Elizabeth Lopatto
AI chatbots are for suckers, crypto edition.
The fine folks at Protos had a little talk with Binance’s AI bot and... listen, parting chumps from their money is a novel way to monetize AI.
Elizabeth Lopatto
Senior Reporter
Senior Reporter
More From Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
“I do TikTok to rip people off.”
Caveat emptor, but especially on TikTok. There’s a moderation problem for their ecommerce business, The Financial Times reports:
Three TikTok employees said cleaning up fraudulent content on the app and monitoring its ballooning number of merchants seemed to have fallen by the wayside amid a frantic push for growth.
Cottage industry of Chinese scammers target TikTok
[Financial Times]
Elizabeth Lopatto
Wait, so how exactly does Waystar Royco work?
Great question! The Financial Times tried to find out. We know there’s a valuation around $80 billion, that Kendall Roy selling to Stewy “King of Looking Fab in a Turtleneck” Hosseini was an astoundingly bad decision, and... oh it seems like the financial stuff is more vibes-based than math based!
Still, the Bloomberg terminal shade is fun.
Elizabeth Lopatto
“Either way, when the Auschwitz Museum is having to issue a public statement saying that they didn’t pay for Twitter Blue, it’s probably time for some deep self-reflection about what you’re doing.”
Ryan Broderick has some thoughts on the ongoing verification demolition derby, which has somehow gone even worse than I thought it would. Sure, someone could probably give Elon Musk useful advice, but this is way funnier! Webbed site.
The business genius has another excellent idea
[www.garbageday.email]
Elizabeth Lopatto
“Humbled” Silicon Valley VCs are loading up on money from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE.
If you can’t raise in the US... try, try again?
“We came to San Francisco looking for them in 2017. Now . . . everyone is coming to [us],” said Ibrahim Ajami, head of ventures at Mubadala Capital, part of Mubadala Investment Company, a $284bn Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund. “The tech correction has humbled the industry.”
Silicon Valley VCs tour Middle East in hunt for funding
[FinancialTimes]
Elizabeth Lopatto
Sometimes reality is just wilder than fiction.
Lachlan Murdoch had a panic attack during the deal to sell 20th Century Fox to Disney! (A person close to him denies this but cmon lol.) Lachlan told Rupert that James was leaking stuff to Succession writers! There’s even a cameo by Rupert Murdoch’s former wife, Wendi Deng, who may have pushed him into a piano and fractured some of his vertebrae!
Oh and in case you were wondering about the real-life inspo for Connor Roy? It’s Prudence, and if you can’t get enough Prudence, I suggest you check out Michael Wolff’s Murdoch biography.
Inside Rupert Murdoch’s Succession Drama
[Vanity Fair]
Elizabeth Lopatto
Our hero Dril’s alter ego is a guy named Paul Dochney.
Gotta be honest, that sounds like a name Dril would make up.
Dril was born on Something Awful, in the Fuck You and Die forum. He migrated to Twitter during a period when SA regulars wanted a way to post on mobile. And how do you make a Dril tweet?
“I just post whatever bullshit I’m thinking,” Dochney explained of the Dril Process. “I kind of have to get into, like, the writing mood. But there’s no ritual or anything. Usually when I’m driving or I’m in the shower, I’ll come up with some sort of idea.”
Elizabeth Lopatto