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.
Malik, who founded the tech blog GigaOm in 2001 before eventually transitioning into venture capital, died on Wednesday at Stanford Hospital “after a long health journey with his heart,” said Om’s family in a post on his website.
[On my Om]
You might remember I took a break from Decoder last year — we had a baby, so I took some leave. In my place, we had an excellent slate of guest hosts, and we’ve been working hard to bring you those episodes in full video since we launched our official Decoder YouTube channel.
So today, we’re featuring a really great interview conducted last fall by my very good friend Joanna Stern, now the founder and CEO of New Things, and Ford CEO Jim Farley. Watch it here, or read the full transcript here.
Neil Vogel, CEO of the publisher formerly known as Dotdash Meredith, brought up his company’s AI licensing deals with Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft in an Axios interview this week. He noted that while it blocks other unlicensed AI crawlers, it can’t block Google’s since it’s the same one used for Google Search.
According to Vogel, “We would love to do something productive with them, but we’re probably heading towards more confrontation than productivity with those guys.”
The company — which provides “Digit” humanoid robots to customers like Amazon and Toyota — is set to merge with acquisition company Churchill Capital Corp and list under the ticker symbol AGLT. Agility CEO Peggy Johnson says that going public will give the company an edge over its competitors “seeking to fill the labor gap.”
[The Wall Street Journal]
That’s a workforce reduction of about 13 percent over the last 12 months, according to a disclosure filed Monday. And Oracle is hardly alone in at least partially attributing the cuts to AI advancements:
Worries are quickly mounting over job losses due to AI disruption, as 196 tech companies laid off more than 119,800 employees so far this year, according to Layoffs.fyi.
The open-source AI startup has a deal through 2029, similar to Anthropic and Google, to rent compute capacity from SpaceX’s Colossus 2 data center for $150 million per month (up to $6.3 billion), reports the Wall Street Journal.
[Wall Street Journal]
Chipmaker SK Hynix, which supplies high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips to Nvidia and Google, has overtaken Samsung, with Reuters reporting that its market capitalization has now hit $1.35 trillion. Samsung had held the top spot since 2000, prior to the AI boom.
The Roku Netflix Player was originally a streaming box that then-Netflix CEO Reed Hastings decided not to build.
Now Semafor reports Netflix was interested in acquiring the company before Fox closed its $22 billion deal, losing out once again after Paramount swooped in with a deal to buy Warner Bros. while enjoying a cozier relationship with this administration’s regulators.
Like buying Roku, for example.
Dkfkhfkwkdnc:
The masculine urge to fold companies into progressively dumber conglomerates
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A month after a jury dismissed Elon’s claims in the Musk v. Altman case, US District Judge Rita Lin dismissed an xAI lawsuit accusing OpenAI of stealing trade secrets and poaching employees. This time, it was dismissed with prejudice, meaning it can’t be refiled, unlike when she dismissed the case in February.
The judge wrote in her ruling that continuing the case “would be futile.”
The head of the top US autonomous drone maker on China, mass surveillance, and why he thinks drones can make us safer.
While SpaceX plans satellite-based AI servers, Bloomberg reports it ran into trouble trying to develop and run Grok AI in Memphis, citing unnamed sources. They claim that deals renting capacity to Anthropic ($15 billion annually) and Google ($920 million per month) happened following hardware variation and lag issues:
Elon Musk’s company had planned to train its most cutting-edge AI models on a massive amount of computing power by using a cluster of three data center campuses. However, the firm encountered latency issues when connecting Colossus 1 with two other sites located more than 10 miles away, the people said, compounded by aging network infrastructure.
With the debut of SPCX, Elon Musk’s 4.8 billion shares are enough to push his wealth beyond $1.1 trillion, as noted on Forbes’ “definitive, minute-by-minute guide to every billionaire around the globe.”
As reported by CNBC, the New York Times, and others, trading commenced at a price 11 percent above the $135 IPO price, but lower than the $175 shown in some earlier indications. It’s already spiked as high as $167, before falling back to $155. As long as the share price remains above $138, that is enough to make Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire.
It also gives SpaceX a market cap of over $2 trillion, making it currently the 6th most valuable public company in the US.
That price puts SpaceX at a market valuation of around $1.77 trillion ahead of its record-breaking stock market debut on Friday. CNBC reports that SpaceX may allocate 20 percent of shares to retail investors, down from the previous expectation of 30 percent.
WMG has agreed to buy Sureel AI — an attribution company that uses “AI DNA” to track how artists’ content is used to train generative AI models — for an undisclosed sum. The startup will continue to operate as a standalone platform.
[PR Newswire]
The Wall Street Journal reports that it’s Kalshi’s latest effort to address insider trading:
Users seeking to make bets in some markets linked to material nonpublic information will be required to submit an online form disclosing where they work, Kalshi said. The changes are set to be rolled out in the coming weeks. Sensitive betting markets related to issues such as company performance and national security, including the war in Iran, are expected to require employment disclosure, according to a Kalshi official.
“What we’re showing here is kind of a draft version of the version one of the SpaceX AI satellite,” said Elon Musk at the reveal on Monday. “It’s actually much simpler than a Starlink satellite.” The release of renders and specs for the space-based AI1 data center is very much timed to lend credence to the SpaceX IPO, which is set to begin trading on Friday.
If you’ve ever wondered what the hell is going on with Bending Spoons’ “buy, do layoffs, ????” strategy, perhaps the statement it filed Monday with the SEC for a public listing will explain.
Named for the scene in The Matrix, it’s pulled this move with brands including AOL, Vimeo, Meetup, Evernote, Eventbrite, Brightcove, WeTransfer, Filmic, and many others, hoovering up and leveraging their accumulated 500 million users, data, and 9 million monthly paying subscribers to raise more money for more acquisitions.
Mustafa Suleyman on automation, OpenAI, and why it’s ‘dangerous’ to call AI ‘alive.’
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.”
Elon destroyed Twitter, but somehow still won as he prepares to take SpaceX public in what could be the biggest IPO ever.
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.
