Good morning. Did you catch the Soham Parekh drama late last week?
It all started when Playground AI entrepreneur Suhail Doshi warned on social media that a software engineer named Soham was hustling for simultaneous tech startup gigs—not a moonlighting situation, mind you, but three, four, or more parallel jobs.
You can imagine what happened next. Several more entrepreneurs weighed in to say they, too, had interviewed, if not hired, Parekh before dismissing him. The man in question materialized to defend himself. An earnest public debate began about “hustle culture” and the fairness of working more than one gig when there are entrepreneurs who serve as CEOs for multiple companies.
And then there was the steady stream of tech industry jokes from some of Silicon Valley’s finest.
“The world’s first fully autonomous ai agent,” wrote Box CEO Aaron Levie. “What do you think Soham Parekh’s LinkedIn header is?” asked Greylock investor (and LinkedIn cofounder) Reid Hoffman. But the writer’s room prize goes to Beehiiv’s Tyler Denk, who pled: “Chill, that’s our CTO.”
Today’s tech news below. —Andrew Nusca
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What does an activist investor want with HPE?
It’s been radio silence since it was reported in April that the activist investor group Elliott Management had taken a $1.5 billion stake in Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
The investment is an acute one for HPE and its CEO, Antonio Neri. Fourteen chief executives have been forced out of their jobs after Elliott took a stake in their companies and demanded talks with their boards, according to Reuters.
Is Neri’s neck on the chopping block? Fortune asked both companies for comment, but neither wanted to talk on the record.
However, other sources pointed to several clues, hiding in plain sight, about what Elliott potentially wants from HPE.
The first: Improve its execution. A Q1 mistake in accounting for the cost of its inventory tanked its stock by nearly 16% in a day and wiped more than $3 billion off HPE’s market cap.
The second: Boost its efficiency relative to peers. HPE generates just $494,000 per employee in revenue; that compares to Cisco’s $595,000 and Dell’s $885,000.
One option is ousting Neri or HPE’s longer-serving board members. Neri has been CEO for seven years; six of HPE’s 12 board members have been there for 10 years or more.
But Elliott prefers to avoid proxy battles. HPE could instead give Elliott a seat on the board and to agree on a strategy to turn the company around.
It needs it. Since 2018, HPE stock has risen 48% to just above $21 per share. The S&P 500, meanwhile, rose 135%. That’s a dismal performance for a tech company that ought to be benefiting mightily from the mania around AI. —Jim Edwards
Ford CEO: AI will wipe out half of white-collar jobs
Ford CEO Jim Farley recently became the latest corporate boss to sound the alarm about artificial intelligence’s impact on workers.
During the Aspen Ideas Festival last week, he highlighted the importance of the “essential economy”—which he defined as everything that gets moved, built or fixed—while saying blue-collar skilled trades have been neglected.
The U.S. spends too little on vocational training, which is also geared more toward 1950 than 2050, contributing to a decline in blue-collar productivity, Farley explained, though the carmaker has been investing in training.
Meanwhile, demand for skilled trades is expected to surge, and even the AI boom will require workers to build and service the facilities that provide all the computing capacity that’s needed.
There’s already a massive shortage of trade workers, he added, estimating a deficit of 600,000 in factories and nearly half a million in construction, for example.
“There’s more than one way to the American dream, but our whole education system is focused on four-year [college] education,” Farley said. “Hiring an entry worker at a tech company has fallen 50% since 2019. Is that really where we want all of our kids to go?”
It’s time for a new mindset in the U.S., he said. Because “artificial intelligence is gonna replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the U.S.” —Jason Ma
A U.S.-only TikTok app is apparently in the works
TikTok is reportedly building a new version of its app for users in the United States.
The app will launch on September 5, according to a report by The Information, and force existing TikTok users to download a new app.
The existing app will reportedly work in the U.S. until March of next year.
The news comes as talks between the U.S. government and TikTok’s Beijing-based parent ByteDance grind on, months after a January 19 divest-or-be-banned deadline passed.
Trump, whose administration is tasked with enforcing the ban, has thrice extended that deadline as he works toward a fresh arrangement.
ByteDance has maintained that it won’t sell its U.S. operation.
Trump said Friday that he’d start talking with the Chinese government this week about its approval for a possible deal that would give TikTok’s U.S. arm a new parent company.
According to the latest reports, ByteDance would retain a 20% stake in the new company, which would be majority-owned by a consortium of U.S. investors that include existing investors General Atlantic, Susquehanna, KKR, Coatue as well as new ones from one of several groups vying for a stake. —AN
More tech
—Elon Musk launches political party in U.S. His “America Party” has already caused a stir in the White House.
—India’s AI model push. Tremendous willpower to move the needle on LLMs, if only there weren’t 22 languages to contend with.
—Do you care if your favorite music is AI-generated? On the success of “Velvet Sundown” and the new muzak.
—Autodesk CEO on Trump: Reshoring push is ultimately good for business, uncertainty is not.
—Ingram Micro outage. The IT giant was hit by a SafePay ransomware attack that knocked out internal systems.
—Microsoft’s AI future. The company’s AI business brings in $11.5 billion, but that’s still just 4% of total annual revenue.
—Clorox marketing experiments with generative AI. More ideas, helpful insights, but also…“bleachless bleach.”
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