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Elon Musk just convinced Tesla shareholders to approve his $56 billion compensation package, making him the highest-paid CEO in history — assuming he can avoid a Delaware judge’s disapproval. And where higher to stage this circus than in Texas, home of all the pieces great, including ego? After the voting results were announced, shareholders erupted in applause at Tesla’s gigafactory in Texas. Meanwhile, Musk is juggling chainsaws with more firms than a clown and faces two latest lawsuits (suing only once a week is for wimps). Oh, and forget about all the fancy ESG initiatives; these were shot down faster than you may say “corporate responsibility”. Who needs sustainable development when Elon is dancing on stage with 0.7 Twitter’s price of money in his suitcase?
The most interesting startup stories of the week
It seems that Henrik Fisker’s talent for designing cars is matched only by his talent for bankrupting firms. Despite its desire to turn out to be the Apple of electric vehicles (with Magna as Foxconn), the highly touted Ocean SUV sank faster than the Titanic because of software glitches, recalls and a slew of lawsuits. Now, by filing for Chapter 11 in Delaware, Fisker has gone from dreaming of revolutionizing the auto industry to easily trying to not get stuck with a $500 million bill. This implies that Fisker bankrupted the title company for the second time. Will he make it to three? Wait for further information.
- Yes, I saw this one coming: Have you ever felt like your subscription services were conspiring against you? Well, Adobe just got subpoenaed by the Department of Justice for allegedly making it easier to flee from Alcatraz than canceling one of your subscriptions.
- You are watching our ads: YouTube is back in motion, folks. This time, they’re taking their anti-ad-blocking crusade to a latest level with server-side ad injections, so those annoying ads greet you before the video even lands on your device. Oh, and I summarized this story in the TechCrunch Minute series if you are more of a watcher than a reader.
- I’m going around in circles: Loop, an insurance startup with a noble mission to dismantle biased pricing models, appears to have hit a huge fundraising wall. After 20 months of trying (and failing) to boost some money, co-founder John Henry was faced with the unenviable task of announcing his layoffs via Instagram.
Trend of the week: All eyes on artificial intelligence
Apple has finally thrown its hat into the circus of AI icons, joining the likes of Google and OpenAI in a desperate try to represent AI with a logo that makes sense at all. Spoiler alert: they’re just as clueless as everyone else. Apple’s latest graphic for “Intelligence” is essentially a psychedelic circle – wait, no – a crooked infinity symbol? It’s actually the New Siri. Or perhaps it’s when the edges of your phone glow like an alien spaceship landing. The real takeaway here? Nobody knows what artificial intelligence should appear like, but let’s go for friendly pastel colours and call it innovation.
Meanwhile, Ilya Sutskever, the artificial intelligence mastermind who decided last month that OpenAI wasn’t exciting enough anymore, began his own enterprise called Safe Superintelligence Inc. with a few other former OpenAI cronies. (SSI). Following his dramatic departure from OpenAI (probably over how one can avoid Skynet taking up), Sutskever is committed to making sure that super-intelligent AI doesn’t turn out to be our ruler any time soon. SSI’s mission? To balance the stunning advances in AI with safety measures so that we do not find yourself in our own episode of Black Mirror.
The most interesting collections this week
Meet the dynamic duo who appear to have skipped the quarter-life crisis and immediately began swimming in money. Edward Tian and Alex Cui, founders of GPTZero, are living proof that top school friendships can result in multi-million dollar ventures. In just a 12 months and a half, they turned their AI detection startup into a money-making machine that outperforms your favorite viral app. With $10 million fresh from eager VCs who couldn’t wait for an official raise, these guys are well on their technique to creating an Internet where we will still tell whether your essay was written by you or by ChatGPT’s stoned cousin named Cheech.
Other stories you’ll be able to’t miss on TechCrunch…
Every week there are all the time a few stories I need to share with you that by some means don’t fit into the above categories. It can be a shame to miss them, so here’s a random bag of goodies:
- So what happened to Fisker?: Once again, Fisker proves that it’s the little engine that couldn’t. Despite outsourcing production to auto giant Magna and aiming to get to market quickly, the electric vehicle startup ignored one glaring problem: It wasn’t able to turn out to be a real automobile company.
- Tough times for an Apple developer: Get able to spill one on your favorite third-party apps, because iOS 18 is on the way and brings a wrecking ball with it. Apple’s notorious habit of “sherlocking” – that is, grabbing ideas from third-party developers and inserting them into the operating system – could generate nearly $400 million in app revenue.
- Life-minus: Well, it looks like the personalized vitamin subscription company Care/of is officially calling it quits. The company announced that all subscriptions will end by June 17. Despite $46 million in investor support and Bayer’s massive $225 million buy-in in 2020, it simply couldn’t keep the lights on.
- That’s not how privacy works: In a stunning display of cybersecurity ignorance, EU lawmakers are once again attempting to create the legislative equivalent of blindfolded juggling saber-toothed tigers. Meredith Whittaker, Signal’s CEO and common sense advocate, has sharply criticized the EU’s latest plan to scan private messages for CSAM as a sure-fire technique to destroy network security.