Twitter drama aside, a bevy of worthy stories cropped-up in the tech business sphere this week. Let’s jump in.
Musk Officially Occupies Twitter
After the initial announcement six months prior, Musk’s takeover of Twitter is officially underway — a $44B transaction that will allow him ownership of a platform with 240 million daily users. Debates have been spawned about Musks’s loosening of Twitter’s guidelines and the ethicality of the deal itself. ‘In this new Gilded Age, we’re being battered by billionaires rather than the corporations that were the face of the 20th century,’ Richard Walker, a Silicon Valley historian at UC Berkeley, told the New York Times. ‘And tech titans are leading the way.’
The Generative AI Boom
You’ve likely heard something about Generative AI in the past few months, most likely due to Twitter. Whether or not you believe in the hype is up to you — Jasper and Stability AI, two start-ups renowned for their nascent generative AI tooling, have recently celebrated unprecedented founding rounds. The space is also garnering significant VC attention. Sequoia partner Sonya Huang says that the software is ‘speculative’ but overall good. ‘People are looking for something to latch on to that is hope,’ she told Protocol, ‘and generative AI appears to be that.
Apple Releases New Products
Apple revealed its fourteenth iPhone make this past week at a press conference, alongside three new Apple Watches, and a notable update to its AirPods offering. As is common with its new releases, the iPhone model poses more battery life and camera features than the year prior; unlike the typical drop, though, the iPhone’s price will be the same as the year’s past, countering expert predictions that there would be an $100 price hike.
Adoption of Crypto En Masse
A Fidelity survey showed that 74% of institutional investors — from high net-worth users to financial advisors — remain highly interested in digital asset adoption, contrary to media reportage and the bear market. ‘We believe that digital assets fundamentals remain strong and that the institutionalization of the market over the past several years has positioned it to weather recent events,’ Fidelity Digital Assets President Tom Jessop stated. The survey included 1,052 institutions across the US, Europe, and Asia, the majority of users concentrated in Asia.
