timef 04/12/2025

When Elon Musk announced that his AI startup, xAI, had acquired his social media company, X (formerly known as Twitter), in an all-stock deal, it raised some eyebrows. But in many ways, the deal made sense. xAI’s chatbot, Grok, was already deeply integrated with X, X was floundering financially, and Musk needed a way to […]

Thirteen years ago, Forerunner Ventures began helping to usher in a new era of consumer startups, including Warby Parker, Bonobos, and Glossier. None has gone through a traditional IPO process. Warby Parker was taken public through a special purpose acquisition vehicle. Bonobos was acquired by Walmart. Glossier is still privately held, along with many other […]

Earlier this week, Meta landed in hot water for using an experimental, unreleased version of its Llama 4 Maverick model to achieve a high score on a crowdsourced benchmark, LM Arena. The incident prompted the maintainers of LM Arena to apologize, change their policies, and score the unmodified, vanilla Maverick. Turns out, it’s not very […]

Google Cloud announced a long list of impressive AI startups as customers during its Cloud Next conference this week

Banking executive and former presidential advisor Dina Powell McCormick and Stripe co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison are joining the board of Meta, according to a report from Axios. Powell McCormick spent 16 years in several leadership roles at Goldman Sachs. She also served as Deputy National Security Advisor to President Donald J. Trump during his […]

A group of professors specializing in copyright law has filed an amicus brief in support of authors suing Meta for allegedly training its Llama AI models on ebooks without permission. The brief, filed on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Francisco Division, calls Meta’s fair use defense “a […]

Small businesses could be crushed under President Trump’s increased tariffs, according to an open letter by 38 female consumer product founders. While Trump paused his tariff increases for 90 days for various countries – setting the rate at 10% for now  –  China’s was raised to 145%, which includes the previous 20% levy. In the […]

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! Tariffs, tariffs, tariffs. If there is one certainty in this uncertain moment, it’s this: U.S. tariff policy is likely to change again. As of Friday morning, there […]

A court hearing on the sale of bankrupt electric truck startup Nikola’s assets to Lucid Motors was going smoothly on Friday. No objections had been filed to the transaction, and Delaware bankruptcy Judge Thomas Horan verbally approved it without hesitation. Until, that is, a lawyer piped up on the Zoom call towards the end of […]

A new ship-building startup called Blue Water Autonomy has emerged from stealth with the promise of developing captain-less naval ships. The Boston, Massachusetts-based company has raised a $14 million seed round from Eclipse VC, Riot, and Impatient Ventures. The startup was founded in 2024 by former members of the U.S. Navy, leaders of Amazon Robotics, […]

A group of ex-OpenAI employees on Friday filed a proposed amicus brief in support of Elon Musk in his lawsuit against OpenAI, opposing OpenAI’s planned conversion from a non-profit to a for-profit corporation. The brief names twelve former OpenAI employees: Steven Adler, Rosemary Campbell, Neil Chowdhury, Jacob Hilton, Daniel Kokotajlo, Gretchen Krueger, Todor Markov, Richard […]

General Motors is laying off 500 workers at a factory in Canada because of weak demand for its all-electric BrightDrop vans, according to CNBC. GM told CNBC that the cuts were not related to the ongoing trade war being waged by President Donald Trump. The company is cutting one of the two shifts at the […]

ChatGPT became the world’s most downloaded app in March, excluding games, topping the usual contenders for the No. 1 spot, Instagram and TikTok. This is the first time the app has topped the monthly download charts and ChatGPT’s biggest month ever. According to new data, ChatGPT’s installs jumped 28% from February to March to reach […]

YouTube is looking into potentially offering a feature that would allow users to set a daily timer to limit how long they spend on Shorts. Recent findings from the beta version of the YouTube app, first reported by Android Authority, suggest that the platform is developing a feature to help users stop the endless scrolling […]

Digital payments platform Stripe invites customers to join its management team meetings on a bi-weekly basis so it can get “candid feedback,” according to co-founder Patrick Collison. In an April 8 post on X, the fintech giant’s CEO said the company has a customer join for the first 30 minutes of the meeting, which is […]

Ireland’s data regulator, the Data Protection Commission (DPC), said Friday that it has opened an investigation into Elon Musk’s X over the social media platform’s use of personal data collected from European users to train Grok. The DPC will investigate how X processes personal data “comprised” in publicly accessible posts by European users for the […]

The business of moving goods in the United States is dominated by trucks, which handles about two-thirds of the 20.2 billion tons of freight that’s transported annually. Parallel Systems founder and CEO Matt Soule wants to change that by putting a modern autonomous and electric twist on the centuries-old railroad system.  The Los Angeles-based company […]

A recent breach of Berkshire Hathaway-owned private jet company NetJets has revealed a guide for flight attendants serving Elon Musk, per a Bloomberg report. The memo offers an interesting glimpse into the personal preferences of the world’s richest man. Some of the preferences are surprising for the CEO of Tesla, a company dedicated to sustainability. […]

Matt Rogers says Quilt is picking up where his old startup, Nest, left off.

Spotify announced on Friday that it plans to invest €1 million–or approximately $1.1 million — to boost audiobook production in languages other than English, beginning with French and Dutch. The investment indicates that Spotify is eager for more non-English titles in its limited library as it tries to compete with major players like Audible in […]