Dispatch 021
Some breaking news just hitting the wires that Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has retired. All sort of interesting flags here – including that it was effective yesterday, which puts his cryptic, Biblical tweet in a different light if nothing else... He's also stepped down from the board, as David Zinsner, Intel's CFO, and Michelle Johnston Holthaus, the head of Intel Products, are in as interim co-CEOs while that board (which has also had its own shake-ups) looks for a replacement.
The stock market likes the moves so far, undoubtedly because something had to change with Intel. Gelsinger got the job just three years ago and as a company man – he had started there in 1979 before a short stint away – people seemed optimistic that he could turn things around. But that has been a challenge, to say the least, with Intel's miss on mobile being amplified by a miss on AI as their longtime rival NVIDIA has risen to become the most valuable company in the world, with a market cap over 30x that of Intel.
More to come on this in the coming days, I'm sure!
I Think...
⚖️ Elon Musk Files for Injunction to Halt OpenAI's For-Profit Transition – Sort of surprised this didn't happen earlier, but perhaps it's a sign that OpenAI's for-profit transition is moving along a bit faster than anticipated. I'm no lawyer, but it's hard to see how Musk can stop this from happening – since none of this seems to have been formally agreed upon in a contract, including, by the way, the agreement not to fund OpenAI competitors, as the reporting has that as just a verbal request, not a formal arrangement (which undoubtedly would be problematic – as might be the overlapping board element). And now adding to the conflicts is xAI itself, which clearly has had no trouble fundraising despite the concerns here. Then again, Musk does have the ear of the incoming President, which you'd hope wouldn't matter with the courts, but will almost certainly matter in many other ways! Regardless, all of this is swirl that creates further headaches and bad publicity for OpenAI, Sam Altman, Microsoft, etc. And given Musk's very real investment in the early days of OpenAI, you have to wonder how that plays into the for-profit transition equity stakes... [TechCrunch]
🪫 Musk’s Rivals Fear He Will Target Them With His New Power – A couple weeks back, I wrote the following blurb: "One element of the whole Elon Musk/Donald Trump thing that I haven’t seen really discussed: what does it mean for OpenAI? Musk, like Trump, seemingly has many enemies. And now Musk, like Trump, is in a rather terrifying position to do something about it." Well, this post attempts to answer that. It's still not entirely clear what this all means practically speaking for OpenAI, but the reporting suggests that the relationship between Musk and Sam Altman is not good – just in case the above story didn't make that abundantly clear. Interestingly, there was apparently a bit of a detente – and a hug? – earlier in the year. But then Musk found a new friend and again, if/when OpenAI morphs into a for-profit, watch this space – lawsuits aside, there are some real political ramifications here... [WSJ 🔒]
🦋 A Funny Thing Happened on The Way To Your Phone – Josh Marshall's thoughts on both his up-to-now usage of Xitter and now his rising use of Bluesky largely mirror my own. He also makes a plausible case for why the latter is rising where so many Twitter-clones have failed: a combination of features being right place/right time. In short, Bluesky is serving the role that Twitter used to serve, and just as Xitter is seemingly focused on serving other roles. But like Marshall, I worry about where this goes/ends for Bluesky as at some point, at some scale, the incentive structures start to rear up... Also, while Meta's blatant copying has been just sort of cute to date, at some point it may be less cute, especially if they figure out what such a product should actually look and work like. [TPM 🔒]
🪙 How Libra Was Killed – Back in the camp of why you need to still check Xitter, David Marcus, who ran the Libra/Diem crypto project for Meta a few years back details why it failed/was killed off. Obviously, he's going to be biased about this topic, and while he notes he only heard the actual execution order third-hand, there's no reason to think this isn't at least a directionally accurate portrayal of what went down behind-the-scenes. It also obviously shouldn't be a surprise. Nor should it be a surprise when any number of new initiatives are bogged down and "Frankenstein'd" to death with the new administration, DOGE or not. "100% a political kill" is not about efficiency, it's about politics. That doesn't change. [Xitter]
I Wrote...
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
I Note...
- Beyond his relationships with OpenAI and Big Tech, a real key to watch for with Elon Musk and the Trump administration will be his ties to and relationship with China... [FT 🔒]
- Can we stop this simulation now? Scottie Pippen wonders how the Chicago Bulls would have fared with Elon Musk on their team. It seems like a joke, albeit a weird one. But people are also taking it seriously. So I will too. The answer is that they would have won zero championships as they would have gone 0-82 in the regular season since you can't play an NBA team, even the worst one, even if you also have Michael Jordan, with four players against five. [Xitter]
- 'Brain Rot' is Oxford English Dictionary's word of the year, which, remarkably, seems to stem from Henry David Thoreau's "Walden" published 170 years ago. Today's use which led to the win? A “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state particularly stemming from overconsumption of trivial online content." See: above. [NYT]
- AWS offering physical locations to securely upload data to their cloud feels very Swiss bank-y, right down to the private room. Prices are $300 - $500/hour. You better get a gold USB stick for that. [TechCrunch]
- Does anyone else feel like The New York Times' critics go out of their way to pick esoteric, often hard-to-watch films as their "Best Movies" of the year? It's the equivalent of the annoying know-it-all in class that no one likes because they refuse to admit that normal, popular things are cool. The one exception this year may be Furiosa, but undoubtedly only because it bombed at the box office. So it's okay to pick that uncool cool one. Also, they put Megalopolis on this list. [NYT]
- The one line Disney requested be cut from Deadpool & Wolverine was vulgar, but hardly more so than the rest of the jokes in the film. I guess Mickey Mouse is just a bridge too far. The replacement joke is better anyway; much more clever. [THR]
- Y Combinator is going back to in-person Demo Days this week. [TechCrunch]
- As Bitcoin and the broader crypto world surge post-election, the other, smaller figurehead of the movement, Ethereum, seems muted at best. Why? Some blame Layer-2 operators. Others, Solana. Many, both. [Bloomberg 🔒]
- I did not realize that BYD – best known as a Chinese EV maker – was not only a third-party manufacturer for Apple, but apparently assembles "over 30%" of all iPads for the company. [WSJ 🔒]
- SpringHill, the media company co-founded by Lebron James, loses a lot of money a year. [Bloomberg 🔒]
- Bluesky is both working on and thinking through account verification as the rise in usage has naturally led to a rise in spam. I noted this myself in recent days (which Bluesky acted quickly upon). It's really too bad that Xitter has ruined the concept of badges. I like the website verification process, but there needs to be a more visual/obvious way to quickly tell who is legit and who is not. [TechCrunch]
- Following up on the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade viewership points last week, this year's parade set new records – 31.3M watched – thanks in no small part to streaming. [THR]
I Quote...
"[Selling] Arm in 2016, that objectively was a mistake. It’s difficult to blame people but SoftBank bought Arm for £24bn. It’s now listed on Nasdaq and valued at £110bn. So that’s a huge miss."
-- Nick Train, a UK hedge fund manager pointing out the obvious: had ARM not been sold in 2016, it would be a "top five company" on the London Stock Exchange, which is struggling to find such bright spots when compared to the US stock markets – similar to a point I made over the weekend.
I Spy...
Apple is projecting a 300-foot Wallace & Gromit animation onto its headquarter in the UK. Which is also the Battersea Power Station. Which is also the backdrop of Pink Floyd's Animals album.
Shot on the iPhone, of course. This will run each night until New Year's Eve.
