Aakash Gupta

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[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

In 1998, Marvel offered Sony the movie rights to nearly every character it owned. Iron Man, Thor, Black Panther, Ant-Man, the lot, for $25 million.

Sony's executives sent the deal back with one line: "Nobody gives a sh*t about any of the other Marvel characters. Go back and do a deal for only Spider-Man."

So Sony paid $10 million for Spider-Man alone, plus 5% of gross and half of merchandise revenue to Marvel. Ike Perlmutter's own partner Avi Arad called the terms pitiful. Marvel was two years out of bankruptcy and took it anyway.

The rejection is the reason the MCU exists. Stuck with characters nobody would buy, Marvel mortgaged them for a $525 million credit line and made Iron Man itself in 2008. The characters Sony passed on went on to gross more than $30 billion.

And the fine print aged even better for Marvel. That merchandise clause never expired. Every Spider-Man backpack, toy, and lunchbox sold since 2002 pays Marvel half, which is why Marvel profits from Sony's movies whether they hit or flop.

Sony saved $15 million and passed on $30 billion. Then spent the next two decades sharing the one character it kept.

[Pop Base @PopBase]

New trailer for ‘SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY.’

In theaters on July 31.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Your employer used to spend about $10,000 a year renting the desk you worked at. They went remote, stopped paying it, and nobody sent you a check. Now a Bay Area landlord is charging tenants $200 a month extra to work from home, and he's just the first one to send you the bill.

Because the cost of housing your working hours never disappeared. It moved into your apartment: 45 extra hours a week of HVAC, electricity, water, carpet wear, and appliance cycles. Utilities alone run $50-100 a month higher in a full-time remote household. Stack occupancy and wear on top and $200 might be an undercharge.

An office desk in San Francisco runs about $800 a month. That's the standard ~117 square feet per employee at $75-100 per square foot downtown.

So the desk your company stopped renting cost $800 a month. The one in your bedroom now costs $200. Your employer kept the difference.

Remote work quietly moved real estate costs off corporate balance sheets and onto household budgets, and it stayed invisible exactly as long as nobody itemized it.

This listing itemized it.

[SaasWiz @SaaSWiz]

Bay Area landlords🔫🔫🔫

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The whole $5 billion AI-for-science initiative is running on a $40 million donation.

Microsoft is giving $40M in compute credits over three years. Everything else is 15 federal agencies pointing their existing budgets at the same press release, plus access to Department of Energy supercomputers the government already owns and paid for years ago.

Now put $5 billion against the thing it's meant to accelerate. Bringing a single drug to market costs about $2.6 billion and takes 12 years. So the entire national initiative to "accelerate drug discovery" is funded at roughly the price of two approvals, and that budget is also covering pediatric cancer, chronic disease root causes, energy infrastructure, and longer-lasting building materials.

Fifteen agencies. One pool of money. Five hard problems that each independently eat billions.

Then look at what the government is actually contributing. It holds some of the largest datasets on earth: chemical records, critical minerals, patient health across the entire population. That's the input no lab can buy at any price, and it's what Microsoft's credits exist to process.

Fifteen agencies, one $40 million compute donation, and a federal hard drive, announced at $5 billion because that's the part that fits in a headline.

[Polymarket @Polymarket]

BREAKING: U.S. launches a $5 billion AI research initiative to uncover the causes of chronic disease & accelerate drug discovery.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

@Franco_Vision @grok I still don’t get why they all passed

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The family with $1 left over each month is on track to retire with roughly $4 million. It's sitting right there in their own chart.

Look at what got counted as money that's gone. $30,000 a year into 401(k)s. $16,000 a year into a 529. That's $46,000 of annual saving, deducted before the chart declares them broke. At an 8% return, $46,000 a year compounds to $2.1 million in 20 years.

The mortgage does the same trick. $5,000 a month in a market where that home runs $1M+. A chunk of every payment converts income into equity, and by the time the kids leave the house, that's a seven-figure asset with the loan mostly gone.

Even the scariest line item self-destructs. The $90,000 private school bill ends when the kids graduate, and college is already prepaid through the 529 that's been compounding since kindergarten. The two biggest expenses in the chart have expiration dates. The two savings lines never stop.

So read the bottom row again. $12 a year in leftover cash flow, sitting under $46,000 in annual wealth building, a house being paid off, college funded, retirement funded, three vacations, and a weekly date night. Zero leftover cash is what a fully allocated budget looks like. Every dollar has a job.

$408,000 a year doesn't feel rich because rich isn't a feeling in month 14. It's a balance sheet in year 20. This family already bought it. The chart just filed it under expenses.

[Sam ⚔️ Financial Samurai @financialsamura]

So you think earning $408,000 a year is a lot of money?

After working 50+ hours a week, being stressed out of your mind, and barely seeing your kids, it might not be the dream income you imagined.

Look how quickly the money goes. $1/month left over.

What would you cut?

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The director of the new Spider-Man made his first hit for $400,000. It was about his old job at a group home for at-risk teens. The unknown actors he cast in it included two future Oscar winners.

Destin Daniel Cretton worked as a counselor at a facility for troubled kids before film school. Short Term 12 (2013) was that job turned into a script. A $400K indie can't afford stars, so he filled the cast with people nobody had heard of yet.

The people nobody had heard of: Brie Larson, three years before her Oscar for Room. Rami Malek, five years before his for Bohemian Rhapsody. LaKeith Stanfield, in his first film role ever, eight years before his own nomination. Plus Kaitlyn Dever and Stephanie Beatriz.

One $400,000 movie seeded that much of modern Hollywood. It grossed $2.3 million.

Larson became the bridge. Cretton directed her again in Just Mercy, Marvel came calling, and Shang-Chi became the first pandemic-era film to cross $200M domestic, finishing at $432M worldwide with theaters half-open.

Now Brand New Day is tracking for a $180-190M opening, the biggest of 2026, without a single IMAX screen (Nolan's Odyssey has them all locked for a month).

At that pace, it will out-gross Short Term 12's entire theatrical run roughly once an hour, all weekend.

Pascal and Feige stood up and cheered for a guy who has been over-delivering on budgets since his budget was $400,000.

[Warling @WarlingHD]

Amy Pascal says she and Kevin Feige cheered after watching the Director's Cut of 'SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY':

"Actually, it was the first time that Kevin and I stood up after a director's cut and cheered. That's how good it was.

That's how good Destin [Daniel Cretton] is."

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

In 2012, Nicklas Bendtner flashed sponsored boxers after scoring at the Euros. UEFA fined him €100,000 on the spot. The sponsor paid the fine for him and called it the best ad they ever bought.

Last night Lamine Yamal did the same thing in the World Cup final, in front of 1 billion people. No fine yet. Just a German streetwear brand watching its entire boxer stock sell out in days.

The brand is 6PM, founded by Achraf Ait Bouzalim, who started it at 21 while studying business administration and working at his parents' smoothie shop. Its whole model is engineered scarcity: limited drops that sell out in minutes. The final ran that playbook at planetary scale, unpaid.

Now look at the economics football's governing bodies created. Official partners pay nine figures per World Cup cycle for stadium boards and "clean kit" rules that ban every other logo from the pitch. The rulebook covers undergarments specifically. Enforcement is the only thing protecting that nine-figure price.

And the enforcement precedent is €100,000. The boxers sell for €30 a double pack. If FIFA hands Yamal the Bendtner treatment, the fine equals about 3,300 packs of the product it just advertised. 6PM cleared more than that before the trophy ceremony ended.

Bendtner proved the fine was worth paying. Yamal just proved you might not get one at all. Every brand with a waistband logo took notes this week.

[CentreGoals. @centregoals]

🚨🚨| JUST IN: Lamine Yamal accidentally helped a clothing brand 𝐒𝐄𝐋𝐋 𝐎𝐔𝐓 its boxer shorts after the World Cup final.

Yamal lifted his shirt several times during the match, showing the logo of the German brand ‘6PM’ to approx 1 billion viewers across the world.

[@BILD]

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Powerball just ran the cleanest export deal in gambling. A UK ticket costs £4, about $5.35. A US ticket costs $2. Both put the exact same fixed dollar amount into the jackpot. And if a Brit wins, the cash option American winners get doesn't exist for them.

Tonight's drawing is the first with UK players in the pool. The jackpot sits at $567 million. An American winner can take $251.8 million in cash tomorrow. A UK winner gets 30 annual payments administered by the National Lottery, with no lump sum option.

The odds stay at 1 in 292.2 million for both countries. Powerball repeated that line in every press release, and it's true. It's also the least interesting part of the deal.

Here's the mechanism. Lottery sales don't scale linearly with jackpot size. A $100 million jackpot is background noise. A billion-dollar jackpot is a national event that pulls in people who never play. Powerball has crossed $1.5 billion five times in the past decade, and those rollovers are where the revenue lives.

That's what MUSL actually acquired. 49 lotteries now feed one number, and every £4 ticket in York or Manchester speeds the rollover toward the billion-dollar headlines that make American sales explode. Allwyn gets something too: EuroMillions is legally capped at €250 million. Powerball's record is $2.04 billion. They just started selling Brits a jackpot 8x bigger than anything Europe is allowed to offer.

The first UK ticket sold at 5am in a shop in York. The buyer paid 2.7x the American price for the same 1-in-292-million shot, minus the cash option. The jackpot doubles as the ad budget, and 68 million Brits just started funding it at a premium rate.

[Breaking911 @Breaking911]

The U.S. Powerball jackpot is going international for the first time, with players outside the United States able to participate beginning with tonight’s drawing.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

In 1916, James Kraft patented a process that makes cheese physically incapable of separating when heated. That patent is the reason a hotel in Altoona, PA put American cheese on pizza, and the reason it works far better than it has any right to.

Real cheese is an emulsion held together by casein protein. Heat it past 150°F and the fat leaks out, which is why bad pizza pools grease. Kraft's fix was emulsifying salts, mostly sodium citrate, which grab the calcium locking the proteins together and swap in sodium. The freed proteins wrap every fat droplet and hold on at any temperature a pizza oven can reach.

That gives American cheese a property mozzarella will never have. It melts into a uniform liquid sheet without releasing a drop of grease. On thick, spongy Sicilian dough, that sheet works as a moisture seal, so the crust stays dry and springy instead of soaking through.

The flavor logic is a cheeseburger's. Sweet sauce, salty peppercorn salami, sharp raw green pepper, mild tangy cheese binding it all. Swap the dough for a bun and you've eaten this combination a thousand times.

The chemists' joke is real, too. Sodium citrate's formula is Na3C6H5O7. Read the letters. NaCHO.

The Altoona Hotel added it to the menu in the 1950s as the cheap option, originally with Velveeta. The hotel burned down in 2013, and about a dozen local shops kept the recipe going, some still selling slices for $2.50.

[Sir Yacht @SirYacht_]

Drove 4 hours to Altoona, PA to try Altoona-style pizza

-Thick, spongy dough
-Salami
-Tomato sauce
-Green bell peppers
-Controversial use of American cheese on top

Can't tell if it's a war crime or art, but I thought it was pretty good

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Hollywood cut sex scenes by 40% since 2000. Violence, drugs, and profanity stayed flat over the same 24 years. The only vice that vanished from movies is the one the internet gives away for free.

The audience data explains why. UCLA surveyed 1,500 Gen Z viewers: 47.5% said sex isn't needed for most plots, and 51.5% want more stories about friendship instead. In 2000, fewer than 20% of top-grossing films had zero sexual content. By 2023 it was nearly half.

This tracks their actual lives. In 2011, 47% of American high schoolers had ever had sex. By 2021 it was 30%.

For most of film history, the theater held a monopoly on sex. A 1993 audience had to buy a ticket to see Basic Instinct. Sex scenes were a scarce commodity and studios priced them like one.

Then the internet made explicit content infinite and free, and the scarcity flipped. What became rare for a generation raised on phones is the thing they now ask Hollywood for: friendship, connection, people simply hanging out. The UCLA researchers said it plainly: young people are living through a loneliness epidemic and they look to movies to model what they're missing.

Boomers snuck into R-rated movies to see sex. Gen Z sits through sex scenes waiting to get back to the friends.

[Joe Russo @joerussotweets]

Gen Z when they see sex scenes in a movie.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

An Australian National University team tracked 7,155 people through seven years of job changes and found something career advice never mentions: moving from unemployment into a bad job damaged mental health more than staying unemployed.

The numbers, published in Occupational and Environmental Medicine. People who went from unemployment into a high-quality job gained 3.3 points on a standardized mental health scale. People who stayed unemployed lost 1.0 point. People who took a poor-quality job lost 5.6.

The bad job did over five times the psychological damage of no job at all.

The mechanism explains the meme. The health benefits of working trace to four specific ingredients: control over your tasks, manageable demands, job security, and pay you consider fair. A job with those gives you structure, purpose, and a social role. A job without them keeps the alarm clock and the commute while removing every part that made work good for you.

Long-term unemployment is genuinely corrosive, and a good job beats it clearly. But the researchers found the mental health of the unemployed was equal or superior to workers in the lowest-quality jobs, and the decline was steeper for the workers.

Which is why the guy who didn't get the job is drinking coffee in the Alps looking better than half the people who did.

[Tony 🌍 @NeetWorldOrder]

Unemployment cures all mental health issues btw

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

@sidammar316 😂 man is immortal

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Marvel has killed Patrick Stewart's Professor X on screen twice. They're paying to bring him back a third time at age 86, because he's still a safer bet than any hero they've launched in seven years.

Stewart first played Xavier in 2000, at 59, in a movie that grossed $296M and kickstarted the modern superhero era. Fox buried the character under a tree in Logan. Marvel decapitated a variant of him in Multiverse of Madness. He keeps outliving his own deaths.

The reason is math. Since Endgame's $2.8B, the new-character pipeline stalled. The Marvels grossed $206M worldwide against a reported $270M budget. So for Doomsday, Marvel paid Robert Downey Jr. over $100M to come back as Doom, paid the Russo brothers $80M to direct, and reassembled the 2000 X-Men cast: McKellen, Marsden, Romijn, Grammer, Cumming.

The two actors anchoring the biggest movie of 2026, Stewart and McKellen, have a combined age of 173.

Superhero movies were supposed to be a machine for minting new stars. Twenty-six years in, the most bankable asset in the entire genre is the same bald head from 2000.

[Neb | 🏳️‍🌈 @NebsGoodTakes]

Avengers: Doomsday (2026)

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Japan's health ministry publishes an official threshold for death by overwork: 80 extra hours a month. Bureaucrats call it the karoshi line. The prime minister just posted a schedule that runs roughly four times over it, and she framed the post as reassurance.

Sleeping 0 to 3 hours a night means being awake 21 or more hours a day. Strip out the chores she listed (laundry, dishes, ironing handkerchiefs) and Takaichi is still logging something like 18 working hours daily. Over a month, that's around 370 hours of overtime by her own government's accounting method.

The timing makes it stranger. She first disclosed the 2-hour nights in November while answering a parliamentary question about how she planned to fix Japan's notoriously long working hours. Weeks earlier she had summoned aides to a 3am study session, six hours before a budget hearing.

Japan knows exactly where this road ends because it wrote the map. In 2015, a 24-year-old Dentsu employee named Matsuri Takahashi died after months of 105-hour overtime. Her death forced the CEO to resign and produced the national overtime caps that exist today.

The numbers keep climbing anyway. Fiscal 2025 set a record: 6,212 applications for overwork-related death and illness compensation, 1,310 approved, the fourth straight year of increases. Tokyo's government moved its own employees toward a 4-day week to fight the trend.

And the head of state's answer to all of it, after campaigning on "work, work, work, work and work," is a cheerful post about finally getting 5 hours on a national holiday.

Takahashi's 105 hours a month killed her at 24. The prime minister is publicly logging triple that and calling it routine.

[Clash Report @clashreport]

Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi says sleeping "0 to 3 hours" a night has become normal since she took office.

The one exception: on July 20 (the last day of the three-day weekend), she said she'd finally gotten "5 hours of sleep for the first time in a while".

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Johnson & Johnson has a company Credo hanging on the wall that says patients come first. For decades, employees walked past it every morning on their way into the building where they were covering up asbestos in baby powder.

They knew. That part isn't speculation, it came out in litigation, the way it always does eventually. The documents got made public.

The company that gave millions of parents a product to trust on their infants had known for years and kept selling it anyway. The final settlement bill: roughly $10 billion, because real people got cancer.

Here's what makes this one different from the usual corporate scandal story. Johnson & Johnson wasn't some indifferent conglomerate with no stated values.

They had the values. Written down. Framed. Repeated in every onboarding deck for generations. The credo predates the scandal by decades.

A mission statement on the wall was never the thing protecting anyone. It's a piece of paper. The people who decided to bury the asbestos data read the same words every single day and did it anyway.
Values don't enforce themselves. Structure does.

That's the gap almost every founder assumes doesn't apply to them, right up until it does.

Write it into the bylaws.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

I literally got The Lean Startup Guy to give a masterclass on how to build AI companies:

0:00 - The @ericries masterclass begins
2:57 - Why OpenAI keeps almost dying
6:27 - Dario's secret weapon at Anthropic
9:19 - The 4 forces of corruption
14:51 - The most besieged person in your org
19:22 - Success is like taking heroin
20:42 - Costco's founder got fired
28:43 - J&J's $10B mistake
31:25 - The structure VCs have never heard of
40:39 - AnswerAI: 9 people, no managers
44:42 - "Mimetic conformity machines"
47:27 - Live demo: how Eric writes with AI
57:39 - The charter mistake that killed SVB
1:08:07 - Does Build-Measure-Learn break?
1:15:45 - Where to get Incorruptible

[Ryan Petersen @typesfast]

Armed undercover secret service operator in a Messi jersey broke up a fight in my section.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

@typesfast Woah

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Hours before signing Uber's Series B term sheet in 2011, a16z cut the price. Travis Kalanick walked, took $32M from Menlo Ventures at a $322M valuation instead, and a16z spent the next 15 years living with one of the most expensive fumbles in venture history. Uber trades at $146B today.

Menlo's consolation prize for being the second choice: $66.5M invested, up to $3.1B returned.

Today the bill for that 2011 phone call came due. a16z is leading a $1.7B round into Kalanick's new company Atoms, with Ben Horowitz joining the board. The check to get back into business with Travis is 5x the valuation of the entire company they walked away from.

The "iykyk" in his announcement is doing heavy lifting. Benchmark, the firm that did get the Uber board seat, led the 2017 campaign that pushed him out, then sued him personally. a16z built its brand on the opposite promise, founder-friendly to a fault, born from Ben's own near-death run at Loudcloud. Kalanick is saying, in public, that the ouster goes differently with Marc in the room.

And the strangest name in the round is Uber itself. The company that removed him as CEO is now funding his second act, backing a founder who says he wants to roll out self-driving more aggressively than Waymo.

Eight years in stealth, employees banned from listing the company on LinkedIn, and the comeback round puts his old investors, his old enemies, and his old company on one cap table. Venture has a short list of grudges that turned into term sheets. This one took 15 years and $1.7B to close.

[travis kalanick @travisk]

https://t.co/SEzWZtFurm

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

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[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The World Cup final was the largest security operation in the history of American sports. The snipers everyone photographed were the most old-fashioned part of it.

Sunday's match received a Level 1 federal designation, the tier reserved for presidential inaugurations. No soccer game in US history had been protected at that level before. The reason is target density: Trump, Sheinbaum, Carney, King Felipe VI, and Pedro Sánchez were all in one building, along with 82,500 fans who each got an airport-style search from Secret Service agents.

The snipers are the visible layer, and the oldest one. NFL stadiums have built elevated positions for them for years. That page of the playbook predates smartphones.

The part that actually changed is above the stadium. Authorities drew a no-fly zone with a 6 kilometer radius up to roughly 900 meters, put F-16s on standby over the New York area, and ran live drone-detection feeds out of a joint operations center. Over the course of the tournament, the FBI seized hundreds of drones flying in restricted airspace near stadiums.

Hundreds. During a soccer tournament.

Fans filmed the one layer of security designed for the threats of 1996, while the layer built for 2026 stayed invisible from the stands and quietly confiscated a small air force of quadcopters.

The planning started two years ago. The snipers were the last and least of it.

[𝐁𝟖 @YanitedBruno]

When you realize there were elite snipers positioned around the stadium during the Spain vs. Argentina game 😳

I guess this is considered a normal football game in the US 😭

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The most reliable test of someone's character: what they do when they owe you an apology and nobody else will ever know. Public accountability is easy. Apologizing when you could've gotten away with it is rare. That's the person you keep close.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

To get all my takes without an algorithmic filter, subscribe to my newsletter:

https://t.co/vHdRoFmd5z

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The part that got me: you stop re-pasting your style guide into every prompt. Set your team's standards once and https://t.co/JCwL4Ki6wi applies them on its own, stacking the right ones on every build.

Small on the surface. It's how a whole team's know-how stops living in one head and starts showing up in every build.

[bolt.new @boltdotnew]

There's a whole new way to use skills in Bolt.

Every skill your teammates build is now yours too. And they stack: one prompt triggers all of them, automatically.

Here's how it works 🧵