Europe just quit the World Cup. UEFA and all 55 of its national associations announced they will not participate in FIFA competitions. No France, no England, no Spain, no Germany in the biggest tournament on earth.
The trigger is wild. Infantino wants to sell a piece of the World Cup to private investors for $4.2 billion. And each of the 211 national associations gets $20 million for voting yes.
211 times $20 million is $4.2 billion. The entire raise equals the approval payments. The investors would be funding the yes votes on their own acquisition.
Infantino thought the voting math made him unbeatable. FIFA runs on one country, one vote, so San Marino counts the same as Germany, and $86 million per federation through 2038 is transformative for small associations that have never qualified for a World Cup. He needs 106 of 211 votes, and he was buying them at retail.
UEFA just found the counter. Europe can't win the vote, so it's destroying the asset instead. European teams have won 12 of the 22 World Cups ever played. European broadcast money anchors the rights being sold. A World Cup without Europe is worth a fraction of the price, and every investor Kushner and JP Morgan are courting knows it by now.
The F1 comparison everyone's making misses the difference. Greg Maffei, who ran Liberty Media's Formula 1 takeover, is structuring this deal, but F1 privatization worked because the teams had nowhere else to race. UEFA already runs the Champions League and the Euros. Europe can exist without FIFA. FIFA cannot exist without Europe.
The vote is September 19. Infantino has the votes. UEFA has the teams. Only one of those makes a World Cup worth watching.
Fifteen years ago, @Coursera and online courses changed education. It worked better than almost anyone expected, expanding access by opening up where you can learn. But how you learn remains largely the same as it has for centuries: it is still one-size-fits-all, taught the same way to each person who shows up.
We now have an opportunity to change how learning happens. With advances in AI, we can now build a custom learning guide for each person. We will turn learning from one‑to‑many to one‑to‑one. I'm starting LearnVector to invent this next generation of learning. We are starting with a $100M investment from Coursera, and plan to collaborate closely with Coursera and Udemy.
Good learning needs much more than just a chatbot. Research shows that chatbots without guardrails harm learning. They help complete tasks and enable students to do better on homework. But cognitive offloading to a chatbot results in them being less skilled. And, you cannot always trust what a chatbot tells you.
In contrast, LearnVector will plan a path with you, adapt to how you learn, and patiently stay with you until you’ve mastered new skills.
One thing has not changed in all this time. People want learning they can trust: material that is accurate, relevant, and worth the effort you put into it. Anything less wastes the most valuable thing a learner has: time. Coursera has a trusted library of materials from authoritative sources. LearnVector plans to work with Coursera to bring this trustworthy learning to everyone. I'm grateful to Greg Hart and the entire Coursera team for supporting LearnVector.
I look forward to working with our talented team to change how we learn, and accelerate human development.
https://t.co/TqFUDFd1hb
Jason Momoa say he played Drogo so well Hollywood thought he couldn’t speak English
‘They thought I couldn’t speak English, after the show killed the character the calls stopped not slowed stopped we were starving after Game of Thrones I couldn’t get work’
‘I have two children it’s like I’ve got to feed my kids I’m completely in debt, I was the most talked about man on television and I couldn’t get hired’
‘So I wrote and directed my own low budget film Road to Paloma to prove I could do something other than grunt on a horse, then Zack Snyder casted me as Aquaman’
For my first post, I’m sharing a letter @NVIDIA signed on why open models matter.
AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country.
Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty.
The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models.
https://t.co/AUKzoQ5Ikb