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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After spending six months alienating many of Twitter’s biggest users, Elon Musk’s Twitter is now trying to woo creators. For the past few weeks, Twitter has been encouraging creators to sign up for its subscription product, through which users pay creators a few dollars a month to receive content that’s behind a paywall, as well as a badge denoting their subscriber status. Twitter’s director of product management overseeing subscriptions, Patrick... Read more ›
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Hi, welcome to your Weekend.While we wait around for another bank to collapse (First Republic, we hardly knew ye), the opposite is happening in social media. A thousand new apps are blooming! With Bluesky and Lemon8 and Mastodon and T2 soaking up attention, it feels like 2008 again in the Valley—except that all the coding is being done by GPTs instead of humans. This week, Arielle examines the great race... Read more ›
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Bohdan Skitenko has been working in the design industry, producing 3D art and animation, for around five years. But it was when version four of generative AI image creator Midjourney was released in November 2022 that he began thinking about pivoting his career toward a more artificial intelligence–integrated one. “I realized that this is the future,” said Skitenko, 21, who lives in Dnipro, Ukraine. “Neural networks remove this barrier between... Read more ›
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Abraham Shafi has stepped down as CEO of messaging app IRL following allegations that the company used bots to inflate the users it reported publicly and to investors, according to a person with direct knowledge. The abrupt change happened after The Information reported a former employee alleged he was fired after expressing concern that a high percentage of IRL’s 20 million claimed users were bots. He researched the matter inside... Read more ›
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Earlier this spring, as Clare Sullivan scrolled through her TikTok feed, she began to notice creators plugging yet another new social media platform. “Follow me on Lemon8!” one said. “It’s going to be the next big thing” the next interjected. “You need to get on TikTok’s new app Lemon8,” another reiterated. Sullivan kept seeing these posts—some sponsored by Lemon8, some organic—hyping the new service, which happens to be owned by... Read more ›
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Sequoia Capital, whose Chinese affiliate became one of the biggest funders of startups in China, has been working with Washington-based national security advisory firm Beacon Global Strategies as it faces potential U.S. government restrictions on American technology investment in China, according to four people with knowledge of the situation. Beacon’s work for Sequoia, which hasn’t been previously reported, is of critical importance because the Biden administration has reportedly discussed limiting... Read more ›
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On the day Sarah Oh got laid off from Twitter last November, her friend Gabor Cselle called with his condolences. Then he made her an offer: Would she help him build a better Twitter? Cselle wasn’t trying to reinvent the social media wheel. He just wanted to return to a simpler time on the platform—before 4,000-character tweets or the bloodbath of blue check marks. Before Donald Trump or Alex Jones... Read more ›
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Welcome back!I’m Kalley Huang, a data reporter for The Information. I’m now writing The Pro Weekly. Please feel free to ask questions and share feedback at kalley@theinformation.com. With sales stagnating or falling, tech companies continue looking for ways to cut costs. They are thinning their ranks, shuttering products and streamlining their operations. This week, we reported personnel changes at Amazon and Meta Platforms that reflect belt-tightening by big tech. Read more ›
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Blackstone’s Jon Korngold has been winning deals since he was nine years old. Back then, the venue was a flea market rather than a boardroom, and the prize was often a random antique rather than a multibillion-dollar company. But he was a deal hound nonetheless, and he often got a better price than his mom, who collected antiques, could. Fast-forward 40 years, and Korngold makes deals on a much bigger... Read more ›
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Advantage, big tech. Snap’s first-quarter report today, showing a 7% drop in revenue, was a markedly worse performance than what its much bigger rival Meta Platforms reported on Wednesday night. (For those who’ve already forgotten, Meta’s ad revenue rose 4% in the quarter.) More noticeable was the difference in the second-quarter revenue outlook: Snap projected a 6% drop, while Meta projected growth of as much as 11%. Investors have made... Read more ›
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So much for the burst of good tidings about the ad market from Meta Platforms’ first quarter results. Snap results, out Thursday, took up the baton that YouTube’s drooping ad sales left off. Snap told investors that the advertising slump that hammered first-quarter results would extend into the second quarter. Pinterest, meanwhile, forecast a second quarter gain in revenue—but not at the double-digit rate that larger Meta expects. Here’s what... Read more ›
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This week’s news that fintech investor Anthemis Group has cut 28% of its staff, which comes one month after Y Combinator slashed about 20% of its workers, suggests more venture capital layoffs are coming.The shrinking appetite of their limited partners means many will likely raise smaller funds, taking away resources to maintain headcount that ballooned during the record bull run. Recall that VC firms’ management fees, usually 2% of a... Read more ›
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Meta Platforms has combined its advertising product, business messaging and commerce departments into one division as part of a broader effort to reduce the ranks of middle management across the company. The changes, communicated internally last week by Meta’s vice president of monetization, John Hegeman, also show how closely Meta has aligned commerce, messaging and advertising areas as it tries to jumpstart ad growth. Read more ›
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Fintechs, beat down by the tech meltdown last year, are struggling to make good on their pitch to consumers. Consumer lending–focused fintechs like Upstart and Pagaya touted artificial intelligence and other flashy tech as a way to lend money to people quickly and easily—even to customers with bad or limited credit histories that couldn’t borrow from traditional banks. Read more ›
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The overnight success of ChatGPT and GPT-4 marks a clear turning point for artificial intelligence. It also marks an inflection point for public discourse about the risks and benefits of AI for our society. Practitioners, policymakers and pundits alike have voiced loud concerns, ranging from fear of a potential flood of AI-generated disinformation to the existential risks of superhuman intelligence whose goals may not align with humanity’s best interests. The... Read more ›
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A former employee of SoftBank-backed messaging app IRL alleged in a legal filing that the company has inflated its user count and retaliated against him and other employees who raised concerns about the accuracy of its user numbers. The former employee, Nicholas Grant, made the allegations in an unfair dismissal complaint he filed with the Welsh employment tribunal last month. Grant says in the filing, which The Information viewed, that... Read more ›
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Tesla is shaking up its top leadership in South Korea just one day after CEO Elon Musk met with South Korea’s president to discuss further investment in the country. Yvonne Chan, a regional director for Tesla’s business in Thailand and Taiwan and close deputy to Tesla automotive head Tom Zhu, has added South Korea business to her responsibilities, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Chan, who previously... Read more ›
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Late last year, a trio of engineers who had just helped Apple modernize its search technology began working on the type of technology underlying ChatGPT, the chatbot from OpenAI that has captivated the public since it launched last November. For Apple, there was only one problem: The engineers no longer work there. They had left the company to work on the technology, known as large-language models, at Google. The three... Read more ›
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General Motors’ decision this week to kill the electric Chevy Bolt brings to a close a turbulent chapter in the company’s foray into electric vehicles, including one of the past decade’s biggest battery scandals and a fire hazard that forced the recall of the entire Bolt fleet. It’s a mystifying decision—and a big mistake. Read more ›
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In tech, three is the new 30. Meta Platforms on Wednesday reported a 3% lift in revenue for the first quarter, the same revenue increase Alphabet reported for its first quarter on Tuesday. Increasing the top line by 3% is a far cry from the 25% to 30% quarterly growth Facebook’s owner once reported with monotonous regularity. But it’s a big improvement from reporting declines in revenue, as Meta had... Read more ›
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09.07.2026 13:25
Last update: 13:20 EDT.
News rating updated: 20:23.
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