At one point in Buster Keaton’s 1920 silent comedy Neighbors, a man whose arm is in a sling is approached by someone who asks: “What happened to you?” “I bought a Ford,” he replies. The joke refers to one of the pains of owning the groundbreaking Model T, widely considered the first automobile affordable to a wide swath of Americans. To start one, you needed to use a laborious hand crank.

On Monday, well over a century later, Ford promised a new “Model T moment” for electric vehicles (EVs). The company said it is investing $2 billion to build a new EV platform and manufacture an affordable EV truck — retailing at $30,000, thanks to the kind of efficient, simplified manufacturing at the heart of the Model T’s automotive revolution — that will roll out in 2027. If successful, the company believes it could transform EV adoption in America, no exhausting hand crank required.

An Electrified Blast from the Past

Ford has taken something of a backseat in its broader adoption of EVs, with the pricey F-150 Lightning and the electric Mustang as its two most prominent offerings. At Ford’s Louisville assembly plant on Monday, CEO Jim Farley said the exponential growth of Chinese companies like BYD and Geely through affordable EV options, and increasingly price–friendly EVs from US and European competitors, meant his company “needed a radical approach” to stake out its own territory. Ford’s money-losing EV business — which posted $2.2 billion in losses in the first half of 2025 — could no doubt use the jumpstart.

This “Model T” moment didn’t happen overnight. Farley last year tasked a secretive “skunkworks” team in Long Beach, California, with developing “a new generation” of affordable EVs, not unlike the secretive team founder Henry Ford set up to develop streamlined production of the Model T:

• The $30,000 EV truck will be the first in a line of affordable battery-powered models that Ford said will take 40% less time to build and need 600 fewer workers than its hybrid-electric crossover SUV, the Escape, which is set to be discontinued after this year. Those efficiencies are thanks to the “skunkworks” team, led by former leading Tesla engineer Alan Clarke, with its new line of vehicles slated to be built at the Louisville plant, which will be converted to manufacture EVs with the $2 billion investment.
• Ford said its new EV platform will vastly reduce the number of components needed in manufacturing: 20% fewer parts than a typical vehicle and 25% fewer fasteners, translating to fewer workstations in the plant and a 15% reduction in assembly time. The batteries for the new line of EVs will come from a new $3 billion factory in Michigan.

“We believe the only way to really compete effectively with the Chinese over the globe on EVs is to go and really push ourselves to radically re-engineer and transform our engineering supply chain and manufacturing process,” Farley said. He boasted that the midsize EV pickup will cost less than a Tesla Model Y and have more room than a Toyota RAV4.

Writers Room Challenge: The Model T, which was produced from 1908 to 1927, did a great deal for comedy beyond Buster Keaton, frequently playing for laughs in silent film-era staples by the likes of Laurel & Hardy and Charlie Chaplin. Maybe we’re in for a run of Ford EV truck-themed Netflix capers.

David Ellison is going from UFC ringside to UFC ringleader.

After being spotted in front row seats at multiple UFC events this year, Ellison’s newly acquired Paramount (now technically called “Paramount, a Skydance Corporation,” though we’ll stick with the old name to remain within our self-imposed length constraints) agreed to a seven-year, $7.7 billion deal to become the mixed-martial arts competition’s exclusive US rights-holder. It’s the first (or, well, maybe second) significant move of Paramount’s new Ellison era.

Elbow Strike

Live sports rights remain the lifeblood of media companies, and UFC’s time on the market provoked nothing short of a bloody cage match. Paramount’s final offer ultimately beat out fellow competitors Netflix, YouTube, Amazon and ESPN, according to a Bloomberg report over the weekend. The agreement, which runs from next year through 2032 and includes a payment schedule weighted more toward the back end of the deal, also trumps UFC’s current rights agreement with ESPN, valued at $550 million annually. After spending big on an NFL rights re-up, which even included giving up a 10% stake in itself to the league, ESPN appears to be paring back elsewhere; the Disney-owned company similarly backed out of renewing rights to Formula 1 Racing earlier this summer.

For Paramount, the deal could help transform its struggling streaming division. For UFC-owner TKO Group, it’s just the second blow in a recent one-two rights-sale punch:

• The deal gives Paramount the rights to 30 “Fight Nights” per year, as well as 13 “marquee events.” All content will stream on Paramount+, with some being simulcast on CBS; Paramount+ accounts for just 2.2% of all streaming usage, according to a recent Nielsen report.
• The deal puts an end to UFC’s pay-per-view era, while bringing it into the streaming age. WWE, TKO’s other fighting brand, just signed a five-year, $1.6 billion deal to stream marquee WWE events (such as WrestleMania) on ESPN’s forthcoming streaming service; WWE’s weekly show, RAW, began airing on Netflix in the US this year as part of a 10-year, $5 billion deal.

Wall Street had a mixed reaction to the mixed martial arts news: TKO’s stock soared more than 10%, while Paramount’s (now trading as $PSKY) fell 3.7%.

In a Corner: TKO may soon score a third leg in its ring-corner stool: boxing. Last month, a bipartisan group in the House of Representatives introduced legislation that would allow new ventures in the sport to launch outside of existing sanctioning bodies. (In news to us, boxing has been regulated by the US government since the organized crime-filled days of the 1950s.) That comes as TKO looks to launch a new boxing promotion as part of a joint venture with funding from Saudi Arabia.

Goldman Sachs has a warning for inflation-weary US consumers: You ain’t seen nothing yet.

With the latest consumer price index report due today, Wall Street and the world writ large spent Monday wondering just how much tariffs have impacted consumer prices. According to a Goldman Sachs note to clients making the rounds of the finance world over the weekend, US shoppers have had just a little taste of tariff inflation to date — and should expect a much bigger helping in the days and weeks to come.

Sharing is Caring

While inflation has been relatively muted amid the trade war so far (a June CPI report showing a 2.7% year-over-year increase came as a relief), a rise in prices is still expected across the board today. Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal are penciling in a 2.8% hike, with so-called core CPI, which excludes volatile food and energy costs, climbing 3.1%. Even as the White House maintains its strategy is delivering more revenue to the government and will prompt more companies to make their products in the US, experts are noting a slow and steady gain in prices.

That tracks with what Goldman analysts have seen, so far at least, though the investment bank says the — let’s say digestible — pace of inflation now is due to corporations absorbing a significant amount of tariff pain. And the laws of business gravity say that when costs go up, those costs will, eventually, trickle down to the consumer:

• According to Goldman, consumers through June have absorbed 22% of new tariff costs, while US businesses have picked up 64% (presumably to avoid sticker shock), and foreign exporters have borne 14%. By the fall, consumers’ share could rise as high as 67% as businesses increasingly allow the costs to trickle down.
• That means inflation is likely to widen; by December, Goldman says that the core personal consumption expenditure index, the Fed’s favored inflation metric, could reach 3.2%, up from 2.8% in June. That seriously jeopardizes the Fed’s ability to curb inflation to a 2% target, which Goldman says likely would’ve been reached by next summer otherwise.

Powell to the People: Even with the probable uptick in inflation, a rate cut when Fed Chair Jerome Powell and his monetary policy committee colleagues meet in September is still looking likely. According to CME Group’s FedWatch tool, investors are pricing in an 86% chance of a quarter-point cut in September, up from 57% odds a month ago (Kalshi bettors see a 75% chance). Somewhat complicating matters further: The US government still hasn’t struck a trade agreement with China, as an executive order on Monday extended the tariff pause between the two countries for yet another 90 days to allow for more negotiating. While we’d say we’re getting impatient, we’ve binge-watched enough 90 Day Fiancé this summer to know that such deadline pressure doesn’t always create diamonds.