Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
Step right up to Elon Musk’s financial merry-go-round.Tucked more than 200 pages into SpaceX’s S-1 paperwork, which the company filed on Wednesday, is an outline of how interconnected Musk’s various companies are, including through more than $660 million in payments, goods, and services involving SpaceX and his other ventures last year.Musk has his hands in many pots. In addition to being the CEO of aerospace company SpaceX, he’s the CEO (and “Technoking”) of electric carmaker Tesla, the founder of tunneling business The Boring Company, the cofounder of brain chip firm Neuralink, and was the CEO of xAI, until it merged…
Mark Zuckerberg is signaling that Meta employees can stop looking over their shoulders.After long emphasizing cost-cutting, management flattening, and “Year of Efficiency” rhetoric, the Meta chief struck an empathetic tone in his post-layoff email to employees on Wednesday — emphasizing stability, conceding communication failures, and promising to “do right by people along the way.”In his internal email to staffers, he thanked the roughly 8,000 workers who were being let go and emphasized his desire to provide “as much stability as possible” to those who remained.It was a reminder that layoff anxiety carries a real business cost.To that point, Zuckerberg said…
Steve Wozniak did what other college graduation commencement speakers couldn’t this year: earn applause when talking about AI.The Apple cofounder took the stage during Grand Valley State University’s graduation ceremony earlier this month. During his speech, Wozniak offered reassurance to new graduates who are entering the workforce at the height of the AI revolution.”You have AI — actual intelligence,” Wozniak said.The remark garnered laughs and applause from the audience.”It would take too long to go deeply into what I think about AI, but we’ve been trying to create a brain,” Wozniak said. “Is there a way we can duplicate a…
President Donald Trump has delayed signing an executive order that would allow the government to evaluate AI models before they’re released. Trump claimed he is not happy with the language of the order: “I didn’t like certain aspects of it,” he told the White House press pool. “We’re leading China, we’re leading everybody, and I don’t want to do anything that’s going to get in the way of that leading.” The unofficial reason: Not enough tech CEOs could make it to Washington, D.C. on short notice, according to several reports. And what’s an executive order signing without a photo op?…
With AI taking over feeds and the biggest social media platforms feeling less social than ever, there’s an opportunity for a breakthrough startup.Business Insider wants to know: Who is backing those companies?Some venture capitalists are on the hunt for the “next big thing” in consumer technology — even as VC interest in the broader consumer category is in flux.There are new social networking startups vying to be the next generation’s Facebook, Tumblr, or TikTok. The space is also brimming with new companies trying to disrupt dating and day-to-day life with AI assistants that help you navigate your in-real-life relationships and plans.We’re publishing…
Elon Musk’s companies love to work together. Now, we have a bit more insight into how much money is moving between them. Loading audio narration… On Wednesday, SpaceX filed its 277-page S-1, a document that peels back the curtain on the combined space-and-AI company’s spending.The filing showed that SpaceX (and its recently acquired fellow Musk company, xAI) bought hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of products from Tesla. Purchases included $697 million in Tesla Megapack products across 2024 and 2025, plus $131 million in Cybertrucks in 2025. The rocket company also bought an additional $34 million in Megapacks between January…
Elon Musk’s attempts to win over advertisers have yet to spark a major recovery in ad revenue for X. Loading audio narration… In 2025, ad revenue for X (formerly Twitter) reached $1.8 billion, up around 7% from 2024. That said, revenue was down 21% from 2023 and about 59% from 2021, the year before Musk took over Twitter and began alienating some brands with looser content moderation.Here were the stats:X’s ad revenue figures were revealed in an S-1 filing by SpaceX, X’s parent company.Since buying Twitter, Musk’s relationship with advertisers has been rocky. In 2023, he told marketers who were…
Alongside tools for AI-generated podcasts, Spotify on Thursday introduced a new, ElevenLabs-powered AI tool for self-publishing audiobooks within the Spotify for Authors platform. The company said at its Investor Day event that the feature will launch in beta this June on an invite-only basis, initially with support for the English language only. The AI-powered audiobook generation won’t bind authors to an exclusive contract, meaning they are free to publish their generated audiobooks anywhere. The news builds on Spotify’s previous partnership with ElevenLabs, which allowed writers to submit audiobooks created on the voice AI startup’s platform to Spotify. The audio streaming…
One of the common features for companies to build in the age of AI is to connect services like email, calendar, documents, and notes to create a daily brief in text or audio format. Spotify is also giving in to this temptation and releasing a new standalone desktop app called Studio by Spotify Labs for this purpose. Today, the company released the ability for users to explore a topic by creating a podcast about it. Spotify is also adding personal context to this podcast generation tool. And, because in 2026 companies can’t refrain from adding agents to their apps, the…
For users, Spotify has been a place to consume podcasts made by other creators. The company wants to change that by introducing a personal podcast feature, which uses AI to generate podcasts for users based on an idea or a custom prompt. Earlier this month, the company released a GitHub-based command-line tool for Claude Code and Codex that allows users to create a podcast and save it to their own Spotify library. The company said that, soon, users would be able to create podcasts directly within the Spotify app. They can also schedule them to create daily or weekly briefs…