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If theres one thing President Donald Trump cannot do, its keep a secret. Alongside saying that negotiations between the U.S. and China held in Madrid September 14 and 15 had gone well, Trump decided to tease a cliffhanger that would keep everyone coming back to his Truth Social profile. A deal was also reached on a certain company that young people in our Country very much wanted to save, he wrote. They will be very happy. That certain company is TikTok, and the smart betting is that the deal that placates both the U.S. and China could involve Oracle, the company cofounded by Larry Ellison, which this month shot up in value, making the 81-year-old the worlds richest man for a short period. Oracle was a preferred buyer in Trumps eyes earlier this year, when TikToks parent company, ByteDance, denied planning to sell the app to Oracle. Despite that, Trump said that an offer from Oracle was still on the table. (Neither Oracle nor TikTok responded to Fast Companys request for comment.) Any inkling of Ellison within the TikTok deal would be yet another major media move for the magnate, who with his son, David, recently pulled off an $8 billion merger with Paramount, putting him in ownership of the likes of MTV, Nickelodeon, and CBS News. That latter media property is a concern for some: The newly christened Paramount Skydance is reportedly in negotiations with Bari Weiss, founder of The Free Press, to become either editor-in-chief or copresident of CBS News. Weisss reporting for The Free Press has taken ideological slants that would be unusual for CBS News, which attempts to maintain an impartial, objective stance in its reporting. The Ellisonsfather and sonare now rumored to be looking to broker an even bigger deal. Paramount Skydance is said to be looking to buy Warner Bros. Discovery in a deal that would be worth more than $70 billion. Paramount and Warner Bros. would in essence become the biggest studio in the world with a formidable base of franchises that include DC Comics, Harry Potter, Mattel licenses like Barbie, Hasbro licenses like Transformers, Mission Impossible, Star Trek, Top Gun, Dora, SpongeBob, etc., wrote Barclays analyst Kannan Venkateshwar in a report last week. Alongside all those household names, theres another journalistic outlet that would come under Ellison ownership: CNN, up to now one of the biggest thorns in Trumps side. If the Warner Bros. Discovery deal were to go through, Ellison would control streaming services with a combined 200 million-plus subscribers, says Barclays (though there will be overlap between the Paramount+, HBO Max, and Pluto services). Its something Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren warned against on X on September 11. The deal with Warner Bros. Discovery, she wrote, must be blocked as a dangerous concentration of power. Add TikToks 170 million-plus users and one of the hottest properties in the social space and you get to a position of dominance in the media. (Warrens office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) It is not a sign of a healthy democracy when billionaires are buying up all of the means of cultural consumption, says Steven Buckley, lecturer in media and digital sociology at City St Georges, University of London. Others have pointed out that the potential playbook, if this were to go ahead, draws comparisons with Elon Musks takeover of a social platform to dominate public discourse. Musk has previously taken credit for helping Trump secure the White House in 2024 through his positioning of X as a supportive social network. It is naive to think that over time [Ellisons] business and political philosophy, combined with the external political pressures from this and future administrations, wouldnt have an impact on how the American public experience TikTok, Buckley says. Of course, many critics would argue that any deal is based on a false premise that TikTok needs to be American-owned outrightan issue that has literally been litigated as long back as the dying days of Trump’s first presidency. Fundamentally TikTok is not broke, but Ellison and the Trump administration are trying to fix it nonetheless, Buckley says. Any actual problems with the platform such as misinformation, harassment, etcetera are not going to be fixed simply by a change of ownership. And user privacy is certainly not at the front of this administration’s mind.
Category:
E-Commerce
Blame Ryan Reynolds. Or maybe the Trump family. Or, if we must, three beloved sitcom stars from the early-to-mid 2000s. But the recent news, first reported by Business Insider, that Jimmy MrBeast Donaldson and his Beast Industries were planning to launch their own wireless service by sometime in 2026, needs someone to blame for this harebrained idea. Way back in June, I wondered, is mobile the new tequila? Meaning, is wireless service the latest industry where a celebrity can start a company (or invest in one), market it using their face and charisma, and hope for a nine- or ten-figure exit? The short answer is (or should be) absolutely not. In this premium piece, youll learn: What a MrBeast wireless service would have to overcome to be successful Why wireless brands and celebrity brands really dont mix The six secrets to Ryan Reynolds success as a marketer that are increasingly hard to replicate How the major wireless carriers could co-opt the trend of famous people selling mobile service Were deep into the DTC, social marketing era that has seen legacy brands of all stripes get threatened by upstarts. The modern consumer is constantly craving something new. That has not only fueled these brands but also traditional players embracing gross-out marketing, superstar collaborations like the recent Oreo-Reeses team-up, anthropomorphic Nutter Butters on TikTok, and stolid middle-of-the-grocery-store staples from Kraft and Heinz (soon to be two companies again!) doing too many attention-grabbing, culture-hacking moments to count. @fastcompany Strange food combos are always a marketing hit. Brands are at it again, and our team tested some of the latest gross out foods. @brachscandy Tailgate Candy Corn and @tropicana Crunch Cereal. #brandingtips #grossout #weirdfoodcombos #eatwithme #marketing original sound – Fast Company But is wireless really the same as the candy aisle? [Photo: Roy Rochlin/Getty Images/MTV] Beast Mode You watch MrBeast’s YouTube videos and maybe even his Amazon Prime Video reality series. You eat his Feastables candy. You may even have scarfed down a MrBeast Burger before that business went bust. By you, I refer, of course, to a 13-year-old boy. Now imagine if MrBeast was also your mobile service. Donaldson laid out the logic of his expansion into consumer goods a couple of years ago, outlining that brands simply couldnt pay what it should cost to sponsor his YouTube videos as they routinely attracted more than 100 million views. So to get the value from his work, he needed to create his own brands.Donaldson already has a successful chocolate bar brand called Feastables, launched in 2022, as well as a toy brand called MrBeast Lab, and a snack brand called Lunchly. What do all those things have in common? Theyre all products targeted predominantly at MrBeasts younger audience. Theyre also all ostensibly fun. You know whats not fun? Selecting a wireless plan. So far as we know, the candy business at least is working, as its reportedly profitable and generating almost as much revenue as the media side of the business. If Donaldson werent so committed to overspending on his videos, where he lost more than $100 million last year. And for what? No idea why he had to build a maximum security prison, for example, for whats basically an episode of a game show, which is supposed to be a cheap format! If Beast could make highly profitable media, he could focus his other pursuits on growing his CPG Feastables brand, which just expanded into cookies. When Feastables bars first launched, I interviewed Donaldson, who told me that Feastables had been made so that he could enjoy them even with his Crohns Disease, which requires him to eat carefully so as not to inflame his condition. But as Beast Industries has grown, that sense of personal connection to the brands being aunched is dissipating. If MrBeast has a compelling personal story for why hes starting a wireless company, I cant wait to hear it. But a wireless service largely strays from everything that makes sense for celebrity brand extensions: Celebs thrive in such sectors as fashion, booze, and beauty in part because it’s easy for them to personalize those products and people already want to spend money on those goods. Services-based businesses carry much greater risk because people expect, yknow, ongoing service versus just delivering what you promised in a package. Celebrity products can double as badge brands, signaling your affinity for the celebrity and doubling as free marketing for everything they do. How do you even signal that youre a customer of a particular wireless carrier? Well, you could tell people, but when was the last time you heard anyone say, I love my wireless carrier? What about Ryan Reynolds, you ask? Lets break down Reynoldss success with Mint Mobile. The Reynolds Mirage Its easy to be hypnotized by Reynolds Deadpool-forged, meta-advertising approach to Mint. In 2019, he bought a 25% stake in the company, made a slew of self-aware and funny ads, its app downloads soared by 34% in the first 12 months, and the company was then acquired by T-Mobile for $1.35 billion in 2023. Easy-peasy, right? There are about as many reasons why Reynolds’ success with Mint would be near impossible to replicate, as there is why the success of Deadpool is so tough for Marvel to replicate (except with Deadpool himself). It’s currently 2025, not 2016. Reynolds was early to the game. His promotional work for the first Deadpool movie gave him a clear identity as a pitchman. In 2018, he started a marketing agency, Maximum Effort, so he had the infrastructure to produce his own ads. The Deadpool 2 campaign and his work promoting Aviation Gin (a spirit thats, well, a harder sell than tequila) allowed him to developand perfecta style that fit perfectly with his movie star persona. Reynoldss ads dispensed with the unspoken artifice of adland, breaking the fourth wall, and acknowledging it was all rather ridiculous. As he told me last year, Audiences know theyre being advertised to, so if you can acknowledge that invisible contract, its a bit more authentic . . . My feeling is always that its just a fucking commercial. Who gives a shit? Just make sure that its fun. By the time he invested in Mint Mobile, he knew exactly how to position the brand as a no BS marketer. From a delightfully lo-fi Powerpoint presentation to somehow convincing Rick Moranis back in front of the screen, it all had the air of a comedy sketch. Mint was a discount carrier, which has traditionally been the only piece of the market where a brand can break through against the major players. Because of Reynoldss marketing approach, he managed to sell cheap phone service without cheapening his own brand. Reynolds also knows when to be in your face and when to go away. After 2024s Deadpool v. Wolverine onslaught, which helped the movie be the second-largest box office smash of the year with $1.3 billion in worldwide grosses, he became far less omnipresent, a luxury that YouTubers and podcasters (and the attention-starved Trump family) cant afford. So yeah, its easy for stars (and their agents and business reps) to see dollar signs as they rush into a category like wireless. But historically, building a branded wireless service has been a tough road. MVN-uh oh Technically, MrBeast isnt actually launching a telecom company. Although I would love to see him try, just for the videos wed likely get out of it. Imagine I Built 100,000 Cell Towers in 100 Days! or Survive 100 Days Without Cell Service, Win Wireless for Life. If his mobile plans do materialize, it would be a MVNO, a mobile virtual network operator. These are brands that buy excess network capacity from the major carriers, and profit from the difference between that price and what they charge customers. For the majors like AT&T and Verizon, its a way to cash in on unused network capacity, while smaller brands get to offer up cheaper mobile plans and some brand variety for customers. In addition to Mint (before its acquisition), there have been other successful MVNOs such as Cricket and Google Fi. But the path is also littered with the graves of failed brands. Remember Ampd? Founded in 2005, the brand aimed its brand at younger people who wanted to consume content and games on their phones. (This was pre-iPhone.) It went on a full-on brand blitz, signing up MTV as a content partner, Snoop Doggs youth football league, Coachella, and more. But by mid-2007, it had burned through $360 million and declared bankruptcy. ESPN, perhaps the most powerful brand in American sports, launched its own MVNO in 2006and shut it down later that same year. This was due to a slew of factors, not the least of which was the $300 phone it expected users to buy to go with it. On a slide deck, the mobile business must look like a no-brainer: four entrenched players, no real brand affinity, not a lot of overt customer innovation. In reality, its incredibly competitive. The U.S. market is saturated. Because most people already having mobile phones, growth for any new brand largely comes from stealing users from a competitor. This is done primarily through race-to-the-bottom price promotions, but major brands like Verizon and T-Mobile are also increasingly using perks such as tickets to sports and concerts to build loyalty. What could MrBeast posibly offer to compete with these? Itll take more than a free candy bar, or even one of his massive giveaways. Although it would make sense for MrBeast to sell an entry-level wireless service given his young fan base, hed be taking a huge risk if he slaps Beast on the name. The logical move would be to call it Beast Mobile, just as the SmartLess guys dubbed their phone service SmartLess Mobile. But the best a wireless brand can hope for with consumers is not to be hated, to be fine, a utility in peoples lives. Donaldson also carries the additional burden of being MrBeast, so hes not only the face of the brand but hed be tying his personal brand to the fate of his wireless startup. Cash grab vs brand strategy Celebrity-backed brands are no longer a novelty, so their reason to exist must stem from an actual passion of the celebrity themselves. Thats the key for what we like about a person to transfer over to whatever products and services theyre hawking. When a celebrity venture feels like an organic extension of what theyre already known for, it resonates differently with consumers, Rethink New York chief creative officer Tara Lawall, who worked with the Smartless crew to launch its mobile brand, told me back in June. Millions of people listen to SmartLess on their phones, which makes mobile a natural fit for the brand. That connection sounds a bit tenuous, as people do almost everything on their phones. By that logic, everything from ChatGPT to Fortnite should have a wireless service. (Oh, please no.) Exactly no one is emotionally invested or passionate about their wireless plan, and Beast is not a good enough actor to convince anyone that he has an actual passion for the sector. Which is why a mobile brand feels like such a naked cash grab. (The SmartLess trio can more or less play the Reynolds card of making a joke out of it, and well see if that can deliver for an older audience.) These all still feel like a stretch, and are pretty clearly ventures built to be acquired by one of the major carriers, just as Mint Mobile was. So why dont we skip the middle step? Famous Wireless Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile should just mimic fashion brands and release their own celebrity-backed mobile plans. Think of it as a version of the McDonalds Famous Orders campaign but for wireless. Could you imagine a Taylor Swift-branded mobile plan that offered merch, ticket perks, and advance clues to her next moves? Or a Philadelphia Eagles plan? These could essentially be the same MVNO, just skinned Fortnite-style to fit different fan cultures. (Maybe Fortnite should have a wireless service?) We find ourselves in a moment when Buffalo Bills quarterback and NFL MVP Josh Allen can say, Its really about the authenticity of itnever putting my name on something that I personally dont believe in or I wouldnt use. Meanwhile, on the other side of the spectrum, there’s Sydney Sweeney who says she needs to take every brand offer in order to make up for Hollywoods shortfall. If I just acted, I wouldnt be able to afford my life in L.A., she told The Hollywood Reporter in 2022. I take deals because I have to. Both approaches can work, but what they symbolize is that celebs cant be cynical about how they monetize their brands beyond the primary source of their fame. Remember that in 2023, Donaldson and his company sued Virtual Dining Concepts, its partner on MrBeast Burger, claiming the company had taken advantage of his brand to expand rather than focusing on the quality of the food. The bulk of online reviews for MrBeast Burger outlets had less than two out of five stars, and used words like, disgusting, revolting, and inedible. Dropped calls and monthly fees are a world away from a sloppy burger. And much tougher to swallow.
Category:
E-Commerce
A robot that folds your laundry is the kind of idea that sells itself. Just ask Syncere, a five-person startup that secured more than 1,000 preorders for its Lume robot with nothing but a simulated concept video. That video, which racked up more than four million views on X over the summer, shows a pair of bedside lamps transforming into robotic arms that calmly fold a pile of laundry on the bed. (The video itself does not acknowledge that it’s a computer-generated rendering.) Syncere is taking preorders for $200or $2,000 to be first in linewith plans to launch next summer. Introducing Lume, the robotic lamp.The first robot designed to fit naturally into your home and help with chores, starting with laundry folding.If youre looking for help and want to avoid the privacy and safety concerns of humanoids in your home, pre-order now. pic.twitter.com/2JmU0qXUIV— Aaron Tan (@aaronistan) July 28, 2025 “The idea is that you just dump your laundry on the bed and then you walk away . . . and when you come back, it’s as if the laundry on the bed magically folded and sorted itself, CEO Aaron Tan tells Fast Company. Automating housework has been a dream going back at least as far the invention of the dishwasher and its 1893 debut. Although most of the current robot revolution has focused on the workplace and the prospect of working side-by-side with a humanoid, the response to Syncere’s video and that of Figure’s humanoid folding towels last month has shown there’s a lot of interest in domestic robots that could take over tedious chores most people hate. And laundry’s got to be at or near the top of that list. In this Premium piece, you’ll learn: How Syncere came up with the concept of robot arms that double as lamps The key technologies that Tan says enable robotic laundry-folding to be possible What happened to the buzzy laundry-folding bots of the 2010s Which training data and techniques Syncere is relying on to teach its robot how to fluff and fold The hurdles the startup faces to realize its vision From bot-of-all-trades to clothes horse Syncere didnt start out with laundry-folding robots in mind. Having earned PhDs in robotics from University of Toronto, Tan and co-founder Angus Fung originally designed a mobile robot with an arm to perform a variety of tasks, from cleaning and bed-making to food delivery. To test their ideas, they found work as housekeepers at a Marriott in the Toronto area, aided by a manager who was willing to let them experiment. But when they started bringing their robots into peoples homes for testing, they started getting pushback. The idea of installing an industrial-size robot in the home didn’t sit well with people, who either feared for their safety or weren’t sure where they’d put it. “What people wanted was a way to get rid of their chores, but they want their homes looking beautiful, not having to worry about getting run over or colliding with these large machines,” Tan says. That led to the idea of a robot that focused only on folding laundry and could fit more naturally into home environments. Syncere’s new plan calls for a pair of six-axis robot arms that stand about six feet tall, working as regular lamps when they’re not folding clothes. They’ll come equipped with cameras and a board of similar specs to Nvidias Jetson Orin developer kit (though Tan declines to name the specific processor), with data processed on-device. While folding times can vary, Tan claims that Syncere’s robot arms can fold a garment in as quickly as 5 to 10 seconds. “We envision an average load of laundry to take less than two hours to do,” he says. A history of unfulfilled promise Syncere isn’t the first startup to build buzz by promising to eliminate one of the most tedious household chores. In the late 2010s, a couple of rival startups called Foldimate and Seven Dreamers became fixtures at trade shows such as CES, showing off their ability to fold garments with little to no assistance. Foldimate promised a sub-$1,000 price tag, but required users to manually feed clothing into the machine, while Seven Dreamers’ Laundroid robot aimed to fold clothing autonomously in a $16,000 box the size of a large armoire. Neither product made it to market. Foldimate’s website quietly went offline a few years ago without explanation, and the company behind Laundroid filed for bankruptcy in 2019 despite raising $100 million, with CEO Shin Sakane citing problems with mass production. Reached via LinkedIn, Sakane said he still hopes to bring Laundroid to life in the future, but said he isn’t working on it now and didn’t respond to further requests for comment. Emails to an address believed to be associated with Foldimate founder Gal Rozov went unanswered, as did a request for comment with the company he now works for. The AI eyes have it Tan says the barriers to building a laundry folding robot are lower than they were five or 10 years ago. Robotic arms and actuators are cheaper and easier to acquire, but more importantly, AI and computer vision technologies are much more advanced. “It quite simply comes down to the advances in AI,” Tan says. “The advances in computer vision that happened in the late 2010s and early 2020s, and most recently with these large foundation models . . . things are a lot different now.” To start training its robot, for instance, Syncere used open-source vision-language-action models, a concept that Google pioneered in 2023 that allows robots to understand and take action on what they’re seeing. Syncere is also using large language models to help describe garments to the robot so it can understand what they are and how to treat them. David Held, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, says recent advancements such as vision-language-action models only provide a starting point. Syncere would still have to train the robot to do the actual folding, and that’s going to take a lot of time and effort. Training the robot Currently, one of the best ways to train this kind of robot is through teleoperation, or “puppetry” as Held calls it. Essentially, the trainer uses a remote control or joysticks to manipulate the robot’s arms and fold laundry manually. Through this process the robot eventually learns how to handle different types of clothing. Tan confirmed that Syncere is using teleoperation to train its robot, but Held says that it’ll take a lot of data to account for things like crumpled up shirts or an inside-out pair of pants. It’s unclear how much data will be necessary to make a home robot work reliably. “Companies that are working on this problem and trying to release this as a product are betting that they can collect enough data, and train a big enough network, to handle all of that variability,” Held says. “I think that’s a big unknown right now, whether that’s going to pan out, or whether we’re going to need other ways to augment that data.” More obstacles ahead Assuming Syncere can train its Lume robot to fold a pile of laundry from start to finish, a more pedestrian obstacle remains: It still needs to figure out how to manufacture at scale a product that’s never been made before. Even if laundry-folding robots are more feasible now, that doesn’t mean they’re easy to make. Previous laundry-folding robot startups have fizzled out before shipping a single unit, and Syncere has yet to show evidence of a working prototype. For now, Syncere isn’t thinking much about it. Tan says the company plans to build every individual robot in-house for at least the first year. That won’t be sustainable for long, but he says the approach will allow the startup to “keep the iteration cycle tight” in conjunction with early backers. (Note that neither Tan nor his co-founder Tan have any prior experience shipping consumer hardware.) In other words, those who put down $200 or $2,000 now are essentially signing up to be beta testers, a point that is not made clear on Syncere’s order pages. Meanwhile, Syncere may need sources of funding beyond what it’s collected from 1,000-plus preorders, and its financing situation is unclear. Tan cited a16z as “one of our investors,” and its website refers to having “closed our funding round,” but it’s technically part of the a16z speedrun accelerator program, not one of its main portfolio companies. Syncere has also received funding from the incubator Founders, Inc and is working out of its San Francisco office. Tan says Syncere plans to keep its early customers in the loop with a steady drip of content, including an eventual look at a prototype. Syncere led with a rendered concept video, he says, “because we wanted to paint the vision clearer.” But it’s worth remembering That strategy has worked to an extent, in that Syncere has gradually raised its waitlist price from $50 to $200 off the success of its viral video. “We’ve slowly increased the price as we’ve exceeded our original expectations,” Tan says. Now it just needs to meet the expectations of folks who’ve been hearing about laundry-folding robots for close to a decade now, only to have come up empty-handed. With recent advancements in AI and computer vision, laundry-folding robots are more feasible than they’ve ever been. The question is whether Syncere will be the one to finally deliver them.
Category:
E-Commerce
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