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Indianapolis Star
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Indianapolis Star
Jim Irsay left behind 'greatest guitar collection on Earth.' What happens to it now?
INDIANAPOLIS -- As Jim Irsay immersed himself in professional football for the past four decades, first as general manager of the Indianapolis Colts and then as owner, he always had a side gig -- rock 'n' roll relic collector extraordinaire. Especially guitars. Irsay amassed a colossal collection of guitars (199 to be exact) and other musical instruments, spending tens of millions of dollars on what Guitar Magazine once called "the greatest guitar collection on Earth." When Irsay died last week, many of the instruments in the collection were on loan throughout the country, including at the "Amped at IU" exhibit at Indiana University and at the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle for "Never Turn Back: Echoes of African American Music." The items in those exhibits will remain at those locations until the displays are scheduled to end. The long-term plan for The Jim Irsay Collection, which also includes artifacts of American history and pop culture, has not been determined. The team told IndyStar on Wednesday it would be "getting more info on the collection in the coming weeks." Irsay had a penchant for obtaining rare musical instruments and items that were used by some of the greatest artists in history. Among them: Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Prince, Eric Clapton, Sir Elton John, Jerry Garcia, Les Paul, David Gilmour, Jim Morrison, Pete Townshend, Jimi Hendrix, John Coltrane, The Edge, Janis Joplin and Kurt Cobain. But Irsay's collection goes beyond music and includes eclectic items like an Apple II manual signed by Steve Jobs, Hunter S. Thompson's Red Shark convertible and Jack Kerouac's original typewritten manuscript of "On The Road." Experts have valued the collection at close to $1 billion, should it ever be sold in its entirety. 'My purpose in building this collection," Irsay wrote on his collection's website, "is to preserve, protect and share items that tell inspiring stories about dreaming big, overcoming obstacles and accomplishing great things in life." The "Amped at IU" exhibit includes pieces from Irsay's collection that help illustrate the instrument's history, including an 1850s CF Martin, a 1910 Gibson U Harp, 1939 Rickenbacker Silver Hawaiian Lap Steel and more. The display also feature artifacts from The Beatles, their manager Brian Epstein, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Johnny Cash and others. Details: "Amped at IU" runs through September at University Collections at McCalla, 525 E. 9th St. in Bloomington. McCalla's galleries are open noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday. The "Never Turn Back: Echoes of African American Music" includes three items Irsay loaned to the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle -- James Brown's stage-worn, red sequined cape from the 1960s and 1970s, John Coltrane's 1966 Yamaha alto saxophone and Miles Davis' 1980 Martin Committee trumpet. The exhibit explores "the rich legacy of African American music, tracing the deep cultural roots of gospel, blues, jazz and soul. Through evocative photography, rare concert flyers, instruments and costumes, the exhibit showcases the profound influence of Black communities on the evolution of these genres." Details: Runs through early 2027 at the Museum of Pop Culture, 325 5th Ave N, Seattle, WA. Info and tickets
Fast Company
16-05-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
What '80s pop culture taught me about investing
As a lifelong pop culture aficionado, I have a tendency to connect my favorite media to whatever I'm currently doing. When I purchased a secondhand easy chair a few weeks ago, my husband and I spent a sweaty 30 minutes struggling to get it up the stairs. With the chair still wedged at an impossible angle, we paused to catch our breath and I said, ' You're gonna need a bigger boat.' Similarly, anytime I use up the last of the milk or take the last cookie from a package, my brain always bellows ' FINISH HIM! ' But the pop culture in my head is more than just a running commentary on mundane moments. My favorite entertainment has also been an excellent teacher. In particular, the pop culture of my childhood taught me a number of financial lessons that I've never forgotten—including instruction on how to be an investor. Here are the timeless investing lessons I learned from 1980s pop culture. Lemonade Stand: the risk of playing it safe While the majority of my fellow late Gen Xers have deep and visceral memories of dying of dysentery on the Oregon Trail, my early childhood gaming trauma stemmed from the lesser-known Apple II game Lemonade Stand. This simple game teaches the basics of business planning by simulating a child's lemonade stand. The player receives a weather report for the day and has to decide what to spend on lemonade ingredients and advertising as well as determine the price for each glass of lemonade. As a frugal and business-minded 7-year-old, I invested heavily in lemons and sugar when the game predicted a hot summer day on my first turn. I also set a reasonable per-glass lemonade price, knowing that it was folly to overcharge my customers. Though it seemed unnecessary on such a beautiful, 8-bit sunny day, I also splurged on a single advertising poster. Once my preparations were complete, I leaned back in my chair, ready for profits to rain down on me. To my shock, I only had two customers all day. I didn't even make back the money I spent on cups. Pop culture lesson: know where to invest To little Emily, it made sense to spend money on ingredients, since you can't sell lemonade without them. But I balked at the expense of advertising, which seemed unnecessary compared to lemons and sugar. I couldn't predict or measure advertising's return on investment, so I assumed it was a waste of money. (Unfortunately, I continued to make this mistake into adulthood. When I first started freelancing, I only owned a desktop computer. Investing in a laptop seemed like an unnecessary expense with no potential upside for my fledgling writing career—except that I traveled at least once a month and had to move heaven and earth to either work ahead or find a computer at my destination every single time.) The shock of losing my Lemonade Stand money taught me that playing it safe can't protect you from loss. There is a risk to investing—whether you're investing in advertising, a new laptop, or in the stock market—but there's also a risk to playing it safe. You could lose your business because no one knows about it, lose your time (and your mind) because you don't have the equipment you need, or your uninvested money could lose buying power over time because of inflation. There is no such thing as a risk-free financial decision, and playing Lemonade Stand in second grade taught me that better than anything else. The Westing Game: invest independently Ellen Raskin may as well have written her 1978 Newbery Medal winning book The Westing Game specifically to appeal to me. The novel begins after Westing Paper Products tycoon Sam Westing is found dead. Westing's lawyer invites his 16 heirs—who all happen to be the only tenants of the newly constructed Sunset Towers—to the reading of the will. Once there, the heirs are paired off and given $10,000 and an envelope of mysterious clues written on paper towel scraps. They are invited to figure out who has taken Sam Westing's life, and the winner will receive his $200 million estate. As much as that set up is more than enough to get my attention, it was the character of Turtle Wexler that really established this book as one of the pop culture giants of my childhood. This 13-year-old budding entrepreneur and investing genius captured my heart by being smart, funny, and financially confident beyond her years. Turtle and her partner, a 60-year-old dressmaker named Flora Baumbach, receive the incomprehensible clues SEA, MOUNTAIN, AM, and O, which the teen girl believes to be stock symbols. Since Westing was known to be a business wizard, Turtle thinks the stocks indicated by the clues must be clear winners. The pair invests the $10,000 in the clue stocks and in Westing Paper Products (stock symbol WPP). The clue stocks don't perform as well as Turtle had hoped. Her daily perusal of The Wall Street Journal indicates that the Westing Paper Products stock is likely to go up, so she dumps the clue stocks and puts all their money in WPP. By the end of the game several weeks later, Turtle and Flora's $10,000 stake has grown to $11,587.50. Pop culture lesson: lean into your knowledge Turtle taught me the importance of investing based on my own knowledge, expertise, and instincts, rather than following someone else's lead. She starts her investing journey with the knowledge that Westing was a remarkably astute investor. She assumes the clue stocks must have been handpicked by Westing. But when the clue stocks don't do well, she pulls her money from them and invests in something she has direct understanding of, rather than doubling down on her assumption that Westing must have known better. She changes her investing tactics once she has new information. Turtle also shrugs off Flora repeatedly asking if she is sure about her investing choices. She doesn't let the concerns of her 60-year-old partner sway her, because she knows Flora doesn't understand the stock market as well as she does, even though she is much older. All together, Turtle's example made it clear to me that successful investing requires knowledge and a willingness to trust yourself. It's helped me avoid following the crowd into decisions that don't fit my investing strategies. Trading Places: anatomy of an investing scheme I loved the 1983 film Trading Places for Eddie Murphy's brilliant comedic timing, but I was even more fascinated by the movie's portrayal of revenge via short sale. It took me several rewatches to fully understand how the investing scheme resulted in financial doom for the film's villains, the Duke brothers. To exact their retribution, Murphy's character Valentine and Dan Aykroyd's Winthorpe show up to the New York Commodities Exchange ready to trade. Their goal: sell as many orange juice concentrate futures as they can before the U.S. Department of Agriculture report on the nation's orange crop. Meanwhile, the Dukes are buying as many OJ concentrate futures as they can before the report, essentially trying to corner the market. Between the heroes feverishly selling and the Dukes feverishly buying, OJ future prices skyrocket until the moment trading pauses for the crop report—which reveals the orange harvest will be strong. In the aftermath of the announcement, the Dukes are stuck with all the futures they purchased at inflated prices. To fulfill the margin call, they must pay $394 million. At the same time, Valentine and Winthorpe busily purchase futures from everyone but the Dukes at a greatly reduced price. This allows them to fulfill the orders they sold before the report dropped—and make a ridonculous profit. This scene fascinated me as a kid, but it also confused me. I knew that successful investing was about buying low and selling high. But I couldn't understand how the characters could sell high then buy low. How could you sell something before you bought it? Pop culture lesson: stock sales aren't always linear After many years of catching the movie on TBS reruns, I finally grasped that stock and commodities sales don't have to follow a linear progression of cause then effect. It's possible to buy low after selling high, provided you plan your investment strategy carefully. That's because you don't have to own something you sell. You can borrow a stock (or an OJ future, for that matter) for a fee. As long as you return it or an identical asset before the margin call, you can sell the borrowed asset even though you don't own it. This is what Valentine and Winthorpe did to ruin the Dukes. They took their pooled money to pay the borrow fees of the futures, sold those futures at inflated prices before the crop report, then bought back the futures at the rock-bottom price afterwards so they could return the borrowed assets. While short sales like the one in Trading Places are unlikely to ever be part of my own investment strategy, understanding the fluid nature of ownership in stock and commodities trading has made me a better investor. It broke me out of the rigid cause-and-effect thinking that limited my investing creativity. Learning through story Despite being a lifelong money nerd, stories are my first love. So it's no wonder the most enduring lessons I learned about finance come from the pop culture I loved as a child. Playing Lemonade Stand in my elementary school computer lab disrupted the story I'd told myself that it was possible to make a profit without risking an investment. Reading The Westing Game gave me the story of a confident financial heroine to remember when I'm tempted to follow the crowd. And Trading Places folded a satisfying revenge story into a creative investing scheme, which helped me feel smart and savvy when I finally wrapped my head around the details.
Yahoo
06-05-2025
- Yahoo
Epic Games' CEO says fighting Apple cost his company more than $1 billion. He says it was worth it.
I started programming back on an Apple II when I was 13: You turn the computer on, you get a BASIC programming prompt. Anybody can write code, anybody can save it to a floppy disk, you can share it with a friend, you can sell it. Those digital freedoms are essential to the future. Tim Sweeney: This is really one of the issues at the heart of our digital freedoms for the future. We live our lives on our smartphones. We're connected constantly to people. We work on them. We play on them. And our futures are going to be ever more connected there. So the freedom for consumers and developers to do business together is of paramount importance. If you have one monopoly gatekeeper who dictates what people are allowed to play, see, hear — and takes exorbitant fees from every transaction that everybody does online — we're going to have a much less free world than the one that we grew up in. Peter Kafka: Why was last week's ruling important to you and Epic? And why should a normal person care about it? You can hear our entire discussion over on my Channels podcast. The following is an edited excerpt of our conversation. And I also wanted to know when I'll be able to play Fortnite on my iPhone — something I haven't been able to do since 2020, when Sweeney first started fighting with Apple. (I've asked Apple for comment, but they haven't expanded on the statement they made last week expressing their disappointment and plans to appeal.) Explaining why Apple's App Store rules are so important — to both Apple and the developers who complain about them — can be a drag, though I keep trying . I wanted to hear Sweeney's take on it directly because he's made the fight a core part of his job for half a decade. Apple is going to appeal that ruling (and Sweeney is in a parallel fight with Google over its app store rules). But if the ruling stays put, it means the five years and the enormous amount of money Sweeney says he spent and sacrificed by challenging Apple and its CEO, Tim Cook, will have paid off. Sweeney is the CEO of Epic Games — best known as the company behind Fortnite — and he won what may be a very meaningful court victory last week , by forcing a significant change in the way Apple runs its App Store. There aren't a lot of people who can say they've beaten Apple . Tim Sweeney may have just earned a spot in that club. Sweeney says he pursued the case for business reasons — but that there's also a moral component to his fight. Last week, Sweeney won what could be a far-reaching victory — if it survives Apple's appeal. It may also bring Fortnite back to iPhones. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney — the guy behind Fortnite — has been fighting Apple over its App Store rules for five years. Story Continues I subscribe to Netflix. I subscribe to Spotify. Neither of those is done through Apple because in both cases, neither of those companies wanted to pay Apple's fees. But I use Spotify and Netflix on my phone. I could maybe argue that it's a bit of a hassle for me to have to deal with Netflix on a website instead of directly through its iOS app. But it doesn't really seem like it's a sort of life and death situation for me or any of the companies involved. Apple has two tiers of rules. They have one tier of rules for what they call reader apps, which are basically apps operated by multi-hundred-billion-dollar companies — Amazon Video, Netflix, Spotify, and a number of others. Apple lets those apps do business outside of the app. And they've previously obstructed those developers from telling users about the better deals [you could get by going to those sites directly]. But even with that restriction, which is now being taken away, it seemed like life was OK for me, life was OK for Netflix, life was OK for Apple. Everyone was getting what they wanted. It was not OK for game developers. Because that reader app exception only applied to streaming video, streaming audio, and ebook sites. Apple forced all games, all social media apps, and everything else, to only do business through their app. So Apple imposed a rule on all game developers, saying if you sell anything for your game anywhere in the world on any platform, then you must sell it on iOS, and you must use our payment method, and you must pay us 30% if your revenue is greater than a million dollars. So the game developers did not have a choice, and everything there was just marked up 30%. What happens given the ruling last week? It means now all users are free to learn about better deals from all developers, and all developers are free to not just accept payments outside of the app on the web, but to tell users about those alternative ways to pay and to give consumers better deals. That's a key economic gain here. Now developers will be able to send users to the web to give them a better price, and then to make a little bit more money for themselves, too. But that's just the first-order effect. The second-order effect is that you can expect if Apple continues to offer such a horrible deal, that everybody's going to move away and steer their customers towards iOS payments on the web. So I would hope that Apple would step up and compete, give developers a much better deal than 30%, and actually engage in competition. But whether Apple chooses to compete or not, the court has enabled developers to make the choice for themselves. Apple says they're going to comply with the judge's ruling, but they're also going to appeal it. So it's possible the rules get changed again. Do you think a meaningful number of developers are willing to take advantage of this window, knowing that it can get shut down? It's 30% of revenue, so all major developers will support alternative payments. Spotify was the first major app I saw that already has done it. Fortnite will do it later this week. And many, many apps are doing it. You said Fortnite is going to come back to iOS. You guys were kicked off the platform in 2020 for violating Apple's rules. There's nothing in the judge's ruling that says Apple has to reinstate Fortnite on iOS. Have you talked to Apple? How do you imagine Fortnite will come back to iOS? Epic has a valid [Apple] developer account in good standing. Our subsidiary Epic Games Sweden opened up an account in order to distribute Fortnite in the European Union. Our dealings with Apple on that account have been managed by their developer relations team, who have been cordial. Do you feel confident that I will be able to play Fortnite on my iPhone later this week? I believe so. I would be very surprised — well, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if we had a bug that took a day or two more to fix — but I would be very surprised if Apple decided to brave the geopolitical storm of blocking a major app from iOS. We've told Apple what we're doing. How much has it cost you to engage in this five-year legal fight? We've had legal bills in the matter of Epic vs. Apple of over $100 million. I assumed it was much more. You were hiring top-shelf lawyers and … Well, yeah. Well over $100 million, just in legal fees. But if you look at lost revenue, that's another story. We can't predict exactly how much we would have made on iOS, but in the two years that we were on the platform, Fortnite had made about $300 million on iOS. So you could have projected hundreds of millions of dollars of lost revenue as a result of the fight. And that's just from people who were playing and couldn't play. I'm thinking of the future players you would have gotten, who didn't get exposed to the game because they don't have access to it via their phone. Roblox has tons of young players. The majority there are teenagers or below. They're all getting to it via their phone. Those are all people who could have played Fortnite for the last five years. That's right. Metcalfe's Law is a real factor here. You're much more likely to play a game or use a social network if your friends are there. So Apple cutting off Epic from access to the entire iOS audience, that not only affects the players that are directly denied access to Fortnite, it also affects all of their friends who might have played Fortnite more or might have played Fortnite but didn't, because their friends weren't able to play. So you could easily imagine that there's been a billion dollars or more of impact to Epic in this time. I think freedom cannot be purchased at too dear a price. The world needs to change here. And if it doesn't change, then you're just going to have Apple and Google extracting all of the profit from all apps forever. And there will be no proper digital economy. It will just be monopolization. I understand the logic and emotion behind that argument. On the other hand: You're running a for-profit company. You have a lot of investors. They put a lot of money into you. Did they come to you at any point in the last five years and say, "Tim, I know that freedom cannot be purchased at too dear a price. On the other hand, I've invested a lot of money in you because you're a games company, and your game is banned from mobile phones. Could you just settle this up and declare victory and move on?" Other than one investor who exited Epic right quick, everybody has stood by us, because nobody invested in Epic because they want to make a 30% profit flipping the stock. They have invested in [us], believe in our vision, believe in our potential, and believe that if we succeed in building the metaverse and growing Fortnite from a game into an ecosystem, into an open platform serving literally billions of players, that it will totally have been worth it. They all realize that if Apple controls the spigot, the revenue spigot at the top of the funnel, they will use that control to extract all of the profit that will ever be made from this space. Do you imagine this is the rest of your professional life — running a business, coding, and then also having legal fights with platforms? There's a game and a meta game here, right? The game is making awesome software, which is awesomely fun, creatively and technically. I love that. But there's a meta game of ensuring that we have the right to do that, and that we can profit from the fruits of our labor, and that all developers can. So much of our business is not just Epic profiting from our games. It's Epic helping other developers succeed and profiting from the success of thousands or hundreds of thousands of different developers themselves. Epic is one of the few companies in the industry that's positioned in a way that really forces us to fight for everybody. And I don't feel bad about this. I put a lot of brain power into coding over the years. I put a lot of brain power into figuring out how to defeat the monopolies that are blocking us. What good is coding if you don't have the right to release your product? You have to mix the love of the art together with your defense of your right to engage in the art. Read the original article on Business Insider
Business Insider
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Business Insider
Epic Games' CEO says fighting Apple cost his company more than $1 billion. He says it was worth it.
There aren't a lot of people who can say they've beaten Apple. Tim Sweeney may have just earned a spot in that club. Sweeney is the CEO of Epic Games — best known as the company behind Fortnite — and he won what may be a very meaningful court victory last week, by forcing a significant change in the way Apple runs its App Store. Apple is going to appeal that ruling (and Sweeney is in a parallel fight with Google over its app store rules). But if the ruling stays put, it means the five years and the enormous amount of money Sweeney says he spent and sacrificed by challenging Apple and its CEO, Tim Cook, will have paid off. Explaining why Apple's App Store rules are so important — to both Apple and the developers who complain about them — can be a drag, though I keep trying. I wanted to hear Sweeney's take on it directly because he's made the fight a core part of his job for half a decade. And I also wanted to know when I'll be able to play Fortnite on my iPhone — something I haven't been able to do since 2020, when Sweeney first started fighting with Apple. (I've asked Apple for comment, but they haven't expanded on the statement they made last week expressing their disappointment and plans to appeal.) You can hear our entire discussion over on my Channels podcast. The following is an edited excerpt of our conversation. Peter Kafka: Why was last week's ruling important to you and Epic? And why should a normal person care about it? Tim Sweeney: This is really one of the issues at the heart of our digital freedoms for the future. We live our lives on our smartphones. We're connected constantly to people. We work on them. We play on them. And our futures are going to be ever more connected there. So the freedom for consumers and developers to do business together is of paramount importance. If you have one monopoly gatekeeper who dictates what people are allowed to play, see, hear — and takes exorbitant fees from every transaction that everybody does online — we're going to have a much less free world than the one that we grew up in. I started programming back on an Apple II when I was 13: You turn the computer on, you get a BASIC programming prompt. Anybody can write code, anybody can save it to a floppy disk, you can share it with a friend, you can sell it. Those digital freedoms are essential to the future. I subscribe to Netflix. I subscribe to Spotify. Neither of those is done through Apple because in both cases, neither of those companies wanted to pay Apple's fees. But I use Spotify and Netflix on my phone. I could maybe argue that it's a bit of a hassle for me to have to deal with Netflix on a website instead of directly through its iOS app. But it doesn't really seem like it's a sort of life and death situation for me or any of the companies involved. Apple has two tiers of rules. They have one tier of rules for what they call reader apps, which are basically apps operated by multi-hundred-billion-dollar companies — Amazon Video, Netflix, Spotify, and a number of others. Apple lets those apps do business outside of the app. And they've previously obstructed those developers from telling users about the better deals [you could get by going to those sites directly]. But even with that restriction, which is now being taken away, it seemed like life was OK for me, life was OK for Netflix, life was OK for Apple. Everyone was getting what they wanted. It was not OK for game developers. Because that reader app exception only applied to streaming video, streaming audio, and ebook sites. Apple forced all games, all social media apps, and everything else, to only do business through their app. So Apple imposed a rule on all game developers, saying if you sell anything for your game anywhere in the world on any platform, then you must sell it on iOS, and you must use our payment method, and you must pay us 30% if your revenue is greater than a million dollars. So the game developers did not have a choice, and everything there was just marked up 30%. It means now all users are free to learn about better deals from all developers, and all developers are free to not just accept payments outside of the app on the web, but to tell users about those alternative ways to pay and to give consumers better deals. That's a key economic gain here. Now developers will be able to send users to the web to give them a better price, and then to make a little bit more money for themselves, too. But that's just the first-order effect. The second-order effect is that you can expect if Apple continues to offer such a horrible deal, that everybody's going to move away and steer their customers towards iOS payments on the web. So I would hope that Apple would step up and compete, give developers a much better deal than 30%, and actually engage in competition. But whether Apple chooses to compete or not, the court has enabled developers to make the choice for themselves. Apple says they're going to comply with the judge's ruling, but they're also going to appeal it. So it's possible the rules get changed again. Do you think a meaningful number of developers are willing to take advantage of this window, knowing that it can get shut down? It's 30% of revenue, so all major developers will support alternative payments. Spotify was the first major app I saw that already has done it. Fortnite will do it later this week. And many, many apps are doing it. You said Fortnite is going to come back to iOS. You guys were kicked off the platform in 2020 for violating Apple's rules. There's nothing in the judge's ruling that says Apple has to reinstate Fortnite on iOS. Have you talked to Apple? How do you imagine Fortnite will come back to iOS? Epic has a valid [Apple] developer account in good standing. Our subsidiary Epic Games Sweden opened up an account in order to distribute Fortnite in the European Union. Our dealings with Apple on that account have been managed by their developer relations team, who have been cordial. I believe so. I would be very surprised — well, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if we had a bug that took a day or two more to fix — but I would be very surprised if Apple decided to brave the geopolitical storm of blocking a major app from iOS. We've told Apple what we're doing. We've had legal bills in the matter of Epic vs. Apple of over $100 million. I assumed it was much more. You were hiring top-shelf lawyers and … Well, yeah. Well over $100 million, just in legal fees. But if you look at lost revenue, that's another story. We can't predict exactly how much we would have made on iOS, but in the two years that we were on the platform, Fortnite had made about $300 million on iOS. So you could have projected hundreds of millions of dollars of lost revenue as a result of the fight. And that's just from people who were playing and couldn't play. I'm thinking of the future players you would have gotten, who didn't get exposed to the game because they don't have access to it via their phone. Roblox has tons of young players. The majority there are teenagers or below. They're all getting to it via their phone. Those are all people who could have played Fortnite for the last five years. That's right. Metcalfe's Law is a real factor here. You're much more likely to play a game or use a social network if your friends are there. So Apple cutting off Epic from access to the entire iOS audience, that not only affects the players that are directly denied access to Fortnite, it also affects all of their friends who might have played Fortnite more or might have played Fortnite but didn't, because their friends weren't able to play. So you could easily imagine that there's been a billion dollars or more of impact to Epic in this time. I think freedom cannot be purchased at too dear a price. The world needs to change here. And if it doesn't change, then you're just going to have Apple and Google extracting all of the profit from all apps forever. And there will be no proper digital economy. It will just be monopolization. I understand the logic and emotion behind that argument. On the other hand: You're running a for-profit company. You have a lot of investors. They put a lot of money into you. Did they come to you at any point in the last five years and say, "Tim, I know that freedom cannot be purchased at too dear a price. On the other hand, I've invested a lot of money in you because you're a games company, and your game is banned from mobile phones. Could you just settle this up and declare victory and move on?" Other than one investor who exited Epic right quick, everybody has stood by us, because nobody invested in Epic because they want to make a 30% profit flipping the stock. They have invested in [us], believe in our vision, believe in our potential, and believe that if we succeed in building the metaverse and growing Fortnite from a game into an ecosystem, into an open platform serving literally billions of players, that it will totally have been worth it. They all realize that if Apple controls the spigot, the revenue spigot at the top of the funnel, they will use that control to extract all of the profit that will ever be made from this space. There's a game and a meta game here, right? The game is making awesome software, which is awesomely fun, creatively and technically. I love that. But there's a meta game of ensuring that we have the right to do that, and that we can profit from the fruits of our labor, and that all developers can. So much of our business is not just Epic profiting from our games. It's Epic helping other developers succeed and profiting from the success of thousands or hundreds of thousands of different developers themselves. Epic is one of the few companies in the industry that's positioned in a way that really forces us to fight for everybody. And I don't feel bad about this. I put a lot of brain power into coding over the years. I put a lot of brain power into figuring out how to defeat the monopolies that are blocking us. What good is coding if you don't have the right to release your product? You have to mix the love of the art together with your defense of your right to engage in the art.
The National
05-05-2025
- Business
- The National
Former Apple chief Sculley attends opera about Steve Jobs
Former Apple chief executive John Sculley recently had the opportunity to relive the highs and lows of working with Steve Jobs by attending an opera about the late technology tycoon in Washington. 'A wonderful evening at the Kennedy Centre in Washington DC,' he posted in an Instagram photo carousel showing his attendance at The (R) evolution of Steve Jobs. According to Mr Sculley's social media posts, he also treated those in attendance to an impromptu question-and-answer session to discuss his experiences working with Mr Jobs and his time at Apple. In what has now become part of Silicon Valley folklore, Mr Jobs convinced Mr Sculley to make the leap from PepsiCo, where he served as president, to Apple as chief executive in 1983, which at the time was seen as an unprecedented and risky career move. With his marketing background that won him accolades at Pepsi through campaigns such as the Pepsi Challenge, he helped bolster revenue on Apple products such as the Apple II, while also working closely with Mr Jobs on introducing the Macintosh computer in 1984. Although revolutionary for its graphical user interface that is now ubiquitous in computing, sluggish Macintosh sales caused tension between Mr Sculley and Mr Jobs, leading Apple's board to side with Mr Sculley and strip Mr Jobs of a role in the company. Apple's revenue grew rapidly in the initial years following Mr Jobs's departure, but the company's lead with Macintosh methodically evaporated as Microsoft made progress with Windows and the proliferation of PC clones led to increasingly slim profit margins for the industry as a whole. The company's sales and market share plummeted and many blamed Mr Sculley for failing to adjust Apple's direction. He was sacked in 1993, and later watched as Mr Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, bringing the company from the brink of bankruptcy to one of the most influential technology companies in the world. For years, in many Silicon Valley and business circles, Mr Sculley was cast as a villain, the man who made the mistake of firing Mr Jobs. But in recent years, he has pointed out in interviews that Apple's board at the time made the decision. He has also since said that it was mistake to leave Mr Jobs with no role at Apple during the tumultuous year that led to his dismissal. In a 2014 interview with The National, Mr Sculley briefly touched on his time at Apple and the fracture of his relationship with Mr Jobs. 'I have so many mistakes, we don't have the time to go through them. You only learn from your mistakes, you never learn from your successes,' he said at the time. 'If anything, the biggest risk is when you are successful, you become a victim of that success because you believe you did something brilliantly well and then you later discover you were just plain lucky.' Mr Sculley is chairman of Nirvana Health / RxAdvance, which assists with pharmaceutical and the reduction of administrative health care costs. He also cofounded Obi Mobile in 2014, a company that launched what it described as affordable smartphones, although the company is no longer operational. Mr Sculley is not featured in the opera, although several actors have portrayed him in films and shows over the years. He previously praised Jeff Daniels portrayal of him in Aaron Sorkin's 2015 Steve Jobs biopic. The former Apple chief executive also figured prominently in the award-winning documentary General Magic, which took an in-depth look at one of the first attempts at creating a smartphone in the mid-1990s. The Grammy-winning The (R) evolution of Steve Jobs is currently being staged at Washington's Kennedy Centre. John Moore sings the role of Mr Jobs.
