Good Morning. From a Miami courtroom to a faked Polymarket screen to a packed Toy Story showing, the dollar figures are enormous today.

We also cover a sitcom legend's passing, a green DC landmark, and Pizza Hut's $2.7B exit (forwarded this email? Join 523k readers).

Coca-Cola faces the IRS in a Miami federal appeals court June 25, with more than $20 billion at stake. The fight centers on whether Coke booked too much profit abroad and too little in the US.

The IRS won the first round in Tax Court in 2020, and Coke paid $6 billion. The decade-long dispute covers 2007 through 2009 returns and a contested 1996 agreement over cross-border transactions.

A full loss could cost Coke roughly $14 billion more for 2010 through 2025, plus a higher tax rate going forward. The company has booked accounting costs for just $520 million, betting on a win. Huge stakes for both.

Prediction market Polymarket paid dozens of mostly college-age creators to film fake trading videos, an investigation published June 20 found. The creators placed bets on near-perfect copies of the site, hiding their company ties (WSJ).

Reviewers examined over 1,100 videos. In 70%, a bet was placed, totaling $1.9 million, none real. One creator appeared to win $100,000 betting Trump would publicly say McDonald's in January, using a clip from two months earlier (more on this army of fake creators, here).

Across 118 videos showing wins, creators claimed nearly $900,000, though real bets would have lost over $166,000. Polymarket, banned from US crypto trading since 2022, said it will audit promotional content. The clips drew 140 million-plus views.

Hollywood is having its strongest box office since before the pandemic. Disney's "Toy Story 5" opened over the weekend to an estimated $312 million globally, the second-best debut ever for a Pixar film.

Domestically the sequel pulled $160 million, the biggest US and Canada opening since April 2025. Total domestic box office this year sits near $4.46 billion, the highest since 2019. Ticket sales are up 7% to 312 million.

Executives project domestic receipts could near or top $10 billion this year, beating the $8.9 billion postpandemic record from 2023. The boom is credited to Hollywood releasing more films than any year since 2019.

▲ Tarantino says 2019 was the last year of good movies

At age twenty, Benjamin Franklin built himself a chart. Thirteen virtues, one row each, and every night he marked where he fell short. He ran that scorecard for fifty years and became an inventor, a diplomat, and a founding father. It was the original 1 percent better, done with a quill.

The three words he is still quoted for, healthy, wealthy, and wise, were the whole stack, and he put them in that order on purpose. Health is the energy everything else runs on. Wealth is the options that buy back your time. Wisdom is what keeps the first two from going to waste.

Now picture him with Claude. Franklin taught himself to write by rewriting great essays from memory and hunting for where his came up short. He ran a debate club, the Junto, just to have sharp minds to think against. He made his hard calls with what he called moral algebra, weighing every reason for and against by hand.

Each of those was a workaround for a thinking partner he never had. He likely would have used Claude to pressure-test an argument at five in the morning, grade his own writing line by line, and run his nightly audit without lifting a quill. The man got a lifetime of output from a notebook. Imagine him with this.

Researchers once tracked comic book creators across 234 publishers to find what predicts a blockbuster. Not years in the field, not the publisher's budget, not how many comics you had already shipped. The single biggest predictor was how many different genres a creator had worked across. One person with range beat entire teams of specialists.

David Epstein calls this the import-export business of ideas. Breakthroughs happen when you carry something from one field into another. It is why Bowie, who genre-hopped so much early on that it looked like career sabotage, got a forty-year run while the specialists who outsold him faded in ten.

Here is the catch for you. The wandering is not the opposite of mastery, it is the training for it. Van Gogh flamed out of five careers before his experiments finally collided into a style no one had ever seen. The move is to go deep in a few places, then connect them. Your weird side projects are probably not the distraction you have been told they are.

▲ James Burrows, "Cheers" and "Friends" director, dies at 85 after 1,000-plus sitcom episodes | Get his memoir

▲ DC Reflecting Pool battles algae after $14.7 million renovation as Trump cites vandalism, five arrested

▲ Alex Freeman, 21, scores to send USA into World Cup knockouts; son of Packers legend | Watch Alex score

▲ Claude Guillemot, Ubisoft co-founder behind Assassin's Creed, dies in French plane crash

▲ Pizza Hut sells for $2.7 billion in two deals after losing U.S. market to Domino's

Interview with Robinhood’s Founder [WSJ]

Real-time fact-checker for politicians [Post]

Chocolate chunk banana pancakes [Recipe]

Heinz exposes cheap competitors [Post]

The right age to watch Jurassic Park? [Video]

Naval: Don’t worry about “wasting” tokens [Video]

For the man everyone leans on [Partner*]