 | Jan 15, 2025 | | | | | | Good morning! TikTok is preparing to shut off its app for U.S. users on Sunday unless the Supreme Court intervenes to block the ban. Warner Bros. Discovery adds SoFi's CEO and IAC's CEO to its board of directors. Brazil says Meta Platforms' content policy changes may lead to violations of the country's laws.
| | | | TikTok is preparing to shut off its app for U.S. users on Sunday, the day a federal law will ban the app, unless the Supreme Court intervenes to block the ban, The Information reported. Under the plan, people attempting to open the TikTok app in the U.S. will instead see a pop-up message directing them to a website with information about the ban. TikTok plans to give users the option to download all their data so they can take a record of their personal information with them. Abruptly switching off the app, rather than allowing people who have already downloaded it to continue using it, will bring home the impact of the ban to all TikTok users. Under the law, TikTok will be banned on Jan. 19 in the U.S. unless it has cut its ties with its Chinese parent, ByteDance. The law requires app store operators like Apple and Google to stop making TikTok available for downloads. It also requires Oracle, TikTok's cloud provider, to stop hosting the app's U.S. user data. | | | | Warner Bros. Discovery has appointed SoFi CEO Anthony Noto and IAC CEO Joey Levin to its board of directors, bringing the company's total to 13 board members. WBD said Noto and Levin's appointments bring two decades of executive experience in media, commerce, technology and mergers and acquisitions. That last piece is notable as WBD and its chief executive, David Zaslav, have previously signaled their openness to do new deals, which could include everything from a merger with another company to spinning off or selling WBD's declining cable TV assets. Before SoFi, Noto spent four years at Twitter (now X), first as its CFO and then later its COO. Prior to that, he was an executive at Goldman Sachs and the NFL. Levin, meanwhile, has been CEO of Barry Diller's internet and media company IAC since 2015. Earlier this week, IAC announced Levin will leave his role as CEO of IAC after the company completes its spinoff of Angi, its home services technology company. He will remain as an advisor for IAC while also serving as executive chairman of the standalone Angi. | | | | Brazil's government said on Tuesday that Meta Platforms' content policy changes last week don't protect fundamental rights in the country and may lead to violations of laws forbidding some forms of hate speech, such as racial slurs, Reuters reported. Last week, Meta said it would end fact-checking in the U.S., reduce actions taken on content that might violate its policies and recommend more political content on its social media apps. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva earlier called Meta's changes to fact-checking "extremely serious," Reuters reported. Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In August, Brazil temporarily blocked X after the company failed to comply with court orders, including some related to the moderation of hate speech. | | | | American chip pioneer Intel is spinning off its corporate venture capital fund, Intel Capital, into a standalone investment fund, the company said Tuesday. Intel will remain as an investor in the new firm, which has been operating within the business for 30 years. The separation is still in progress, but Intel Capital is expected to change its name and operate independently by the end of the year, according to a press release. The firm has $5 billion in assets under management, exclusively from Intel until now. It will now seek external investors. Intel Capital has made over 1,800 investments, including in data labeling company Scale AI, AI chip startup Sambanova, software startup Datarobot and humanoid robotics company Figure AI. The firm will continue investing in early-stage startups across cloud, devices, frontier technology and Silicon, according to a spokesperson. Intel said the spin-off fits into its strategy to bring "greater focus and efficiency across the business," according to a statement by David Zinsner, interim co-chief executive officer and chief financial officer. Intel joins OpenAI, Google and SAP and other firms in having corporate venture arms that are separate from the company's main operations. | | | | The Biden administration signed an executive order to accelerate the development of at least six massive artificial intelligence data centers on federal land—an effort to ensure American companies remain global leaders in AI. The order, which comes one day after Biden published new controls on AI chips, shows that the government wants to prevent the potential offshoring of these sites, which could be critical to the country's competitiveness and security. The availability of power has been a major constraint on new developments in the U.S. The Biden administration called on the Department of Defence and the Department of Energy to lease federal sites, where companies in the private sector will be able to build data centers for AI. These sites could consume up to 5 gigawatts of power each, according to Navtej Dhillon, who works at The White House as deputy director of the National Economic Council. That's five times bigger than the largest sites cloud providers are developing today, according to The Information's AI Data Center Database. It is unclear when or if the data centers on federal land will ever scale to 5 gigawatts, Dhillon said. Developers at these sites—who will be selected by a competitive bidding process—must adhere to several conditions, such as ensuring their sites are powered by a certain amount of clean energy and that they buy an "appropriate share of domestically manufactured" chips. | | | | The European Union is reassessing its probes into Apple, Meta, Google and other big tech companies, the Financial Times reported, a move that comes as U.S. tech executives press President-elect Donald Trump to intervene in European regulatory efforts. All decisions and potential fines are on pause until the review is complete, the FT reported, though technical work on the cases will continue. The review includes all cases starting from March last year under the EU's digital markets regulations, according to the report. A spokesperson for the European Commission denied a review was taking place, telling the FT the ongoing cases were not ready yet "at a technical level." Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Joe Rogan's podcast last week that Trump should stop the EU from fining American tech companies, and noted that the EU has fined US tech companies more than $30 billion dollars over more than a decade, by his own calculation. The commission started a new term last year, and Thierry Breton and Margrethe Vestager, two regulators tough on tech firms, have left their posts. | | | | The Securities and Exchange Commission sued Elon Musk in federal court in Washington, D.C., for not properly disclosing a major purchase of Twitter shares ahead of his takeover of the social media company, Bloomberg reported. By not disclosing his position in the required time, the SEC said, Musk was able to buy Twitter stock more cheaply than otherwise, allowing him "to underpay by at least $150 million" for the additional shares before he belatedly disclosed his stake. In a statement, Alex Spiro, a lawyer for Musk, said Musk "has done nothing wrong." Spiro called the suit part of "the SEC's multi-year campaign of harassment against" Musk based on "an alleged administrative failure to file a single form—an offense that, even if proven, carries a nominal penalty." | | | | JPMorgan has elevated the co-head of its commercial and investment bank, Jennifer Piepszak, to chief operating officer, replacing Daniel Pinto who is retiring from the role at the end of June. Pinto, the right-hand man of CEO Jamie Dimon, is planning to retire at the end of 2026, the bank said in a statement. Doug Petno, the current co-head of JPMorgan's global bank operations, will succeed Piepszak as co-chef executive of the commercial and investment bank. Who will eventually succeed Dimon, who has been CEO of JPMorgan since 2006, has been a long-running question on Wall Street. All corporate functions will now be jointly managed by Dimon and Piepszak, according to JPMorgan's statement. However, Piepszak has no interest in taking the CEO job at this time, Bloomberg reported. | | | Popular articles
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