A few weeks ago, I asked readers to submit their questions about the creator economy. Let’s dive into a few of them today, and please keep the questions coming!1. Is Instagram dead? What should they do to stay relevant? —Anonymous subscriberAny eulogies for Instagram are premature. While the app has had plenty of stumbles in its fight against TikTok, recently it seems to be finding a better groove. It’s not... Read more ›
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Smash Capital, a late-stage investment firm co-founded by Disney veterans including Kevin Mayer, is seeking to raise as much as $500 million in fresh capital, according to two people familiar with the matter. The new fundraising would supplement half a billion dollars the fund previously raised. The fund, which is separate from Mayer’s Blackstone-backed venture, Candle Media, invests in consumer internet and technology startups. Its portfolio includes stakes in Epic... Read more ›
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After slouching toward a sluggish end of 2022, technology mergers and acquisitions look to be showing new signs of life. That activity coincides with a continued rise in shareholder activism as value-oriented investors take advantage of the paradigm shift in valuations to demand higher profits and cash flow margins. Amid tightened market conditions and the still-looming potential of an economic recession, balance sheet health is now under a microscope. With... Read more ›
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What do a bottle of shampoo made by Johnson & Johnson, a lamp from a Chinese seller and an Arc’Teryx jacket all have in common? Amazon has labeled them all as coming from American small businesses. Amazon began adding a “Small Business” badge to items on its U.S. site about a year ago, pitching it as an effort to “help customers who want to support small businesses while also enjoying... Read more ›
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There’s no AI (and perhaps not too much human intelligence) involved in either World Wrestling Entertainment or Endeavor’s Ultimate Fighting Championship. But for sheer spectacle, today’s proposed merger of the two companies beats anything going on right now in tech—and we’re not talking just about what’s on the screen. Vince McMahon’s maneuvers over the past few months to take back control of WWE from his daughter, despite misconduct allegations, could... Read more ›
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Public figures ranging from celebrities to journalists braced for their blue check marks on Twitter to disappear over the weekend if they weren’t paying for Twitter Blue, its subscription service. For the most part, this didn’t happen. Instead, the social network simply decided to update the description of verified accounts. But some rivals are using the disarray to talk up their own verification systems. Koo, an Indian microblogging service, announced... Read more ›
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For several years, venture capital firms have been cagey about whether they have raised money from Saudi Arabia, following the 2018 murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in one of the country’s consulates. The Saudis, for their part, are no longer keeping quiet. The venture arm of the Saudi Public Investment Fund, the country’s $620 billion sovereign wealth fund, has begun disclosing on its website its partnerships with nearly... Read more ›
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OpenAI has for years relied on a small, nimble team, composed primarily of researchers, to develop impressive artificial intelligence models rivaling those from Google and Microsoft. Now the seven-year-old startup is acting more like a traditional enterprise software company by building a sales team and aggressively courting customers to use its AI. The company’s transformation from research-focused startup to deal closer began last year. Months before its ChatGPT chatbot seized... Read more ›
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Salesforce has always been known for internal power struggles. Now, as the dust settles from the January departure of Bret Taylor as co-CEO, at least two senior executives are vying for a wider range of responsibilities, perhaps anticipating the day CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff finally steps aside. Srinivas Tallapragada, chief engineering officer, and David Schmaier, chief product officer, have become more visible in recent months, according to two people... Read more ›
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Last week, the Biden administration released near-final rules governing how companies and consumers can tap hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. tax credits meant to spur the rise of a mine-to-factory electric vehicle battery industry. But companies including Ford and Tesla have rushed ahead of the rules, in the process helping to reveal what a U.S.-focused industry might look like. So far, Ford’s and Tesla’s bets appear to be... Read more ›
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After slashing its private stock price four times last year, Instacart is feeling better about itself. The grocery delivery firm, whose business skyrocketed during the pandemic but later cooled off, in late February raised its internal stock price 18% compared to December, according to a person with direct knowledge. While the company’s private share price for employees is likely still down roughly 70% from two years ago, the move could... Read more ›
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As the saying goes, “You can tell a lot about a person by the type of sword they keep near their desk.” That’s certainly true for company founders like Jason Kingsley of the gaming studio Rebellion Developments. For others, keepsakes veer more toward de-stressing objects, like Clément Kerstenne’s deck of cards, or inspirational items, like Arianna Huffington’s bronze sculpture of Marcus Aurelius. In this month’s “Founder’s Keepers,” we ask seven... Read more ›
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Clayton Kim first bonded with his boss, Fount CEO Andrew Herr, over “the crazy shit that we’ve tried on our own bodies.” Kim, the health and performance startup’s chief technology officer, has done much to his body. I witnessed one small act of craziness when I recently visited Kim’s home, which also doubles as Fount’s makeshift office, in Marina Del Rey, Calif. There, Herr and I watched as Kim, who... Read more ›
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Hi, welcome to your Weekend! This is Abe filling in for Jon, who returns as Weekender-in-Chief next Saturday.If the cars, brain implants and spaceships don’t pan out, Elon Musk has a promising future as a fear-monger. His was the leading name attached to a widely discussed open letter published this week that urged a halt in artificial intelligence research, warning that AI poses “profound risks to society and humanity.” Quickly,... Read more ›
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ByteDance, the Chinese owner of TikTok, generated more than $80 billion in annual revenue last year, up more than 30% from roughly $60 billion in 2021, according to two people with knowledge of the figure. The 2022 result, which hasn’t previously been reported, is significant because most technology companies with that kind of revenue experienced a marked slowdown in growth last year. It also means ByteDance revenue is on par... Read more ›
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In late September 2022, Ryan Crownholm, a 46-year-old entrepreneur from Los Angeles, donned a pair of plush surgical scrubs and hopped onto a stainless-steel MRI table at Prenuvo, a fast-growing chain of body-scanning clinics. Crownholm, the founder of landscaping service DirtMatch, was undergoing an elective MRI, which cost him $2,500 and would generate a full 20-page set of diagnostics about his nervous, circulatory, digestive, urinary and musculoskeletal systems. “It felt... Read more ›
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On a rare rain-free afternoon this spring, Richard Socher stood atop a hill, surveying the direction of the wind. The wind often interests Socher, the 38-year-old co-founder and CEO of search engine You.com, because in his spare time he likes to fly around on a paramotor, a parachute-like contraption supported by a backpack propeller. We were standing at one of his launch spots, a short hike from the 40-acre ranch... Read more ›
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Welcome back!OpenAI has been the talk of the tech world in recent months, following the release of the ChatGPT chatbot in November and GPT-4, the newest edition of its machine-learning model, earlier this month. Its pace of product releases is impressive, especially from a company that started as a nonprofit research organization. My colleague Jon detailed a key reason in an article accompanying our OpenAI org chart earlier this week.... Read more ›
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The crypto industry is littered with the corpses of now-shuttered businesses. Among the survivors, at least so far, is Bakkt, a crypto company founded by New York Stock Exchange owner Intercontinental Exchange. But after a previously unreported second round of layoffs earlier this month, a slew of executive exits and the shuttering of its consumer app, few would be betting on Bakkt. Yet Bakkt isn’t giving up. Last November it... Read more ›
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So here is a question: If you develop some software and train it on random material from the internet to make it smarter, do the creators of that material have any right to the software?What happens if you are Google and you train your software with public conversations generated from a chatbot made by OpenAI, one of your main competitors, which has been hiring your top talent? Is that smart?... Read more ›
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06.04.2026 02:42
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