Highly customized ultra-luxury vehicles are increasingly in vogue.
State of play: Rolls-Royce Motor Cars announced today that it's investing about $370 million to expand its capacity to make meticulously personalized vehicles for uber-wealthy customers.
The move comes after a 10% increase in "bespoke" vehicle revenue per unit in 2024, an all-time high jump.
The company delivered 5,712 vehicles overall in 2024, its third-highest ever.
Fun fact: Features of bespoke Rolls-Royce models have included:
Federal Reserve officials are worried that President-elect Trump's trade and immigration policies will stoke inflation, according to minutes from their latest policy meeting released on Wednesday.
Why it matters:Higher tariffs and mass deportations could make America's bumpy battle against inflation more difficult. In that scenario, the Fed could keep interest rates higher for longer — and put the central bank on a collision course with Trump.
Private equity keeps pushing deeper into sports, with all major North American leagues now allowing at least some form of institutional ownership.
State of play: Axos spoke with Ian Charles, co-founder and managing partner of Arctos Partners, which has deals with such clubs as the Buffalo Bills, the Golden State Warriors, and the Boston Red Sox.
AI hyperscaler Anthropic is in advanced talks to raise $2 billion led by Lightspeed Venture Partners at a $60 billion post-money valuation, as first reported by the WSJ.
Why it matters: This would make Anthropic the world's seventh most valuable startup, despite ongoing losses and less than $1 billion of annualized revenue.
Anti-DEI shareholder proposals have surged over the past few years.
Why it matters: These measures are a somewhat obscure but important piece of the pushback against corporate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts — programs meant to broaden a company's hiring pool of candidates and make employees from different backgrounds feel more welcome.
The Net-Zero Banking Alliance epitomizes everything the MAGA world hates about international banking.
As such it's hardly a surprise that all of America's largest banks have now withdrawn from it.
Why it matters: Without U.S. banks on board, it becomes harder for NZBA to meet its goal of helping the world achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
Three massive, concurrent tectonic shifts are reordering in dramatic ways how America and the world will get, and consume, information in the years ahead:
Trust in traditional media is vanishing.
Where people are getting information instead has shattered into dozens of ecosystems.
The world's most powerful social platforms — X, Facebook, Instagram — no longer police speech or information.
Distinguishing truth from falsehood is frustrating, endless, thankless work — and now Mark Zuckerberg is walking away from it.
The big picture: Facebook's latest content-moderation pivot looks like part of a plan to win over Donald Trump as he takes power again. But the field Zuckerberg is abandoning is one he never wanted to play on in the first place.
State of play: Hasbro announced today that it has redesigned the Monopoly game board and introduced new "expansion packs" tied to the Free Parking space and the "Go to Jail" directive.
Changes include "stunning modern graphics," larger tokens and "crisp" Monopoly money with an updated look.
It coincides with the game's 90th anniversary.
Zoom in: Expansion packs include "twists by giving players a chance to win money, collect new cards to get away with mischief, and unlock opportunities to buy every space on the board," Hasbro says.
"You can even buy the bank!"
🎩 Nathan's thought bubble: See, now they've gone too far. The banker was already susceptible to corruption — and now malfeasance will be condoned?!
GroupM, the largest media buying agency by revenue, is shifting its business to focus on many big data sets instead of a single proprietary one, Brian Lesser told Axios in his first interview since being named global CEO last year. That strategy, which he calls "predictive performance," will anchor GroupM's client focus moving forward.
Why it matters: The recently announced mega-merger between Omnicom and IPG underscores the pressure media-buying agencies face in trying to modernize their business to meet the demands of a data-driven advertising world.
The U.S. Postal Service is closing all post office locations and suspending regular mail delivery Thursday for former President Jimmy Carter's national day of mourning.
The big picture:Financial markets, including the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, will be closed Jan. 9.
Crypto media company The Block is looking to raise $10 million–$15 million over the next few months as it tries to rebuild its business following a damning 2022 funding scandal related to disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, according to sources familiar with its investor pitch.
Why it matters: The funding scandal, in addition to broader challenges facing the crypto industry, cut The Block's top-line revenue by more than half between 2022 and 2024.
The Washington Post on Tuesday began informing staff that it would be cutting 4% of its staff, impacting fewer than 100 roles across business functions.
Never has it been easierto spread misinformation at scale — with less concern about media meaningfully policing it, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen write in a "Behind the Curtain" column.
Why it matters: Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are of one mind. The most powerful global information platforms should be governed by free speech — and the people — not by the platforms themselves.
May Mobility, the scrappy autonomous vehicle startup, is partnering with Europe's Tecnobus to add electric, self-driving buses to its fleet.
Why it matters: May Mobility has found success by partnering with government agencies to integrate autonomous vehicles into public transit systems, rather than build an independent robotaxi service like General Motors and Ford have tried unsuccessfully to do.
TikTok's sister app Lemon8 has been sponsoring posts on TikTok encouraging users to migrate to Lemon8 amid a looming ban threat, according to sponsored posts viewed by Axios.
Why it matters: The TikTok ban law also applies to other apps owned by TikTok's Chinese parent ByteDance, like Lemon8.
Mark Zuckerberg moved further in the direction of MAGA on Monday, when he appointed three white men, including UFC chief executive and Trump friend Dana White, to the board of directors of Meta.
Why it matters: We're a long way from 2022, when Peter Thiel resigned from the same board in order to be able to support Trump-aligned candidates.
President-elect Trump confirmed his son Donald Trump Jr. is visiting Greenland in a Monday evening post that renewed his call for the U.S. to take ownership of the autonomous territory that's part of of Denmark.
The big picture: Greenland's government was told the president-elect's elder son was due to arrive Monday in the capital, Nuuk, per a statement from the territory's Ministry for Independence and Foreign Affairs that noted he wouldn't meet with anyone from the government because the "visit is not official."
