The LEGO Star Wars Inception
LEGO and Star Wars created a ~$1B a year toy business by combining two iconic brands that appeal to both children and adults.
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Today, we are talking about LEGO Star Wars and how the iconic 25-year old partnership makes ~$1B a year and incepted my family’s brain.
Also this week:
Costco sells $200m of gold a month
The restaurant reservation racket
…and them fires memes (including Shōgun)
Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung once remarked that “people don't have ideas, ideas have people”.
In Christopher Nolan 2010 film Inception, American philosopher Leonardo DiCaprio said:
“What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm?
An idea. Resilient... highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it's almost impossible to eradicate.”
I have been thinking about these quotes while watching my son become obsessed with LEGO Star Wars. It started with LEGO then morphed into Star Wars-themed LEGO sets.
Now, he is exploring Star Wars lore and a corner of his playroom looks like this:
Looking at this LEGO Star Wars collection, I realized that the ideas of LEGO and Star Wars were incepted into my brain long ago and I passed the ideas on to my son.
Unsurprisingly, this outcome was not random. The minds behind LEGO (the Danish Christiansen family) and Star Wars (George Lucas) created products that were aimed at children but still appealing to older age groups.
Launched in 1999, LEGO Star Wars has been very lucrative and the collaboration will likely thrive for decades to come.
To understand why, let’s look at:
Star Wars and the Greatest Hollywood Deal Ever
Lego: Great Product with Great Marketing
The Rise of LEGO Star Wars
Star Wars and the Greatest Hollywood Deal Ever
In 1973, George Lucas pitched the idea of a “space western” film series to Fox. The studio offered Lucas $500k to make the film. He countered with a directing fee of $150K — a 70% cut on the base pay — in exchange for certain film rights.
That film series was Star Wars and the fruits of the negotiation laid the foundation for one of the greatest film franchises ever and Lucas’ ~$10B fortune. Many consider it the greatest deal in Hollywood history (or, technically, the worst deal ever for Fox).
The lead-up to Lucas making Star Wars is a classic “bet on yourself” story and began in 1967: that year, Lucas graduated from the University of Southern California (USC) and co-founded a production firm called American Zoetrope with his buddy Francis Ford Coppola (yes, that one). In 1971, Lucas released his first film THX 1138, a dystopian sci-fi film that was an extension of a film school project.
The reception for THX 1138 was meh and the flop put American Zoetrope into debt.
As a financial lifeline, Lucas urged Coppola to direct a film for Paramount called The Godfather (yes, that one). The 1972 classic mafia film was a commercial and critical smash hit.
It was now Coppola’s turn to give Lucas advice.
While the pair created American Zoetrope to pursue unique projects shunned by the traditional Hollywood system, the success of The Godfather showed that it was possible to create mainstream blockbusters with artistic merit.
Lucas launched his own production company (LucasFilms) and pitched two projects to various Hollywood studios:
American Graffiti: a coming-of-age tale based on Lucas’ youth in 1960s California.
Star Wars: A 9-part space western adventure.
Inspired by serialized space westerns like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon — as well as Frank Herbert’s Dune book series — Lucas was set on creating a multi-film epic for his space western idea. However, science fiction was a shaky genre at the time. Why? Ed Wood’s 1959 film Plan 9 From Outer Space was considered the worst film ever and turned studios off of sci-fi projects for years.
Although Universal initially rejected the idea of a space epic, they did agree to distribute Lucas' American Graffiti. The movie was released in 1973 and went on to become one of the top-performing films in Hollywood history (it made $115 million on a budget of $750k).
With this success, Lucas had significant leverage to pursue his sci-fi western.
Tom Pollock — Lucas’ attorney at the time and later chairman of Universal Pictures — told Deadline about the Star Wars negotiation. It’s a long excerpt but worth reading to understand the interesting deal structure:
[Universal passed on Star Wars] before American Graffiti came out. Jeff Berg, who was George’s agent, took the treatment to Alan Ladd Jr at Fox and Laddie said “yes, I’ll make this”, and they negotiated the outline of the deal.
George got $50,000 to write, another $50,000 to produce, and $50,000 to direct. There were no contracts yet, but that was the deal. So American Graffiti came out and it was a huge hit. It was made for $750,000 and made over $100 million.
Jeff says, “George, I can get you a lot more than $150,000. We can get $500,000, maybe a million.” George said, “Look, I’m going to have a lot of money now from American Graffiti. What I really want from the deal we’re making at Fox is, I see this movie in multi-parts.”
George and I have had a disagreement over whether it was six or nine parts, but this is the way that he always saw it. It was always envisioned as this serial. What he said was — and you have to remember that George has an innate suspicion of Hollywood studios — “the worst thing that can happen to me is that I couldn’t make the sequel, or I couldn’t do the rest of the series if the first one worked. So you have to make sure that I have the ability to do that.”
That part fell on me. So instead of taking more money or other things, he used the success of Graffiti for that. I want to emphasize that none of this was because he knew that Star Wars was going to be so successful. It was all about, “I don’t want to not have the ability to make the movies I want to make,” and have it get lost in what today is called development hell.
So in the negotiations…we came to an agreement that George would retain the sequel rights. Not all the rest of the stuff [like merchandising rights] that came later, mind you; just the sequel rights. And Fox would get a first opportunity and last refusal right to make the movie. […]
So we closed the deal, and Star Wars got made and it’s a humungous hit; the biggest movie of all time. When we made the sequel deal...for The Empire Strikes Back, George made the decision to self-finance the film. Lucasfilm made a lot of money on Star Wars and would reinvest the money in the movie. The deal that was offered to Fox was, you get distribution rights theatrically and video around the world for seven years, and we retain everything else. And [we asked for the] merchandising back.
So, let me summarize the deal:
Lucas took a $350k pay cut to direct Star Wars (from $500k to $150k).
In exchange, Fox gave him the sequel rights.
Star Wars crushed it in theatres: the film came out in 1977 and made $775m on a budget of $11m (it knocked off Jaws to become the top-grossing film ever).
However, Fox still had the merchandising rights: this was not considered an important revenue stream in the 1970s but 40m+ Star Wars toys were sold in 1978 (worth ~$100m).
Lucas negotiated back the merchandising rights in exchange for Fox being the distribution partner for Empire Strikes Back. Flush from Star Wars, Lucas self-financed the sequel so Fox had no choice because he could walk away. In exchange for giving Lucas the merchandising rights, Fox was able to distribute the sequel.
With the sequel and merchandising rights in hand, Lucas printed money in the following decades, as Star Wars became a massive pop culture phenomenon. Lucas went on to make five more franchise films, including the much-maligned prequels.
These films were intended to introduce the Star Wars universe to a new generation of kids (The Phantom Menace was released in 1999 and told from the vantage point of an 8-year-old Anakin Skywalker).
Combined, the two trilogies have made a total of $4.3B:
However, the box office haul is only a fraction of the Star Wars empire. After the first film, Lucas owned 100% of the franchise and turned that IP into so so much money:
$30B worth of merch/toys
$4B of video games
$2B of DVDs, VHS, TV
$2B of books and comics
By the end of the 2000s, Lucas was planning to complete the final three films of his “9-part” space epic. It would be a decade-long commitment, though. Nearing his 70s, Lucas was ready to move on and — in full control of the Star Wars IP — sold LucasFilms to Disney for $4B in 2012.
The deal consisted of 50% cash and 50% stock. The latter portion amounted to 37m shares at a price of ~$50, which equated to ~2% of Disney’s market cap at the time. Lucas became Disney’s 2nd largest individual shareholder behind only Laurene Powell Jobs, who owned 4% of Disney. She received the shares when Steve Jobs passed away in 2011 (that stake was down from 7% of Disney, which is what the entertainment conglomerate gave up to acquire Jobs’ Pixar in 2006 for $7.4B).
No one in the mid-1970s expected toys to become worth ~70% of a deca-billion dollar film franchise. But it makes sense when you consider that Lucas actually made the original Star Wars for kids.
As noted in a U Nottingham paper by Peter Krämer, Lucas was initially quiet about his intention to target children during promotion for Star Wars because he didn’t want to alienate teen and adult moviegoers. After Star Wars smash opening, Lucas stated, "I decided I wanted to make a children's movie [and] to go the Disney route [because] a whole generation was growing up without fairytales.”
He packaged the fairy tale within Joseph Campbell’s well-known Hero’s Journey storytelling template and made obvious kid-friendly decisions for the 1977 film:
R2-D2 and C3PO: Krämer writes that the “tiny R2D2 clearly serves as a stand-in for a young child, albeit a very precocious one, while C3PO may be seen either as a bickering older sibling or even as a fussy yet caring mother figure.” The robots are the focus of the film’s first 15 minutes. Many advised Lucas against this framing but he powered through (Lucas also borrowed the idea of telling the story through the eyes of lower-rung characters from Akira Kurosawa’s 1958 film Hidden Fortress).
Parent-Children Viewing: As with classic fairy tales, Lucas wanted parents to take on the role of storytellers when watching the film with their child. This is why all of the Star Wars films begin with scrolling text (“…In a galaxy far far away…”) because the expectation is that parents will read and explain the narrative to their kids.
Now, let’s get to the LEGO story.
Lego: Great Product with Great Marketing
The LEGO Group is currently the world’s largest toy company with annual sales reaching ~$10B (surpassing Mattel at $6B and Hasbro at $5B). The privately-held firm is probably the world’s largest education company if bucketed in that category (25% of LEGO is owned by the LEGO Foundation — which focuses on education as part of its mission — and the company launched an education arm in 1980).
The start of LEGO dates back to 1932.
Founded by Danish carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen, the company has its roots in wooden-building construction (churches, homes) and carpentry (furniture, cabinets).
The pivot to toys was born out of necessity: as the Great Depression impacted Europe in the early-1930s, Ole Kirk was searching for a new business line to help float a faltering carpentry business.
Danish parents needed distractions for their children and Ole Kirk filled the void with wooden toys such as pull-along ducks, yo-yos and train sets. His business was renamed to LEGO, which is a mash-up of two Danish words — “leg godt” (which translates to “play well”).
Over the next three decades, a confluence of events propelled LEGO to the forefront of the toy industry per The LEGO Story by Jens Andersen:
World War II: Denmark was occupied by Nazi Germany from 1940 to 1943. During this period, there was an import ban on toys and other products. LEGO became the country’s largest toy producer and parents bought the products to keep their children busy (towards the end of the occupation, LEGO even used its operations to smuggle weapons from England to aid the country’s anti-Nazi resistance).
Education Revolution: In the 1930s and 1940s, there was a growing interest in child development. The movement built on the work of Germany’s Friedrich Frobel (who launched the first kindergartens in the 19th century) and Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (who proposed that children learn through play). Ole Kirk and his sons were interested in applying the concept of “learning through play” to their business.
Plastics Goes Mainstream: After WWII, plastic products swept through Europe. LEGO’s wooden toys — while very high quality — were not versatile enough for the next phase of child entertainment. Plastic was the answer for global expansion (Andersen writes that “unlike wood, plastic didn’t have to be seasoned, steamed, oven-dried, milled, polished, painted, varnished, and finally assembled with screws, nails, and labels. And while a piece of wood had to pass through many different human hands and undergo numerous processes, plastic seemed designed for simple, rapid mass production by a machine operated by a single person”).
Ole Kirk realized that in order for LEGO to stay competitive with other toy makers, the company had to fully embrace plastics. Against the wishes of his sons — who were becoming more involved in the business — Ole Kirk used half of LEGO's sales in 1947 to purchase a plastics manufacturing machine. It was the right bet. By 1951, over 50% of LEGO's sales were based on plastic toys, including miniature animals, vehicles, sailor figures and "peace" pistols.
While Ole Kirk made the correct call, LEGO was still at the fickle whim of the toy hype cycle. Ole Kirk’s third son Gotfred wanted to find one type of toy that LEGO could put all its might behind and was inspired by a product from the UK. Since the 1930s, English toymaker Hilary Fisher Page had been selling a system of “self-locking building bricks” called Kiddicraft. The toy industry is notorious for rip-offs and LEGO readily admits that its bricks were based on ideas from Page and Kiddicraft.
LEGO ramped up its plastic brick business in the early-1950s and advertising around the product positioned the toy as a “system of play”. In post-WWII Europe — when so many countries were literally rebuilding their war-torn cities — these building toys became very popular. Unlike a traditional toy, a “system of play” could be more than just a fad and also used by multiple generations. Parents could build with their children and their children could share the toys with their friends and siblings.
However, there was a major problem with LEGO’s first run of plastic bricks: they were completely unstable and would always fall apart.
Why? Because the Kiddicraft brick was hollow and when you stacked too many hollow bricks on top of each other, they couldn’t hold together after a certain height.
In January 1958, Gotfred travelled to Germany to speak with the country’s head of LEGO sales. German customers were complaining about the instability of LEGO bricks. Gotfred began sketching out ideas to make the LEGO bricks interlocking and more stable.
In less than a week, he filed a patent for a “toy building brick” with 2x4 studs on top and 3 tubes on the bottom. When two of these 2x4 bricks were combined, they had “clutch power” and the connection was very strong. However, it was also easy to take the bricks apart.
This combination was perfect for children.
The concept of "clutch power" was the key to unlocking the true potential of LEGO bricks as a "system of play," capable of lasting for multiple generations. Since 1958, LEGO has produced 600 billion bricks — "billions" with a "b" — and another 20-30 billion are added to the mix each year (and that’s why you will step on at least 1,250 LEGO bricks in your life and scream each time from the excruciating pain).
The engineering feat is truly impressive:
Minuscule Fault Tolerance: Every new LEGO brick has to fit with every other brick ever created. This requirement means that LEGO only permits a maximum variation of 0.0005” (half a thousandths of an inch) between bricks.
Operational Efficiency: The main LEGO factories — located in Billund (Denmark) Nyíregyháza (Hungary), Monterrey (Mexico), Jiaxing (China) — produce 30,000 bricks per minute and operate 24/7 for the entire year. A key metric is throughput per square meter and LEGO is always exploring improvements for plastics (including better techniques for melting, dyeing and shaping) and molds (such as adding more inserts or pressing bricks more efficiently).
A notable example of LEGO's manufacturing reputation can be seen in an e-mail sent by Elon Musk to Tesla employees during the ramp-up for the Cybertruck production:
Due to the nature of Cybertruck, which is made of bright metal with mostly straight edges, any dimensional variation shows up like a sore thumb. All parts for this vehicle, whether internal or from suppliers, need to be designed and built to sub 10 micron accuracy. That means all part dimensions need to be to the third decimal place in millimeters and tolerances need be specified in single digit microns. If LEGO and soda cans, which are very low cost, can do this, so can we.
Precision predicates perfectionism.
The 2x4 LEGO brick laid the foundation for decades of success and new toy innovations including wheels and motors (1960s), DUPLO for toddlers (1970s), Minifigures (1970s) and Technic advanced sets (1980s).
LEGO has turned into a physical social network. So many people had LEGOs — and the pieces all worked together — that the toy was shared through generations and became a default answer to “what do I buy my kid’s friend for his birthday that I know for sure he’ll know what to do with it?” (today, the social network has jumped online with countless Facebook/Reddit groups, the BrickLink secondary marketplace and LEGO IDEAS, where users vote on fan-submitted designs that potentially get turned into real sets with the original designer making a 1% royalty on sales).
Over the decades, the idea of the LEGO brick has spread like a meme. It is a two-way street. Children love LEGO and LEGO’s management believes that child creativity is an important source of inspiration (a popular saying at LEGO: “children are our role models”).1
Despite the power of the meme, LEGO faced huge challenges at the turn of the 21st century.
The Rise of LEGO Star Wars
LEGO is a great rebuttal to the sentiment that “great products sell themselves”. As noted, LEGO bricks are a true engineering achievement and the “system of play” can be picked up by any child within 5 minutes. Even so, LEGO has put so much marketing muscle behind the product.
A particularly notable example is from the 1980s when LEGO made a push into the lucrative US market. The Danish company didn’t rely on the product to “sell itself”. Rather it partnered with McDonald’s on four separate occasions over the decade to include LEGO bricks and Minifigures inside Happy Meals. The partnership led to the production of ~100 million bags of bricks for the fast food chain.
That is one way to gain mindshare.
The timing of the McDonald’s partnership was also important because all traditional toy makers were losing market share in the 1980s to movies and video games.
LEGO’s business took a hit in the 1990s as it struggled to stay relevant (in addition to films and video games, LEGO lost its patent on the brick design and saw cheap knock-offs such as Mega Blocks flood the market).
Enter George Lucas.
Two decades after silencing all the haters with Star Wars, the legendary director was ready to release the first film in a prequel trilogy: The Phantom Menace.
Now, we aren’t here to discuss the artistic merits of The Phantom Menace (that is a completely different rant). We are here to discuss how Star Wars and LEGO was a match made in heaven.
Quick recap: Lucas created Star Wars for kids and leveraged the film’s success to create and own the merchandising rights for the brand. Meanwhile, LEGO created bricks as a way for children to learn through play.
What happens when you combine these two cultural memes? Magic.
Well, it wasn’t instant magic.
LEGO’s Danish management was historically conservative and the company resisted guns in LEGO sets for decades. While a popular set based on pirates was launched in the late-1980s and introduced consumers to cannons and villains, Star Wars was another leap (the word “war” is in the name).
Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen — Ole Kirk’s grandson — was leading LEGO at the time and wanted to plug into the LucasFilm IP juggernaut. He also wanted to shake the company out of complacency.
“On the day The Phantom Menace premiered [in May 1999], fifty thousand LEGO Star Wars sets were to be sold in Toys ‘R’ Us alone,” Jens Andersen writes in The LEGO Story. “And the sum total of LEGO Star Wars products sold on American soil that year would reach $130m. Later that year, sales exploded elsewhere in the world, as the film premiered abroad.”
That $130m sales figure represented about 10% of LEGO’s total sales for the year.
LEGO still wasn’t out of the woods yet, though.
The business almost went bust in the early-2000s. Things turned around under Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, a former McKinsey consultant who was the first non-family member to run LEGO (also the first McKinsey consultant who I would say “you’re a legend” to if we ever met).
Knudstorp trimmed the product portfolio from 12,000 pieces to 7,000 pieces and put more resources behind winning sets including Bionicles (an in-house creation), Harry Potter (launched in 2001) and, of course, Star Wars.
The licensing boom kicked off by LEGO Star Wars has an amazing feedback loop and the success has been repeated with other film franchises (Jurassic Park, The Avengers, Batman, Frozen). Kids walk into LEGO stores and are reminded of what new films are available in theatres and on streaming apps. Or, the kids watch the film and bug their parents to extend the fun by purchasing a LEGO set (side note: LEGO has made significant efforts to gain share in the girl toy market; however, boys still account for over 70% of product sales.).
To achieve even better economics — by not paying licensing fees — LEGO has successfully created its own media IP as well. The LEGO Movie was released in 2014 and made over $468m as basically a 101-minute long ad for LEGO products.
LEGO also created TV shows around a ninja-universe (Ninjago) and day-to-day city life (City). One of LEGO’s biggest in-house bets came out in 2023. Called Dreamzzz, LEGO built a fantasy world by surveying thousands of children on the types of stories they wanted. LEGO then produced hours of TV content based on the surveys and put it on Netflix. After 100m hours of watch-time, the Dreamzzz sets went on sale.
According to the Wall Street Journal, LEGO is pleased with early sales for Dreamzzz and it appears to be a model for future launches.
LEGO Star Wars and My Son
My appreciation for LEGO and its business strategy has skyrocketed since I became a parent. With no explicit plan, my family has walked through every step of the LEGO journey.
I bought my son his first LEGO set when he was 18 months old. It was a $20 bulldozer because he was obsessed with construction vehicles and a wave of nostalgia washed over me (I hadn’t played with LEGO in decades). The set was too advanced for him but I happily built it while he happily smashed it.
A few months later, I bought my son a DUPLO police car. He was able to finish it himself and started asking for LEGO products. We would buy him a DUPLO or LEGO set whenever we passed a LEGO store for the next year. The Speed Champions series of sports cars was his major transition into adult LEGOs.
Soon, he was watching the LEGO City on Netflix and we were getting requests to buy products from the show.
By the age of 4, his playroom had become a shrine to LEGO. I have to give credit to my wife for the amount of clean-up she has done. Each evening, she spends half an hour taking apart his LEGO "inventions" — mostly vehicles — and placing the pieces into dozens of plastic drawers arranged by color and size.
The orderly workspace is a constant inspiration for my son to keep building.
Our trips to the library and bookstores quickly turned into searches for texts on how to build custom LEGO vehicles, buildings and characters. One of the books — LEGO Galaxy — introduced him to the AT-AT attack vehicle from The Empire Strikes Back.
I always planned on showing my son Star Wars and we even dressed as Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker for his 3rd Halloween. But he didn’t even know about the Star Wars world or characters at the time.
The LEGO AT-AT opened the floodgates. We started buying all the LEGO Star Wars sets. Then, he started watching LEGO Star Wars on Netflix. I showed him random clips from the film franchise on YouTube (a big fan of how Yoda talks, he is). After that, we bought Star Wars-themed books (from comics to encyclopedias of all Rebel and Imperial vehicles). And I'll probably watch the trilogy with him sometime within the next year.
Meanwhile, his obsession with LEGO has taught him so much about focus, imaginative play, problem solving and how to deal with setbacks. Any new parent that asks me for suggestions on toys only gets one answer — LEGO. It’s pricey but it is actually much less pricey on a “hours spent playing per dollar” basis if your kid becomes obsessed with the system of play.
LEGO doesn’t break out Star Wars in its financials but it’s ~$1B annually if we apply the logic that it was “10% of sales in 1999”. There are so many adult-themed LEGO Star Wars sets to sell to hundreds of thousands of AFOLs (aka “adult fans of LEGO”). The $1000 Millennium Falcon beckons me every time I walk into the store since it is conveniently placed at adult eye level (unfortunately, my wife says there isn’t enough room in the house for it).
None of this was planned.
Not by me, anyway.
George Lucas and the Christiansen family planted the seeds decades ago. The “ideas” of Star Wars and LEGO had been incepted in my head and I was more than happy to pass them along.
As much as I appreciate the brands — particularly LEGO’s mission to help kids learn through play — it is a bit unnerving to see such effective marketing and consumer programming. LEGO Star Wars is celebrating its 25th anniversary and the combined cultural clout suggests it will still be crushing it for another 25 years.
In a way, my son got incepted then incepted me by getting me back into LEGO.
But I’ve also used his LEGO obsession to introduce him to other types of media.
I’m a huge fan of the song “My Heart Will Go On”. He’s too young to watch Leo and Kate trolling that toad Billy Zane in Titanic, but he has read about the ship and is obsessed with the story.
For Christmas, his uncle bought him the 9,900-piece LEGO Titanic.
He built it and that was my chance to introduce him to Celine Dion’s title track from the film and — boom! — now he’s into Celine’s catalog of operatic bangers.
Remember: People don’t have ideas, ideas have people.
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Links and Memes
Costco’s Gold & Credit Card Arbitrage: Costco is selling up to $200m in gold bars per month (~80,000 oz). It’s a lot. For reference, China’s Central Bank bought $400m of gold in March (~160,000 oz).
The majority of Costco gold sales are online and the retailer has partnered with a Swiss gold dealer to make the bars.
A funny side note: a bunch of Costco members were trying to rack up credit card rewards by buying the bars and then re-selling them. However, the scheme backfires because it’s hard to get market rate for the size of bar that Costco sells (1oz), per WSJ:
Costco won’t buy the bar back or refund (it’s basically the only product you can’t return at Costco)
There are 1,700 official bullion dealers in the US and they often buy 1oz bars at a 5% discount
Online dealers have a smaller discount but then you’re paying $40+ per oz shipping
The volume of physical gold purchases from China, Costco and other institutions is a major reason why the price of gold is up ~50% since end-2022 even as ETF gold holdings are down 1/5th.
People, please stop trying to arb Costco credit card rewards. Just be a normal person and prep for the apocalypse by putting the Costco Gold under your mattress along with Kirkland-branded hiking socks, comically oversized cans of tuna and 20lb tubs of cashews.
***
Some other baller links:
AI Tupac: Two of hip-hop’s biggest names — Drake and Kendrick Lamar — are in a rap beef. Last weekend, Drake dropped a diss track titled “Taylor Made Freestyle” that included AI-generated verses by Tupac and Snoop. Drake is a master of making memes (think the Hotline Bling video) and just released the most famous AI song ever. However, Tupac’s estate threatened to sue Drake over the use of his voice, leading Drake to take the song down from his social accounts. Complex has a great breakdown of the song’s lyrics and here is an upload of the song.
The Restaurant Reservation Racket: The New Yorker has a wild story about people gaming restaurant reservation platforms (eg. Resy) by making a ton of reservations and then selling them on secondary markets. Some people are making $80k a year just sniping tables at the hottest restaurants. I hate it because restaurants are often stuck with phantom reservations and lose business. But it’s a hard problem to rein in. Also, if I were single and living in New York in my 20s, I’d probably be using these services and getting outbid by Goldman Sachs douchebags.
TikTok Ban? President Biden signed a bill that gives TikTok nine months (with a potential three-month extension) to sell itself or be banned in the US. The timeline means it will all happen after the US election. The app’s Chinese owner Bytedance — which answers to the CCP — sounds like it would rather shut down the app and incinerate $100B in enterprise value. My prediction: the app shuts down sometime in Q1 2025 and, within 3 hours, every creator is on Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts or Vine if Twitter/X brings it back. This is what happened when India banned the app in 2020. No one cared after a day and life instantly went on. Even if TikTok hangs around, investor M.G. Siegler argues that the app has major headwinds with its business model and ability to retain talent.
…And them baller X/Twitter posts:
LEGO’s fundamental and beliefs: Children are our role models. They are curious, creative and imaginative. They embrace discovery and wonder. They are natural learners. These are precious qualities that should be nurtured and stimulated throughout life. Lifelong creativity, imagination and learning are stimulated by playful activities that encourage hands-on and minds-on creation, fun, togetherness, and the sharing of ideas. People who are curious, creative and imaginative - who have a childlike urge to learn - are best equipped to thrive in a challenging world and be the builders of our common future.
LEGO’s mission statement: To nurture the child in each of us. We will do this as the world leader in providing quality products and experiences that stimulate creativity, imagination, fun and learning.
Obviously, it’s one of those deals where it’s not just about the $4 billion that came later [when Disney acquired LucasFilms] but all the money that was made in between that can be traced back to this decision. It’s important to remember that none of the original deal came out of money as those who know something about it might think. It came because George just wanted to be able to make the movies he wanted to make.
A colleague pointed out some Chinese websites which sell shameless Lego copies. You can buy that Millenium Falcon for 120 euros. Legality asides, Lego must have some insane profit margins if they can sell that for $1000...
Talking about 1000 dollar toys, the Verge pointed out a Transformer that can auto-transform! That would have been awesome as a kid. I'd still like one but euh yeah, I don't think I have enough space to put it 😂... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIc0lhmKIZE
in which Trung Phan reminds me I really need to visit a Lego factory some day. awesome post. as always.