Happy Thursday Everyone! Today’s newsletter: 950 words…3.6 mins
🗞 Today’s Edition: TIME’s 2025 Person of the Year, Disney $1B Investment in OpenAI, Sarkozy Drops Prison Memoir, Machado’s Great Nobel Escape, Sanders’ Crusade Against AI Data Centers, Trump’s Gold Card… & much more!
📜THE HIGHLIGHT
One killer insight to stash in your back pocket
📕 TIME’s 2025 Person Of The Year
TIME’s 2025 Person of the Year isn’t a person — it’s power itself.
The magazine crowned The Architects of AI, a coalition of tech titans whose code, chips, and unchecked ambition reshaped 2025 more than any politician, CEO, or celebrity.
Think Huang, Altman, Musk, Li, Su, Amodei, Hassabis — the unofficial G8 of the algorithmic age.
💡Why it matters: AI finally crossed from hype-cycle buzzword to global operating system.
ChatGPT now has 800M weekly users.
Big Tech is dumping tens of billions into GPUs, data centers, and model training.
AI is baked into phones, feeds, health apps, finance, logistics — often invisibly.
Most people are using AI… without knowing they’re using AI.
📜 The TIME thesis: The debate about “responsible AI” is over. Speed won. Regulation lost. And the people steering humanity’s next chapter aren’t elected — they’re engineers and founders with compute clusters.
🎰 Betting markets saw this coming: AI itself led Polymarket with ~40% odds, outrunning Huang (27%) and Altman (15%). Influence > fame.
👀 History rhymes:
In 1982, TIME crowned the computer.
In 2006, it crowned You.
In 2025, it crowned the forces remaking you — and everything around you.
⚡Bottom line: AI didn’t win Person of the Year. It won the century.
♟️THE CHESSBOARD
Geopolitics Decoded In 3 Moves
Nobel Peace Prize winner Machado greets fans in Oslo (left); Machado on the balcony of her hotel, being cheered by supporters
📚 Sarkozy Releases Prison Memoir
Nicolas Sarkozy just dropped the most Parisian comeback move ever: a prison memoir.
Diary of a Prisoner recounts his 20 days in La Santé, where France’s ex-president lived in what he calls a “budget hotel with a reinforced door.”
Spent 23 hours a day alone with Jesus, Monte Cristo, and a treadmill he nicknamed an “oasis.”
The book’s an instant bestseller — and a political reset. Critics say it’s less confession, more campaign trailer ahead of his March 2026 appeal.
💡Bottom line: Sarkozy is turning incarceration into influence.
🥇 Machado’s Great Escape
María Corina Machado just pulled off the most cinematic Nobel entrance ever. After 11 months in hiding, Venezuela’s opposition leader:
Slipped past 10 military checkpoints in disguise,
Hitched a ride on a fishing boat to Curaçao,
And caught a private flight to Oslo — all while the U.S. quietly ensured she wasn’t mistaken for a cartel vessel.
💡Bottom line: Even so, she missed the actual ceremony (her daughter accepted the award on her behalf); but her balcony shout — “Oslo, here I am!” — to cheering supporters, hit Caracas like a flare.
🕵 Denmark Just Put the U.S. on Its Watchlist
Denmark just did the unthinkable: it labeled the United States a potential security risk. In its new threat assessment:
Copenhagen places Washington in the same paragraph as Russia and China
Cites U.S. economic pressure, tariff threats, and Trump’s revived push to assert control over Greenland — including alleged threats of force earlier this year.
The worry: An unreliable America = a hungrier Moscow.
💡Bottom line: Denmark's Defense Intelligence Service (DDIS) warns Russia could exploit doubts about U.S. security guarantees to ramp up hybrid attacks on NATO. No immediate response from the U.S. has been reported.
🗽THE EMPIRE FILES
Political Drama From DC To NYC
A still of Sanders’ video on X railing against new data centers
🔌 Bernie’s Anti-Data Center Crusade Hits the Servers
Bernie Sanders is going scorched-earth on AI data centers, calling them “water-sucking, energy-draining” facilities.
He’s backing a national moratorium, blasting projects like Meta’s $10B Louisiana site that would use 3× New Orleans’ electricity and spike local utility bills.
Sanders’ message: Communities should fight back.
This ignores the fact that AI powers everything from medical breakthroughs to America’s next productivity boom.
⚡AI is scaling, but Bernie doesn’t want the future to have bandwidth.
🎫 Trump Unveils the “Gold Card”
Trump just rolled out the “Gold Card” — a $1M express lane to America for wealthy foreigners who want residency ASAP.
He’s pitching it as a “direct path to citizenship” for “productive” talent, with businesses paying $2M and a coming $5M Platinum tier promising tax perks.
⚡ Democrats call it “immigration for the 1%,” but Trump’s betting these immigrants who can afford these price tags, “will create jobs”; adding, it’ll “sell like crazy.”
🤖 CODES & POWER
Tech Wars, Crypto Chaos, and AI’s Black Mirror Moments
🎮 Disney Buys Into the AI Multiverse
Disney is dropping $1B into OpenAI and opening the gates for Sora and ChatGPT Images users to generate videos with 200+ iconic characters — from Mickey to Vader to Iron Man.
The deal gives Disney equity warrants and access to OpenAI tools for employees, while OpenAI promises tighter copyright controls.
⚡ It’s the most aggressive IP-to-AI pivot in Hollywood yet.
🇬🇧 Britain’s VPN Boom Goes Brrr
UK VPN usage exploded up to 6,000% after the Online Safety Act kicked in on July 25, forcing age checks via IDs and biometrics.
ProtonVPN saw 1,400% spikes, and VPN apps rocketed to the top of the App Store as users dodged new filters.
⚡Critics say the crackdown is basically a DIY Great Firewall, pushing people to sketchier sites while privacy fears fuel the VPN stampede.
📺 FUN FACTS & TRIVIA
Warhol Inspired the Louboutins
Christian Louboutin’s signature red soles were reportedly sparked by Andy Warhol’s influence. A sketch from Warhol’s Flowers series grabbed Louboutin’s attention in the ’60s-era pop-art spirit, inspiring him to paint the now-legendary crimson sole onto his shoes.