David Pierce

We’ve known that SBF, the former billionaire and former FTX CEO, had come up as a possible partner in Musk’s Twitter acquisition. Musk has since distanced himself from SBF, but according to Semafor, Musk also took his money:

The FIFA app crashed in Qatar today, ESPN reported, and thousands of fans couldn’t access their tickets or get into games. They had to resort to printing out tickets, like our ancestors once did.

He talked a lot about betting on distribution vs. content, not giving a crap about the metaverse, and “a world where technology was going to expand the purview of the storyteller.” He also said he was happy being retired, which, whoops! Now, Iger’s back as Disney CEO to execute on his vision for the next couple of years.

Like this Insider story points out, The World Cup is the biggest thing on Twitter. By a wide margin. If the next few weeks can go well for Musk and co. it could be a big step toward getting the platform back to normal. But if Twitter crashes, or has huge moderation issues, or can’t keep up with the pirated highlights, it won’t have anywhere to hide.

Freakonomics has a whole episode looking at why (and whether) Google seems to be getting worse at finding and delivering search results. As ever, the truth is complicated, but there are a lot of reasons Google feels worse than it used to. And most of those reasons are ads.

Quitting Twitter: maybe a good idea for lots of reasons! Also really hard to do, because in addition to being a horrifying hellscape it’s also an irreplaceable way to share information. Like, say, trying to get your Senator’s message some coverage:

We covered all that on the latest episode of The Vergecast, along with what Dall-E and other platforms will mean for copyright law, the difference between CMYK and RGB, and much more. AI art is coming, y’all!