Author: GT

Tesla has proposed a new 10-year compensation plan for CEO Elon Musk that could be worth as much as $1 trillion even as the EV maker’s car business stumbles and it sets its sights on humanoid robotics and AI. The company has tied the compensation to a number of benchmarks, one of which involves increasing Tesla’s overall valuation from around $1 trillion to more than $8 trillion. The plan would grant Musk more than 423 million additional shares in the company, boosting his level of control to around 25%. Musk has previously threatened to leave Tesla if he didn’t receive…

Snapchat is launching a new Lens that lets users create and edit images using a text-to-image AI generator, the company told TechCrunch exclusively. The new “Imagine Lens” is available to Snapchat+ Platinum and Lens+ subscribers. Imagine Lens allows users to create, edit, and re-create Snaps by entering their own prompts. They can then share the image with their friends, post it to their Story, or share it outside of Snapchat. While Snapchat already has numerous generative AI Lenses, the company notes that Imagine Lens is its first open prompt image-generation Lens. Users can generate images using custom prompts, like “create…

If you’re a founder who planned to wait until the last minute … this is it. Today is the final day to secure your exhibit table at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025. If you want to get in front of more than 10,000 startup and VC leaders, connect with media, and generate a nonstop pipeline this October, you need to act now. There are only a few tables left. Once they’re gone, they’re gone. Don’t let your competitor take the last table with your startup’s name on it. Book yours now. Image Credits:Halo Creative Here’s what you get when you exhibit at Disrupt…

Tesla shareholders will soon vote whether to let the electric vehicle maker invest in Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI, a proposal pitched as a way to strengthen Tesla’s ambitions in AI, robotics, and energy.  Listed in Tesla’s proxy statement alongside a company-backed push to raise Musk’s 10-year pay package to $1 trillion, the proposal comes from Stephen Hawk, a Florida shareholder with a $2,000 stake of common stock. His supporting statement reads: Tesla’s integration of Grok into its vehicles demonstrates the tangible benefits of collaboration with xAI. As Tesla pivots toward AI-driven technologies, including Full Self-Driving and robotics, a strategic…

When you design for people instead of institutions, you don’t just build a product. You build a movement. That’s the idea behind this live Builders Stage session called “Creating Communities and Companies That Last,” only at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 on October 27-29 at San Francisco’s Moscone West. This fireside chat brings together Jason Citron, founder and former CEO of Discord, and Tade Oyerinde, founder, CEO, and chancellor of Campus and Campuswire, for a conversation about building long-term value through community-first design. Lock in your Disrupt pass now to learn how to scale smarter and stronger, and save up to $668.…

Acqui-hires feel like they’re here to stay: The team behind Alex, a popular tool that lets developers use AI models within Apple’s development suite Xcode, is joining OpenAI. In a post on X, Alex’s founder Daniel Edrisian said the startup’s team is joining OpenAI’s Codex division, which is building the company’s AI coding agent. Y Combinator-backed Alex was founded in 2024 and sought to integrate AI models into Xcode. Apple, however, earlier this year updated Xcode to let users tap ChatGPT and other AI models without needing external tools. Edrisian didn’t mention if this was a reason his startup’s team…

Isotopes AI came out of stealth on Thursday with a healthy $20 million seed round. It offers an AI agent to solve a problem that data analytics products have struggled with for decades: The people who know how to run the big data infrastructure are not the ones who actually need to use the data. With LLMs, business managers can ask questions of their data in natural language. Isotopes’ agent, Aidnn, can provide answers and draft complex planning documents, gathering data from wherever it’s stored, like finance apps, ERP, CRM, and cloud storage. There are countless agentic business analytics offerings…

X, formerly Twitter, has started rolling out its new encrypted messaging feature called “Chat” or “XChat.”  The company claims the new communication feature is end-to-end encrypted, meaning messages exchanged on it can only be read by the sender and their receiver, and — in theory — no one else, including X, can access them.  Cryptography experts, however, are warning that X’s current implementation of encryption in XChat should not be trusted. They’re saying it’s far worse than Signal, a technology widely considered the state of the art when it comes to end-to-end encrypted chat.  In XChat, once a user clicks…

Sodium-ion battery startup Natron ceased operations this week, ending the company’s 12-year quest to commercialize its technology in the U.S. The company had $25 million worth of orders lined up for its Michigan factory, but it couldn’t deliver them until it had UL certification, according to Raleigh’s The News & Observer, which reported on the business’s closure because Natron had been planning to bring jobs to the state of North Carolina with its new factory. However, receiving the UL certification can be a lengthy process, often spanning several months. Natron investors balked at releasing more funds, leaving the startup facing…

Warner Bros. is suing AI startup Midjourney for copyright infringement, alleging that the company allows users to generate images and videos of characters like Superman, Batman, and Bugs Bunny without permission. As first reported by Reuters, Warner Bros. says that Midjourney knowingly engaged in wrongful conduct, noting that the company previously restricted subscribers from generating content based on infringing images but recently lifted those protections. “Midjourney has made a calculated and profit-driven decision to offer zero protection for copyright owners even though Midjourney knows about the breathtaking scope of its piracy and copyright infringement,” the complaint reads. The lawsuit seeks…