Cue Sunk My Battleship!
OpenAI's Dual CEO • Apple's Smart Glasses Chips • xAI's New Funding
I still can’t get over the fact that Eddy Cue managed to sink both Apple’s and Google’s stock with one comment on a witness stand. Apple has now largely bounced back, Google has largely not — despite issuing their own sort of rebuttal on the matter. The 4D chess element of such a statement is fun to think through. Cue clearly wants to help Apple save those $20B+ a year in payments. And Google hasn’t really been helping in that matter, as they’d undoubtedly prefer to get what Cue also testified was likely to be the same exposure for $0 a year. And so by suggesting Google’s power is waning, he’s helping Google here in a way, but it’s really helping Apple in a different way, while also hurting Google in another way. In that way, it’s sort of brilliant. If that was the plan. And if it doesn’t backfire.
My two posts on the topic this week:
Apple Hits Google's Battleship
Eddy Cue's comments on the witness stand may have been meant to be a shot across the bow – whoops
Trying to Solve the Apple Safari Google Search Riddle
Apple says search queries are falling, Google says they're not...
• Enjoying a Kronenbourg 1664 🍻
• Listening to "It Ended on an Oily Stage" by British Sea Power 🎶
• Written on an M4 MacBook Air 💻
• Sent from Paris, France 🇫🇷I Think...
🤖 OpenAI Expands Leadership with Fidji Simo
A few thoughts here. First, this seems like a great hire. Simo has experience with product companies at scale (Facebook) and now public companies (Instacart). She joined the OpenAI board a year ago, so she knows this company. Second, it seems awfully weird to have a secondary “CEO” title here. Yes, it exists inside some massive companies, but OpenAI — valuation aside — is still a startup. Maybe they had to give it to her to get her to walk from the Instacart role, and while the job technically sounds more like a COO role, OpenAI already has one of those, he now reports to her. On the other hand, usually the person who the entire rest of the C-suite reports to is the CEO. It’s just that OpenAI now has two of those. We all are well aware that OpenAI is “not a normal company” — to say the least — but is there something more to read into this latest oddity? The company did just fail in their attempt to turn into a for-profit. A lot was riding on that. And again, Simo was in the room for it all. Just to put the obvious question out there: is Simo the one who takes OpenAI public? [OpenAI Blog]
😎 Apple Developing Specialized Chips for Glasses, AI Servers
The big part of this news, I think, is that they’re taking the ‘smart glasses’ category — i.e. the wearables before the “true” AR glasses — seriously. Meta, of course, has given them some reason to with their Ray-Ban partnership. But I assume what has Apple more concerned was the ways that work could help accelerate the path to said AR glasses. Meta obviously showed those off last year in a way that Apple never would, and by all accounts, they’re insanely impressive. But they’d also likely cost well north of $10k to buy right now if Meta made them. Of Apple’s many prowesses, manufacturing consumer goods at scale has to be near the top. Even after years of the Quest, it’s just not something Meta can match right now. And ditto for a tangential element of that: chip design. If Apple can whittle down an Apple Watch chip into a pair of simple, more affordable glasses on the lower-end, while they continue to push forward with Vision Pro on the higher-end, they would seem poised to meet Meta on that next proverbial battle ground: your face. A race which may be all Tim Cook cares about right now. The key, to me, is that they make such glasses fun. It feels like that’s what needs to be injected back into the brand right now. Also, the AI servers element comes into play too, down the line, as that technology will obviously also be critical for all of this. [Bloomberg 🔒]
💰 New Funding Talks Could Value xAI at $120 Billion
Yeah, I mean why not. It has been a whole month since xAI was last valued at $80B after all. Of course, that valuation came not from a funding round, but from the merger with Xitter. That deal valued Xitter itself at $33B (net of debt). And so the combined valuation was already just past $100B, so this is just a small step-up from that merged valuation. If you consider a few billion to be small. Which I don’t, but those currently valuing AI startups do. What is xAI’s revenue? Last November, it was reported to be $100M in ARR. Presumably, it’s up quite a bit from that point, but probably still in that ballpark. Meanwhile, Xitter’s own revenue (actual revenue, not a run rate) was reported to be $2.6B in 2024. (And some revenue moved between the two for various deals.) For context, OpenAI’s revenue in 2024 was said to be $3.7B (with an ARR closer to perhaps $5B by the end of that year). Given the $300B valuation for OpenAI, xAI’s number doesn’t look outlandish on the surface, but: it’s not apples-to-apples. Xitter’s revenue was said to be shrinking up until recently. You have to believe the merger leads to some sort of massive advantage for xAI itself, while discounting Xitter’s revenue fairly heavily relative to OpenAI’s. Or maybe the bet is that Elon Musk is going to merge all of his companies together at some point. [NYT]
I Wrote...
“Get Book”
A button to buy something within the app you're using. Imagine that.
Just Jony
A couple takeaways from Jony Ive's Stripe Sessions chat
I Note...
How much has it cost Epic to fight Apple in court? Well over $100M, according to Tim Sweeney. But when you take into account the lost revenue from Fortnite not being in the App Store over the past five years, the potential costs are easily over $1B, he noted on Peter Kafka’s Channels podcast. That’s one expensive last laugh. (He still thinks it was worth it, but what else would he say?) [BI 🔒]
The most surprising thing to me in the news that Grand Theft Auto VI is being delayed until May 2026 is that Grand Theft Auto V came out in 2013! That’s the year the Playstation 4 and Xbox One launched — the previous generation of consoles. Apple had just launched the iPhone 5s — and 5c! That feels like 100 years ago. [NYT]
Tesla fails to secure the trademark for "robotaxi" because it’s deemed too generic. I’m not sure why they’re going after this versus simply using “Cybercab”. Perhaps because the Cybertruck is seemingly not going well for the company? But ‘Cybercab’' is actually sort of a fun branding for such an operation… [TechCrunch]
The Andy Serkis-helmed next Lord of the Rings film, The Hunt for Gollum, gets a release date: December 17, 2027. No official word on Ian McKellen’s involvement yet — he’d be 88 when it’s released. Though Gandalf is around 24,000 years old in the books, so he’s aging into the role. [THR]
Disneyland is heading to the UAE. Interestingly, the Miral Group, an arm of the Abu Dhabi government, is paying for basically the entire thing (including paying Disney to design it and royalties as a percentage of revenue). There’s some level of brand risk, but seemingly little else. One other key aspect: it’s a relatively short flight from India as well. [NYT]
I feel like everyone is downplaying the new Netflix search powered by ChatGPT — undoubtedly because other attempts at this, such as by Amazon, have been bad. But if someone nails this — truly just describing content you want to see in natural language — it could be a pretty massive feature. Especially with Netflix’s huge corpus of content. [TechCrunch]
Speaking of Netflix, sort of weird that they haven’t rolled out a 'Subscribe' button yet with the iOS wall coming down? Perhaps they’re worried it’s just going to go right back up, and why bother? Still, it would undoubtedly put more pressure on Apple… [9to5Mac]
With the news that Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock are teaming up for a new film all I know is that it better be called ‘Threed’. (There’s zero indication it has anything to do with Speed but beyond the two stars, one of the producers of Speed also brought this new project to them…) [THR]
The Apple TV+ adaptation of Foundation has been a slow burn over its first two seasons. There are some great moments, but sizable chunks have also been a slog. But the trailer for season 3 looks fantastic. Almost like an action movie. I’m not sure how much that will please Isaac Asimov fans but we’re also way beyond sticking to those scripts; I think this approach could help the series gain some steam if it hopes to continue. It’s back on July 11. [9to5Mac]
We have a name for Comcast’s
unwanted childrenTV networks: Versant. But, as it turns out, what sounds like generic corporate gibberish is actually a word meaning "a region of land sloping in one general direction". Which direction might that be in this case? [Variety]And it sounds like Warner Bros Discovery is about to shove their own Versant out the door, thus splitting the company in two. No company has been more transparent about their desire for M&A, but who is buying? [THR]
It feels like if Snap is going to figure their way out of the rut they’re in — certainly with investors — perhaps something like Snap Map is a way forward. 400M MAUs of a feature that’s unique to their network (and interesting). Though naturally Meta is trying to copy it for Instagram… [TechCrunch]
Also having a problem righting the ship? Starbucks. Brian Niccol clearly needs (and will get) more time, but the tariff situation exacerbating an already problematic coffee trade is… an issue for a coffee company. [Economist 🔒]
First we get “hands on” walk-throughs of fake iPhone 17 mock-ups made out of rumored design specs, now we’re getting actual Google ads based around rumored iPhone 17 designs. You know someone is in your head when… [9to5Mac]
The Golden Globes is getting a “Best Podcast” category in 2026. At least they’re not even pretending it’s about some sort of evaluation of art, it’s going to be six nominations from the 25 most-listened-to shows. [THR]
Microsoft adopting Google’s standard for AI agents to connect means one thing: we’re getting closer to the world I envision of bots thanking bots, almost exactly a decade ago. [TechCrunch]
I Quote...
“I'm somewhat embarrassed to say that Tim Cook has made Berkshire a lot more money than I've ever made.”
— Warren Buffett, at Berkshire’s annual shareholder meeting (where, yes, he also announced he would step down at year-end). Berkshire, of course, was Apple’s largest shareholder for years (aside from ETFs) after they started buying in 2016. And the stock rose 680% over that span.
That span, of course, was only during Cook’s reign of the company, which Buffett noted in his follow up comment: “Nobody but Steve could have created Apple, but nobody but Tim could have developed it as he has.”
I Spy...
Did I mention (above) that Disneyland Abu Dhabi will be built on one of their man-made islands: Yas Island? Hopefully that helps to cool it down, with the average high temperature over the summer months well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit…
