Ima Short | Wall Street Memes

Xbox, the one X-themed company not owned by Elon Musk, is in dire straits at the moment, facing declining sales made worse by several crucial business missteps.

Just this year, Microsoft Gaming’s revenue has been down 7%. Content and services: down 5%. And hardware revenue (mostly from Xbox consoles themselves) is down 33%.

But now with new CEO, Asha Sharma, at the helm, Xbox is making some rapid U-turns.

Firstly, she’s dropping development on the wildly unpopular AI gaming assistant ‘Copilot’. This tool was pitched as “your personal gaming sidekick with Xbox.” Oh, cool, I bet there were lots of things it could do, right? “With in-game assistance, get unstuck, pass roadblocks, and level-up your gameplay.” Oh nice, so it can do real-time walk-throughs that’s a cool feature, what else can it do?

“The guide you want, when you want it. Brainstorm strategies and get tips or insights with personalized coaching.” Ah, OK, so it can just do walk-throughs. Gotcha.

Sharma has also shaken up the Xbox leadership, bringing over four colleagues from her former AI division and shuffling around a number of other roles.

Last month Sharma also ended the “This is an Xbox” marketing campaign (presumably because people now know what an Xbox is), she dropped the ‘Microsoft Gaming’ branding, unveiled a new logo, and cut the price of the Xbox Game Pass.

(Just an aside on ‘This is an Xbox’. The whole campaign was designed to say that anything could be an Xbox, your phone, your TV, your laptop, basically saying that you don’t need to buy an Xbox anymore. Just an incredible self-own, guys.)

All smart changes, but will they be enough to right the sinking ship and compete with overachievers like PlayStation and Nintendo?

Good question! Let’s ask Gaming Copilot (Beta)! Hey, Copilot, will Xbox get back on track and become a successful gaming console again?

“Sure, I can offer tips… hints… anything you need.”

Ok, yeah, well, an answer to my question would be great.

“It really depends on your playstyle. If you’re looking for an AOE blast, ‘Weaver’s Bliss’ is the way to go. But if you like attacking from a distance, definitely go with ‘Amflied Rend’.”

…What? What are you talking about? Someone shut this thing down. Oh, you have? OK, great.

Did they really think they could buy eBay?

Michael Burry, the investor made famous in The Big Short, just sold his entire position on GameStop, bringing to an end one of the greatest crossover episodes of all time.

Since 2019, Burry has been involved in the GameStop saga, but after the game retailer’s CEO, Ryan Cohen, suggested they could buy eBay for $56 billion, Burry pulled out and GME’s stock plummeted 10%.

Come on guys, everyone knows you should only make your final bid in the last minute.

Burry’s retreat was announced on his Substack newsletter, ‘Cassandra Unchained,’ in which he explained that GameStop is simply going to be saddled with a lot of debt should the deal go through.

“Wall Street does indeed mistake debt for creativity, and does so constantly,” Burry wrote. “I of all people should have known.”

Burry does, however, “support the effort” to combine the platforms and capitalize on the billion-dollar collectibles market. He just doesn’t think GameStop’s financial structure can take the weight.

And hey, this might all be hypothetical anyway, as eBay will likely “reject GameStop’s offer out of hand” according to Burry.

So what you’re saying is… so you’re saying that this deal is already… dead and Burry-ed?

Alright, alright, I’ll let myself out…

Jimmy-boy Cramer is at it again with his nefarious predictions, and this time he’s turning on AI.

“Lately, we’ve been seeing parabolic moves all over the market,” said our modern prophet, “Those are worrisome.”

He’s specifically talking about the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index (aka SOX), which has been up 18 times in a row, jumping 46% in total. The best month in the index’s history, second only to February 2000…

…Does that date sound familiar by any chance?

Well, it does to Jim Cramer, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley, who are all warning of a bubble-burst similar to the dot-com crash.

But when was Jim ‘Reverse’ Cramer ever right?

“I don’t want to overreact,” he said, overreacting. “But we’ve been taking some action around the edges.”

He’s trimming some AI positions in his Charitable Trust, although he does still recommend Arm Holdings to people, but that’s because he has shares in Arm Holdings, wait, what?

“Trim some winners…don’t chase the parabolic stuff…and let’s wait to see if we have a more benign pullback from these wild past few weeks.”

‘What goes up must come down,’ basically, and I guess you don’t need to be a prophet to work that one out.

People are very dumb.

Despite only seeing links to this through Instagram, Facebook and X, it looks like, yeah, this is true as navigating through ‘pay.gov’ you eventually come to a page where you can donate ‘Gifts to Reduce the Public Debt’ via “Bank account (ACH), PayPal account, Venmo account, Debit or credit card.”

I mean, why would they say no to free money?

With the US national debt sitting pretty at $39,074,637,550,015 dollars in money, it’s impossible for an average American to even make a dent in that number. Even if you Venmo’d them a million dollars every day it would still take millions of years to pay off the debt.

ON TOP OF THAT, the money is owed to the public anyway. If you willing pay this, you’re paying twice.

Despite that, it hasn’t stopped people from contributing. According to a Grok AI summary, “lifetime totals reach about $67 million.”

People are very dumb.

Do bare in mind though that that’s a lifetime total and this scheme has been running since 1961. It’s only the Venmo/Paypal option that’s new when it was added in 2025.

Wait, so none of this is news? Why the hell am I even reporting on this?

Ngl, I just learned what a capex is…

Tesla’s stock just fell a massive 2.4% as Elon Musk pours more money into spending on AI, robots and chips to snack on when he gets peckish, although shares were back up 4% after the bell so what we even talking about here?

As Elon explained, “We are going to be substantially increasing our investment in the future. You should expect to see very significant increase in capital expenditures that are I think well justified for a substantially increased future revenue stream. Tesla is not alone in this.”

Because that’s the thing, every tech company is building out there data centers right now and the Tesla investors (tesltors if you will) banked on Musk. They voted for him to take the company in the direction of more AI and more robotics. What did they think that wouldn’t cost a bit of money?

And when I say a bit more I do mean more than double but shush shhhh.

So yeah, Elon is all in AI and robots if that wasn’t perfectly clear now.

Where does that leave the EV manufacturing portion of the company? Well, who knows and honestly who cares.

Maybe they’ll combine products and Elon can finally achieve the dream of creating a Cybertruck that’s also actually a Transformer.

…get a job at the White House.

The Big Guy Upstairs: Donald Trump has just been accused of insider trading by the BBC and everyone just let out a collective, “Ya, you think?”

Just to make the point clear we’ve already covered this here:

One Gambler Made $436,000 On Maduro Capture And It’s Looking Like They Knew Something We Didn’t

And here:

This Billion Dollar Bet On Oil Prices Falling Was Placed Just Hours Before Trump’s Ceasefire

And there are numerous other examples of trading spiking just before a big government announcement and every time it looks super shady.

The BBC has collated the top five examples in this handy article but just to run you through it here we’ve got:

March 9 when oil futures spiked just 45 minutes before Trump said that the conflict was “very complete, pretty much.”

March 23 when oil trades jumped minutes before Trump posted about peace talks.

April 9 last year when traders bet on the stock market going up just 18 minutes before Trump paused tariffs and lo and below, the stock market went up.

And then there’s the Maduro capture (we mentioned that) and the February 28 Iran strikes.

I’M JUST SAYING IT’S SUSPICIOUS GUYS.

I mean this is literally illegal but no one has been prosecuted since it was made illegal for lawmakers in 2012. It’s very likely nothing will happen here again.

In the largest DeFi exploit of the year (so far), hackers drained nearly $300 million from the staking platform Kelp DAO.

Simply put, the hackers tricked LayerZero’s bridge designed for blockchains to communicate with each other into believing it had received a valid instruction from another network and to release 116,500 rsETH (restaked Ether and 18% of supply) worth around $293 million.

Fine, that’s just Kelp that was hit, right?

Well, no.

The problem is that rsETH is such a popular staking token, so interwoven with the Ether market and the DeFi market as a whole that the broader ramifications are massive.

For example, Aave, the largest DeFi lending platform froze all rsETH markets to retain the damage, Lido paused deposits and reportedly rsETH was “just three minutes away from losing an additional $100 million,” Meir Dolev, the Cyvers Chief Technology Officer.

But we’re also seeing withdrawals in Solana and other cryptids, sorry, cryptos (can never get the verb ending right). Morpho, Sky and JupLend are all down.

Also there’s whatever this means: “The KelpDAO exploit (~$290M, is NOT a LayerZero protocol bug. It’s a configuration issue and a case study every project with a cross-chain token needs to look at today,” one technical breakdown by cryptogoblin (?) read.

So what, everything’s at risk, or what?

Well, despite what I implied in my title, that’s hopefully the end of this specific exploit, but it’s more the knockon effect. Combined with the massive $285 million Drift attack in April, morale in crypto is at an all time low, with some even saying this is the end of DeFi although.

Who knows the ramifications of this particular hit, but right now, I’m sorry, things aren’t looking so great in the world of crypto, bro.

This story is genuinely insane.

SO let me set the scene:

Changham Kim (AKA Kim Chang-han) is the CEO of a South Korean video game publisher called Krafton. Krafton has put out numerous titles, but their flagship game is PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG). Back in 2021, Krafton bought Unknown Worlds Entertainment, the developer behind the insanely successful Subnautica, for $500 million.

Last year the team were ramping up development on the hotly anticipated Subnautica 2 when internal projections predicted the game would hit the needed targets to trigger a massive $250 million earnout for the dev team (as agreed when they first bought the company).

Kim freaked out and turned to his lawyers, seeking to get out of the deal. His lawyers responded saying there was nothing he could do and in fact trying to back out or firing the devs would obviously look bad and might even be illegal.

But Kim ignored them and turned to everyone’s favorite sycophant: ChatGPT.

OpenAI’s LLM pushed back at first but when pressed, suggested Kim form “an internal taskforce, dubbed Project X.”

Following ChatGPT’s advice, Kim locked out the devs from their own Steam page in an effort to delay the game’s release.

Then Kim went full ham and just straight up fired the dev team without cause.

Obviously this triggered a lawsuit in which all of Kim’s ChatGPT logs came out and a Delaware court ruled that the dev team be reinstated and Krafton still has to pay the $250 million earnout.

Oops.

So if there’s a moral to this story it’s maaaayybe don’t lean on ChatGPT for legal advice, especially with a quarter of a trillion and a lawsuit on the line.

It’s unclear though if Changham has learned his lesson as, of the time of writing, it seems that Kim is somehow still the CEO of Krafton… and Subnautica 2 is still delayed.

ChatGPT could not be reached for comment.

A THOUSAND Disney employees have just been fired as the new CEO seeks to streamline operations, particularly in Marvel (comics and studios) as production output has been reduced significantly.

Here’s the full report from Variety:

Disney is making layoffs this week to “streamline our operations” in various parts of the company, CEO Josh D’Amaro said in a memo to employees Tuesday.

The media company is eliminating about 1,000 roles, primarily as a result of Disney’s formation of a consolidated enterprise marketing division under the leadership of Asad Ayaz, chief marketing and brand officer, a source familiar with the situation said. The cuts will span marketing functions across Disney’s studios, TV networks, ESPN, product and technology, and corporate groups, the source added.

D’Amaro, in his note to employees, said the unified enterprise marketing and brand organization is “designed to serve consumers in an even more connected way.”

“Over the past several months, we have looked at ways in which we can streamline our operations in various parts of the company to ensure we deliver the world-class creativity and innovation our fans value and expect from Disney,” he wrote in the memo. “Given the fast-moving pace of our industries, this requires us to constantly assess how to foster a more agile and technologically-enabled workforce to meet tomorrow’s needs. As a result, we will be eliminating roles in some parts of the company and have begun notifying impacted employees.”

“I know this is hard,” D’Amaro wrote. “These decisions are not a reflection of their contributions, or of the overall strength of the company. Rather, they reflect our continual evaluation of how to more effectively manage our resources and reinvest in our businesses.”

Disney reported having about 231,000 full- and part-time employees as of September 2025 (the end of its fiscal year).

It’s the first big restructuring action under D’Amaro, who took over as Disney’s CEO on March 18 from Bob Iger. D’Amaro was previously the chairman of Disney Experiences.

Read D’Amaro’s memo about the job cuts:

Dear Fellow Employees & Cast Members,

We have experienced a great deal of change these last few years, both at the company and across our industries. Knowing firsthand how these moments can bring uncertainty, I want to be open about some difficult news that will be communicated this week.

In January, we announced our unified enterprise marketing and brand organization, designed to serve consumers in an even more connected way. Over the past several months, we have looked at ways in which we can streamline our operations in various parts of the company to ensure we deliver the world-class creativity and innovation our fans value and expect from Disney. Given the fast-moving pace of our industries, this requires us to constantly assess how to foster a more agile and technologically-enabled workforce to meet tomorrow’s needs. As a result, we will be eliminating roles in some parts of the company and have begun notifying impacted employees.

I know this is hard. Those that will be leaving us have done meaningful work here and care deeply about this company. These decisions are not a reflection of their contributions, or of the overall strength of the company. Rather, they reflect our continual evaluation of how to more effectively manage our resources and reinvest in our businesses.

Compassion and respect remain at the heart of our company. As we move forward through this transition, our priority is to support those impacted and help each person navigate what comes next with resources, guidance, and direct support.

Despite these difficult decisions, I remain optimistic about where we’re headed as a company. I’m deeply grateful for all of your contributions and for the dedication, professionalism, and care you bring to your work each day. Even in challenging moments, you continue to demonstrate what makes Disney so special.

Josh

Surprise, surprise: it’s inflation.

Inflation means everything is more expensive, specifically rent is up nearly 50% from last year and clothing costs are up more that 25%. Those two factors alone are massive reasons why raising a child is so expensive now.

But it’s not the biggest cost in growing a human being

Childcare is by far the largest expense for families with kids under 5, which makes sense I guess, but then why is looking after children really expensive for some people but other people get paid to do it?

All of these stats come from a recent study from LendingTree (whatever the f that is) which broke down all the average costs state by state. Click on this article where I’m getting all this information from. It’s pretty cool, they’ve got an interactive map and you can see in which state it costs the most to raise a kid to 18.

Turns out Hawaii is the most expensive and New Hampshire is the cheapest. Who knew?

But on average the cost of raising a child to 18 is $303,418, up 1.9% from last year. (Sorry, should have been clear, that 27.8% in the title is compared to 2023, bit misleading there…)

As Matt Schulz, chief consumer finance analyst at LendingTree and co-author of the study, explains, “Inflation is just taking a toll, clearly, on people, and it’s certainly one of the reasons why we saw such significant growth here.”

“A few states and even areas within various states are what are called ‘childcare deserts,” where there’s just not nearly enough supply of daycare and child care centers to keep up with the demand for it,” Schulz explained. “So what happens is that the ones that are there—and especially the really good ones that are there—can charge basically whatever they want to charge, and it ends up driving up the rates quite a bit.”

“It’s a real challenge for people who really need the help,” Schulz said. “As much as we wish that people had a relative or a trusted friend that they could lean on for that sort of thing, a lot of people just don’t have that choice, so they have no other choice but to pay whatever they need to for daycare.”

“It just turns a really challenging situation into an almost unmanageable one for people, and that’s why we see so many people factoring in finances when it comes to deciding whether to start a family or how many kids they might have.”

“As much as we wish that we didn’t have to to think about the cost of being a parent, you’re doing yourself and your family a bit of a disservice if you don’t, because there are very, very few among us who, for for whom the cost of raising a child is not significant,” Schulz said.

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