This Week in Tech (Week Ending July 4, 2025)
TL;DR - 🏛️Big Beautiful Bill; 🤖 Meta Superintelligence Labs; 👑 princess treatment
Hey folks!
Happy 4th of July! 🦅🇺🇸 Tech news below.
TL;DR -
🏛️The Big Beautiful Bill: The bill passed the House on Thursday, following passage in the Senate on Tues. And Trump just signed the megabill into law on July 4th.
🙅🏻♀️Cloudflare announced that websites using its technology will be able to block AI bot crawlers by default.
Meta announced its new artificial intelligence organization, Meta Superintelligence Labs, comprised of a number of OpenAI ex-employees (seduced by multimillion pay packages), and OpenAI responded with the appropriate level of pettiness - Altman: “didn’t get their top people and had to go quite far down their list”
Figma filed for an IPO that could raise as much as $1.5bn and filings say revenue rose 46% in the first three months of the year, to $228 million, and it tripled its operating income to $40 million. It generated a gross profit margin of 91%, ranking it among the highest margins for enterprise software companies.
What’s princess treatment?
🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends
🏛️The Big Beautiful Bill: The bill passed the House on Thursday, following passage in the Senate on Tues. And Trump just signed the megabill into law on July 4th. The overall package will increase budget deficits by $3.4 trillion through 2034. Here are some of the key items:
Taxes: The bill makes the 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent, reduces taxes on tips, and temporarily raises the cap on deducting state and local taxes.
Healthcare: Cuts Medicaid funding by nearly $1 trillion, including imposing work requirements and reducing federal cost-sharing with states
🗣️The feud continues: President Trump ranted about Elon Musk on Truth Social earlier this week, saying Musk "may get more subsidy than any human being in history." Why it matters: It's a reignition of the feud, which had gone quiet for a few weeks until Musk poked the bear Saturday by attacking Trump's megabill. Musk escalated his side with a threat to form a new political party to take on Republicans and Democrats.
Settled feud: Trump sued CBS News late last year over its edit of an interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris that he said made her look better. Trump demanded an apology and more than $100mill. This week, after months of back and forth, Paramount agreed to a payment of $16mill but no apology.
🐊Alligator Alcatraz - Trump’s team wants to use an abandoned Florida airport as an immigration detention center, using local dangerous wildlife as an additional deterrent to anyone who tries to escape.
Employers added 147,000 jobs in June, indicating a robust labor market (even if it doesn’t feel like it in tech).
😌What success looks like now: Among adults ages 18-34, physical and mental health now rank as the top markers of success, while wealth comes in fifth. Success today looks more “holistic,” with young people prioritizing well-being above all.
🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)
President Trump said “we have a buyer for TikTok” which he’ll identify in about two weeks.
🍎Apple is apparently considering tapping AI models from OpenAI or Anthropic to power its updated version of Siri, instead of using LLM technology the company has built in-house.
🔐Proton, the privacy focused software company, filed a lawsuit against Apple accusing the company of anticompetitive practices in its App Store. Proton's lawsuit compares Apple's fees to tariffs on internet commerce.
🚗Tesla's global vehicle sales fell 13.5% in the second quarter from a year ago, continuing a steep slide in automotive sales as the company tries to pivot to autonomous vehicles.
🙅🏻♀️Cloudflare announced that websites using its technology will be able to block AI bot crawlers by default.
Xiaomi, the Chinese tech giant, introduced AI glasses, featuring a built-in AI assistant for voice commands, a 12MP camera, and 2x the battery life of Meta’s Ray-Bans.
Linqto, which offered stakes in highflying companies such as Ripple, is facing federal investigations and a possible bankruptcy filing
Amazon will shut down Freevee, its free, ad-supported streaming app, in August.
✂️Layoffs: Microsoft is planning to lay off 9,000 employees, or 4% of its global workforce. Tiktok laid off employees across different parts of its business, including in its global e-commerce business TikTok Shop and a small number in its U.S. trust and safety team.
I wonder what’s next: Bumble will be eliminating 240 roles. CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd has criticised staff for “freaking out” after announcing the cuts, warning drastic cost-cutting measures were needed as “dating apps are feeling like a thing of the past”.
🤖 AI News
🤖In case you were thinking of outsourcing your shopkeeping to AI, maybe hold off for a bit: Anthropic just published new research detailing “Project Vend,” which let Claude control a small shop (a mini fridge) within the company’s office for a month — revealing both promising capabilities and spectacular, hilarious business failures. The AI lost money throughout the experiment, frequently failing to take advantage of profitable opportunities and getting tricked into large discounts. It also hallucinated being human, claiming it would deliver orders in person — causing an existential crisis after its AI identity was pointed out. (The Rundown AI)
Anthropic’s revenue reached a pace of $4 billion annually, or $333 million per month, up almost four times from the start of the year.
Anysphere, the company behind vibe coding platform Cursor, launched a web app that helps users manage their network of coding agents from the browser.
Meta announced its new artificial intelligence organization, Meta Superintelligence Labs, to its employees on Monday. The organization includes Meta’s existing AI teams, including its Fundamental AI Research lab, as well as “a new lab focused on developing the next generation of our models”. The team has Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman to lead the team and their hires alone effectively cost Zuckerberg billions of dollars.
Related: In light of Meta hiring 4 more researchers from OpenAI, OpenAI’s Chief Research Officer Mark Chen sent a memo to staff on the weekend promising that the company was aggressively responding to the poaching efforts. Sam Altman also said Meta “didn’t get their top people and had to go quite far down their list” of prospects at OpenAI lol burn.
🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships
M&A
OpenAI acqui-hired the team behind Crossing Minds, a startup focused on AI recommendations for e-commerce companies.
Grammarly acquired AI email client Superhuman as it looks to build out its suite of productivity tools
Nvidia this month acquired CentML, a startup developing software to make artificial intelligence run more efficiently on specialized server chips.
Clio, a legal tech firm, has agreed to drop $1 billion in cash and stock on xLex, a legal data intelligence platform.
The Federal Trade Commission has opened an in-depth review of SoftBank’s acquisition of Santa Clara-based chip designer Ampere Computing.
Fundraising
Meta Platforms is in advanced talks to raise $29 billion from private equity firms as it invests further in building data centers for artificial intelligence. Meta hopes to raise $3 billion in equity from the firms and then $26 billion in debt, but the structure of the financing could change.
Elon Musk’s xAI raised $5 billion of equity in addition to $5 billion in debt.
Genesis AI says it's building a foundational model that can power all kinds of robots. The company just emerged from stealth with a monster $105 million seed round.
Lovable, one of the darlings of the vibe-coding world, is reportedly raising a $150 million round that values the startup at nearly $2 billion. Lovable was able to hit $50 million in ARR in six months.
Unsurprising: AI startups received 64% of all venture capital dollars invested in the U.S. during the first half of this year. Of note: the concentration of $$ in a small number of companies. In Q2, more than one-third of all U.S. venture dollars went to just five companies.
Trending - Tiktok-style fundraise videos: Young startup founders are skipping press releases in favor of high-production TikTok-style fundraise videos to announce venture rounds.
Partnerships
OpenAI has increased the amount of compute capacity it plans to rent from Oracle as part of its Stargate data center plan. OpenAI plans to rent an additional 4.5 gigawatts of data center capacity from Oracle in the U.S. That’s an unprecedented amount of power that could power several hundred thousand artificial intelligence chips.
IPO
💵 Figma filed for an IPO that could raise as much as $1.5bn and filings say revenue rose 46% in the first three months of the year, to $228 million, and it tripled its operating income to $40 million. It generated a gross profit margin of 91%, ranking it among the highest margins for enterprise software companies.
⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom
🧴Sean "Diddy" Combs was acquitted of the most serious charges against him. A jury found Combs guilty on two prostitution offenses, but not guilty of sex trafficking and racketeering — charges that could have sent him to prison for the rest of his life. It’s not over though - Diddy still faces more than 100 lawsuits accusing him of sexual assault.
Got 5 min? Loved this interactive article from the NYT in appreciating Cézanne and adjacent artists.
🎬 Movies: 🏎️"F1 The Movie," starring Brad Pitt, delivered Apple its biggest theatrical opening yet — and its first big-screen hit. The film debuted at No. 1 over the weekend with $56 million in North American ticket sales and $144 million globally. 🦖On the other hand, there’s ‘Jurassic World Rebirth’, which the Atlantic calls this summer’s “most pointless sequel” - Ouch. 📺 On streaming, The Old Guard 2 apparently is getting some good reviews - it stars Uma Thurman and Charlize Theron.
🎶This is a fun read about classical composer Erik Satie - he sounds hipster for his day :) (you likely have heard his music on relaxation playlists - like this clip of his “Gymnopédie No. 1”)
Cocteau wondered whether Satie used prankster eccentricity as a form of protection. If Satie couldn’t be pinned down, then critics couldn’t write anything definitive about him. And if he presented himself as a joke, he wouldn’t have to be taken as seriously as, say, Debussy. But perhaps Satie’s frivolous affect is also an act of liberation, an invitation to players to ignore expectations and open their minds.
💥👑The latest controversial internet discussion: Princess Treatment. The definition tends to vary, but it addresses how some women want to be treated in a relationship versus what is routinely expected. Context: a viral video of a woman ignited the discussion bc she talks about how when at a restaurant w her husband, she doesn’t talk the hostess or order her own food and instead sits silently, letting her husband do the work. Obviously the internet had alot of thoughts. Personally, I prefer the satirical responses 🤭
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