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NYT's best shows of the 21st century. The top 2 are about running businesses.

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Stablecoin payment activity isn’t evenly distributed. Nearly two-thirds of the volume originates from Asia, primarily Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan.

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we're making @blocks smaller today. here's my note to the company. #### today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation. i'll be straight about what's happening, why, and what it means for everyone. first off, if you're one of the people affected, you'll receive your salary for 20 weeks + 1 week per year of tenure, equity vested through the end of may, 6 months of health care, your corporate devices, and $5,000 to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition (if you’re outside the U.S. you’ll receive similar support but exact details are going to vary based on local requirements). i want you to know that before anything else. everyone will be notified today, whether you're being asked to leave, entering consultation, or asked to stay. we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly. i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead. i'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome. a smaller company also gives us the space to grow our business the right way, on our own terms, instead of constantly reacting to market pressures. a decision at this scale carries risk. but so does standing still. we've done a full review to determine the roles and people we require to reliably grow the business from here, and we've pressure-tested those decisions from multiple angles. i accept that we may have gotten some of them wrong, and we've built in flexibility to account for that, and do the right thing for our customers. we're not going to just disappear people from slack and email and pretend they were never here. communication channels will stay open through thursday evening (pacific) so everyone can say goodbye properly, and share whatever you wish. i'll also be hosting a live video session to thank everyone at 3:35pm pacific. i know doing it this way might feel awkward. i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold. to those of you leaving…i’m grateful for you, and i’m sorry to put you through this. you built what this company is today. that's a fact that i'll honor forever. this decision is not a reflection of what you contributed. you will be a great contributor to any organization going forward. to those staying…i made this decision, and i'll own it. what i'm asking of you is to build with me. we're going to build this company with intelligence at the core of everything we do. how we work, how we create, how we serve our customers. our customers will feel this shift too, and we're going to help them navigate it: towards a future where they can build their own features directly, composed of our capabilities and served through our interfaces. that's what i'm focused on now. expect a note from me tomorrow. jack

🚨 𝘽𝙍𝙀𝘼𝙆𝙄𝙉𝙂: @PayPal replaces CEO after earnings miss. Here's what we know: PayPal announced that Alex Chriss will step down, following weaker-than-expected Q4 results and slowing growth in branded checkout. Chriss will be replaced by HP Inc. CEO Enrique Lores after profit and revenue fell short of expectations. Shares of the firm tumbled more than 12%. Jamie Miller, the payments firm’s chief financial officer, will serve as interim CEO until Lores takes over on March 1, according to a statement Tuesday. “While some progress has been made in a number of areas over the last two years, the pace of change and execution was not in line with the Board’s expectations,” newly appointed board chair David Dorman said in the statement. Key signals: • PayPal-branded checkout growth slowed to 1% • Q4 EPS and revenue missed expectations • 2026 transaction margin dollars expected to decline slightly Another reminder of how unforgiving public markets are for large-scale payments platforms when growth and execution slow. Big reset moment for PayPal. Source/more info: bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

Exclusive: JPMorgan is cutting off its relationship with Checkbook, the fintech firm that provided some high-risk stablecoin startups such as Venezuela-focused Kontigo with access to JPM bank accounts. Last month, we reported that JPM froze the accounts of these stablecoin startups. Here's @MichaelRoddan's dive on Checkbook: theinformation.com/articles/…

Trump just announced a 10% cap on credit card APRs. Starting January 20th. Yes, 11 days from now! 😳 The post calls for "a one-year cap on Credit Card interest rates of 10%" from the administration's one-year anniversary. Three problems I immediately think about:

the most undervalued opportunity in crypto: neutral stablecoin infrastructure because businesses will never build on their competitors' chains

I’ve seen a lot of people misunderstand what we’re saying. Our claim is that in a world of full automation, inequality will skyrocket (in favor of capital holders). People aren't thinking about the galaxies. The relative wealth differences in a thousand years—or a million—will be downstream of who owns the first dyson swarms and space ships. And space colonization isn't bottlenecked by people’s preference for human nannies and waiters. So even if you can make 10 million dollars a year as a nanny in the post-abundance future, or get a 10 million dollar charity handout, Larry Page’s million cyborg heirs can own a galaxy each. You might think this is fine! Why is inequality intrinsically bad, especially if absolute prosperity for everyone goes up? Fair enough, but to me quadrillion fold differences in wealth between humans seem hard to justify in a world where AIs are doing all the work anyways - these disparities in wealth are not incentivizing hard work or entrepreneurship or creativity, which is what we use to justify inequality today. Just to recap, full automation kills the corrective mechanism on runaway capital accumulation - which is that you need labor to actually make productive use of your capital, thus driving up wages. Some people asked: why assume AGI leads to full automation? Maybe people will still prefer human nannies and waiters. Even if true, we think labor's share of GDP—which has been roughly 2/3 for centuries—would still likely collapse toward zero, massively increasing inequality. Here's why. It sometimes happens that when machines are only slightly better than humans, people sometimes pay a premium for the human version. But once machines become much better, that preference disappears. When carriages were not much faster than being carried on a litter, the rich sometimes preferred the litter. Now they prefer the car. They might still have a chauffeur—but once self-driving vehicles are allowed to move far faster, human-driven cars may be relegated to a slow lane. If the economy grows 100x, wages must also grow 100x for labor's share to stay at 2/3. But prices are relative—so this means human labor becomes 100x more expensive compared to AI-produced goods. A human-cooked meal costs 100x what the robot version does. For labor share to hold steady as that ratio grows to 1,000x, then 10,000x, the preference for human-made goods would have to become increasingly fanatical. And there's a second problem: the higher wages rise, the greater the incentive to develop machine substitutes for whatever services humans still provide. The premium on human labor is precisely what incentivizes its own replacement. Just to clarify a few other things: - “Piketty’s long run series are disputed.” We spend a long chunk of the essay explaining why Piketty is wrong about the past! But we’re arguing that the assumption he makes (specifically that labor and capital are substitutes) would be true of a world with advanced enough automation. We spend so much time rebutting his claims about the past because the wronger you think he was about the past, the more you think will change once his assumption comes true. - “A capital tax would lower growth.” Yes, as we point out, capital taxes incentivize consumption now instead of saving and investing for the future, at the margin. But if capital is the only factor of production, then it’s hard to come up with an inequality-capping tax that doesn’t lower growth. - “Capital can escape, both across time and space. This makes a wealth tax impractical.” We agree! As we say in the essay and in the tweet summary below, it would be really hard to implement Pikkety’s flagship solution (a high and progressive global wealth tax). You could go Georgist and try to tax land, but the natural resource share of income is only 5% and is likely to stay low until we hit “technological maturity” for reasons we explain in the essay. We don’t see any easy ways to avoid (literally) skyrocketing inequality - in fact, that’s what inspired us to write the essay and explain this problem in the first place. Also, to address a subtext: I think the currently proposed California wealth tax is a very bad idea for many reasons. This essay is about inequality under full automation, not about how California can make its healthcare expenditures more sustainable.