Daybreak

On Wednesday, Meta began firing 8,000 people.This makes up 10% of its global workforce. The cuts started at 4am on 20 May, rolling across time zones. People found out by email. Meta's quarterly revenue that same week: $56 billion. It's capex guidance for 2026: up to $145 billion, almost all of it going into AI. This is the current trend in Big Tech: record profits, mass layoffs, redirect to machines, repeat. 

Then, closer home: Unacademy is being sold to upGrad for $218 million — over 90% below its 2021 peak of $3.44 billion. The edtech gold rush is over and what's left is the reckoning.

Tune in.

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Adani Group has spent the last decade building India's largest private airport empire. But owning nine airports turned out to be only the beginning.

From aircraft maintenance to pilot training to ground handling, the group is now reaching into every corner of the aviation business. Airlines operating at Adani airports are already feeling the squeeze — on pricing, on vendor choice, on the terms of doing business.

India has never had a single player control this much of the aviation stack.

Are the regulators keeping up?

Tune in.

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Virat Kohli's new Meta Oakley ad has 40 million views in two weeks — more than every other athlete in the global campaign, including the one that aired during Superbowl. 

The tagline says Athletic Intelligence is here. 

But the ad shows the glasses answering questions, playing music, and recording a slow-motion shot. The athletic part is mostly just Kohli.

India's smart wearables market is set to triple by 2033. Fifty million Indians already make health decisions based on what these devices tell them. Studies show a 30-80% error rate on something as basic as calorie counting.

So how intelligent is Athletic Intelligence, really?

Tune in.

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Three weeks before the FIFA World Cup kicks off in the US, India still does not have a broadcaster for the tournament. JioStar offered $20 million. FIFA said no. Sony did not bid at all. A petition has reached the Delhi High Court asking that matches at least air on Doordarshan.

The easy explanation is that FIFA got greedy. 

But that does not explain how the world's biggest sporting event ends up with no takers in a country with more than 300 million football fans.

In today's episode, host Snigdha Sharma looks at what FIFA fundamentally misunderstood about India as a football market. And how one merger  gave Reliance enough power that left FIFA with nowhere else to go.

Tune in.

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

The Indian government just moved two million email accounts off NIC's servers onto Zoho's cloud. 

The reason the government decided to leave behind a system it had built and run for 40 years? A list of issues; including ransomware attacks, power outages, and even a blackout on a New Year's Eve that knocked out Parliament's website.

The fix was a seven-year, 200 crore rupee contract with a private Indian company. Zoho actually scored lower than Google and Microsoft in the government's own assessment. Bur it won the assessment anyway.

Thing is, India spent years building open-source infrastructure to stay independent. The question is whether it just traded one dependency for another.

Tune in.

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Jio Studios is now the largest production house in India by revenue, catalogue, and box-office share. It got there fast. Stree 2, Laapataa Ladies, Dhurandhar, all Jio. The Dhurandhar franchise alone is closing in on Rs 3,000 crore worldwide.

Meanwhile, Dharma, Excel, Maddock, and Bhansali have all sold significant stakes just to stay in the game. Jio simply does not need to. It has Reliance's telecom network, streaming platform, and marketing muscle all working together. The studio model that Bollywood once abandoned is back.

But can Jio can build an identity to go with it?

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Gen Z was supposed to be AI's most enthusiastic adopters. For a while, they were. Then the hiring froze, the jobs disappeared, and the tools got good enough to make the question uncomfortably personal.

Excitement about AI among Gen Z is down 15% since last year. Anger is up 9%. But the more interesting story isn't the sentiment shift — it's what's happening underneath it. Writing skills degrading without anyone noticing. Complacency creeping in. A generation becoming, in one colleague's words, more boring.

The curiosity is there and so is the dread. And, often in the same person.

Tune in.

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Air India’s board met in Mumbai last week to discuss cost cuts, CEO succession, and whether to start charging business class passengers separately for meals and lounge access. The airline is projecting losses exceeding ₹22,000 crore for the financial year just ended, nearly double the year before. Campbell Wilson is stepping down as CEO.

International flights are being cut by over 20%. Jet fuel costs are up 63% since the war on Iran began. But the crisis arrived at an airline already deep in trouble.

In today’s episode, we look at what was happening inside the Tata turnaround long before the war on Iran began.

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

On a Wednesday morning in April, The Ken's Mrunmayee Kulkarni went to Rushikonda beach in Visakhapatnam looking for a manhole. She found it — a concrete chamber with a reinforced lid, no armed guard, no exclusion zone, no legal protection. In a few years, it will be one of the landing points for the world's longest undersea cable.

95% of India's internet — every payment, every message, a $341 billion services economy — runs through cables like this. The nearest repair ship is in Singapore. There is no protection law. And 60% of that traffic runs through a war zone.

What happens if something goes wrong?

Tune in.

Read Mrunmayee's story here.

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

India's carmakers are staring down a deadline. 

In less than a year, new emission norms will require them to dramatically cut their carbon output — or pay hundreds of millions of dollars in fines. Electric vehicles were supposed to be the answer. But the batteries aren't ready, the infrastructure isn't there, and adoption has been slower than anyone predicted.

So the industry has quietly pivoted to an unlikely stopgap: CNG. Tata, Maruti, and Hyundai are all betting on it. In fact, two in every five Maruti cars sold last year ran on the fuel.

But a stopgap is still just a stopgap.

Tune in.

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.