In today’s newsletter I discuss if the 2026 FIFA World Cup is anEntertainment or Sporting event? It’s an honest question, and I’m not sure what the answer is. I’m also discussing Meta is creating their own prediction market, Amazon just backed out of distributing a firm about Sam Altman after they invested $50 billion dollars in his company OpenAI, EV startup Slate is launching taking pre-orders for their new $24,950 dollars pickup truck nicknamed Open Slate (punny), Alan Greenspan has passed away at the young age of 100, Peter Thiel started his own secret society called Dialog and you’re not invited, Craigslist’s Craig Newmark is giving away his fortune, and the International Olympic Committee is giving each Olympic athlete $10,000 for training and living expenses if they are selected to compete in either the Summer or Winter Olympics.

Let’s get into it.

When you think of this year’s FIFA World Cup, what comes to mind? Scotland’s “Tartan Army” drinking Boston dry? Norway’s “Viking Row” in the stands? What about announcers constantly saying the phrase “hat trick” and you have no idea what that even means? For a true football fan, or what we call soccer here in the U.S., the strangest thing they’ve witnessed this year is the new “hydration breaks” with DJs blasting music to try and settle the booing crowds. Where did these hydration breaks come from, why is the crowd booing, and since when did soccer matches have DJs?

Let’s get into it.

Soccer didn’t used to have these 3-minute long hydration breaks in the middle of each half. Players would just tough it out amidst the heat of the match. Anticipating that the 2026 FIFA World Cup matches would be the hottest in history, FIFA decided in their infinite wisdom to make them mandatory, claiming it was for player safety. Aww, that’s a cute thought, but the truth has a lot more to do with FIFA seeing green. You see, those 3-minute long breaks are the perfect time for advertisers to do what they do best and show ads. So essentially, hydration breaks have been monetized in the name of player safety, and fans aren’t happy.

Enter the lonely DJ to try and quell the booing crowds.

DJs have been playing sporting events like football, baseball, basketball, and soccer games for the last four decades in order to keep the energy of the crowd high during breaks. The last thing you want is for the crowd to get bored, or even worse, start booing, which is exactly what World Cup fans have been doing in protest of the 3-minute hydration breaks that FIFA has required in each soccer match. You see, any break in play slows the game down and stops the more dominant team’s momentum, like when they’re pressing their advantage on a scoring drive only to have the ref blow the whistle for a mandatory water break, as if the players are in preschool and need the teacher to remind them to drink their sippy cup. It’s absurd!

To try and combat the boos of the crowd, DJs have been blasting karaoke bangers like "Take Me Home, Country Roads" by John Denver, "Macarena" by Los del Río, "Sweet Caroline" by Neil Diamond, and the new karaoke hit "Mr. Brightside" by The Killers (which I personally love). These songs have had a so-so effect on calming the rowdy fans, well maybe not the rowing Norwegian fans, but some fans can’t help themselves from singing along to the 105 decibel thumping music of the "Macarena".

If only bringing pleasure to soccer fans’ ears were the real reason FIFA is requiring these water breaks.

The more insidious reason is money!

Fox is projected to make between $250-$500 million dollars from selling ads during these 3-minute long commercial slots, and soccer fans can smell the blatant money grab.

Let me break it down for you. Fox essentially has a two-minute window within each mandatory 3-minute long water break for them to run commercials. The first 20-seconds of the break acts as a sort of start buffer, and then they have a 30-second buffer at the end as they return to play. That leaves them (4) 30-second ad slots for each of the 2 water breaks during a FIFA World Cup soccer match. Now let’s do some complex math, at least for me. There are 104 games in the 2026 FIFA World Cup, which means with 2 water breaks per match for a total of 4-minutes worth of ads, Fox has created out of thin air 832 ad spots to sell for between $200,000-$700,000 per 30-second ad depending on the popularity of the teams playing, with ad slots getting more expensive as they get closer to the final match of the tournament. So each match can bring in between $1.6-$5.6 million dollars, then multiply that by the 104 games comes out to Fox scoring ad revenue from monetizing those hydration breaks to the tune of between $166-$582.4 million dollars. And that doesn’t even include the ad slots they’re selling during halftime or before and after the matches. So yea, Fox is crushing it when it comes to ad sales!

I guess I wouldn’t be as upset about these mandatory 3-minute long water breaks if FIFA and Fox were honest with their fans and just called these breaks what they really are: money-making opportunities at the expense of playing the world’s most beautiful game.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is developing their open prediction market called Arena that is being designed for users to bet on real-world outcomes. Sound familiar? It should, because Meta is entering what could be a $1 trillion dollar market by the end of this decade, but they’re not the only 800-pound gorilla in this market. Both Polymarket and Kalshi are already multi-billion dollar established companies in the prediction market industry, and they’re only getting bigger. Now Mark Zuckerberg, fresh off his familiar to turn Facebook into a metaverse company, and hot for the idea of Facebook, I mean Meta now, to get a piece of the prediction market pie.

The size of the prediction market industry is growing so fast that it's starting to rival the market size of the traditional sportsbooks market, and is estimated to surpass it within a decade. The global sports betting market size's estimated to be between $124-$127 billion dollars as of 2026, and is expected to grow to $295.29 billion dollars in 2034, with a CAGR of 11.18%. While sports betting's been a huge market, the prediction market industry has a larger total addressable market size of as much as $500 trillion dollars, thanks to the opportunity for investors to bet on every conceivable event in the world from corporate mergers, to global conflicts, to presidential elections.

Polymarket, founded by Shayne Coplan, is one of the biggest prediction markets in the world. As their platform's grown in popularity, their user base has grown to over 1.3 million unique users, and 477,000 monthly active traders, who've invested over $26.2 billion dollars in total trading volume as of Q1 of 2026. Polymarket gained popularity when people wagered an estimated $3.6 billion dollars on the 2024 presidential election between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Polymarket recently raised a funding round led by Intercontinental Exchange, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, which valued Polymarket at $15 billion dollars. That brings the total amount of money raised by Polymarket to $2.3 billion dollars across seven funding rounds, including from the VC firm Sequoia Capital, and famous investors like Vitalik Buterin, one of the co-founders of the cryptocurrency Ethereum, who invested in a $45 million dollars funding round.

Kalshi, the other big dog in the prediction market industry, was co-founded by Luana Lopes Lara and Tarek Mansour. Kalshi's monthly trading volume in June 2026 was approximately $22.6 billion dollars, from their over 2 million unique users. In 2025 Robinhood Markets’ CEO Vladimir Tenev partnered with Kalshi to offer their users event contracts by integrating Kalshi's prediction market tech into Robinhood’s platform. Kalshi's latest funding round was a $1 billion dollar Series F in May 2026, which valued the company at $22 billion dollars, and was led by Coatue Management. With this funding round Kalshi co-founder Luana Lopes Lara became the youngest self-made billionaire, with a net worth of $2.6 billion dollars.

Now Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is developing Arena to compete with the Polymarkets and Kalshies of the prediction market industry, but with 3.98 billion monthly active users out of the world’s total population of 8.3 billion people I wouldn’t bet against Mark Zuckerberg.

Nothing shady to see here. Just a trillion dollar company backing out of an agreement to distribute a movie about a controversial AI executive who that company just agreed to invest in. Like I said, nothing to see here, except hypocrisy and an effort to whitewash the truth.

Amazon’s MGM Studios had agreed to distribute the new $40 million dollar movie ‘Artificial’ starring Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman, but the company just backed out of the distribution deal after Amazon invested $50 billion dollars in OpenAI. Yea, shady AF!

The nearly finished biographical drama ‘Artificial’ is about OpenAI’s co-founded and publicity hound CEO Sam Altman, and is directed by Luca Guadagnino, and focuses on the 5-day period when Sam Altman was fired, then almost went to work for Microsoft, before he was rehired by OpenAI after the internal coup by the company’s board of directors to oust him fell apart.

To say it was a conflict of interest on Amazon’s part to distribute a film that portrays Sam Altman in a negative light, while investing $50 billion dollars in his company, would be an understatement.

But let’s be honest for a minute here; is there really any other light to describe Sam Altman other than negative?

There’s a new EV startup in the U.S. that’s not called Tesla, and its new pickup truck is priced at $24,950 dollars for the base model. I’m talking about Slate Auto’s new pickup truck that has the cute model name Blank Slate. Someone loves puns!

Along with Slate’s low base-model price, owners can upgrade the pickup truck to a SUV with a $5,000 kit, or they can switch out the body kit with different aftermarket kits and colors depending on their mood. The Blank Slate EV pickup truck is being built and assembled at a massive factory repurposed from a former printing facility in Warsaw, Indiana.

Slate Auto was co-founded by Miles Arnone, William Barker and Jeff Wilke out of the Re:Build Manufacturing program, and led by current CEO Peter Faricy who used to be the Vice President of Amazon Marketplace. The company operated in stealth mode for the last 4 years, and has raised $1.4 billion dollars from such luminary investors as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Mark Walter who’s an owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, as well as funding from VC firms General Catalyst and Guggenheim Partners.

Pre-orders are now being accepted for the Blank Slate EV pickup truck for the low-low price of only $24,950. Get your’s today!

Alan Greenspan, the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987-2006, has passed away at the age of 100. He was the second-longest tenured head of the Federal Reserve, and he guided the Fed through the 1987 stock market crash, the dot-com economic boom of the 1990s, the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, and by far my favorite Federal Reserve Chairman.

There’s really not a lot more to say about Alan Greenspan. Rest in power Chairman.

People are obsessed with secret societies, mostly because they haven’t been invited and they’re dying to know what goes on behind closed doors. Now the world has a new secret society founded by one of the world’s wealthiest billionaires, and a king maker to silicon valley’s elite. I’m talking about Peter Thiel, who has a net worth of between $21.3-$26.2 billion dollars and is the co-founder of PayPal, Palantir, Founder’s Fund and the ensuing PayPal Mafia who incestuously invest in each other’s companies including former PayPal employee Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and Reid Hoffman’s LinkedIn.

Now Peter Thiel’s latest venture is a secret society called Dialog, which is an ultra-secret, or at least it was before Wired first reported about the invitation-only club for elite global leaders, entrepreneurs, socialites, actors, financiers, athletes, and playboy billionaires. This secret society was apparently founded back in 2006, but it’s remained so secret we’re only finding out about it today. Someone must be good at keeping secrets!

Apparently there’s even a yearly retreat, with this year’s event being held in Dublin, Ireland from August 12-16, where they’ll be discussing such diverse topics as “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness,” “Navigating WWIII,” “How’s Your Sex Life?,” and “Build-a-Cult” by the founder of the Christian networking site Pray.com. You can’t even make up how spot on that is.

And no secret society can be complete with their own dating site, which Dialog had, but it’s no longer accessible, or maybe it’s just a secret dating site.

If the idea of billionaires and some of the most influential people in the world all belonging to a silicon valley secret society scares you then you’re not alone. I know I’m still a little bummed out that I haven’t received my invite yet.

Craig Newmark, the founder of the infamous if not famous Craigslist, has been on a mission to give away his wealth during his lifetime. While he still owns an estimated 40 percent of Craigslist, and has a net worth of around $1.3 billion dollars, he’s given away more than $500 million dollars of his fortune to various philanthropic groups through his non-profit Craig Newmark Philanthropies. Some of his biggest donations include the $100 million dollars he’s pledged toward national cybersecurity defenses and cyber threat initiatives, which to be honest is a strangely interesting endeavor to donate money to but I get it. He’s also donated $42 million dollars to veterans support organizations, and $25 million dollars to fighting hunger and food insecurity. Craig Newmark is also a lover of freespeech, having donated over $170 million dollars to bolster public journalism, including a $20 million dollars endowment for the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, and a $10 million dollar grant to establish a journalism ethics center at Columbia University.

And Craig Newmark isn’t the only Silicon Valley alumni who’s made it their mission to donate all of their wealth during their lifetime. MacKenzie Scott, who was once married to Jeff Bezos and was a co-founder of Amazon, has an estimated net worth of around $43.6 billion dollars depending on the price of Amazon’s stock which affects the remaining 1.3% equity stake she still holds in Amazon. Since MacKenzie Scott established her charitable platform, Yield Giving, in 2022 she has donated $26.3 billion dollars in unrestricted funds to more than 2,700 organizations worldwide.

That’s insanely generous!

It’s about time that the International Olympic Committee finally provides athletes competing in the Summer and Winter Olympics with some financial assistance to help offset their costs of training and competing in the games. The ICC has set up a $100 million dollars fund to provide direct financial assistance to Olympic athletes around the world. Now the nearly 10,000 athletes competing in the Olympics will each receive $10,000 U.S. dollars to help offset the steep expenses that come with training, travel, and equipment.

Worldwide there are an estimated 40 countries, including Canada, China, and Japan, that help their athletes out financially to be able to afford to compete in the Olympics while representing their countries on the world stage. You know who doesn’t help out their own athletes while training for the Olympics? The United States! Shame on you America for not helping our own Olympians as they scrap together enough money to be able to train and reach their full potential while representing our country.

Do better America!

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The Business Behind The News is written, edited, and published by Chris Thompson.