Elon Musk’s empire is a whirlwind of activity—and Tesla’s investors would like more of his focus

Around two-thirds of respondents to a Bloomberg survey said Musk needed to pay more attention to what is still his main gig. They think he’s distracted by his other pursuits. That seems to be a fair assessment.

Twitter is the biggest distraction. “Whatever sins this platform may have, being boring is not one of them,” Musk tweeted today. Okay, but hemorrhaging money is—he also admitted Saturday that ad revenue has halved, and the company is “still negative cash flow” thanks to its heavy debt load. Twitter can’t pay its rent, and a new lawsuit claims it still owes ex-workers a cool $500 million in severance.

The “boring” reference was presumably aimed at Twitter’s suddenly very present rival, Meta’s Threads, but that’s just another indicator of how precarious Twitter’s position is these days. Musk may not be Twitter’s CEO anymore, but it’s clear he’s still the boss, and that means paying quite a lot of attention.

Musk focus is further divided by his latest A.I. venture, xAI, which has set itself the laughably grand task of building a “good” artificial general intelligence “with the overarching purpose of just trying to understand the universe,” Musk said in a Friday Twitter Spaces chat about the launch.

And then, returning for a moment to ventures that actually make money, there is SpaceX. According to Barron’s, SpaceX is now worth $150 billion, making it more valuable than either Boeing or Raytheon. Again, a justifiable attention magnet. There’s also Neuralink. The Boring Company. The list goes on.

It’s not like Tesla is standing still—for one thing, it’s finally made a Cybertruck, though as Fortune’s Christiaan Hetzner points out in his analysis, we still don’t know what it’s capable of, or how much it costs. We don’t even know if what just rolled off the production line was intended for a customer, or just for internal evaluation. Tesla’s shareholders would certainly like to know, given that the waiting list for the odd-looking vehicle, which was supposed to enter production two years ago, is estimated to be close to two million long.

Hopefully, Tesla’s CEO will tell his investors what they need to know this week. But it seems unlikely that he’ll be satisfying their desire for focus anytime soon. More news below.

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David Meyer

NEWSWORTHY

Call of Duty deal. Activision’s Call of Duty franchise will stay on Sony’s gaming platform for a decade after the Microsoft-Activision merger takes place (assuming it does), thanks to a new deal between Microsoft and the PlayStation maker. The Verge reports that the deal only covers CoD, which, like the 10-year term of the final agreement, differs from what Microsoft originally pitched to Sony—a deal covering all Activision titles, through the end of 2027.

Trouble for Meta in Norway. After the EU’s top court blew up Meta’s last legal justification for its key moneyspinner of behavioral advertising, Norway’s data protection regulator has banned Facebook and Instagram from tracking people to target advertising at them. As Reuters reports, Meta notes there’s no immediate impact on its business model. That’s just because the rest of Europe’s privacy regulators now get to weigh in on the Norwegian decision—it is quite likely that they will approve the ban and extend it across the EU and European Economic Area (of which Norway is a member; it isn’t in the EU).

Apple’s M3 devices could come soon. The first Macs to boast the third generation of the company’s in-house silicon could come as soon as October, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman predicts. Gurman: “October is too early for new high-end MacBook Pros or desktops, so the first beneficiaries of the new [M3] chip should be the next iMac, 13-inch MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro.”

SIGNIFICANT FIGURES

16

—The number of years for which Calibri was the standard font in Microsoft’s Word and other Office suite apps. The sans serif font became the default in Office 2007, but with screens boasting much higher resolutions these days, Microsoft is making the new Aptos font the default in Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Excel.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

Sensitive U.S. military information has been sent to Mali for years thanks to a simple typo. Now the Russia-friendly government will get access to it, by Chloe Taylor

Microsoft promises to keep ‘Call of Duty’ on Sony PlayStation after Activision merger closes, by Associated Press

Barry Diller calls A.I. ‘overhyped to death’ after striking Hollywood actors label it an ‘existential threat’, by Steve Mollman

Chipmaker CEOs head to Washington to fight restrictions on selling to China—and protect their bottom lines, by Bloomberg

Unstoppable Domains adding .eth addresses to arsenal of Web3 offerings, by Ben Weiss

How to stay afloat, and thrive, in the generative A.I. tidal wave, by Stephen Pastis

BEFORE YOU GO

The war on privacy. The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee has advanced a bill, which would force tech platforms to report users who they think are breaking drug laws. The Cooper Davis Act would require the likes of Facebook to send detailed information, including personal data, to the Drug Enforcement Agency. That could mean undermining end-to-end encryption. As Gizmodo reports, privacy advocates have a thing or two to say about that.

Meanwhile, Forbes reports on a license-plate-recognizing A.I. that American cops are using to analyze the movements of people’s cars, to see if they’re making journeys that are “typical of a drug trafficker.” Ben Gold, a lawyer for one guy who got busted by the Rekor-made A.I., is pushing back against the constitutionality of the tactic: “This is the systematic development and deployment of a vast surveillance network that invades society’s reasonable expectation of privacy.”