Briefing
entertainment media/telecom

SPAC by Former Disney Execs Buy Digital Fitness Company

By
Jessica Toonkel
· · Source: The Information

For months, entertainment executives have been wondering what former Disney executives Tom Staggs and Kevin Mayer would decide to choose back for the first target of their SPAC, Forest Road Acquisition Corp. Would it be a movie studio? Would it be a digital media company? Turns out it was neither. Forest Road announced today that it is buying Beachbody Company, a streaming digital fitness...

Get access to exclusive coverage
Read deeply reported stories from the largest newsroom in tech.
Latest Articles
 
The Briefing markets startups
Larry Summers Has a Message for Silicon Valley
By Jessica E. Lessin · March 21, 2023 5:00 PM PDT
Larry Summers, former U.S. Treasury secretary, at a conference in 2019.
Larry Summers has a message to all of us here in Silicon Valley: It’s time to switch up that reading list. “Perhaps pay a little more attention to history relative to science fiction in terms of understanding all the things that the future may hold,” he said during a conversation with me and The Information subscribers Tuesday.
Latest Briefs
 
Nvidia CEO Says Generative AI is an ‘iPhone Moment'
By Kevin McLaughlin · March 21, 2023
OpenAI Temporarily Shuts Down ChatGPT After Privacy Bug Leaks Users’ Chat Histories
By Aaron Holmes · March 21, 2023
New Report to Australian Government Alleges ByteDance Poses Disinformation Threat
By Shai Oster · March 21, 2023
Stay in the know
Receive a summary of the day's top tech news—distilled into one email.
Access on the go
View stories on our mobile app and tune into our weekly podcast.
Join live video Q&A’s
Deep-dive into topics like startups and autonomous vehicles with our top reporters and other executives.
Enjoy a clutter-free experience
Read without any banner ads.
Sarah Nagy gives a demo of her startup, Seek.ai, at an AI event at the San Francisco Wine Society in January. Photography by Laura Morton
First Look startups ai
Boom Times in San Francisco’s AI Underground
By Arielle Pardes
Not even a banking crisis could chill the fever sweeping San Francisco. Last Wednesday, as the tech industry recoiled from the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, a party was scheduled at the offices of Maverick Ventures in an old army hospital in the Presidio.
Cover art and portraits by Clark Miller
The Big Read
The Instant Oral History of the Silicon Valley Bank Collapse
By Abram Brown, Annie Goldsmith, Margaux MacColl, Arielle Pardes, Nick Wingfield and Kaya Yurieff
On a cosmic level, the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank was a mere blip. The murmurs about trouble began last Wednesday, the panic spread via group texts and Twitter threads on Thursday, the bank went under on Friday, the government got its act together on Saturday, and on Sunday every current and former customer of SVB could breathe a cautious sigh of relief.
A pedestrian passes a Silicon Valley Bank branch in San Francisco, on Monday, March 13, 2023. Photo by AP.
Exclusive startups venture capital
SVB’s $9.5 Billion Venture Unit Included Large Investments in Andreessen, Sequoia, Documents Show
By Kate Clark
As potential buyers circle the remnants of Silicon Valley Bank and its affiliates, one asset could be particularly appealing: the company’s venture capital arm.
Art by Clark Miller.
Opinion startups economy
SVB Is Dead. Long Live SVB.
By Jason Pontin
We all know how it began. It started on March 9, when the run on Silicon Valley Bank made the innovation economy totter and threatened a global financial crisis.
Clockwise from top left: Julie Bornstein, Esther Crawford, Mark Hammond, Max Cutler, Kağan Sümer. Photos via Julie Bernstein, Robert Cowherd, Microsoft, Wikimedia and Kağan Sümer.
Free Agents startups
On the Market: The Founders Who Joined Microsoft, Spotify, Coinbase and Twitter
By The Information Staff
Call them acqui-fires. Several founders who took positions at the bigger tech companies that bought their startups recently lost their jobs when layoffs rolled through Silicon Valley.
A recent New York Knicks/Los Angeles Lakers game. Photo by Adam Pantozzi/NBAE via Getty Images.
Exclusive google amazon
NBA Wants Billions More in Sports Deals: Media and Tech Firms Are Resistant
By Sahil Patel
The NBA is one of the most popular sports leagues in the world. It also has high hopes for squeezing far more money out of media outlets in negotiations for future TV broadcast rights, in part because tech giants including Amazon and Google have told the league of their interest in streaming the games.