This Week in Tech (Week Ending Nov 7, 2025)

TL;DR - 🇺🇸Election day; 📉Stocks sell off; 📣Earnings; 🤖OpenAI

Hey folks!

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 more financing. And it reached a deal with Amazon to buy $38 billion in cloud computing services over the next seven years.

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🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends

• 🇺🇸 It was Election Day this past week. It was a big night for Democrats - major wins include Virginia’s next governor (Democrat Abigail Spanberger), New Jersey’s next governor (Mikie Sherrill), California’s Prop 50 which redraws the state’s maps in favor of Democrats, and of course, NYC’s next mayor Zohran Mamdani.

• 📉Stocks sold off this week as investors’ jitters about an AI bubble grew stronger - The Nasdaq was down more than 2% since last Friday’s close (as of Thurs) and is on pace for its worst week since early April.

• 🛬Flights at dozens of major U.S. airports will be cut by 10% in the coming days — and more cuts could follow as Thanksgiving nears - due to staffing shortages from the shutdown.

• We’re officially in the longest government shutdown in US history, breaking the record set in the 2018-2019 shutdown.

• RIP Dick Cheney, widely regarded as the most powerful vice president in American history.

• ☄️A UPS cargo plane crashed shortly after takeoff in Louisville, Ky., killing at least seven and injuring several others.

• Consumer trend - we’re all getting cheap - Fast-casual restaurants are slumping as consumers opt to save their cash at lunchtime. Data: The stocks of Chipotle, Sweetgreen, Cava, and Noodles & Co. plunged this past week. Double click: Gen Z and young Millennials — a core demographic for fast-casual chains — are “facing several headwinds, including unemployment, increased student loan repayment and slower real wage growth,” Chipotle’s CEO said on an earnings call.

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🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)

• 🇦🇪Microsoft announced on Monday that it will invest $15.2 billion in the United Arab Emirates over the next four years. The investment will include the first-ever shipments of the most advanced Nvidia GPUs to the UAE. Why it matters: It’s a move that positions the country as both a proving ground for U.S. export-control diplomacy and a regional anchor of American AI influence.

• 📣Earnings:

  • Palantir’s sales to U.S. businesses hit $397 million in the third quarter, exceeding Wall Street’s expectations and growing 121% YOY. The U.S. commercial growth was a highlight of continued breakneck growth for Palantir, which has been the stock market’s best-performing software company and neared a $500 billion market capitalization before the market closed Monday.

  • Shopify’s Q3 revenue grew 32% YOY to $2.84 billion as it continued to add new merchants and expand its reach in newer markets like Europe and with brick-and-mortar retailers. Net income fell 68% to $264 million due to increases in both R&D and sales and marketing. Shopify shares fell nearly 5% in premarket trading.

  • Uber’s revenue growth accelerated to 20% in the third quarter, lifting EBITDA by 33% to $2.3 billion. Underwriting the growth was Uber’s delivery business, where bookings jumped 25% and Ebitda rose 47%, due partly to the expansion of the delivery business into groceries.

  • Snap shares soared more than 20% in after hours trading after the social media company reported a slight acceleration in revenue growth to 10% in the third quarter as well as a new partnership with Perplexity, in which Perplexity will pay Snap $400M to power search in Snapchat.

  • DoorDash stock slumped as much as 20% in after-hours trading after the delivery firm revealed it expects to “invest several hundred million dollars more” in upgrading its technology and expansion next year than it did this year.

  • Pinterest shares tumbled 21 percent after they reported disappointing quarterly results partly because of a hit from tariffs.

• 🤑Tesla shareholders approved a record-setting pay package for Chief Executive Elon Musk, a plan designed to motivate the world’s richest man with as much as $1 trillion in additional stock.

• 🚀SpaceX will receive $2 billion to build satellites for the U.S. government as part of President Donald Trump’s “Golden Dome” defense project.

• Elon Musk launched Grokipedia, his own AI powered version of wikipedia, on Monday.

• 👂Spotify is adding a new feature called “Listening stats” that will show users weekly numbers about their listening habits

• 🚗Tesla expects to deploy at least 1,000 Robotaxi vehicles in the San Francisco Bay Area and 500 or more in Austin before the end of the year,

• 🏬Meta opened a two-story flagship store — Meta Lab, on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood — this past weekend as a showcase for AI glasses and VR headsets.

• ⌚️WhatsApp finally launched an Apple Watch app, allowing users to get call notifications, read full messages, record and send voice messages, and view media content more clearly on their watches.

• 🦹Meta estimates that it earns 10% of its revenue from scams

• Bluesky hit 40 million users.

• Teen Vogue is being folded into Vogue.com, marking the end of one of the last youth media outlets that defined millennial and Gen Z girlhood.

• Gannett, the largest newspaper publisher in the U.S., is rebranding to USA Today Co.

• New kid on the block: Locket, a new social app, is using iOS Live Activities to reach Gen Alpha via the iPhone Lock Screen. It crossed 1mill posts and 2mill users this week.

• VC land: Roelof Botha, who has held the top role at Sequoia Capital for three years, announced he was handing the reins to two partners, Alfred Lin and Pat Grady. It’s not clear why Botha decided to step down now. (The Information)

• Layoffs: Andreessen Horowitz is pausing its Talent x Opportunity (TxO) fund and program and laid off staff;

🤖 AI News

• Anthropic expects to generate as much as $70 billion in revenue in 2028, up from roughly $4.7 billion this year. Roughly 80% of Anthropic’s revenue through 2028 comes from sales of its AI models through an application programming interface to business customers.

• 🇨🇳Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said China will win the artificial intelligence race because of the country’s lower energy costs and looser regulations.

• ⭐️At a conference, OpenAI provided color on how they might seek more financing: “We’re looking for an ecosystem of banks, private equity, maybe even governmental… that allows the financing to happen. That can really drop the cost of the financing but also increase the loan-to-value, so the amount of debt you can take on top of an equity portion.” OpenAI also added that AI should be viewed as a “national strategic asset” and that the U.S. needed to be thoughtful in its race against China to “grow our AI ecosystem as fast as possible.”

• Google is now baking Gemini into Maps to let users ask it questions while driving, improve navigation, and do more with the app

• Amazon demanded Perplexity stop allowing its AI assistant to make purchases on Amazon’s site and escalated with a lawsuit filed on Tuesday. In the lawsuit, Amazon alleged Perplexity committed computer fraud and violated its terms and conditions.

• Google removed its open-source AI model Gemma from its AI Studio developer tool after Senator Marsha Blackburn sent a letter accusing Gemma of fabricating rape allegations against her.

• Shopify says AI traffic is up 7x since January, and AI-driven orders are up 11x

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🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships

M&A

• M&A Trends - software M&A volume is on track to hit the highest annual total volume of deals but the average deal size is smaller

• Core Scientific shareholders last Thursday voted against an all-stock acquisition offer from CoreWeave valued at $9 billion. CoreWeave then acquired Marimo, an open-source Jupyter Notebook competitor, for an undisclosed sum.

• SoftBank Group explored a potential acquisition of chipmaker Marvell Technology earlier this year

• Google announced its intent to acquire cloud security company Wiz for $32bill in March and the deal is now on track to close in early 2026, with the US govt’s blessing.

• Apple CEO Tim Cook signaled to investors during their Q4 earnings call that the company is open to acquisitions and partnerships to move things forward on the AI front.

• Netflix is exploring a bid for Warner Bros. Discovery’s studio and streaming business.

• Kimberly-Clark (which owns Huggies, Kleenex and Cottonelle) agrees to buy Kenvue (which owns Tylenol, Aveeno, Listerine and Neutrogena) for over $40 billion in stock and cash. The deal will unite two consumer products giants.

Fundraising

• Ripple said it raised a $500 million strategic investment at a $40 billion valuation

Partnerships

• ⭐️OpenAI has reached a deal with Amazon to buy $38 billion in cloud computing services over the next seven years. The deal is OpenAI’s first with AWS as the startup moves quickly to rent servers equipped with Nvidia chips from a wide range of cloud providers. OpenAI has separately committed to spend $250 billion on Microsoft Azure and $300 billion on Oracle’s cloud in the coming years, and it has raised $100 billion from Nvidia to fund its own data centers.

• Apple is nearing a deal to pay Google $1B annually to power its new Siri. The new Siri powered by Google will likely release next spring. Originally launched in 2011, Siri has fallen far behind the competition, especially with the rise of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. A team inside Apple attempted to build the company its own version of a ChatGPT, but they’ve struggled inside Apple’s corporate culture,

• People Inc. signed an AI licensing deal with Microsoft, which will use its media content in Copilot.

⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom

• 🚬Cigarettes are creeping back into culture. Bloomberg connects the trend to Gen Z’s loneliness epidemic and rejection of hyper-digital life — cigarettes, unlike vapes, offer ritualized, face-to-face socialization and analog connection.

• ⚾️ The Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Toronto Blue Jays to win the World Series, becoming back-to-back champions.

• 🇵🇹Travel diaries: This article about Madeira was one of the more popular articles in the NYT - “its mountains are laced with scenic trails, tumbling cascades and inviting villages.”

• 💎The Florentine Diamond: A legendary jewel of the Hapsburg dynasty was thought to be lost for over a century. Its heirs have admitted it was in a bank vault in Canada.

• It was the NYC Marathon this past weekend - my favorite part are the signs:

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