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Disney will pay roughly $180 million over three years to hire more than 60 Character.AI employees, adding $30 million in retention bonuses to the compensation package. The recruitment deal is separate from a $20 million opening bid Disney made to acquire intellectual property and specific legal claims from the startup. Character Technologies filed for Chapter 11 in Delaware after failing to manage costly lawsuits involving teen suicide and self-harm. Court documents show the company was losing $9 million a month, spending $14 million monthly on compute costs against $1 million in revenue. A court-supervised auction for the remaining assets is slated to close by December.
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Key sources
- SOURCE@techmeme“Disney agreed to hire 60+ staff from Character․AI and pay them ~$180M over three years, plus $30M for retention awards”x.com
- SUPPORT@reuterslegal“filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the US and agreed to sell some of its assets to Walt Disney for $20 million”x.com
- SOURCE@jason_koebler“spending $14 million/month on compute alone at a time their revenue was around ~$1 million/month”x.com
- SUPPORT@max_paperclips“basically everyone and everything involved was acquired, and everyone got rich”x.com
- SUPPORT@rohanpaul_ai“expects any sales to close by December”x.com
- SUPPORT@mtslive“going from a $2.7 billion Google deal to a $20 million Disney sale”x.com
- SUPPORT@gergelyorosz“Google basically acquihired the founding team, leaving a zombie company behind”x.com
- SUPPORT@kunchenguid“12M MAU, with average 2 hours of daily time spent per user!”x.com