Startups

Another wild week for Elon Musk

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illustration of Elon Musk; background is a pattern of the twitter logo and the "general prohibition" sign
Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

Hello, friends! Welcome back to Week in Review, where we quickly recap the most read stories on TechCrunch from the last 7 days. The goal: If you had a busy week, you should be able to skim WiR and still have a pretty good sense of what happened in tech. Want it in your inbox? Sign up here.

Many, many thanks to Henry Pickavet for putting WiR together while I took a couple weeks off. I wish I could say it was a wonderfully relaxing few weeks off, but I was traveling with a back injury and my 3-year-old … so, yeah, nah. I had a great time, but I’m glad to be home and putting words on the internet again!

The most read story this week, by far, was news that Elon Musk quietly had twins with “one of his top executives” last year. Musk responded to the myriad takes with a tweet: “Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis. A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far.”

greg

other stuff:

An illustration of a white hand on a blue rounded-corner square on a background with iPhones.
Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

Elon Musk says he’s killing the Twitter deal: Elon Musk’s legal team announced late Friday that they intend to halt the $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, citing “false and misleading representations upon which Mr. Musk relied when entering into the Merger Agreement.” Twitter chairman Bret Taylor immediately responded with a statement that “the Twitter Board is committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr. Musk and plans to pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement.” This is gonna get messy.

Glance is headed for the U.S.: Glance is a company that puts tailored content/games (and, of course, ads) on an Android phone’s lock screen. After finding its way onto around 400 million smartphones in Asia over the last few years, the company is prepping for a U.S. launch “within two months,” according to a scoop from our own Manish Singh.

A bigger, tougher Apple Watch: Rumors of new Apple devices are always in the air … but when the very-often-correct Mark Gurman says something is coming, we tend to pay attention. Gurman says that Apple is building a beefed out version of its Apple Watch for “extreme sports athletes” — one with a bigger display for easier reading mid-workout and a tougher design so you’ll worry less about dings and dents.

Apple’s “Lockdown” Mode: It’s a generalization for sure, but the more features your phone has, the more potential attack vectors there are for hackers to target. With that in mind, Apple this week announced “Lockdown Mode,” a setting coming to iOS/iPadOS/macOS that lets you instantly disable a number of features — think things like what files it’ll open, what websites are allowed to do, who can contact you, etc. It’s meant primarily for those who “may be at risk of highly targeted cyberattacks,” an Apple press release said, but will be available to all later this year.

Vauld hits pause: Cryptocurrency prices saw massive crashes throughout May and June, and crypto lending platform/exchange Vauld said early this week that it is suspending “all withdrawals, trading and deposits” as it explores “potential restructuring options.” In a series of tweets, Vauld co-founder Darshan Bathija noted that customers had withdrawn over $197 million from the platform in the last few weeks alone.

Sunny Balwani found guilty: After a 3-month trial, former Theranos COO Sunny Balwani was found guilty on 12 criminal charges this week. For those who haven’t been following every beat of the Theranos disaster, Amanda put together an excellent, succinct overview of the case thus far — and the impact it has had on the startup ecosystem already.

Amanda interviews MKBHD: I may be half a decade older than him, but I want to be Marques Brownlee when I grow up. Otherwise known as MKBHD, he’s a wildly popular tech YouTuber, increasingly popular TikToker, professional ultimate Frisbee player (!), and an all-around-cool human. Amanda caught up with Marques at VidCon, where they talked about everything from evolving the long-form content he’s known for with the pacing of TikTok in mind, his thoughts on the metaverse and the tech he thinks isn’t getting enough attention.

audio stuff:

Podcasts! You like them, we’ve got them.

Over the last few days, Darrell chatted with Amanda about her trip to VidCon on The TechCrunch Podcast, Jacquie and Anita talked about crypto’s “savior” on Chain Reaction, and the Found podcast team talked with WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg about his 19 years leading the company.

You can find all these and much, much more in our weekly podcast roundup.

added stuff:

Want even more TechCrunch? Head on over to the aptly named TechCrunch+, where we get to go a bit deeper on the topics our subscribers tell us they care about. Some of the good stuff from this week includes:

The thing that makes your pitch deck useless: “You’ve brushed off your Keynote skills, you’re giddy that you’re finally going to be able to start paying yourself a living wage, and you are excited to start pitching your startup’s next round of funding to your investors,” writes Haje (TC’s resident Pitch Deck expert). “It’s heady times, for sure, but hit the other pedal there for a moment, friend — you may be forgetting something.”

Meanwhile…: That last post covered the slide Haje says every pitch deck needs; this one’s all about the slide he thinks is useless.

So are we in a startup recession or what?: Alex Wilhelm spends more time thinking about the nitty-gritty of startup economics than just about anyone I know, so when he opens a post with something like “I don’t know what is going on in the startup market and it’s a bit of a pain in the ass,” I read on.

More TechCrunch

Paris-based Mistral AI, a startup working on open source Large Language Models — the building block for generative AI services — has been raising money at a $6 billion valuation,…

Sources: Mistral AI raising at a $6B valuation, Softbank ‘not in’ but DST is

You can expect plenty of AI, but probably not a lot of hardware.

Google I/O 2024: What to expect

Dating apps and other social friend-finders are being put on notice: Dating app giant Bumble is looking to make more acquisitions.

Bumble says it’s looking to M&A to drive growth

When Class founder Michael Chasen was in college, he and a buddy came up with the idea for Blackboard, an online classroom organizational tool. His original company was acquired for…

Blackboard founder transforms Zoom add-on designed for teachers into business tool

Groww, an Indian investment app, has become one of the first startups from the country to shift its domicile back home.

Groww joins the first wave of Indian startups moving domiciles back home from US

Technology giant Dell notified customers on Thursday that it experienced a data breach involving customers’ names and physical addresses. In an email seen by TechCrunch and shared by several people…

Dell discloses data breach of customers’ physical addresses

Featured Article

Fairgen ‘boosts’ survey results using synthetic data and AI-generated responses

The Israeli startup has raised $5.5M for its platform that uses “statistical AI” to generate synthetic data that it says is as good as the real thing.

52 mins ago
Fairgen ‘boosts’ survey results using synthetic data and AI-generated responses

Hydrow, the at-home rowing machine, announced Thursday that it has acquired a majority stake in Speede Fitness, the company behind the AI-enabled strength training machine. The rowing startup also announced…

Rowing startup Hydrow acquires a majority stake in Speede Fitness as their CEO steps down

Call centers are embracing automation. There’s debate as to whether that’s a good thing, but it’s happening — and quite possibly accelerating. According to research firm TechSci Research, the global…

Retell AI lets companies build ‘voice agents’ to answer phone calls

TikTok is starting to automatically label AI-generated content that was made on other platforms, the company announced on Thursday. With this change, if a creator posts content on TikTok that…

TikTok will automatically label AI-generated content created on platforms like DALL·E 3

India’s mobile payments regulator is likely to extend the deadline for imposing market share caps on the popular UPI payments rail by one to two years, sources familiar with the…

India likely to delay UPI market caps in win for PhonePe-Google Pay duopoly

Line Man Wongnai, an on-demand food delivery service in Thailand, is considering an initial public offering on a Thai exchange or the U.S. in 2025.

Thai food delivery app Line Man Wongnai weighs IPO in Thailand, US in 2025

The problem is not the media, but the message.

Apple’s ‘Crush’ ad is disgusting

Ever wonder why conversational AI like ChatGPT says “Sorry, I can’t do that” or some other polite refusal? OpenAI is offering a limited look at the reasoning behind its own…

OpenAI offers a peek behind the curtain of its AI’s secret instructions

The federal government agency responsible for granting patents and trademarks is alerting thousands of filers whose private addresses were exposed following a second data spill in as many years. The…

US Patent and Trademark Office confirms another leak of filers’ address data

As part of an investigation into people involved in the pro-independence movement in Catalonia, the Spanish police obtained information from the encrypted services Wire and Proton, which helped the authorities…

Encrypted services Apple, Proton and Wire helped Spanish police identify activist

Match Group, the company that owns several dating apps, including Tinder and Hinge, released its first-quarter earnings report on Tuesday, which shows that Tinder’s paying user base has decreased for…

Match looks to Hinge as Tinder fails

Private social networking is making a comeback. Gratitude Plus, a startup that aims to shift social media in a more positive direction, is expanding its wellness-focused, personal reflections journal to…

Gratitude Plus makes social networking positive, private and personal

With venture totals slipping year-over-year in key markets like the United States, and concern that venture firms themselves are struggling to raise more capital, founders might be worried. After all,…

Can AI help founders fundraise more quickly and easily?

Google has found a way to bring a variation of its clever “Circle to Search” gesture to iPhone users. The new interaction, launched in January, allows Android users to search…

Google brings a variation on ‘Circle to Search’ to iPhone users

A new sculpture going live on Wednesday in the Flatiron South Public Plaza in New York is not your typical artwork. It combines technology, sociology, anthropology and art to let…

Always-on video portal lets people in NYC and Dublin interact in real time

Apple’s iPad event had a lot to like. New iPads with new chips and new sizes, a new Apple Pencil, and even some software updates. If you are a big…

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Autonomous, AI-based players are coming to a gaming experience near you, and a new startup, Altera, is joining the fray to build this new guard of AI agents. The company announced…

Bye-bye bots: Altera’s game-playing AI agents get backing from Eric Schmidt

Google DeepMind has taken the wraps off a new version of AlphaFold, their transformative machine learning model that predicts the shape and behavior of proteins. AlphaFold 3 is not only…

Google DeepMind debuts huge AlphaFold update and free proteomics-as-a-service web app

Uber plans to deliver more perks to Uber One members, like member-exclusive events, in a bid to gain more revenue through subscriptions.  “You will see more member-exclusives coming up where…

Uber promises member exclusives as Uber One passes $1B run-rate

We’ve all seen them. The inspector with a clipboard, walking around a building, ticking off the last time the fire extinguishers were checked, or if all the lights are working.…

Checkfirst raises $1.5M pre-seed to apply AI to remote inspections and audits

Close to a decade ago, brothers Aviv and Matteo Shapira co-founded a company, Replay, that created a video format for 360-degree replays — the sorts of replays that have become…

Controversial drone company Xtend leans into defense with new $40 million round

Usually, when something starts to rot, it gets pitched in the trash. But Joanne Rodriguez wants to turn the concept of rot on its head by growing fungus on trash…

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Monzo has raised another £150 million ($190 million), as the challenger bank looks to expand its presence internationally — particularly in the U.S. The new round comes just two months…

UK challenger bank Monzo nabs another $190M as US expansion beckons

iRobot has announced the successor to longtime CEO, Colin Angle. Gary Cohen, who previous held chief executive role at Timex and Qualitor Automotive, will be heading up the company, marking a major…

iRobot names former Timex head Gary Cohen as CEO