Cuba Is Already on the Brink. Maduro’s Ouster Brings It Closer to Collapse.
Cubans speculating about whether their government will be next to fall, with crucial Venezuelan oil imports now in jeopardy
The ouster of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro could intensify Cuba’s economic crisis, which already rivals the post-Soviet collapse.
Cuba faces severe problems, including water shortages, blackouts, a failing healthcare system and a sharp drop in tourism.
Mass emigration has led to a population decline of 2.7 million since 2020, with live births falling below 1899 levels.
Elderly Cubans are digging through garbage for scraps of food in Havana. In the country’s second city, Santiago, crowds have gathered, blaring music by Cuban exiles such as Gloria Estefan and Willy Chirino, who sings “Our day is coming soon.”
The U.S. ouster of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro has jolted this country of fewer than 10 million people, which has long relied on Venezuela for oil imports that have barely kept its tiny economy from collapsing.
It opens a new and perilous chapter for the island’s Communist regime during an economic implosion that already rivals the crisis suffered by Cuba after the collapse of the Soviet Union more than three decades ago.
In poorer cities, people are openly speculating about whether the U.S. will topple the government of Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, the successor to Raúl and Fidel Castro, the siblings who led the Cuban Revolution in 1959 that sent shock waves across Latin America.
“They are nervous,” Manuel Cuesta Morúa, a Havana-based political activist, said of the government. “Repression will increase, it’s the typical response.”
Cuba’s state security apparatus has long had a tight grip on all levels of society, from workplaces to schools or concert halls. But Maduro’s capture risks upending the government’s control of every street, its deep surveillance system and its vast network of snitches, say Cuban dissidents and former officials.
Two days after Maduro’s ouster, Reynaldo Flores was dealing with his fifth consecutive day without running water at his apartment in Havana. It is his new normal, along with the daily blackouts, the failing healthcare system, the trash piled high along the streets, and his aching joints from the mosquito-borne illnesses that have plagued the island.
“Six, seven, 10 days go by with no water,” said 66-year-old Flores. “Then when the water returns, there’s no electricity to pump it in.”
Recently, he said, there was one day where he simultaneously had no electricity, no running water and no gas to cook with. Like all Cubans, Flores saves water in a tank, rationing it for drinking, cooking, washing and bathing. When it runs out, he jumps from one rooftop to another to gather buckets of water from nearby cisterns.
He worries most about the elderly looking for food in the garbage. When they contract a virus, they go to overwhelmed hospitals to die. All of that without taking into account the stifling heat.
“One of my friends works for the government and was just tasked with picking up elderly people who live alone, who’d been dead in their homes for days,” said Flores, who is retired and relies on remittances from relatives abroad.
Cuba has been in a perpetual economic crisis, which has intensified since the Covid-19 pandemic. More than 2.7 million people—about a quarter of the island’s population, the majority of them young and ambitious—have fled the island since 2020, most to the U.S. It is “demographic hollowing out,” said Cuban demographer Juan Carlos Albizu-Campos. He estimates Cuba’s population is now eight million.
The combined result of mass emigration and decreased female fertility is that live births in Cuba plunged to levels below those of 1899, when Cuba emerged from a bloody three-year war of independence that decimated its population, said Albizu-Campos.
“Cuba’s problem was already existential,” said Joe García, a former Cuban-American congressman who speaks often with senior island officials. “On the Cuban side, it’s desperation and worse desperation,” said García, a Florida Democrat.
Tourism, once one of the island’s economic pillars, has plummeted, with hotel occupancy hovering below 30%, according to industry executives. Most tourists, the majority from Russia and China, arrive with all-inclusive packages, meaning that spending doesn’t trickle down to ordinary Cubans as visitors don’t spend much outside their preapproved itinerary.
A new 42-story luxury hotel towers over the once-elegant Vedado district in Havana, Cuba’s capital. Yet the $200 million, Spanish-run hotel is “nearly empty,” said William LeoGrande, a Cuba analyst at Washington’s American University who recently returned from the country.
He estimates that hard-currency income from tourism is down 75%.
Many Cubans depend on remittances from family members abroad. The state relies on billions of dollars collected by the government from thousands of Cuban doctors working in Venezuela, Mexico and other countries, and subsidized Venezuelan oil imports, to keep the lights on. But now the Venezuelan oil spigot could be shut off by the U.S.
Cuba has no money to buy oil on international markets, and can only hope that friendly countries such as Angola, Algeria, Brazil or Colombia will make up the shortfall if Venezuela, under U.S. pressure, cuts off its supplies, said Jorge R. Piñon, who tracks Cuba’s energy consumption at the University of Texas.
Venezuela has been providing some 35,000 barrels of oil a day of the estimated 100,000 barrels a day the island needs. Cuba produces about 40,000 barrels a day of sulfur- and metals-laden heavy crude that feeds the country’s decrepit power plants. Mexico, which sent about 22,000 barrels a day to Cuba last year, has since lowered shipments to some 7,000, while Russia sends about 10,000 barrels a day, he said.
Cutting off Venezuelan oil would devastate Cuba’s economy.
“I would not be surprised if the Americans tell Venezuela to continue giving oil to Cuba, so as not to open another Pandora’s box,” said Piñon, who calculates oil shipments to the island using reports from services that track tanker movements. Without Venezuelan oil, he estimates Cuba’s energy infrastructure would collapse within 30 days.
As the country struggles to survive, the big question will be the response of Cuba’s leadership, which has ruled with an iron fist since the revolution led by the Castros and their “bearded men in olive green.” The first action of the Communist regime was to require workers to attend a rally over the weekend to denounce Maduro’s capture and declare two days of mourning, with flags at half-staff honoring the 32 Cuban soldiers and high-ranking military intelligence officers who died during the U.S. military incursion.
Without oil, there is a risk that the rolling blackouts, which sometimes leave island residents with only four hours of electricity a day, will worsen. Those who have relied on generators to get by will have a hard time running them without access to fuel. Even cooking will be complicated, as some residents have turned to petroleum-run stoves to cook their food.
LeoGrande said that unlike the crisis after the Soviet collapse, a time known as the “special period” when the economic pain was felt across Cuban society, the hardship in this crisis is falling disproportionately on poorer Cubans who don’t have relatives abroad who send them dollars.
“There is more visible inequality,” LeoGrande said. “Poor people are as bad off as in the special period, but a segment of middle and upper class have access to dollars and are not in such bad shape, which causes real social tension.”
OpenAI’s Shopping Ambitions Hit Messy Data Reality
The Takeaway
- OpenAI is still working on standardizing and structuring merchant data
- Stripe explored acquisition or acquihire to boost AI commerce efforts
- Merchant, consumer adoption remains a broader question
OpenAI’s efforts to turn ChatGPT into a go-to personal shopper are off to a slow start.
Challenges with wrangling product data mean in-app checkouts aren’t yet widely available to the millions of shops that OpenAI said in September would soon be coming to ChatGPT. OpenAI and its early partners, Shopify and Stripe, have been working on ways to better standardize and share merchants’ product information in order to expand the shopping service more broadly, two people with knowledge of the efforts said.
The slow introduction highlights the hurdles to making widespread AI-powered shopping a reality. While people are already flocking to chatbots like ChatGPT for product recommendations and shopping inspiration, turning those conversations into purchases has proven complicated.
Buying something through a checkout in ChatGPT isn’t quite the same as buying the same goods on the seller’s own website, since ChatGPT is inserting itself between merchants, shoppers and payment firms. The chatbot shows a list of products to shoppers in search results, but ensuring the details are as up to date as what’s on a merchant’s website isn’t always easy. ChatGPT has to interpret information like pricing and in-stock availability that is often ambiguous and spread out across multiple systems.
If the agent gathers information incorrectly, it might charge the wrong price or place orders for something that’s out of stock, which increases the risk of disputes or other payment issues.
An OpenAI spokesperson said the company is working hands-on with merchants on how best to structure and standardize product data to make sure it’s accurate, and is trying to learn from early uses and incorporate feedback from merchants and payments firms.
To promote the in-chat checkouts, OpenAI has teamed up with Shopify, which offers ties to the millions of online shops that use the e-commerce giant’s website and checkout software. And to help retail, payment and AI firms coordinate transactions, OpenAI has partnered with Stripe on standardization to ensure AI software initiates purchases and communicates with merchants correctly. This set of rules, which the two companies call the Agentic Commerce Protocol, sits on top of existing e-commerce and payment application programming interfaces.
But while the protocol sets rules, it doesn’t fix the fact that merchants’ product information is often not standardized and can be open to interpretation—for example, a retailer may normally label something as “in stock” even if it is available only for a back order or preorder.
That’s meant OpenAI and Shopify teams have to do lots of hands-on work to get the merchants that are already selling in ChatGPT up and running, according to a person who worked with one of the brands.
At least one of the high-profile brands Shopify highlighted in September, luggage seller Away, isn’t yet available for purchase inside ChatGPT. And other Shopify merchants that want to join the checkout are still waiting for more details—three merchants and people who work with them say they have applied to participate but haven’t heard back yet. Away didn’t respond to a request for comment.
That includes a merchant with roughly $300 million in annual sales—on the bigger side for a Shopify seller—that applied on OpenAI’s site to join a beta test for the checkout. When its CEO followed up with the retailer’s Shopify representative about when more Shopify merchants would be added, they said the checkout was rolling out slowly.
Shopify, for its part, says that building the checkout has required a lot of upfront work and it has been adding more merchants by the day. The company says it plans to roll out selling directly in ChatGPT for all its U.S. merchants very soon.
On the payments side, Stripe has had to build a connection between AI apps and merchants’ backend systems so agents can properly understand merchants’ product catalogs and send transaction information from users for merchants to process.
Since the September announcements, Stripe has focused on helping more merchants get set up to receive agentic transactions, according to a person with direct knowledge of the efforts. Stripe also approached at least one commerce-oriented startup that specializes in handling transaction data between AI apps and merchants to discuss a potential acquisition or acquihire that would help Stripe scale up agentic transactions more quickly, a person with knowledge of the talks said.
One result of Stripe’s efforts since the checkout launch has been an expanded set of tools for merchants it released in mid-December, including one tool that allows sellers to give Stripe access to their product data so it can share that information with any agent in a more standardized way. Merchants currently have to join a waitlist for access. Stripe didn’t have a comment.
Broader Challenges
For OpenAI, which has said it takes a cut of sales made through its in-chat checkout, shopping would generate more revenue from the ChatGPT users that don’t pay for its service, which is the majority of its nearly 900 million users. OpenAI has told investors it wants to generate around $110 billion in revenue from nonpaying users by 2030.
How OpenAI’s checkout rollout progresses also has implications for the broader e-commerce landscape.
OpenAI leaders view partnerships with payment processors as an efficient way to grow in-app shopping, since the payment firms have large customer bases of merchants, a person who spoke with the company about the strategy said. Stripe and its rivals, meanwhile, don’t want to miss out on any potential new source of payment volume.
Worldpay, PayPal and Checkout.com have said they will adopt Stripe and OpenAI’s ACP standard, although Stripe is a rival to those firms. Backing a common standard, however, could boost overall adoption of in-chat shopping.
London-based Checkout.com is targeting a launch in the first quarter of 2026 for its ACP features, which will allow its merchants to make sales through ChatGPT checkouts, Chief Product Officer Meron Colbeci said in a mid-December interview.
PayPal, for its part, is planning to launch PayPal wallet payments in ChatGPT in the first half of 2026, Mike Edmonds, the company’s vice president of commercial growth for agentic commerce, said in an interview in late December.
Meanwhile, retailer enthusiasm for AI shopping tools is still a question mark. In-chat checkout could boost merchants’ sales, but they worry about damage to their brands if shoppers have a poor experience.
Shoppers also need to get used to the idea of buying stuff using AI. On PayPal’s October earnings call, executives acknowledged AI-driven shopping was still in early stages and hadn’t yet become a widespread consumer habit.
In addition to investing in the AI development work, PayPal will have to spend on marketing to drive user “habituation,” Chief Financial Officer Jamie Miller said. Those expenses, combined with other product investments, could cut into the company’s margin or earnings growth next year, she said.
Moscow says US seizure of Russian tanker risks military escalation at sea
Russia’s foreign ministry accuses Washington of lowering the ‘threshold for use of force’
Russia’s foreign ministry warned the US seizure of a Russian-flagged tanker on Wednesday risked creating “further military and political tension in the Euro-Atlantic”, hinting that it risked provoking further violent incidents at sea.
The ministry said on Thursday that the US seizure of the Marinera was an “egregious violation of the fundamental principles and norms of international law” that “visibly lowers the threshold for the use of force” against maritime vessels.
The seizure will concern Russia, which is now likely to ship an increasing amount of its oil on sanctioned vessels such as the Marinera, that claim Russian nationality but had previously been operating without a flag state.
The US justified the interception by claiming the Marinera, added to the US sanctions list for links to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in 2024, was “responsible for transporting sanctioned oil from Venezuela and Iran”.
In previous statements, the US had also referred to the statelessness of the ship. The Marinera was originally intercepted near the Caribbean in late December, when the empty vessel was sailing west to pick up oil from Venezuela.
According to the International Maritime Organization, at this time, it was falsely claiming to be registered as a Guyanese ship. Under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, the vessel would have been legally boardable by a warship as the ship was “without nationality”.
After refusing to be boarded, the ship sailed north-west across the Atlantic, and was pursued by the US Coast Guard ship, the USCGC Munro. It was finally seized about 325km south of Iceland.
During its journey across the sea, however, the vessel was sold to a Russian company based in Ryazan and reflagged as a Russian ship, meaning the authorities in Moscow regard it as operating under their jurisdiction and oversight.
FT analysis has identified 11 other similarly stateless ships that have recently moved Russian oil and were granted a Russian flag since November. These ships were all recent members of the so-called ghost fleet, the group of tankers whose unknown ownership complicates sanctions enforcement action. In each case, the vessel had moved Russian oil since January 2025.
A further five stateless ships in the ghost fleet were given Russian nationality earlier in 2025.
“Inspired by the dangerous and irresponsible precedent set by Washington, certain other countries and structures may consider themselves in the right to use these methods,” the Russian ministry said.
The ministry said the US sanctions cited as justification for the detention were “illegitimate” and called US claims the seizure was part of attempts to gain control over Venezuelan oil exports “extremely cynical”.
It said Russia had repeatedly sent the US “reliable information” that the Marinera changed its jurisdiction to Russia late last month and denied US claims it had sailed under a “false flag”.
John Healey, the UK defence secretary, called the legality of the switch into question on Wednesday, saying it had “tried to adopt the Russian flag”. Referring to it by its pre-switch name, the Bella 1, he said it was “a sanctioned, stateless vessel”.
The Man Who Could Be Apple’s Next C.E.O.
John Ternus, a low-profile but influential executive at Apple, could be next in line to replace the company’s longtime chief executive, Tim Cook, if he steps aside.
Around 2018, Apple considered adding a tiny laser to its iPhones. The part would allow consumers to take better photos, more accurately map their surroundings and use new augmented reality features. But it would also cost Apple about $40 per device, cutting into the company’s profits.
John Ternus, Apple’s head of hardware engineering, suggested adding the component to only the more expensive Pro models of the iPhone, said two people familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Those devices, Mr. Ternus reasoned, tended to be purchased by Apple’s most loyal customers, who would be excited about new technology. Average consumers, on the other hand, probably wouldn’t care.
Threading the needle between adding new bells and whistles to Apple’s products while watching the bottom line has defined the careful, low-profile style of Mr. Ternus, who joined Apple in 2001. He is now considered by some company insiders to be the front-runner to replace Tim Cook, Apple’s longtime chief executive, if Mr. Cook decides to step aside.
Apple last year began accelerating its planning for Mr. Cook’s succession, according to three people close to the company who spoke on the condition of anonymity about Apple’s confidential deliberations. Mr. Cook, 65, has told senior leaders that he is tired and would like to reduce his workload, the people said. Should he step down, Mr. Cook is likely to become the chairman of Apple’s board, according to three people close to the company.
Despite his low profile, Mr. Ternus appears to have shot to the front of the pack to be Apple’s next C.E.O., according to four people close to the company. But Mr. Cook is also preparing several other internal candidates to be his potential successor, two of the people said. They could include Craig Federighi, Apple’s head of software; Eddy Cue, its head of services; Greg Joswiak, its head of worldwide marketing; and Deirdre O’Brien, its head of retail and human resources.
Mr. Ternus, 50, is the same age that Mr. Cook was when he took over for Steve Jobs in 2011. Like Mr. Cook, Mr. Ternus is known for his attention to detail and his knowledge of Apple’s vast supply network. Both men are also considered even-tempered collaborators, capable of navigating the bureaucracy of one of the world’s wealthiest companies without ruffling feathers.
Mr. Ternus’s rising profile has caused debate among Apple alumni and rank-and-file employees about whether he would lead like Mr. Cook, who succeeded by making the company more predictable and incremental, or Mr. Jobs, who laid the foundation for the company’s success with risky bets and visionary products.
“If you want to make an iPhone every year, Ternus is your guy,” said Cameron Rogers, who worked on product and software engineering management at Apple from 2005 to 2022.
The question for Apple is whether the company needs an innovator or another deft manager. While it has been years since the quick success of the iPhone and iPad, Apple has had many small hits under Mr. Cook and continues to be one of the most profitable companies in the world. Apple also faces tricky challenges, like navigating President Trump’s frequently changing tariff plans and its dependence on Chinese manufacturing.
Apple’s plans for artificial intelligence are also a big question. While other giant technology companies have spent tens of billions of dollars on developing A.I., Apple has largely been on the sidelines, and it has pushed off making major changes to its products with new A.I. technology.
It will be up to Apple’s board of directors to decide who will eventually replace Mr. Cook, who also sits on the board. The rest of the company’s eight board members did not respond to requests for comment, and Apple declined to comment and to make Mr. Ternus available for an interview. The Financial Times and Bloomberg previously reported on aspects of Apple’s succession planning.
Mr. Ternus, the youngest member of Apple’s executive leadership team, would be Apple’s first chief executive in three decades to have spent his career working on hardware. Unlike some of the other candidates to replace Mr. Cook, Mr. Ternus has worked on many of Apple’s devices as well as the global operations that manufacture those products.
But he would take over as a relative unknown outside Apple. Inside the company, he is known more for maintaining products than developing new ones, according to six former employees. And Mr. Ternus, who has been an engineer in Silicon Valley for all of his adult life, has limited exposure to the policy issues and political responsibilities associated with Apple’s corner office.
A California native, Mr. Ternus received a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was on the varsity swim team. For his senior project, he designed a device that allowed quadriplegics to use head motions to control a mechanical feeding arm.
In the four years after his graduation from Penn in 1997, Mr. Ternus designed headsets and other products at a virtual reality start-up. He then joined Apple, first working on screens for Macs as the company transitioned away from the colorful iMacs of the late 1990s.
Within about three years, he became a manager, said Steve Siefert, Mr. Ternus’s first boss at Apple. During that time, their team moved office floors, switching from a closed office plan to mostly open seating with a few offices. When he was promoted, Mr. Ternus had the option to move into one of those offices but declined.
Mr. Ternus was “a man of the people,” Mr. Siefert said, adding that the decision to sit with his team likely helped Mr. Ternus manage and motivate his staff. When Mr. Siefert retired in 2011, freeing up his office, Mr. Ternus once again said he wanted to remain in the open space.
By 2005, Mr. Ternus had been promoted to lead Apple’s hardware engineering team for iMacs as it made the G5 series, said Michael D. Hillman, who helped hire Mr. Ternus and worked with him at Apple for more than a decade.
That team was working on using magnets to hold the computer’s glass screen in place, Mr. Siefert said. The technique was unusual for its time and faced skepticism, but Mr. Ternus still pushed for it.
“When presented with such an out-of-the-box idea, he would champion it,” Mr. Siefert added.
Mr. Ternus spent extended periods of time working with manufacturers in Asia, Mr. Hillman said. Mr. Ternus traveled between the continent and Silicon Valley and learned how difficult it could be to have a manufacturing supplier deliver on Apple’s design expectations. Apple also paired Mr. Ternus with an external consultant to advise him on leadership.
Mr. Ternus became a key lieutenant of Dan Riccio, his predecessor as Apple’s head of hardware. By 2013, Mr. Ternus’s role had expanded to include overseeing the Mac and iPad teams.
In recent years, Mr. Ternus has shouldered more responsibility for updates to Apple’s products. He spearheaded the iPhone Air, which was released last year with a new, slim design, and was a key leader in Apple’s transition from using Intel’s chips in Macs to using the company’s own chips in 2020. Mr. Ternus has also been involved in Apple’s experimentation with foldable phones, according to one of the people close to the company.
“He’s a nice guy,” Mr. Rogers said. “He’s someone you want to hang out with. Everyone loves him because he’s great. Has he made any hard decisions? No. Are there hard problems he’s solved in hardware? No.”
In a 2024 commencement speech at Penn’s engineering school, Mr. Ternus told graduating students that, in the future, they would be proudest not of specific projects but of the journey to make them all happen.
“Now, while you’re on that journey, there’s going to be many times in your career where you have to take on something new,” Mr. Ternus said. “And sometimes, you might wonder whether or not you can actually do it.”
Soho House take-private at risk after backer pulls $200mn funding
Shares in the New York-listed members’ club sank more than 20%
Shares in Soho House sank more than 20 per cent after the members’ club operator disclosed that a major backer of its take-private deal had pulled a $200mn funding commitment, putting the plans in jeopardy.
After decades of global expansion and a turbulent stint as a public company after a 2021 stock market listing in New York, Soho House announced in August that it was returning to private ownership in a $2.7bn deal with a group of investors led by New York-based MCR Hotels.
But Soho House said in a filing on Thursday that MCR Hotels had cancelled its commitment to purchase $200mn of the company’s shares at $9 per share. That price was a premium on the company’s share price in August, but well shy of the $14 price tag when Soho House floated in 2021.
Soho House shares, which had jumped last year on news of the deal, sank as much as 21 per cent in early trading in New York on Thursday, before settling at about $7.50.
The member’s club operator has grown from a trendy London venue to a global empire, but some critics argue that its focus on growth has come at the expense of exclusivity and coolness, making it too easy to get a membership while service levels dipped.
At the end of 2024, the average number of members per Soho House venue was 4,700, up 30 per cent since 2021.
MCR Hotels owns more than 25,000 guest rooms across the US, including the 1960s-themed TWA Hotel at JFK airport. When the deal with Soho House was announced in August, MCR Hotels said it planned to expand the members’ club operator by opening sites rather than adding throngs of new members to the existing houses.
MCR Hotels did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
OpenAI Reserves $50 Billion for Stock Grant Pool
The Takeaway
- OpenAI established a $50 billion employee stock grant pool.
- Massive stock pool highlights OpenAI’s aggressive talent acquisition.
- Total employee equity now comprises 26% of the company.
OpenAI last fall set aside an employee stock grant pool worth 10% of the company, which was valued in October at $500 billion, according to two people with knowledge of the plans. The $50 billion pool of restricted stock units should last for roughly five years and should rise in value as the company’s private share price continues to increase.
The employee stock grant pool, which hasn’t previously been reported, stands out for its size relative to the stock compensation expenses of much larger rivals such as Meta Platforms and Google. The move shows that OpenAI plans to continue spending heavily on recruiting and rewarding talent after a surge in employee-related expenses in the last two years.
OpenAI has already awarded about $80 billion in vested equity, according to a different person with knowledge of the company’s plans. Last year alone, employees sold about $10 billion worth of shares to other investors, according to the person, an unprecedented amount for a company only a decade old.
The vested equity, along with the $50 billion employee stock grant pool, comprises about 26% of the company following a corporate restructuring last fall. The process converted profit-sharing units held by stakeholders including Microsoft into traditional stock.
For context, OpenAI’s $50 billion pool for future rewards is three-quarters of the $66 billion Meta spent on stock compensation from 2020 to late 2025, even though Meta was expected to generate 15 times as much revenue as OpenAI last year.
The OpenAI grant pool’s value is likely to increase soon. The company is in talks to raise as much as $100 billion at a roughly $750 billion valuation before the financing.
Amid the war for AI talent, OpenAI has projected about $20 billion in additional stock compensation charges between 2025 and 2030 compared to projections made early last year. The projections from the summer expect stock-based compensation to be roughly $10 billion this year and $13 billion next year, ramping to nearly $21 billion by 2030, according to one of the people with knowledge of the plans.
The plans follow an intense fight for the AI researchers that companies like Meta, Google’s Gemini, Microsoft and Anthropic see as instrumental in improving their models to produce AI that’s as smart as or smarter than humans.
Last year, Meta lured valuable researchers from OpenAI and other AI firms with huge salaries and stock grants, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on signing bonuses, cash salaries and equity compensation.
Some of OpenAI’s former employees have left to form rival companies. Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder and former chief scientist at OpenAI, held $4 billion in vested OpenAI equity in late 2023, court filings recently revealed. At the time, OpenAI Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap estimated OpenAI employees’ vested equity at $29 billion (the total company was about to be valued at roughly $86 billion in a share sale). The company then employed nearly 800 people; the figure has risen to about 4,000 today.
Investors in any of these companies, however, may be wary of such spending on stock awards. Issuing new shares to fund equity-based compensation dilutes the value of existing shares. Public companies frequently offset this dilution by buying back shares, something OpenAI can’t afford to do, given that it’s burning billions of dollars in cash every year.
New grants since the restructuring have come from this $50 billion pool, said one of the people. Although it isn’t clear how much of the pool OpenAI has given to employees thus far, its executives have said privately they don’t expect to allocate the full stock award pool, according to one of the people. Some investors expect the company to hand it out faster than five years, say in three years, said the other person.
OpenAI unveils ChatGPT Health, says 230 million users ask about health each week
OpenAI announced ChatGPT Health on Wednesday, which the company said will offer a dedicated space for users to have conversations with ChatGPT about their health.
People already use ChatGPT to ask about medical issues; OpenAI says that over 230 million people ask health and wellness questions on the platform each week. But the ChatGPT Health product silos these conversations away from your other chats. That way, the context of your health won’t come up in standard conversations with ChatGPT.
If people start chats about their health outside of the Health section, then the AI aims to nudge them to switch over.
Within Health, the AI might reference things you’ve discussed in its standard experience. If you ask ChatGPT for help constructing a marathon training plan, for example, then the AI would know you’re a runner when you talk in Health about your fitness goals.
ChatGPT Health will also be able to integrate with your personal information or medical records from wellness apps like Apple Health, Function, and MyFitnessPal. OpenAI notes that it will not use Health conversations to train its models.
The CEO of Applications at OpenAI, Fidji Simo, wrote in a blog post that she sees ChatGPT Health as a response to existing issues in the healthcare space, like cost and access barriers, overbooked doctors, and a lack of continuity in care.
While the healthcare system has its drawbacks, using AI chatbots for medical advice creates a new slew of challenges. Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT operate by predicting the most likely response to prompts, not the most correct answer, since LLMs don’t have a concept of what is true or not. AI models are also prone to hallucinations.
In its own terms of service, OpenAI states that it is “not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of any health condition.”
The feature is expected to roll out in the coming weeks.
Gapping down
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In reaction to earnings/guidance:
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Gapping up
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- NEOG +21.4%, LAB +7% (guidance), GMED +6% (guidance), APLD +5%, PHAR +4.4% (guidance), LENZ +3.7%, AZZ +2.8%, CMC +2.6%, IVVD +2.1% (guidance), STZ +1.4%, SNX +1.2%, AMRN +1.2% (guidance), SMPL +0.9%, BKE +0.8% (Dec comps)
Other news:
- ACON +43.5% (reports strong Nociscan growth, solid cash position, and outlines 2026 milestones)
- NOC +8.9% (President Trump wants a 50% defense budget increase, according to Bloomberg)
- LMT +8% (President Trump wants a 50% defense budget increase, according to Bloomberg)
- LHX +7.7% (President Trump wants a 50% defense budget increase, according to Bloomberg)
- GD +6.7% (President Trump wants a 50% defense budget increase, according to Bloomberg)
- RTX +5.3% (mentioned in truth social post)
- HII +5.1% (President Trump wants a 50% defense budget increase, according to Bloomberg)
- DVLT +3.5% (announces a distribution date of February 21, 2026 for warrants to purchase common stock to eligible record equityholders of Datavault AI)
- AMLX +3.3% (announces the selection of AMX0318, a long-acting glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor antagonist, as a development candidate for post-bariatric hypoglycemia and other rare diseases)
- KRMN +3% (agrees to acquire Seemann Composites and Materials Sciences; reaffirms FY25 guidance)
- UUUU +2.7% (Announces Updated Feasibility study for Toliara rare earth and HMS project in madagascar confirming world-class scale and economics, including $1.8 billion NPV and ramping up to over $500 million of expected annual EBITDA)
- CGEM +2.7% (provides corporate update and highlights anticipated 2026 milestones)
- ANGI +2.6% (reduction in workforce)
- JCAP +2.2% (prices secondary offering of 10.0 mln shares of common stock at $20.50 per share)
- RANI +2.2% (initiation of a Phase 1 clinical trial to evaluate the safety, tolerability, bioavailability, and pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of single and multiple doses of RT-114)
- SMTI +2.1% (innovative technology contract from Vizient for BIASURGE Advanced Surgical Solution)
- AREN +2% (announces debt maturity extensions, supporting refinancing efforts)
- BA +1.7% (President Trump wants a 50% defense budget increase, according to Bloomberg)
- TXT +1.7% (President Trump wants a 50% defense budget increase, according to Bloomberg)
- ABVX +1.5% (2026 corporate outlook)
- USFD +1.5% (awarded a $198 mln defense logistics agency contract)