• Home
  • Latest
  • Fortune 500
  • Finance
  • Tech
  • Leadership
  • Lifestyle
  • Rankings
  • Multimedia

Trendingnow

1

New York City women are making up to $30,000 per month by renting out their closets to strangers

2

Why did a $154 billion CEO just endorse stripping most Americans of voting rights—and taking us back to the 19th century?

3

The millennial generation is split in 2: an older crowd with boomer-style comfort, a younger set going 'back to the early 1900s'

1

New York City women are making up to $30,000 per month by renting out their closets to strangers

2

Why did a $154 billion CEO just endorse stripping most Americans of voting rights—and taking us back to the 19th century?

3

The millennial generation is split in 2: an older crowd with boomer-style comfort, a younger set going 'back to the early 1900s'
TechData Sheet

Data Sheet—Why Sprint Could Be a Rare Blunder for SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son

By
Aaron Pressman
Aaron Pressman
and
Adam Lashinsky
Adam Lashinsky
Down Arrow Button Icon
By
Aaron Pressman
Aaron Pressman
and
Adam Lashinsky
Adam Lashinsky
Down Arrow Button Icon
October 31, 2017, 9:39 AM ET
Add Fortune on Google for similar content.

Happy Halloween!

Masayoshi Son appears to be going this year as Hamlet, turning in his second performance in three years of heatedly pursuing a merger between his Sprint and Deutsche Telecom’s T-Mobile only to abandon the effort.

When talks broke off in 2014 the two sides assumed antitrust regulators wouldn’t allow a tie-up. This time around, per a report by Japan’s Nikkei, Son’s SoftBank became concerned it would lose control should T-Mobile take over Sprint.

Shares in T-Mobile and Sprint tumbled Monday as investors betting on industry consolidation—and higher cell-phone prices—bid down the two U.S. laggards. Aaron has speculated that Son could be putting on a “to be, or not to be, that is the way to get a better price” act. Others think he wants to invest ever more in Sprint, the better to realize his dream of connecting devices, humans, and other machines in a single artificial intelligence.

The opposite is feeling more likely—that Son has made a rare blunder by buying a slow-growth mobile carrier in a highly saturated market and is finding it tough to operate or financially engineer his way out of the problem.

Get Data Sheet, Fortune’s technology newsletter.

Have a good day and don’t eat too much candy.

Adam Lashinsky
@adamlashinsky
adam_lashinsky@fortune.com

NEWSWORTHY

Trick. With top social networks expected to testify in Congress tomorrow on Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election, more info is coming out about just how successful those efforts were. Facebook posts from Russia's “Internet Research Agency" reached 126 million Americans, more than 10 times the company's earlier estimate. Twitter said bogus tweets were viewed 288 million times.

Treat. Amid record profits, Samsung named three long-time company insiders as co-CEOs and heads of three of its most important business units. CFO Lee Sang-hoon will be the new board chairman and co-CEOs J.K. Shin and Yoon Boo-keun will resign.

Trick. The feud over royalty payments between Qualcomm and Apple escalated again, with the Wall Street Journal reporting that next year's iPhones may eliminate chips from Qualcomm. That could cut revenue by more than $2 billion. Qualcomm shares, already down 16% this year, were down 6% in early trading on Tuesday.

Treat. As Apple looks ahead to possible record profits, thanks to new higher priced iPhones, its stock hit an all-time high on Monday of $168.07, before closing at $166.72. Analysts say the share price needs to reach about $194 for Apple to become the first company with a public market value of $1 trillion. And Apple's all-time record profit? $18.36 billion in the holiday quarter of 2015 (Apple's fiscal first quarter of 2016).

Trick. Netflix said it would cancel its original series House of Cards after its upcoming sixth season. The news came after actor Anthony Rapp said series star Kevin Spacey had sexually assaulted him in 1986.

Treat. Cybersecurity startup Recorded Future, which monitors activity on the "dark web," raised $25 million from Insight Venture Partners. The company is almost cash flow positive with revenue “in the mid-eight figures” CEO Christopher Ahlberg tells Fortune.

Trick or treat. Reviews of the iPhone X arrived on Tuesday—well, sort of. Apple gave many reviewers only 24 hours with the phone before allowing articles to be posted. At The Verge, Nilay Patel said the new screen was amazing but Face ID didn't work everywhere, such as in bright sunlight. (Apparently Apple engineers need to get out more.) Nicole Nguyen at BuzzFeed got the phone much earlier than most, however. After a week, she had mastered all the new gestures required by the elimination of the home button. But it's the new size—smaller than an iPhone Plus but with a higher resolution screen—that was most attractive.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Like a fractal pattern, the world of bitcoin and other digital currencies seems to get more detailed and remain quite complicated the closer you look. So I'm constantly on the lookout for good explainers. Y-Combinator's Ramon Recuero has written about the splitting of single cryptocurrencies into multiple, incompatible forks. And his evolutionary biology metaphor makes the explanation better than most:

Forks, in short, are an evolutionary mechanism for digital networks, which allows them to try out many different futures at the same time. What if Facebook could create and explore hugely different versions that shared past data and operated entirely independently from each other? This type of experimentation is A/B testing on steroids. This evolution can happen at different times during the cryptocurrency’s life span. Many now-famous cryptocurrencies like Litecoin, Dash, or Zcash, started as a Bitcoin implementation.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

Here's the First Look Inside Waymo's Self-Driving Minivans By Kirsten Korosec

Hollywood's New Piracy Problem: Rogue Streaming Boxes By Jeff John Roberts

How Serious Are Tech Giants About Blockchains? Ethereum Co-Founder Grades Apple, Amazon, Google By Robert Hackett

Elon Musk's SpaceX Edges Nearer to Goal of Reusable Rockets By Joseph Hincks

Why AMD's Stock Plunged 20% in Less Than a Week By Aaron Pressman

Google Is Making It Easier to Stream Live Television With a New YouTube TV App By Tom Huddleston Jr.

Apple iPhone Sales in China Soar After 18 Months of Decline By Don Reisinger

BEFORE YOU GO

What will the kids get up to on Halloween these days? Creating their own artificially intelligent, horror-story-telling Twitter chatbot, at least if the "kids" are some young scientists at MIT's Media Lab. Check out "Shelly," named after Frankenstein author Mary Shelley.

This edition of Data Sheet was curated by Aaron Pressman. Find past issues, and sign up for other Fortune newsletters.
About the Authors
By Aaron Pressman
See full bioRight Arrow Button Icon
By Adam Lashinsky
See full bioRight Arrow Button Icon
Add Fortune on Google for similar content.

Latest in Tech

Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025

Most Popular

Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Fortune Secondary Logo
Rankings
  • 100 Best Companies
  • Fortune 500
  • Global 500
  • Fortune 500 Europe
  • Most Powerful Women
  • World's Most Admired Companies
  • See All Rankings
  • Lists Calendar
Sections
  • Finance
  • Fortune Crypto
  • Features
  • Leadership
  • Health
  • Commentary
  • Success
  • Retail
  • Mpw
  • Tech
  • Lifestyle
  • CEO Initiative
  • Asia
  • Politics
  • Conferences
  • Europe
  • Newsletters
  • Personal Finance
  • Environment
  • Magazine
  • Education
Customer Support
  • Frequently Asked Questions
  • Customer Service Portal
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms Of Use
  • Single Issues For Purchase
  • International Print
Commercial Services
  • Advertising
  • Fortune Brand Studio
  • Fortune Analytics
  • Fortune Conferences
  • Business Development
  • Group Subscriptions
About Us
  • About Us
  • Press Center
  • Work At Fortune
  • Terms And Conditions
  • Site Map
  • About Us
  • Press Center
  • Work At Fortune
  • Terms And Conditions
  • Site Map
  • Facebook icon
  • Twitter icon
  • LinkedIn icon
  • Instagram icon
  • TikTok icon
  • YouTube icon

Latest in Tech

small keyboard
AIOpenAI
OpenAI’s first hardware device debuted at $230. Now, it’s on eBay for $1,850
By Emily ForliniJuly 27, 2026
5 hours ago
Sam Altman thinks the singularity is already here, but an expert says OpenAI’s Hugging Face breach doesn’t prove it
AISam Altman
Sam Altman thinks the singularity is already here, but an expert says OpenAI’s Hugging Face breach doesn’t prove it
By Marco Quiroz-GutierrezJuly 27, 2026
6 hours ago
Photo of Elon Musk
SuccessElon Musk
A Nobel economist challenged Elon Musk to donate his entire $1T fortune by 2036. Musk’s reply: ‘I am actually going to do something along these lines’
By Sydney LakeJuly 27, 2026
7 hours ago
Elon Musk’s vision of a post-money future got mocked. Vinod Khosla warns it could become a dystopia instead
AIthe future of work
Elon Musk’s vision of a post-money future got mocked. Vinod Khosla warns it could become a dystopia instead
By Nick LichtenbergJuly 27, 2026
8 hours ago
Dario Amodei looking to the side.
AIAnthropic
A trove of users’ seemingly private conversations with Anthropic’s Claude AI chatbot showed up in Google search results
By Beatrice NolanJuly 27, 2026
11 hours ago
The war between competing AI models could end up more like Apple vs. Android than VHS vs. Betamax
AITech
The war between competing AI models could end up more like Apple vs. Android than VHS vs. Betamax
By Jason MaJuly 27, 2026
12 hours ago

Most Popular

New York City women are making up to $30,000 per month by renting out their closets to strangers
Retail
New York City women are making up to $30,000 per month by renting out their closets to strangers
By Sarah GlodekJuly 27, 2026
21 hours ago
Why did a $154 billion CEO just endorse stripping most Americans of voting rights—and taking us back to the 19th century?
C-Suite
Why did a $154 billion CEO just endorse stripping most Americans of voting rights—and taking us back to the 19th century?
By Nick LichtenbergJuly 27, 2026
12 hours ago
The millennial generation is split in 2: an older crowd with boomer-style comfort, a younger set going 'back to the early 1900s'
Real Estate
The millennial generation is split in 2: an older crowd with boomer-style comfort, a younger set going 'back to the early 1900s'
By Nick LichtenbergJuly 25, 2026
3 days ago
An 11-year-old is cleaning his neighbors' trash cans for $10 each—he now has 100K followers as teens face the worst summer job market since 1948
Success
An 11-year-old is cleaning his neighbors' trash cans for $10 each—he now has 100K followers as teens face the worst summer job market since 1948
By Orianna Rosa RoyleJuly 25, 2026
3 days ago
College-educated women are snapping up the highest-earning men without college degrees, leaving the rest further behind
Economy
College-educated women are snapping up the highest-earning men without college degrees, leaving the rest further behind
By Mia OsmonbekovJuly 26, 2026
2 days ago
I've been teaching college students for decades. Most of them can no longer finish a book
Commentary
I've been teaching college students for decades. Most of them can no longer finish a book
By Austin SaratJuly 26, 2026
2 days ago

© 2026 Fortune Media IP Limited. All Rights Reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy | CA Notice at Collection and Privacy Notice | Do Not Sell/Share My Personal Information
FORTUNE is a trademark of Fortune Media IP Limited, registered in the U.S. and other countries. FORTUNE may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website. Offers may be subject to change without notice.