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Greetings! Is Mark Zuckerberg auditioning for the role of Elon Musk’s Mini-Me? We’re kidding, but it is uncanny how much Zuckerberg seems to be following Musk’s lead lately. In the latest example, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Meta Platforms is considering moving its legal incorporation to Texas, out of Delaware, just as Tesla did last year. This follows Zuckerberg’s recent decision to adopt a “community notes” feature for fact-checking within Meta’s apps, as in Musk’s X. Then there’s Zuckerberg’s pullback on DEI, his podcast chatter about “masculine energy,” and Meta’s support of Musk’s challenge to OpenAI’s for-profit conversion. The days when these two were talking about a cage match seem to be far in the rearview mirror. It may not be a coincidence that, unlike most tech CEOs, the two have unchallenged power at their companies. In keeping with that power, they’re both making giant, risky investments on AI-based products. That’s particularly true for Zuckerberg, who is turning on the money spout this year to make his Meta AI assistant the leader in the industry and make Meta’s Ray-Ban AI glasses an even bigger hit. Musk, for his part, is going all in on self-driving cars at Tesla, hoping to compete with Waymo in robotaxis. (For more that plan, see here). On conference calls discussing their respective fourth-quarter earnings reports this week, both Musk and Zuckerberg characterized this year as vital to determining the outcome of these bets. Investors so far are backing them to the hilt. If they fall short, expect some fireworks. Missed Opportunities?There’s a reason why very few companies allow reporters to join Wall Street analysts in asking questions on quarterly earnings calls. Unlike reporters, analysts rarely ask tough questions, preferring to zero in on arcane minutiae that help their financial models and ensure they don’t upset company executives. Take this week: None of the Wall Street analysts on Microsoft’s earnings call this week asked CEO Satya Nadella whether President Trump was correct in saying Microsoft was in talks to buy TikTok. Perhaps they thought the subject was too lowbrow? It certainly can’t be because the issue is not important. A purchase could cost tens of billions and eat up eons of management time. Maybe the analysts assumed Nadella wouldn’t want to answer the question, so they obliged him by not asking it. Whatever the reason, investors missed an opportunity to get an answer on an important subject. The Information’s Stories of the WeekStart your weekend reading with this colorful feature about the battle between preservationists and environmentalists on the one hand and developers building giant data centers for AI on the other. As Theo Wayt chronicled in the story, they’re waging battle in Virginia, a state that is “at the crossroads of modernity and history.” Elsewhere on the AI front, one of our biggest stories of the week was this scoopy deep dive into how Meta’s AI teams were freaking out about rival AI model DeepSeek’s advances. To figure out how DeepSeek did what it did, Meta’s teams started four war rooms to learn how the model works. Other angles on DeepSeek were here, here, here and here. We also dug into how other Chinese AI startups are doing (not so well). New details about the Stargate AI data center venture emerged this week. We scooped the news that SoftBank will put a total of $40 billion into both Stargate and OpenAI, Stargate’s driving force. Cory Weinberg went deeper on the risks facing SoftBank in making the investment. We also published this Glossary of AI Jargon, which is a must-read for anyone who isn’t fluent in AI tech speak. And we detailed how data centers are becoming their own power utilities to ensure they have enough electricity to operate. Meanwhile, on the deal front, we broke news that Snowflake is in talks to buy analytics startup Redpanda. And we published this True Value analysis making the case that Seagate Technology and Western Digital may be sleeper AI picks. Finally, this was big tech earnings week, with results coming from Meta, Microsoft, Tesla and others. We followed up on Meta’s results with this report on how it is working with ad agencies to ensure advertisers use its generative AI creative ad tools. And Steve LeVine gave his take on Tesla’s earnings. In Other News
- Zyphra, a Palo Alto, Calif., developer of open-source models that users can download to devices like phones or home entertainment devices, is in talks to raise $100 million in Series A funding at a $1 billion valuation, according to a person close to the company.
- Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees Thursday that the company sold more than a million of its Ray-Ban smart glasses in 2024, marking the first time it has disclosed sales figures for the product.
- Crypto exchange Kraken said its revenue last year more than doubled to $1.5 billion from $671 million in 2023.
- Apple filed an emergency motion Thursday evening seeking to pause the U.S. government’s antitrust case against Google as the iPhone maker appeals a district court judge’s decision to prevent it from intervening (more here).
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