Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:• The Big Read: How a Chinese megabillionaire became the Jensen Huang of batteries. • Style and Shopping: Tech invaded Cannes. Then we went shopping.• Plus, Recommendations—our weekly pop culture picks: “Long Buried,” “How to Not Die in Prison” and “Dust Bunny”On Tuesday, a closely watched Congressional primary in New York City ended in defeat for Alex Bores, a former Palantir engineer turned state legislator who... Read more ›
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On Wednesday morning at 7:30 a.m, the mimosas started flowing at Convoy’s Seattle headquarters. It wasn’t a celebration. After months of Convoy trying desperately to raise cash or find a buyer, employees had just been ordered to stop taking new orders and cancel existing shipments. The startup, which had raised more than $1 billion from backers ranging from Jeff Bezos and Bono to Fidelity and T. Rowe Price, was out... Read more ›
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Early last year, Sam Bankman-Fried attended a dinner, alongside Hillary Clinton, Jeff Bezos and Leonardo DiCaprio, at the house of investor Michael Kives, co-founder of the firm K5. Kives, Bankman-Fried wrote to his colleagues at FTX shortly afterwards, was “the most connected person I’ve ever met.” Bankman-Fried told his colleagues in a written pitch, published in court this week in Bankman-Fried’s trial on fraud charges, that FTX should invest in... Read more ›
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As tech companies grapple with slower growth, a focus on profitability and tumbling valuations, many are shuffling their leadership. Our Org Charts reflect those changes.Logistics startup Flexport last week named the leaders who will report to founder Ryan Petersen, whom the board reinstated as CEO last month. Since Petersen and the board ousted former Amazon executive Dave Clark, 10 top executives have exited the company and hundreds of people have... Read more ›
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I’m nine minutes into a two-and-a-half-hour conversation with Andy Jassy when it becomes clear why the CEO has invited me to Amazon’s Seattle headquarters. Like everyone else in business these days, he wants to talk about artificial intelligence. Unless you’ve been under a rock this year, you know that the breakthroughs in large language models are upending the balance in tech. Microsoft is ascendant again after a strategic alliance with... Read more ›
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SpaceX’s most important customer—NASA—is getting impatient with the rocket company’s delays in building critical equipment meant for the space agency’s next mission to the moon. In recent months, NASA officials have raised concerns with their counterparts at SpaceX that the company has missed milestones related to a lunar lander project worth over $4 billion and a $53 million contract on technologies for fueling the spacecraft that will take astronauts to... Read more ›
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It’s not a happy time on Wall Street. As third quarter earnings from Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs revealed this week, the investment banking business has deteriorated lately, as the deal market remains stagnant. Morgan Stanley reported a 27% drop in investment banking revenue in the third quarter, by far the biggest decline on Wall Street, while Goldman’s advisory business shrank 15%. This isn’t exactly the situation many expected a... Read more ›
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As someone who grew up in Seattle, then spent several years in San Francisco, I’ve gotten a good feel for the two cities’ tech scenes and how they differ. Those differences are more clear than ever as the generative artificial intelligence boom reverberates through both tech hubs.In San Francisco, techies have been pumping their chest about AI, spending days attending “Cerebral Valley” events and nights partying at AI hacker houses.... Read more ›
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Investment firm Thrive Capital is leading a deal to buy OpenAI shares from employees through a tender offer that would give the company a paper valuation of at least $80 billion, according to a person with direct knowledge. The deal would boost OpenAI’s valuation by at least three times from a similar transaction the startup made six months ago. The deal would expand Thrive’s investment in the artificial intelligence developer,... Read more ›
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Kicking off today’s newsletter with a scoop: Cameo in recent weeks has sought to raise at least $10 million in funding, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. Such a deal, if completed, would be a sign investors are still hopeful of the celebrity video site’s future. But the site has also lost a high-profile ambassador. Earvin “Magic” Johnson left Cameo’s board earlier this year, a Cameo... Read more ›
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Trucking startup Convoy’s revenue collapsed in the first nine months of this year, falling far short of the company’s 2022 revenue, according to two people with direct knowledge of the company’s financials. The revenue shortfall preceded an abrupt shutdown of the company’s day-to-day operations on Wednesday and sweeping layoffs it announced on Thursday. As of early October, Convoy had taken in about $320 million in revenue, the people said, which... Read more ›
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On Aug. 9, President Joe Biden signed an executive order banning U.S. investments in China’s advanced technology sectors, including semiconductors, artificial intelligence and quantum computing. The ban has attracted much attention, and concern from some investors. But it will have only a modest impact. Dollar-denominated funds in China with American limited partners already had halted investments in semiconductor companies, which now only take investments in Chinese yuan. Investors question how... Read more ›
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When Shein announced a partnership with Forever 21 in August, it unveiled a deal that would align two firms that might otherwise be enemies: a China-founded online fashion retailer and a U.S. brick-and-mortar retail label that’s bleeding sales to e-commerce upstarts. The deal involves Shein issuing $300 million to $400 million worth of its shares to buy 33% of Sparc, a joint venture between U.S. shopping mall giant Simon Property... Read more ›
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In tech, all software roads eventually lead to hardware. Look no further than OpenAI’s Sam Altman dreaming up an artificial intelligence-powered personal device with ex-Apple designer Jony Ive and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son. Another topic the three men may have discussed at Ive’s San Francisco studio: existing AI hardware companies that Altman is excited about, given his wide array of investments.So perhaps it’s no coincidence that SoftBank is now in... Read more ›
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Anyone scrolling quick videos of people making elaborate kinds of spaghetti or sharing dating horror stories may not be in the mood to click on an ad suggesting they buy a new pair of jeans. That’s at least what ad executives are saying about Meta Platforms’ efforts to sell ads on Reels, the Facebook owner’s answer to TikTok. A year after Meta began selling ads on Reels, the company is... Read more ›
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Hieu Duong, lead inventor of a process touted by Tesla CEO Elon Musk as a way to sharply cut the carmaker’s battery costs, has left Tesla for a startup that’s pursuing the same advance using a different approach. In a surprising development, AM Batteries, a tiny Chelmsford, Mass., company with no revenue, hired Duong as chief manufacturing officer and Lie Shi, president of battery separator maker Celgard, as CEO. Both... Read more ›
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Google and its parent company Alphabet has quietly laid off staff, spokespeople for the conglomerate said, as tech firms continue to tighten their belts following a marked slowdown in business growth. Divisions such as Google News, Alphabet’s healthcare analytics subsidiary Verily and self-driving car unit Waymo recently laid off staff, including this week, the spokespeople said. The moves indicate Alphabet is determined to reduce costs even after cutting 6% of... Read more ›
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Let’s hope the boffins who track inflation are watching video streaming (and not for the entertainment value!). Netflix today raised the price on its premium tier by $3 a month to $22.99, a notably bigger increase than the last time it jacked up prices. Aggressive price increases are becoming standard in streaming, at least among the bigger companies, as we noted here recently. A few days ago, for instance, Disney... Read more ›
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Despite TikTok’s immense popularity, it still has work to do to help advertisers and the agencies that make ads understand how to best use the short-form video app.The latest effort to address this: Earlier this month, the ByteDance-owned company invited creative agencies to participate in a program focused on upcoming major sporting events, including the Super Bowl and March Madness, according to an email invitation seen by The Information. Read more ›
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Nikita Bier has done it again. Nine months after he sold anonymous-compliments app Gas to Discord, the app is being shut down. Bier is known in Silicon Valley as the founder of TBH, another anonymous social app which he sold to Facebook in 2017. In mid-2018, Facebook said it was closing the app “due to low usage.” Bier’s repeat of the feat puts the spotlight on app acquisitions that many... Read more ›
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China’s government has taken a stake in a domestic subsidiary of Tencent, the operator of WeChat, China’s biggest messaging app, in the latest step by Beijing to tighten its control over the country’s big tech firms. The government has taken a similar sized stake in the domestic subsidiaries of several other tech giants over the past few years, including ByteDance, Alibaba, Kuaishou and Weibo. Such an arrangement, known as “special... Read more ›
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05.07.2026 10:06
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