Meet Tim Cook, Nike consigliere

Disney said this week that it would (again) replace Bob Iger as CEO, with a target of 2026. Which got me thinking: How have successors to boomerang CEOs fared?

Tim Cook followed Steve Jobs’ now legendary return, and Apple’s doing better than anyone dreamed. Parag Agrawal followed Jack Dorsey’s second tour at the company formerly known as Twitter, only to be digitally defenestrated by Elon Musk. Laxman Narasimhan took over from Howard Schultz at Starbucks and was shown the door 16 months later. Vlad Kliatchko replaced Michael Bloomberg at Bloomberg LP, but he’s barely a year in. Ditto Matt Baer, who took over from Katrina Lake at Stitch Fix.

Meanwhile: Michael Dell remains atop his namesake company; Sam Altman returned to OpenAI; Kevin Plank boomeranged back to Under Armour. All three are founders; all three are a generation (or more) away from Iger’s 73 years.

What’s it all mean? That if you’re in the business of following a returning Logan Roy, you better make one helluva Tomlette. —Andrew Nusca

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Meet Tim Cook, Nike consigliere

Add another title to Tim Cook’s resume: CEO transition whisperer.

Cook, the Apple CEO, is also Nike’s most tenured independent board director. That’s translated into a busy side hustle recently, advising Nike cofounder Phil Knight and exec chair Mark Parker on the company’s CEO change following one of the toughest years in the apparel brand’s history. 

While recently departed Nike CEO John Donahoe has referred to the Apple boss as a mentor, Cook was actively involved in the decision to replace Donahoe and “helped secure” retired Nike lifer Elliott Hill as the new Nike chief, according to a new Bloomberg report. 

Cook has served on Nike’s board for 19 years, starting back when he was still Apple’s chief operating officer under Steve Jobs. But if the next year at Nike requires as much of his time as the past 12 months, it might not be the best sign for the company. —Jason Del Rey

TikTok owner dismisses intern over AI interference

Seems a ByteDance intern went rogue. 

The TikTok parent partly confirmed rumors that an undergraduate intern in its commercial tech team had “maliciously interfered” with AI training.

They were sacked, unsurprisingly, and ByteDance told the intern’s university about the incident.

However, the firm also said that some of the rumors circulating online—like claims about thousands of GPUs being destroyed and ByteDance losing tens of millions of dollars—were over-egged, according to a new Guardian report..

That doesn’t specify what did happen, though—nor what the miscreant’s motivations might have been. Perhaps someone sent from the future to try to stop the genesis of AGI? —David Meyer

Intuit CEO: LLMs aren’t ready for tax season (yet)

Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi is all in on incorporating artificial intelligence into his company’s software. But there are limits. 

While the technology may be useful for automating certain tasks, he told the Verge, it’s not quite ready for helping customers using Intuit’s best-known product, TurboTax, for preparing their tax returns.

“We can’t generally be right when it comes to accounting and taxes. We have to be 100 percent accurate,” the executive said. And a lot of TurboTax customers are scared of getting it wrong, he added: “If the IRS comes after them, they want to make sure somebody is there to protect them.”

Still, expanding data and AI capabilities were big reasons why Intuit acquired email marketing company MailChimp and personal finance company Credit Karma for a combined $19 billion over the last four years, Goodarzi said. But when he had just become CEO five years ago, Goodarzi recalls “the most heated debate” internally was about whether to invest in AI. That debate is now over. —Jenn Brice

Russia hacked Georgia for years

Russian spies have been watching activity by the Georgian government and major companies in the country for a matter of years—from the inside.

A new Bloomberg News report says Georgia has been the subject of “a comprehensive espionage and hacking campaign over years” that has given Russia the ability to “potentially sabotage critical infrastructure.” (This is what your IT departments have been warning you about, people.)

Confirmed victims include the nation’s foreign ministry, finance ministry, central bank, energy companies, telecom firms, media organizations, and more. The hacks reportedly happened between 2017 and 2020.

Why monitor and not outright meddle? To influence, according to officials quoted in the report. If the former Soviet state is acting in unwelcome ways—Georgian parliamentary elections are this weekend, by the way—Russian infiltrators can tilt the table, pinball-style. —Andrew Nusca

Google’s Nobel winner: A ‘golden era’ of AI breakthroughs

Winning the Nobel Prize for AlphaFold’s contributions to chemistry “feels like a watershed moment for AI," Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis told the Financial Times. The prize shows that AI is “mature enough” to play a real role in scientific discovery, he said—and he’s got a point. 

AlphaFold didn’t just crack the code; it predicted the structure of every known protein like the most complicated jigsaw puzzle in the universe. 

Hassabis hopes that in 10 years, we'll look back and see AlphaFold as the spark that launched “a golden era of scientific breakthroughs across countless fields.”

Not everyone’s cheering. Some critics argued that awarding the Nobel for AI-driven protein predictions to Google DeepMind, one of the world’s top AI labs, overlooks other groundbreaking research in biology. —Sharon Goldman

More data

—‘Blade Runner 2049’ company sues Elon Musk. Denied IP use but “did it anyway,” the firm alleges.

—Qualcomm debuts Snapdragon 8 Elite. Its new flagship mobile chip is all about—you guessed it—AI.

—Meta is using facial recognition to combat celeb scams. Those ads aren’t advertising what you think they are.

—Stripe will acquire stablecoin infra company Bridge. TFW your goal is to be the Stripe of blockchain.

—IBM launches third-gen Granite LLM. Coming to an (open source-loving) enterprise near you.

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