Good morning. The great film director James Cameron—known by one generation for Avatar, another for Titanic, and still another for the Terminator—has joined the board of Stability AI.
What’s a Hollywood guy got to do with the company behind the generative AI model called Stable Diffusion? If you’ve seen a demo of the stuff, the question practically answers itself.
Cameron joins a board that includes Napster cofounder Sean Parker and Greycroft cofounder Dana Settle. Just don’t talk to him, Sean: He’s wired in. —Andrew Nusca
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There’s something about Mark (and his politics)
A rakish new hairstyle, gold chain, and fresh wardrobe are the most salient features of Mark Zuckerberg’s recent makeover.
But it turns out Sir Zuck’s transformation extends to his political beliefs, too.
Once a vocal supporter of progressive causes, the billionaire Facebook founder is now “done with politics,” according to a New York Times report. Like a disillusioned dreamer in a loss-of-innocence novel, Zuck has apparently soured on Washington, believing that lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are anti-technology.
What’s more, the right-wing backlash to some of his philanthropic efforts, such as voting booth safety during the pandemic, have caused Meta’s CEO to pull back on anything that might be perceived as even remotely partisan.
For what it’s worth, Zuckerberg has made political contributions to officials in both parties. (In 2014, for example, he gave $2,600 each to Republican John Boehner and Democrat Nancy Pelosi.) His individual contributions this decade have mostly gone to PACs, though he’s spent hundreds of millions on election administration.
Zuckerberg’s political retreat is in striking contrast to the increasingly overt political activism and outspokenness of other tech figures like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen. But then again, he may not be retreating so much as recalibrating.
As the Times report notes, Zuck has spoken to Donald Trump twice on the phone this summer. And sources told the paper that his main political philosophy is essentially free market, anti-regulation libertarianism.
Who knows, maybe Zuckerberg will even run for president someday. It wouldn’t be the first time a tech-forward media mogul occupied the Oval Office. —Alexei Oreskovic
Ex-Twitter employee: 1, Elon Musk: 0
Grok this: A former Twitter employee scored a win in a legal battle with Elon Musk over severance pay, according to a memo shared with Bloomberg.
The worker, who was laid off after Musk bought the social media service in 2022 for $44 billion, was awarded his full severance package in arbitration.
The victory is a hopeful sign for 2,000 other laid-off employees who are pursuing similar arbitration claims against the service, now known as X.
Musk’s X, it turns out, has allegedly left a long trail of unpaid bills. Landlords, a private jet service, and former Twitter executives have all sued the company at one time or another.
The company did win a key legal case in July, though. A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit claiming X owed more than $500 million in severance to 6,000 laid off employees.
One thing’s certain: Musk is a godsend to attorneys. —Jenn Brice
Visa sued for alleged debit monopoly
The U.S. Department of Justice has filed an antitrust lawsuit against Visa for being, well, a little too everywhere consumers want to be.
The suit alleges Visa—whose payment network processes more than 60% of debit transactions in the U.S.—imposes exclusionary agreements on merchants and banks that penalize Visa customers who make debit transactions on different networks.
According to the DOJ, Visa allegedly “locks up debit volume, insulates itself from competition, and smothers smaller, lower-priced competitors.” It also allegedly turns viable competitors into partners to ultimately extract loftier fees than it otherwise would. Delightful!
We’ll see where this one goes. Visa has not yet commented on the suit, though the FTC did force rival MasterCard to abandon similar practices last year.
At any rate: A successful suit could open the market to younger payments companies like PayPal, Square, and Stripe. And make merchants a lot happier. —AN
Now streaming: More Paramount layoffs
It’s never good when your layoff plan includes a “phase two.”
The three co-CEOs of Paramount Global—the company formerly known as Viacom and CBS and most awkwardly, ViacomCBS—unveiled a new wave of cuts on Tuesday that they promise will bring the company to 90% of its planned $500 million in reductions. (Comforting!)
Paramount’s growth has stalled as it contends with the secular decline of conventional TV and the high-stakes dealmaking for its controlling shareholder, the Redstone-run National Amusements.
The second part of that has been sorted: Ellison-led Skydance Media is waiting for its acquiring deal to close sometime in the first half of next year.
But the first? Still trouble, and Paramount is hardly alone. (Just ask Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery how they’re doing.) The MTV and Comedy Central parent didn’t divulge where it made cuts, but it laid out a three-phase, profit-generating plan this summer that began last month.
As Logan Roy once said: Life? Just “a number on a piece of paper…a fight for a knife in the mud.” —AN
The music stops at TikTok
Rest in peace, TikTok Music—we hardly knew you.
TikTok parent ByteDance announced Tuesday that the service will shutter on Nov. 28.
ByteDance launched the music streamer a little over a year ago as a successor to a service called Resso. At the time, some believed TikTok Music could prove to be “the first real challenger to Spotify’s global dominance.” (With apologies to Apple and Amazon.)
But it was not to be.
The app only ever saw release in Australia, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, and Singapore. Wider availability was unlikely thanks to both anti-TikTok political sentiment and fractious relations between ByteDance and major labels. (Something Spotify knows all too well about.)
TikTok itself will surely continue to be a place where some new artists catch fire, but otherwise, the show won’t go on. —David Meyer
More data
—U.S. House approves permit exemption for domestic chip manufacturers. Something something global competitiveness.
—Everywhere you turn, there’s Google’s Gemini. Gmail! Docs! Drive! Gird your loins.
—AI is coming to a Spotify playlist near you. Can’t wait to give it the prompt, “Mournful love songs about the Age of Intelligence.”
—Vinod Khosla has something to say about AI. Artificial interns for everyone, apparently?
—MKBHD’s new app criticized as a “cash grab.” The internet’s favorite reviewer gets reviewed, and it ain’t pretty. —AN
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