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As many families are preparing to gather for the holidays, influenza (flu) cases are spiking across the country. According to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), positive test results have reached the highest levels seen so far this season. The most frequently reported influenza virus this season is the influenza A H3N2 virus. Last week, Fast Company reported on a new mutated strain of influenza A H3N2, known as the subclade K flu variant, which emerged after multiple mutations. Heres what you need to know. Recent data shows positive cases are spiking According to CDC data for the week ending December 13, 14.8% of samples tested positive for influenza. This is the highest level of positive cases so far this season. A total of 927 influenza viruses were reported by public health laboratories. Of those, 911 were influenza A and 16 were influenza B. Of the 706 influenza A viruses that were subtyped, 89.9% were influenza A H3N2. For the week ending December 13, states with the highest flu activity include: Colorado Louisiana New Jersey New York Rhode Island Tracking data from the New York State Department of Health shows cases at their highest for the season, with over 5,300 hospitalizations so far. In New York City, flu cases have spiked significantly. [Screenshot: via CDC] Holiday season means data will lag this week Unfortunately, the CDC wont provide further updates on the spread of the virus until the very end of the year. Data reporting will be delayed due to the Christmas holiday. According to the CDC, data for the week ending December 20 will be posted on December 30. What are symptoms of the flu? Typical symptoms of the flu vary from mild to severe. The CDC says these are the main symptoms to watch out for: fever or feeling feverish/chills cough sore throat runny or stuffy nose muscle or body aches headaches fatigue (tiredness) possible vomiting and diarrhea (more common in children than adults) The agency notes that not everyone with the flu gets a fever. Total flu illnesses reach 4.6 million nationwide So far this season, the CDC estimates that at least 4.6 million flu illnesses have occurred. The agency estimates that there have been 49,000 hospitalizations and 1,900 deaths from the flu. If youre feeling sick this holiday season, you should limit contact with others. The CDC recommends that everyone 6 months of age and older who has not yet been vaccinated this season receive an annual influenza vaccine. Approximately 130 million doses of the influenza vaccine have been distributed in the U.S. this season.
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E-Commerce
SoftBank Group is racing to close a $22.5 billion funding commitment to OpenAI by year-end through an array of cash-raising schemes, including a sale of some investments, and could tap its undrawn margin loans borrowed against its valuable ownership in chip firm Arm Holdings, sources said. The “all-in” bet on OpenAI is among the biggest yet by SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, as the Japanese billionaire seeks to improve his firm’s position in the race for artificial intelligence. To come up with the money, Son has already sold SoftBank’s entire $5.8 billion stake in AI chip leader Nvidia, offloaded $4.8 billion of its T-Mobile US stake, and slashed staff. Son has slowed most other dealmaking at SoftBank’s Vision Fund to a crawl, and any deal above $50 million now requires his explicit approval, two of the sources told Reuters. Son’s firm is working to take public its payments app operator, PayPay. The initial public offering, originally expected this month, was pushed back due to the 43-day-long U.S. government shutdown, which ended in November. PayPay’s market debut, likely to raise more than $20 billion, is now expected in the first quarter of next year, according to one direct source and another person familiar with the efforts. The Japanese conglomerate is also looking to cash out some of its holdings in Didi Global, the operator of Chinas dominant ride-hailing platform, which is looking to list its shares in Hong Kong after a regulatory crackdown forced it to delist in the U.S. in 2021, a source with direct knowledge said. Investment managers at SoftBank’s Vision Fund are being directed toward the OpenAI deal, two of the above sources said. SoftBank’s scramble to marshal funds offers a window into the strain faced even by the world’s biggest dealmakers as they scramble to finance ambitious AI data center projects worth hundreds of billions of dollars. SoftBank declined to comment. SOFTBANK HAS OPTIONS OpenAI has not yet received the remaining funding, but expects the money to come in by the end of 2025, as stipulated in the contract, sources said. SoftBank has multiple sources of capital it could tap, including margin loans, cash on its balance sheet, stakes in listed companies, and corporate bonds or bridge loans, sources said. Son has strong reasons to draw on a range of funding mechanisms to fulfill those obligations. SoftBank secured a deal to invest in OpenAI at a $300 billion valuation in April. Since then, the valuation of OpenAI has risen dramatically and the company is in talks to raise additional funding from investors, including Amazon, tripling its valuation to close to $900 billion, one of the sources added, which would give SoftBank a significant paper gain once the transaction is completed. A major pool of capital for SoftBank is its undrawn capacity of margin loans borrowed against its ownership of British semiconductor and software design company Arm Holdings. SoftBank recently expanded its margin loan capacity by $6.5 billion, bringing the total undrawn capacity to $11.5 billion. Arms stock has since tripled from its IPO price, providing SoftBank with additional collateral headroom to expand its borrowing capacity. SoftBank reported parent-level cash of 4.2 trillion yen ($27.16 billion) as of September 30. The group still owns about 4% of T-Mobile US, remaining the wireless carriers second-largest shareholder, a stake worth roughly $11 billion at the end of September, according to LSEG data. Despite investing at a less active pace, it has continued to back AI startups such as Sierra and Skild AI. OPENAI NEEDS THE MONEY Both OpenAI and SoftBank are investors in Stargate, a $500 billion initiative to build AI data centers for training and inference that executives say is crucial to the U.S. government’s ambitions to keep ahead of China in AI. The rush to build data centers has also prompted tech giants including Meta Platforms to commit unprecedented sums to these buildouts – which need chips, power, cooling, and servers – and they have brought in deep-pocketed partners to spread the risk. Their hefty capital outlays have sparked concerns about what happens if the investments fail to bring commensurate returns, raising the specter of an “AI bubble” bursting. SoftBank promised in April to invest up to $30 billion in OpenAI – $10 billion of which the startup would receive the same month. The rest of the payment was contingent on the AI startup transitioning to a for-profit corporation by the end of the year, an ambitious feat that OpenAI achieved in October. The new funding is crucial for covering OpenAIs rising costs to train and run its AI models as competition from Alphabet’s Google ratchets up. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told employees recently that the company is now entering a code red phase to improve ChatGPT delaying other product rollouts to fend off the momentum behind Googles Gemini. In October, Altman said OpenAI aimed to build 30 gigawatts of computing capacity for $1.4 trillion. He said he ultimately wants OpenAI to add 1 gigawatt of compute every week – an enormous target given that each gigawatt currently comes with a capital cost of more than $40 billion. (Reporting by Echo Wang in New York, Krystal Hu and Deepa Seetharaman in San Francisco and Miho Uranaka in Tokyo; Editing by Sayantani Ghosh and Matthew Lewis) Echo Wang, Miho Uranaka and Krystal Hu, Reuters
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E-Commerce
This year delivered whiplash: geopolitics, tariffs, and technology all shifting at once. And heading into 2026, the disruption isnt easing up. Bob Safian distills hard-won lessons from his Rapid Response podcast this year on how to lead when the ground wont stop movingfeaturing standout moments from Airbnbs Brian Chesky, Runways Cristóbal Valenzuela, Metas Clara Shih, LinkedIns Aneesh Raman, Planned Parenthoods Alexis McGill Johnson, and the NWSLs Jessica Berman, with practical takeaways for turning uncertainty into advantage. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scalepodcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. Lesson number one: As tech moves fast, we need to move even faster Among the most challenging aspects for leaders is the speed of change and how it requires us to reset our expectations and practices. Here’s the CEO of AI video company Runway, Cris Valenzuela, talking with me about planning in the eye of the AI storm. How far out do you think of your product roadmap? Or is that something you’re reassessing all the time? Cris Valenzuela: Yeah, it’s a weekly thing, to be honest. If you’re planning on a quarterly basis, you’re not going to make it. You’re done. In four weeks, you’re going to get leapfrogged and things will change. We’ve historically taken this open-ended research approach. Instead of defining very specific goals you want to accomplish, you define the boundaries on which you want the team to play and experiment. And then setting the boundaries and the limits is kind of the hard thing because if it’s too open, then there’s nothing really directionally happening. If it’s too broad, then it’s just an objective that’s very clear. If it’s broad enough and has enough of the right incentives, then people are going to stumble on things that are new, that you’ve never thought of before, that have a great value. And those are the things that we care the most. Valenzuela’s approach is so different from traditional leadership, leaning into experimentation rather than specific goals, and reframing plans on a weekly basis. It’s an approach that could make a lot of people uneasy. I talked about this with Clara Shih, who’s led AI business at Salesforce and at Meta. She offered practical insights about navigating what’s hype and what’s imperative. Here’s me and Shih. How do leaders strike the balance between I got to be in this, versus it’s not really showing any measurable impact now yet? Clara Shih: I see this all the time from various leaders that I meet with. I think it’s first being hands-on and really getting in there and understanding the capabilities because I think with that judgment, with that firsthand experience, only then can leaders really know, “Okay, I want to apply it here, but not here.” Another really great success formula is splitting up the team, right? Having people focus on immediate use cases, what can I unlock today that will show me ROI this quarter, next quarter, versus what are the bigger bets where just I see the secular trend and we have to skate to where the puck is going. But just know that it’s going to take longer and more experiments to asymptotically hopefully get to the right answer. And then just having space and time to live in both time horizons simultaneously. What’s the day-to-day? What’s the quarter? How could I be completely screwed in six months or 12 months if I don’t have this tiger team that’s incubating experiments at startup speed? Lesson two: In an AI world, human connection is a competitive advantage AI technology is so powerful. But there’s an equally strong thread about emphasizing the human factor within enterprises, that that will truly differentiate the winners. Here’s Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb. Brian Chesky: The term AI, the important term is artificial. We’re going to live in a world where it’s not clear that what you’re seeing is real. And the opposite of artificial is real. The opposite of screen is the real world. People want real connections in the real world. Why are people feeling so lonely right now? Because they were connecting with people they don’t know, arguing with people on the internet and your Instagram followers aren’t coming to your funeral. No one changed someone else’s mind in YouTube comment section. And now pretty soon we’re going to have a situation where your friends are going to be AIs. So there has to be this movement to real. Chesky’s business at Airbnb, of course, relies on in-person interaction through home stays and experiences, but that doesn’t diminish the leadership implications of what he’s saying. The challenges and opportunities of this age come down to human choices. The choices we make about how we interact with each other defines leaders and organizations, especially because AI is changing how we’re interacting. Here’s LinkedIn’s Chief Economic Opportunity Officer, Aneesh Raman, talking about what he calls the five Cs, the core human skills for this era. Aneesh Raman: What you’ve got is sort of what I call the five Cs, this list I’ve developed with neuroscientists, courage, compassion, creativity, curiosity, and communication. Those are kind of the core skills I think that make us humans. Remember, our species until about 40,000 years ago wasn’t the only sapiens around. And we were never the biggest, we were never the fastest. What allowed us to emerge as the apex species on this planet is that we were able to adapt in really important ways by those five Cs in how we both told really complex stories through language and then how we organized to increase scale around things like nation states. So that’s going to come to the center of it all for us and we’ve got to shore those skills up. Lesson three: The most important decisions are simple and brave When uncertainty is high, clarity of mission matters more than ever. For some, new pressure served as a valuable reminder of what was most important. Here’s an exchange I had with Alexis McGill Johnson, president of Planned Parenthood, who’s been in the crosshairs of the Trump administration all year. Alexis McGill Johnson: I feel concern that a number of really critical institutions in our society are feeling a financial pressure to, I think in many ways, go against thir core values. Your values are … That’s your integrity. That’s who you are. So I cannot actually stand here and say, “We’re going to walk away from the very communities that we have committed ourselves to providing care for.” It sounds like you wish maybe that there was a little more bravery from some other leaders whose, I don’t know, whose missions may not be as clearly values-based all the time. Two things come to mind here. One is watching people obey in advance, comply in advance before the actual directives come, which I think sends a signal that people are willing to kind of stand down. But I think we’re also missing the collective action here, that there is a logic of collective action that means that when we actually stay kind of arms linked and say, “You know what? We are going to stand with the rule of law and what we believe the Constitution says here.” I think it really is about linking arms and understanding that that is really the kind of strongest attack back in some ways to the kinds of things that we are facing. When it comes to decision making, I often think of a framework Brian Chesky has talked about, focusing on what he calls principle decisions versus business decisions, choices that you’ll be proud of even if things don’t go your way. It seems pretty simple, but then the most important decisions often are if boiled down to their essence. Jessica Berman, commissioner of the National Women’s Soccer League, keeps a pile of children’s books on the coffee table in her office to remind her team to ground themselves in the basics. Here’s Berman. Jessica Berman: Every single leadership lesson you need in life, you learned when you were five It’s such a great analog for people to humanize and boil down sometimes hard to talk about or complex concepts that are really interpersonal. Is there a book that right now, a children’s book that you find yourself going to more? I have one. We’re Going on a Bear Hunt. Guess what? You can’t go around it. You can’t go over it. You can’t go under it. You just have to go through it. And that is the story of challenges in life, and so we cite that in our office almost every single day.
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E-Commerce
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