Rob Topping

Netflix used to rent Disney's movies for about $30 million a year. Today Netflix is worth about $100 billion more than Disney. Disney spent ten years selling its biggest rival the exact movies that got people to sign up. When Netflix started streaming in 2007, it was a free add-on to the DVD plan with about 1,000 titles. The $5.99 plan got you six hours of streaming a month. A lot of Hollywood thought it was a joke. As late as 2010, the CEO of Time Warner compared Netflix taking over to the Albanian army taking over the world. So in 2008 Starz, which held the TV rights to Disney and Sony movies, let Netflix stream them for around $30 million a year. They figured it was easy money from a few people watching on laptops. Then Netflix went from 9.4 million subscribers to 23 million in three years, with Toy Story 3 and Tangled sitting right on the home screen. Starz woke up in 2011. Netflix offered about $300 million to keep the deal going, ten times what it had been paying, and Starz still said no. Its own CEO later called the original deal terrible. Disney's answer was to cut out Starz and sign with Netflix directly. In December 2012 it made Netflix the exclusive pay-TV home for every new Disney, Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm movie starting in 2016, for a reported $300 million a year. Most people covering the deal thought Disney had fleeced Netflix. Michael Pachter at Wedbush said he wouldn't be surprised if Netflix never made $100 million in profit again. The whole company was worth about $5 billion back then. Netflix made $3.66 billion in profit last quarter. That's 36 years of Pachter's "never again" number in three months. Disney kept cashing those checks for a pretty simple reason. Renting out movies you already made is mostly profit, and it shows up right away. Building your own streaming app means years of losses and a stock that gets punished for it. So Disney took the easy money, and the whole time Netflix was using those movies to buy itself time. Time to start making its own shows, starting with House of Cards in 2013, and time to get a few hundred million people in the habit of opening Netflix first. By the time Iger pulled the movies in 2017 to launch Disney+, Netflix already had more than 100 million members. Then the bill showed up. Disney lost over $11 billion on streaming by 2023 trying to win back an audience it had basically helped Netflix build. You can see all of it in the chart. $100 a month into Disney roughly doubled, and that's with Disney owning Marvel and Star Wars the whole time. Netflix stock is down about half from its June 2025 high, and it's still worth around $290 billion. Disney sits at about $190 billion. And this year Netflix lost the bidding war for Warner Bros, and Paramount paid it a $2.8 billion breakup fee on the way out. That one check would've paid for the old Starz deal for 93 years.

A woman from St. Louis booked a single day of fishing in Canada, her first time ever on that river, and pulled up a fish her guides think is more than 100 years old. It's over 11 feet long, and it'll never make the record books. In British Columbia it's illegal to lift a sturgeon that size out of the water, so nobody can put it on a scale. The official world record is a 468-pounder from 1983. This one got sized up with a tape measure instead. Sixty inches around the middle, run through a length-and-girth formula, comes out to roughly 1,100 to 1,200 pounds. It had also never been caught or tagged before, so it spent its whole life in a busy fishing river without anybody landing it. If the age guess is right, it hatched into a river that had just been gutted. In 1897 the Fraser gave up about 1.1 million pounds of sturgeon. By 1905 the catch was down to around 44,000. The canneries were after caviar, so the big females went first, with some of the roe shipped to Russia of all places. Problem is, a Fraser female doesn't spawn until she's about 26, and after that only every 4 to 10 years. Every egg-heavy fish they pulled was a quarter century of growing the river couldn't replace. First Nations fishermen warned the cannery owners it would crash, and by 1905 it had. That fish then made it through decades of commercial nets until B.C. banned keeping sturgeon in 1994. A female that hatched the year of the ban would've only hit her first spawn around 2020. Funny thing is, nobody can actually prove the age. You age a sturgeon by slicing a fin ray and counting rings like a tree stump, and when USGS researchers tested that on fish whose real ages were known, the readers' consensus matched only about 31% of the time, and got worse the older the fish was. So "over 100" is an educated guess on a fish nobody had ever measured. Sturgeon outlasted the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, and Fraser River caviar almost got them in eight years.

Back in 1985, barely anyone knew who Tommy Hilfiger was. So he bought a billboard in Times Square saying he was one of the four greatest designers in America, right next to Ralph Lauren, Perry Ellis and Calvin Klein. Twenty-five years later, the company that owned Calvin Klein paid $3 billion for him. Somebody just put the same trick up on a billboard in San Francisco. The Hilfiger sign was basically a game of hangman. It read "The 4 great American designers for men are" with blanks for each name and only the initials filled in, and down at the bottom in small type it admitted his logo belonged to the least known of the four. He had almost no money for ads. George Lois, the ad guy his investor brought in, told him that if he marketed himself like every other fashion brand, it would take him 20 years to build a name. Tommy's first reaction to the hangman idea was that people would think he'd lost his mind, and he only said yes because he figured he had nothing to lose. Think about what your brain does when you read that sign. You see three names you already think of as the best in the business, and you drop the fourth one into the same bucket before you ever stop to ask whether he belongs there. Hilfiger got filed next to Calvin Klein without proving a thing, because your brain did the filing for him. Now look at the billboard sitting by the Bay Bridge on-ramp in San Francisco. It's five app icons floating in front of a giant moon, and that's the whole ad. Four of those apps come from Anthropic, Perplexity, xAI and OpenAI. Add up what investors last paid for those companies and you get more than $2 trillion. (xAI, the company behind Grok, is part of SpaceX now.) The one sitting in the middle is Notion, last valued at $11 billion. That's about half a percent of what everyone else on that sign is worth put together. Notion has spent three years trying to get people to stop thinking of it as a notes app and start thinking of it as an AI company, and the business is getting there. Reports say AI plans were bringing in more than half its revenue by early this year, and Sacra estimates it hit $865 million in annual recurring revenue this summer, up 82% from a year ago. There's been IPO talk for months too, and Wall Street pays a lot more for every dollar an AI company brings in than it does for a notes app. Which bucket you put Notion in is worth billions of dollars to them. Leaving the words off is the smartest part. If the sign said "Notion, the AI workspace," you'd roll your eyes and keep driving. With nothing written on it, the only thing left to think about is who made the row, which is exactly the question you want people asking about you. Nobody's signed it, either. If that N in the middle turns out to be the one paying, it wouldn't be Notion's first mystery billboard. Back in July it put up "AI Dread?" signs around the city with nothing but a phone number on them, and only owned up after the SF Standard tracked it down. It took Tommy 25 years to go from that billboard to a $3 billion check, and with an IPO on the table, Notion would very much like its version to pay off a lot sooner.