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Disneyland Resort Celebrates 70 Years
Walt Disney CEO Bob Iger speaks during the 70th anniversary celebrations of Disneyland Resort on July 17, 2025, in Anaheim, California (Getty Images)

Disney+ has gone from one of the cheapest to one of the most expensive streaming services

Since Disney+ launched in 2019, its price has gone up 172%. A combined Disney+ and Hulu app paves the way for future price increases.

When Disney launched its streaming service Disney+ for $6.99 a month in 2019, it was cheaper than many other services out there.

Starting in October, it will be 172% more expensive than it was six years ago.

Back then, Netflix had just raised its price to $8.99 per month for its basic service. HBO’s streaming service, then called HBO Now, cost $14.99. Apple TV+, which also launched in 2019, cost $4.99 but also had a tiny content library consisting of about eight originals. Hulu, which is owned by Disney and unlike the others had an ad-supported tier at the time, had recently lowered its ad tier to $5.99 per month while its ad-free tier was $11.99.

In the intervening years, these streaming services repeatedly raised their prices and ad-supported tiers became commonplace.

With Disney’s latest price hike — its fourth in four years — slated to go into effect in October, Disney+ and Hulu are now some of the most expensive streaming services. Disney raised the prices of its Disney+ and Hulu bundles as well, which cost only $1 more than a single subscription. On the company’s latest earnings call, it announced it would merge Disney+ and Hulu into a single app next year.

“I imagine down the road, it may give us some price elasticity as well that we haven’t had before,” CEO Bob Iger said on the call, suggesting the cost of Disney+ will likely continue to grow.

“You’re going to end up with a far better consumer experience when those apps are combined, by combining all of the program assets of both apps, both current apps, and obviously, with an improved consumer experience comes the ability to lower churn, which is obviously something that we’re very, very focused on and committed to doing,” Iger said.

Read more: The Disney, Hulu, Max bundle is more attractive to consumers than a Netflix subscription

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Morgan Stanley expects Tesla to have 1,000 Robotaxis by the end of 2026. Musk had predicted 1,500 by the end of 2025

Ahead of Tesla’s earnings report next week, Morgan Stanley has released a note estimating that the company will scale its Robotaxi fleet much more slowly than CEO Elon Musk has said. The firm thinks the automaker will have 1,000 vehicles in its Robotaxi service by the end of 2026 — 500 fewer than Musk estimated a few months ago Tesla would have by the end of 2025.

More key to Tesla’s success, however, will be removing the safety monitors from those rides, which Morgan Stanley says will be a “precursor to personal unsupervised FSD [Full Self-Driving] rollout.” Musk, of course, had also promised to remove safety drivers in Austin by the end of 2025, but driverless rides are still in the testing stage.

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Meta says it’s delivered new AI models internally this month and they’re “very good”

Meta’s last AI model release, Llama 4, was marred by delays and accusations of rigged benchmarks, but the company says the latest models built by its Superintelligence Labs team look promising. CTO Andrew Bosworth told reporters at the World Economic Forum that the team delivered new models internally in January and they’re “very good.”

Bosworth didn’t specify what the models are, though The Wall Street Journal has reported that Meta is working on a large language model and an AI image and video model code-named Avocado and Mango, respectively.

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Two charts that show why Amazon is building a giant physical store

This week Amazon received approval to build a hybrid big-box store and fulfillment center outside Chicago that’s roughly twice the size of a typical Target. Why would the e-commerce giant want to wade into a costly and cumbersome physical store, especially after earlier brick-and-mortar iterations like Amazon Go have failed?

There are at least two reasons. First, despite e-commerce’s rapid growth, the vast majority of retail purchases still happen in physical stores, according to Census Bureau data:

Second, Amazon’s own customers regularly shop at competing big-box retailers: Consumer Intelligence Research Partners found that 93% have also shopped at Walmart. And as Amazon pushes further into groceries — a category still dominated by in-person shopping — CIRP estimates that basically all Amazon customers buy groceries elsewhere.

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