Good morning, Quartz readers!
Here’s what you need to know
US state attorneys called for a recall of Kia and Hyundai cars. The vehicles are apparently too easy to steal.
Larry Elder entered the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Once a Trump supporter, the former radio host will now go head-to-head with the ex-president.
Thieves stole $15 million worth of gold and other cargo from Canada’s largest airport. Police are following various lines of investigation, including that of a potential inside job.
BuzzFeed News is shutting down. It’s the end of an era for the brand that steered internet news; its parent company is going to focus on HuffPost instead.
Elon Musk has had an extremely busy week
Elon Musk is known for writing down everything he has to do and getting those tasks done in time blocks, but even the most organized CEO would balk at the billionaire’s duties this past week. It went a little something like this:
🚀 Test launch the most powerful rocket ever built
🥊 Start a fight with Microsoft
🤑 Make Tesla Model 3 and Model Y cars cheaper
📉 Calm Tesla investors
🙄 Make Twitter a more hostile place for trans people
💨 Get high
🐦 Piss off the guy who popularized #hashtags
🤖 Tease TruthGPT
Why Virgin Orbit went bankrupt
The prospects of Virgin Orbit, the now bankrupt rocket maker that was spun out of Richard Branson’s space tourism company Virgin Galactic, are being closely watched by the space industry. But the real question here is whether anyone could have rescued Virgin Orbit. (Elon Musk, as we’ve established, was too busy.)
There were two things standing between Virgin and success—could they have been resolved?
Liam Gallagher likes his new song that isn’t his
“It’s better than all the other snizzle out there.”
—Liam Gallagher, lead singer of Oasis, praising an AI revival of his voice featured on a new album released by “AISIS.” We’ll see if AISIS’s The Lost Tapes / Vol. 1 will meet the same fate as the fake Drake-Weeknd track.
Quartz’s most popular
👋 The countries where people retire the youngest
🇸🇪 Ikea wants to paint the American furniture market blue and yellow
🏏 Saudi Arabia wants to do to cricket what it did to golf with LIV
🥦 Where marijuana is legal in the US in 2023
💰 A surprising finding about how Chinese companies pay in Africa
🎤 BTS’s Suga could break K-pop records with his first solo album, D-Day
Surprising discoveries
Fossilized pee can tell us about ancient climates. Rock hyrax urine hardens quickly, capturing pollen and wildfire residue from different eras.
A former fiscal officer in Ohio used public funds to stock his private zoo. A $4,116 wildebeest, a snow cone machine, and hot tubs were among the purchases.
Tokyo added an over-80 division to its “Soccer For Life” league. The oldest player is 93 years old.
Will AI agents one day pay taxes? We don’t charge honey bees for all the work they do, but then again, they’re not after our jobs.
Lions, once extinct in Chad’s Sena Oura National Park, are back. It’s a sign conservation efforts in nearby Cameroon are working.
Our best wishes for a productive day. Send any news, comments, taxpayer snow cones, and Lion King songs to talk@qz.com. Reader support makes Quartz available to all—become a member. Today’s Daily Brief was brought to you by Sofia Lotto Persio and Morgan Haefner.