A number of private equity firms are thinking about buying Peloton and taking it private, according to CNBC. That’s after the company’s bad quarter (and lack of strategy) led to both a 15 percent staff layoff and CEO Barry McCarthy stepping down. How will the PE vultures fix things? They have “zeroed in on cutting Peloton’s operating expenses,” of course. That’ll fix it, sure.
The big DOJ antitrust trial over Google Search revealed last week that Big G pays Apple $20 billion a year to be the default search on iOS. That’s over 20 percent of the “services” revenue Tim Cook loves to talk about on earnings calls, but hey, where is all that money on the balance sheet?
BI’s Peter Kafka found out: Apple categorizes it as “advertising.”
[Business Insider]
Polestar, now a more independent brand distinct from Volvo, is gearing up to deliver its most affordable cars yet.
On today’s Decoder, Verge transportation editor Andy Hawkins and I try to figure out Tesla. The company has been on a real rollercoaster these past two weeks — in terms of its stock price, its basic financials, and well, its vibes. With Elon Musk saying he’s going all in on autonomy and announcing a robotaxi event in August, it seems like we’re getting closer to a make-or-break moment for the company.
Between when we recorded this episode and today, there have been more than a half dozen new updates in the Tesla saga, including another wave of layoffs. That is a lot of chaos for a company that is trying to execute a huge pivot to become a very different kind of business than it is today — and do so very quickly. Like I said, Andy and I tried to explain Tesla. You let us know if we succeeded.
The all-EV future might not land in 2030, but it’s coming — and a new slate of challenges is coming with it.
US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken met with China’s Xi Jinping today to discuss everything from AI to the war in Ukraine. But “TikTok did not come up,” Blinken told reporters at a short press conference following his meetings today. Seriously, that’s all he said. Maybe next time.
[The New York Times]
Our latest episode of Decoder is about the brand-new TikTok ban — and how years of congressional inaction on a federal privacy law helped lead us to this moment of apparent national panic about algorithmic social media.
This is a thorny discussion, and to help break it all down, I invited Verge senior policy reporter Lauren Feiner on the show. Lauren has been closely covering efforts to ban TikTok for years now, and she’s also watched Congress fail to pass meaningful privacy regulation for even longer. We’ll go over how we got here, what this means for both TikTok and efforts to pass new privacy legislation, and what might happen next.
Look, this is fine advice from Adam Mosseri — build an audience, not traffic, as we say so often around here — but it’s just so weird to lean this far into the idea of engagement for regular people. These platforms all feel like work now, and increasingly less fun work. No wonder everyone is going to the DMs!
Our pals at Rest of World have a deep dive into the TSMC chip fab in Arizona, one of the major plants funded by the Chips and Science Act. It was meant to come online this year, but it’s fallen well behind schedule, and culture shock is a major reason why:
Several American former employees said they felt relief after quitting. In group chats, engineers celebrated the departure of their friends. “TSMC was the worst possible place to work on Earth,” one American ex-TSMC engineer told Rest of World. Another, who recently left the company, described TSMC as having “a purely authoritarian work structure.”
Shades of Foxconn in Wisconsin, but at least this time there’s an actual factory.