• ☝️ The AquaDom, a 50-foot-tall cylindrical fish tank billed as the largest of its kind in the world, collapsed on Friday, spilling 264,000 gallons of water and nearly 1,500 tropical fish into a hotel atrium in Berlin; officials said no one was seriously injured due to the fortunate time at which the collapse occurred.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

• 💼 Goldman Sachs is planning to lay off as many as 4,000 employees, or roughly 8% of its workforce, Semafor reported Friday.
• 🐦 Twitter will ban “free promotion” of competing social platforms – meaning users will longer be allowed to share links from Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, Truth Social, and more – the company’s official account tweeted Sunday, before deleting those messages and replacing the support page mentioning the rule’s enforcement with a poll. | Journalists from the NYT, CNN, and WaPo were suspended from Twitter on Thursday after violating the site’s rules against posting private information, per CEO Elon Musk; most of the accounts were reinstated by Friday evening.
• 🪙 FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried will no longer contest extradition to the United States, Reuters reported on Saturday.

SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

• 🍿 Avatar: The Way of Water opened to $134 million domestically and $435 million globally this weekend; it’s the third largest worldwide opening since 2020; though analysts were expecting between $150 million and $175 million domestically.
• 🌌 Henry Cavill is set to executive produce and star in a new Amazon Prime TV series based around the popular sci-fi fantasy game Warhammer 40,000.
• 🏈 College Football bowl season kicked off on Friday. (Full results and schedule) | The NCAA tapped outgoing Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Barker as its next president.

SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

• ⚡ Tesla last week launched a new power utility service in Texas that allows some locals with home Powerwall backup batteries to sell excess energy back to the grid.
• 🧠 Brain-computer interface company Synchron raised a $75 million funding round featuring investments from Jeff Bezos- and Bill Gates-backed foundations.
• 🚀 SpaceX completed three separate space launches in less than 48 hours over the weekend.

EVERYTHING ELSE

• ❗ A 5.4-magnitude earthquake struck western Texas Friday evening, representing the fourth-largest quake in state history.
• ❄️ The National Weather Service is predicting “heavy rain and heavy snow” to impact much of the US starting on Thursday and lasting through Christmas Eve (Saturday).
• 🏫 Some 48,000 student employees in the University of California system agreed to end a month-long strike after reaching a new deal that includes a pay hike of 55% and added health and child care benefits. (Background)

CLICKBAIT

• 🤔 Want to tell if someone is lying to you? Try this trick. (Video)