Author: GT

Welcome back to Week in Review! Elon Musk says that xAI bought X in an all-stock deal; a16z-backed 11x faked some customers; the Lumon Terminal Pro pops up on Apple’s website; and much more. Let’s dig in! xAI buys X: X owner Elon Musk announced on X on Friday that xAI acquired X in an all-stock transaction. This combination values xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion. “Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent,” Musk said. Fudging the numbers: More than 20 sources — including investors and current and former…

JACKSON, N.H. (AP) — A skier since age 4, Thomas Brennick now enjoys regular trips to New Hampshire’s Black Mountain with his two grandchildren.“It’s back to the old days,” he said from the Summit Double chairlift on a recent sunny Friday. “It’s just good, old-time skiing at its best.”Behind the scenes, the experience is now propelled by a high-tech system designed to increase efficiency at the state’s oldest ski area. And while small, independent resorts can’t compete on infrastructure or buying power with conglomerates like Vail, which owns nearby Attitash Mountain Resort and seven others in the Northeast alone, at…

Amazon announced this week that Jennifer Salke is stepping down as the head of Amazon MGM Studios — a move that could indicate high-level dissatisfaction with the company’s streaming strategy over the past few years. To be clear, Salke’s boss Mike Hopkins (the head of Amazon MGM Studios and Prime Video) praised her work in an email to employees and described her departure as one that allows the company to “flatten our leadership structure a bit” — a recurring theme in recent tech company layoffs. In other words, Amazon does not intend to fill Salke’s role. Instead, the heads of…

“Tesla Takedown” organizers have promised their biggest day of global action today, encouraging thousands to protest outside Tesla showrooms, dealerships, and even charging stations to peacefully object to Elon Musk’s role in slashing government spending.  As Tesla protests have spread, so has the backlash. Activists holding up signs are being conflated with masked vandals throwing Molotov cocktails. On social media, and in Washington, the distinction is fading fast.  President Donald Trump has called attacks on Tesla “domestic terrorism” and threatened to send “terrorist thugs” to prisons in El Salvador. U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi has pledged to prosecute “those operating…

An excerpt from the upcoming book “The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future” offers new details about why OpenAI’s board briefly fired CEO Sam Altman back in 2023. Written by Wall Street Journal reporter Keach Hagey, the book claims the nonprofit’s board members became increasingly concerned after learning about issues such as an OpenAI Startup Fund that was actually personally owned by Altman. At the same time, co-founder Ilya Sutskever and CTO Mira Murati were reportedly collecting evidence of what they saw as Altman’s toxic and dishonest behavior, complete with screenshots from Murati’s Slack channel.…

AI web-crawling bots are the cockroaches of the internet, many software developers believe. Some devs have started fighting back in ingenuous, often humorous ways. While any website might be targeted by bad crawler behavior — sometimes taking down the site — open source developers are “disproportionately” impacted, writes Niccolò Venerandi, developer of a Linux desktop known as Plasma and owner of the blog LibreNews. By their nature, sites hosting free and open source (FOSS) projects share more of their infrastructure publicly, and they also tend to have fewer resources than commercial products. The issue is that many AI bots don’t…

Krafton, South Korea’s gaming giant known for titles including PUBG: Battlegrounds and Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI), has acquired a controlling stake in 12-year-old Indian gaming studio Nautilus Mobile for $14 million in an all-cash deal. On Friday, the South Korean gaming company confirmed to TechCrunch that it has acquired a “north of 75% stake” in Nautilus, the gaming studio popular for its cricket enthusiast-focused Real Cricket franchise. The Pune-based studio will continue to operate independently after the deal, which is expected to close by the end of the month, with all its 45 employees remaining on Nautilus’ payroll, Krafton told…

Bitcoin mining company MARA Holdings (MARA) is launching a fresh $2 billion stock offering to buy more bitcoin, continuing its plan of buying BTC in the open market through capital raise while sticking to its “Hodl” strategy. According to a Form 8-K and a new prospectus filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), MARA entered into an at-the-market (ATM) equity program with a group of investment banks including Barclays, BMO Capital Markets, BTIG, Cantor Fitzgerald, and others. The proceeds of the offering, which will see brokers selling shares of the miner from time to time, will be used…

Google said today that it will start offering user choice billing in the U.K., giving Google Play developers the ability to use other billing options instead of Google’s own system. The change kicks in on March 29, initially only to non-game developers. If developers opt for it, they cannot replace Google Play billing altogether. Instead, the third-party route will be offered as an option. Developers who opt to use an alternative billing option get a 4% discount from the fees they pay to Google (to account for the fees that third parties may also charge). Google typically gets a cut…

Trevor Milton, the founder of bankrupt hydrogen trucking startup Nikola who was convicted of fraud, has been pardoned by President Trump, the White House confirmed to TechCrunch. Milton was convicted in October 2022 of one count of securities fraud and two counts of wire fraud related to claims he made about Nikola’s progress to investors. He was sentenced to four years in prison in December 2023. He has been out on a $100 million bond while he appealed that sentence. The pardon comes just a few weeks after Nikola filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The company has been working with the bankruptcy…