Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:• The Big Read: Pickleball is the past—the tech elite is obsessed with padel. • Plus, an Americana-themed batch of Recommendations—our weekly pop culture picks: “The Americans,” “East of Eden,” “High Desert Daydream,” “Lonesome Dove,” USA vs. Belgium, and “The Twilight Zone.” The year’s midpoint is an apt moment for some studied reflection, and I’ve been thinking about how much has changed in the last six... Read more ›
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Well that’s one way to get attention. According to a statement issued today by a bunch of leading names in AI, “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority.” Right. It’s hard to imagine anyone out there disagrees—who but the most extreme misanthrope wants to extinguish the human race? The question, then, is why the very people responsible for AI’s development are suggesting it should be... Read more ›
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Like most startups, gaming companies have seen interest from venture capitalists fall off sharply in the last year. But appetite is not completely dead. Investors have been backing those that prioritize creator-generated content and those that incorporate generative artificial intelligence—and sometimes both.Gaming startups raised $1.1 billion in 140 deals in the first quarter, according to a report out Tuesday from PitchBook, down 76% in dollar terms from a year ago... Read more ›
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Activist investor Legion Partners, which owns a stake in Twilio, has met several times with the company’s board of directors and management, urging them to make changes to the board and consider divestitures, among other moves, according to people familiar with the matter. The conversations come at a critical moment for the $11.5 billion communications software company. Its use of supervoting shares, which gives CEO and co-founder Jeff Lawson a... Read more ›
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In November 2021, just as crypto prices were hitting all-time highs, MoonPay—a crypto payments startup that celebrities including Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton had praised for its non-fungible token “concierge” service—announced it had completed its first ever outside fundraising: an eye-popping $555 million round at a $3.4 billion valuation from investors including Tiger Global Management and Coatue Management. There was more to the deal than met the eye. MoonPay raised... Read more ›
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The technology hype cycle would have us believe that the metaverse—so recently the darling of digital trendsetters—is on the decline, its place usurped by generative artificial intelligence. Yet this narrative, while superficially attractive, is a fiction. The truth is that emerging technologies are part of a synergistic ecosystem. Rather than heralding the demise of the metaverse, generative AI may well prove to be its catalyst, fueling accelerated development in extended... Read more ›
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Merger and acquisition activity has been anemic for more than a year, with buyers and sellers often far apart on price after valuations have taken a beating. But one corner of the M&A market has held up much better than others during the doldrums: the sale of companies owned by a founder with neither venture capital nor private equity backers. The number of deals of that type declined just 5.7%... Read more ›
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The Singapore-based CEO of TikTok, Shou Zi Chew, is getting a bigger job. TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, is putting its newer social media app, Lemon8, under Chew’s supervision, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. The move appears to reflect ByteDance’s strategy of locating the heads of its global apps outside China, in an effort to defend the apps from a backlash over their Chinese ownership.... Read more ›
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For much of the last century, metals companies have made stainless steel from nickel mined in Russia or the Philippines and smelted at temperatures up to 2,900 degrees. But demand for nickel is outstripping supplies because the metal is a key component in most electric vehicle batteries. So metals producers have turned to a new supplier—Indonesia, which possesses vast reserves of a previously spurned low-grade type of nickel—and new smelting... Read more ›
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Hi, welcome to your Weekend.Wall Street short sellers are not everyone’s cup of tea. That goes double for a lifelong contrarian like Marc Cohodes, who sees himself as an anti-fraud vigilante fighting for the little guys—while also being a loudmouth bully on Twitter. Nobody knows this better than veteran finance journalist Michelle Celarier, who has been on the receiving end of Cohodes’ verbal abuse over the years. When she set... Read more ›
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When Andy Wilson’s company received its first successful client referral through ChatGPT, he was shaken to his core. The founder and CEO of Logikcull, a San Francisco–based legal technology company, Wilson “had the exact same reaction to ChatGPT as I had to the internet browser in the early ’90s,” he said. “But this time I knew it would be even bigger than the internet, the cloud, the iPhone combined.” Read more ›
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On Wednesday night, Twitter experienced multiple outages during a high-profile live audio forum on the app in which Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis launched his presidential campaign. While the specific reason for the flub couldn’t be learned, the company several weeks ago stopped paying for special software that handles high-traffic internet services, including for the app’s live-audio feature, according to a person with direct knowledge of the decision. The move,... Read more ›
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On June 29, 2020, as thunderstorms swept Mumbai and daily Covid-19 cases in India surged by almost 20,000, millions of people began experiencing a flood of network errors on their mobile devices. TikTok—and nearly 60 other Chinese apps—had been driven offline in the world’s largest democracy. A sweeping government crackdown on Chinese tech had begun, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi issuing bans on widely popular apps and services to protect... Read more ›
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In the spring of 2022, the irascible Wall Street short seller Marc Cohodes was in a particularly foul mood. The 62-year-old’s second marriage was on the rocks. He was recuperating from shoulder surgery after his horse rammed him. He couldn’t do much of anything besides fume and tweet about the financial markets. On April 29, 2022, Cohodes found himself seething about offshore crypto exchange FTX and its CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried,... Read more ›
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Welcome back!Los Angeles, with its close ties to the larger entertainment industry, has emerged as the center of the creator economy. For years, startups serving creators have flocked to Southern California. But this year, more money is flowing to creator startups based elsewhere.Only 14% of the creator economy startups that have raised funding this year are headquartered in Southern California. Prior to this year, 27% of the startups in The... Read more ›
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Chime found a way to offer zero-fee banking services without being a bank itself. But that approach is starting to show its limits. While Chime brought in more than $1 billion in revenue last year, according to two people familiar with the figure, Chime’s revenue growth has slowed dramatically since 2020. And behind the scenes, the startup that once fetched a $25 billion valuation has struggled to fix costly fraud... Read more ›
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Since 100% of the conversations I have on a given day turn to artificial intelligence, I can’t stop thinking about the new technology, the new business models around it and how regulators will respond. And if I am being honest with myself, the answer to most of the questions that come up in these conversations is that I simply have no idea how this will all play out. Apparently, investors... Read more ›
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A new livestreaming service called Kick has been attracting streamers with a revenue-split that lets creators keep 95% of their subscription revenue, a more generous deal than the 50% split they get from streaming site Twitch. A new report Thursday shows just how successful that perk has been. Hours watched on Kick climbed to 51.8 million in April, up from 12.8 million in January, according to a new report on... Read more ›
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Welcome back!U.S. venture capitalists seem to be gripped by patriotic fervor, with a growing faction urging their peers to back more companies that help the U.S. battle adversaries like China. That’s put other venture capital firms with large China footprints on the defensive, as I reported this week.The recent bout of nationalism has worried me, as well as some investors I’ve spoken to. For one thing, it could fuel xenophobia... Read more ›
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JPMorgan has told customers with personal credit lines at First Republic Bank that it will no longer offer those lines when they come up for renewal, according to correspondence viewed by The Information. The failed lender, which has been sold to JPMorgan, had offered personal lines of credit to its wealthy client base as a key way of attracting customers. A person familiar with the matter said JPMorgan doesn’t offer... Read more ›
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Sign up for Rosen’s newsletter, Parqor, part of The Information’s newsletter network. I doubt the shareholder lawsuit filed against former Disney CEO Bob Chapek and current Chief Financial Officer Christine McCarthy a couple weeks ago will go to trial. If Disney is guilty of fraud in how it represented the performance of its streaming properties, then there is a biblical-style legal reckoning coming for all media companies with streaming businesses.... Read more ›
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08.07.2026 03:27
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