Return of the Rings 📧
As noted a few days ago, I didn't love the first season of The Rings of Power on Amazon Prime Video (they really should have gotten a better/shorter name for the service by now?), but I find myself excited to dive into the new season tonight.
It's still sort of wild that Amazon made it at all, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to adapt tangential content to beloved books and, of course, movies which did insanely well despite those being a massive risk as well. (Not The Hobbit ones – well, those too, if you consider trying to make three movies out of one, relatively short book a risk, which I do.)
If nothing else, I appreciate that the show has a different vibe than those movies. (Unlike, say, a movie about Gollum, which I suspect will be similar to the films.) Sort of the Tom Bombadil of the canon, as it were.
Some Thoughts...
🥊 NVIDIA Crushes Earnings, But Crushes Them More Softly – Revenue rose an absolutely amazing 122% y/y – the problem is that this follows three straight quarters of simply stupid 200%+ growth. Obviously none of this is sustainable, one just hopes (for NVIDIA and the broader tech ecosystem and maybe the entire stock market) that they can manage expectations correctly as they "downshift" to just "great" growth. One issue remains that the stock has gathered a retail following, not like the GameStop nonsense, but more like Tesla, with people eager to bet on AI in general... If/when Wall Street starts to go after AI spend from Big Tech more heavily, NVIDIA will be under assault. [CNBC]
🍪 Only the Paranoid Don't Survive – It could be worse for NVIDIA. Like 100% worse. They could be Intel. This report about Lip-Bu Tan, the one Intel board member with critical industry knowledge, leaving that position is pretty damning. Per the report, Tan paints a picture of a bloated company that is risk-averse. The fact that he only lasted two years in the seat (after having been tasked with actual hands-on work by CEO Pat Gelsinger) is even more damning. He's been on the board of HP (Enterprise) for almost a decade. HP! It increasingly feels like Intel needs a Hail Mary. They're not in the dire straits that Apple was in back in the 90s – they have almost $30B in cash, for one thing – but the perception is bad and getting worse. Time is not on their side. They're under assault from all sides. Activists are circling... Who can they buy? Who would they be allowed to buy? [Reuters]
🎁 Berkshire Hathaway Hits $1 Trillion in Market Value – It's the first non-tech company to hit the mark. Why? Well, undoubtedly thanks in no small part to a tech company – its largest holding, the current market cap king: $3.5T Apple. While Berkshire's been selling down those shares, it's still the largest holding and gives Warren Buffett somewhat of an AI narrative, I guess. Which per the NVIDIA bit above, is all that matters right now (though banks and credit cards have been pretty good to hold recently too, Berkshire's second and third largest holdings are BoA and AMEX, respectively). Oh, and the company is also holding $270B in cash. Buffett turns 94 years old tomorrow. What a birthday present. [NYT]
🤫 Elon Musk’s Free Speech Absolutism Is Supremely Flawed – A good column by Adrian Wooldridge, though I would argue that it's less that it's "flawed" and more that it's "total bullshit". It's time to move on from this "free speech" nonsense on these platforms. If we want that, there should be a fully open-source project that no for-profit entity controls. But we don't want that, in so far as we still use Twitter and Telegram and the like. That's because what everyone actually wants is free reach. And that's "free" as in beer. Without reach these networks die. And they're thus incentivized accordingly. No lip service will ever change that. No matter how loud the person is saying it. [Bloomberg 🔒]
⚖️ Telegram Founder Charged with Range of Crimes in France – In the end, Occam's razor wins again (for now, at least). Pavel Durov was charged with, essentially, "failing to prevent illicit activity on the app" and more specifically for Telegram not responding to requests for cooperation in France. While other social networks seemingly comply more often, this is obviously a very slippery slope in the space. And naturally, the rest of the EU wants in on the action too. Durov is out on bail, but not allowed to leave France. This will be quite the trial if it goes that far. If it's allowed to go that far (okay, okay, conspiracy hat set back aside for now). [NYT]
The Inner Ring
Content exclusive to paid members of Spyglass
M.G. Siegler
Some Analysis...
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
As An Aside...
👷 Midjourney, the AI image-generating service, says it's getting into hardware. Which seems weird at first except that founder David Holz was also a co-founder of Leap Motion and they brought onboard Ahmad Abbas, another ex-Leaper who more recently worked on the Vision Pro. I suspect it won't be a competitor to that product, but it could be almost anything else... Some sort of display? [TechCrunch]
💸 OpenAI looks set to hit the $100B valuation threshold in a new round of funding (and likely already hit it in smaller secondary sales). Still a ways to go to hit ByteDance's $250B - $300B private valuation, but it's creeping up on SpaceX at $200B. It's 1/10th a Berkshire Hathaway! Microsoft, of course, has to participate here, but it will be interesting to hear just how much they put in this time around and if it's cash or credits... [WSJ 🔒]
🏈 Oh would you look at that, one day after ESPN dunks on Apple's comically simple Sports app, some updates to Apple Sports. As they tell it, these are to get ahead of the football season, which started either last week if you follow college or next week if you follow the NFL, so... Anyway, they seem like decent updates – and will thankfully replace Live Updates in the Apple TV app. Also, real-time betting odds, which remains a really weird thing for Apple to focus on! [MacRumors]
🎸 While Oasis may have mended old wounds, rest assured, The Smiths have not. Though Morrissey is clearly trying to put pressure on Johnny Marr to reunite, posting publicly about an offer they got for a 2025 reunion tour, Marr refuses, in part, due to Morrissey's politics. How soon is never? [Consequence]
🇺🇸 Politics, you say? In a new book "by" Donald Trump, he casually notes how Mark Zuckerberg will "spend the rest of his life in prison" if he "interferes" (my quotes, not his) with the election again. Which is just a totally normal threat to make from a former (and perhaps future) president to a private citizen. But it also just makes all the sucking up from Zuck to Trump somehow look even worse. Like Trump's crazy nonsense is paying dividends. So he'll keep doing it, of course. [Politico]
🧑💻 Five years after it bought Tumblr – wow, it's been five years – WordPress is finally moving the service over to its backend. Apparently, end-users shouldn't notice any differences, but parent company Automattic needs help pulling it off. [TechCrunch]
And I Quote...
"In Russia it’s become like television, except it has opposing viewpoints."
-- Andrei Kolesnikov, an independent political scientist based in Moscow, remarking on what Telegram means in Russia. The rest of his quote trots out that pesky "free speech" notion again, but I do think the idea that it provides a "relief valve for public opinion" in the otherwise censored country is interesting...