Talk of SpaceX going public is sending the stocks of its partners and investors soaring. After multiple outlets reported earlier this month that SpaceX could pursue an IPO as soon as next year, The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday (Dec. 14) that the Elon Musk–led rocket and satellite company will begin hearing pitches from investment banks this week, marking a concrete step toward a long-anticipated public listing.

The scale of a SpaceX IPO would be historic. Bloomberg reports the company is seeking to raise more than $30 billion at a valuation of roughly $1.5 trillion. That would nearly double estimates from earlier reports and quadruple SpaceX’s most recent valuation from a secondary share sale over the summer.

For years, Musk had teased a potential IPO of SpaceX’s Starlink division. Now, the company is considering a full public listing, signaling that its launch business is generating steady revenue capable of withstanding the scrutiny of public markets.

IPO speculation first surfaced on Dec. 5. While SpaceX CFO Bret Johnson has told employees the listing remains “highly uncertain,” the market has already reacted. Shares of several publicly traded SpaceX partners and investors have surged, including EchoStar, a communications networks firm, and STMicroelectronics, which supplies components for SpaceX’s Starlink terminals. Other space-focused companies, such as Rocket Lab, also rose in sympathy.

Here are four companies to watch as SpaceX inches closer to what could be one of the largest IPOs in history:

EchoStar Corporation (SATS)

EchoStar operates satellite communication networks, provides wireless and broadband services, and owns brands including Boost Mobile and Hughes Network Systems. Earlier this year, SpaceX agreed to buy wireless spectrum licenses from EchoStar for about $17 billion to support Starlink’s expansion. The deal was funded with a 50-50 mix of cash and SpaceX equity, leaving EchoStar as one of the company’s largest outside shareholders—and positioning it as a major beneficiary of any IPO.

STMicroelectronics (STM)

STMicroelectronics is one of Europe’s largest semiconductor manufacturers and a key supplier to SpaceX. The company provides radio-frequency chips used in Starlink satellites and user terminals, enabling high-speed connectivity across the constellation. STMicroelectronics has shipped roughly five billion chips to SpaceX over the past decade and expects to double that total by 2027, Reuters reported.

Alphabet (GOOG)

Alphabet, Google’s parent company, invested about $900 million in SpaceX in 2015, acquiring an estimated 6 percent to 7 percent stake when the company was valued at $12 billion. That investment, made alongside Fidelity, would see a massive paper gain if SpaceX goes public at the target valuation.

Bank of America (BAC)

Bank of America joined SpaceX’s cap table in November 2018, investing approximately $250 million during a financing round that valued the company at $30 billion. While the stake represents a small portion of the bank’s overall portfolio, it could still deliver an outsized return in the event of a blockbuster IPO.

Other notable shareholders

Musk remains the largest shareholder of SpaceX, owning roughly 40 percent of the company. Other major investors include Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Fidelity, Baillie Gifford and Valor Equity Partners.

Several public funds also hold exposure to SpaceX, offering investors indirect access to the company ahead of a listing. These include the ERShares Crossover ETF, the ARK Venture Fund (managed by Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest) and the Baron Partners Fund.

Jay Clayton, the former chair of the SEC from 2017 to 2020, known for his tough stance on cryptocurrencies and protecting retail investors, has a few thoughts on prediction markets—a space that is growing dangerously fast and increasingly blurring the line between investing and gambling.

“In any new thing—and I don’t want to get ahead of the CFTC or the SEC—you have to ask yourself: What function is this product performing?” He said yesterday (Dec. 2) during an interview at a Semafor event hosted at the New York Stock Exchange.

One such “new thing” Clayton dealt with during his SEC tenure was initial coin offerings, or ICOs. His view was that ICOs serve the same purpose as IPOs and therefore are subject to U.S. securities laws.

“People were like, Oh no, it’s not a stock, it’s a coin. Well, it’s an investment in a company that you expect to get a return, so the function it’s performing is the same as a stock or the same as some kind of bond,” Clayton said.

He then returned to prediction markets. “The real question is what function are prediction markets providing?” He said. “When does it look just like a cash-settled option on a stock? And when does it look like a bet on a football game? Those are two different functions… If I go into the betting shop and buy a cash-settled option on American Express, should it just be regulated as a bet or should it be regulated as a cash-settled option?”

There’s no easy answer. In the U.S., prediction-market contracts are treated as derivatives or event contracts, putting them under the authority of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Both Polymarket and Kalshi operate under special CFTC licenses as regulated exchanges under U.S. derivatives law. However, some types of event contracts—particularly those tied to sports or gaming outcomes—may face additional restrictions under state-level gambling laws.

Both companies have had bumpy paths in reaching U.S. customers. Polymarket was banned by the CFTC in 2022 for offering unregistered event contracts. Some U.S. users stayed on the platform by using VPNs. It officially returned to the U.S. last month after receiving an amended Designated Contract Markets license from the CFTC. Kalshi has faced similar scrutiny, including a Nevada court ruling last month that some of its sports contracts fall under state gaming law rather than federal oversight.

“People look for regulatory relief by providing a close enough function to something that’s highly regulated, and then they can operate under less regulation…But you have to ask yourself, is it far enough away from a current function that’s finally regulated that it should be regulated differently?” Clayton said. “Luckily, I don’t have to think about those things.”

Clayton is now the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, a role President Trump appointed him to in April.

Prediction markets are breaking into the mainstream. The young founders of both Polymarket and Kalshi recently became billionaires as their companies’ valuations soared.

Last month, the NYSE’s parent company, Intercontinental Exchange Inc. (ICE), announced plans to invest $2 billion in Polymarket and distribute its data to institutions worldwide. Polymarket is reportedly nearing a valuation between $12 billion and $15 billion as it pursues a new funding round.

During Tesla’s annual shareholders meeting in Austin, Texas yesterday (Nov. 6), investors approved a record-setting compensation plan that could award CEO Elon Musk up to $1 trillion in Tesla stock over the next decade. The package, which is tied to an unusually high set of performance milestones, is the third long-term award Tesla has designed to motivate Musk to grow Tesla’s business exponentially.

Tesla, which currently has a market cap of about $1.35 trillion, has seen EV sales slow in recent periods. Its high stock price is instead riding on expectations that the company will deliver its next wave of A.I.-driven products, including robots and self-driving software. “What we’re about to embark upon is not merely a new chapter of the future of Tesla but a whole new book,” Musk told shareholders yesterday.

The pay plan, first proposed by Tesla’s board in September, drew opposition from major proxy advisors including Glass Lewis and Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS). Even so, more than 75 percent of shareholders ultimately voted for it.

The award is structured as 12 tranches totaling 425 million shares, each tied to a mix of market value and operational targets. If Musk achieves all of them, the shares would be worth about $1 trillion.

Here are the conditions Musk must meet:

• Bring Tesla’s market value to $2 trillion to unlock the first tranche.

• The next nine tranches require $500 billion increases in market value, up to $6.5 trillion.

• The final two tranches require $1 trillion increases, meaning Tesla would have to reach $8.5 trillion by 2035.

• Each target must be sustained on both a six-month and 30-day average basis.

In addition to those valuation goals, Musk must hit a series of operational milestones:

• Deliver 20 million Tesla vehicles cumulatively.

• Reach 10 million active Full Self-Driving (FSD) subscriptions over a consecutive three-month period.

• Deliver 1 million bots, including Optimus or its successors.

• Deploy 1 million Robotaxis in commercial operation.

• Meet annual adjusted EBITDA milestones starting at $50 billion and eventually reaching $400 billion. (Tesla’s 2024 EBITDA was $12.44 billion.)

• The last two tranches are also conditioned on Musk putting in place a board-approved CEO succession plan. He will be 64 in 2035.

If Musk earns the full award, his stake in Tesla would rise to 25 percent from about 13 percent, matching a demand he has made publicly since early 2024. He has argued that a larger ownership position is necessary not to enrich himself but to preserve his ability to steer Tesla toward “an artificial intelligence and robotics juggernaut of truly immense capability and power,” as he said on an earnings call in early 2024.

That vision is expected to include his A.I. startup xAI, now valued at about $200 billion. At yesterday’s meeting, Tesla shareholders also voted on a separate proposal to allow Tesla to invest in xAI. Tesla general counsel Brandon Ehrhart said more shares were cast for the proposal than against it, though there were many abstentions, and the board would review next steps.

Musk has received two similarly structured awards before, in 2012 and 2018, but the new package is dramatically more ambitious. The 2012 plan required him to raise Tesla’s market cap in $4 billion increments; the 2018 plan raised that bar to $50 billion increments. This time, most of the plan is built around $500 billion jumps.

“In 2018, Elon had to grow Tesla by billions; in 2025, he has to grow Tesla by trillions—to be exact, he must create nearly $7.5 trillion in value for shareholders for him to receive the full award,” Tesla said in an SEC filing yesterday.

At some point during the rapid development of any new technology, consolidation is inevitable. Big players eventually buy out smaller competitors or crowd them out by capturing market share. In the current A.I. boom, large firms are taking this further through a strategy known as an “acqui-hire,” where a company purchases a smaller firm mainly to absorb its talent, often shutting down the acquired company’s product afterward.

Big Tech giants like Meta and Google have struck billion-dollar deals in this category: Meta’s $14 billion investment in Scale AI, Google’s $2.7 billion stake in Character.AI, and its $2.4 billion deal with Windsurf, to name a few. But the true master of this playbook is Apple, which has quietly acquired more than 100 companies since 2010—most too small to warrant a press release.

Aside from its $3 billion acquisition of Beats Electronics in 2014 and the $1 billion purchase of Intel’s smartphone modem business in 2019, Apple rarely makes large public deals. Yet CEO Tim Cook has said Apple buys companies “every two to three weeks.”

Its latest target appears to be a 10-person computer vision startup called Prompt AI, CNBC reported last week. Founded in 2023 by a team of UC Berkeley researchers, the San Francisco–based company has raised only $5 million in venture capital and was last valued at between $50 million and $60 million, according to PitchBook data.

Prompt AI’s main product is an app called Seemour. It connects home cameras to create a more sophisticated understanding of space. Its technology enables cameras to recognize people, pets and objects, alert homeowners to unusual activity, and even answer questions about what’s happening in view. The company describes itself as building “machines that sense the world just like you.” According to CNBC, Prompt’s technology and talent are expected to join Apple’s HomeKit smart home division. Prompt AI could not be reached for comment.

Apple’s acqui-hire playbook

Unlike traditional acquisitions, the main goal of an acqui-hire is talent, not technology. “Acqui-hires let Big Tech firms rapidly capture specialized talent while avoiding the cost, regulation and complexity of traditional acquisitions,” Ben Boissevain, founder of Ascento Capital Invest, an investment bank specializing in advising on tech M&A deals, told Observer. “[They were] specifically got used in recent A.I. acquisitions because the breakthrough ideas come from a few talented top engineers.”

Apple’s best-known deal of this kind is arguably its 2010 purchase of Siri. The company absorbed Siri’s founding team, including co-founders Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer, to develop its own voice assistant. However, unlike a typical acqui-hire, Apple retained Siri’s product and built it into its ecosystem.

Other notable A.I.-related acqui-hires include Emotient, a San Diego-based company that used A.I. to analyze facial expressions and infer emotions. Apple acquired it in 2016 to enhance its facial recognition technology. That same year, Apple also “acqui-hired” two machine learning startups, Turi and Tuplejump, whose key engineers joined Apple’s internal A.I. teams.

Being acquired by a company like Apple often marks a victory for a startup’s investors, but the quicl exit offered by an acqui-hire comes with its own tradeoffs. If the Prompt AI deal goes through, its investors will receive some payout but likely not recover their full investment, CNBC reported. Shareholders typically see modest returns compared to full takeovers,” Boissevain said, adding that acqui-hire deals also often come with retention risks. “Employees benefit from higher pay and infrastructure but often lose autonomy and startup culture, which can lead to burnout or attrition within a few years,” he said.

—Apple’s suite of consumer-facing A.I. offerings, Apple Intelligence, has faced skepticism for lacking truly groundbreaking features. But Cook has hinted the company is far from done making A.I. moves. In July, he said Apple had acquired seven smaller companies in 2025 so far and remained open to larger deals, adding, “We are not stuck on a certain size company.” Cook characterized Apple’s acquisition strategy as augmenting its capabilities—especially in A.I.—consistent with its long-standing preference for buying teams and technology rather than revenue.

“Apple may surprise us with a large acquisition of a company like Perplexity, which is valued between $14 billion and $18 billion, Boissevain speculated on the high-flying A.I. answer engine maker, “which would be an excellent strategic fit, potentially powering Siri, Spotlight and Safari with A.I.-native capabilities.”

Vogue has found a successor to Anna Wintour. The fashion magazine announced today (Sept. 2) that Chloe Malle, a longtime Vogue editor known for leading the company’s digital initiatives, will become head of editorial content at American Vogue. Malle, a former Observer reporter and the daughter of the actress Candice Bergen, began her career at Vogue in 2011. She is currently the editor of Vogue’s website and co-hosts its weekly podcast, The Run‑Through with Vogue. 

Wintour, 75, announced her retirement as editor-in-chief of American Vogue after a legendary 37-year run. She has stepped back into a less hands-on role as Vogue’s chief content officer, overseeing Malle and the magazine’s nine other heads of editorial content around the world. Wintour still works from her office at Condé Nast’s One World Trade Center headquarters in New York City.

“I also feel incredibly fortunate to still have Anna just down the hall as my mentor,” Malle said in a statement.

Malle, 39, is the daughter of Bergen and French filmmaker Louis Malle. She grew up in Los Angeles and New York and studied literature at Brown University. After college, she worked as a reporter at this publication (then the New York Observer), covering arts, fashion and celebrity real estate from 2009 to 2011.

She joined Vogue in 2011 as a social editor, shortly after the magazine relaunched its website as part of a major digital expansion. In a 2014 interview with the beauty website Into the Gloss, Malle recalled her job interview with Wintour in a scene reminiscent of The Devil Wears Prada.

“You’re supposed to never wear black. I wore black. It was in March and so cold, so I wore black tights and these black J. Crew suede booties, which were fine, but were sort of falling apart. And then I wore this very boring…Diane von Furstenberg collared dress with a gray and white striped blazer,” she said. “Apparently, there are a lot of things people know to do and not to do when they’re interviewing at Vogue, and I just didn’t have the community of friends or peers who had that information.”

“I consider myself more of a ‘fashion girl’ now, but my evolution’s been almost by osmosis,” she said in 2014.

But unlike Andrea Sachs, Malle rose through the ranks at the fashion Bible. She covered a wide range of topics, including fashion, politics, homes and gardens, beauty and health. She has also edited several books for Vogue. She began co-hosting The Run‑Through podcast in 2022 and was appointed to lead all of Vogue’s digital content in the fall of 2023. The company said web traffic has doubled since Malle took over.

“I’ve spent my career at Vogue working in roles across every platform—from print to digital, audio to video, events and social media,” said Malle, who lives in Manhattan with her husband, two children and their dog, Lloyd. “I love the title, I love the content we create, and I love the editors who create it. Vogue has already shaped who I am, now I’m excited at the prospect of shaping Vogue.”

“Chloe has long been one of Vogue’s secret weapons when it comes to tracking fashion,” Wintour said in a statement. “But she is not so buried in the industry that she misses the world: Like the best designers, she understands fashion’s big picture, its role shaping not just what’s on the runway but the changing fabric of modern life. Although she is no stranger to the glamour of red carpets, her talent has been for original thinking and hard work.”

ChatGPT’s continued popularity and ballooning user base is propelling OpenAI’s market value to new heights. The A.I. giant is in talks to sell shares held by current and former employees at a valuation of around $500 billion, potentially making it the most valuable privately held company in the world, surpassing TikTok parent ByteDance and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

The proposed secondary stock sale, first reported by Bloomberg, would not bring new capital into OpenAI but would instead allow insiders to cash out—a common strategy used by fast-growing startups to retain talent and reward early employees. Thrive Capital, an existing investor in OpenAI, is reportedly in talks to lead the deal. If completed, the valuation jump would mark a nearly 67 percent increase from OpenAI’s last reported valuation of $300 billion in March, following a $40 billion financing round led by SoftBank.

OpenAI’s user base has surged alongside its valuation. ChatGPT recently surpassed 700 million weekly active users, up from 500 million in March, the company revealed this week. Users now exchange more than 3 billion messages daily on the chatbot, the company said.

OpenAI makes money primarily through ChatGPT subscription plans ($20 a month) and licensing its A.I. models to enterprise clients and developers. While OpenAI has not confirmed profitability, CNBC reported the company is on track to hit $20 billion in annual revenue by the end of this year—double what it projected just two months ago.

On Tuesday, OpenAI released two “open weight” reasoning models, which the company claims outperform similarly sized open models on reasoning tasks at a low cost. The company is also preparing to launch GPT-5, its most advanced language model to date.

In addition, in a move to expand government adoption, OpenAI recently struck a nominal $1-per-year licensing deal with U.S. federal agencies, enabling them to pilot and deploy OpenAI’s tools across various public-sector applications.

In May, OpenAI announced a $6.5 billion all-stock acquisition of io Products, an A.I. hardware startup co-founded by former Apple design chief Jony Ive. The deal signals OpenAI’s ambitions to move beyond software and into A.I.-powered consumer devices.

OpenAI isn’t the only A.I. firm commanding sky-high valuations. Anthropic, founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees, is reportedly seeking a $170 billion valuation in its latest fundraising round. Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s xAI, launched in 2023, is aiming for a valuation of up to $200 billion.

With Elon Musk’s controversial $56 billion Tesla pay package still tied up in court, the electric carmaker has approved a $29 billion interim compensation plan in case he ultimately loses the original award. According to an SEC filing yesterday (Aug. 4), Tesla’s board has authorized a package granting Musk 96 million shares of Tesla stock, which will vest in two years as long as he remains CEO or holds another key executive role at the company. However, if a final court ruling allows him to fully receive the original $56 billion package, the interim award will be voided.

What’s happened to Musk’s $56 billion package so far

January 2018: Tesla’s board and shareholders approved a 10-year, performance-based compensation plan for Musk. The plan included 12 tranches of stock options with a total potential value of roughly $56 billion if fully earned through 2028.

February 2019: A group of Tesla shareholders filed a lawsuit in Delaware—where Tesla is incorporated—alleging the plan’s approval process was flawed. The case, known as Tornetta v. Musk, was led by shareholder Richard Tornetta.

April 2022: Delaware Chancery Court Judge Kathaleen McCormick ruled against Musk, finding that the board’s approval of the plan was not sufficiently independent. Tesla and Musk later appealed the ruling.

February 2024: Judge McCormick formally ordered the $56 billion compensation plan to be rescinded, ruling that Tesla’s board withheld key information from shareholders ahead of the original approval vote.

June 2024: At Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting, shareholders voted to reaffirm the $56 billion package. They also approved a plan to reincorporate Tesla in Texas to avoid further Delaware judicial challenges. 

What’s in the new $29 billion package:

• Options to purchase 96 million shares of Tesla common stock
• The shares are scheduled to vest on Aug. 3, 2027
• Musk must pay $23.34 per share upon vesting, matching the exercise price from his 2018 compensation plan

Elon Musk’s fortune and Tesla at a crossroads

Musk has exercised stock options from eight of the 12 tranches in his $56 billion compensation package. The remaining four tranches are tied to additional milestones, including further growth in Tesla’s market capitalization and the outcome of ongoing legal challenges.

He currently owns about 13 percent of Tesla, or roughly 410 million shares—a stake that accounts for about a quarter of his nearly $400 billion net worth. Musk, who also leads at least five other companies, has recently faced pressure to refocus on Tesla amid declining sales and a falling share price.

Now that Elon Musk has wrapped up his high-profile advisory role in Washington, a group of Tesla’s institutional investors is pressing him to return his full attention to the company, which has seen sales plummet in key markets in recent months. The investors point to slowing electric vehicle sales and a slumping stock price as evidence that Tesla needs Musk back at the helm.

Yesterday (May 28), Tesla chair Robyn Denholm received a letter signed by 12 major pension funds that collectively hold significant stakes in the company. As first reported by the Financial Times, the letter calls on Musk to commit to working at least 40 hours per week at Tesla.

“The current crisis at Tesla puts into sharp focus the long-term problems at the company stemming from the CEO’s absence, which is amplified by a Board that appears largely uninterested and unwilling to act in the best interest of all Tesla shareholders by demanding Musk’s full-time attention on Tesla,” the letter said.

“Given Musk’s leadership roles at four private companies and his foundation, the Board must ensure that Tesla is not treated as just one among many competing obligations,” the letter said.

Aside from Tesla, he partially owns and runs at least five other companies, including SpaceX, X, The Boring Company, Neuralink and xAI.

Musk recently promised to refocus on Tesla and scale back his role as the head of the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). “Back to spending 24/7 at work and sleeping in conference/server/factory rooms. I must be super focused on X/xAI and Tesla . . . as we have critical technologies rolling out,” he wrote on X earlier this month.

Musk is the largest shareholder of Tesla, owning about 13 percent of the company. Its other major shareholders include institutional funds such as Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street. Because Tesla is part of the S&P 500 index (since December 2020), many pension funds that invest in index funds also own shares in Tesla. The signatories of this week’s letter collectively hold about 0.25 percent of Tesla, worth roughly $3 billion.

Before leading the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell had a career on and off Wall Street spanning nearly three decades. Among the handful of people who worked closely with him for an extended period was David Rubenstein, the founder of the Carlyle Group. Speaking at a conference last week, Rubenstein described Powell as “a nice guy, a lawyer by training—not an investment banker, not an economist,” and credited this background for his success as Fed chair.

“He explains what he’s going to do before he does it, which many Fed chairs didn’t do,” Rubeinstein said during an onstage interview at Semafor’s World Economy Summit in Washington D.C. on Friday (April 25). “When Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan were chairs, they would take action, and you had to figure out later what they really did, because they didn’t have press conferences.”

The tradition of the Fed hosting press conferences after Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meetings started with former Fed chair Ben Bernanke in 2011. Powell has expanded the practice—now briefing the press after every FOMC meeting—the committee meets eight times a year—in an effort to improve transparency and communication around monetary policy.

Powell was a partner at Carlyle from 1997 to 2005, leading a U.S. buyout fund. After leaving the private equity firm, he founded Severn Capital Partners before returning to public service in 2012 as a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, nominated by former President Barack Obama. He assumed the role of chair in 2018.

Powell recently made headlines after President Donald Trump threatened to fire him—a threat Trump later walked back. The President has criticized the Fed’s interest rate policies and Powell’s warnings that tariffs would drive higher inflation.

Rubenstein praised Powell’s calm in the face of such attacks. “One of the things he’s done very well is not responding to criticism,” he said, then turned to the audience and asked, “How many of you here would like to be beat up by the leader of the free world and just not say anything in your defense?”

“Jay has been very good at basically keeping his head down, not criticizing anybody who’s criticizing him, and just dealing with the problems that the Fed sees,” he added. “I think he’s got the confidence of the [Fed] board and the confidence of the people setting interest rates.”

Powell is widely respected across Washington and Wall Street for his steady leadership during the Covid-19 pandemic—cutting interest rates to near zero, launching massive bond-buying program and supporting emergency lending facilities. While criticized for a slow response to post-pandemic inflation, Powell course-corrected rapidly, hiking interest rates at the fastest pace in four decades while successfully avoiding a recession.

Among President Trump’s long list of high tariffs imposed on goods from China—from 245 percent on needles and syringes to 170 percent on squid—there is one notable exception: zero tariff on children’s books. They qualify under one of the few tariff-exempt classes known as “informational materials.” In the children’s product category, toys should also be exempt from tariffs, argued Ynon Kreiz, CEO of Mattel, the company behind Barbie, Hot Wheels, and Fisher-Price.

“There should be zero tariff on toys, globally. Toys are a foundational part of children’s development. It plays to a fundamental human behavior,” Kreiz said during an onstage interview at Semafor’s World Economy Summit in Washington D.C. today (April 24). “We believe that, given the roles toys play in society, they should be exempt from tariffs.”

Still, that’s a long shot that will likely require substantial lobbying. In the meantime, even if tariffs on Chinese goods remain high, Mattel is better positioned than many competitors, Kreiz noted.

Industrywide, roughly 80 percent of toys are made in China. Mattel, however, has reduced its dependence on Chinese manufacturing to around 40 percent. The company now manufactures in seven countries, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico and Thailand. These countries are currently subject to a 10 percent tariff and could face steeper rates in three months if Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs return. By 2027, Mattel aims to ensure that no single country accounts for more than 25 percent of its global production. Today, only about 20 percent of all Mattel products flow from China to the U.S., according to Kreiz.

Kreiz, a former entertainment executive, has led a major turnaround effort since joining Mattel in 2018, focusing on IP monetization and brand storytelling. He has revitalized Mattel’s iconic brands like Barbie and Hot Wheels while pushing the company into film and television production, including the blockbuster Barbie movie released in 2023.

“Mattel has evolved from a toy manufacturing company that was making items to become an IP company that’s managing franchises,” Kreiz said. “Much of our business is about growing our core business and evolving beyond toys and capturing the full value of our intellectual property.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that about 20 percent of Mattel products sold in the U.S. are made in China. 

Martin Makary, the newly sworn-in commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), said funding cuts initiated by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have not impacted the agency’s core scientific staff. Speaking at Semafor’s World Economy Summit in Washington, D.C. today (April 24), Makary reaffirmed his commitment to leading the FDA with “gold standard science” and “common sense.”

The Trump administration’s cost-cutting campaign has eliminated approximately 3,500 jobs at the FDA. Makary clarified that the cuts were largely concentrated in the agency’s communications, IT, legislative, and policy teams. “None of the cuts were to scientific reviewers or inspectors,” he said during an onstage conversation with PBS anchor Amna Nawaz, noting that the agency continues to prioritize faster drug approvals.

Makary pointed out that the FDA’s headcount had doubled over the past two decades, standing at around 19,000 employees before the latest cuts. That growth, he said, led to administrative silos and inefficiencies—making some reductions necessary.

One particularly controversial termination was Peter Marks, the FDA’s top vaccine regulator for over eight years. Marks, who served as director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research and played a central role in the accelerated development of COVID-19 vaccines during Trump’s first term, said he was forced out by Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Marks’ removal has sparked concerns about the administration’s stance on vaccines. Earlier this month, HHS issued a pointed statement: if Marks “does not want to get behind restoring science to its golden standard and promoting radical transparency, then he has no place at FDA under the strong leadership of Secretary Kennedy.”

Makary pushed back on the characterization of Marks as a vaccine expert, pointing out that his background is in hematology (which studies blood-related diseases), not vaccinology. “He was overseeing a division that houses the vaccine research center,” Makary said, adding that Marks had previously pushed out two senior scientists—Marion Gruber and Philip Krause—over disagreements on Covid-19 booster recommendations for children. “So, the irony that he’s the top vaccine expert is that he pushed out two top career scientists at the vaccine center,” Makary added.

Makary reiterated his stance on vaccines: “Vaccines save lives, and any death from a vaccine-preventable illness is a tragedy.”

However, he has criticized the agency’s pandemic-era approach, particularly regarding quarantine and vaccine recommendations for children. “The worst thing you can do as a doctor is to put out a recommendation with such absolutism when the reality is that data is very fuzzy or there’s no data,” he said.

Before his public service appointment, Makary was a professor at Johns Hopkins University specializing in surgical oncology and gastrointestinal laparoscopic surgery. He is widely recognized for co-developing the surgical safety checklist and for founding the Johns Hopkins Center for Surgical Trials and Outcomes Research.

Hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin, a major Republican donor, says he supports President Donald Trump’s overarching economic goals—cutting government spending, leveling the playing field with trade partners and reviving American manufacturing—but warned that the administration’s current approach to is damaging what he called the “American brand,” a reputation that could take years to repair.

“The United States is more than just a nation; it’s a universal brand, whether it’s our culture, our financial strength, our military strength. America rose beyond just being a country. It was like an aspiration for most of the world, and we’re eroding that brand right now,” Griffin said during an onstage interview at Semafor’s World Economy Summit in Washington, D.C. today (April 23).

Griffin’s comments follow Trump’s announcement earlier this month of sweeping tariffs on most countries, which were abruptly paused just days later. The whiplash has rattled markets, with investors selling off both U.S. stocks and Treasury bonds—long considered the world’s safest investments. The selloff suggests deepening doubts about not only the U.S. economy but also the credibility of the U.S. government.

“In the financial markets, no brand compared to the brand of the U.S. Treasuries—the strength of the U.S. dollar, the creditworthiness of U.S. Treasuries. no brand came close. We put that brand at risk,” Griffin warned. “It can take a very long time to remove the tarnish on a brand.”

The selloff of Treasury bonds have led to a weakening of the U.S. dollar against other major currencies. Using the euro as a reference, the U.S. “has become 20 percent poorer in four weeks,” Griffin said.

Discussing the broader implications of Trump’s trade policies and his administration’s stance on the war in Ukraine, Griffin added, “We’ve had a shock to the world about America’s commitment to multilateralism, to free trade. And we’ve had a real calling into question the American role when it comes to global security.”

Griffin urged President Trump, as well as his treasury secretary Scott Bessent and commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, to be “very thoughtful” in their policymaking to preserve America’s global image. “When you have a brand, you need to behave in a way that respects that brand, that strengthens that brand because when you tarnish that brand, it can take a lifetime to repair the damage that has been done,” he said.

Later at the same conference, Stephen Miran, chief economic advisor to President Trump, pushed back on Griffin’s remarks, saying he disagrees with the assertion that the administration’s tariff policy is damaging the American brand. He encouraged investors to look beyond the short-term negative impact created by tariffs.

“At the end of the day, the brand of America, the desire to invest in America, to be in American, to hire in America is all a function of economic opportunity,” said Miran, whose background is also in hedge fund. “President Trump and his administration are focusing on creating the best economy American has ever had. I think you got to look forward through what’s happening now with tariffs to the trade deals that are being negotiated, to the tax relief that’s being negotiated with Congress.”

“The more authentically local it is, the more likely it is to travel.” That’s the secret formula behind global sensations like Squid Game, according to Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, who spoke today (April 23) at Semafor’s World Economy Summit in Washington, D.C. Over his 25-year tenure at the streaming giant, Sarandos has developed a counterintuitive strategy for creating international hits: don’t aim for global at all.

“Our Korean team feels very much like it’s a Korean company. They were able to make great programming like that for Korea because there was no focus on making it global,” Sarandos said during an onstage interview with Semafor editor-in-chief Ben Smith today.

Squid Game’s success wasn’t just a lucky break. It rode the crest of a cultural wave that had already brought Korean pop culture to global prominence—from BTS’s chart-topping music to Parasite’s historic Oscar wins. Still, Netflix didn’t create Squid Game with international audiences in mind, even though K-dramas have a large fanbase abroad. (More than 60 percent of Netflix users watched at least one Korean title last year.)

To be fair, Squid Game’s success wasn’t just a lucky break; it rode a cultural wave that had brought Korean pop culture to global prominence—from the boy band BTS’s chart-topping music to Parasite’s historic Oscar wins. Still, Netflix didn’t create Squid Game with international audiences in mind, despite knowing K-dramas have a large fanbase in the West. (More than 60 percent of Netflix subscribers watched at least one Korean title on the platform last year.)

“It’s very different than typical K-drama—it wasn’t romantic, for sure; it’s a bit dark and strange, but it’s very Korean,” Sarandos said, alluding to how the series’ plot draws on traditional Korean children’s games from the 1980s and 1990s.

In its early days, Netflix tested the idea of creating globally oriented shows by mixing actors or storylines from different countries. That strategy flopped, Sarandos said. But when it pivoted to the opposite, viewership soared. Netflix’s overseas teams have “have absolute autonomy over what they program for their countries,” Sarandos said, and “there’s no discussion about making anything from a local [show] global.”

That philosophy extends beyond Korea. The CEO pointed to Adolescence, a newly released four-part psychological crime drama, as another example. The series is so “remarkably British,” Sarandos said, that American viewers might need to watch it with subtitles.

Today, Sarandos describes Netflix as both “a local company and a global company” and both “a tech company and an entertainment company.” Though the U.S. remains its biggest market, international users now make up the majority of Netflix’s subscriber base. About 70 percent of subscribers—and around 80 percent of new signups each quarter—are outside the U.S.

Current claiming a market cap of close to $450 billion, Netflix is one of the few major tech companies to see its stock rise this year amid market volatility triggered by unpredictable policymaking in Washington. Sarandos has stated his ambitions to grow Netflix into a trillion-dollar company eventually, though he hasn’t detailed any plans to expand beyond its core offerings. For now, he said, the company’s streaming business continues to post strong results, with revenue doubling and profits rising steadily over the past five years.

As the global financial system evolves, Fink argues, a better formula to allocate assets should be something like a 50/30/20 portfolio: 50 percent stocks, 30 percent bonds and 20 percent private assets, such as infrastructure, real estate and equity in privately owned companies.

Fink proposed this idea in his annual letter to investors published this week, dedicating a substantial section to private markets and calling for broader access to private assets for retail investors.

Private assets encompass infrastructure projects like ports, bridges, and power grids, as well as companies that aren’t publicly traded. Historically, these investments have been the domain of governments, bank loans, and wealthy individuals who have to meet strict income or capital thresholds. While they carry higher risks, these investments also tend to offer greater returns. As more companies (especially rapidly-growing ones in Silicon Valley) stay private for longer and the demand for infrastructure surges, governments and banks are struggling to keep up.

“Assets that will define the future…aren’t available to most investors,” Fink wrote. “As we enter our century’s second quarter, there’s a growing mismatch between the demand for investment and the capital available from traditional sources.”

To help close this funding gap, BlackRock is channeling its clients into private market opportunities through a series of strategic acquisitions. BlackRock’s clients include institutional investors—like pension funds, university endowments and insurance companies—as well as retail investors who can own a piece of BlackRock’s portfolio through its mutual funds and iShare ETFs.

In October 2024, BlackRock acquired Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP), a firm owning and operating assets in energy, transportation, water and waste management, and digital infrastructure sectors. BlackRock is also in the process of acquiring Preqin, a leading data provider specializing in private markets, and HPS Investment Partners, an asset manager of private credit.

Making private markets more transparent

Beyond access, another obstacle that discourages investors from entering private markets is a lack of transparency. “Investing in private markets feels a bit like buying a house in an unfamiliar neighborhood before Zillow existed, where finding accurate prices was difficult or impossible,” Fink wrote.

“For decades, private markets have been among the most opaque corners of finance. Investors know these assets hold long-term value—but exactly how much value? That’s not always easy to determine,” he added.

The answer to that questions lies in data—think how Zillow brings clarity on real estate and what Bloomberg terminals do for stocks and bonds. BlackRock aims to provide the same level of transparency to private markets through data providers like Preqin, which tracks 190,000 funds and 60,000 private asset managers globally. “Preqin effectively does for private markets what Zillow did for housing,” Fink wrote.

“With clearer, more timely data, it becomes possible to index private markets just like we do now with the S&P 500,” the CEO added. “Once that happens, private markets will be accessible, simple markets. Easy to buy. Easy to track. And that means capital will flow more freely throughout the economy.”

Between running her namesake brand, spearheading a foundation, co-hosting a podcast, parenting four kids and—until recently—making time for reality TV, Rebecca Minkoff still manages to clock out at a reasonable hour and log eight hours of sleep. “Sleep for me is a big source of recognizing that I need it to go at the rate I go,” she told Observer.

The 44-year-old fashion designer, who uses a giant paper planner and writes everything down, organizes her daily tasks by theme and urgency, with to-dos sorted into “must finish,” “nice to have” and the inevitable “push to next week.” Mondays through Thursdays are reserved for her role as chief creative officer of the Rebecca Minkoff brand. Fridays belong to the Female Founder Collective, which she co-founded with fellow entrepreneur Alison Wyatt in 2018 to support women business owners like herself. She makes tangible quarterly plans instead of chasing five-year visions. And instead of doing everything herself, she has learned to delegate with precision. 

Recently, Minkoff announced her exit from Bravo’s Real Housewives of New York City after a one-season appearance. “Family, friends and brand” are now the focus, she said in an Instagram post in early February. 

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Rebecca Minkoff brand and the launch of its iconic “Morning After Bag,” or MAB. Among her “tentpole” moments for 2025: the release of her first book, Fearless, a collection of candid life and career advice; a four-part podcast series with the Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell; and the relaunch of the MAB—a smaller, more shrunken version of the original version designed to “fit under your arm for the girl going out now 20 years later,” Minkoff said. 

A success by accident

Today, handbags account for roughly 80 percent of her brand’s total sales, but Minkoff actually started out as an apparel designer. In 2004, when Minkoff was three years into her apparel design career and working as a celebrity stylist on the side to pay her bills, she received a request by her friend, the actress Jenna Elfman, to design a handbag for a movie she was working on. Despite having no experience in making handbags, Minkoff jumped at the opportunity anyway. 

“In those days, it was all about the Sex and the City lifestyle: serendipitous meetings on the subway, romantic encounters on the street, getting past the velvet rope to dance the night away—and having a handbag with room for your dancing shoes when you headed off to work the morning after a wild night out,” she wrote in Fearless. “And just like that, the idea of the Morning After Bag was born.” 

The first MAB, a chocolate brown canvas with metallic faux crocodile trim and a turquoise zipper made by an industry-famous artisan in the Garment District for $1,600, never made to the big screen but later took off in its own right—thanks to Minkoff carrying it everywhere herself. The bag gained traction through word-of-mouth, got the attention of influential fashion buyers, and eventually catapulted the Rebecca Minkoff brand into the household-name status..  

However, as fashion trends evolved, so did the needs of Minkoff’s customers. “Nobody had smartphones in 2005,” she noted. “Nobody carries an East West wallet anymore. So, we made the bag smaller but big enough to hold a phone.” 

Beyond functionality, Minkoff said her muse has evolved too. “The girl in 2005 was probably a girl who was looking for love and focused on it. I think the girl today—love is going to be part of her life, but it’s not necessarily the sole focus of her life.”

Building a lasting brand in a volatile industry

In fashion, surviving 20 years is a feat, especially for a brand like Rebecca Minkoff, which lands in the “accessible luxury” category—a space that’s not quite fast fashion, not quite heritage luxury, and often vulnerable to trends. 

“The most difficult thing is how fast everything is moving,” the designer said. “You can have a trend and it’s gone in a couple of months.” Because it takes about nine months to get a new design from concept to shelf, Minkoff’s approach is to hedge. “While we are trying to participate in trends, we’re not aligning our entire business to them. For us, it’s always about balancing a few trend-driven items with a core that never goes away.”

That “core” includes the brand’s distinctive hardware—celestial studs, chunky chain links, and the designer’s signature dog leash clips. “I originally was getting those dog clips at Home Depots around the city or wherever I would be traveling. I’d bring an extra suitcase and buy out the Home Depot,” she said.

Ultimately, it’s less about the silhouette or the aesthetics and more about the woman who carries it. “When you close your eyes, we want you to think about the brand as a little bit casual with a bit of a rock n’ roll edge,” Minkoff said. “As long as you can close your eyes and think that, then we can be either part of a small-bag trend or a large-bag trend.”

Rebecca Minkoff’s customers are primarily Millennial and Gen Z women, the latter of which are rediscovering the appeal of the Y2K fashion that defined their preceding generation. Brand awareness appears to remain strong. The economic side of it, however, is another story.

Rebecca Minkoff bags used to be made in China, in the same factory that produced Kate Spade’s. In 2018, new tariffs imposed by the first Trump administration nearly crippled the business, forcing the designer to move her production to Vietnam and Indonesia. 

Then came the Covid-19 pandemic. Factory capacities were down as much as 90 percent. Bag sales cratered. Unlike fashion giants with a global reach and an expansive product catelogue, Rebecca Minkoff was too small to keep assembly lines busy alone. In 2021, Minkoff decided to sell her company to Sunrise Brands, a Los Angeles-based apparel group, in order to stabilize its supply chain. She stayed on as chief creative officer, now with the resources to better navigate black-swan disruptions.

In an age of hyper-competition, where trends are driven more by TikTok algorithms than fashion editors, Minkoff’s philosophy hasn’t changed much: consistency, brand identity and a refusal to chase the zeitgeist at the expense of substance. “I think it’s about really honing in on who your woman is, what she stands for, and the lifestyle she’s leading,” she said.

On this day seven years ago, SpaceX launched the maiden flight of Falcon Heavy, a rocket used for heavy-lift and deep space missions, with a special payload on board: a cherry red 2008 Tesla Roadster owned by Elon Musk. The sports car was permanently mounted on the rocket’s upper stage and had a spacesuit-clad dummy named “Starman” sitting in its driver’s seat. The car disappeared from telescopes about a month after its launch—until last month.

On Jan. 2, the Minor Planet Center (MPC) at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., an organization collecting data on small celestial bodies in the solar system, announced the discovery of an unusual asteroid, designated 2018 CN41. Submitted by a citizen scientist, the object was drifting at an altitude of under 150,000 miles (240,000 km) above Earth, classifying it as a near-Earth object (NEO) that warranted monitoring for its potential to collide with our planet in the future.

Hours later, with the help of professional and amateur astronomers, the MPC found out it wasn’t an asteroid after all, but the Tesla Roadster launched into space seven years ago. The car is still mounted to the Falcon Heavy rocket’s upper stage, according to a note published by the MPC on Jan. 3.

Tracking the Roadster’s location in space has become an annual curiosity. Simulation sites like WhereIsRoadster.com estimate the vehicle’s real-time location based on NASA data. According to the site, the vehicle is currently moving away from Earth and toward Mars.

According to SpaceX’s own calculation, the Roadster completed its first orbit around the Sun in August 2019 and made its first close approach to Mars on Oct. 7, 2020.

Unless it crashes into Earth or Mars, the Roadster will float around in the solar system for several million years, according to NASA. But solar and cosmic radiation and micrometeoroid impacts will likely destroy the vehicle over time. In 2019, Musk tweeted that SpaceX might one day launch a small spacecraft to catch up with the Roadster and take photographs or even bring it back to Earth for research.

At the Roadster’s launch in 2018, Musk set Starman to listen to endless loops of David Bowie’s Space Oddity in one ear and Life On Mars? in the other during the journey. If his battery were still working, the dummy would have listened to these two songs almost a million times by now.

President Donald Trump kicked off his second term yesterday (Jan. 20) with a barrage of executive orders on immigration, national security, trade, energy and health. Many of these orders are to repeal policies and regulations put in the place by the Biden administration. Trump’s economic policies, in particular, could have far-reaching implications for international trade and key domestic industries like oil and automobile. Here’s what he announced or implemented on his first day back in office:

Planned tariffs on Canada and Mexico

Trump told reporters yesterday he plans to impose a 25 percent tariff on goods imported from Canada and Mexico starting Feb. 1. But those tariffs are not set in stone just yet. Instead, the President signed an executive order directing federal agencies to study existing trade policies with Canada, Mexico and China, the three largest trade partners with the U.S.

On the campaign trail, Trump promised tariffs on all foreign countries, especially China. But he appears to be holding off that move, pending the outcome of the TikTok sale. During the campaign, Trump threatened tariffs of as much as 60 precent on China. But he has since tempered his stance. He said yesterday he would discuss the matter further with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

The upcoming tariffs on Canada and Mexico could potentially drive up the prices of goods imported from those countries, from cars to winter coats to avocado. Possible tariffs on China will affect the prices of electronics, furniture, toys and apparels.

The President ordered the government to assess the feasibility of creating an “External Revenue Service” to collect tariffs and duties. These funds are currently collected by Customs and Border Protection.

A 75-day lifeline for TikTok

As promised before the inauguration, Trump signed an order delaying the ban of TikTok in the U.S., giving the app’s Chinese owner 75 days to find a U.S. buyer. Yesterday, Trump said he would keep TikTok alive in the U.S. as long as a U.S. entity owns half of it. He said the app could be worth as much as $1 trillion and that interest in owning a piece of it is overwhelming.

Declare an energy emergency

Trump yesterday criticized the Biden administration’s policies restricting domestic oil drilling, which he believes hampered oil and natural gas production and led to high inflation. To reverse that, he signed orders to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil drilling and reverse a ban on offshore drilling for 625 million acres of federal waters. “We will drill, baby, drill,” Trump said during his inauguration speech.

In addition, the President declared a national energy emergency, a first in the U.S. history, in an attempt to boost electricity production and override existing environmental rules.

Revoke Biden’s electric vehicle mandate

Specifically targeting the automobile industry, Trump revoked the Biden-era mandate to make electric vehicles account for half of new car production by 2030. He also began to claw back on regulations on tailpipe pollution from gas cars in a bid to encourage automakers to increase production overall, not just making EVs. These policies serve the purpose of “saving auto industry and keeping my sacred pledge to our great American autoworkers,” Trump told the nation yesterday. “In other words, you’ll be able to buy the car of your choice.”

Pull out of international organizations

One of the executive orders signed yesterday was to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, an international pact signed by nearly 200 countries in 2016 to fight climate change. Another order was to withdraw the U.S. from the World Health Organization.

Launch DOGE

As expected, Trump signed an order to implement the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a cost-cutting initiative led by Elon Musk. However, the newly created entity, which is not an official federal agency, has drawn at least four lawsuits from advocacy groups that accuse it of violating federal laws.

After a monstrous stock rally following November’s presidential election, Tesla reported its first annual decline in electric vehicle delivery, highlighting the growing disconnect between its high-flying stock price and its core automobile business.

The Elon Musk-led company yesterday (Jan. 2) released its fourth-quarter and full-year vehicle production and delivery numbers. In 2024, Tesla delivered  1,789,226 electric vehicles globally and produced 1,773,443. Last year’s EV delivery represented a 1.1 percent drop from 2023’s 1.81 million.

Fourth-quarter delivery slightly beat the previous year’s number by 2 percent but fell short of analysts’ expectation of over half a million vehicles. In the October-December quarter, Tesla delivered 495,570 vehicles and produced 459,445.

Following the report, Tesla shares fell more than 7 percent yesterday before rebounding 4 percent today.

Notably, Tesla saw a steep drop in sales in Europe last year, delivering 283,000 vehicles in the region, down 14 percent from 2023, according to registration data from the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association reported by CNBC.

The good news is that in China, Tesla’s largest overseas market where EV competition is particularly intense, sales are still growing. The company said today its EV delivery in China rose 8.8 percent last year to a record high of more than 657,000 cars. Tesla’s largest rival in China is the homegrown BYD, which also sells EVs in Europe, Southeast Asia and Latin America. BYD delivered 1.76 million EVs globally last year, still slightly behind Tesla’s 1.79 million.

Musk, who also runs SpaceX, xAI and a few other companies, devoted much of his time last year supporting Donald Trump’s election campaign, pouring in at least $277 million to promote the President-elect and accompanying him at campaign events.

Thanks to his close ties to Trump and the Republican Party now, Tesla stock surged 66 percent in the weeks following Trump’s election win in November and finished 2024 up 63 percent. The rally reflects investors’ hope that Tesla (and other Musk-led companies, which are all privately held) could benefit from Trump’s economic and industrial policies. The company is currently valued at an all-time high of $1.26 trillion, far more than any other automaker.

Tesla’s high stock price is sustained in large by hopes for its automobile products like EV batteries, self-driving software, a planned robotaxi service and a humanoid robot that’s still under development. While Musk’s vision for Tesla is beyond just a car company, the vast majority of its revenue still comes from EV sales, which faces an industry-wide slowdown as the market saturates and governments phase out consumer subsidies.

On Dec. 7, 2022, seven days after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a former OpenAI research scientist named Aravind Srinivas, who’d left the company just three months earlier, launched a competing A.I. chatbot called Perplexity. “Everybody was obsessed with ChatGPT. We were the only product that came and said, references and citations are important. So, from the beginning, we cared about it.” Srinivas, co-founder and CEO of Perplexity AI, said during an onstage interview at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference on Oct. 30.

Lately, Perplexity has been in a lot of hot water for exactly the problem Srinivas set out to address two years ago. Last month, the company was sued by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, both owned by News Corp, for plagiarizing their content in search results. A few days earlier, the New York Times sent a “cease and desist” notice to the startup demanding it stop using the newspaper’s content on its site.

Perplexity is at the forefront of the so-called A.I. answer engines, which aim at answering users’ specific questions by summarizing information on the internet, instead of just providing links in response to a few key words. Srinivas said the median query put into Perplexity’s answer engine is 10 to 11 words, versus Google Search’s two to three, suggesting that users come to Perplexity with more well thought-out questions.

Srinivas claimed Perplexity “always cites its sources” and “doesn’t claim ownership of any content.” “It’s just surfacing content from the web, summarizing it in a manner that the user can digest and then provide you where it’s getting all this information,” he said, adding that it’s exactly like how journalists do their job and therefore shouldn’t be considered plagiarism.

However, he admitted that, like other rapidly-evolving A.I. apps, Perplexity’s current safety guardrails are not perfect and could be easily bypassed using prompt engineering—a buzzing term describing the practice of designing inputs for A.I. tools that will produce optimal outputs.

The new publications that sued Perplexity claim the A.I. company is competing for the same audience as theirs using copyrighted content. But Srinivas said Perplexity users don’t come to the app to consume daily news, but to “make sense of what’s going on.”

“Like, how does that particular piece of news affect me? In the context of news, should I continue to buy more Nvidia stock? These are not the kind of questions you can come and ask TechCrunch, but you come and ask Perplexity,” the CEO said.

Acknowledging that reported news is essential in making Perplexity’s product valuable, earlier this year, the company launched a unique program to share advertising revenue with news publishers. It’s currently working with Time, Fortune and the German news site Der Spiegel.

But ultimately, Srinivas believes that no one should own the right to facts. “Our belief is that facts need to be universally distributed to everybody,” he said. “Imagine a world where scientists claim ownership over a certain fact, and other people cannot state it. Knowledge and truth cannot be disseminated in such a manner.”

Srinivas, originally from India and holding a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, was a research intern at DeepMind and Google. Before co-founding Perplexity, he was a research scientist at OpenAI for about a year.

Bret Taylor, the new board chairman of OpenAI, said he wasn’t planning on engaging in much board work when the high-flying A.I. company was on the brink of collapse and called him for help this time last year. “That weekend after Sam [Altman] had been fired by the board, I ended up getting calls from both the board and Sam expressing that I could help potentially mediate the situation,” Taylor said during an onstage interview at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco yesterday (Oct. 29).

Taylor joined OpenAI in November of 2023 as the chairman of a new board after a dramatic leadership shakeup that fired and rehired its CEO Sam Altman within days. When asked if Altman called him up asking him to get his job back, Taylor said the situation was “more nuanced” than that. “But I think they mutually came to the conclusion that I could help them both navigate the complex situation the organization was in at that point,” he said.

Taylor, 44, has held many notable titles in tech: he was the former chief technology officer of Facebook (now Meta Platforms), the former co-CEO of Salesforce and, for a brief while, the board chairman of Twitter (before Elon Musk bought it and renamed it “X”). In addition to serving as OpenAI’s chairman, Taylor now also runs an A.I. startup called Sierra, which helps companies build conversational A.I. to better serve their customers.

Taylor said he started the new company out of his genuine excitement for the current wave of A.I., which he said was kick started by OpenAI’s ChatGPT. “I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing if not for OpenAI…ChatGPT was the moment that changed the consciousness of the world around A.I.,” he said. “I realized that this organization which had such a meaningful part of my story was potentially about to disintegrate, and that I was in an oddly unique position to be able to help.”

Advice to startup founders on surviving after a major acquisition

Taylor, who describes himself as an entrepreneur by nature, got the top jobs at those tech giants not by climbing the corporate ladder but through selling his own companies to them. In 2009, he sold a social networking startup called FriendFeed to Facebook for $15 million and subsequently joined the company as CTO. He left in 2012 to start a productivity software company called Quip. In 2016, Salesforce acquired Quip for a whopping $750 million and named Taylor Salesforce’s chief product office the following year. He was promoted to co-CEO, along with founder Marc Benioff, in 2021.

It’s rare for a startup founder to thrive under a larger corporate umbrella following an acquisition. (Think Instagram’s Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, Slack’s Stewart Butterfield, YouTube’s Jawed Karim, Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, just to name a few.) Taylor said he credited his success to a piece of advice he received from Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s former chief operating officer.

“I had just become chief technology officer of Facebook and was managing a team larger than any team I had managed before. She gave me some really critical feedback that basically boiled down to, ‘You should expect more of your leaders and stop trying to do all the work yourself,'” he said.

The bottom line is, “entrepreneurs go through different stages of their company. When you start, you need to build something people want. But at some point, you really have to build a company as a CEO,” Taylor said. “If you are too wedded to a perception of who you are, you won’t actually make that transition.”