Biz editor @Axios. Pro Rata newsletter. Dan@axios.com. Native Masshole. DM for Signal/Telegram.
Boston-ish
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Tesla lost around $47 billion in market cap today. Or, put another way, it lost more than one full Twitter.
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Prediction: Trump and Elon will have a significant falling out before the 4-year term is over. There can only be one main character at a time.
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Today in DOGE: friend of a friend just got laid off. Been fed employee for over four years, and got promoted less than a year ago.
But that promotion is technically a “new” role, thus probationary.
In other words, fired because they performed well.
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Nothing to see here, just the owner of this site and a presidential candidate chatting it up with a man indicted for rape/human trafficking and another who lied about dead kids to harass their grieving parents.
This may really be the bottom.
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Crowdsrike is not a Ukranian company.
It's based in Silicon Valley. It's listed on the Nasdaq.
Its largest shareholder is a private equity firm from which Trump hired his top international econ advisor (who later became Ambassador to India).
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If Trump issues an EO to basically overturn the TikTok ban law, what’s to stop him from doing the same with most any other law?
Not a rhetorical question.
No matter how one feels about TikTok, there seem to be some major constitutional issues at play here.
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1/ This is silly (as is the hearing). We know where most of @elonmusk $$ came from for Twitter, in terms of banks and outside equity.
2/ The idea that any passive investor can influence how Musk operates his companies runs counter to most of Musk's history.
Plaskett to Jim Jordan: "Americans can see through this. Musk is helping you out politically, and you're going out of your way to promote and protect him and to praise him." She then adds, "there are many legitimate questions about where Musk got the financing to buy Twitter."
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NEW: Silicon Valley Bank paid out bonuses just hours before seizure axios.com/2023/03/11/silicon…
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Dominion plans to sue Sidney Powell, doesn't rule out Trump axios.com/dominion-defamatio…
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It's kinda weird that someone who's about to be CEO of three different companies is insisting employees be on premise for at least 40 hours per week.
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Be sure to check out @jonathanvswan interview of @realDonaldTrump tonight at 11pm. #AxiosOnHBO
piped.video/watch?v=nU50qnbp…
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It continues to be fascinating to watch Facebook basically argue: a sophisticated marketing campaign on our platform didn't influence user behavior.
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The U.S. is about to lose a ton of future scientists and founders. To satisfy a grudge.
NEW and BREAKING: Another major blow for Harvard -- the Trump administration has essentially revoked Harvard's ability to enroll foreign students by taking away their ability to get visas. w/@MichaelCBender nytimes.com/2025/05/22/us/po…
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There's an argument to be made that Musk already violated this part of the agreement, by his tweet today about @vijaya and the NY Post story.
Oh man this is amazing. No random public announcements (that's normal) except Elon Musk is allowed to tweet about the deal (lol) but not if he insults Twitter. I'll get back to the previous topic in a second, but this was too delightful to ignore. /9
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Two days ago, I asked Truth Social spokesperson about the company's financial viability.
She replied that I was "illiterate," without answering my question.
Today, the SPAC that agreed to buy Truth Social fired its chairman and CEO.
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This cannot be a comfortable day for David Sacks.
On the other hand, it's just the best day for Sam Altman.
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Were I at Microsoft, I'd be asking one question:
How on earth didn't we have an OpenAI board seat?
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Automattic paid peanuts for Tumblr. Source familiar puts it well south of $20 million.
Reminder: Yahoo paid $1.1 billion for it.
axios.com/verizon-tumblr-wor…
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Every time I see shock that Hunter Biden was put on a board of directors for which he wasn't qualified, I wonder if the person has ever looked at most boards of directors.
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They did this after Sandy Hook too. Then, when people stopped paying attention, they started again.
NYT: dicks sporting goods won’t sell assault-style rifles and will not sell any gun to anyone under 21. nytimes.com/2018/02/28/busin…
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Except that there are tons of U.S. govt investigations.
Some of SBF's investors are the same as the ones who co-invested on Elon's takeover in Twitter.
Another FTX exec gave around $20 million to Republicans.
In short, this is factually wrong and intellectually dishonest.
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1/ Fidelity, which helped @elonmusk finance his $44 billion Twitter takeover, wrote down the value of its investment by 56% after just one month.
axios.com/2022/12/30/twitter…
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Sequoia Capital has long been the gold standard of venture capital. Bar none.
But two of its largest ever checks, if not its largest, are in companies without boards of directors or CFOs.
FTX just bit the dust. And you're reading this on the other one.
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There is little more frustrating than having a kid who’s unable to get vaccinated be put at greater risk by adults who simply refuse to get vaccinated.
I get that covid is likely endemic now, and for our lifetimes, but so much callous dismissal of the social contract is stunning
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So many Elon fanboys argued that he was playing chess while Twitter was playing checkers.
Turns out that Elon might have been playing Candy Land.
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Disappointed that the Cheddar Bay Biscuits recipe wasn’t broken out as a separate asset in the Red Lobster bankruptcy filing.
It deserves its own valuation.
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America, in two acts:
"Take a vaccine that could save my life, or the lives of my loved one? Nah."
"Take a vaccine that could get me free fries from Shake Shack or a 0.0000001% chance at winning a million dollars? Sign me up!"
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Study: Immigrants and their kids founded 45% of U.S. Fortune 500 companies axios.com/immigrants-founder…
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Breaking: Senators scream at social media CEOs so that they can go viral on social media.
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Doxxing is always a bit of a strange concept for those of us who remember when giant catalogs of everyone’s phone numbers and home addresses were delivered annually to our front doors.
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This morning, 50 secretaries of state will wake up with the same prayer: "Please don't let the whole country know my name tomorrow."
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Cord-cutting is supposed to be so that you don't pay massive cable bills.
So, now, instead you will pay for Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Disney+, HBO Go, etc.
This didn't work out as expected.
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Yes, it is commendable that AT&T is giving its employees a $1,000 bonus. But it's $200 million, for a company that had $13 billion in profit last year. Or, put another way, it didn't need tax cut to do it. This is PR.
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There is some hypocrisy in criticizing FB for not catching everything on its platform by a group of U.S. Senators who admit to not reading giant spending bills before voting on them.
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Except there is no actual ID verification via the new blue. This itself is becoming parody.
Previously, we issued a warning before suspension, but now that we are rolling out widespread verification, there will be no warning.
This will be clearly identified as a condition for signing up to Twitter Blue.
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Yeah, I "disagree" with someone who tells parents of dead little kids that their kids aren't really dead.
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Please don't be IHOP Blockchain. Please don't be IHOP Blockchain Please don't be IHOP Blockchain. Please don't be IHOP Blockchain. Please don't be IHOP Blockchain.
For 60 pancakin’ years, we’ve been IHOP. Now, we’re flippin’ our name to IHOb. Find out what it could b on 6.11.18. #IHOb
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The only really good thing that's happened this week involves two guys leaving Earth altogether.
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I'm on the road today, working out of a hotel. Alone. So I have laptop out at hotel restaurant.
Small boy (1.5 yrs?) walks up to me. Taps my leg. Mother runs up apologetically: "He thinks you're his dad, because he's always working on a laptop."
Little part of me dies inside.
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Airlines should get the emergency loans. But not until the CEOs first are required to wait on hold for an hour. Disconnected by accident. Put on hold for another hour. Then connected to the wrong person. Then be told the loans have been misplaced but will be delivered by Tuesday.
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New Sanders tax plan would really screw over a lot of startup employees -- would tax options at vest, rather than at exercise.
Many employees would be unable to pay -- forcing them either to give up options or take out loans.
wsj.com/articles/bernie-sand…
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As I wrote yesterday, Apple/Google banning Parler from app stores is a much bigger deal than Twitter banning Trump.
But if AWS were to remove Parler from its service, that would be bigger deal than all of the rest put together.
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FTX investor tells me that the company has not yet sent them any information on the deal. Says all he knows is what he's seeing on Twitter.
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Good suggestion from a friend:
Try to buy gift certificates from your favorite local establishments, particularly mom/pop. Even via phone. Gives them much needed cash flow today, and you’ll get to use them eventually.
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I hope Congress asks Zuck historical questions in non-chronological order -- and one random one over and over and over -- just as a bit of payback.
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Scoop: Trump pins Ukraine call on Energy Secretary Rick Perry axios.com/trump-blamed-rick-…
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A man yesterday killed a schoolteacher & an 8 year-old. Not on front page of NYT or WSJ. No presidential statement. How far we've fallen.
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A real startup called Who Gives A Crap just raised $31 million in VC funding. Everything about this is perfect.
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That feeling of rage when you walk by a single family house on thanksgiving with 12 cars lined up outside it. And you know they have kids in the local school.
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If it isn’t legal to drive over 80 mph anywhere in the country, why are cars sold with the ability to do so?
Is there any other product that explicitly enables and displays an illegal use case?
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Musk says "Jonathan, I'm only here because you're a friend."
(his name is Andrew)
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This is a very important moment for VCs to prove their worth. That fabled “value-add.”
If a VC fund has access to capital (ie not tied up in Svb), it can offer now to front the 3/15 payroll, if it proves necessary.
Lowercarbon just did this, per letter to founders. Who’s next?
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When's the last time the CEO of a very successful company quit to join another company in a non-CEO role?
techcrunch.com/2025/05/07/in…
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Sequoia Capital is declining comment.
Twitter is one of the largest, if not the largest, investments in its history.
Like w/ FTX, there's no board of directors. Which Sequoia and others knew going in, or at least didn't require as condition of investing
Fallen so far so fast.
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Just checked into NYC hotel, and realize that my room windows look directly into an apartment I lived in 18 yrs ago.
So I'm kinda staring. Then a woman appears. Sees me. Pulls the blinds.
She and I have a very different understanding of what just happened.
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If you don’t want the COVID vax because it’s “experimental,” you’re gonna be in a real pickle if you get hospitalized and get told the FDA status of most of your treatment options.
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The U.S. has long supported a two-state solution, but it never occurred to me that the U.S. might be the second state.
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If HQ Trivia had just been able to hold out for another month... This could have been its moment.
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I first wrote about @moderna_tx more than 6 yrs ago, when it was just an ambitious local startup raising venture capital.
Today I got a Moderna vaccine that will let me spend time with friends, family and colleagues again.
Some VC-backed startups really do change the world.
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Reminder that lots of ex-Twitter employees say Elon has failed to provide promised severance. Would be remarkable if some of them ended up at Meta, and aren't subject to NDAs, etc. because Elon violated the employment agreements...
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This chart from Carta is pretty brutal. Over 40% of 2018-vintage VC funds have not made a single distribution.
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Fun fact: TikTok is still owned by a Chinese company, and it's still not banned in the U.S.
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Buffett: "When my first wife lost her credit card, I made no attempt to get it back because the guy was spending less than she was."
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Trump ordering removal of BLS commissioner because of weak jobs report.
1/ She was a senior Census Dept economist during Trump's first term.
2/ This sets a very dangerous precedent, since it basically gives marching orders to future BLS commissioners. No one should want this.
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Kudlow to CNBC: when I said the virus was contained a month ago, it was true. “No one could have imagined” the increases in cases.
Wrong and even more wrong.
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CNBC report that FTX will buy BlockFi for just $25 million.
The company raised $1.2 billion in equity capital -- this is a massive loss for venture land.
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Watch the full “Axios on HBO” interview with President Trump axios.com/full-axios-hbo-int…
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Per @sarafischer: Firing was NOT part of Dominion settlement.
"Instead related to material uncovered during pre-trial discovery and the company is concerned that more information exists that could be legally damaging..."
axios.com/2023/04/24/tucker-…
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Pinterest's initial market cap is $10 billion. Zoom's is $9.2 billion.
Pinterest raised over $1.4 billion from VCs. Zoom raised $160 million.
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Love what my kid's teacher "assigned" today via Google Classrooms:
Ask a family member to tell you their least favorite chore.
Do that chore.
Write what it was like to do the chore.
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Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital: we can look at every company we’ve ever funded, and learned that the time from first email/contact to term sheet has shrunk from 90 days in 2004 to just 9 today.
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Oatly's investors include Oprah, Jay-Z and Natalie Portman.
But instead it went with its singing CEO.
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The "Silicon Valley VCs moving to the Midwest" story is a bit like your friend saying after a vacation to a tropical island: "I might just quit my job and live there forever."
It's not happening.
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Job posting of the day:
Green Monster Scoreboard Operator - Boston Red Sox (BOSTON · MA)
teamworkonline.com/baseball-…
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What to know:
1/ Fed is backstopping all SVB depositors. Everyone gets access to everything tomorrow. Crisis averted.
2/ There does not yet appear to be a deal to sell any part of SVB.
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SEC: Theranos told prospective investor it had $108 million in 2014 revenue. Real number was closer to $100,000.
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As a response to Trump being banned, this is backward.
If you strip Sec 230, social media platforms will ban MORE people, because the platforms could be sued for what's posted on them.
Trump could sue for ban, but Twitter's defense wouldn't be 230. It would be owning Twitter.
I’m more determined than ever to strip Section 230 protections from Big Tech (Twitter) that let them be immune from lawsuits.
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Once again, trolly tolls... I'm not mad/sad/angry/etc. about this deal. I'm just covering it. Sorry to disappoint...
If you want to believe differently, I can't stop you from being wrong.
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