Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:âą The Big Read: Pickleball is the pastâthe tech elite is obsessed with padel. ⹠Plus, an Americana-themed batch of Recommendationsâour weekly pop culture picks: âThe Americans,â âEast of Eden,â âHigh Desert Daydream,â âLonesome Dove,â USA vs. Belgium, and âThe Twilight Zone.â The yearâs midpoint is an apt moment for some studied reflection, and Iâve been thinking about how much has changed in the last six... Read more âș
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Garry Tan was in his happy place. Surrounded by food trucks and techies basking in San Franciscoâs September sun, the CEO of Y Combinator snapped selfies with entrepreneurs as he meandered through a crowd of 2,700 attendees at the startup acceleratorâs annual alumni event. A week earlier, though, Tan had been blowing a fuse. In a series of barbed tweets, Tan had blasted Ali Partoviâthe leader of a rival accelerator,... Read more âș
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Fordâs plans for a $3.5 billion battery plant in Michigan may be in jeopardy amid fierce political criticism of a licensing agreement between the automaker and Chinaâs Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd., the worldâs largest battery manufacturer. Read more âș
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There comes a point in every major new technology cycle where new alliances form, especially between the incumbents and the younger upstarts nipping at their heels.This is happening at superspeed in artificial intelligenceâbut the pattern is frankly pretty weird, and I think it points to the fact that AI, in a lot of ways, is going to be different from tech developments before it, like cloud and mobile. Read more âș
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Itâs Kalley Huang, reporting from Menlo Park, Calif., where Meta Platformsâ developer conference is taking place in person for the first time since 2019. CEO Mark Zuckerberg, on a stage set up in the middle of Metaâs campus, unveiled a suite of generative artificial intelligence products, several directed at creators.The most interesting are 28 chatbots, many modeled on celebrities and creators. Meta is paying Charli DâAmelio, LaurDIY, MrBeast and others... Read more âș
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Elon Muskâs X, formerly known as Twitter, is cutting around half of the global team devoted to limiting disinformation and election fraud on the platform, including the head of the group, according to three people familiar with the situation. The cuts come less than a month after the company said it would expand the team and as X faces renewed criticism from the European Commission over the volume of misinformation... Read more âș
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Sam Bankman-Friedâs criminal trial, set to kick off with jury selection on Oct. 3, will thrust the FTX founder and the collapse of one of the worldâs biggest crypto exchanges back in the spotlight. It will be a brutal reminder of a huge misstep by Sequoia Capital, Paradigm and other investors who poured a total of $2 billion into Bankman-Friedâs companies. Fraud committed against those investors is a key part... Read more âș
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All eyes will be on the trial of Sam Bankman-Fried next week, which is set to kick off in a Manhattan court on Oct. 3. The trial will bring FTX and its dramatic collapse back into the news, which could spell trouble for crypto proponents who have been advocating for pro-crypto legislation in Washington.âWe realize it's going to be the major headline,â said Kristin Smith, CEO of the Blockchain Association,... Read more âș
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If you were thinking of trading in your phone for the latest iPhone 15, you may want to hold off.Jony Ive, the renowned designer of the iPhone, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have been discussing building a new AI hardware device, Jessica and I reported on Tuesday. In a whoâs who of tech, SoftBank CEO and investor Masayoshi Son has also talked to both Ive and Altman about the idea,... Read more âș
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SeatGeek, a venture capitalâbacked ticketing app, may have a strong sales pitch when it starts early discussions with investors this week about a potential initial public offering led by Morgan Stanley. During recent quarters, revenue grew roughly 70% from the prior year, thanks to a boom in live concerts. While SeatGeek isnât yet profitable, it expects to be by next year, a person familiar with the companyâs financials said. But... Read more âș
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Sequoia Capital China recently acquired a stake in Chinese social e-commerce app Xiaohongshu from existing investors at a discount to the companyâs most recent equity financing valuation, according to three people with knowledge of the matter. Sequoia China, which is preparing to separate from Silicon Valleyâs Sequoia Capital next year, bought the Xiaohongshu shares earlier this year in multiple transactions at a valuation of $14 billion, 30% below the startupâs... Read more âș
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Jony Ive, the renowned designer of the iPhone, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have been discussing building a new AI hardware device, according to two people familiar with the conversations. SoftBank CEO and investor Masayoshi Son has been involved in at least some aspect of the conversation, according to one of these people, but it is unclear if he will remain involved. Read more âș
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Talk about anticlimactic. Weâve been expecting todayâs Federal Trade Commission antitrust lawsuit against Amazon since the day commission chair Lina Khan was sworn into office in June 2021. After all, she rose to antitrust fame with her 2017 Yale Law Journal paper arguing that modern competition policy wasnât equipped to deal with the threat Amazon posed. Yet despite the plentiful time for preparation, what we got today was a 172-page... Read more âș
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Paris here. Yesterday, we published a story about MasterClassâ post-pandemic woes. MasterClass, like many startups, spent wildly when times were good, then got caught flatfooted when its pandemic-era gains didnât continue. Its evolution says something about the position many creator economy darlings now find themselves in. For a while, it had seemed like MasterClass could be the poster child for a new crop of media companies. The startup, which launched... Read more âș
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The Federal Trade Commissionâs lawsuit filed against Amazon in federal court in Seattle on Tuesday does not explicitly call for the break up of Amazon, but a close reading suggests that is definitely what the agency wants. The FTC argued in the lawsuit that anticompetitive practices in one business line can reinforce Amazonâs monopoly in another, in a âflywheel of anticompetitive harm,â implying the only way to prevent that could... Read more âș
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Microsoftâs push to put artificial intelligence into its software has hinged almost entirely on OpenAI, the startup Microsoft funded in exchange for the right to use its cutting-edge technology. But as the costs of running advanced AI models rise, Microsoft researchers and product teams are working on a plan B. In recent weeks, Peter Lee, who oversees Microsoftâs 1,500 researchers, directed many of them to develop conversational AI that may... Read more âș
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ChatGPT might be coming soon to a fridge or bedroom near you.On Monday, LLM developer OpenAI announced upcoming voice and image capabilities for its AI-powered chatbot. These new features will allow users to do things like asking for a dinner recipe based on the ingredients revealed by a photo of their fridge contents or requesting ChatGPT to tell a bedtime story. The announcement is also a sign of a broader... Read more âș
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The San Francisco Bay Areaâbased bankers at Centerview Partners, the investment bank that advised Silicon Valley Bankâs owner and Credit Suisse through recent turmoil, got two doses of bad news last week. First, they learned officially what many already suspected: The firm had fired a male banker in its San Francisco office after he made vulgar comments to a female colleague at a party following a Centerview event last month.... Read more âș
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You know the cloud industry is in upheaval when industry leader Amazon Web Services has to copy a tactic used by its smaller rivals to compete more effectively. The Amazon unitâs decision on Monday to invest up to $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic, as part of a broader deal in which AWS becomes the startupâs âprimary cloud provider,â looks a lot like the type of equity-for-business deals AWS previously... Read more âș
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Letâs kick off this week with some creator economy M&A news. Beehiiv, a newsletter publishing startup, is acquiring Swapstack, an advertising marketplace for newsletters, Beehiivâs CEO Tyler Denk confirmed to me. Beehiiv is acquiring the smaller firmâs tech and relationships with advertisers. Swapstack co-founder and CEO Jake Schonberger and a Swapstack account manager will join nearly two-year-old Beehiiv. Theyâll help expand the ad network Beehiiv launched earlier this month to... Read more âș
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Looks like Amazonâs finally made its AI bet.On Monday, model developer Anthropic announced that it had raised as much as $4 billion from Amazon. As part of the deal, Amazon Web Services will become Anthropicâs primary cloud provider, and Anthropic will train and deploy its future models on AWSâ training- and inference-specialized chips, Trainium and Inferentia. What that means isnât totally clear, however, since Google in February invested $400 million... Read more âș
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06.07.2026 21:25
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