Philippa Kaur

FIVE MILLION DOLLARS were on offer to contestants in “Beast Games”, a new game show being made for Amazon’s Prime Video streaming service. Instead, some participants received physical injuries, emotional distress and sexual harassment, according to a complaint filed in a Los Angeles court on September 16th. Amazon and the show’s creator, Jimmy Donaldson, a 26-year-old YouTuber known as MrBeast, have not commented on the lawsuit. But the fiasco has reassured some Hollywood executives that they have little to fear from social-media upstarts. More

When Kelly Ortberg landed in the chief executive’s chair at Boeing last month the list of problems he had to confront at the aerospace giant was already daunting. Production of the 737 MAX passenger jet, Boeing’s most important product, has been curtailed after a mid-flight blowout of a fuselage panel in January. Production of the larger 787 Dreamliner has also slowed down owing to supply-chain problems. Plans to launch the even bigger 777X are years behind schedule. Add to that losses at Boeing’s usually lucrative defence division and an embarrassing software failure that left astronauts piloting its Starliner spacecraft stranded on the International Space Station and some may wonder why Mr Ortberg took the job. More

LIKE HIS fellow Victorian beancounters, Edwin Waterhouse made his name in part by unearthing frauds perpetrated during the railway mania that gripped late-19th-century Britain. These days the accounting-and-consulting powerhouse that traces its history to his successful sleuthing more often makes news for failing to detect financial malfeasance—or for engaging in mischief itself. Between 2010 and 2023 it faced around $450m in fines and settlements related to botched audits and other misconduct in various countries. The firm, which now goes by PwC rather than PricewaterhouseCoopers, at least spares Edwin’s memory the indignity of having his name openly tied to the mess. More

A new football season will begin on September 27th: not the Premier League or La Liga, but the annual update of the world’s favourite football video-game. “FIFA”, as the franchise was known from its pixelated debut in 1993, sells nearly 30m copies a year. In-game spending pushes its annual revenue above $3bn, estimates MoffettNathanson, a firm of analysts, which calculates that the title contributes nearly two-thirds of the profit of its publisher, Electronic Arts (EA). Gaming has few bigger names than “FIFA”. More

Kindness is in the air. Publishers produce business books with titles like “The Power of Nice” or, simply, “Kind”. LinkedIn, which is ostensibly a networking site for career-minded professionals, is overrun with sickly videos showing people being improbably generous to the homeless. Firms publicly embrace the values of compassion: one manufacturer of safety-gear talks of “offering grace internally”, which sounds terribly intrusive. More

A rare beast may soon lumber across the hills of Silicon Valley: not a $1bn unicorn, nor a $10bn decacorn, but a hectocorn—a startup valued at more than $100bn. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, is understood to be in talks to raise $6.5bn from investors to fund the expansion dreams of its co-founder, Sam Altman. If it pulls off the deal, OpenAI’s valuation will be about $150bn, making it only the second ever $100bn-plus startup in America after SpaceX, a rocketry giant led by Elon Musk (who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and is now Mr Altman’s nemesis). More

A rare beast may soon lumber across the hills of Silicon Valley: not a $1bn unicorn, nor a $10bn decacorn, but a hectocorn—a startup valued at more than $100bn. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, is understood to be in talks to raise $6.5bn from investors to fund the expansion dreams of its co-founder, Sam Altman. If it pulls off the deal, OpenAI’s valuation will be about $150bn, making it only the second ever $100bn-plus startup in America after SpaceX, a rocketry giant led by Elon Musk (who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and is now Mr Altman’s nemesis). More

The car industry’s effort to decarbonise revolves around replacing petrol with batteries. A growing number of customers want both. Buyers who cannot afford a fully electric car, or worry about the availability of charging points, are turning to plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), sales of which are rocketing. But the hybrid ride may prove to be short. More