new video loaded: Prince Andrew Is Losing His Titles and His Home
transcript
transcript
Prince Andrew Is Losing His Titles and His Home
King Charles III’s younger brother, who fell from grace over his association with Jeffrey Epstein, will no longer be able to call himself a prince. The king is also evicting him from Royal Lodge, where he lives.
How long have you known about Andrew and Epstein? Fair enough for the Royal Lodge because, you know, it looks far too big for someone of his stature. It’s a disgrace. So I’m happy he’s got stripped of his titles, his royal titles as well. He should be kicked out of the country.
King Charles III’s younger brother, who fell from grace over his association with Jeffrey Epstein, will no longer be able to call himself a prince. The king is also evicting him from Royal Lodge, where he lives.
Universal Music Group generated revenues of €3.021 billion ($3.53bn) across all of its divisions (including recorded music, publishing, and more) in Q3.
That’s according to UMG’s fresh set of quarterly results, published today (October 30).
They reveal that UMG’s overall Q3 revenue figure was up 10.2% YoYat constant currency, driven, according to UMG, by growth in all segments.
Adjusted EBITDA weighed in at €664 million ($775m) – a margin of 22%.
Among the highlights within UMG’s latest results was the company’s recorded music subscription streaming revenues, which grew 8.7% YoY at constant currency to reach €1.178 billion ($1.37bn) in Q3, driven “primarily by the growth in global subscribers,” UMG said today.
Another big highlight came in the form of UMG’s physical revenues, which grew 23.1% YoY at constant currency to €341 million ($398.31m), driven, according to UMG, “by initial shipments of Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl and strength in new releases, particularly in Japan”.
Commenting on the Q3 earnings announcement, UMG’s Chairman and CEO, Sir Lucian Grainge, said: “As we position the company for long-term value creation, we continued to achieve strong results this quarter.”
Photo: Austin Hargrave
“As we position the company for long-term value creation, we continued to achieve strong results this quarter.”
Sir Lucian Grainge
He added: “Importantly, we continued to drive progress on our strategic plans, including our artists’ and songwriters’ creative and commercial success, our global expansion, the industry’s embrace of our responsible AI initiatives and the continued implementation of Streaming 2.0.”
Matt Ellis, UMG’s CFO, added: “We’re pleased that our strong quarter was driven by healthy results across all segments of our business: Recorded Music, Music Publishing and Merchandising.
“Our double-digit growth in both revenue and Adjusted EBITDA is a reflection of the breadth and depth of our global roster, the strength of our partnerships, and the consistent execution on our strategic plan.”
RECORDED MUSIC
Universal’s overall Recorded Music revenue for the third quarter of 2025 was €2.223 billion ($2.59bn), up 8.3% YoY at constant currency.
Within the Recorded Music segment, UMG’s ‘Subscription and streaming revenues’ (including ad-supported and subscription streaming revenues) grew 6.6% YoY at constant currency to €1.515 billion ($1.77bn).
Breaking UMG’s recorded music streaming figure down further reveals that the company’s subscription streaming revenues specifically grew 8.7% YoYat constant currency to reach €1.178 billion ($1.37bn), driven primarily, according to UMG, “by the growth in global subscribers”.
Universal’s ad-supported recorded music streaming revenue reached €337 million($393.64m), which was flat YoY, “as consumption continues to shift from better monetized video platforms to short-form platforms, which are not yet as well monetized,” UMG said today.
Within Universal’s recorded music business, Physical revenue grew 23.1% YoY at constant currency to €341 million ($398.31m), driven, according to UMG, “by initial shipments of Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl and strength in new releases, particularly in Japan”.
‘License and other’ revenue grew 4.1%YoY at constant currency to €328 million ($383.13m), due to “improvements in live income”.
Downloads and other digital revenue reached €39 million ($45.55m), which was flat YoY (at constant currency).
Top sellers for the quarter included the KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack, Mrs. GREEN APPLE, Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter and Morgan Wallen, while top sellers in the prior-year quarter included Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter, Billie Eilish, Chappell Roan and Post Malone.
MUSIC PUBLISHING
Universal’s overall Music Publishing revenue for the third quarter of 2025 was €543 million ($634.27m), up 13.6% YoY at constant currency.
Digital publishing revenue grew 16.8% YoY at constant currency to €327 million ($381.96m), reflecting “continued growth of streaming and subscription revenue as well as new business wins”.
Performance revenue grew 17.3% YoY at constant currency to €115 million ($134.33m).
Synchronization revenue grew 3.3% YoYat constant currency to €63 million ($73.58m).
Mechanical revenue declined 3.7% YoY at constant currency to €26 million ($30.37m).
Other revenue reached €12 million ($14m), flat YoY at constant currency.
MERCHANDISING AND OTHER
UMG’s ‘Merchandising and Other’ revenue in the third quarter of 2025 reached €259 million ($302.53m), an increase of 15.6% YoY at constant currency.
According to UMG, this was driven by “higher touring merchandise sales” and was “partially offset by lower direct-to-consumer sales due to the timing of product releases”.
EBITDA ETC.
In Q3 2025, UMG’s EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, and depreciation) grew 11.7% YoY at constant currency to €594 million ($693.84m).
EBITDA margin expanded to 19.7%, compared to 19.4% in the third quarter of 2024.
Adjusted EBITDA for Q3 was €664 million ($775.61m), up 11.6% YoY at constant currency.
Adjusted EBITDA margin improved to 22% compared to 21.6% in the third quarter of 2024,
All EUR-USD conversions made at the average rate of the relevant period according to the European Central Bank.Music Business Worldwide
Carla leads a fight in flood-damaged Valencia where climate change and tourism threaten turtles along Spain’s coastline.
Carla grew up witnessing her father’s fight to protect Valencia’s fragile beach ecosystems. Now, as climate change warms the Mediterranean, sea turtles – driven by rising sea temperatures – have begun arriving to lay their eggs on her city’s shoreline. But the beaches they rely on are under threat. Mass tourism, unchecked development, and the recent floods are eroding these vital habitats.
At 27, Carla is an environmental lawyer and conservationist who works with her father to restore the beaches and protect turtle nests, knowing the species’ survival depends on their efforts. After the catastrophic 2024 floods, Carla rallies her community to act fast to restore Valencia’s coastline. With turtle nesting coinciding with peak tourism, Carla urgently needs volunteers to protect each nest – and time is running out.
After the Floods is a documentary film by Adriana Cardoso and Rodrigo Hernandez.
Less than a week after setting a new 100 butterfly SCM World Record in his home country of Canada on the final stop of the World Cup, Florida’s Josh Liendo is riding that World Cup taper, blasting an 18.68 in the 50 free on the first day of a two day battle against conference foe Georgia in Gainesville.
Liendo dominated the field in the 50 free, finishing over a second ahead of runner-up finisher and Georgia sophomore Alex Painter in 19.69. For reference, Liendo’s fastest time in the 50 free from October of last season was 18.92.
That 50 free was not the first sign that Liendo was still on the momentum train; his first win came in the 50 butterfly, where Liendo was the only swimmer to swim under the 20 second barrier, clocking 19.69. Liendo’s junior teammate Scotty Buff clocked the only other sub-21 second performance in 20.88.
Other Notable Men’s Performances:
Florida junior Jonny Marshall took a narrow win over Ruard Van Renen of Georgia to claim the men’s 50 backstroke, out touching the Bulldog by six hundredths of a second, clocking 21.24.
Gator freshman Ahmed Jaouadi dominated the 1000 free, winning by nearly 15 seconds in 8:36.65.
The Gator men dominated on the boards; junior Conor Gesing took the 1-meter event in 373.73, while freshman teammate Jesus Agundez Mora notched the 3-meter crown (369.38).
Georgia sophomore Elliot Woodburn picked up the lone event win for the Bulldogs on day one with his 50 breast performance of 24.00.
The Florida women swept all five events in the pool, and claimed another two event wins on the boards.
Gator freshman Beatriz Bezerra comfortably won the 50 fly, winning by over half a second in 23.89.
Florida finished 1-2-3 in the 50 breast, leading the charge was sophomore Anita Bottazzo in 26.58, freshman Grace Rabb clocked 27.80, and junior Molly Mayne rounded out the top three in 27.90.
Florida sophomore Julie Brousseau took the six second win over Georgia’s Kennedi Dobson in the 1000 free, clocking 9:25.20.
Junior Catie Choate and freshman Sylvia Statkevicius rounded out the day 1 winners in between the lane lines for the gators, with Choate winning the 50 back (23.99) and Statkevicious claiming the 50 free (22.83).
Freshman diver Maria Garcia added big points on the boards for Florida, winning both 1-meter (325.20) and 3-meter (361.95).
Friday’s events will be a more traditional event format; with the events as follows:
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The Israeli military said Sahar Baruch (L) and Amiram Cooper (R) were killed by their captors
Israel has confirmed the identities of two deceased hostages whose bodies it received from Hamas via the Red Cross in Gaza on Thursday.
Forensic tests showed the remains were those of Amiram Cooper, 84, and Sahar Baruch, 25, the Israeli prime minister’s office said.
“The government of Israel shares in the deep sorrow of the Cooper and [Baruch] families and all the families of the fallen hostages,” it said in a statement.
The Hostages and Missing Families Forum in Israel demanded that all 11 Israeli and foreign deceased hostages still in Gaza be returned immediately by Hamas in line with the US-brokered ceasefire agreement.
Amiram Cooper was abducted along with his wife, Nurit, from Kibbutz Nir Oz during the Hamas-led attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, which sparked the war. Hamas released Nurit after 17 days, but it continued to hold Amiram.
The Israeli military said it estimated Amiram was murdered in captivity in February 2024, but that final conclusions will be made upon completion of a post-mortem.
It had previously said he was killed along with three other hostages – Nadav Popplewell, Chaim Peri and Yoram Metzger – in Khan Younis while troops were operating in the area. Hamas had claimed they were killed by an Israeli strike.
Sahar Baruch was kidnapped during the attack on Kibbutz Be’eri by Hamas gunmen, who also killed his brother, Edan, and grandmother, Geula Bachar.
The Israeli military said it estimated that he was murdered in captivity on 8 December 2023, and that it was awaiting the results of a post-mortem.
It had previously announced that he was killed during a rescue attempt by Israeli forces.
The military expressed its deep condolences to the two men’s families and stressed that Hamas was “required to fulfil its part of the agreement and make the necessary efforts to return all the hostages to their families and to a dignified burial”.
The Hostages and Missing Families Forum, which represents many hostages’ families, said: “There are no words to express the depth of this pain.”
“The hostages have no time. We must bring them all home, now!”
Israeli prime minister’s office
Israeli soldiers salute the coffins, which were handed over by Hamas via the Red Cross in Gaza
On Tuesday, the Israeli government accused Hamas of violating the Gaza ceasefire deal after the group handed over a coffin containing human remains that did not belong to one of the 13 deceased Israeli and foreign hostages then still in Gaza.
It said forensic tests showed they belonged to Ofir Tzarfati, a hostage whose body had been recovered by Israeli forces in Gaza in late 2023.
The Israeli military also released footage filmed by a drone that showed Hamas members removing a body bag containing the remains from a building in Gaza City, reburying it, and then staging the discovery in front of Red Cross staff.
The Red Cross said its staff were unaware that the body bag had been moved before their arrival and that the staged recovery was “unacceptable”.
Hamas rejected what it called the “baseless allegations” and accused Israel of “seeking to fabricate false pretexts in preparation for taking new aggressive steps”.
Hours later, the Israeli government accused Hamas of another ceasefire violation, saying the group’s fighters had killed an Israeli soldier in an attack in an area of southern Gaza.
Hamas claimed it was not involved in the incident in the Rafah area, but Israel’s prime minister ordered a wave of air strikes across Gaza on Tuesday night in response. The Israeli military said it attacked “dozens of terror targets and terrorists”.
Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry said 104 Palestinians were killed, including 46 children and 20 women, making it the deadliest day since the ceasefire took effect on 10 October.
US President Donald Trump maintained “nothing” would jeopardise the ceasefire agreement, which his administration brokered along with Qatar, Egypt and Turkey, but he added that Israel should “hit back” when its soldiers were targeted.
EPA
On Tuesday, Hamas fighters removed a body bag from a tunnel in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis
Under the deal, Hamas agreed to return the 20 living and 28 dead hostages it was holding within 72 hours.
All the living Israeli hostages were released on 13 October in exchange for 250 Palestinian prisoners and 1,718 detainees from Gaza.
Israel has so far handed over the bodies of 195 Palestinians in exchange for the bodies of the 15 Israeli hostages so far returned by Hamas, along with those of two foreign hostages – one of them Thai and the other Nepalese.
Nine of the 11 dead hostages still in Gaza are Israelis, one is Tanzanian, and one is Thai.
All but one of the dead hostages still in Gaza were among the 251 people abducted during the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, during which about 1,200 other people were killed.
Israel responded by launching a military campaign in Gaza, in which more than 68,600 people have been killed, including more than 200 since the ceasefire took effect, according to the territory’s health ministry.
new video loaded: How the Trump-Xi Meeting Eased a Major Trade War
President Trump and China’s leader Xi Jinping just had a highly anticipated meeting in South Korea. David Pierson, a New York Times foreign correspondent covering China, breaks down what they accomplished and how they de-escalated a major trade war.
By David Pierson, Christina Thornell, Nikolay Nikolov and Chang W. Lee
Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In this edition…Nvidia becomes the first $5 trillion market cap company…Anthropic finds AI models have ‘introspection,’ of a kind…and Meta, Alphabet, and Microsoft tell investors just how much they’ve been spending on AI data centers.
Hello, it’s Jeremy here. I’m just back from Fortune Global Forum in Riyadh, where AI was very much a central feature in many of the discussions. I will provide a few insights from what I learned there.
Of course, there was a lot of discussion at the event about whether there’s an “AI bubble”—and that was before we got the latest earnings and cap ex numbers from Meta, Microsoft, and Alphabet. Wall Street’s disparate reactions to the companies’ quarterly report cards show the market’s growing impatience to see tangible results from hefty AI investments. They will only support companies who can show they are seeing notable revenue impact today.
Why the market reacted so differently to Meta’s, Microsoft’s, and Alphabet’s capex numbers
Consider Alphabet, which saw its shares climb after its earnings report. With its quarterly search revenues growing 14.5% year-over-year, and cloud revenues up 32%, Alphabet continues to defy concerns that AI poses an existential innovator’s dilemma to its core advertising-based business model. By contrast, Meta said capital expenses on AI data centers next year would be even larger than the already whopping $70 billion to $72 billion it’s spending this year as CEO Mark Zuckerberg races to build “super-intelligence,” an incredibly ambitious effort with limited immediate revenue impact. Investors weren’t having it, and Meta’s shares got hammered, dropping 9% in pre-market trading.
Investor reaction to Microsoft’s earnings fell somewhere between these two extremes. Like Alphabet, it reported revenue numbers that exceeded consensus analyst forecasts, but not by much, and it also said capital expenditures would climb more than analysts had anticipated. So it saw its shares slide about in line with investors’ disappointment in the size of the gap between revenue acceleration and capital expense growth, even though Microsoft’s cloud computing sales were up an impressive 40% from last year, a figure it largely attributed to AI spending.
What was striking at Fortune Global Forum, however, was how little global executives seemed to care about these financial market dynamics. If there was any consensus from the discussions in Riyadh, it was that the current moment is a lot like the early days of the internet or the roll out of cloud computing in the mid-2000s and early-2010s. In other words, a real technological transformation is underway. Yes, it might involve some companies becoming overvalued—as did happen with the internet boom. But almost all agreed that AI is going to have a transformative and lasting impact on their companies, and on the world economy, even if there is a market correction.
Executives are finding value in AI
At an IBM-sponsored dinner at FGF that Fortune hosted, Ana Paula Assis, IBM’s senior vice president and chair for EMEA and growth markets, said that, in her experience, it wasn’t the fear of an AI bubble—the concern that AI might just be a flash in the pan that doesn’t live up to the hype—that held companies back from investing in the technology. Instead, it was the speed of AI innovation that was actually the problem. Some companies, she said, seemed worried they would build systems around one set of models and capabilities, only to have those eclipsed in just a few months or a year, requiring them to change those workflows and swap models again. She described some potential customers as “like deer in the headlights” dazzled and frozen in place by the pace of change.
On stage at the conference, Ruth Porat, the president and chief investment officer at Alphabet, echoed Assis’s view to some degree. She noted that there was a big disparity between the speed of AI advances and the speed at which companies were adopting the technology. She said this disparity was largely the result of how difficult it is for large enterprises to change internal processes in general. And to get the most out of AI requires companies to rethink every process, she said, so it is perhaps not surprising that this is happening much more slowly than the rate at which AI companies, including Google, are rolling out new AI models and capabilities.
IBM put out some survey results this week for EMEA enterprises that show companies are indeed moving ahead with deploying AI at scale. Its survey of 3,500 senior executives in 10 countries found that two-thirds reported “significant productivity gains” from deploying AI. In some sectors, such as finance, the figure was 72%. Adoption in Saudi Arabia was even higher still—84%. What’s more, across EMEA, 92% of those surveyed were confident that AI agents would deliver ROI within the next two years. (Which may prove the point about the tech capabilities running far ahead of adoption. You might remember how many top tech execs declared 2025 to be “the year of AI agents.” I guess the real year of AI agents might be 2027!)
Nvidia becomes world’s first $5 trillion company as it reveals $500 million order backlog. The AI chip company became the first business ever to reach a $5 trillion market capitalization, after its shares rose earlier in the week following several announcements by its CEO and founder, Jensen Huang, at a developer conference in Washington, D.C. Huang revealed that the company has a $500 billion order backlog for its latest Blackwell GPUs and its upcoming Rubin GPUs. The company has also recently announced deeper partnerships and investments with OpenAI, Oracle, and Eli Lilly. Nvidia has seen its market cap add $3 trillion in value since early 2024. Read more from The Wall Street Journal here.
Fed Chair Powell says AI boom not comparable to dot com bubble. U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said the current artificial intelligence boom differs from the dot-com bubble because today’s leading companies—and here he seems to have been referring to the likes of Nvidia, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Meta, as opposed to the AI model makers such as OpenAI and Anthropic—actually generate profits. He also noted that the AI boom is driving tangible economic growth through investments in data centers and chips. (Although it should be said that the dot com bubble also fueled capital investment in fiber optics and networking equipment.) He contrasted this with the 1990s internet frenzy, when many high-valued firms collapsed after failing to turn a profit. You can read more from CNBC here.
Anthropic says cutting-edge AI models may have a kind of introspection. The AI company said its Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 models exhibit early signs of introspection—the ability to detect and describe aspects of their own internal states rather than just generate plausible text. In experiments, Anthropic researchers “injected” specific neural activation patterns that they knew were associated with particular concepts into the model at times when it was not considering topics related to those concepts. It then asked the model whether it noticed anything different about its thinking in these instances. The models were able to correctly identify some of these “thoughts” as not their own some of the time, indicating a limited form of self-monitoring, according to the Anthropic researchers. This introspective behavior, however, was highly inconsistent—occurring only about 20% of the time—and its underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Anthropic cautions that while intriguing, these findings do not imply human-like self-awareness but could help advance future work on model transparency and interpretability. You can read more in Anthropic’s blog post on the research here. Study finds top AI models can’t construct predictive “world models.” A group of researchers from the non-profit AI lab the Basis Research Institute and affiliated with MIT, Harvard University, the University of Montreal, the University of Cambridge and Cornell University, built a new benchmark to test how leading LLMs perform at tasks that require understanding a virtual world, including discovering links between cause and effect and the “rules” by which the world operates. Their new “AutumnBench” involves a suite of 43 grid-world environments with 129 tasks, including predicting which objects are behind an obstruction, planning, and detecting what’s changed in a scene and the likely cause. They looked at how three state-of-the-art reasoning models— Anthropic’s Claude 4 Sonnet, Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, and OpenAI’s o3—compared against 517 human participants. They allowed the test subjects to spend some time exploring each virtual world and deploying strategies to figure out the rules of the world before testing them on the tasks. The results show that humans significantly outperform the AI models across all task types and environments. What’s more, they found that the models fail to adopt human-like strategies for determining the rules of the virtual worlds and how to perform the tasks, such as hypothesis-testing and updating their beliefs to account for new evidence. You can read the research paper here.
AI CALENDAR
Nov. 10-13: Web Summit, Lisbon.
Nov. 26-27: World AI Congress, London.
Dec. 2-7: NeurIPS, San Diego.
Dec. 8-9: Fortune Brainstorm AI San Francisco. Apply to attend here.
EYE ON AI NUMBERS
$78.2 billion
That’s the amount that just Meta, Microsoft, and Alphabet collectively spent building new AI data centers and buying AI hardware in the three months between the end of June and the end of September. And all three companies signaled they plan to continue to ramp up that spending further over the next quarter and throughout 2026. You can read more here from the Financial Times.
Announcing the move, staff at the outlet said ‘authoritarian regimes are already celebrating’ its potential demise.
Radio Free Asia (RFA) will shut down its news operations on Friday, citing the government-funded news outlet’s dire financial situation caused by funding cuts under President Donald Trump’s administration and the ongoing US government shutdown.
Bay Fang, RFA’s president and CEO, said in a statement that “uncertainty about our budgetary future” means that the outlet has been “forced to suspend all remaining news content production”.
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“In an effort to conserve limited resources on hand and preserve the possibility of restarting operations should consistent funding become available, RFA is taking further steps to responsibly shrink its already reduced footprint,” she said on Wednesday.
Fang added that RFA would begin closing its overseas bureaus and would formally lay off and pay severance to furloughed staff. She said many staff members have been on unpaid leave since March, “when the US Agency for Global Media [USAGM] unlawfully terminated RFA’s Congressionally appropriated grant”.
On March 14, Trump signed an executive order effectively eliminating USAGM, an independent US government agency created in the mid-1990s to broadcast news and information to regions with poor press freedom records.
Alongside RFA, USAGM also hosts sister publications Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE) and Voice of America (VOA).
Following March’s executive order, RFA was forced to put three-quarters of its US-based employees on unpaid leave and terminate most of its overseas contractors.
Another round of mass layoffs followed in May, along with the termination of several RFA language services, including Tibetan, Burmese and Uighur.
Mass layoffs also took place at VOA in March when Trump signed another executive order placing nearly all 1,400 staff at the outlet – which he described as a “total left-wing disaster” – on paid leave. It has operated on a limited basis since then.
Trump has said operations like RFA, RFE/Radio Liberty and VOA are a waste of government resources and accused them of being biased against his administration.
Since its founding in 1996, RFA has reported on Asia’s most repressive regimes, providing English- and local-language online and broadcast services to citizens of authoritarian governments across the region.
Its flagship projects include its Uighur service – the world’s only independent Uyghur-language outlet, covering the repressed ethnic group in western China – as well as its North Korea service, which reports on events inside the hermit state.
An announcement penned by RFA executive editor Rosa Hwang, published on the outlet’s website on Wednesday, said, “Make no mistake, authoritarian regimes are already celebrating RFA’s potential demise.”
“Independent journalism is at the core of RFA. For the first time since RFA’s inception almost 30 years ago, that voice is at risk,” Hwang said.
“We still believe in the urgency of that mission – and in the resilience of our extraordinary journalists. Once our funding returns, so will we,” she added.
RFE/Radio Liberty, which went through its own round of furloughs earlier this year, said this week that it received its last round of federal funding in September and its news services are continuing for now.
“We plan to continue reaching our audiences for the foreseeable future,” it said.
It’s not immediately clear why RFA and RFE/Radio Liberty – which share the same governing and funding structure, but are based in the US and Europe, respectively – are taking different approaches.
