Numlock News: May 5, 2026 • Won, Wrigley, Whatnot

May 05, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Samsung

Lee Kun-hee, the chairman of Samsung who died in October 2020, left behind a 26 trillion won fortune that included shares, property, and art collections. South Korea assesses a 50 percent inheritance tax rate, and maintaining control of the company was of paramount importance to the family. This was pretty closely watched: Samsung is the largest chaebol in the country, a massive employer and a critical part of the nation’s economy, so a succession crisis or a loss of control could have consequential reverberations for the politics and economy of the entire nation. The tax bill was paid in six installments over the past five years, coming in at 12 trillion won (US$8 billion), the largest settlement in South Korea’s history.

Osmund Chia, BBC News

Whatnot

Sales via livestream apps are picking up in the United States, fueled largely by Whatnot, which has become the second-most downloaded shopping app in Apple’s App Store, beating out Amazon and eBay. Livestream sales account for about five percent of the ecommerce market in the United States, well under the 60 percent seen in China. Whatnot sellers are now creating over five million listings a day, and last year, the app facilitated $8 billion in sales. Buyers are also spending a ton of time on the app: 46 minutes on Whatnot for the average user in the first quarter of 2026. By comparison, the average YouTube user spent 83 minutes on that app, and those videos aren’t just people pushing stuff to buy.

Alicia Tang, Bloomberg

Wrigley View

The Chicago Cubs have been locked in litigation against a nearby restaurant called Wrigley View Rooftop, which sells access to stands on its roof with a pretty solid view of the field where the Cubs play. It’s a pretty interesting legal fight; the Cubs sued in 2024 alleging unjust enrichment and that the restaurant misappropriated the team’s property rights, while Wrigley View Rooftop alleges that the Cubs don’t own the building and the restaurant has a legal right to conduct business on its rooftop as it sees fit. And even if the Cubs do have an established property right in the form of a live Cubs game product, Wrigley View Rooftop alleges that the team failed to protect that right by putting Wrigley Field in the middle of a city infamous for very tall skyscrapers. Before 2024, the venue and the Cubs had a deal — 17 percent of revenue from out of stadium rooftop seats and 11 percent of billboard revenue to the Cubs — but when the deal ended the team told the venue it could not renew. Naturally, a 1938 ruling of Pittsburgh Athletic Co. v. KQV Broadcasting Co. has come into play here, because this of course is not the first time something like this has happened in baseball in America.

Michael McCann, Sportico

Cone Collection

The forestry industry employs a group of professionals often called “pinecone cowboys” who scale tall trees in order harvest pinecones from the top, which are the cones likeliest to have pollinated by other trees. Those seeds are then used to replant forests, sustain tree farms and recover after fires. The profession first emerged in 1933 with a division of the Civilian Conservation Corps that collected enough cones to plant over three billion trees by 1942 , which was ultimately important during the postwar housing boom. Today, as a result of repeated budget cuts and reductions in personnel, the U.S. is well behind the 120 million annual seedling goal proscribed in the REPLANT Act; the Forest Service produces only 30 million to 50 million seedlings a year, and given that it takes about 220 seedlings to reforest a burned acre of forest, the agency is only meeting six percent of its post-wildfire planting needs annually.

Dillon Osleger, High Country News

Star Wars

Nielsen released data on how people are actually watching Star Wars these days and found that 44.2 percent of view time is from the live-action movies. This is a somewhat surprising result, given just how much of Star Wars there is in animation (16.8 percent of view time) and live action series (38.9 percent). Over the course of 2025, people watched 33 billion minutes of Star Wars content. A year ago on May the Fourth, the newly-released Andor led in terms of most-streamed. It was followed by Star Wars: A New Hope and then, to my shock, the third-most watched Star Wars thing was none other than Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. For those unfamiliar, Star Wars was the side project of toy impresario George Lucas, you know, the THX-1138 and Red Tails guy.

Erik Gruenwedel, Media Play News

Sea Levels

A new study published in Nature Sustainability argues that at this point, southern Louisiana will face three to seven meters of sea level rise as a result of warming global temperatures, which will result in the loss of three quarters of its remaining wetlands and push the shoreline as much as 100 kilometers inland. This is not all forecast; since the 1930s, Louisiana has lost 2,000 square miles to coastal erosion and at current rates, will lose another 3,000 square miles over the next 50 years. At that point, New Orleans, which is home to 360,000 people, might only be able to exist with a seawall, substantially upgraded levees and at some point may not be viable.

Oliver Milman, The Guardian

Tenet

New research published in the journal Futures found that, based on survey data, Americans care significantly more about future generations than is generally believed. The survey asked how many future generations society should keep in mind when making collective decisions, and how far into the future do people still deserve “moral concern.” With a generation defined at 25 years, the average respondent said that society should consider 17 generations ahead when making decisions. Whether or not that’s an exact figure is, granted, a bit abstract, but what makes it interesting is that the average respondent assumed the average American would say 13 generations, indicating that people are at least somewhat more future-conscious than we assume them to be.

Kyle Fiore Law and Stylianos Syropoulos, The Conversation

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