John Abbamondi had orders to let the CEO of Ticketmaster down easy.
Technology
Did Live Nation punish a venue by taking Billie Eilish away?
In April 2021, Abbamondi was the CEO of BSE Global, the company that ran Brooklyn arena the Barclays Center. BSE Global’s existing Ticketmaster contract would expire at the end of September, and Abbamondi and his team had evaluated proposals from SeatGeek, AXS, and Ticketmaster. The economics of Ticketmaster offer, according to Abbamondi, “was nowhere near as good as the other two.” SeatGeek’s technology was “superior” to Ticketmaster’s on balance, on top of better financial terms including an equity stake in the company, the arena decided. It clinched their decision to go with a newer, smaller player in the field.
When Abbamondi called to break the news to Michael Rapino, the Live Nation Entertainment CEO, the meeting became tense — and a recording of it came back to haunt Rapino in this month’s Live Nation-Ticketmaster monopoly trial. Abbamondi was one of two witnesses who took the stand Wednesday, alongside Mitch Helgerson, the chief revenue officer for the Minnesota Wild hockey team. Both men said that when they considered switching their venues’ ticketing platform from Ticketmaster, executives there threatened them with the loss of vital Live Nation-promoted concerts. It’s the behavior, the Justice Department and 40 state and district attorneys general say, of a monopolist — a charge Live Nation-Ticketmaster denies.
Abbamondi, identifying the voices on the 2021 call to a Manhattan jury Wednesday, said that “the nervous guy was me and the angry guy was Michael.” The few minutes played in court captures an exchange that went “sideways,” as Abbamondi put it, when he tried to thread a delicate needle: rejecting Ticketmaster’s services while trying to hold its parent company Live Nation to a separate contract promising to fill Barclays Center with concerts. At one point, Rapino dropped an F-bomb while discussing his frustration over a contractual dispute. He told Abbamondi he believed they were never planning to renew with Ticketmaster in the first place.
Rapino reminded Abbamondi about the new UBS Arena in Queens, which could draw more Live Nation-promoted shows away from Barclays. Though Ticketmaster theoretically operates separately from Live Nation, Abbamondi took this as a “not-so-veiled” threat — cut off the left arm, and the right arm would swing back. Abbamondi hung up feeling like he’d failed to “do my job there, which was to land the plane smoothly.”
The venue “saw a dramatic decline in Live Nation shows that were booked at the arena”
Abbamondi still signed the deal with SeatGeek, which began in October 2021. Then, he testified, the venue “saw a dramatic decline in Live Nation shows that were booked at the arena.” Artists were just beginning to fill stadiums again after the start of the covid pandemic, including Billie Eilish, who’d had to cancel shows in New York venues including Barclays in 2020. Normally, Abbamondi would have expected Live Nation to rebook her show there next time she was on tour. But when she began touring again in 2021, she booked at the new venue Rapino had warned about — the UBS Arena. When Barclays asked about it, they were told it was the “artist’s decision.” Other promoters, he said, hadn’t reduced their bookings at Barclays by nearly as much.
In 2022, mere months into the SeatGeek contract, Abbamondi was fired. Less than a year later, Barclays announced it was going back to Ticketmaster.
Ticketmaster, in the witnesses’ telling, wasn’t the best option for a ticketing vendor, but Live Nation’s power as a concert promoter forced their hand. In the case of the Minnesota Wild, which played at the then-Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Helgerson said the fear of losing Live Nation shows was a large driver behind its decision to stick with Ticketmaster — even though it found it would make $1 million a year more switching to SeatGeek.
The arena was already engaged in tight competition for concerts with the Target Center across the river in Minneapolis, a similarly-sized venue. So when the Wild kicked off negotiations over renewing its contract with Ticketmaster in 2018, the ticketing service knew how to hit them where it would hurt. When the Wild staff mentioned they were planning to consider a proposal from SeatGeek too, a Ticketmaster executive told them that Live Nation could move all of their shows to the Target Center if they switched ticketing vendors, Helgerson testified. “We took it as a credible threat,” he said. “Losing those shows would be almost catastrophic to our organization.”
“We took it as a credible threat”
To ease the risk, SeatGeek offered what it called “Live Nation retaliation insurance” — a promise to compensate the arena for concerts booked at the Target Center on dates Xcel had open. SeatGeek offered the arena a higher upfront bonus and fee share that overall would make the venue an additional $1 million a year compared to Ticketmaster’s offer. But even retaliation insurance couldn’t make up for the loss of the “vibrance of the venue” and the impact on its own employees should Live Nation pull its shows. Ticketmaster’s alleged threat created an “insurmountable challenge.” The venue signed another contract with Ticketmaster.
There were complicating factors in both these cases, which Live Nation pointed out on cross-examination. It was both risky and a lot of work to move to a new ticketing platform. Like switching any enterprise software, it would take a while for staff to get up to speed, and Abbamondi admitted that while SeatGeek’s technology gave them more options over things like how to price individual seats, it was less user-friendly. An executive whom Helgerson worked with worried that SeatGeek’s lack of an interface for concert promoters at the time would be an obstacle to getting them to bring shows to the arena. Abbamondi also said he’s personal friends with SeatGeek’s co-founder, and he testified he wasn’t fired because of the SeatGeek deal — he was given two other reasons.
SeatGeek offered what it called “Live Nation retaliation insurance”
There was also a separate legal dispute between the Barclays Center and Ticketmaster, which appeared to be at least part of the reason that the call between Abbamondi and Rapino broke down. Barclays believed their contract with Ticketmaster would expire at the end of September 2021, as originally stated. But Ticketmaster believed that because the Covid pandemic shortened the regular NBA season, a clause in the contract had been triggered to extend that contract another year. On top of that, in an earlier, unrecorded call between Abbamondi and Rapino, the Ticketmaster CEO suggested that they should be given the chance to counter any offer Barclays received. Abbamondi said he tried his best to respond in a “noncommittal” way, but the implication was that Rapino might have seen it differently.
The jury will have to decide whether the threats Abbamondi and Helgerson described were really as menacing as they believe, one of many factors that will determine whether Live Nation-Ticketmaster should face penalties — including the possibility of a breakup.
In one text exchange, Live Nation executive Patti Kim, a friend of Abbamondi’s, wrote that he should “think about the bigger relationship” with Live Nation, not just who’s writing the bigger check. She added a winky face. “That was my friend saying, ‘you know what I mean,’” Abbamondi said. This week, the jury is expected to get the chance to hear from the rival allegedly offering those bigger checks: SeatGeek CEO Jack Groetzinger.
Technology
Amazon.com says things are fixed after some issues with logging in and checking out
If you were having issues shopping on Amazon or loading your playlists on Amazon Music on Thursday, you weren’t alone. For over three hours today, Downdetector showed a sizable spike in people reporting issues with checkout, search, and logging in. The problem seemed to be affecting both the site and the mobile apps. But an Amazon spokesperson tells The Verge that the issues are now fixed.
“We’re sorry that some customers may have temporarily experienced issues while shopping,” Amazon spokesperson Jennie Bryant says in a statement. “We have resolved the issue, which was related to a software code deployment, and website and app are now running smoothly.”
Several Verge staffers experienced issues themselves when there were problems. Clicking through to many products produced a “sorry, something went wrong” error, and even pages that did load were not showing pricing. Users reported being repeatedly logged out of their accounts when trying to check out or load their cart. Even the parts of Amazon.com that were working seem to be loading slowly.
The company has been dealing with AWS outages in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates due to drone strikes by the Iranian military, but there has not been any word of more widespread outages in the US or elsewhere.
Update March 5th: Added comment from Amazon saying that things are fixed.
Technology
$163K in fake medical bill charges; AI uncovers it for you
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Last summer, a man’s brother-in-law suffered a fatal heart attack. The hospital bill for four hours of emergency care: $195,628.
The man’s sister-in-law was ready to pay it. He asked her to wait. He requested an itemized bill with CPT codes, the universal billing codes hospitals use, and fed the whole thing into Claude, an AI chatbot.
Within minutes, Claude found duplicate charges, services billed as “inpatient” even though the patient was never admitted, supply costs inflated by 500% to 2,300% above Medicare rates and charges for procedures that never happened. He cross-checked with ChatGPT. Both AIs agreed. He wrote a six-page letter citing every violation by name.
The hospital dropped the bill to $33,000. An 83% reduction. Zero medical training. A $20 app.
A man cross-checked a hospital bill with AI and got it reduced by some 83%. (Neil Godwin/Getty Images)
Your bill is probably wrong, too
That story sounds extreme. It’s not.
The Medical Billing Advocates of America estimates 3 out of 4 medical bills contain errors. The average hospital bill over $10,000 has roughly $1,300 in mistakes. And less than 1% of denied insurance claims are ever appealed. Hospitals and insurers are banking on the fact that you won’t check.
AI flips that equation. You don’t need to understand CPT codes or have a medical billing degree. You just need to paste.
You can use AI platforms, like ChatGPT, to spot errors or suspicious charges on medical bills. (Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
The 5-minute audit
Step 1: Call your provider and request an itemized bill with CPT codes. Not the summary. The full line-by-line breakdown. You’re legally entitled to this.
Step 2: Open ChatGPT, Claude, Grok or Gemini (free versions work) and paste this:
“I’m pasting my itemized medical bill below. Please: (1) Explain every charge in plain English, (2) Flag any duplicate or suspicious charges, (3) Compare each charge to average costs, (4) Identify billing code errors or bundling violations, and (5) Draft a dispute letter I can send to the billing department. Here’s my bill:”
Step 3: Paste your bill. The AI will translate every line and tell you what looks wrong.
WOMAN SAYS CHATGPT SAVED HER LIFE BY HELPING DETECT CANCER, WHICH DOCTORS MISSED
If the AI finds errors, call the billing department and ask for a supervisor. (iStock)
Step 4: If the AI finds errors (it probably will), call the billing department and ask for a supervisor. Reference the specific codes. Hospitals resolve disputes all the time when patients show up prepared.
Pro tip: Counterforce Health (counterforcehealth.org) is a free AI tool built specifically for insurance denial appeals. Worth bookmarking.
It’s time to give your medical bills a thorough examination. The AI will see you now.
Real talk. Everybody’s talking about AI. Nobody’s showing you what to actually DO with it. My new free newsletter, Splash of AI (SplashofAI.com), gives you one trick, one tool and one “wait, I can do THAT?” moment every single week. Five minutes. Plain English. The kind of stuff that saves you time, money or both. You’ll wonder how you got by without it.
Send this to someone who is staring at a medical bill they can’t make sense of. Forward this right now. Seriously. This could save them hundreds or even thousands of dollars, and it takes less time than making coffee.
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Technology
Meta’s AI glasses reportedly send sensitive footage to human reviewers in Kenya
Meta’s AI-powered smart glasses could be sending sensitive footage to human reviewers in Nairobi, Kenya, according to an investigation by the Swedish outlets Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten. The report, which was published last week, claims Meta contractors in Kenya have seen videos captured with the smart glasses that show “bathroom visits, sex and other intimate moments.”
So far, at least one proposed class action lawsuit accusing Meta of violating false advertising and privacy laws has emerged in response to Svenska Dagbladet’s reporting, citing the company’s claim that its smart glasses are designed for privacy:
By affirmatively claiming that the Glasses were designed to protect privacy, Meta assumed a duty to disclose material facts that would inform a reasonable consumer’s decision to purchase the product. Instead, Meta hid the alarming reality: that use of the AI features results in a stranger halfway around the world watching the most private moments of a person’s life.
The Nairobi-based contractors interviewed by Svenska Dagbladet are AI annotators, meaning they label images, text, or audio, with the goal of helping AI systems make sense of the data they’re training on. “We see everything — from living rooms to naked bodies,” one worker says, according to Svenska Dagbladet. “Meta has that type of content in its databases.”
A former Meta employee reportedly tells Svenska Dagbladet that faces in annotation data are blurred automatically, though workers in Kenya say this “does not always work as intended,” and some faces are still visible. Another person reportedly tells the outlet that a wearer’s bank cards are sometimes seen in the footage they review as well.
Meta’s Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses come with a built-in AI assistant capable of answering questions about what a user can see. The glasses have soared in popularity in recent years, despite growing concerns over privacy and surveillance.
EssilorLuxottica, the eyewear giant that Meta works with to develop the camera-equipped glasses, sold over 7 million of the AI-powered glasses in 2025 — more than tripling its sales in 2023 and 2024 combined. Last year, Meta made some changes to its privacy policy that keep Meta AI with camera use enabled on your glasses “unless you turn off ‘Hey Meta.’” It also stopped allowing wearers to opt out of storing their voice recordings in the cloud.
As reported by Svenska Dagbladet, the Kenya-based AI reviewers work with transcriptions as well, ensuring Meta AI provides the correct answer to the questions users ask aloud. In a statement to The Verge, Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton says media captured by its smart glasses “stays on the user’s device” unless they choose to share it with other people or Meta.
“When people share content with Meta AI, we sometimes use contractors to review this data for the purpose of improving people’s experience, as many other companies do,” Clayton says. “We take steps to filter this data to protect people’s privacy and to help prevent identifying information from being reviewed.”
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