🌍 Microsoft’s iPhone moment

Plus: Social media warning labels.

Image for article titled 🌍 Microsoft’s iPhone moment
Photo: VCG (Getty Images)

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Here’s what you need to know

China is beating the U.S. on nuclear power. While the U.S. has larger capacity now, China is close on its heels, and will surpass it in the next decade.

A Southwest Airlines Boeing plane almost crashed into the Pacific Ocean. The incident, which happened in April, is being investigated by the Federal Aviation Administration. Meanwhile, the U.S. airline industry just saw its fifth unprofitable first quarter in a row, and Boeing’s CEO search isn’t going well.

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One group that’s seeing more money than ever: CEOs. Executive pay in the U.S. is skyrocketing at the highest rate in 14 years, and worker pay is very, very… very much lagging.

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Speaking of the ultra-rich, the Internal Revenue Service is targeting a tax loophole they use. The agency says it could raise more than $50 billion over the next decade by closing it.

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Microsoft is having its iPhone moment

Being a frontrunner in the AI race has already propelled Microsoft to new heights, and analysts think that ascent is far from peaking.

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Wedbush analysts see Microsoft’s AI strategy as its “iPhone moment,” one that will transform the cloud industry and cement its place ahead of competitors like Amazon and Google. Plus, “a tidal wave of Copilot and Azure monetization [is] now on the doorstep for MSFT,” the analysts said.

Here are some digits that color their predictions:

$25 billion: Amount analysts predict that Copilot could add to Microsoft’s trajectory by 2025

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2025: Year analysts say will be “the true inflection year of AI growth” for Microsoft

No. 1: Most valuable company in the world, the position Microsoft keeps vying with Apple for

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Should social media come with warning labels?

Vivek Murthy, the U.S. Surgeon General, absolutely thinks so, and called for their creation yesterday.

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Similar to warning labels on tobacco products, Murthy wrote in a New York Times op-ed published Monday that such a warning would state that “social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents.”

However, the data on the effects of social media on children is mixed – plus any warning label would require legislation from Congress. Read the latest on the proposal from Quartz.

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More from Quartz

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📹 YouTube to test allowing users to provide video context

🐦 The next pandemic could come from bird flu, former CDC chief says

🐶 Nationwide is dropping 100,000 pet insurance policies — and blaming inflation

🚗 Toyota’s chairman faces a reckoning over a massive safety scandal

🍟 McDonald’s is scrapping its AI drive-thru experiment


Surprising discoveries

Japan is seeing more cases of flesh-eating bacteria than it did in all of 2023. The country saw a record 941 cases last year, and this year’s count is already at 977.

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Fast food managers in California are making as much as $174,000 a year. The work is intense — the Wall Street Journal followed one worker over the course of one day.

Solar power is officially bigger than oil for the first time. China’s huge investment in panels is fueling the growth.

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Another first: Humans are farming more fish than catching it. A record 223.3 million metric tons of animals and plants were farmed in 2022.

BeReal is getting ads. It was only a matter of time.


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