🤑 Selena Gomez is a billionaire

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TOP STORY
🤑 Selena Gomez is a billionaire

Earlier this week, we learned that singer, actress, entrepreneur, and wizard Selena Gomez is officially a billionaire, according to Bloomberg.

Gomez, who is 32, is one of the youngest self-made billionaires in the United States, worth a sizzling $1.3 billion.

Very impressive.

There’s no way, though, that the residual checks from Wizards of Waverly Place or Only Murders in the Building catapulted her to billionaire status. So what did?

The “vast bulk” of her wealth, roughly $1.1 billion, is tied to Rare Beauty, the makeup company she founded in 2020.

A brief breakdown of Gomez’s fortune: 

• Rare Beauty: $1.1B

• Brand Deals: $90M

• Music/Tours: $85M

• Stake in Wondermind: $34M

• Acting: $26M

• Real Estate: $8M

Rare Beauty offers a wide range of makeup products, which we won’t get into here, and has mastered the art of modern marketing by partnering with popular influencers and leveraging Gomez’s own social media presence to build a massive brand.

With a whopping 424 million followers on Instagram, Selena Gomez is the third most followed person in the world, and she’s been able to wield that power with even more impact than Thor’s freaking hammer.

Social media can turn people into billionaires; who knew?

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
🍓 OpenAI’s “Strawberry” model thinks like a human

OpenAI’s next AI model will have human-like reasoning. So, this is how it starts, people, the robot takeover.

Sometime in the next two weeks, OpenAI is planning to release its unassumingly named 'Strawberry' AI model, said to be capable of solving math problems it’s never seen before and thinking through problems before answering them.

OpenAI is basically giving a supercomputer a functioning brain so that it can think through more complex problems.

We also know that:

• Strawberry is connected to ChatGPT but will also be available on its own, although it's not clear yet how it will be offered.

• The first version of Strawberry will only work with text, not images, so it won't support multiple types of media.

So, unfortunately we’ll have to wait a few extra seconds to get answers from Strawberry, but I think we’ll survive. 

I’m still shocked and impressed that this AI model will be able to think before it acts. 

I can’t even do that yet! Where’s my software update?

CYBERSECURITY
🚘️ Avis has been hacked

Oh no, call off the next family trip to see the in-laws; Avis was just hacked!

Earlier this week, car rental giant Avis announced that it was in the process of informing hundreds of thousands of people that their personal information and driver’s license numbers were stolen during a cyberattack in August.

Some quick facts:

• Avis owns fellow car rental companies Budget and Zipcar.

• Over 10,000 rental locations in 180 countries.

• In 2023, Avis reported $12 billion in revenue, with CEO Joe Ferraro earning $10.2 million in total compensation.

I wonder what it must be like to be on the PR team in charge of telling thousands that their identities have been stolen.

Definitely wouldn’t want that job.

Back to the hack, here’s what we know right now:

• The breach was discovered on August 5, with the unauthorized access beginning two days earlier.

• Stolen data includes names, addresses, emails, phone numbers, dates of birth, credit card information, and driver’s license numbers.

• 299,006 individuals are affected, as per a filing with Maine’s attorney general, with 34,592 from Texas.

• More breach notices are expected, and the total number of affected individuals may rise.

But Avis doesn’t know who hacked them or who the hell is even in charge of cybersecurity at the company.

Not a great look for Avis.

Guess we’ll be Ubering for the time being.

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