The Saga for WBD Continues; OpenClaw’s Brightest Hired at OpenAI; and People Are PAYING to Land Interviews?

Warner’s board just reopened the bidding table briefly entertaining Paramount’s “best and final” even as it pushes shareholders to stick with the signed Netflix deal, turning Hollywood into a high-stakes auction over the future of premium content. Meanwhile, the job market has a new paywall: desperate candidates are spending thousands on “reverse recruitment” just to land interviews, a troubling sign that access to opportunity is becoming monetized. In AI, OpenClaw’s founder is joining OpenAI as the open-source bot becomes a foundation, and Nvidia + Meta just secured millions more chips because in this race, compute and distribution decide winners. All this and more in today’s Read It and Eat!

Markets Around The World

Markets as of 17th February 2026. Cells in RED mean that the value is down, cells in Green mean the value is up.

MAJOR HEADLINES

• It’s not over until the Warner Bros Sign; Paramount Increases Offer just to reopen discussions

  
  

Warner Bros. Discovery has taken a two-track approach: publicly urging shareholders to reject Paramount’s hostile overture while simultaneously pushing forward with its agreed merger with Netflix. At the same time, WBD has opened a narrow window to hear Paramount’s “best and final” proposal a tactical move that signals the board is weighing near-term cash and deal certainty against longer-term strategic fits. The result is a high-stakes auction atmosphere in which timing, breakup fees, and regulatory optics will determine the winner.

For shareholders, the calculus is brutally simple: accept the safe, signed path with Netflix or hold out for a potentially higher but riskier offer from Paramount. Paramount’s willingness to press a hostile bid and WBD’s temporary engagement shows both hunger for scale and the fragility of streaming economics, where owning premium libraries and global distribution translates directly into subscriber leverage and ad pricing power. Regulators will be watching closely, too: any consolidation among top studios raises antitrust questions about content gatekeeping at a time when platforms increasingly control both distribution and direct monetization.

What to watch next: formal proposals and deal structures (cash vs stock), any adjustment of Netflix’s existing agreement with WBD, and shareholder votes or poison-pill manoeuvres. If WBD accepts a Paramount sweetener, expect immediate legal and regulatory theatre; if it doubles down on Netflix, pressure will shift to how quickly the merged entity can extract synergies and scale a global streaming business. CNN

• Reverse Recruitment; People Are PAYING Recruiters to Get Interviews (We Are So Cooked)

Job-seekers who can’t break through the noise are increasingly paying recruiters to do the heavy lifting a practice now widely called “reverse recruitment.” Rather than the traditional model where employers pay headhunters, candidates are handing agencies cash to secure interview slots, introductions to hiring managers, or packaged “fast-track” pipelines into competitive roles. What began as boutique career coaching has metastasized into a pay-to-play market for access, and the headline is blunt: access now has a price.

The article lays out how the fee structures actually work in practice: some providers charge flat upfront fees for guaranteed introductions or interview slots, others sell tiered “packages” that bundle interview access with resume rewriting and mock interviews, and some operate on success-fee models that take a cut of first-year salary after a hire. In short, you can buy a seat in the interview room (or a coaching bundle to improve your odds) and prices and promises vary widely depending on the recruiter’s network and the role’s seniority. For example, a candidate who secures a role paying $100,000 a year could end up paying $13,000 in total typically structured as a $10,000 success commission once hired, plus $3,000 in ongoing monthly fees charged during the search process.

This trend raises immediate fairness and fraud questions. Paying for access privileges wealthier candidates and risks turning hiring into a two-tiered system where merit matters less than bankroll; it also opens the door to unscrupulous operators selling fake “exclusive” interviews. For applicants: vet recruiters carefully, demand written terms (what counts as a delivered “interview”), and avoid large, nonrefundable upfront payments unless you can verify outcomes. For employers, it’s a signal to audit hiring channels because if your talent pipeline is effectively being monetized by third parties, your brand and diversity goals could suffer. CBSnews

• OpenAI opens Arms in the Acqui-Hire of OpenClaw an Agentic AI Open Source Platform

OpenClaw began as an open-source project focused on personal agents software that automates tasks, chains actions across apps, and helps users manage workflows in a more autonomous way. Its founder, Peter Steinberger, built the project around community contributions and an ethos of transparency: anyone could inspect and extend the code, and early adopters praised the project for practical agent prototypes and rapid iteration. OpenClaw’s appeal was its mix of developer-friendly tooling and a clear vision for turning general-purpose models into useful, agentic assistants that do real work for people.

The move to bring OpenClaw into OpenAI is best understood as an acqui-hire an acquisition whose primary value is talent and expertise rather than the standalone product. Acqui-hires are now routine among big tech firms: companies buy teams, roadmaps, and developer communities to accelerate product roadmaps, not just to own a piece of software. This is the same acquisition model used by Facebook to take only the best and brightest from ScaleAI for $16bn while sidestepping regulations For OpenClaw, the acqui-hire path offers faster engineering support, cloud infrastructure, and commercial channels that an independent open-source project might struggle to fund on its own.

The pros and cons cut cleanly for both sides and for the broader ecosystem. For OpenAI, folding OpenClaw in accelerates development of personal agents, strengthens its talent bench, and helps ensure tighter integration between models and agent runtimes a speed advantage in a winner-take-most market. For the OpenClaw community and the wider open-source world, however, risks loom: foundation status can drift into corporate capture, contributor influence may wane, and the balance between openness and product roadmaps can tilt toward commercial priorities. More broadly, these acqui-hires turbocharge innovation but also concentrate control over agent infrastructure in a handful of labs — raising questions about interoperability, governance, data access, and who decides the safety and privacy defaults for the assistants that increasingly act on our behalf. Reuters 

• Nvidia and Meta Expand GPU Partnership with Millions More AI Chips 

Nvidia and Meta announced a deepened, multi-generational partnership that will see Nvidia supply Meta with millions of Blackwell- and Rubin-class GPUs, along with CPUs and networking gear, for both model training and inference. The deal formalizes a long arc: cloud and social platforms need scale compute for generative AI, and chipmakers need committed, high-volume buyers to justify fab investments and roadmap cadence. For Meta, securing vast GPU supply reduces choke points and guarantees capacity for aggressive model development and product rollouts.

The expanded supply pact also underscores Nvidia’s centrality to the AI stack and the economics of scale: whoever locks long-term demand can command premium pricing, accelerate node transitions, and influence software optimizations. For Meta, the partnership is about de-risking infrastructure and speeding time-to-market for new AI features that will power ads, social experiences, and creator tools. But the arrangement also tightens the industrial concentration around a few hyperscalers and chip vendors, amplifying strategic dependencies and geopolitical concerns around export controls, supply chains, and data residency.

Key things to monitor: delivery timetables and how the chips are allocated between training and real-time services; whether the deal includes co-developed silicon/software optimizations; and any downstream pricing or exclusivity provisions that could limit competitors’ access. If Meta scales aggressively with these chips, expect faster product innovation and more intense debate about who controls the compute foundations of the AI economy. Yahoo Finance

Minor Headlines

• Logan Paul sold a Pokémon card for $16.5 million to Anthony Scaramucci’s son. LAtimes 

• Anthropic reports 11% boost in daily active users following Super Bowl commercial criticizing OpenAI CNBC

• Palantir joins the wave of businesses and billionaires moving to Florida. MSN

• Japan GDP grew 0.1% in Q4 avoids technical recession and misses expectations. CNBC

• UK unemployment hits highest rate for nearly five years. BBC

•  CFTC Assert Control over Prediction Markets Regulation CNBC

• Nvidia sells remaining stake in SoftBank-backed chip designer Arm Holdings MSN

• Blackstone founder Stephen Schwarzman plans to donate his entire $48 billion fortune Times Of India