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Christie’s has abruptly shifted into reverse, withdrawing a 1958 Ferrari 250 GT from auction that it claimed was owned by Angelina Jolie. The decision came after questions about its ownership were raised on an internet forum for Ferrari enthusiasts, Bloomberg reported Monday.

Basic details about the car’s history and background were missing from the listing and, while the auction house maintains the car belonged to Jolie, it declined to provide paperwork, and deactivated a web page that promoted the listing. “Car of a star, star of a car,” hails a press release still up on Christie’s site, which says the lot was expected to fetch €600,000 to €800,000 ($650,000 to $865,000).

Maybe famed archeologist and antiques expert Lara Croft — the tomb raider Jolie once portrayed — can be called in to investigate the mystery.

Big Tech

Meta Readies AI Search Engine to End Reliance on Google, OpenAI

It’s not just the trendy oversized sweatshirts, the gold chains, the fit jiu-jitsu physique, the curly locks, or the custom Porsche.

The “Zuckaissance” — as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s fashion rebrand has been dubbed — may be a signal of big changes to business, too. The Zuck-led social media giant is developing an artificial intelligence-based search engine to stake its claim in a rapidly growing market where OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft are already jockeying for position.

Search of Lost Dime

The Information broke the news Monday that Meta is developing an AI search engine, to be embedded in its Meta AI chatbot. The company has reportedly been indexing the web for at least eight months. (In July, Meta quietly revealed a new web crawler for “training AI models or improving products,” but stayed hush-hush when it came to publicizing it.)

Meta AI currently uses Google and Bing’s search engines when it fetches users answers about current events, financial markets, and sports. The Information, citing sources familiar with Meta’s thinking, said the company is slashing reliance on other Big Tech firms in order to insulate itself from a repeat “sting” — like Apple’s 2021 changes to iPhone privacy features, which wiped out $10 billion in ad revenue. Zuckerberg’s social empire will also further expand its footprint into rival territory:

Zuckerberg said in September that Meta AI had close to 500 million monthly active users (and in August, he noted it had 185 million weekly active users). That’s fast approaching OpenAI, which said earlier this month that its ChatGPT had 250 million weekly active users. Keep in mind, Meta AI is yet to launch in major markets, including the EU and Brazil.
Not to be outdone, Google is aggressively integrating its Gemini chatbot into its suite of products, and a new version of the Gemini 2.0 model could be rolled out as early as December. OpenAI — which relies on the Bing search engine of its largest investor, Microsoft — is also planning to launch a new ChatGPT model that month.

Google What? AI search engines have eaten into Google’s search market dominance so much that, next year, the company’s share of the US search ad market could drop below 50% for the first time in over a decade, according to eMarketer. Bernstein Research reports that some young people are even dropping “Google” as a verb in favor of a cutting-edge new slang term: “search.”

Written by Sean Craig

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Media & Entertainment

MLB is Loving the Ohtani Effect

Photo of Los Angeles Dodgers player Shohei Ohtani — Photo by Joe Glorioso/All-Pro Reels via CC BY-SA 2.0

One of the few positions Shohei Ohtani hasn’t played is relief pitcher, but he may have saved baseball.

Every time the Japanese slugger — maybe the best two-way player ever — steps to the plate, he’s not just helping the Los Angeles Dodgers chase a World Series title. He’s also helping league commissioner Rob Manfred and MLB conquer the world.

Who’s on First?

MLB has been wearing its rally cap for a while now. Last year’s World Series drew an average of 9 million viewers per game, making it the least-watched championship series in league history, followed by 2020, 2021, and 2022. For reference, an average of 24 million viewers tuned in to the 2004 World Series.

This year’s post-season — featuring Ohtani’s first-ever playoff appearance and a World Series showdown between the Dodgers and fellow big-market behemoth the New York Yankees — has been different. And its audience is putting the “world” in World Series:

Friday night’s Game 1 extra-innings thriller averaged 15.2 million US viewers for Fox, good for the largest Game 1 audience since 2017. Game 2 drew 13.8 million viewers.
Across the Pacific, 14.4 million Japanese viewers tuned in to Game 1, MLB announced Monday, and 15.9 million Japanese viewers tuned in to Game 2, which also featured Japanese pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto starting for the Dodgers. That means roughly 12% of Japan’s entire population has been tuning in during breakfast.

Growing the Game: Developing a major international presence can be a key path to growth for non-football sports leagues in America, where the NFL and college football reign supreme. The NBA — which hasn’t had an American-born MVP since the 2017-18 season — has cashed in on a growing global footprint: It generates roughly $715 million annually in non-US media rights deals, good for about 20% of its total media rights revenues, according to Ampere Analysis data. And more global eyes mean even more revenue-generating opportunities. MLB has already felt the Ohtani effect. In the past two years, the number of Japanese brands advertising in MLB stadiums has leapt from 11 to 35, according to SponsorUnited’s 2024 MLB Marketing report. For those of you keeping score at home, those are among the 56 global brands that advertised in MLB stadiums this year.

Written by Brian Boyle

Technology

Who’s at Fault in the CrowdStrike-Delta Summer Meltdown?

What’s more terrifying than a software malfunction that disrupts entire swatches of the global economy? Lawyers.

On Friday, Delta Airlines sued cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, the company behind the glitchy software update that sparked a global outage of critical flight systems this summer. Fittingly, on Monday, CrowdStrike announced it had filed to countersue.

Cyber Insecurity

To recap: In July, CrowdStrike rolled out a faulty update that crashed millions of Microsoft Windows computers using its software. Delta, a client of both CrowdStrike and Windows, experienced a massive outage that caused 7,000 worldwide flight cancellations. Ergo, Delta sued CrowdStrike on Friday, alleging it is liable for over $500 million in out-of-pocket losses, as well as unspecified profit losses and reputational harm.

As happens in the high-stakes world of corporate law, what goes around comes around — CrowdStrike came back with its own list of allegations:

In its own suit, CrowdStrike alleges that Delta refused assistance from both it and Microsoft. The company is seeking a declaratory judgment plus legal fees.
In previous public statements leading up to the lawsuits, CrowdStrike highlighted how Delta’s internal response worsened the issue’s impact, and how other airlines fared better amid the outage.

Hanging On: While the summer outage marked one of the highest-profile digital disasters ever, its bottom-line impact on CrowdStrike has hardly been catastrophic. “Our work found little to no evidence of customers shifting away from CrowdStrike,” BNP Paribas analysts wrote in a paper. Meanwhile, the company’s share price has already recovered somewhat from a broad sell-off following the outage. It currently trades at around $300 per share — below its all-time high around $390, which it traded at just prior to the outage, but above the $217 per share pit it fell into in the days afterward.

Written by Brian Boyle

Extra Upside

Humbug: Volkswagen is considering a deluge of pay cuts, layoffs, and factory closures, the company’s works council warned Monday.
Grounded: Boeing launched a $19 billion share sale, one of the biggest in history for a publicly traded company, as executives desperately try to ward off a credit rating downgrade.
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