Crypto News: Movie parents are not OK

Sunday is Hollywood's big night, when the Academy Awards are handed out. Bloomberg Pursuits editor-at-large Chris Rovzar writes that there's a good chance an actor will win an Oscar for playing a very anxious parent. Plus: The Iran war hits the two-week mark, and it's revealing more about AI-powered tools of war. And in lighter news, college basketball's March Madness brings a rush to sign viral stars (free link), and we have a lot of questions about Trump's habit of giving away shoes.

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"You two turned out fine, didn't you?" Stellan Skarsgård, playing the notoriously difficult film auteur Gustav Borg, nervously asks his two daughters during the Norwegian film Sentimental Value. The pair has accused him of abandoning them midway through childhood, leaving them to take care of each other—and their emotionally unstable mother. He argues that his absence was the only choice, and in the end, it made them stronger.

Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas in Sentimental Value. Photographer: Kasper Tuxen/Cannes Film Festival

It's a deep anxiety that runs through many of the films which, like Sentimental Value, are nominated for best picture at Sunday's Academy Awards: Are the kids all right? Have we properly protected them? The answer is brutally mixed: Children in Sinners, Train Dreams and Hamnet don't fare so well. In fact, if you are the kind of person who likes to see all the nominated films during awards season—and you're a parent—it's been a rough couple of months.

Oscar-nominated director Joachim Trier (The Worst Person in the World) lets Borg off easy. His daughters are grown, healthy adults—one fulfilled by family, the other her career. A catharsis is reached, or at least a détente. Fellow nominee Paul Thomas Anderson, director of One Battle After Another, absolves his hero too: Leonardo DiCaprio's Bob Ferguson is a terrible father, paranoid, stoned, simultaneously overprotective and utterly absent. Over the course of the movie, he goes to incredible lengths to rescue his daughter (Chase Infiniti), which is heroic but hilarious in its haplessness. Maybe his daughter doesn't need to be saved—despite her father's flaws or, generously, perhaps because of them, she has grown up to be sharp and brave and good. Better than he is.

Roughly the same lesson is learned from Guillermo Del Toro's Frankenstein, even: Dads can be the worst, but their kids don't have to be.

This optimistic take is a far cry from the portrait painted by women directors this past year, who instead explore the never-ending not-enoughness of motherhood. Rose Byrne is up for best actress for a harrowing performance in Mary Bronstein's If I Had Legs I'd Kick You. Byrne's Linda is trapped in a tiny torture chamber of a life, with a daughter suffering from a mysterious illness, an apartment falling apart and nearly every person around her failing to offer help or solace. It's One Trauma After Another, a Black Swan where the impossibly high-wire performance is not ballet but motherhood. Are the problems in her imagination? Are they her fault? We don't know, but Linda is left to swear, "I'll be better."

Although Jennifer Lawrence wasn't nominated for Die My Love, directed by Lynne Ramsay (We Need to Talk About Kevin), she delivered a similarly jagged tour de force as a wild, lonesome mom engulfed in the flames of postpartum depression as she sifts through the ashes of a once hot-and-heavy marriage. Set in a deceptively bucolic countryside, the portrait is Christina's World for a woman on fire.

Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal in Hamnet. Source: TIFF

If you are a parent and you want a bit of both perspectives, you might try to catch Hamnet before Sunday's ceremony. Chloe Zhao is gentle on both William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and his wife, Agnes (Jessie Buckley), walking with Agnes as she suffers every mother's worst nightmare. There can be comfort for the worst terrors of being a parent, the film tells us—and, if not absolution, at least catharsis. And from those anxieties and sorrows, great art can be made.

Related from Bloomberg Pursuits: My $812 Night Out Started and Ended in a Movie Theater

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AI on the Battlefield

Illustration: enigmatriz for Bloomberg Businessweek

On a recent Friday night, the US made two drastic moves that could end up altering the future of artificial-intelligence-powered warfare. Just after 5 p.m. Eastern time on Feb. 27, Donald Trump's administration declared that Anthropic PBC, the $380 billion startup whose Claude-branded AI products have recently become ubiquitous, was a supply chain risk. In addition to making consumer-facing chatbots and coding tools, Anthropic had major contracts to provide AI services to the military. That relationship had gone sour when the company refused to allow its tech to help enable mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons, while the government said it should be able to use the tech for all lawful purposes. With its move, the administration blacklisted one of the country's most promising tech startups, as if it were something run by the Chinese military. President Trump also derided Anthropic on social media as a "Radical Left AI company."

About eight hours later, the US bombed Iran. The campaign wasn't exactly the robo-war that Anthropic objected to, but it did include signs that such a future could be rapidly approaching. Using an AI-enabled mission control called Maven Smart System, the US attacked 1,000 targets in the war's first 24 hours, about twice the scale of the shock-and-awe campaign in Iraq in 2003. Within 10 days it had hit 5,000 targets, according to US Central Command.

The US had previously used Maven Smart System to share targeting information with Ukraine in 2022 and then in strikes against Iraq, Syria and the Houthis in 2024. But the Iran attacks were the technology's biggest test to date.

Katrina Manson, in an excerpt from her coming book Project Maven, shows how the US enlisted Silicon Valley in its vision for AI warfare: 'God, It's Terrifying': How the Pentagon Got Hooked on AI War Machines

Listen to the Big Take podcast: The Pentagon Is Embracing AI in Warfare. Where Are the Guardrails?

Live Updates on the War: US Says Today's Strikes on Iran Will Be Heaviest So Far

Markets: Brent Oil Trades Above $100 as US Steps Up Strikes on Iran

Weekend Essay: The Trauma of Conflict in Iran Will Reshape the Gulf

In Brief

US consumer spending barely rose in January after economic growth was weaker than previously reported at the end of last year.
The spike in oil prices and growing concerns around private credit are causing market activity to resemble the lead-up to the 2008 global financial crisis, according to Bank of America's Michael Hartnett.
The job market for recent college graduates in New York is worsening. The total number of available entry-level jobs in the city fell 37% from 2022 to 2024.

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On the Podcast

This week on the Everybody's Business podcast from Bloomberg Businessweek, hosts Stacey Vanek Smith and Max Chafkin dive into the relationship between the price of gasoline and the global price of oil. They explore why very expensive oil might be sticking around despite President Donald Trump's on-again-off-again declarations of victory in Iran and what the political fallout might be for the midterms. Plus: Bloomberg News reporter Ben Steverman joins the show to discuss the Wild West that is white-collar salaries.

Listen and subscribe to Everybody's Business on Apple, Spotify, iHeart and the Bloomberg Terminal.

Trump Investments

$750 million

That's how much money American Ventures, a fund that counts President Donald Trump's eldest sons as partners, has invested in drone companies. The Trumps' involvement comes as the US military is deploying unmanned aircraft in the Iran conflict and looking for cheaper ways to shoot down enemy drones.

Signing Cinderella

Illustration: Alex Gamsu Jenkins for Bloomberg Businessweek

Two years ago, during the first round of the men's college basketball national championship, Jack Gohlke of Oakland University in Michigan became an overnight sensation. Gohlke, a 6-foot-3 guard from suburban Milwaukee who looks, as one teammate put it, like a "high school history teacher," came off the bench and hit ten 3-pointers in an upset win over the University of Kentucky. The spectacular shooting performance, combined with Gohlke's everyman appearance, made him a viral folk hero, with fans online trading quips about the "future insurance salesman" with the "hairline of a man twice his age" who had taken down a blue blood program. It was a textbook example of why the tournament is known as March Madness.

For Gohlke, the madness was only beginning. After the game, his teammates told him he should probably check his phone. His Instagram account, which began the day with about a thousand followers, was adding thousands by the hour. Hundreds of messages were pouring in from friends and family offering congratulations, and from brands offering sponsorship deals. "It was just too crazy for me to handle," Gohlke says. "I was not prepared for anything like that."

As Ira Boudway writes in a new Field Day column, once the NCAA changed its rules to allow athletes to profit from their name, image and likeness, or NIL, the tournament's breakout stars have had the opportunity to cash in on their sudden and often short-lived celebrity: The Real March Madness Is the Corporate Race to Ink Viral Stars (🎁)

What's Up With the Florsheims?

Trump hosting a bilateral meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in the Oval Office on March 3. Photographer: Daniel Torok/White House

Of the many inconsequential tribulations you're likely to suffer in daily life, there are few more irritating than ill-fitting shoes. The day-ruining agony of an itty-bitty toe blister or ankle booboo is easy to dismiss until you're the one at work having a raw spot raked into your skin with every step you take, the relief of your fuzzy house slippers miles away and many hours in your future. Choosing the right footwear for yourself is an important personal choice, and for that reason (and other, more HR-relevant ones that I trust you can imagine), shoes aren't a gift commonly exchanged among co-workers.

Donald Trump's White House, of course, isn't most workplaces. This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump has taken to distributing pairs of Florsheim dress shoes, which retail for about $145, to favored allies both inside and outside the administration, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Fox News star Sean Hannity. Apparently the president sometimes hands over the new kicks in autographed shoeboxes. Indeed, once the shoes have been brought to your attention—especially Trump's own preferred shiny black leather Oxfords—it's difficult to miss them in photos of senior administration officials attending events with the president.

Amanda Mull, in a new Buying Power column, has a long list of questions about the president's gift giving: Let's Talk About Trump's Shoe Thing

Brazil's Gen Z

"Mounting economic, social and existential insecurities have driven many young people toward right-wing ideas that emphasize a return to order. Religion amplifies this appeal by offering a coherent narrative of moral stability that seems to address these concerns."

Flavia Biroli

Political scientist at Universidade de Brasília

The growing religious zeal of young voters is poised to shape elections in Latin America's largest country. Read the full story here.