US Affairs

America has made it to the moon again

After half a century, the United States has made it back to the moon. The Odysseus spacecraft successfully landed on the moon Thursday, becoming the first private spacecraft to land on the moon (that has remained intact).

Intuitive Machines’s Odysseus lander became the first US spacecraft to land on the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972, making the landing a pivotal landmark in US space history.

Why now?

After being launched aboard a SpaceX rocket, Odysseus landed around 180 miles from the lunar south pole. Scientists took an interest to the region due to the presence of ice, along with traces of evidence from the early formation of the solar system, which NASA says could lead to some of the most prolific discoveries of the 21st century.

• NASA says this section of the moon will introduce “a unique opportunity for scientific discovery”, and that the mission will “commence a new era of deep space science.”

The craft is carrying around $120 million worth of NASA materials which are there partly to lay the groundwork for a human visit in 2026 as part of the Artemis program.

The privatization of space

With the Artemis program, NASA clearly has its eyes set on getting humans back to the moon. However, the agency’s budget is one-tenth the size it was at the peak of the Apollo space program, so NASA is turning to the private sector in order to help accomplish its goals.

Intuitive Machines Odysseus mission is part of the NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS), a program which allows the agency to send its in-house devices aboard private spacecraft, thus spending much less money than if it had to send its own.

• NASA paid $118 million to Intuitive Machines in return for Odysseus to take six of their research machines to the lunar surface.

• According to Thomas Zurbuchen, who led the creation of the CLPS program, this type of mission could cost half a billion to a billion dollars if led by NASA instead.

For comparison, India landed a spacecraft on the moon’s south pole for $75 million last year, which was less than half the budget of Dune: Part II (reportedly $190 million), that released on Sunday.

Nvidia is becoming one of the most important stocks on Earth

The AI expansion is only getting bigger, and Nvidia is reaping the benefits. The behemoth chipmaker, whos chips underpin almost every bit of AI technology, showed extremely impressive sales in a Q4 earnings report, boosting confidence in AI tech and the companies supporting it.

The company boasted quarterly sales that reached $22.1 billion, which is a 265% increase from the same time last year. Its net profit also surged to $12.3 billion compared to $1.4 billion from the same period in 2023. Nvidia’s insane quarter finished out “one of the quickest rises in corporate history,” said the WSJ.

In a statement, CEO Jensen Huang said that AI has hit a “tipping point” with demand “surging worldwide across companies, industries, and nations.” Huang’s company controls around 80% of the high-end AI chip market, per Reuters, so his statement has some efficacy to it.

The most important stock in the world?

Before Nvidia’s earnings report went public, Goldman Sachs’s trading desk called Nvidia “the most important stock on planet Earth,” because Nvidia is a proxy for AI demand, and AI demand has been the main driver of the stock market for the past year.

Nvidia was the best-performing S&P 500 stock of 2023, and replaced Tesla as the most-traded stock by value. It added more than $1.2 trillion in market cap in the last year and became the third-most valuable company in the US for a short time, ahead of Alphabet and Amazon.

Reddit is making its Wall Street debut in an unusual way

Reddit, which is home to Wall Street Bets, is betting on Wall Street. Last week, Reddit filed to go public, marking the first IPO by a social media company since Pinterest in 2019. However, this will not be your typical IPO.

Why not? Reddit is planning to offer 75,000 of its power users the opportunity to buy shares at the IPO price, which is a luxury not usually given to individual investors.

Companies going public typically sell IPO shares to professional investors, who are expected to hold the stock for long periods and lower the potential for large fluctuations in the share price.

Reddit wants to pay its moderators

Reddit has around 60,000 moderators, or users who manage communities within reddit, which are dubbed subreddits. Mods are unpaid, and Reddit CEO Steve Huffman hopes that by giving them skin in the game, they’ll feel more like owners in the company.

However…

The early indication is that most users are not happy about the IPO and overall sentiment seems to be negative, according to a report from The Verge.

One user commented under a thread in r/WallStreetBets, saying “They have not proven that this user base or data set can be monetized,” which, in part, is true.

While Reddit is one of the most visited websites in the country, it has struggled to prove it can be profitable, especially compared to other social media platforms in the US.

• In its IPO filing, the company said it’s been unprofitable since its founding in 2005 and pulled in $804 million in revenue in 2023.

  • In comparison, X is projected to have made $2.5 billion last year.

• The company’s list of “risk factors” is longer than Facebook’s and Twitter’s combined when they filed to go public, Bloomberg’s David Lee said.

They do have one hope: Selling data. Reddit makes most of its money through ads, and is attempting to find a new way to make revenue by licensing its huge number of messages to train AI models.

Last week, it announced a reported $60 million annual deal with Google for AI training, and the company could look to find similar partnerships with other tech companies.

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Grab Bag

Employers are no longer using the word ‘fired’

The newest corporate trend? Ditching the word ‘fired’. For many companies, fired is too harsh of a word, and they’re replacing it with euphemisms like “involuntary career event” and “corporate outplacing,” although, it doesn’t change the outcome.

Why change the verbage?

Stanford professor Robert Sutton compared the use of soft language to “jargon monoxide,” when he spoke to Bloomberg, which is intended to ease the person getting fired, although it might just have the opposite effect.

• Citi described cutting 20,000 jobs in November as creating a “simplified operating model.”

• UPS said its 12,000 layoffs were an attempt to “fit our organization to our strategy.”

Of the tens of thousands of people laid off so far this year (the tech industry alone has cut 32,000), some have filmed themselves getting the dire news and posted the ensuing conversation on TikTok, sending the hashtag #layoffs on the app to nearly 400 million views.

Former Cloudflare employee Brittany Pietsch made a video that went viral last month, in which she filmed herself being laid off. It serves as an example of what companies are clamoring to avoid when firing (or rightsizing) an employee.

Air Canada was forced to pay a customer over a chatbot error

Some of the biggest headlines this year have involved airlines and AI, so it’s fitting that the latest airline affair has been caused by… none other than AI. Canada’s Civil Resolution tribunal ruled in favor of a customer who was given inaccurate information about bereavement fare discounts from an Air Canada chatbot.

What happened?

Two years ago, Jake Moffat tried booking a flight the day his grandmother died to attend her funeral, and asked Air Canada’s chatbot for help regarding the airlines bereavement rates. The chatbot told Moffat to book the flight and request a refund within 90 days.

However, Air Canada denied his $450 refund, saying its policy explicitly stated that the airline will not provide refunds for bereavement travel after the flight is booked. The airline initially offered Moffat a $200 coupon and promised to update the chatbot, but Moffat decided to take the airline to a civil tribunal.

Air Canada’s arguments were this:

• The chatbot was a separate legal entity “responsible for its own actions.”

• Moffat should not have trusted the chatbot and should have double-checked the information with the airlines policies.

One tribunal member called the arguments “remarkable,” which threw the country’s ‘Canada nice’ on full display. After the ruling, the airline appears to have removed chatbot services from its website. This might be the first and last time a robot will lose its job to a human.

Fast Facts

Shot Safety: Vaccines that protect against Covid symptoms were linked to increases in neurological, blood and heart-related conditions in the largest global vaccine safety study to date.

(Un)Paid Parking: New York City is currently owed $1 billion in unpaid parking and speeding tickets, according to the Independent Budget Office.

Dog Days: The world’s oldest dog was posthumously stripped of his title after the Guinness World Records could not prove he was 30 years old at the time of his death.

Toilet Time: A ride-share company in Tokyo is offering clients a four hour “restroom tour”, which is exactly what it sounds like, and hopefully doesn’t come with souvenirs.

Weight Watchers (literally): WeightWatchers invited influencers to an “Ozempic hype house” to make content for WW’s new weight loss drug service.