🪇 Puerto Rico Is About To Take Over The Super Bowl Halftime Show

In today’s newsletter I discuss how Puerto Rico’s Bad Bunny Is About To Take Over The Super Bowl Halftime Show, there’s a new trailer for ‘Greenland: Migration’, DoorDash unveiled a delivery robot named Dot, SWIFT is coming for Ripple’s XRP, Apple has decided to postpone Academy Award winner Jessica Chastain’s new thriller 'The Savant' at the last minute, and video game maker Electronic Arts is going private for $55 billion dollars.

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🪇 Puerto Rico Is About To Take Over The Super Bowl Halftime Show

Latin American superstar Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, better known as Bad Bunny, has been chosen to headline the Apple Music Super Bowl Halftime Show on Sunday, February 8, 2026. This is a big deal for the Super Bowl, but also for global entertainment economics. This engagement solidifies Bad Bunny’s position as one of the hottest performers worldwide, and gives the National Football League access to a demographic that demonstrates overwhelming spending power. The Latin music industry is a massive and rapidly expanding market. Recorded music revenues in the Latin American region grew by a remarkable 22.5% in 2024 alone. No wonder the NFL jumped on the opportunity to sign Bad Bunny!

Bad Bunny is one of the most commercially dominant artists in the world, with his success largely driven by streaming and touring. He has amassed over 115.8 million equivalent records sold worldwide and his songs have accumulated close to 100 billion total streams on platforms like Spotify and YouTube. His massive tours grossed hundreds of millions in revenue. His 2024 ‘Most Wanted Tour’ grossed approximately $210.9 million. Bad Bunny's net wealth is currently estimated at $80 million dollars.

He just finished his Puerto Rican residency in San Juan, and it’s estimated that the total economic impact for Puerto Rico could be between $380 to $700 million dollars, including ticket sales and massive visitor spending, and ticket sales for the residency alone accounted for approximately $97 million dollars, demonstrating concentrated demand for his live performance rights. In 2022, Bad Bunny’s ‘El Último Tour Del Mundo’ and the ‘World's Hottest Tour’ combined set an industry record for the highest grossing tours in a calendar year, pulling in over $435 million dollars. This figure was before Taylor Swift’s ‘Eras Tour’ easily took over the record for the highest grossing tour of all time, with over $2 billion dollars in revenue.

This remarkable success, which came on the heels of his all Spanish language album ‘Un Verano Sin Ti’, or ‘A Summer Without You’ in English, became the best-selling album of 2022 in the United States, proving his ability to convert global popularity into significant capital returns. The Super Bowl Halftime Show is sure to boost Bad Bunny’s global brand and future earnings, though performers don’t actually get paid for performing at the Super Bowl Halftime Show. It’s that much of an honor!

The Super Bowl LX will take place at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, California, and is slated to be broadcast live on NBC, drawing on the massive financial momentum established by previous years. The Super Bowl Halftime Show is one of the most-watched live performances in the world, attracting millions of viewers globally. Bad Bunny already has worldwide fame, now he’ll be able to include Super Bowl Halftime performer on his resume.

🎮 Business

Investment group Silver Lake Partners, Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners, and Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund have agreed to acquire video game maker Electronic Arts for $55 billion dollars, which comes out to $210 dollars per share. This historic transaction is the largest leveraged buyout ever! And you can be sure there won’t be any hold ups or FTC investigations. It's good to have a powerful family behind you for these kinds of deals.

🍿 Entertainment

The new trailer for ‘Greenland 2: Migration’ just dropped, and I’m on the edge of my seat waiting for it to come out on January 9, 2026. I’m a big fan of the first movie ‘Greenland’, and if you haven’t seen it yet you can check it out on HBO Max.

🤖 Tech

DoorDash unveiled an autonomous delivery robot, named Dot, developed in-house and currently operating in the Phoenix metro area. The robot is capable of carrying up to 30 pounds of food at up to 20 MPH, which is just enough capacity for my family to order Taco Bell for a late night “Fourth Meal.

📺 Streaming

Apple has decided to postpone Academy Award winner Jessica Chastain’s new thriller 'The Savant' at the last minute just before it was scheduled to premier on September 27 due to the recent increase in gun violence and shootings that have occurred. While I do believe in being sensitive to current events, this looks like a great show that sheds light on the importance of countering terrorism, and I for one look forward to its release when the timing is right.

🪙 Crypto

SWIFT just announced they’re creating their own blockchain-based shared ledger to modernize cross-border payments, and they’ve already partnered with over 30 major institutions like JPMorgan and HSBC. The initiative, which SWIFT CEO Javier Pérez-Tasso described as a commitment to enhancing the future of payments, attempts to throw some serious shade on Ripple’s XRP vision of replacing the financial messaging leader with their own XRP crypto token. Ripple’s CEO Brad Garlinghouse has said he believes XRP could capture 14 percent of SWIFT's transaction volume. As a long term XRP crypto token holder I continue to stand by my belief that Ripple will continue to have a big impact on the cross-border transaction industry, and SWIFT’s attempts to copy what Ripple’s XRP has already accomplished will not fool anyone in the industry.

📡 Space

A new Space solar startup named Aetherflux, which was founded by Robinhood’s co-founder Baiju Bhatt in October 2024, has raised a total of $60 million dollars including $10 million dollars of his own personal capital. The company plans to deploy a constellation of small satellites in Low Earth Orbit to collect solar energy and wirelessly beam it to small ground stations using infrared lasers, with a major space demonstration mission scheduled for 2026, which will take off on a SpaceX rocket. This technology aims to provide power to remote military sites and disaster zones, proving that turning sci-fi into reality is just a matter of already being rich then raising another $50 million dollars to start your own Space startup.

🏈 Sports

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell is actively pursuing his long term goal of establishing new international franchises. He’s also working on increasing the league’s revenue to $25 billion dollars by 2027 as part of this global growth strategy. Internal discussions among NFL owners have floated the idea of a four team European division, with the expansion fee for each club estimated to be in the range of $3 billion dollars to $5 billion dollars. Given that the current collective bargaining agreement extends through the 2030 season, Roger Goodell has plenty of time to find a few eccentric billionaires who are willing to spend over $5 billion dollars on a NFL football team located overseas.

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irl Media NEWSLETTER is written, edited, and published by Chris Thompson.