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Meta’s Moment of Reckoning

Pop some popcorn. Put some butter. Add some salt. Because opportunists (politicians) are pointing their muskets at villains (tech bros), using children’s welfare as the ammunition. In case you were wondering, I am talking about the battle between New Mexico AG and Silicon Valley’s villain in chief.

The next bout is on May 4. So mark your calendars. Why?

This week two verdicts came in quick succession. First, a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million for knowingly enabling child predators on Instagram and Facebook. Then, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube negligent for designing platforms that addicted a young woman who first used YouTube at age six and Instagram at nine.

On the surface this is big win for ambulance chasers. However it could be much bigger if politicians actually have the best intentions that go beyond winning the next elections. History tells me, they

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The Debt Beneath the Dream

Every gambler knows that the secret to survivin’
Is knowin’ what to throw away and knowing what to keep
‘Cause every hand’s a winner and every hand’s a loser
And the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep

Kenny Rogers, The Gambler.

I don’t know Masayoshi Son, and I don’t need to. But my guess is that the SoftBank founder and CEO can’t be having a good start to his week. The stock of his flagship, SoftBank, is deflating faster than a balloon stuck in powerlines after a New Year’s party. He has bet big on OpenAI as his all-in wager. Whether he is right or wrong remains to be seen.

SoftBank’s shares dropped as much as 12.5 percent. Reports emerged that OpenAI and Oracle had scrapped plans to expand a flagship data center in Texas. Bloomberg reported the expansion fell apart over a combination of

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Block & Tackle: Job Cuts & the AI Narrative

Jack Dorsey, CEO of Block (the company formerly known as Square), went on X (the company formerly known as Twitter, which he co-founded) and shared a lower-case employee memo, candidly outlining his decision to cut about 4,200 people, just over 40 percent of the company’s staff. The memo was in sharp contrast to the investor letter shared with shareholders, prompting John Gruber to quip on Daring Fireball, “That’s a telling sign about who he respects.”

Wall Street loves nothing more than job cuts. It loves them more than it loves vision. In my jaded eyes, the market wasn’t rewarding his AI narrative. It was rewarding the cut. Block stock surged 22 percent on the news. And frankly, no one is looking at Block for any AI vision.

Either way, the thrust of the memo was AI. In way too many words, what Jack was saying was that AI is here,

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Amazon & The Cost of (AI) Lateness

My word, the torrent of news keeps coming. You have hardly had time to digest the news of the $30 billion raise by Anthropic, and here we are dealing with $110 billion in new funding by OpenAI. (Well, not the entire round is done, but that doesn’t make for a splashy headline, does it? But it fits the bill for our new announcement economy befitting our unhinged now.)

TLDR of OpenAI’s news. Amazon put in $50 billion. Of that, $15 billion now and $35 billion when IPO is announced or AGI is achieved, which in itself is a hilarious set of what-ifs. Nvidia put in $30 billion, not the headliner $100 billion announced last September. SoftBank, which should be renamed as Soft(Touch)Bank, put in $30 billion. The pre-money valuation was $730 billion. Post-money, $840 billion.

Anyway, while drinking my morning coffee, I looked at the news and couldn’t help but

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Mad Money & The Big AI Race

an artificial intelligence illustration on the wall

There isn’t that much of a difference between OpenAI and Anthropic. Both are big foundational AI companies. Both have changed how we think about information, code, and work. Both have very similar valuation metrics. Heck, both even have the same investors. One is chasing growth, margins, and building a real business. The other is chasing astronomical destiny. One is a consumer company with 800 million daily users. The other is an enterprise-focused company selling to businesses. The key difference is that one is focused and the other is doing way too many things.

The real story is that Anthropic, despite its woo-woo ideas about the future, AI ethics, and post-AI morality, is on its way to building up a real money machine. So what can we learn from Anthropic’s recently announced funding? The company raised a whopping $30 billion at a self-disclosed valuation of $380 billion. If you look at

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Is Waymo Worth $126 Billion?

Photo by Leo_Visions on Unsplash

Over the past three years, I have embraced three technologies almost completely. Generative AI, Apple’s Vision Pro, and Waymo. They are all part of my daily routine. And while I can skip Vision Pro occasionally, I don’t leave home without Waymo. I am probably one of their earliest adopters, willing to wait an extra ten minutes for the Waymo versus Uber. Yes, it drops me off a few hundred feet from where I need to be. Yes, it takes a bit longer. Yes, it can’t go everywhere. Yes to all the problems. And yes to the fact that I am okay using a human as a backup to this robot. And yet I am confounded by its valuation, especially given the challenges of growth.

When I started reading an interview with co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana in Bloomberg, I was hoping for some clarity. I didn’t get any. My editors would have

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Our Crazy Unhinged Now

A confluence of events prompted me to quip on Twitter:

What amazing times we live in now. A $16 billion funding for @Waymo (congrats team, the product) is an afterthought thanks to the mega deal between @SpaceX & @xai It might be the smartest deal of the year or simply the best value enhancement since the Kardashian Clan discovered Botox. By the way, @Walmart is now a trillion dollar company. Go ahead and laugh now. Seriously, and be grateful for the amazing times we are living in.

I was being very ironic, sardonic even.

Waymo raised $16 billion this week. Sixteen billion dollars. At a $126 billion valuation. Those are some serious numbers. I have covered technology long enough to classify that as a jaw-dropping amount of funding raised by a company. Sixteen billion into a $126 billion valuation is roughly 13% ownership. That is a private equity-sized bite wearing the

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What Ben & John Don’t Get

Apple, to be fair, isn’t selling the same sugar water year-after-year in a zero sum war with other sugar water companies. Their sugar water is getting better, and I think this year’s seasonal concoction is particularly tasty. What is inescapable, however, is that while the company does still make new products — I definitely plan on getting new AirPod Pro 3s! — the company has, in the pursuit of easy profits, constrained the space in which it innovates.

That didn’t matter for a long time: smartphones were the center of innovation, and Apple was consequently the center of the tech universe. Now, however, Apple is increasingly on the periphery, and I think that, more than anything, is what bums people out: no, Apple may not be a sugar water purveyor, but they are farther than they have been in years from changing the world.

Ben Thompson, Stratechery via John Gruber

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The iPhone 17 Event: Less Awe, More Unsexy & That’s A Good Thing


As you know, for the first time since the iPhone era began, I didn’t attend the iPhone launch event. I am gutted that I didn’t get to see the new iPhone 17 devices in person. Still, I couldn’t help myself. I tweeted a bit about the event whilewatching the stream. What can I say? I still like to believe that I am the grand poohbah of the peanut gallery around Apple events. 

And when the dust settled and I had some time during the evening, I started to put together my thoughts about the event. Apple’s iPhone 17 event had only one true awe — the massive capabilities of the team behind Apple Silicon and their counterparts in engineering. 

Yes, we all know that these events are carefully staged PR shows, like fashion week for tech. Yes, they reflect the painful reality of the twilight of the smartphone era. Yes, we know that the rectangular slab that has revolutionized our lives since 2007 is

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