Compound Interest from Semafor Business

Hasbro traces its toy-making roots to 1860. But it’s increasingly an IP powerhouse, mining its collection of characters and universes for movies, video games, and AI-generated content. Chris Cocks tells Liz and Rohan about why adults are now the biggest toy buyers, the stunning success of “Magic: The Gathering,” and how AI will change toymaking. Plus: why Mr. Potato Head might become your customer service representative.

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This season of Compound Interest is in partnership with Amazon Business. Amazon Business is a trusted partner that transforms business buying by combining Amazon's vast selection, competitive pricing, and fast delivery with added tools and insights to help businesses simplify purchasing, manage spend, and buy smarter.

Orlando Bravo has more riding on the software comeback than anyone in the world. As founder and managing partner of Thoma Bravo, he oversees $172 billion of private-equity money, nearly all of it invested in corporate software. He tells Liz and Rohan why the SaaSpocalypse is over, why LBOs are so hard to do right now, and AI’s “giant sucking sound” in the capital markets.

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This season of Compound Interest is in partnership with Amazon Business. Amazon Business is a trusted partner that transforms business buying by combining Amazon's vast selection, competitive pricing, and fast delivery with added tools and insights to help businesses simplify purchasing, manage spend, and buy smarter.

The prices of land, power, construction equipment, and the laborers to run them are soaring, thanks to the AI data-center boom. That inflation now threatens to spill over into the rest of the economy, the president of the Chicago Fed warns.

Liz and Rohan sit down with Austan Goolsbee to discuss AI inflation, whether the hyperscalers even care about interest rates, and whether the Fed should care about a world where robots do all the jobs.

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This season of Compound Interest is in partnership with Amazon Business. Amazon Business is a trusted partner that transforms business buying by combining Amazon's vast selection, competitive pricing, and fast delivery with added tools and insights to help businesses simplify purchasing, manage spend, and buy smarter.

Investors have been freaked out about private credit — what is it, why do I own it, and will it blow up?

Liz and Rohan sit down with the co-CEOs of Blue Owl, the face of private-credit’s rise over the past decade, and the face of its troubles over the past year, to talk about whether investor jitters are overblown and where the firm goes from here (AI, obviously).

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This season of Compound Interest is in partnership with Amazon Business. Amazon Business is a trusted partner that transforms business buying by combining Amazon's vast selection, competitive pricing, and fast delivery with added tools and insights to help businesses simplify purchasing, manage spend, and buy smarter.

Note: Liz joined Semafor media editor Max Tani on this week's episode of Mixed Signals from Semafor Media. You can listen to more Mixed Signals here.

Warner Music Group CEO Robert Kyncl joins Mixed Signals to explain what a record label actually does in a world where anyone can upload a song to Spotify. Max and Liz ask Robert why Warner struck a deal with AI music company Suno while Sony and Universal are still suing it, how he thinks about the nuclear-weapons-style leverage labels hold over streaming platforms, and why he thinks Netflix is leaving a massive opportunity on the table by ignoring music.

America’s biggest retailer is quietly getting into banking. After trying and failing to crack financial services a few times, is back at it with OnePay, which has 7 million customers, $50 billion in annual payment flow — and virtually zero in acquisition costs. Piggybacking on Walmart’s 1.5 million employees and 150 million customers, it thinks it can succeed where other fintechs have floundered. Liz and Rohan talk to CEO Omer Ismail to find out whether the big box titan can really compete with the big banks.

Big law firms have run the same playbook for 50 years: hire armies of young lawyers, bill their hours at steep rates, and funnel the money up to the partners. AI is about to upend that model. It can already do much of the grunt work that associates cut their teeth on and is coming for the sacred cow of Big Law — the billable hour. This week on Compound Interest, Liz and Rohan sit down with Rachel Proffitt, partner and CEO of the Silicon Valley-based Cooley, to talk about what the rainmakers of the future look like, the rise of AI-native law firms, and the paranoia sweeping the industry.

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This season of Compound Interest is in partnership with Amazon Business. Amazon Business is a trusted partner that transforms business buying by combining Amazon's vast selection, competitive pricing, and fast delivery with added tools and insights to help businesses simplify purchasing, manage spend, and buy smarter.

The World Cup prints money — an estimated $10 billion this year. FIFA keeps almost all of it. The business case for the host cities shouldering much of the costs, however, isn’t so clear.

New York-New Jersey Host Committee CEO Alex Lasry joins Liz and Rohan this week to break down what’s really in it for New York (and, ahem, New Jersey), why he thinks you can’t put a price on the opportunity, and the hypothetical logistical nightmare that keeps him up at night.

He also reflects on his family’s time owning the Milwaukee Bucks to make the case for public funding of stadiums, and argues that more sports owners should prioritize the fan experience over the bottom line.

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This season of Compound Interest is in partnership with Amazon Business. Amazon Business is a trusted partner that transforms business buying by combining Amazon's vast selection, competitive pricing, and fast delivery with added tools and insights to help businesses simplify purchasing, manage spend, and buy smarter.

Image Credit: Reuters/Kai Pfaffenbach/Shannon Stapleton/Bob Donnan-Imagn Images

One of Silicon Valley’s top political fixers, Bradley Tusk, built a career helping startups like Uber and FanDuel brawl their way to legitimacy — in his words, “legalize disruptive sh*t.” His message to AI companies: You have no idea what’s coming.

Anant Bhalla had a front-row seat to Wall Street's takeover of the life insurance industry, which turned a sleepy corner of American finance into a multitrillion-dollar investment engine. Now, even he’s worried it’s gone too far.

He talks to Liz and Rohan about “zombie” insurers, ratings shopping, and where the next big blowup will happen.

This season of Compound Interest is in partnership with Amazon Business. Amazon Business is a trusted partner that transforms business buying by combining Amazon's vast selection, competitive pricing, and fast delivery with added tools and insights to help businesses simplify purchasing, manage spend, and buy smarter.