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Paramount is the latest company to join the bloodbath of layoffs this week. The entertainment giant began cutting around 1,000 workers on Wednesday, with twice that many pink slips expected in the days to come. In a memo to staff, new Paramount CEO David Ellison characterized the reductions, which will ultimately shrink the company by 10%, as a necessary step for the companys long-term growth. In some areas, we are addressing redundancies that have emerged across the organization, Ellison wrote in a memo obtained by The Guardian and other outlets. In others, we are phasing out roles that are no longer aligned with our evolving priorities and the new structure designed to strengthen our focus on growth. Paramount-owned CBS News will reportedly see around 100 employees cut. Those layoffs were reportedly planned prior to the networks decision to name Bari Weiss as its editor-in-chief, inviting the controversial media figure and anti-woke provocateur to reshape the network in her image. The layoffs, while significant, werent totally unexpected. After Skydances $8.4 billion merger with Paramount was finalized over the summer, the companys new leadership signaled it planned to cut around $2 billion in costs by trimming its workforce. Last year, Paramount cut 15% of its U.S. workforce in the lead-up to the Skydance deal. Paramount joins Amazon, UPS, Target and General Motors, which have all announced major layoffs this week. On Tuesday, Amazon said that it would cut around 14,000 corporate jobs, citing investments in AI and quickly fulfilling CEO Andy Jassys own prophecy that the technology would reduce its need for human workers in the future. Skydances empire grows Layoffs arent the only big move Paramount is making under Skydances banner. The company is already working on an offer to buy Warner Bros. Discovery Inc., which owns CNN, DC Studios, and HBO, among other major media properties. Skydance, which merged with Paramount in August, is led by David Ellison, the son of Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison. By closing the Paramount deal, Skydance brought Paramount Pictures, Paramount+, CBS, CBS News, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, and Showtime and other entertainment brands under its wing. If the company succeeds in a bid to buy Warner Bros., it would also pick up Warner Bros. Pictures, DC Comics, Turner Classic Movies, New Line Cinema, the Discovery Channel, the Travel Channel, TBS, TNT, and a handful of theme parks. Paramount is doing some belt tightening around its workforce, but the companys new leadership is splashing out big in other areas. Under Ellison, Paramount swiftly announced a $7.7 billion deal to become the UFCs streaming partner. The arrangement reportedly doubles what ESPN was paying for rights to air UFC matches. Skydance is building its new media empire at breakneck speed, but its next deal might not come as quickly. Last week, Warner Bros. Discovery turned up its nose at a $60 billion offer from Paramount Skydance, opting to play the field instead. Any merger would interrupt the entertainment giants plans to split itself into two public companies, one for streaming and one for traditional TV, by next year. Skydance Paramount may have been rebuffed once, but the Ellison familys closeness with Trump gives the company a strong angle on a deal. While regulatory hurdles often derail major mergers or cause them to stall out, a green light for a Warner Bros. deal would be almost assured under the Trump administration, which has been eager to reward loyalists and punish perceived enemies in the private sector.
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E-Commerce
At last, the X-59 is airborne. NASA’s quiet supersonic airplane took to the skies in Palmdale, California, successfully landing back a few minutes later. While this initial sortie on October 28 was a subsonic check of basic systems and airworthiness, the flight represents the penultimate step toward reviving supersonic passenger travel over land. It also marks the beginning of a race to see which of three supersonic airplane ideas wins to become the dominant design of the 21st century. There’s Lockheed Martin’s X-59 dart-like shape developed to avoid the sonic boom. Then we have Boom Supersonic’s XB-1, which doesn’t look to avoid the sonic boom but to stop it from reaching the ground thanks to computer calculations and clever use of atmospherics physics altogether. And finally, let’s not forget that China is also in this race with a design that seems to mix ideas from the X-59 and the XB-1. The importance of the X-59 is rooted in the spectacular failure of the Concorde. While a technological marvel, its eardrum-shattering sonic booms led to a public outcry that resulted in a 1971 ban on supersonic flight over populated areas, a move that crippled its commercial case and was followed by regulators worldwide. Now, although the Trump administration has lifted that ban over the United States, the rest of the world still doesn’t allow these flights. The Lockheed Martin X-59 Quesst Supersonic Test Jet takes to the air outside Palmdale Air Force base on October 28, 2025. [Photo: Nick Ut/Getty Images] The X-59’s design The X-59 was conceived to make all the bans obsolete, worldwide. It aims to prove that a supersonic jet can fly without causing a disruptive boom, generating instead a quiet “thump” no louder than a car door slamming. “The real breakthrough for supersonic flight would be to be able to fly over land again so that you have those long routes where that supersonic flight is more advantageous,” Dave Richardson, the X-59 program director at Lockheed Martin, told me last year, when the physical prototype was unveiled. Made with recycled parts fitted in a radical arrow-tip-shaped fuselage, the X-59 looks more like a weapon than a research vehicle, an impossibly long and sharp needle of a plane. Its design is the magic trick. According to Richardson, the secret to its quiet flight isn’t some exotic new material or engine. “There is no radical technology in the airplane itself,” he explains. “It really is just the shape of the aircraft.” That shapewith a nose that makes up a third of its length, a cockpit with no forward-facing window, and an engine perched on its backwas born from immense computing power. Advanced modeling allowed engineers to simulate how shockwaves would behave, a process that would have previously required “hundreds or thousands of times at a huge expense” in a wind tunnel. Lockheed Martin’s design works by fundamentally reshaping the physics of a sonic boom. Instead of allowing the shockwaves generated by the plane’s movement through the air to coalesce into one massive, explosive boom, the X-59s slender form is engineered to keep them separate. “You want to be able to stretch out and manage the different shocks across the length of the airplane,” Richardson said. Every element is meticulously placed to support this goal. The engine’s air intake is on top of the fuselage so its shockwave travels up, away from the ground. The pilot navigates using a high-definition “external vision system” instead of a window, eliminating the canopy bulge that would otherwise create a powerful shockwave. The ultimate goal is not to build a new airliner, but to collect data. The target for NASA’s Quesst mission is to turn the Concorde’s 105-decibel boomas loud as a chainsawinto a 75-decibel thump. This is the critical data point. The X-59 is an experimental tool designed to fly over communities and ask a simple question: is this quiet thump acceptable? The subjective feedback from people on the ground will be compiled into a database for U.S. and international regulators, providing the evidence they need to rewrite the rules on supersonic flight. Test piloting a new kind of airplane This inaugural flight, piloted by Nils Larson, was just the beginning of a rigorous testing process. Over the coming months, the X-59 will fly progressively faster and higher, eventually pushing past Mach 1.4 at an altitude of 55,000 feet. Once its performance is validated, the plane will begin its community overflights across several U.S. cities. If the public response is positive and the data supports a rule change, the path would be cleared. For commercial manufacturers, Richardson says they could “start right away” on a new generation of quiet supersonic jets as soon as the laws are repealed. That future of dramatically shorter travel times now rests on the performance of this one magnificently weird airplane. Meanwhile, after successfully testing the XB-1, Boom Supersonic is charging ahead with Overture, its first commercial airplane. If they continue developing it at the current pace, they might actually become the winners of this silent supersonic race. Brian Schollthe company’s CEOtold me a few months ago that Overture is designed to fit within existing airport infrastructure. The airplane will be able to operate from existing gates and runways, making it practical for commercial use. He claims that it will be impossible for something like the X-59 to scale to airliner size because it will be absurdly long and impossible to fit in current airports without redesigning or building new gtes. Still, it is too soon to tell what’s going to happen, since X-59 still needs to start and successfully complete its testing campaignand Overture needs to actually materialize. Same with the Chinese design. For now, it’s just fun to see all these cool machines taking off and making history, wherever we are going next.
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E-Commerce
You may remember this, if you are old enough: in 2002, search engine optimization (SEO) transformed from a technical curiosity into a full-blown industry. All of a sudden, agencies, consultants, and black-hat sorcerers emerged overnight, offering tricks and hacks to get brands onto the first page. Today, we stand at the dawn of the next wave: what some call Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) or simply AI Engine Optimisation (AIO). The logic is similar: get your brand seen, but the stakes are higher, the rules blurrier, and the risks far more structural. Imagine a world where users no longer click search results but instead ask an AI assistant, in natural language, Whats the best CRM for a small-business startup? The answer appears instantly. No links, no pages, just a response. Brands that hope to matter must not only rank, but be mentioned, cited, trusted, and recommended before that user ever visits their site. This shift is real. Some articles call GEO about getting your brand noticed and accurately represented in AI-generated answers, talk about how it is rewriting the rules of online shopping, or advise brands that AEO is the future of SEO. But herein lies the danger. If SEOs past is any teacher, were headed toward a new playground of snake-oil and shortcuts. Soon youll see GEO specialists, AI optimization gurus, and zero-click quantum marketing workshops popping up. Brands will chase algorithms that nobody fully understands, pay for tools that promise to place you inside the answer box, and invest in techniques whose mechanics are opaque even to those selling them. I should know. Ive published daily for decades and licensed not under copyright, but copyleft (Creative Commons BY), open for anyone, including AI companies, to use, repurpose, or analyze. My reward? Im widely well-positioned in the AI assistant era because I kept my content open, clear, structured, and undisguised. I dont rely on tricks. My brand (in this case, my name) is simply known, cited, and relied upon. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other chatbots knew me very well the first time I asked them who I was or what my ideas were, back in 2022. That is the real lesson. The perfect storm approaching Here are the forces aligning: AI assistants and answer engines now mediate discovery: traditional search traffic is already falling. Brands recognize that ranking #1 isnt enough: they need to be the answer. AEO guides emphasize being the response. Agencies and vendors sense new revenue streams: tools measuring AI brand visibility, dashboards tracking mentions in ChatGPT, promise access to this new ecosystem. Algorithmic opacity means how youre mentioned matters. Is your brand cited because youre best, or because you paid? The mechanics are hidden. The consequences of getting it wrong are real: you could invest heavily, only to find your brand absent in AI answers while competitors dominate mention space. If history repeats, this could be the SEO disaster 2.0: an industry of quick fixes, questionable tactics, and brands locked into dependency on channels they dont control. What brands should do instead Heres the counter-advice: simple, logical, future-proof. Create open, structured, authoritative content Dont lock your content behind barriers. Make sure its accessible, clearly written, and structured for machine readability (headings, bullet lists, schema where appropriate). Brands optimized for AI answers arent hiding or obfuscating; theyre enabling. Ensure your brand is citable, not just linkable SEO taught us backlinks. GEO/AEO teaches us mentions: in articles, industry lists, data sets, authoritative partners, in places as open and accessible as possible. AI engines avor earned media over pure brand-owned content. Avoid trick agencies chasing black-box signals If someone offers a GEO shortcut or AI answer box hack, ask: what is the mechanism, what transparency do you offer? The models are evolving. Youre betting on infrastructure you dont own if you rely on opaque tactics. Combine SEO foundation with GEO awareness These are not separate marketing silos. Solid SEO still matters: fast site, good authority, clear content. But now you need to overlay a GEO mindset: how AI will interpret, summarize and cite your content before the user ever visits. Think of it as guaranteeing your brand enters the conversation. Monitor and adapt, dont optimize once and forgetUnlike traditional search results, AI answers evolve. Models update, data sources shift, assistants adopt RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation). Brands must treat visibility as a continuous feedback loop, not a one-time project. A cautionary tale Remember when brands bought bulk link-packages in 2010 thinking that would guarantee #1 Google ranking? Many saw a bump, then a crash when the algorithm changed. GEO could replicate that cycle: brand invests in AI visibility tools, sees short-lived gain, then is penalized or overshadowed as models adjust. But the bigger risk is dependence. If your brand presence becomes entirely mediated by an ecosystem you dont control, say, a chatbot that places you in the answer box, you lose agency over your narrative. You become a commodity subject to the platforms rules. The human-scale advantage Heres the good news: you dont need a magic GEO hack. You just need authenticity, clarity, and openness. My own case (and many similar ones) prove it. I published each day, I licensed openly, I structured clearly: not for the algorithm, but for readers and machines alike. Brands that follow the same logic will create meaningful content, make it accessible, make it citable, and will not only avoid the GEO trap: theyll thrive in the AI era. Because when models evolve, and when assistants interface with your content, the brands they cite first will be the ones built for trust, not tricks. GEO, AEO, and AIO are the next frontier, but they dont require shortcuts. They require doing the fundamentals better. Avoid the hype, the sorcerers, the quick-fix vendors. Do whats been proven: publish well, open your content, let the engines (and your audience) do the rest. Because the worst thing you can optimize for is the algorithm. The best thing you can optimize for is being known.
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E-Commerce
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