FEATURED IN TODAYS NEWSLETTER

• Costco beats Q1 earnings estimates with a potential membership fee hike looming

• Ledger wallets drained in crypto’s latest embarrassing hack

• Will hyperrealistic AI images make fake news impossible to control?

Business

Costco beats Q1 earnings estimates with a potential membership fee hike looming

Costco (COST) sported some bulked-up earnings for its fiscal 2024 Q1 results, sending its stock higher in Friday trading.

For the quarter, Costco reported adjusted earnings per share of $3.58, higher than Wall Street expectations of $3.41. Revenue came in at $57.8 billion, up 6% year over year, compared to expectations of $57.71 billion, per Bloomberg data.

Same-store sales, excluding gas and foreign exchange, came in lower than expected, dragged down by its performance in the US. Total same store-sales jumped 3.8% last quarter, compared to 4.3% expected.

LATEST IN CRYPTO

Ledger wallets drained in crypto’s latest embarrassing hack

It's been weeks since the crypto world has suffered a significant scandal—meaning we were probably overdue. And sure enough, Thursday brought yet another "you've-gotta-be-kidding" moment when hackers compromised software used to connect Ledger hardware devices to a variety of decentralized applications. This would be roughly equivalent to using a Web2 service like Facebook or Google to log in to a website, and then finding out the log-in code was compromised and that hackers could steal your account data.

AI

Will hyperrealistic AI images make fake news impossible to control?

Pope Francis received a wave of online praise for his fashion sense last weekend thanks to a viral photo of the 86-year-old pontiff dressed in an ultrastylish white puffy coat.

The only problem is, the image is fake. It was created using an artificial intelligence program called Midjourney, one of a handful of rapidly developing tools that allow users to, among other things, create near photorealistic images using nothing more than a well-worded text prompt.