while it was appropriate to prohibit cartels that fix prices and divide markets and mergers that create monopolies, practices that are allegedly exclusionary, such as vertical agreements and price discrimination, did not harm consumers and so should not be prohibited."
"From 1977 to 2007, the Supreme Court of the United States repeatedly adopted views stated in The Antitrust Paradox in such cases as Continental Television, Inc. v. GTE Sylvania, Inc., 433 U.S. 36 (1977), Broadcast Music, Inc. v. CBS, Inc., NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, Spectrum Sports, Inc. v. McQuillan, State Oil Co. v. Khan, Verizon v. Trinko, and Leegin Creative Leather Products, Inc. v. PSKS, Inc., legalizing many practices previously prohibited."
If we had a strong executive branch right now, we’d have already threatened to launch an FTC inquiry to break up Amazon and or nationalize SpaceX in response, merited or not.
The pure shock of the prospect of breaking them up would spook investors, tank their stock, put both CEOs on the defensive, and force them back in line, and everything would get resolved nicely with a face to face meeting and a handshake.
Whether it’s merited or not is not the point. Purely from a governance standpoint, as a citizen I hate to see corporate interests trying and succeeding to usurp government and societal norms.
Sometimes examples need to be made so others know not to make the same mistake.
I think there's plenty of merit when a massive, multi-trillion dollar corporation (which already has a long history of exploiting workers, exploiting laws, and buying favorable laws) tries to exploit its workers even more.
I'm all for allowing corporations to have goals that aren't 100% in line with the country's best interests, but those goals do NOT and shall not ever take legal standing over the country's interests. We need to have serious repercussions for when corporations try to usurp government in a race-to-the-bottom attempt to further weaken labor laws or measures designed to protect common citizenry.
Fining the board and C-Suite executives collectively a sum of 5x the company's market cap should be a start.
"Whether it's merited or not" you want the might of the federal government to "threaten" businesses, acting within the law, that have interests you don't agree with?
It’s called politicking. It happens between any group of people of any size greater than 1: what priorities to focus on, what to apply extra scrutiny to, what to leave alone for another day, etc.
In our government, that’s a big part of what the president’s role is. “Bully pulpit” and all that. Presidents do it every day, for smaller and higher profile cases.
At that level, it’s all negotiation. If they didn’t want (or feared the) scrutiny, corporate interests wouldn’t have started the negotiation in the first place. They know it looks bad if Biden doesn’t respond, and that he must in some way. They’re just betting that he won’t start with such a strong gambit, because corporations are no longer afraid of our government, and haven’t been for decades.
That's what they did in Russia when some company founders dared go against the govt or own/fund anti-government media. They did call being against arbitrary, excessive and illegal governance something like "trying to usurp the government", but at least they were not quite as extreme and didn't say quite parts like "Whether it’s merited or not is not the point", out loud. And corporations supposedly threatening some "societal norms" by suing the government is not even Putin-level, it's straight out of 1930ies Europe.
If this kind of authoritarian stuff is what motivates people in NLRB and similar agencies, I'd say abolish them altogether. I'd rather be ruled by cyberpunk dictator Bezos than people with such opinions/approaches
Been to a few destination weddings (Mediterranean coast, India, Montana), and I think they’re the most fun, by far.
All 3 of them being for close friends and family, I have come to understand the expectation to be:
If it’s too much, or you don’t want to travel that far, or you’re busy— no worries! If you do, great, we invited you because we want to celebrate with you too, so why not make a big trip of it?
And then usually followed by a more casual reception closer to home for those family and friends who wanted to make it but couldn’t for whatever reason.
Police will forcefully evict you from a home. They will not guard the entrance to a restaurant and refuse entry to the owners until they pay their servers stolen wages/tips.
Yes, this sucks for employees in the short term who thought their equity was potentially worth 2x what it is (and more importantly, liquid!). But also, if their numbers are good enough to plausibly command that price, it’s probably better for everyone, employees included in the long run, to go public? And not via SPAC, but via a real IPO.
Looking back, I think this ZIRP phenomenon of PE and VC was unhealthy (remember crypto??), unrealistic, and ultimately only benefitted a few founders, some employees, and mostly VC firms making paper gains by marking up SoftBank-esque valuations that no one actually believed.
We’re forgetting that all of FAANG IPOd when they too were much less than $20 billion. Maybe it’s time for the next generation of software companies to take control of their own destiny rather than wait for a golden parachute to buy them out.
Regardless, given the fact they were close / within the same order of magnitude as Figma, it's interesting that the prospect of them IPOing is apparently considered a nuclear option.
I personally don't believe the valuation is far off or unreachable, but someone giving you a valuation that you have the potential for in the future today with zero risk and low pain is still quite different than having to work your way through justifying it.
In addition, once you announce to employees that the company is getting bought, the culture changes drastically in ways that are not favorable to independent continuation, for better or worse.
That said, the $1B cash infusion must be nice enough to soothe most of the pain. I wish and expect them all the best should they deploy that cash wisely.
According to Harvard Business school (2017): the median market cap of a publicly traded company is $832m. Even at half its valuation, Figma is way, way, way above that.
Very little, but the marketing game is strong. Salesforce started as just sales, does more of a complete solution now, I always thought... wow, what a stupid thing to make so much money, but here it is.
I think Figma is the same, it captures a large part of the market and makes a lot of people reliant and pay for it.
Is it any different than DataDog, Splunk, NewRelic, Gitlab, DigitalOcean, or any of the other publicly traded saas companies?
I mean Figma seems more sticky than something like DataDog. I worked at a company that would hop from DataDog to NewRelic back and forth. It was exhausting but in the end it didn’t take much time TO switch.
"Isn't slashing ten billion dollars in market value a good thing for the people we are taking the money away from?"
Be honest, at least. It's terrible for the employees. They went from having a guaranteed payday to gambling primarily so that "the public" can have a share they did nothing to deserve.
An IPO allows every employee and shareholder to be as liquid as they like, and optimize to your individual tax and risk situation.
An exit is a one time thing. At most, you get to elect how much cash and how much converted stock you want. More likely, the company decides what that breakdown is.
The IPO isn't a guaranteed thing, look at WeWork. Further, an IPO isn't immediate.
This nonsense took people from millionaires to "I don't know, let's Let The Market Decide (but not any relevant participants, only speculators)."
An exit is a one-and-done. You can do whatever you want with the money, it's yours.
An IPO means you're locked into a potentially-doomed company for three months after, solely for the good of people who did nothing to deserve anything.
Look at the VA Linux IPO; it took people from on-paper millionaires to completely broke in just the window of not being allowed to part with shares. Six months for Facebook RSUs.
This putting aside the potential privacy risks inherent to the IPO process. Have 5%? Guess what's now public knowledge? Some S-1s even list shareholders with fewer than 5%.
The active duty military vote is not actually a solid republican voting block, contrary to popular belief: in 2020, they swung +8 for Biden [1]. It’s the veterans who are solidly (2/3) conservative, currently, but even that’s lessening [2].
Unfortunately I don’t think a majority of either party wants to reign in military spending, considering every admin including Obama and Biden has increased it since Carter, even though likely granting such a blank check is financially irresponsible (i.e. trillions unaccounted for in budget audits [3]). Both parties just want to please that bloc of votes, because it also has ripple effects on the rest of the nation’s votes to be seen as “good on military”.
I personally think our military could be just as effective if we tightened the wallet, but I don’t think either party actually wants to.
Just to be clear, I wasn't for a moment suggesting that the military itself is a solid R (or D) voting bloc.
What is true, however, is the most (not all) communities with a functioning US military base close by is a solid voting bloc for NOT cutting military expenditures, at least not insofar as they could lead to base closures (and specifically, their base).
The Democrats were much more interested in cutting military budgets until, you know, all that fun with Russia... and China... and Israel. We are very quickly remembering why we spend so much.
The American military budget is mostly the "America guarantees everyone can do business with anyone else (but mostly America) so that we can be very wealthy" budget. Remember that we built and sailed the Great White Fleet before world war 1.
Separate any discussion about the "tone" of the article, could someone who is better at reading between the lines better than I explain the changes to Out-Of App Store payments?
Is it a 10-max 20% fee to Apple, no matter the distributor, in the EU? Or are those rules only for the App Store, and anything else won't be touched by commissions to Apple?
It sounds like the percent fee is for apps downloaded from the app store plus the 3% if you use apple payment processing. Then theres a .5 euro annual fee per user over 1 million no matter which market the app was downloaded from.
OpenAI cannot hurt her standing in the industry— in fact, “ScarJo takes on Big Tech and wins”, in an era after the Hollywood unions called a strike and won protections from studios using generative AI for exactly this scenario, is ironically probably one of the best thing she can do for her image right now.
She is also one of the most litigious actresses in the industry, taking on Disney and winning what’s estimated to be 8 figures.
Good luck OpenAI!