This Week in Tech (Week Ending Nov 21, 2025)
TL;DR - 🏛️ the Epstein files; ⭐️Nvidia earnings; 🤝OpenAI and Anthropic partnerships
Hey folks!
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 for the AI hungry tech industry, reported record sales and strong guidance, helping soothe jitters about an artificial intelligence bubble.
🙋🏻♀️Paramount, Netflix and Comcast formally submitted bids for Warner Bros. Discovery.
Both OpenAI and Anthropic locked in major partnerships: Anthropic announced new Microsoft and Nvidia partnerships, including a $15 billion investment. OpenAI announced separate partnerships with Target and Intuit.
🖼️💰 The world’s most expensive modern artwork was sold at auction this week. Check out what it was below
🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends
🇺🇦 The Trump administration has been secretly working in consultation with Russia to draft a new plan to end the war in Ukraine.
It’s happening guys: 🏛️ The House voted 427-1 to compel the Justice Department to release all of its Jeffrey Epstein files.
Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers’ ties to Jeffrey Epstein prompted him to announce that he’s “stepping back from public commitments”. Summers is on the board of OpenAI and is still a professor at Harvard.
💰Just one more reason to not invest too much in crypto: Kidnappings and attacks to steal crypto assets are on the rise, so crypto investors are taking self-defense courses to teach them how to escape.
💉The C.D.C. changed its longtime position on vaccines and autism: the C.D.C. has long fought against the claim that vaccines cause autism. Until this week, a website it created to fight misinformation said that studies had shown “no link between receiving vaccines and developing autism.” Now, that website has been changed to say that studies “have not ruled out the possibility.”
📉 Yikes: IQ scores dropped across matrix reasoning and pattern recognition between 2006 and 2018, with the steepest declines among 18- to 22-year-olds. NY Mag argues we’re not getting dumber because of screens themselves, but rather because we’re exposed to too many other people’s thoughts all the time.
🙅🏻♀️💒22point drop in teen girls’ interest in marriage: Only 61% of high school senior girls now say they want to get married someday, down from 83% in 1993, while teen boys’ interest has stayed essentially flat at 74%. The data undercuts the trad-wife fantasy circulating online and reveals a broader generational divergence where “boys talk about wanting a wife, while girls talk about wanting a secure, stable, and fulfilling life.”
🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)
🍎Apple’s succession plans for its next chief executive have accelerated, with its board and senior executives preparing for current CEO Tim Cook to step down potentially next year
⚖️A U.S. federal judge ruled Meta did not break antitrust laws by illegally stifling competition through its purchases of Instagram and WhatsApp, a defining win for the tech giant as it seeks to expand its dominance in the AI era. Catch up quick: The Federal Trade Commission, which sued Meta during President Trump’s first administration, tried to argue in court that the tech giant shouldn’t have been allowed to purchase Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014, even though both deals were previously blessed by the FTC.
🇦🇺Meta has begun to notify Australian teens that their accounts will be shut down. Australia’s social media ban for teens under 16yo goes into effect on December 10, at which point Meta will revoke account access for users under the age of 16 in Australia
⭐️Nvidia, the world’s most-valuable publicly-listed company and an bellwether for the AI hungry tech industry, reported record sales and strong guidance, helping soothe jitters about an artificial intelligence bubble. Profit was $31.9 billion, up 65 percent from a year ago and 245 percent from the year before that. Also, Nvidia said Wednesday it had struck deals to rent $26 billion of servers from cloud providers over the next six years, doubling the cloud spending commitments it disclosed just three months ago.
📺“We’ve gone in a circle”: Disney’s new multiyear distribution agreement with YouTube represents a new streaming future in which programmers finally let their sports content be ingested by larger digital pay-TV providers, instead of trying to force consumers to their own apps
☁️💣Cloudflare suffered an outage that took down several big websites and services, including ChatGPT, Claude, Spotify, and X.
Salesforce said it’s investigating an incident where hackers compromised some of its customers’ data after breaching customer experience company Gainsight.
💰Faire announced a tender offer to buy employee shares at a price that values the company at $5.2 billion, nearly 60% lower than the company’s last public valuation of $12.6 billion from mid-2022.
DoorDash suffered a data breach impacting users’ phone numbers and physical addresses. The delivery giant said “no sensitive information” was accessed, and did not specify the number of customers, delivery workers, and merchants who were impacted by the breach.
🎶Spotify’s latest feature lets you transfer playlists from other services/ Spotify has partnered with TuneMyMusic on a new in-app feature that lets users import their playlists from other streaming services.
🤖 AI News
💬OpenAI has begun piloting group chat capabilities in ChatGPT for people in Japan, New Zealand, South Korea and Taiwan.
OpenAI is rolling out a new ChatGPT designed for K-12 teachers.
Google released Gemini 3, its latest and most advanced foundation model, to be made immediately available through the Gemini app and AI search interface
Google releases Nano Banana Pro, its latest image generation model:
Hugging Face CEO says we’re in an ‘LLM bubble,’ not an AI bubble
Jeff Bezos, who hasn’t held a formal operating role since stepping down as Amazon’s C.E.O. in 2021, is now co-C.E.O. of a new A.I. start-up, Project Prometheus. The company has already raised $6.2 billion, much of which comes from the billionaire himself. Project Prometheus is focusing on A.I. with real-world applications, including engineering and manufacturing in fields like computers, aerospace and automobiles.
🌎The new frontier in AI is world models that can understand and simulate reality. Machine learning veteran Yann LeCun, who has told colleagues he’ll leave Meta in coming months, plans to launch a world model startup. Why it matters: Models that can navigate the way the world works are key to creating useful AI for everything from robotics to video games. For all the book smarts of LLMs — the models that power your favorite chatbots — they currently have little sense for how the real world works.
Techcrunch recommends this guide from Wikipedia on “signs of AI writing”: Things to watch for include -
Undue emphasis on symbolism, legacy, and importance (ex: “underscores its importance”)
Undue emphasis on notability, attribution, and media coverage
Superficial analyses
Promotional and advertisement-like language (ex: “continues to captivate”)
🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships
M&A
🙋🏻♀️Paramount, Netflix and Comcast formally submitted bids for Warner Bros. Discovery.
Adobe to buy Semrush for $1.9 billion
Spotify acquires music database WhoSampled. WhoSampled offers an extensive database of songs, samples, covers, remixes, artists, and more. That data is powering Spotify’s latest features, like its upcoming music discovery tool SongDNA.
Fundraising
Amazon is expected to raise $15 billion in a bond offering, the latest sign of how big tech companies are tapping the debt markets to help fund enormous investments in AI.
XAI, the artificial intelligence startup run by Elon Musk, has told shareholders that it’s planning to raise money at a $230 billion valuation
Thinking Machines Lab, the artificial intelligence developer co-founded by ex-OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, has been in talks with potential investors to raise between $4 billion and $5 billion in the startup’s next round of funding. It’s aiming for a valuation of at least $50 billion.
Databricks, a database provider whose tools help customers develop and use AI, is in talks to raise money at a valuation of more than $130 billion, up around 30% from its valuation in a financing round just two months ago.
Kalshi’s, the prediction market, valuation jumps to $11B after raising $1B. Plus: apparently at Goldman Sachs’ private tech conference, Kalshi was the “hottest company” there.
Kraken, the crypto exchange that’s aiming to go public next year, said it raised a $200 million strategic investment from Ken Griffin’s Citadel Securities at a $20 billion valuation.
Function Health raises $298M Series B at $2.5B valuation.
Suno, an AI music startup, raises at $2.45B valuation on $200M revenue.
Sakana AI, a Tokyo-based developer of artificial intelligence models and applications, said it has raised $135 million in a funding round at a valuation of $2.5 billion without the newly raised capital.
Ramp raised $2.3bn, hitting a $32B valuation, just 3 months after hitting $22.5B
IPO
📉“So where is this going?” - Stubhub investors: StubHub shares plunged 22% on Friday, the day after the ticketing company reported its first earnings result as a public company. The stock is now trading 38% below its IPO price, just two months after its debut. The company didn’t give any guidance about the fourth quarter, which may have frustrated investors looking for some idea of what StubHub is seeing so far this quarter.
Partnerships
Anthropic announced new Microsoft and Nvidia partnerships, including a $15 billion investment. Why it matters: The move underscores how AI’s biggest developers and cloud providers are intertwining their models, chips and compute resources, despite being competitors.
OpenAI and Target announced plans to make the retail giant’s app available through ChatGPT’s new app feature
Intuit signed a $100M+ deal with OpenAI to bring its apps to ChatGPT. Intuit said its tools, such as TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks and Mailchimp, will be accessible through ChatGPT, allowing users to ask questions and complete tasks such as estimating tax refunds, reviewing credit options, or managing business finances
Fox News Media has been working with Palantir for the past year to build a suite of custom AI newsroom tools alongside its journalists.
⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom
🕵️♀️True crime, which was the third-most-listened-to podcast genre last year, continues to grow in popularity in the U.S. Out of the 10 top series, nine are in the true crime genre.
📸National Geographic’s Pictures of the Year 2025 are pretty great - they span the globe and industries. Below: a water hole in Botswana
🎶Newly discovered Bach pieces: When Peter Wollny came across a pair of unsigned organ works while researching his dissertation in 1992, he set them aside. They were strikingly original and he wanted to know who composed them. Now, after three decades of detective work and handwriting analysis, Wollny finally announced that he was confident the pieces were teenage works by Johann Sebastian Bach. Listen to them here.
What $236mill looks like: Gustav Klimt’s ‘Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer’ sold for $236.4mill at Sotheby’s, making it the world’s most expensive modern artwork at auction and the second-priciest work of art ever auctioned overall. The reigning titleholder remains a $450 million Leonardo da Vinci, “Salvator Mundi,” that Christie’s sold in 2017.
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