Caught in a Vice: Another digital media upstart is in trouble

5/2/23 8:00PM

Caught in a Vice‍

‍Vice, once the edgy upstart disrupting digital media, is reportedly making preparations to file for bankruptcy unless the company can find a last-minute buyer in the coming weeks.

The news of Vice Media’s apparent demise comes less than 2 weeks after the shuttering of BuzzFeed News and against an ever-widening backdrop of layoffs that have rocked the media world throughout 2023.

‍Don’t believe the hype‍

‍Vice started life as a bootstrapped, independent punk magazine in Montreal back in 1994, a far cry from the media giant that the company would become. At its 2010s peak the Vice Media empire sprawled across multiple websites, its own TV channel, a record label, shows on HBO, an ad agency, and even a production company — a stable of content that attracted some of the biggest investors in media.

A $70m investment from Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox saw Vice capture a valuation of $1.4bn in 2013. That figure increased quickly as outside investors looked to ride the wave of brash, digitally-native new media that was equally comfortable exposing warlords or exploring social taboos — all at a time when the “firehose” of web traffic from Facebook was fairly predictable.

‍Vice’s expansion earned a $400m injection from Disney in 2015, with a $450m investment from PE firm TPG 2 years later — a deal that saw the company reach its peak valuation of $5.7 billion.

Many things could be blamed for its financial difficulties, but as one former Vice exec put it "at some point, what got you there isn’t what you are", suggesting that what made Vice's content work with a few hundred journalists, never worked quite as well at 3,000 employees — the company's peak headcount in 2017.

Max Knoblauch23h

The Trump administration is reportedly planning a 50% made-in-America requirement for USMCA tariff relief

Qualifying for USMCA-related lower tariffs may soon require more US-made vehicle components, according to reporting by The Wall Street Journal.

The Trump administration is reportedly planning to introduce a 50% US content requirement for vehicles covered by the trade pact to receive lower tariffs. The content would be measured by cost, according to the WSJ.

There currently isn’t any US-specific requirement for those lower tariff rates, but in order to receive preferential tariffs, vehicles are must contain at least 75% regional content (components made in North America). Per Reuters reporting, the Trump admin is seeking to raise the regional requirement to 82%.

These reported plans are subject to change as the US negotiates USMCA terms with Mexico over the next few months.

Overall, Tesla will likely have the easiest time qualifying for any stricter requirements. The automaker’s vehicles contained the highest amount of US/Canadian content in 2025, according to American University research. Ford, GM, and Stellantis all scored lower.

Notably: the underlying government data that many domestic content measurements rely on intentionally combines US and Canadian components, so it’s difficult to know exactly how much of any given vehicle is specifically US-made.

Exclusive | Trump Administration Wants Autos Under USMCA to Be at Least 50% Made in America

These reported plans are subject to change as the US negotiates USMCA terms with Mexico over the next few months.

Tom Jones5/29/26

The $640,000 Luce makes the average Ferrari look like a bargain

Put aside the shape; put aside the smoothing out of Ferrari’s iconic sharp edges; put aside, even, the calls from former Chairman and President Luca Cordero di Montezemolo to “take the Prancing Horse off.” On the grounds of price alone, Luce detractors might have a point.

By now, many of us will have read the criticisms of Ferrari’s first fully electric vehicle, as the Luce — which was unveiled to the world earlier this week and promptly saw the company’s shares crash out in New York and Milan — gets subtly shaded by competitors online and not-so-subtly shaded by basically everyone else.

What makes all of this worse for Ferrari is that, even by the luxury car maker’s notoriously high standards, they’ve slapped a pretty hefty price tag on the Luce, and the company’s CEO, Benedetto Vigna, has already been forced to defend the €550,000 ($640,000) price point, saying yesterday that it’s “fair to pay for innovation,” per Reuters.

While Ferrari’s cars have been getting more expensive of late, as recently as 2022, Ferrari’s average revenue per car sold was around $340,000. At nearly twice that price, this new electric model is obviously proving a little much (visually, conceptually, and financially) for many loyal and long-standing fans of the Prancing Horse to stomach.