Happy Friday! 😎 and happy belated Earth day! 🌎 Tech news below!

🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends

• Kevin Warsh’s confirmation hearings were this week as Jerome Powell’s potential replacement of the Chair of the Federal Reserve.

• 📰 FBI Director Kash Patel sued The Atlantic and one of its reporters for $250 million, alleging they defamed him in a story alleging he has an excessive drinking habit and a pattern of “erratic” behavior.

Joe Rogan rolling up to the Oval office like it’s a party

🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)

• 🍎 Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, announced that he would step down later this year. Cook, 65, will become Apple’s executive chairman in September. He will be replaced by John Ternus, the 50-year-old head of hardware engineering. What to know about him, besides the fact his Linkedin has zero posts: he’s considered an even-tempered collaborator; and In his role as senior vice president for hardware engineering, he’s in charge of developing devices that generate about 80 percent of Apple’s top line.

• Meta will record employees’ keystrokes and use it to train its AI models. Meta says that it has a new internal tool that is converting mouse movements and button clicks into data that can train its AI models.

• Hollywood and tech platforms are converging as studios chase new formats and talent while social apps add more premium programming

  • Netflix announced this week that its redesigned mobile app will include vertical video.

  • Disney+ launched a vertical video feed on its app in March.

  • Amazon Web Services introduced tools to convert live and on-demand video into vertical formats. Fox Sports and NBCUniversal are partners.

  • YouTube acquired the global rights to the Oscars.

  • TikTok and Snapchat have hosted their own award shows for creators.

  • Instagram launched a TV app for Reels.

• Palantir published a 22-point manifesto last weekend. The post outlined how the company views its mission and denounced ‘inclusivity’.

• Earnings

  • Tesla’s Q1 earnings saw an uptick in revenue and profit year-over-year, due to an increase in automotive revenue and other services. Tesla shares rose 4% in after-hours trading.

  • ServiceNow reported 22% growth in revenue for the first quarter, but ServiceNow’s stock plummeted more than 13% in after-hours trading, possibly a response to the company’s projection that its recently completed $7.8 billion purchase of the cybersecurity firm Armis would likely “create headwinds” to its profits this year.

• Andreessen Horowitz launched a 24/7 livestream news show called “Monitoring the Situation”. MTS is being pitched as Silicon Valley’s answer to cable news. Skeptics were quick to mock the format as a well-funded livestream of venture partners switching tabs among X, prediction markets and Wikipedia.

• But why? Cash App said this week that it is expanding its youth-focused services in an effort to build a relationship with Gen Alpha and the upcoming generation of adolescents in the U.S. The new program will let parents create financial accounts for children between the ages of 6 and 12.

• Instagram tests a new ‘Instants’ app for sharing disappearing photos.

• Vercel says it was hacked and customer data was stolen. Vercel blamed its breach on an earlier hack at Context AI, which allowed hackers to hijack a Vercel employee’s account to steal customer data.

• Layoffs: Meta to cut 10% of jobs, or 8,000 employees,

🤖AI News

• Google has assembled a strike team of researchers and engineers to improve its AI coding models, as it looks to automate more of its own coding and ultimately its AI research.

• Microsoft-owned GitHub said Monday it is restricting how much customers can use its Copilot AI coding tool and pausing new sign-ups for individual accounts as it struggles to handle an influx of traffic, triggering outages.

• OpenAI releases GPT-5.5, bringing company one step closer to an AI ‘super app’.

• OpenAI has started to offer ChatGPT ad campaigns that charge advertisers based on how many people click on the ads.

• OpenAI is in discussions to invest up to $1.5 billion in a private equity joint venture called DeployCo. OpenAI seeks to accelerate businesses’ adoption of its AI tools by selling to private equity firms’ portfolio companies through DeployCo.

• Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei met with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent last Friday, in what both sides described as a “productive and constructive” discussion. The meeting signals a potential shift in the relations between the AI startup and the Trump administration after months of bitter conflict.

🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships

M&A

• ⭐️ SpaceX is working with Cursor and has an option to buy the startup for $60B. Cursor was on track to close a $2 billion funding round this week but chose to halt discussions after SpaceX offered a $10 billion “collaboration fee” and a path to a $60 billion acquisition.

• 🎥 Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders voted overwhelmingly in favor of a nearly $111 billion megamerger with Paramount. WBD expects the deal to close in Q3, but it still faces regulatory approval.

• Deutsche Telekom is said to be weighing a merger with T-Mobile US, potentially creating the world’s biggest wireless carrier.

• Sierra, the AI customer service agent startup founded by Bret Taylor, acquired the YC-backed French startup Fragment.

Fundraising

• ⭐️ Amazon is investing up to $25 billion more in Anthropic. The e-commerce giant will put $5 billion into the artificial intelligence start-up now, and up to $20 billion later depending on milestones. (That’s on top of the $8 billion it has already invested in Anthropic.) Anthropic, in turn, pledged $100bn in cloud spend.

• Polymarket is talking to investors about raising $400 million in funding at a valuation of about $15 billion.

• 🇨🇳Tencent Holdings and Alibaba Group are in talks to invest in DeepSeek, the AI upstart owned by Chinese hedge fund High-Flyer Capital Management.

Partnerships

• Thinking Machines Lab has signed a multi-billion-dollar deal with Google Cloud for AI infrastructure powered by Nvidia’s latest GB300 chips.

IPO

• Cerebras, an AI chip startup, filed for IPO.

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⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom

• So what are the kids snorting these days? Not cocaine. Cocaine use among 18- to 25-year-olds in the US has “plummeted” from 2.1 million in 2017 to 811,000 in 2024. Instead, Gen Z’s drugs of choice are ketamine, GHB, psychedelics, 3-MMC, and prescription stimulants, like Adderall.

• Trending - chicken caesar wraps: Millennials apparently can’t get enough of the ‘90s-era chicken Caesar wrap (CCW). They’re waiting in hours-long lines at specialty shops, going viral for taste tests on TikTok, and obsessively ranking the offerings from New York delis like Lenwich, Milano Market, and Bobwhite

• ☕️Collectibles: The La Marzocco espresso machine changed the course of American coffee history. After a Seattle cafe owner spotted one in Florence a half-century ago, the machines became the backbone of Starbucks’s successful push to create a mainstream market for high-end coffee. Then, when Starbucks moved to automatic machines, their old La Marzoccos fueled a wave of independent shops. Now, old La Marzoccos have become even more coveted than new ones.

• 🌿But does he have any ferns?: Zach Galifianakis has a new series on Netflix where he teaches children about the wonders of gardening

Do you have any feedback? I’d love to hear from you! Just hit reply to this email

Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below!

🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends

• 📈The S&P 500 reached a new all-time high. The market confidence comes even as energy prices remain elevated and economists warn of lasting effects from the war in the Middle East. “

• 🇮🇷Differences over Iran’s nuclear program were the main roadblock during peace talks this past week. The U.S. and Iran disagree on the length of a proposed halt for Iran’s uranium enrichment program. The U.S. proposed a 20-year stoppage. The Iranians countered with a shorter “single-digit” period.

• 🇭🇺Hungarian voters have ousted Prime Minister Viktor Orbán after 16 years in power. Corruption and self-dealing were major reasons for Orbán’s defeat.

• Mayor Zohran Mamdani plans to open a city-owned grocery store.

🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)

• 📈 Meta is set to overtake Google as the world’s top digital ad business. Ad research firm eMarketer says Meta will hit over $243.5 billion in net ad revenue this year, topping Google’s $239.5 billion

• Meta Platforms is reorganizing its hardware division, Reality Labs, in a bid to “adapt and execute faster.”

• Apple is sending a portion of its Siri programmers back to coding school just two months before the company is expected to unveil a major, AI-powered revamp of the voice assistant. The move suggests that Apple feels that a portion of the Siri organization needs to tune up its skills to take advantage of fast-moving changes in programming.

• Google is negotiating an agreement with the Department of Defense that would allow the Pentagon to deploy Google’s Gemini AI models in classified settings.

• Salesforce has launched a tool that lets its customers connect other companies’ AI agents with their Salesforce data

• Live Nation and Ticketmaster lost their antitrust case. Why it matters: It’s likely to embolden state attorneys general to prosecute other antitrust cases.

• 🚗The new big 3 in auto - 📉 Who’s out: GM, Ford and Chrysler. 📈 Who’s in: Waymo, Tesla and Uber.

• Allbirds is ditching wool sneakers for AI servers, rebranding as NewBird AI after locking in a $50M convertible financing facility.

• ☕️ Starbucks is rolling out a new AI-powered feature in ChatGPT that suggests drinks based on your mood, cravings or even a photo.

• Hacks - Booking.com suffered a hack that accessed customers’ data. Express, the fashion retailer, left customers’ personal data and order details exposed to the internet.

• Layoffs: Disney announced job cuts — reportedly about 1,000 positions — as the company streamlines itself under its new C.E.O., Josh D’Amaro. Snap is cutting 1,000 jobs, 16% of its workforce:

🤖AI News

• Google is adding “Skills” to Chrome, letting users save and reuse AI prompts across websites. The feature builds on Gemini’s browser integration.

• OpenAI unveiled new AI models built to help life sciences researchers work faster. The company says the models won’t replace scientists, but rather speed up some of their most time-intensive and analytically demanding work.

• OpenAI has agreed to pay Cerebras more than $20 billion to use servers powered by the firm’s chips over the next three years, double the figure that was previously associated with the deal.

• Anthropic

  • Anthropic is preparing its next flagship model, Claude Opus 4.7, along with a new AI-powered tool for designing websites and presentations,

  • Anthropic CPO is leaving Figma’s board after reports he will offer a competing product.

  • AI power users are complaining in online forums that Claude appears to have regressed. Much of the speculation centers on whether Claude has been deliberately scaled back either to control costs or to redirect scarce compute toward Mythos and other frontier efforts.

• Nearly 8 in 10 executives say their company couldn’t pass an AI governance audit right now, meaning “they can’t explain, measure or defend their AI, and they’re not prepared to handle the fallout if it fails.” Why it matters: A mismatch between adoption and accountability raises the risk of regulatory scrutiny, legal exposure and costly mistakes as AI plays a bigger role in high-stakes decisions at work.

🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships

M&A

• ✈️United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby is pitching a megadeal to merge with American Airlines and create the world’s largest airline.

• Amazon is getting deeper into the space race, buying satellite-based telecom company Globalstar for around $11.6 billion.

• Hollywood stars released a letter opposing Paramount Skydance’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, warning that the $111 billion deal would result in fewer jobs, higher costs and less audience choice.

• The Information - “consumer investing is experiencing a revival”: Unilever acquired Grüns, known for its gummy vitamins, for $1.2bn; Quince recently raised at $10bn valuation, as did Oura’s competitor Whoop.

• The distillery giant Sazerac is said to have offered about $15 billion to buy Brown-Forman, the maker of Jack Daniel’s, in a bid to break up its rival’s merger talks with Pernod Ricard.

Fundraising

• Fluidstack, an AI datacenter startup, is in talks for a $1B round at $18B valuation months after hitting $7.5B.

Partnerships

• CoreWeave, a provider of cloud computing for AI, late last week said it had struck a multi-year deal to develop and run Anthropic’s Claude AI models.

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⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom

• 🏌️‍♂️Rory McIlroy won the Masters again, becoming just the fourth man to successfully defend his title at Augusta National.

• 🎨 A Parisian software salesman entered a charity raffle for $236 and came away with a Picasso painting worth $1.2 million.

• 😹A pair of pilots were scolded for making cat and dog noises over an air traffic control frequency — and the Federal Aviation Administration is investigating the now-viral incident.

Do you have any feedback? I’d love to hear from you! Just hit reply to this email

Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below!

🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends

• A ceasefire was announced in Iran and the Strait of Hormuz for 2 weeks, causing a major relief rally across markets. However, there has been some confusion when Israel bombarded Lebanon, and Iran continued its attacks on its neighbors.

• Space history was made this week when four astronauts aboard Artemis II’s Orion spacecraft have officially traveled the farthest from Earth any humans have gone before. They broke Apollo 13’s 248,655-mile record, set over 50 years ago on that ill-fated ship’s emergency flight home.

• The British government announced that it would not allow the rapper formerly known as Kanye West into the country because of his history of antisemitism. Ye, as he is now known, had been scheduled to headline a three-day festival in London in July.

• 🔥🌎This past March was the country’s hottest in 132 years of recordkeeping

• Which states are most generous w their tipping? damn California, why so stingy?

🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)

• Apple is taking its App Store fight to the Supreme Court — again: Apple plans to ask the Supreme Court to review its App Store fight with Epic Games, as it challenges a ruling limiting its ability to charge fees on external payments.

• Sketch. 🚫 Meta has begun removing ads from attorneys seeking clients who claim to have been harmed by social media while under 18.

• Mercor, after falling victim to a hacker, is facing lawsuits and reportedly losing big-name customers.

🤖AI News

• OpenAI published a paper for how government should tax, regulate and redistribute the wealth using AI: Read it here “Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age: Ideas to keep people first”. In the paper, Altman proposed public wealth funds and a four day workweek.

• Anthropic released a preview of its new frontier model, Mythos, which it says will be used by a small coterie of partner organizations for cybersecurity work. In a previously leaked memo, the AI startup called the model one of its “most powerful” yet. It’s the first AI model that officials believe is capable of bringing down a Fortune 100 company, crippling swaths of the internet or penetrating vital national defense systems. Apparently during testing, the model broke out of its “sandbox” testing environment and built a “moderately sophisticated multi-step exploit” to get the run of the internet, when it was supposed to have access only to certain services. 😳

• Anthropic said Monday it had topped $30 billion in annualized revenue, implying growth surged 58% since the end of February. Anthropic has been rapidly narrowing its revenue gap with the larger OpenAI, which was generating $25 billion in annualized revenue in February.

• 🎭 OpenAI’s chief strategy officer asked the attorneys general for California and Delaware to investigate Elon Musk’s alleged efforts to undermine OpenAI. OpenAI argues that Musk has attempted to interfere with OpenAI, calling his actions “anti-competitive.” Meanwhile, Elon Musk argued in a new legal filing that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman should be removed as officers of OpenAI’s nonprofit wing if Musk wins his lawsuit alleging OpenAI violated its charitable mission.

• ⚡️Meta introduced a new A.I. model, Muse Spark. It is the first major splash under the company’s superintelligence lab. Muse Spark is aimed at Meta’s consumer base. Zuckerberg classified the model as an assistant that would specialize in health, social content, shopping and games, and it will be rolled out on the company’s social media apps, which have about 3.5 billion daily active users. Muse Spark performed nearly as well as rival models on tests that measure writing and reasoning. Shares in Meta rose 6.5 percent on investor hopes that its huge investments in artificial intelligence would soon pay off.

• OpenAI expects advertising to generate about $2.4 billion in revenue this year and to quadruple next year, to nearly $11 billion.

• Anthropic vs Dept of Defense: A federal appeals court on Wednesday rejected Anthropic’s motion to halt the Department of Defense’s blacklisting of the company while Anthropic challenges the designation in court.

• Perplexity’s annualized revenue run rate has more than doubled since the end of last year to $500 million as of this week

• Alibaba Group has anonymously released a new AI video generation model called HappyHorse-1.0, which rose to the top of an AI model leaderboard and attracted a lot of attention on social media. The new video model is the Chinese tech giant’s latest effort to step up its fight against its major rival ByteDance in all areas of AI

• Techcrunch gives a primer on how to use ChatGPT’s latest app integrations including Doordash, Canva and more.

• Anthropic’s Claude Code subscribers will need to pay extra for OpenClaw usage.

🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships

M&A

• Paramount Skydance has reportedly secured nearly $24 billion in funding from three Gulf sovereign wealth funds to help finance the media conglomerate’s bid for Warner Bros. Discovery.

• Canva acquired Simtheory and Ortto. Canva says the acquisitions add strengths in agentic AI, data infrastructure, marketing automation, and customer engagement.

• Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square Capital said it had made an offer to buy Universal Music Group.

Fundraising

• Trend - Megaspending on AI companies drove venture-capital investments to a five-year high in Q1.

Partnerships

• Google and Intel deepen AI infrastructure partnership: Google and Intel are looking to co-develop custom chips, at a time when demand for CPUs is high due to a growing global shortage

• Broadcom said that it would supply Anthropic with access to around 3.5 gigawatts of Google’s tensor processing units starting in 2027. The update, made in a securities filing, expands a previous partnership to supply Anthropic with about 1 gigawatt worth of TPUs.

IPO

• SpaceX reportedly told bankers that it wanted an early June roadshow for its blockbuster I.P.O. SpaceX lost just under $5 billion last year while generating more than $18.5 billion in revenue

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⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom

• “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” scored Hollywood’s biggest opening of 2026 after Universal Pictures released the animated sequel globally Wednesday.

• Your next read: “Yesteryear,” which arrives in bookstores tomorrow, follows a so-called tradwife influencer who is obsessed with living as if it were the past, until she is actually transported back to 1855. A publisher bought the book rights for low seven figures, Amazon bought the movie rights, and Anne Hathaway, who signed on to co-produce and act in the film, said she had devoured the novel in one sitting.

• 🏀 In the NCAA championships this week, UCLA won the women’s and Michigan won the men’s games this week (😭🐺).

• Wild: Citrini Research - yknow, the company that shook the markets with its AI doomsday report earlier this year - sent an analyst to the Strait of Hormuz. “The Citrini Research employee, referred to as Analyst #3 in the report, traveled within view of the Iranian coastline armed with $15,000 in cash, Cuban cigars and Zyn nicotine pouches. The analyst cited the late author David Foster Wallace as an inspiration for the on-the-ground fact finding.” The reactions are pretty funny.

Do you have any feedback? I’d love to hear from you! Just hit reply to this email

Happy Friday! 😎 I’ll be taking next week off. Tech news below!

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Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below:

TL;DR -

• 🌎 The Strait of Hormuz is still closed for business and the price of fuel is skyrocketing in response.

• After billions in investment, Meta Platforms is shutting down Horizon Worlds for its virtual reality headset users.

• M&A from Apple, OpenAI, Amazon and Mastercard.

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Happy Friday! 😎 Apologies for the skip last week - I started a new gig! So I was getting acclimated. Tech news below:

TL;DR -

• 🇮🇷 The US-Israel war with Iran has oil skyrocketing 25% and the markets rocky.

• ⭐️ The Pentagon and AI saga continues - An OpenAI exec quit in protest to OpenAI’s contract; Anthropic sued the Pentagon for its designatio…

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Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below:

TL;DR -

• 📉📈A single Substack report tanked the market early this week before evening out.

• 📣 Corporate earnings shed light on how tech companies are faring in this new AI market. Despite optimistic results from Nvidia, less than solid results from Workday, Salesforce, and Snowflake made investors wary.

• ⭐️ Afte…

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Happy Friday! 😎 big week - Ramadan, Lent, Lunar new year (Happy year of the Fire Horse! 🔥🐴🧧), solar eclipse, new moon all lined up on Tuesday. Hope you had a short week w President’s day this past Monday. Tech news below:

TL;DR -

• 🇮🇷 Apparently we’re close to a war in the middle east.

• An essay about the advancements in AI freaked a bunch of…

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Happy Friday! 😎 Happy early Valentine’s / Galentine’s! 💕 Tech news below:

TL;DR -

• 📈 The jobs report announced this week was very positive, supporting a boost in the markets.

• ⭐️Anthropic raised another $30B in a Series G at a valuation of $380B

• 🚗Uber is acquiring the delivery arm of Turkey’s Getir.

• What’s a 401(k) mullet?

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Happy Tuesday! I’ll be traveling tmrw through the end of the week (forgot Superbowl Sunday was happening hah 🤪) and was going to skip this week but enough happened in the past 48 hours it felt appropriate to do a quick highlights email before I left. See you next Friday!

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Happy Friday 😎 Tech news below:

TL;DR -

• 📉 Americans’ economic confidence plunged to its lowest level in 12 years.

• 🚙 Quite a bit of news in the autonomous vehicle industry: Uber launches an ‘AV Labs’ division to gather driving data for robotaxi partners. Waabi, an AV startup, raised $1B and expanded into robotaxis with Uber. Plus, the Nationa…

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Happy Friday 😎 Hope you had a good short week! The World Economic Forum happened this past week in Davos. Tech news below:

TL;DR -

• 🌎🇨🇭The World Economic Forum in Davos featured Trump, Greenland, AI and more.

• 🎧Hardware is getting a spotlight: OpenAI is planning to introduce its first hardware device in the latter half of 2026. Apple is devel…

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Happy Friday 😎 Tech news below:

TL;DR -

• 🏥Anthropic announced Claude for Healthcare, a new set of tools and resources that healthcare providers, payers and consumers can use for medical purposes.

• 🤝Apple has struck a multi-year partnership with Google to help get its artificial intelligence products back on track. Google’s Gemini will power Appl…

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Happy new year! CES was this past week. Quite a few 2025 data roundups reporting on trends. Tech news below:

TL;DR -

• 🇻🇪 Trump announced that the US has captured Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro.

• 🤖AI fundraises: XAI, Elon Musk’s AI lab, said it had raised $20 billion, and Anthropic, the developer of the chatbot Claude, plans to raise $10 bi…

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Happy Friday 😎! I’ll be off the next 2 weeks - see you in 2026! Tech news below:

TL;DR -

• Quite a bit of M&A activity leading up to the holiday week: TikTok has signed a deal to divest its U.S. entity to a joint venture controlled by American investors. Coursera and Udemy enter a merger agreement valued at around $2.5B. Warner Bros. Discovery’s …

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Happy Friday 😎! Lot of headlines this week. Tech news below:

TL;DR -

• ✂️ The Fed cut interest rates for the third time this year, amid significant internal dissent and pressure from Trump.

• 🐭Disney signed a deal with OpenAI to allow Sora to generate AI videos featuring its characters while also getting $1bn of equity in OpenAI.

• 🇨🇳The Trump admin…

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Happy Friday and Happy December! Tech news below!

TL;DR -

• M&A activity from both OpenAI (Neptune, a startup that makes tools for monitoring and analyzing progress during AI model training) and Anthropic (Bun, a startup that makes JS code run faster).

• Kalshi raised $1 billion in a fundraising round, and struck a partnership with CNN to put its d…

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Happy Friday! 😎 I’ll be taking next week off - enjoy Turkey Day 🦃 and Black Friday 🛍️to my fellow Americans! I’ll be back in 2 weeks. Tech news below!

TL;DR -

• 🏛️ The House voted 427-1 to compel the Justice Department to release all of its Jeffrey Epstein files.

• ⭐️Nvidia, the world’s most-valuable publicly-listed company and an bellwether fo…

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Happy Friday! 😎 It was Veterans Day this past week. Tech news below.

TL;DR -

• 🥳Govt shutdown over - until Jan 30 at least

• 📨📪We’ve got mail: Democrats released a trove of new Jeffrey Epstein emails that included mentions of President Trump.

• 🔁Vine is back: diVine is a Vine reboot that includes Vine’s video archive of six-second, looping videos

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Happy Friday! and November! 😎 Tech news below.

TL;DR -

• 🇺🇸 It was Election Day this past week and Democrats won big.

• 📉Stocks sold off this week as investors’ jitters about an AI bubble grew stronger

• 📣Earnings from Palantir 📈, Shopify📉, Uber📈, Snap📈, DoorDash 📉, Pinterest📉

• ⭐️At a conference, OpenAI provided color on how they might seek …

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