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👋 Good morning. It’s especially good if you’re Cristiano Ronaldo, who just topped Forbes' list of the world’s highest-paid athletes for the fourth year in a row with an estimated $300m in earnings ($235m on the field and $65m off). The 50 athletes on the list made a collective $4.1B in the last 12 months and the cutoff to make the list hit an all-time high of $54.6m.

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NEWS FLASH

A copper nugget is turned into copper rods.

♻️ One man’s trash… is another man’s solution to the copper shortage. Startup Red Metals wants to extract copper from discarded materials instead of digging new mines. The problem is pressing: Copper demand could grow 50% by 2040 — to power data centers and electric cars — and supply is projected to drop, causing a 10m-metric-ton shortfall. The startup is building a $70m facility in South Carolina that will use AI to sort copper in everything from old Christmas lights to discarded motors, turning it into copper rods that consumers can use.

📈 Amazon on top: Amazon’s 2025 revenue jumped 12% YoY to $700B+. It now tops the Fortune 500, knocking Walmart from the perch it held for 13 years. Amazon, which first appeared on the list at No. 492 in 2002, is now one of just four companies to reach No. 1 in the list's 72-year history alongside Walmart, General Motors, and ExxonMobil. The list ranks companies by total annual revenue, meaning more profitable companies may actually rank lower. For example, Google owner Alphabet is this year’s most profitable company, but ranks fifth.

⛰️ Great news, Supernatural fans: The popular VR fitness game that lets players work up a sweat in a scenic vista isn’t dead, after all. Meta, which acquired Supernatural maker Within in 2023, is letting the app’s team spin off into its own company, Supernatural Health. The new VR experience will launch for Quest in fall 2026 with the same founders and coaches.

MORE NEWS TO KNOW

RIP: NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) has ended its mission after 11+ years orbiting Mars. NASA lost contact with the spacecraft on Dec. 6 and believes it’s no longer recoverable.
No one is safe from the protein trend… even kids. Startup Frosh wants to bulk up the juice box with 5 grams of whey protein per serving and is now being sold in 1.6k+ Target locations.
Don’t blame the bot: A study from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found it's remote work, not AI, that’s bumping unemployment among young college grads, as it’s harder to train and mentor them from afar.
Preparing for launch: Elon Musk’s SpaceX set the share price for its IPO at $135, which would value the company at $1.77T and make it the world’s largest IPO.

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THE BIG IDEA

A real game changer: Women’s merch gets a makeover

There are two kinds of fouls that take place at NBA games: one happens on the court and the other inside stadiums’ merch stores.

We’re talking about the foul selection of women’s sports apparel, which usually consists of a few shrunken, sometimes pink (and frankly fugly) versions of the men’s options.

Danielle Snyder found herself confronting this issue in 2021, when she — a woman with spirit but also taste — couldn’t figure out what to wear to a Golden State Warriors game and ended up DIYing her own outfit, per The New York Times.

When her creations started catching the attention of other fans, she realized she wasn’t the only one yearning for more stylish game day apparel and eventually turned her passion project into DannijoPro, a sports brand for fashionable girlies.

Nothing but net (and knits)

The brand’s fanwear comes in crocheted, bedazzled, chambray, and cropped styles, priced from ~$100 to $400+ and, thanks to an NBA licensing deal, emblazoned with team logos and names.

Two years since launching, DannijoPro has collaborated with brands like Gap and Revolve, and is now sold at multiple stadiums across the country, including Madison Square Garden, where its sales are up 150% YoY.

It’s become a hit among the growing league of women sports fans, worn by celebrities and WAGs from Brooke Shields to Ayesha Curry.

A win for female fans

Despite representing one of the industry’s fastest-growing segments, women sports fans are an underserved consumer base within the $36B sports merchandise market.

While ~72% of women identify as avid sports fans, 66% of women in a 2025 study said sports orgs don’t understand or appeal to them.
In a survey by Klarna, 79% of female sports fans said they’d buy more merch if there were better options, with 28% reporting trouble finding styles they liked.

In 2024, Front Office Sports referred to the women’s sports merch market as a “supply desert.” Like DannijoPro, other brands are now starting to fill that space.

Some are addressing the void of merch for women’s sports teams in particular, like Playa Society, which offers styles for WNBA and NCAA fans, and Dead Dirt, a seven-figure business hawking soccer jerseys for the NWSL.
Popular retailers like I.AM.GIA are pushing sporty aesthetics ahead of the World Cup.

As for the stans who don’t resonate with what limited merch has become available (or don’t want to pay hundreds for them), knitting your own sports swag is also an option.

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HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Poppi: You know it, you probably love it, and now you can hear the story behind how one entrepreneur grew it into a $2B brand.

NEWSWORTHY NUMBER

How much money online influencing is bringing in for farmers like Nick Welker, a fourth-generation wheat farmer from Montana with 1m+ followers across social media. By contrast, he told The Wall Street Journal, farming itself might bring in just $5k during a bad crop year. He’s one of a growing number of “aginfluencers” milking the public’s current interest in cowboy culture to supplement their incomes amid a rough patch for the agricultural industry.

In 2024, 86% of family farms made a majority of their income from off-farm sources, including content creation and branded merch, according to the most recent US Agriculture Department data via WSJ.

AROUND THE WEB

📅 On this day: In 1880, playwright George Bernard Shaw quit his day job at the Edison Telephone Company to devote his time to writing.

🧛 That’s interesting: The Icelandic translation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula was actually a completely different book.

🗞️ Newsletter: CEO Report delivers concise, high-impact news every evening.

😱 Huh: In honor of the new Scary Movie, there’s a website where you can tell Ghostface what to do.

🐻 Aww: An unexpected guest.

SHOWER THOUGHT

How long do you have to sit on the toilet playing games before it becomes a hobby? SOURCE

Today's email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah and Singdhi Sokpo.

Editing by: Sara "Heavy knitter" Friedman.

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🏀 Merch gets a makeover