The Verge’s latest insights into the ideas shaping the future of work, finance, and innovation. Here you’ll find scoops, analysis, and reporting across some of the most influential companies in the world. Our coverage also includes interviews with innovators and policy makers at the frontiers of business and technology on Editor-in-Chief Nilay Patel’s Decoder; a behind-the-curtain look at Silicon Valley with Alex Heath’s Command Line; and exclusive reporting on Microsoft’s strategy in Tom Warren’s Notepad.
Hoffman, who joined Microsoft’s board in 2017, won’t stand for reelection at the company’s next shareholder meeting, as reported earlier by Bloomberg.
In an episode of his Possible podcast with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Hoffman says he wants to focus on Manas, the AI drug development startup he co-founded last year.
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Peloton has acquired Skōp, a Pilates-focused startup that builds real-time form-tracking technology. That suggests there might be new Peloton hardware on the horizon, as the company tries to recover from its post-covid slump. In a statement, Peloton CEO Peter Stern said:
“Form is everything in Pilates, so we are taking a purposeful approach to ensure we develop the most effective, safest, and fun experiences possible—ones people will keep doing for life.”
You all know how much we here at The Verge love market consolidation. SwitchBot’s acquisition of Nanoleaf offers all that, plus a sprinkling of something extra.
ScootyScoot:
Excellent - more market consolidation and more AI. That’s definitely two things consumers need more of these days!
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Grimes County, Texas, awarded the company a property tax exemption for its planned $55 billion Terafab semiconductor plant. Local residents seem to feel the same way about the project as many do about data centers, and this tax break won’t help. As local landowner Rhonda Nesloney put it in court:
“Elon was on the news bragging he’s about to be a trillionaire . . . and you want to consider giving him a tax abatement.”
CNBC reports details from a new filing ahead of SpaceX’s IPO on June 12th and notes a mention that xAI, which merged with SpaceX earlier this year, bought $269 million worth of Tesla megapack batteries in April.
At the $135 per share price tag, SpaceX would be valued at $1.77 trillion, which assumes the EchoStar spectrum and Cursor transactions close. The valuation would make SpaceX the seventh-biggest company in the U.S. by market cap, and put it above Tesla, which is valued at about $1.6 trillion.
The ESA / YouGov data unsurprisingly shows that an estimated 212 million Americans play games, with gaming at least one hour a week most prevalent among young people, including over 80 percent of Gen Alpha and Gen Z.
Older Americans are playing games, too, though, including 50 percent of Boomers, the only generation where more women play games than men.
As Microsoft shows off its AI tools at Build, close frienemy OpenAI is once again promoting Codex as something for all kinds of information and knowledge-based work that goes beyond ChatGPT’s features. It’s launching new plugins, and says that business and enterprise customers have access to a new preview capable of building “interactive, hosted websites and apps” that it can keep updated with new data.
The biggest public offering ever is financial nihilism’s final form.
Ackman, through his Pershing Square hedge fund, had offered in April to take over UMG in a deal valuing the music giant at around €55 billion. But UMG says that the offer “fundamentally and materially undervalues UMG and will not deliver superior value creation.”
That’s what Amazon exec Dave Treadwell told employees after the company shuttered an internal leaderboard tracking which staff members use AI the most, the Financial Times reports:
The decision came after the tool led some workers to assign AI agents — autonomous bots that can take actions on behalf of users — to carry out needless tasks in an apparent attempt to climb the rankings.
As computing becomes more expensive, employee “toxenmaxxing” reportedly increased costs at Amazon.
As the Wall Street Journal reports, SK Hynix and Micron both passed the milestone this week. The spike in value for the world’s three largest DRAM manufacturers follows a months-long global memory shortage, driven by demand from AI data centers, that’s causing prices to skyrocket on everything from phones to game consoles.
[Wall Street Journal]
Steve Jobs famously told Houston his startup was “a feature, not a product” when trying to acquire it back in 2009. Houston turned down the nine-figure buyout offer and Apple went on to launch iCloud. Houston, now 43 and worth about $2 billion, leaves behind a service used by millions worldwide. He now wants to do something entrepreneurial with — you guessed it — AI.
The deal will pay some workers in Samsung’s highly profitable memory chip unit around $416,000 this year, while employees in other chip units will receive less, and those in its consumer electronics divisions are set to receive very little by comparison. Payouts are pegged to Samsung hitting profit milestones through 2028.
The new deal, still being voted on, ensures enormous bonuses for memory chip workers but much smaller payouts for everyone else. Two Samsung unions take issue with that: one says its members will vote against the deal, the other says it’s taking legal action after being denied the chance to vote.
The smart ring maker has confidentially filed its Form S-1 ahead of an IPO, and it plans to potentially go public this year, Bloomberg reports. Oura also said Wednesday that it’s “on pace” to pass five million paid subscribers this quarter.
Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary is one of the investors backing the Stratos Project, a colossal data center in Utah. It sounds like he has a few fans in the comments section.
Electric Mayhem:
Kevin O’Leary is the Donald Trump of Mark Cubans.
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The rocket company says it’s ‘highly dependent’ on Musk’s leadership. And that his other companies are possible competitors.
The company reported record overall revenue of $81.6 billion and record data center revenue of $75.2 billion, driven by continued demand for its chips in AI data centers.
Nvidia says its next-generation Vera Rubin AI chip is “on track for the second half of this year, starting in Q3,” but noted that PC sales are down due to the RAM shortage and price hikes.
[NVIDIA Newsroom]
Joe Rogan accidentally asked a hard question! He noted that Andreessen has said that the people who are running AI haven’t done a good job explaining AI’s benefits. He asks Andreessen to do it. Andreessen’s pitch appears to be “thinking is too hard.” Well, increasingly, I do believe thinking is too hard… for Andreessen. The rest of us — you know, normal people — are thinking just fine.
The deal is valued at $100 million according to Puck, and would add a US-based brand to Shein’s portfolio after President Trump ended the de minimis exemption on cheap imported goods. If true, that’s a notable pivot for Everlane, which until now has built its brand around sustainability.
The UK’s competition and markets regulator has cleared the deal to go ahead, on the condition that Shutterstock sells its global editorial business, including Backgrid and Splash. This clears a path to finalize the merger, as it was already granted “unconditional antitrust clearance” by the US DOJ in February.
I enjoyed reading this story about Bill Gates’ malevolent influence on the current crop of Silicon Valley megalomaniacs. If you remember his pre-Gates Foundation reputation, you will particularly appreciate it.
[The New York Review of Books]
Even with the FTC’s click-to-cancel rule vacated (but possibly coming back?), it has reached a settlement over Shutterstock’s subscriptions that allegedly required a phone, chat, or email conversation to get out of.
…Shutterstock advertised its on-demand packs as “Best for a one-time project,” with “no commitment,” but failed to adequately disclose that these packs automatically renewed when the last download in the pack was used and—until early 2024—that they automatically renewed after one year.
Just kidding! But some news organizations are offering prediction market affiliate codes — and publishing thousands of stories pushing gambling deals. Popular Information reports that news orgs owned by Advance Local (including The Oregonian and The Cleveland Plain Dealer) are on track to run more than 14,000 pieces of “gambling slop” this year promoting deals for sportsbooks, casinos, and prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi.
[Popular Information]
The data mining company with extensive defense contracts is making merch to signal which side you’re on.
Earlier this week I wrote about the social media “clippers” that get paid to semi-covertly promote podcasts, TV shows, and other media through anonymous accounts. One of the clipping campaigns was for Perplexity AI — but nobody can tell me who, exactly, is responsible for the clips:
Reached via email, Perplexity distanced itself from clipping company Vyro, with spokesperson Jesse Dwyer saying Perplexity “has no knowledge” of the company and “takes any unauthorized use of the Perplexity name or logo very seriously.” When asked to confirm Perplexity had not run or authorized clipping campaigns, Dwyer initially stopped responding to The Verge. After publication, Dwyer told The Verge it was “not accurate” to say Perplexity launched the clipping campaign.
So who did?
You know how only one company in the entire world makes the machine that makes the world’s most advanced chips — and only three companies control the world’s supply of RAM? Reuters reports that Big Tech is trying to buy Big RAM’s favor in exchange for some of those machines, among other “unprecedented” offers.
Everything is gambling, but not everything in gambling is going great, as CNBC reports that on Wednesday, FanDuel CEO Amy Howe was “ousted from that post after five years at the company.” FanDuel’s stock is down 60 percent over the last year, and DraftKings shares are down 30 percent.
Meanwhile, prediction market Kalshi just announced it’s raised a $1 billion investment round at a $22 billion valuation, twice as much as it was worth in December, and claimed to project “annualized” trading volume of $178 billion.
