Philippa Kaur

With sound-stage doors made big enough for performing elephants, the century-old Paramount Pictures lot on Melrose Avenue is a living museum of the film business. Now the studio, one of the world’s first—and the last still based in central Hollywood—is for sale. Paramount’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, is seeking a buyer for the teetering empire she inherited from her father Sumner, who died in 2020. For six months suitors have come and gone. On July 2nd it was reported that David Ellison, a tech heir whose previous bid for Paramount was rebuffed only in June, had reached a preliminary agreement to buy Ms Redstone’s stake in the company.The turbulent picture at Paramount reflects the state of Hollywood. Show business has entered an age of austerity. Cinema is suffering from long covid; this year’s domestic box-office takings are forecast to be 30% lower than in 2019. Cable subscriptions are falling faster than ever, with a record 2.4m Americans cancelling their pay-TV in the latest quarter. More

In the summer of 1994 a job vacancy for software engineers was posted on Usenet, an early precursor to online forums. The company in question planned to “pioneer commerce on the internet”. Applicants needed to be able to design complex systems “in about one-third the time that most competent people think possible”. Résumés could be sent to Jeff Bezos at a Seattle-based startup named Cadabra.The name didn’t stick—on phone calls “Cadabra” was too easily confused with “cadaver”—but the ambition did. Amazon, which turns 30 on July 5th, has indeed changed the world of online shopping. This year its websites will sell an estimated $554bn-worth of goods in America, reckons JPMorgan Chase, a bank. That gives it a 42% share of American e-commerce, far beyond the 6% captured by Walmart, its nearest online competitor (and biggest retailer overall). More

DUBAI SELLS itself as a refuge for the footloose plutocrat. It is an easy place to do business and has convenient flight connections to just about anywhere in the world. Its streets are safer than New York’s or London’s (not to mention much cleaner). Just in case those attractions are not enough, it levies no tax on income, property or capital gains.Small wonder that the United Arab Emirates (UAE), of which Dubai is the glitzy business hub, is forecast to draw a net 6,700 millionaires this year, according to Henley & Partners, a wealth consultancy. That is almost twice as many as are expected to head to America, the historic home of the world’s rich, with 5.5m residents worth $1m or more. Long a bolt-hole for rich Russians, Indians and Arabs from neighbouring countries, Dubai is now attracting a new group of mogul migrants: Europeans fleeing rising political uncertainty at home. More

AFTER SAM ALTMAN was sacked from OpenAI in November of 2023, a meme went viral among artificial-intelligence (AI) types on social media. “What did Ilya see?” it asked, referring to Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder of the startup who triggered the coup. Some believed a rumoured new breakthrough at the company that gave the world ChatGPT had spooked Mr Sutskever.Although Mr Altman was back in charge within days, and Mr Sutskever said he regretted his move, whatever Ilya saw appears to have stuck in his craw. In May he left OpenAI. And on June 19th he launched Safe Superintelligence (SSI), a new startup dedicated to building a superhuman AI. The outfit, whose other co-founders are Daniel Gross, a venture capitalist, and Daniel Levy, a former OpenAI researcher, does not plan to offer any actual products. It has not divulged the names of its investors. More

LAWYERS ARE often seen as the most tedious of professionals. And the most derided (“What do you know when you find a lawyer up to his neck in concrete? Someone ran out of concrete”). Yet that damning reputation is undeserved: lawyers are in fact role models. The method and meticulousness entrenched in the legal style of thought has something to teach other knowledge workers and their managers.In “One L”, a book about his first year at Harvard Law School, Scott Turow describes the slow, arduous progress of going over his first case as “stirring concrete with his eyelashes”. But legal education is not about specific cases or statutes. It is, as Mr Turow later understands, about processing a mountain of information and exercising judgment. It teaches how to infer rules from patterns, use analogies, anticipate what might happen next, accept ambiguity and be ready to question everything. More

BP AND SHELL, two British oil giants, have long sunk cash into solar and wind farms. Their rivals elsewhere have mostly stuck to their drilling. Investors have rewarded single-mindedness. ExxonMobil, an American firm unapologetically wedded to the black stuff, is worth $510bn, half as much again as the British duo combined. Its share price is up by 50% in the past five years, compared with a rise of 10% for Shell and a fall of 13% for BP. That is not to say ExxonMobil has no interest in renewables. But rather than getting into generation, it is placing an indirect bet on the energy transition. On June 25th it signed a preliminary agreement to supply lithium to SK On, a South Korean manufacturer whose lithium-ion batteries will power electric Fords and Hyundais. This follows an announcement in November that it was drilling its first lithium well in Arkansas. A “material” part of its $20bn in low-carbon investments between 2022 and 2027 will go to lithium, says Dan Holton, in charge of these projects. By 2030 the company hopes to produce enough lithium to supply 1m electric vehicles (EVs) a year. Darren Woods, its boss, sees lithium as a “high-return” opportunity. More

Volatile weather is a peril of the high seas. Volatile markets are similarly treacherous for the container-ship industry, which carries 80% of the volume of internationally traded goods. A global pandemic, which kept people at home with little else to do but buy, buy, buy, sent container rates sky-high. In 2022 shipping lines’ return on capital exceeded 40%; the biggest earned profits that were three times the total for the previous two decades combined. Rates and returns tumbled as demand waned and shipping companies started to receive the new vessels ordered during the boom. Then attacks by Houthi rebels on ships in the Red Sea all but closed the Suez Canal. The disruption has sent rates back to records surpassed only during the pandemic. How long will the good times last this time?On the surface, the answer should be: not long at all. Historically, value destruction has been the industry norm. Bernstein, a broker, reckons that between 2002 and 2019 shipping firms’ average return on capital of 4.7% trailed in the wake of its cost of capital, which averaged 10% or so. New ships take a couple of years to build. According to bimco, an industry association, in 2023 the global fleet added capacity of around 2.3m 20-foot equivalent units (the standard measure of container size), surpassing the previous annual record by 37%. Another 1m arrived in the first four months of 2024. In February worries about overcapacity led A.P Moller-Maersk, the world’s second-largest shipping line, to warn it could lose up to $5bn this year. More

THE ROLE of Kweichow Moutai in Chinese society is complex. The state-owned company’s fiery, translucent baijiu is by far China’s favourite booze. It is one of the country’s oldest brands—a rare corporate survivor of the worst days of Maoism. Vintage cases fetch tens of thousands of dollars. In 2021 it was briefly worth a throat-scorching $500bn and in 2022 it eclipsed Tencent, a digital giant, to become for a time the most valuable Chinese listed company.Today its market capitalisation is half that. Some of the decline has to do with President Xi Jinping’s crackdown on graft, before which prized bottles of the sorghum-based firewater would often change hands in place of cash. When in 2020 state TV accused Moutai of benefiting from bribery, $25bn instantly evaporated from its market capitalisation. More