Michael Jordan hasn't played a game in 23 years and Nike still pays him $260 million a year. Messi just found an even better deal. He became a Disney cartoon.
The show follows Leo, a kid from Argentina who gets pulled into a fantasy world ruled by giants and has to outsmart them, loosely modeled on the undersized kid Messi actually was. Sony Pictures built it, Messi executive produces, and Disney is distributing it globally in English, Spanish, and a dozen other languages.
That design choice is the whole business. Jordan's $7 billion a year brand runs on adults who remember 1998, and nostalgia has a shelf life of about one generation. An animated character doesn't age, doesn't retire, and doesn't need the audience to have ever watched a match.
Disney perfected this machine a century ago. Mickey debuted in 1928 and still prints money because the character gets handed down parent to kid, generation after generation. Messi is plugging his name into that exact pipeline while his Inter Miami deal runs through 2028.
Jordan monetized the adults who watched him play. Messi is building a hero for kids who never will.
๐จ ๐ ๐๐๐ข๐ฅ ๐๐ฅ๐๐๐๐๐ก๐: Cristiano Ronaldo's iconic number 7 has been given to Rafael Leรฃo following Ronaldo's departure from the National team. ๐ต๐น
โ @B24PT
Had issues with Ten Haag, Fernando Santos, had issues with Perez,individually sacked 3 managers at Al Nassr and now heโs having issue with Jesus.
Sometimes you have to know when youโre the problem
I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.