It’s Monday and over 30,000 people have submitted queries to a buzzy new AI chatbot. The kicker: ChatTJB isn’t actually powered by artificial intelligence—it’s just an “average individual” named Tucker.

SHOPPING SPREE

The funding round: In 2025, Whatnot raised two funding rounds, each of which generated over $200 million of fresh capital.

Now, the live shopping platform has announced its latest cash infusion—a $545 million Series G round that values the company at $20 billion. That valuation nearly doubles the $11.5 billion figure attached to Whatnot’s previous funding round. 

The new round was led by ICONIQ, Lightspeed, and Avra, with participation from previous investors Andreessen Horowitz, Greycroft, and Y Combinator. In a blog post, Whatnot dubbed it “the largest raise in live shopping.”

Whatnot will apply its fresh capital across multiple areas, including international expansion, continued user growth, and increased investments in AI.

In a statement, CEO and Co-Founder Grant LaFontaine noted that the new funds will allow Whatnot to “build better tools, bring AI to more parts of the selling experience, help sellers reach more buyers, expand into new markets, and continue building the world’s biggest and most trusted marketplace.”

The context: Whatnot has experienced a meteoric rise since its founding in 2019. Last year, the platform generated $8 billion of gross merchandise value (GMV) from live sales.

2026 has brought more good news to Whatnot HQ, with 650,000 new users flooding in on a weekly basis (per Whatnot). Now, as the platform looks to push that growth to new heights, it has even more money to play with.

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GAME ON

The trailer: On August 27, Netflix will give viewers an “extended look” at Grand Theft Auto VI. Then, six hours later, the same preview will drop on YouTube.

The 13-year gap between the fifth and sixth installments of Rockstar’s signature franchise has turned GTA VI into one of the most anticipated video games of all time. The evolution of Rockstar’s strategy has added even more hype. To keep pace with virtual sandboxes like Roblox and Fortnite, the 27-year-old developer is presenting GTA VI as a game creation engine.

Now, Netflix has positioned itself as the first stop for fans eager to get a glance at the new-and-improved GTA ecosystem.

The context: The upcoming arrival of a GTA VI trailer fits into Netflix’s broader efforts to siphon viewers away from YouTube. The streamer has spent 2026 making deals with creators who broke out its Google-owned rival, including The Stokes Twins, Jay Shetty, and Jordan and Salish Matter.

Creator content, however, isn’t the only category that thrives on YouTube. Ever since the days of Twilight: New Moon, YouTube has been one of the first windows for trailers—and for good reason. Rotten Tomatoes Trailers, a channel devoted to film previews, has hauled in 14 billion YouTube views to date.

Netflix understands how big YouTube trailers can be, because it has profited from them itself. The Still Watching Netflix hub ranks among the most-viewed YouTube channels, and there are plenty of trailers among the top Still Watching clips.

By claiming the first window for the GTA VI preview, Netflix is acknowledging the power of both trailers and gaming. The logical next step would be to load up its platform with GTA VI content once the game arrives on November 19.

MYSPACE MOVES

The history: We’re old enough to have been on MySpace during its heyday—and what a heyday that was. During its peak years of 2006-2008, the platform reached 115 million monthly active users and at some points was getting more traffic than Google.

Then Facebook went big, and MySpace passed into obscurity.

Unlike Vine, which also relaunched this year (sort of), MySpace never truly went away. After its usership crashed, fizzling almost entirely in 2011, it changed ownership a few times, but remained up and usable until 2024. At that point, owners Tim and Chris Vanderhook put the platform on read-only mode, leaving it accessible but preventing any new posts. (At post time, the site is currently inaccessible due to traffic overload.)

The relaunch: The Vanderhooks originally took a stake in MySpace in 2011 alongside Justin Timberlake, and now appear to be in full control of the platform’s future.

“We still own Myspace. We are stewards of the Myspace brand at this point, and we are going to relaunch Myspace," they said in a recent documentary directed by Tom Avalone. "We’re just waiting for the right time to do it. And if that one doesn’t work, we’ll do it again.”

The Vanderhooks have already tried and failed to revitalize MySpace once. That attempt, in 2013, ended up losing them "a little over $150 million," Chris said in the documentary, adding that MySpace struggled to retain advertisers who by then were committed to Facebook and were exploring platforms like YouTube.

What will be different this time? The brothers didn’t say—and also didn’t indicate when they plan to bring MySpace back. Whenever that ends up being, they’ll have an entirely new social media universe to contend with.

LISTEN UP 🎙️

The episode: On the latest installment of Creator Upload, hosts Lauren Schnipper and Josh Cohen break down the biggest headlines of the week, from LinkedIn's new slop-flagging feature to Disney's groundbreaking partnership with TikTok.

Tune in to find out how the latest AI detection tools on social media might affect your reach, and find out more about the rules behind the Disney Creator Ambassador program on TikTok.

It’s all right here on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

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Today's newsletter is from: Emily Burton, Drew Baldwin, Sam Gutelle, and Josh Cohen.