Wendy’s is permanently closing its ghost kitchen business. Butler Hospitality, a ghost kitchen company, shut down entirely. Travis Kalanick’s CloudKitchens lost a bunch of restaurant partners. Uber Eats is trimming its menu.
I guess you could say these kitchens got... ghosted.
[Bloomberg.com]
At least three meetings were scheduled in 2014, according to reminder emails Epstein’s assistant sent him. Epstein of course also spent time with Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, and Mark Zuckerberg.
Gee, I wonder if this was “nerd tunnel vision” too.
[The New York Times]
As global levels of debt are rising, debt collectors are using AI to hound borrowers.
Some of the companies that stand to benefit most from AI integration are those that purely exist to collect debt. These companies, known as debt buyers, purchase “distressed” debt from other creditors at steep discounts—usually pennies on the dollar—then try as hard as they can to get debtors to repay in full. They don’t issue loans, or provide any kind of service that clients might owe them for; it’s a business model built on profiting from people who fell behind on payments to someone else.
Here’s a profile of a 34-year-old social network, ECHO, run by a woman named Stacy Horn:
At its peak in the late ’90s, ECHO had 3,500 members. Among them: writers, artists, musicians, actors, therapists, and even, briefly, John F. Kennedy Jr.
Now it has just 43 users.
[MIT Technology Review]
TechCrunch did the math, and it couldn’t be more than $57.4 million, not the $100 million Musk has been claiming. OpenAI became a for-profit business after Musk stopped donating.
“For the first time in more than a decade, returns for venture funds were negative for three consecutive quarters last year,” The Wall Street Journal writes, citing PitchBook Data. “If you deployed a lot of money in 2021 at 2021 prices, that’s not going to feel good,” says Jay Ripley, the head of investments at Global Endowment Management.
Elon Musk has been subpoenaed by the US Virgin Islands because Epstein “may have referred or attempted to refer” him to JP Morgan. Though a subpoena was issued in April, lawyers have been unable to serve Musk with physical papers — and are seeking permission to serve him via email. They seek documents. Other billionaires, including Sergey Brin, have also been subpoenaed.
I have never in my life wanted anything more than the destruction of Intuit, a company that has lobbied to make taxes miserable for all of us for more than 20 years. Now the IRS is threatening to get into the disruption business and all I can say is yes... ha! ha! ha! YES:
A free filing system offered directly by the federal government could upset a commercial tax prep market estimated by research firm IBIS World to be worth $14.4 billion this year.
Turns out one reason movies are so hideously boring these days is that they are being “written” by VFX nerds. There are, of course, others — and I thought this little reflection on the casualties of the streaming wars was instructive.