Good morning. It’s been over a week since the MrBeast x Salesforce Super Bowl ad challenged viewers to solve a puzzle for $1 million…and the puzzle still hasn't been solved. Now, MrBeast is sharing clues to help people find the answer. Anyone down to team up and split the winnings? You investigate the YouTube videos, we’ll sift through the tweets.

— Hannah Doyle & Syd Cohen

Over the weekend, creators came to play for the NBA's All-Star Weekend in Los Angeles. This year, the league invited a record 200 creators to capture content, host events, and gain exclusive access. Here’s why it matters for creators ➡️

“It’s the Super Bowl of the NBA,” sports creator Andrew Fenichel told us—the league’s biggest moment for business and culture. 

Context: All-Star Weekend is less about on-court skills (players often save their best efforts for the playoffs and Finals) and more about entertainment and brand exposure. And that makes the weekend big for creator opportunities.

This weekend, Jesser took over the NBA’s social channels, Druski and PlaqueBoyMax competed in a three-point contest, and Dude Perfect’s Cody Jones played in the celebrity all-star game. 

Fenichel said being invited meant exclusive access for his audience—and unexpected moments. 

And the fan angle? It’s considerable. For example: More than 500 fans attended a live taping of Enjoy Basketball’s Numbers on the Board podcast in downtown LA. All The Smoke podcast also hosted an event at The Lighthouse in Venice. 

So what does the NBA get out of the creator tie-ins? More eyeballs—on social feeds and TV screens alike. The NBA (which, for what it’s worth, has a history of being more lenient on copyright content) has invested heavily in creators—and it’s paid off. The league had 12% more viewers watching the Playoffs last year, an increase it largely attributed to more creator content. As the NFL and MLB ramp up their own creator efforts, the NBA is doing its best to stay ahead.

Last week, several clips of Tom Cruise fighting Brad Pitt and Spider-Man taking on a monster were all over our timelines. Why? Because 1) they were made with a new generative AI video tool from ByteDance called Seedance 2.0 and 2) they looked very real—with believable sounds, faces, and body movements.

How Seedance works →

Pushback against Seedance has been swift. SAG-AFTRA and the Motion Picture Association denounced the tool and filed copyright infringement claims against it. Disney sent a cease-and-desist letter accusing ByteDance of supplying Seedance with a “pirated library” of its copyrighted characters.

What creators are saying: Much of the sentiment is doom and gloom. “I hate to say it. It’s likely over for us,” Ryan Reese, screenwriter of movies like Deadpool and Zombieland, said on X.

Big picture: Users noted that Seedance video quality is much higher than Open AI’s Sora 2 video generator, which released late last year to similar backlash. 

OpenAI was responsive to those concerns, implementing safeguards that made it more difficult for users to violate studio copyrights. Will ByteDance do the same? Yesterday, the company said it’s “taking steps to strengthen current safeguards,” but it hasn’t explained how.

X kicked off the year with several initiatives to get more articles posted on the platform. But the noisiest? A $1 million prize for the user who posted the platform’s top article.

The winner: a tech and crypto professional who goes by Beaver (he said we could call him Chuck). His essay, “Deloitte, a $74 billion cancer metastasized across America,” received 44 million views during the two-week giveaway period. Other finalists included entrepreneurs Dan Koe and Tim Denning.

Chuck’s POV: He said the article took off fast, with 4–5 million views on day one. Elon Musk reposted it the next day, and Chuck said he gained 30K followers overnight.

“For me, X is where the synthesis of ideas happens. Typically things that happen on X are weeks or months ahead of the rest of the corporate [world],” Chuck told us.  

Big picture: X is angling to engage more creators on the platform at a time when user activity is on the decline. Daily active users decreased 10% year-over-year in 2025, three years after Musk acquired the platform.

“I think there’s room for articles on the platform and I think that’s [X’s] goal—to get as much screenshare as they can of people’s time, so the less people have to click off the better,” Chuck said.

*This is sponsored content