Richard Lawler | The Verge

SpaceX cuts a deal to maybe buy Cursor for $60 billion

2026-04-22T05:40:37-04:00

With an IPO looming for Elon Musk’s SpaceX / xAI / X combo platter of companies, SpaceX has announced an odd arrangement to either acquire the automated programming platform Cursor for $60 billion or pay a fee of $10 billion. Buying this startup that’s focused on AI coding could help xAI’s tools compete with market leader Anthropic, as well as the other competitors. A report by The Information this week said Sergey Brin has directed Google’s “strike team” to help its agentic AI tools catch up, while Sam Altman reportedly declared a “code red” at OpenAI last year before shutting down Sora to focus on the ChatGPT superapp and its own Codex tool.

The New York Times first reported a possible deal Tuesday evening, and SpaceX confirmed it in a tweet.

SpaceX:

SpaceX and Cursor are now working closely together to create the world’s best coding and knowledge work AI.

The combination of Cursor’s leading product and distribution to expert software engineers with SpaceX’s million H100 equivalent Colossus training supercomputer will allow us to build the world’s most useful models.

Cursor has also given SpaceX the right to acquire Cursor later this year for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for our work together.

Breakup fees aren’t unusual for a proposed acquisition, but pitching this as “$10 billion for our work together” on AI is. CNBC and Bloomberg have reported that Musk values his combined X companies at $1.25 trillion, and CNBC reported a few days ago that Cursor was in the process of raising $2 billion in funding at a valuation of $50 billion.

Framework’s Laptop 13 Pro launch event

2026-04-23T09:01:33-04:00

Framework CEO Nirav Patel showed off his company’s latest modular, repairable laptops in San Francisco on Tuesday. The headliner is the new Laptop 13 Pro, which is its first machine fully machined out of aluminum, and Patel says its goal is to be “the MacBook Pro for Linux users.”

Read on below for all the updates from Framework’s April 2026 event.

John Ternus is taking over from Tim Cook as Apple’s CEO

2026-04-22T10:35:21-04:00

John Ternus and Tim Cook | Image: Apple

The multitrillion-dollar home of the iPhone, Mac, and so many other tech gadgets is getting a new leader this fall, as Apple has announced that Tim Cook will be replaced as CEO on September 1st by current hardware boss John Ternus. How will we look back on Cook’s legacy, and what will Apple look like under the leadership of Ternus and new chief hardware officer Johny Srouji?

We’ll keep track of all of the latest updates right here, starting with a live recording of The Vergecast.

Here’s how Amazon’s price fixing allegedly drove up prices everywhere

2026-04-22T02:34:49-04:00

On Monday, California Attorney General Rob Bonta revealed the evidence of alleged price-fixing by Amazon. The state filed a request to the Supreme Court in February for a preliminary injunction to stop Amazon’s behavior while the lawsuit it originally filed in 2022 proceeds, and is now making that 16-page document available, “largely unredacted.” It lays out how Amazon allegedly schemed to raise other retailers’ prices ahead of Prime Day, or worked with its vendors to make sure items available at a discount elsewhere were suddenly out of stock and unavailable for the lower price.

In response to a request for comment from The Verge, Amazon spokesperson Mark Blafkin sent over the following statement:

The Attorney General’s motion is a transparent attempt to distract from the weakness of its case, coming more than three years after filing its complaint and based on supposedly ‘new’ evidence it has had for years. Amazon is consistently identified as America’s lowest-priced online retailer, and we’re proud of the low prices customers find when shopping in our store. Amazon looks forward to responding in court at the appropriate time.

Bonta says this document shows how the scheme works with Amazon, vendors, and its supposed competition, like Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Chewy, and Home Depot, in three ways:

Amazon or its competitor, through their common vendor, will agree to increase the retail price or make a product temporarily unavailable, so that the other retailer can match the increased market price, increasing the price for consumers.
A competitor offering a cheaper price on a product will increase its retail price at Amazon’s request (a request made through the vendor), so that Amazon can then match that increased retail price, thereby increasing the price for consumers.
The vendor removes a product from a competing retailer that is offering a lower price than Amazon, so that the lower price is no longer available in the market and Amazon then raises its retail price, resulting in a higher price for consumers.

Two examples from the document (available in full below) jump out, like this one where Amazon sent Levi’s examples of lower prices on Walmart.com, and a response from Levi’s confirming that “I talked to Walmart and they have partnered with us to… take Easy Khaki Classic fit back up to ladder SPP price, $29.99 immediately.”

Another example alleged by Bonta is communication showing Amazon asking vendors like Scotts and Hanes to “look into” raising prices on competing websites. In the Scotts example, it specifically cites Amazon’s self-created Prime Day event as a reason to raise the price for a few days.

In one such case, Amazon directed vendor Scotts (a manufacturer of lawn/garden products) to “reach out to the retailer that we are price matching to and have them raise their prices, even if it is just for the 3 days leading up to [Prime Day].” In another example, Amazon sent Hanes (an apparel vendor) links to Target.com and Walmart.com showing lower prices than were on Amazon, and Hanes confirmed that it “reached out to Target and Walmart to have the prices increased.”

“My office has uncovered evidence that Amazon bullied vendors to hike up the price of their products sold at other shops, or secured the removal of these products altogether, to ensure Amazon was the cheapest place consumers could find products,” said Bonta in a statement. In an interview with the New York Times, he said, “You don’t see price fixing so explicitly and egregiously in writing like this.”

Update, April 21st: Added comment from Amazon.

Allbirds announced a switch from shoes to AI and its stock jumped 600 percent

2026-04-15T16:22:25-04:00

Allbirds had a hit a decade ago with its Wool Runner shoes, but after a $4 billion IPO in 2021, the business never turned a profit, and sales dropped nearly 50 percent between 2022 and 2025. The company recently announced it would sell off its name and assets for $39 million to American Exchange after closing the remaining stores. That shell listing, however, still has some use as the Financial Times points out, and now CEO Joe Vernachio has announced a plan to raise $50 million from an unnamed investor, which will turn NewBird AI into “a fully integrated GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) and AI-native cloud solutions provider.”

NewBird AI expects to use initial capital from the Facility to acquire high-performance GPU assets, which will be deployed to serve customers requiring dedicated access to AI compute capacity. NewBird AI’s long-term vision is to become a fully integrated GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) and AI-native cloud solutions provider. Over time, the Company intends to grow its neocloud platform by expanding its compute and service offerings, deepening partnerships with operators and customers, and evaluating strategic M&A opportunities.

The rise of AI development and adoption has created unprecedented structural demand for specialized, high-performance compute that the market is struggling to meet. Global enterprise spending on AI services and data center investment are on the rise. At the same time, GPU procurement lead times are increasing for high-end hardware, North American data center vacancy rates have reached historic lows, and market-wide compute capacity coming online through mid-2026 is already fully committed. The result is a market where enterprises, AI developers, and research organizations are unable to secure the compute resources they need to build, train and run AI at scale.

NewBird AI is being built to help close that gap. The Company will initially seek to acquire high-performance, low-latency AI compute hardware and provide access under long-term lease arrangements, meeting customer demand that spot markets and hyperscalers are unable to reliably service.

What does that have to do with anything Allbirds has ever done, and how much AI compute can $50 million provide to its customers that trillion- and billion-dollar competitors can’t? I don’t know, but this looks a lot like the kind of zombie brand pivot we saw in the SPAC-happy days of 2021, when Radio Shack suddenly turned into a cryptocurrency company.

We asked Wharton professor Gad Allon about the news, and he said, “Calling this a ‘pivot’ gives Allbirds too much credit.”

“A pivot implies the company is redeploying some capability, whether technology, talent, or distribution, into a new market. Allbirds has none of that in AI. What they do have is a public listing, and in this market, that turns out to be the only asset that matters. They’re not pivoting to AI. They’re using their status as a listed company to raise money against the flavor of the month… There’s an old Wall Street joke that when the shoe shine boy starts giving you stock tips, it’s time to sell. We may have reached the updated version: when the shoe company starts pitching itself as an AI play, the bubble is telling you something.”

Chardan Capital is listed in its press release as a placement agent, and in another recent deal, it served as the “exclusive M&A” adviser on a merger between the maker of the Evie smart ring, Movano, and an AI cloud computing company, Corvex. The newly combined company is still publicly listed under the “MOVE” ticker, but there’s no mention of health tech or future smart rings in its press release.

Following the NewBird AI news, the price of its stock (BIRD) spiked as high as $24.31, a 721 percent increase after opening the day at $6.82, and continues to hover at around $20 or so as of this writing.

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Update, April 15th: Added comment from Gad Allon.

Trump fires US attorney general Pam Bondi

2026-04-03T05:59:59-04:00

Pam Bondi, US attorney general, during a swearing-in ceremony in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on March 24, 2026. | Bloomberg via Getty Images

Taking a break from calling Bruce Springsteen a boring loser on Thursday, Donald Trump followed that up with another Truth Social post saying “loyal friend” Pam Bondi will transition to a yet-to-be-announced job in the private sector.

CNN, The New York Times, and Fox News all reported that Bondi, a figure in the TikTok takeover, pressuring tech companies to block ICE-tracking apps, and the Epstein files release, has been fired. Her departure closely follows the ousting of former Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem last month, as deputy attorney general Todd Blanche will now serve as acting AG.

Donald Trump:

Pam Bondi is a Great American Patriot and a loyal friend, who faithfully served as my Attorney General over the past year. Pam did a tremendous job overseeing a massive crackdown in Crime across our Country, with Murders plummeting to their lowest level since 1900.

We love Pam, and she will be transitioning to a much needed and important new job in the private sector, to be announced at a date in the near future, and our Deputy Attorney General, and a very talented and respected Legal Mind, Todd Blanche, will step in to serve as Acting Attorney General. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

April Fools’ Day 2026: the best and cringiest pranks

2026-04-01T21:03:19-04:00

Welcome to the worst day on the internet! As Chaim Gartenberg pointed out years ago, brands and a holiday dedicated to hoaxes are rarely a winning combo. If you’re a company with any kind of social media, internet, or AI chatbot presence in 2026, you really, truly only have four options on April Fools’ Day:

Don’t do an April Fools’ joke. Put the time and energy into doing something productive that will materially benefit the world (or, less idealistically, your business) instead. Or just don’t do anything. Abstaining entirely would still be a net positive over the drain of resources and mental energy.
Do an April Fools’ “joke,” but actually follow through on your stunt. This is arguably not a prank since you’ve actually created a video game skin or a real product that people can buy — but it doesn’t really hurt anyone.
Do an April Fools’ joke, but be extremely clear from the start that this is a dumb joke and you have no intention of doing the thing that you are “humorously” pretending to do. Does this defeat the purpose of doing an April Fools’ joke because you’re not “fooling” anyone anymore? Absolutely. (Please see my first two points.)
Lie to your customers, successfully tricking them into believing you are making some product, rebranding, or service you are not. By doing so, you will almost certainly annoy everyone once your deceit is made plain for the extremely small gain of pointless PR. The aphorism goes that there is no such thing as bad publicity; the seemingly endless line of companies willing to make fools out of themselves has proven this false time and time again.

So far, we’ve seen some socks that even you can’t lose, Snapchat “Reals” took a shot at Instagram’s Xerox machine approach to product development, and the monitor accessory cats want the most.

If you see anything that particularly sticks out for good, bad, or just unusual reasons, send it to us.

Apple’s Mac Pro is dead, apparently for good this time

2026-03-26T18:24:50-04:00

The most expensive Mac you could get is no longer available on Apple’s website, as 9to5Mac reports that the “cheese grater” Mac Pro workstation has been discontinued. It had been a part of the lineup since replacing the Power Mac G5 in 2006 when Apple shifted from Arm to Intel processors, but it’s had the feeling of a vestigial limb ever since Apple dropped Intel for its own M-series chips.

The M2 Ultra edition of the Mac Pro launched three years ago, with Apple hardware exec and possible future CEO John Ternus saying that “for those users who need the versatility of internal expansion, Mac Pro combines PCIe slots with our most powerful chip.” But without support for adding a new GPU, many of the professionals who should’ve been in its target market told us that they didn’t want one, with or without optional $699 wheels.

The Mac Studio offered similar options without those slots for $3,000 less at the time. Now it stands as the most powerful machine in Apple’s lineup, with M4 Max and M3 Ultra-powered options available now and, likely, M5 Ultra variants on the way.

Apple has acknowledged that 2013’s “trash can” Mac Pro design put it into a thermal corner it couldn’t find a way out of, as large single-GPU cards became preferred over multiple GPUs. Pro users wanted more options, with Red Digital Cinema president Jarred Land stopping during a talk in 2018 to tell an Apple employee that “We need Nvidia support… it’s not good for the community to just be on one platform so please just think about it, please.” Apple addressed those needs at the time by going back to the tower, but now, it’s leaving the Mac Studio and Thunderbolt 5 as its primary option for customers who need to add something extra.

OpenAI just gave up on Sora and its billion-dollar Disney deal

2026-03-25T03:13:06-04:00

A frame from a Sora 2-generated video. | Image: OpenAI

On Tuesday afternoon, OpenAI announced “We’re saying goodbye to Sora,” the video generation tool that it launched at the end of 2024, and centered in a massive licensing deal with Disney only a few months ago. The Wall Street Journal reported the move earlier, saying that OpenAI boss Sam Altman had informed staff that both the TikTok-like Sora app and API access for developers would be discontinued, with no plans to roll the feature into ChatGPT as had previously been rumored.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, as a result, the deal Disney announced in December, saying it would invest $1 billion in OpenAI, license its characters for use within Sora, and send AI-generated videos into Disney Plus, is also coming to an end. On the same day, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told CNBC that the company had raised an additional $10 billion from investors, as the company moves toward a potential IPO, on top of the $110 billion fundraising round announced in February.

OpenAI hasn’t responded to a request for comment or otherwise explained the shift, but there have been signs of a focus on practical adoption over “side quests” following Altman’s declaration of a “code red” a few months ago over possible slippage in the battle between ChatGPT vs. Google Gemini.

Last week, the WSJ reported OpenAI is working on a ChatGPT desktop “superapp” to simplify its product lineup around Codex and its AI browser, which exec Fidji Simo commented on, tweeting, “Companies go through phases of exploration and phases of refocus; both are critical. But when new bets start to work, like we’re seeing now with Codex, it’s very important to double down on them and avoid distractions. Really glad we’re seizing this moment.”

A report from Reuters says that Sora’s future had been debated by company execs for some time, as running it required so much compute power that it left other teams working with less, and that no money ever changed hands between OpenAI and Disney. However, it notes the sudden announcement apparently caught employees by surprise too, coming a day after OpenAI posted about Sora’s safety standards.

It also notes that the former Meta and Instacart exec Simo has a new title now, going from CEO of applications to “CEO of AGI deployment,” while Altman reportedly said that the company’s security and safety teams aren’t reporting directly to him.

Sora:

An important update about Sora: Today, after careful internal discussion about our broader research priorities, we’ve made the difficult decision to discontinue the Sora app.

We know many of you invested significant time and energy into Sora – building not just gens, but also audiences and real communities. The creativity that emerged exceeded what we could have expected.

Our focus now is on making this transition as clear and thoughtful as possible. We’ll share timelines and access details so you can plan accordingly, and we’re exploring ways to support export and preservation of your work. Thank you for creating with Sora, for being part of this community, and for coming on this journey. More soon.

Update, March 25th: Added note from the Sora app, and additional details from CNBC and Reuters.

Arm’s first CPU ever will plug into Meta’s AI data centers later this year

2026-03-24T18:28:49-04:00

After decades of only licensing its chip designs for others to use, UK-based Arm revealed the first chip it’s producing on its own, and the first customer. Dubbed the Arm AGI CPU, it’s another chip designed for inference, or running the cloud processing for AI tools like AI agents that can continue to spawn more and more tasks to run at once. The first company in line to use it is Meta, which has reportedly struggled to launch its own AI chips.

Meta says it’s both the lead partner and co-developer, and plans to work on “multiple generations” of the data center CPUs, for use along with hardware from other vendors like Nvidia and AMD. Arm customers like Amazon AWS, Microsoft, Google, Marvell, Nvidia, Samsung, and others included congratulatory notes with the announcement. However, Qualcomm, which said it had achieved “complete victory” over Arm with a court ruling last fall in their case over the terms of licensing agreements, was not one of them.

Financial terms of the deal weren’t revealed, nor was the number of chips Meta plans to use from Arm, which is currently owned by SoftBank.

According to Arm, its new chip runs on the Neoverse platform used by AWS Graviton, Nvidia Vera, Microsoft, and other AI chips, with up to 136 cores per CPU and 64 CPUs per air-cooled server rack. It says the AGI CPU can get twice as much performance per watt as traditional x86 CPUs while reducing memory bottlenecks, taking advantage of the design’s long-running efficiency advantages.

Other customers lined up for Arm’s chip include Cerebras, Cloudflare, F5, OpenAI, Positron, Rebellions, SAP, and SK Telecom. Arm cloud AI head Mohamed Awad told CNBC that its aim is to be an option for companies that can’t afford to make their own in-house processor.