Circling the Whale Carcass
"Blitzhires" • More 'Slow Horses' • DeepSeek 6 Months Later • 'Superman's' Opening • 'F1's' Box Office Results • Throwing Money at AI • Yaccarino's Ride • Bronze iPhones
In the span of just a few days, one startup pulled off the trifecta: a failed acquisition, a "hackquihire", and now an actual acquisition.
Clearly, in the rush to get a deal done, Google and the leadership of Windsurf didn't quite think through how it might look to the outside world. After all, "hackquisitions" are hardly a new thing at this point. Certainly not for Google. But the twist here was key: because it was coming after an actual acquisition that had fallen apart, most employees who seemed set thanks to a $3B deal which undoubtedly would have triggered accelerated stock vesting, were now being left out in the cold reality of promised upside of sticking around their ship. One suddenly swapping captains. Who themselves were abandoning said ship with a few first mates and some very golden life preservers. Ouch.
Not a good look but also sort of a necessary one given the "hackquisition" model. Because these deals are structured to ensure that they don't look like actual deals, standard deal terms, such as accelerated vesting, can't apply lest they look like standard deals to regulators.
Luckily, Cognition saw the Windsurf boat taking on water and swooped in with buckets. Of cash. Actual cash – or, at least, Cognition shares, swapped and vested or granted upon arrival. $3B worth? No. $2.4B worth? Terms weren't stated, but it's safe to assume it's far below that. Still, it's better than nothing.
Which is a generous and nice read of the current situation, per the reporting of Mike Isaac of The New York Times. Is it rude to describe this deal as if it were a bunch of sharks circling a whale carcass? Yes. But I mean no offense to the people involved here, it's just the actual nautical image that keeps popping into my head...
💸 An OpenAI Acquisition Turns Into a Google 'Hackqusition'...
A rough few weeks may signal some real talent trouble for OpenAI – at the worst possible time
• Listening to "Superman" by Morgan Wallen 🎶
• Written on an M4 MacBook Air 💻
• Sent from Jersey, Channel Islands 🇯🇪Notebook
💸 "Blitzhire" Acqusitions
What I call "Hackquisitions & Hackquihires" per above, Villi Iltchev has his own branding for – and I appreciate his take that while obviously such deal structures are about trying to get around regulatory scrutiny, bigger than the fear of being blocked is the need for speed with such deals. Because AI is so competitive at the moment, if a company like Meta or Google would have to wait a year or longer to even just get feedback on a massive AI deal, that's way too long in this environment. Meta needs these butts in seats yesterday, but today or tomorrow will have to do. What won't work is 2026, which is what would happen if they tried to do a "standard" M&A deal the size of Scale. OpenAI can probably move faster because they're not a public company – which just adds to the list of reasons not to go public – and that's perhaps why they were seemingly doing a "standard" M&A deal with Windsurf. Of course, it fell apart and then Google swooped in with their blitzhire/hackquihire. Regardless, obviously the government is going to actually start looking at these deals with far more scrutiny at some point. Though it helps (such deals) that the government moves at a different speed... [Medium]
🐴 'Slow Horses' Renewed Through 2027
Technically, Apple has renewed it through season seven, but because they're able to produce this show like clockwork – one new season each year – which seems increasingly rare in our age of streaming (where new shows no longer have to premiere every Fall to match advertisers timelines), you can bet that after season 5 due out later this year, season 6 will be released in 2026, and season 7 in 2027. I think this regularity in release schedule really helps the show gain – and keep – audience. So many shows you have absolutely no idea when or if they're ever coming back. Not Slow Horses. Also, the longer commitment from Apple probably helps people feel more comfortable starting to watch now, knowing that it still has a lot of legs left, as it were. (Fine, yes, technically seasons 1 and 2 both came out in 2022 – about 8 months apart – because again, they're so fast to produce, relative to other shows, certainly of similar quality.) [9to5Mac]
🧠 DeepSeek, 150 Days Later
It feels like the R1 "moment" was years ago when really it was just six months ago. So was it "Sputnik"? Has the world forever changed? Well, sort of, but it's not clear how much it actually had to do with DeepSeek itself – which was my prediction from nearly day one. On the consumer side, there was a boom and then bust. Meanwhile, on the cost front, others stepped up to meet the moment. DeepSeek itself says they're not focused on either as it's all about the race for AGI, which basically sounds like what every AI lab says. It's an interesting framework to compare them to Anthropic here. [SemiAnalysis 🔒]
🦸🏻♂️ Superman's Opening Weekend
$125M seems solid (though slightly behind the tracking numbers) but to stick to my soapbox, in relative terms, it's less so. The headline number beats both of the last two Superman reboots, with Superman Returns at $52.5M in 2006 and Man of Steel at $116.6M in 2013. But, of course, when adjusted for inflation, those numbers are more like $80M and $145M, respectively. So this new entry is in between those two. Again, it's a solid number but for as much shit as the Zack Snyder entries get, Batman vs. Superman opened to $166M in 2016 – a wild $205M in 2025 dollars. Yes, the world has changed, especially post-pandemic (though IMAX counters some of this, boosting box office numbers more than ever), but I'm just not sure how helpful it actually is to the long-term of the industry to keep comparing apples to oranges. The global opening total was $220M, which is the key one to watch since the budget was a reported $225M plus $100M more to market (others put this number closer to $200M!). If you extrapolate this out, the movie will likely end up close to breaking even at the box office, but it will all depend on the second week drop as always. F1 dropped 54% in week two (decent, but off of a much smaller base) while Jurassic Park 7 just dropped 57% – not good (but neither were the reviews). [Variety]
🏁 F1's Checkered Flag
Per the above, with three weeks of box office data for F1, it's more clear than ever that despite all the hype – somewhat warranted as it's good, but less so because it's also just grading on a curve for Apple – the movie will not end up breaking even at the box office. It won't even be that close once theatrical and distribution money is removed... Current extrapolations would put it around $465M to $535M worldwide. Apple will only suggest the movie cost around $200M to make, but it was clearly more than that. And when you enter marketing into the equation, it's easily well past $300M. So the simple math just doesn't work out for Apple here. There are other reasons for Apple to be happy about the movie, but making money directly is not one of them. [Variety]
Spyglass
💰 We're Seemingly Still in the "Throw Money At It" AI Era...
...and that's great news for xAI, Meta, and maybe Apple!
Loose Leaf
While there were a lot of headlines about a potential merger of Android and ChromeOS last week, Sameer Samat clarified that this was just the previously announced move to build the latter on top of the former. Still unclear how that will ultimately work, but Chrome – and by extension, ChromeOS – seems awfully important to Google at the current AI moment... [9to5Google]
A lot of rake-stepping at Microsoft at the moment, as executives are internally touting $500M in AI savings while at the same time laying off thousands of their own employees... [Bloomberg 🔒]
But hey, maybe some of those laid off should talk to AI to get a form of cheap therapy to deal with it, another Microsoft leader wrote in a (now deleted) post on LinkedIn. Never stop thought leaderin'. [Aftermath]
In better news, Microsoft is pledging $4B towards AI education, which reads a lot like they're paying to get their AI into school to hook the kids early – combating Google and who else? OpenAI. [NYT]
Microsoft is also bankrolling AI training for teachers alongside OpenAI and Anthropic. [NYT]
Interesting that Amazon is hiring a head of international theatrical marketing, thus becoming a full-fledged studio in time for their first Bond release. Feels like Apple could also use one of these, so they don't have to continue to partner (and thus, lose out on even more of that F1 money), perhaps via an acquisition? [THR]
A 1,225-foot tower in San Francisco would dwarf anything else on the West Coast, including Salesforce Tower, at a mere 1,075-feet. It would roughly be the height of the Empire State Building (well, without its 200-foot antenna). Which AI company will it inevitably be named for? [SFChron]
Also in SF, the former flagship AMC movie theater in the heart of the city is about to re-open as... "Apple Cinemas Van Ness" – but it's not related to Apple, the company, nor their film ambitions. Apple Cinemas is a Cambridge, MA theater company. I'm sure this won't be an issue down the line... [SFist]
SpaceX investing $2B into xAI would obviously just continue the intermingling of the Elon Musk companies – something which just literally paid off for Xitter investors despite that being an otherwise bad deal. [WSJ 🔒]
Musk is saying that he doesn't support an eventual xAI and Tesla merger, which still feels like the ultimate end-game here, but he says a lot of things. Such as that xAI isn't fundraising, ahead of fundraising. [CNBC]
I Quote…
“She tried to ride the tiger but was thrown off.”
– An anonymous advertising executive "who knows Yaccarino and Musk", describing the situation at the end of Linda Yaccarino's short (but long for Xitter) run as CEO.
The "Velvet Hammer" as some apparently call Yaccarino, seemed in way over her head from day one, but was able to last longer in the role clearly thanks to Musk being focused on Washington and his Trump relationship (before that too blew up). Once he was back focusing on his actual companies, it was only a matter of time...
I Spy...
I, for one, would very much welcome a Copper iPhone. While leaker Sonny Dickson isn't sure how Apple would brand such a color – could it be 'Dark Gold' or even 'Orange'? – the new color option is seemingly backed up by notably leaker about such things, Majin Bu... Then again, recall that the 'Bronze' iPhone ended up being decidedly less bronze and more 'desert'. [via MacRumors]