Earlier this week, Thomas Buckley wrote about the film F1 and Apple’s big screen push. Today he continues the conversation with one of the movie’s producers, driver Lewis Hamilton. Plus: The Everybody’s Business podcast discusses New York City’s political earthquake, and an informative, funny book about climate change falls into familiar traps.

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Apple Inc.’s F1 will be released globally today on thousands of cinema screens. The critically acclaimed movie was directed by Joseph Kosinski, whose Top Gun: Maverick grossed $1.5 billion at the box office for Paramount Pictures in 2022, and stars Brad Pitt as a driver who reenters the highest class of racing after several years out of the league. F1 is also the first Hollywood film produced by seven-time Formula One world champion Lewis Hamilton.

In 2022, Hamilton founded Dawn Apollo Films, which he says will produce pictures across multiple genres beyond racing and sports. He got involved in the production of F1—one of Apple’s most expensive movies to date, with a budget of more than $200 million—chiefly to help ensure its authenticity, he says in an interview. The entertainment giant mounted dozens of iPhone cameras onto race cars to shoot angles that are unprecedented in televised racing and better capture the feeling of being on the track.

Jamie Erlicht, Jerry Bruckheimer, Pitt, Hamilton, Tim Cook, Damson Idris, Eddy Cue and Zack Van Amburg at the F1 world premiere on June 16 in New York. Photographer: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images

Formula One is extremely difficult to shoot well, Hamilton says. “Working with Apple really made it possible by creating new technology and cameras that went on the car, which was so much more advanced than even what we use in the racing world.”

Industry tracker Box Office Pro forecasts F1 will gross more than $45 million at the box office in the US and Canada in its opening weekend—which would make it Apple’s best debut in cinemas to date. The company’s partnership with Hamilton will extend past F1: It’s making a documentary film about his career, chronicling his modest upbringing in Hertfordshire in the UK and his parents’ support for him as he began competing in one of the world’s most expensive sports.

Hamilton sees parallels between his story and the plot of Cool Runnings, the 1993 Walt Disney Co. film about a Jamaican bobsled team competing at the Olympics, which he says is a favorite. The theme of perseverance resonated with him, he says. “It’s very reminiscent of me and my father being at a race with a rusty go-kart just as they had a rusty sled.” 

Eddy Cue, the head of Apple’s $96 billion services division, which includes the company’s video programming, the Apple TV+ streaming service, music and podcasts—and a lifelong Formula One fan who sits on the board of Ferrari NV—says he’s always rooted for Hamilton’s success at Grand Prix races. It’s been that much easier to cheer him on since he started racing for Ferrari this season, Cue jokes.

“His story of how he came about is incredibly inspiring,” Cue says. “He is all about greatness.”

In Brief

• The US Supreme Court limited the power of judges to block President Donald Trump’s policies nationwide but left a fight over restrictions on automatic birthright citizenship unresolved.
• The European Union and the US believe they can clinch some form of a trade agreement before a July 9 deadline.
• Bids for the three casino licenses in the NYC area are due Friday, with at least eight projects vying for a coveted spot.

Billionaires Beware?

Photo illustration by 731. Photos: Getty Images (6)

The surprising lead of progressive state lawmaker Zoran Mamdani in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary has some billionaires up in arms. The party’s primary winner is usually is the presumptive front-runner in the fall, and Mamdani’s proposals to help the poor and working class by raising taxes on corporations and the rich have the monied classes chattering.

Hedge fund billionaire and Donald Trump supporter Bill Ackman said he’s ready to contribute hundreds of millions of dollars to a rival. Current Mayor Eric Adams, also a Trump follower since the president’s Department of Justice tossed out his sprawling bribery indictment under controversial circumstances, is likely to see new life breathed into his moribund campaign. But what has Mamdani actually set out to do? And how realistic is it that he’ll be able to push through his agenda? These are some questions host Max Chafkin wrestles with alongside Brad Stone, the editor of Bloomberg Businessweek, and some special guests in this week’s episode of Everybody’s Business. They also take on the spectacle of the Venice wedding of multibillionaire Amazon co-founder Jeff Bezos and former broadcast journalist Lauren Sánchez.

Listen and subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, iHeart and the Bloomberg Terminal.

Climate-Proofing Our Food

Illustration: Sarah Mafféïs for Bloomberg

Back in the early aughts, biofuels such as ethanol were looking like a powerful answer to the climate crisis and our reliance on foreign oil: Using renewable fuels made from plants like corn, experts said, could significantly reduce energy emissions when compared with gasoline. Even better was the future promise of “advanced biofuels,” which would one day use inedible biomass instead of food.

To environmental lawyer Timothy Searchinger, however, something about diverting land from food into energy just didn’t add up. Use one field to grow corn for fuel, he pointed out, and other land will invariably have to be cleared to grow food, house livestock and grow feed for livestock. When those trees are cut down, carbon is released and climate change gets worse.

In February 2008, Searchinger published a paper in the journal Science that dismantled the environmental case for biofuels. The findings were covered widely by the media, and the National Resources Defense Council abandoned its biofuels campaign shortly thereafter. Political bodies have been harder to persuade, and biofuels have hardly disappeared. But they have, at the very least, lost much of their environmental shine.

The crux of Searchinger’s argument—land is not free—made him a logical protagonist for Michael Grunwald’s We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate (Simon & Schuster, July 2025). Grunwald, a former politics reporter at the Washington Post and Politico, points out that livestock is food’s biggest driver of climate change. So if Searchinger was right about the perils of using more land for biofuels, then using more land for livestock will also increase emissions. And if we’re already doing an inadequate job of feeding the planet’s 8 billion inhabitants, using the same tactics to feed 10 billion by 2050 won’t work.

Businessweek’s Deena Shanker, who reviews Grunwald’s book, says it falls into some familiar traps: Lab-Grown Meat Is the Fake Climate Food Fix That Just Won’t Die

A Fortune Made and Lost

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