By the numbers: Phony Warhol drawings, font-opolies, windowless dorms, and more

Plus: Retail battle bots and a massive Roblox outage.

Source: MSCHF

By the numbers: Phony Warhol drawings, font-opolies, windowless dorms, and more

1) Call it a font-opoly. The world’s largest font seller, Monotype, recently bought Hoefler&Co, makers of Gotham (the font). Monotype now owns 30k+ fonts, including heavy-hitters Helvetica, Times New Roman, and Arial.

2) Viral art collective MSCHF’s latest project involved buying a 1954 Andy Warhol drawing for $20k, making 999 copies, then selling them all — including the original — for $250 a piece. By that math, they made ~$230k in profit.

3) Battle of the bots: holiday edition. Akamai, a software firm that helps online retailers fight off buying-bots, found bot use in India is up 55% in the weeks before Diwali. (Cue American retailers gulping as Black Friday and Christmas close in.)

4) At the time of writing this, Roblox, used by 40m+ people daily, has been down for 2+ days (hopefully it’s back up by now). Some thought the massive glitch had to do with Chipotle giving away $1m worth of burritos on the platform. Turns out this wasn’t the case.

5) An architect working on a massive 1.68m-square-foot dorm for 4.5k students at UC Santa Barbara resigned after the sponsor of the $200m project — billionaire Charles Munger — insisted on a design that would mean 94% of the occupants would have no windows.

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