Tech is moving at breakneck speeds—and we’re all in the bobsled

I started the event crammed into a bobsled with a startup founder, and a VC investor, barrelling down the 2002 Olympic bobsled track at 70 mph. We were advised to hit the restrooms before the descent, lest our innards succumb to the g-forces.

We made it down safely (and unsoiled), but the experience offered an apt metaphor for the state of the tech industry right now—a dizzying spectacle of speed, risk, and folly. The U.S. government’s effort to temporarily stop Microsoft’s $69 billion Activision acquisition from closing was rejected and then appealed in a matter of days, Meta’s Twitter-rival Threads racked up 100 million users in five days, and Mark Zuckerberg posted a topless photo of himself while Elon Musk tweeted something about measurements.

The testosterone-fueled antics of the two feuding billionaire tech bros did not go unnoticed at Brainstorm. “Can you imagine the reaction if two women executives behaved this way in public?” said a female startup founder I spoke to. 

The sad reality is that there aren’t enough women tech CEOs to draw good comparisons. But a decade ago there was Carol Bartz, the Yahoo CEO whose habit of dropping the occasional public f-bomb reportedly drew admonitions from her fellow boardmembers. Bartz, who was hired to turn around the faltering internet pioneer, was famously fired over the phone by Yahoo’s chairman in 2011 with more than a year left on her contract.

Marissa Mayer, another former Yahoo CEO, was at Brainstorm Tech this week to discuss the future of the tech business. Back when Mayer was the Yahoo CEO she also caused a public outcry—not because of a Musk-style public display of crassness, but because of the length of the maternity leave that she took (less than one month). 

I didn’t get a chance to ask Mayer her thoughts about the Musk-Zuck shenanigans, but I enjoyed listening to her panel on A.I. and learning more about her startup Sunshine, which has raised $22 million in funding since it was founded five years ago.

Mayer spoke a few hours after Adam Neumann, the ousted WeWork founder known for walking around barefoot and hosting company meetings with tequila shots. Neumann reflected on his past, noting that one of the key lessons he has learned is to surround himself with people who will tell him the hard truths.

Like Mayer, Neumann has a new startup. It’s called Flow, and according to Neumann, it might compete directly with WeWork when his noncompete expires in October. So far, investors have given him $350 million to make his dream of a second chance come true. 

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Alexei Oreskovic

NEWSWORTHY

FTC goes after OpenAI. The Federal Trade Commission is investigating OpenAI to see if the ChatGPT maker is violating consumer protection law through “unfair or deceptive privacy or data security practices,” or when the chatbot emits responses that cause reputational harm. The Washington Post broke the story, based on a letter the FTC sent to OpenAI. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: “It is very disappointing to see the FTC’s request start with a leak and does not help build trust.”

Twitter is sending out checks. Elon Musk's company, which is being sued for allegedly not paying some $500 million in severance owed to former employees, began sending out payments this week. But the recipients weren't the former employees but, rather, influencers and creators who Musk is rewarding for posting on the platform. Many of the recipients who claimed to have received payouts from Twitter live on the far-right side of the spectrum. Andrew Tate, who is being investigated in Romania for allegations of rape and human trafficking, said he received $20,000 from Twitter.

Threads engagement cools off. The debut of Meta’s Threads may have been unprecedentedly explosive, but the dust has already started to settle. According to a CNBC report, marketing intelligence firms think the Twitter lookalike's number of daily active users fell by 20-25% between Saturday last week and Tuesday and Wednesday this week, and one (Sensor Tower) said the time the average user was spending on the platform each day had halved to 10 minutes.

ON OUR FEED

"It’s sort of like having brakes on a car. It actually lets you go faster once you know that you’re in control.”

— Dr. Arati Prabhakar, President Joe Biden’s chief science and technology advisor and head of the White House Office of Science and Technology, spoke on the trade-off between regulation and innovation for A.I. at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference this week

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

Yuga Labs’ new CEO is betting on ‘audacious’ metaverse plans as Bored Ape prices collapse—but details of this virtual world are thin, by Jessica Mathews

Experts are calling the Ripple ruling a win for the industry and XRP. Here’s how lawyers—and Crypto Twitter—are reacting, by Leo Schwartz and Ben Weiss

Twitter seeks end to oversight from Lina Khan’s FTC and ‘investigation that has spiraled out of control’, by Michelle Chapman and the Associated Press

Founder Adam Neumann explains why Marc Andreessen invested $350 million in Flow, his new company that sounds a lot like WeWork, by Fortune Editors

Recording Academy CEO says musicians not to fear A.I. in music: ‘It can be a creative amplifier’, by Alexandra Sternlicht

BEFORE YOU GO

Actors join writers in resisting A.I. The U.S. screen actors’ strike that begins today is about many things, but—as with the screenwriters’ strike that’s been ongoing for over two months now—generative A.I. is a big one. The writers don’t want to effectively become rewriters of A.I.-written source material, nor do they want A.I. to be trained on their work. And the actors don’t want studios to get away with creating digital versions of them without compensating them well.

The studios offered the actors “protection” for their digital likenesses, “including a requirement for performer’s consent for the creation and use of digital replicas or for digital alterations of a performance.” One “well-established actress” told Deadline earlier this week that the proposal was “a power grab, pure and simple…We see what’s coming. They can’t pretend we won’t be used digitally or become the source of new, cheap, A.I.-created content for the studios.”

With Hollywood now firmly ground to a halt, the first major labor dispute around the use of generative A.I. couldn’t really have a higher profile. And it won’t be the last.