It might be time for Apple to think different. The tech giant is losing talent, seemingly falling behind in the AI race, and getting unsolicited feedback from Justin Bieber. But the biggest issue driving it all may be that CEO Tim Cook is losing his sous chefs left and right.

In the last week alone, Apple announced four of his direct reports would be leaving the company:

• Alan Dye, VP of interface design, is joining rival Meta.
• General Counsel Kate Adams is retiring next year.
• Lisa Jackson, VP of environment, policy, and social initiatives, is also retiring next year.
• Aaand AI chief John Giannandrea is…retiring next year.

That’s a lot of volatility for a C-suite that has only had two chief executives since 1997 (Cook and Steve Jobs).

It may get worse: Bloomberg reports that Johny Srouji, the senior VP of hardware tech, who runs Apple’s in-house chips effort, has also told Cook he’s considering a change of scenery, though Apple is trying to figure out a way to keep him around.

AI is costing jobs…with a twist

Giannandrea, the AI chief, was pushed out after Apple struggled to leverage its hardware advantages into Siri (let alone Apple Intelligence) dominance, ceding the chatbot lead to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.

Researchers and engineers have also been jumping ship, joining Meta, OpenAI, and several AI startups, taking an even bigger bite out of Apple’s AI push.

Will Apple keep letting Tim cook? The CEO just turned 65, but he isn’t expected to step down anytime soon. He’s expressed (probably sincere) optimism about the company’s upcoming product lineup. But industry watchers are having some doubts. Prediction markets anticipate about a 50-50 shot that Cook is still the CEO by the end of 2026.—BC

Los Angeles issued first occupancy permit in Pacific Palisades since wildfires. It’s been almost a year since the Palisades Fire in California began in January 2025. On Saturday, the developer Thomas James Homes hosted an open-house-style event at the ~4,000-square-foot home it’s completed building at 915 Kagawa St., the first in the Palisades to receive a certificate of occupancy since the tragedy, according to the office of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. While some locals see it as a sign of hope for the community, others dispute the milestone. Thomas James Homes bought the home for $3.4 million two months before the fire, according to the Wall Street Journal, and planned to conduct a complete demolition, but the wildfire destroyed it before that could happen. The developer is not selling the house; instead, it’s being used as a model home for the 100 additional houses it hopes to build in Pacific Palisades next year.

Trump hosted Kennedy Center Honors, a first for a president. President Donald Trump and the first lady attended the Kennedy Center Honors on Sunday, months after removing the organization’s bipartisan leadership. According to the Associated Press, the president said during a dinner for the honorees on Saturday that he would be hosting “at the request of a certain television network.” CBS and Paramount+ will air the ceremony on Dec. 23. Both are owned by Paramount Skydance, which is heavily funded by Larry Ellison, a top Trump ally. While walking the red carpet for the event, Trump told reporters that the Netflix–Warner Bros. Discovery deal has “to go through a process, and we’ll see what happens.” He confirmed that he had met with Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos last week, whom he called “fantastic.” The president said he would be involved in deciding whether to green-light the deal. The 2025 Kennedy Center honorees included Sylvester Stallone, Gloria Gaynor, George Strait, the rock band Kiss, and former Phantom of the Opera star Michael Crawford.

A pipe burst at the Louvre, damaging hundreds of tomes. France’s national museum and art gallery can’t seem to catch a break. The Louvre’s deputy general administrator said that flooding last week led to a pipe bursting in one of the rooms of the Egyptian antiquities department’s library, soaking 300 to 400 books, visual periodicals, archaeology journals, and other works, some of which date back to the 1800s. A complete count of affected items is being conducted, and museum staff are attempting to dry and dehumidify them. A major renovation of the Louvre’s HVAC had been planned beginning in September 2026 including the area of the museum affected by the damaged pipe. Didier Rykner, a French art historian, wrote in La Tribune de l’Art that the antiquities department had repeatedly asked the deputy general administrator for funds “to protect these books from a potential rupture of the pipes running through the false ceilings, whose state of dilapidation is well known.”—HVL

On Friday, President Trump posted to Truth Social, “I have just approved TINY CARS to be built in America.” He was referring to kei cars, which he said last week might solve the auto affordability crisis in America. Market watchers aren’t so sure.

What exactly is a kei car?

Pronounced like “kay,” they can actually be cars, trucks, or vans. It’s a vehicle category in Japan for autos that are at most ~11 feet long, ~4.9 feet wide, and ~6.6 feet tall.

By comparison, the last gas-powered Smart Car that was sold new in the US before Mercedes-Benz stopped offering them stateside is too big and powerful to be considered a kei car in Japan, according to Car and Driver.

Due to their small size, kei cars don’t meet current US safety standards, and changes to the vehicles and the regulations would be needed. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told CNBC that kei cars are “probably not” for anyone who wants to drive on a freeway, but “if there’s a market for those vehicles, I want to give our manufacturers the opportunity to build those cars.”

Big picture: “The auto market in the United States is going toward bigger, more luxurious cars,” David Friedman, the former acting administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, told the New York Times. It’s not clear that automakers want to make vehicles that cost $10,000 brand-new.—HVL

The Fed makes a call on interest rates: Analysts anticipate the Federal Reserve will announce a third straight rate cut on Wednesday, following their meeting this week, but don’t expect the decision to be unanimous. Not all policymakers are sold on lowering rates, especially since the data picture is still fuzzy following the government shutdown. Investors will also watch for any clues about what the central bank might do when it meets again at the end of January.

SCOTUS hears arguments today on Trump’s firing of an FTC regulator: In March, President Trump fired two Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission’s board, Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya. Both sued, arguing that Trump’s actions violated legal precedent. Bedoya later dropped his suit, but Slaughter stuck with the case as appeals courts offered up conflicting rulings until it reached the Supreme Court. The case could reshape presidential authority over federal agencies. It’s one of several cases that the high court’s justices will hear regarding the extent of presidential power this term.

Who will win college football’s most prestigious award? Besides being the easiest award to high-five, the Heisman Trophy recognizes college football’s top player. Finalists will be announced today, and a winner will be named on Saturday night. Indiana QB Fernando Mendoza and Vanderbilt QB Diego Pavia have the best odds of taking the trophy home. Mendoza may have the edge after his Hoosiers shocked Ohio State over the weekend to win the Big Ten championship and secure the top overall pick in the College Football Playoff.

Everything else:

• AutoZone, GameStop, Campbell’s, and Cracker Barrel report earnings tomorrow.
• The NBA’s in-season tournament, the NBA Cup, enters into knockout rounds tomorrow.
• Oracle, Adobe, and Synopsys deliver results on Wednesday.
• Australia’s social media ban for children under 16 takes effect on Wednesday.
• Broadcom, Costco, and Lululemon report earnings on Thursday.
• The White House hosts a summit on Friday for officials from eight allied countries as part of an effort to bolster supply chains for materials needed to power AI.
• The End of an Era, a six-episode docuseries on Taylor Swift’s record-breaking concert tour, premieres on Disney+ this Friday.
• Ella McCay, a political comedy directed by James L. Brooks, will be in theaters on Friday.
• Hanukkah begins on Sunday night.

Beeple is back, people. At Art Basel 2025 in Miami—which in past years brought us banana taped to wall and the ATM leaderboard—the artist most associated with NFTs brought flesh-colored robo dogs adorned with the heads of famous artists and tech titans for a project called “Regular Animals.”

According to the Wall Street Journal, Beeple made two dogs each to resemble himself, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Andy Warhol, Elon Musk, and Pablo Picasso. (Beeple, whose real name is Mike Winkelmann, said he’s also keeping an “artist’s proof” of each version.) Oh, and the dogs kind of poop NFTs:

• Beeple said of his choice of human inspos, “Increasingly our worldview is being reshaped by tech giants, specifically Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, who control powerful algorithms. They decide what we see and what we don’t see. I also wanted to put the idea forward that we are increasingly seeing the world through the lens of AI.”
• He did that by outfitting the chest of each dog with a camera so that it walks around snapping photos. Those images then go through AI filters before some of them “print” from the dogs’ rear ends.
• They were expected to produce around 1,000 prints over the course of the art fair, which wrapped yesterday. “Around 256” of them were to include QR codes that could be redeemed for an NFT of the image, according to Beeple.

The dogs were priced at $100,000 each and completely sold out. Beeple’s NFT collage “Everydays: the First 5,000 Days” sold at Christie’s in 2021 for $69.3 million, breaking the record for any digital art, before the non-fungible token market largely collapsed starting in 2022. Now, he’s focused on creating physical art that ties into the digital world.—HVL