Hello friends!

It's Sunday, March 29, 2026, and what a week it has been. AI companies making drastic pivots, platforms fighting over creators like it's free agency season, and NASA about to send humans back toward the moon for the first time in over 50 years. Grab a snack, settle in, and let's get into it. 🍿

Apple turns 50. Apple kicked off worldwide celebrations for its 50th anniversary this week. The company that started in a garage in 1976 is now navigating one of its biggest strategic challenges yet: proving it can lead in AI. More on that below.

Artemis II is go. NASA's Artemis II mission, the first crewed flight to the moon in over 50 years, is targeting an April 1 launch from Kennedy Space Center. The four-person crew includes the first woman, first person of color, and first non-American astronaut to travel to the moon's vicinity. The countdown starts Monday.

Instagram is killing end-to-end encryption in DMs. Starting May 8, Meta will remove end-to-end encryption from Instagram direct messages entirely. The feature used to work like a locked drawer only you and the person you're chatting with had the key. Now? Instagram (and by extension, Meta's AI systems) will be able to read your messages. The move comes after mounting government pressure across the UK, Australia, and parts of the EU, and it lands at a particularly awkward time given Meta's back-to-back legal losses over child safety. If you've been using Instagram DMs for anything private, now's the time to rethink that.

Recession odds keep climbing. Moody's recession model is sitting near 49%. Goldman is at 30%. The Iran war is taking a real toll on the global economy. Energy prices are surging, consumer sentiment is plunging, and business surveys show dampening activity across major economies. The upcoming March jobs report (consensus: +57K nonfarm payrolls) could add fuel to the fire.

SoftBank secures $40 billion loan to fuel OpenAI bet. SoftBank locked in a massive $40 billion bridge loan, led by JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, to deepen its investment in OpenAI and support general corporate needs. The 12-month, unsecured loan is one of the clearest signals yet that a 2026 OpenAI IPO is on the table. Masayoshi Son continues to go all-in on AI, even as some investors grow uneasy about the concentration of risk.

Dow enters correction; markets brace for more turbulence. The Dow Jones Industrial Average officially entered correction territory on Friday, joining the Nasdaq. Oil above $100, climbing Treasury yields, and uncertainty over the Iran conflict's endgame have investors rattled. Barclays is warning there may be more downside ahead.

Instagram and YouTube found liable in landmark trial. A California jury ruled that Meta and Alphabet are liable for designing platforms that contributed to the addiction of a young user and ordered them to pay $6 million in damages. This follows a $375 million ruling in New Mexico. The verdict is potentially precedent-setting for over 2,000 other pending lawsuits nationwide and could reshape how tech companies are held accountable for platform design decisions.

OpenAI kills Sora and a $1 billion Disney deal dies with it. In what might be the biggest AI story of the week, OpenAI announced it's shutting down Sora, its AI video generation tool, in a two-stage process app closing in April, API following in September. Disney's $1 billion partnership, which let users generate videos with over 200 Disney characters, collapsed alongside it. The Disney team was reportedly blindsided, learning about the shutdown just 30 minutes after a working session. OpenAI says it needs to refocus compute resources on its AI agent and enterprise tools ahead of a planned IPO. Some analysts see it as the AI industry maturing; others see cracks forming. Either way it's a big deal.

Arm launches its first-ever in-house chip. In 35 years of existence, Arm has never made its own chip until now. The company unveiled the Arm AGI CPU, a 136-core data center processor built for agentic AI workloads, with Meta as its lead customer. Arm says it expects this line to generate six times more revenue by 2031 than the $4 billion it made in 2025. OpenAI and Cloudflare are also early customers. Arm stock surged 16% on the news. This is a fundamental shift from licensing IP to selling silicon and it puts Intel and AMD on notice.

Apple plans to open Siri to rival AI assistants. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple will allow third-party AI chatbots like Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, and others to integrate directly with Siri in iOS 27, expected to be unveiled at WWDC in June. This effectively ends OpenAI's exclusive ChatGPT deal with Siri and turns Siri into more of a platform. Apple also hired ex-Google exec Lilian Rincon to lead AI marketing, and is reportedly offering $200K–$400K retention bonuses to iPhone hardware designers to stop OpenAI from poaching its talent.

Waymo hits 500,000 rides per week. Alphabet's self-driving unit is now handling half a million paid robotaxi trips per week across 10 U.S. cities. A tenfold increase in under two years. The fleet is roughly 3,000 vehicles, and regulators are paying closer attention as the service scales.

Google fires off two algorithm updates in 72 hours. The Google March 2026 spam update and core update landed within three days of each other. The core update is expected to take two weeks to fully roll out and prioritizes content that AI systems can easily parse and trust. If you're a creator or run a content business, this one's worth watching.

OpenAI puts "Adult Mode" on indefinite hold. Following internal protests from employees and investors, OpenAI has suspended its controversial adult-content chatbot project indefinitely. The company appears to be cleaning house ahead of its anticipated IPO.

NewFronts 2026 was the creator economy's Super Bowl. This past week, every major platform showed up to IAB NewFronts in New York to pitch advertisers and creators were the centerpiece of nearly every presentation.

YouTube launches AI-powered Creator Partnerships. YouTube retired BrandConnect and replaced it with Creator Partnerships, a Gemini AI-powered platform that helps brands discover, manage, and run campaigns with creators all in one place. YouTube's VP of Ads Marketing called it an "inflection point" for creator marketing. The platform is positioning itself as a full operating system for creator-brand deals which could displace a lot of third-party tools.

TikTok returns to NewFronts with 200 million users and bold confidence. A year after nearly getting banned, TikTok came in hot, unveiling four new ad formats including Logo Takeover and Prime Time sequential ads. Execs assured advertisers the U.S. joint venture has "done the hard work" and that TikTok is the most secure and creative version of itself ever. The platform is also rebranding its advertiser pitch around full-funnel performance.

Tubi and TikTok partner to turn short-form stars into TV talent. Tubi launched the Creatorverse Incubator with TikTok, a program designed to help TikTok creators develop long-form content for Tubi's free streaming platform. Tubi also announced two scripted originals aimed at Gen Z and a Formula 1 altcast partnership with Apple. The pipeline is simple: TikTok scouts the talent, Tubi helps shape the shows. This is a fundamental shift in who gets a real shot at TV.

Facebook is paying creators $3,000/month to switch platforms and spending billions to back it up. Meta's Creator Fast Track program is offering guaranteed monthly payouts to creators with 1M+ followers on other platforms to start posting on Facebook. But here's the zoom out: Facebook paid creators almost $3 billion last year, up 35% from 2024. The platform is also debuting features that deprioritize spammy, recycled content in favor of original work. It's a clear play to attract real talent and more engaged audiences because frankly Facebook needs it. Its audience skews older than TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, and users spend less time on the platform compared to those three. The interesting thing? This aggressive creator investment is largely a Facebook play. Creator Fast Track isn't really available on Instagram, which is strange given that Instagram is where Meta's younger, more engaged creator base already lives. It raises a question: is Meta trying to revive Facebook as a creator destination, or is it quietly admitting that Instagram's creator strategy is running on a different track entirely?

Meta and YouTube face $3 million verdict over child safety. Tying back to the business section, that landmark California jury verdict found Instagram and YouTube liable for being designed to addict kids. More lawsuits are pending, and Minnesota is moving a bill that would use platforms' own tech to enforce age restrictions. Indonesia just became the first Southeast Asian country to ban social media for users under 16.

The creator economy is growing up and equity is the new frontier. Forbes reports that the industry is moving from #Ad to #Owner. As customer acquisition costs rise and trust in traditional ads drops, equity deals between brands and creators are becoming more common. Meanwhile, a new platform called Mosaic is using verified data and "Creator ID" to bring IMDb-style credibility to creator portfolios.

That's it for this week. Stay weird, stay learning.

—Fahad

Connect with me on LinkedIn! → www.linkedin.com/in/fahadaldulaimi/