The Briefing by Martin Peers, Jessica Lessin and the team at The Information

Five times/week

The Briefing

By Martin Peers, Jessica Lessin and the team at The Information

Get smarter about the day’s news in tech, media and finance by following Silicon Valley’s most-read executive newsletter.

By providing your email, you agree to The Information’s Privacy Policy

Recent Editions

Photo by Mario Tama via Getty.

Netflix Earnings Next Week Should Be OK But Not Great

By Martin Peers · Oct 13, 2023 3:00pm PDT

Earnings season is back. Banks, always the early birds, began reporting Friday and next week Netflix kicks off tech earnings season with its third quarter report on Wednesday. Big tech—Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta Platforms and the rest—don’t start reporting until the week after. But Netflix’s report will give us plenty to chew over. It will give... Earnings season is back. Banks, always the early birds, began reporting Friday and next week...

Photo via Shutterstock

Atlassian-Loom Discount Deal Suggests M&A Market is Reviving

By Martin Peers · Oct 12, 2023 5:00pm PDT · 2 comments

The brief revival of the IPO market may be petering out, thanks to a spate of disappointing offerings lately. But the M&A market, at least for enterprise software firms, seems to be coming to life—even if the valuations are a little painful for sellers. On Thursday, for instance, Atlassian said it would swallow up video messaging firm Loom... The brief revival of the IPO market may be petering out, thanks to a spate of disappointing...

Photo by AFP via Getty.

Birkenstock Stubs Its Toe in IPO

By Nick Wingfield · Oct 11, 2023 5:00pm PDT

Did you know the human foot uses 26 bones, 33 muscles and more than 100 tendons and ligaments when a person is walking? Neither did I, until I read the quirky IPO prospectus for Birkenstock, the German maker of sublimely ugly, supremely comfortable sandals that went public on Wednesday. It was a lackluster debut: Birkenstock shares closed at... Did you know the human foot uses 26 bones, 33 muscles and more than 100 tendons and ligaments...

Caroline Ellison arrives at court in New York today. Photo by Bloomberg via Getty.

SBF Didn’t Understand Risk-Reward

By Martin Peers · Oct 10, 2023 5:01pm PDT · 1 comment

Caroline Ellison arrives at court in New York today. Photo by Bloomberg via Getty.

SBF Didn’t Understand Risk-Reward

By Martin Peers · Oct 10, 2023 5:01pm PDT · 1 comment

Just when it seemed there was nothing new we could learn from the SBF saga, the FTX founder's onetime deputy (and onetime romantic partner) Caroline Ellison testified in court on Tuesday. And her account of Sam Bankman-Fried’s attitudes toward risk, which helped set the stage for FTX’s bankruptcy, was truly mind-blowing. Whatever the outcome of... Just when it seemed there was nothing new we could learn from the SBF saga, the FTX founder's...

Nelson Peltz. Photo by Bloomberg via Getty.

Why Peltz Isn’t the Solution for Disney’s Problems

By Martin Peers · Oct 9, 2023 5:00pm PDT

Here’s a shoutout to those tech folks—among many, many others—who are putting their lives on the line as members of Israel’s defense forces right now, responding to the Hamas attack over the weekend. It puts everything else into perspective. For more details on Israeli tech folks’ involvement, see our story here. Meanwhile, Nelson Peltz has... Here’s a shoutout to those tech folks—among many, many others—who are putting their lives on the...

Photo via Getty

ByteDance Stock Is Very Cheap—for Good Reason

By Martin Peers · Oct 6, 2023 4:00pm PDT

You might have missed it, with all the drama this week about Sam Bankman-Fried’s trial (for our deep dive, see here) and the latest updates from the world of AI, but we got a detailed update on ByteDance’s robust financial performance. And what that told us is that shareholders in the parent company of TikTok have reason to be very frustrated.... You might have missed it, with all the drama this week about Sam Bankman-Fried’s trial (for our...

Photo by Brandon Slater via Getty.

Startup Employees Can Exhale, But Not Relax Too Much

By Cory Weinberg · Oct 5, 2023 5:00pm PDT

Maybe, just maybe, startup employees who held onto their jobs amid spurts of mass layoffs over the last year and a half can exhale. They have survived. The number of monthly job cuts at tech companies—just over 4,600—hit an 18-month low in September, according to Layoffs.fyi, the venerable tracker of employee career pain. The recent sprinkling... Maybe, just maybe, startup employees who held onto their jobs amid spurts of mass layoffs over...

Elon Musk. Photo via Shutterstock.

Musk’s Counterproductive Moves

By Martin Peers · Oct 4, 2023 5:01pm PDT · 2 comments

Elon Musk. Photo via Shutterstock.

Musk’s Counterproductive Moves

By Martin Peers · Oct 4, 2023 5:01pm PDT · 2 comments

What a time to be a tech business reporter! Even as Sam Bankman-Fried’s fraud trial gets underway, our scoop yesterday about AI startup Anthropic’s rising valuation suggests that the disgraced FTX founder may have scored at least one home run with his Anthropic investment. Yes, that’s right: The fast-evolving story about AI startups has... What a time to be a tech business reporter! Even as Sam Bankman-Fried’s fraud trial gets...

Photo via Shutterstock

Streaming Services Should Beware Becoming Like Cable Companies

By Nick Wingfield · Oct 3, 2023 5:00pm PDT · 1 comment

About a month ago, I finally reached my breaking point with YouTube TV, the streaming service I had subscribed to years earlier as a replacement for cable TV. I didn’t think twice about paying $40 a month for it in 2018, but after years of price increases—YouTube TV now costs $73 a month—I realized my family wasn’t watching it nearly enough to... About a month ago, I finally reached my breaking point with YouTube TV, the streaming service I...

Photo via Nasdaq

DoorDash Should Buy Instacart Now

By Martin Peers · Oct 2, 2023 5:01pm PDT · 2 comments

Instacart’s stock price performance so far brings to mind a variation on the old line about love: Is it better to have gone public and lost, or never to have gone public at all? The shares fell 9% on Monday to $26.96, 10% below its IPO price, following our scoop that the Wall Street analysts at the banks underwriting the offering are projecting... Instacart’s stock price performance so far brings to mind a variation on the old line about love:...

Photo via Getty.

Apple’s Hiccup, Blue Apron Gets Picked Up

By Martin Peers · Sep 29, 2023 3:00pm PDT

It’s hard to feel sympathy for Apple, given how much money it makes ($9.2 million in net income every hour in the most recent quarter). But the flood of complaints on social media about overheating in the latest line of iPhones makes you feel a bit for the tech giant and its executives. Here’s a company that wanted to make its high-end phones... It’s hard to feel sympathy for Apple, given how much money it makes ($9.2 million in net income...

Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X. Photo via Getty.

Linda Yaccarino May Have the Toughest CEO Job

By Martin Peers · Sep 28, 2023 5:00pm PDT · 1 comment

Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X. Photo via Getty.

Linda Yaccarino May Have the Toughest CEO Job

By Martin Peers · Sep 28, 2023 5:00pm PDT · 1 comment

Here’s a question: How long can someone stay as CEO of a company when the owner of that company is publicly repudiating what they’re saying? Take Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X, previously known as Twitter. On Wednesday, Elon Musk confirmed a report in The Information about layoffs at X’s election integrity team—Musk even went further than what we... Here’s a question: How long can someone stay as CEO of a company when the owner of that company...

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. Photo by Bloomberg via Getty.

Why the AI Race Is Getting Weird

By Jessica E. Lessin · Sep 27, 2023 5:00pm PDT · 1 comment

There comes a point in every major new technology cycle where new alliances form, especially between the incumbents and the younger upstarts nipping at their heels.This is happening at superspeed in artificial intelligence—but the pattern is frankly pretty weird, and I think it points to the fact that AI, in a lot of ways, is going to be... There comes a point in every major new technology cycle where new alliances form, especially...

FTC Chair Lina Khan. Photo by Chip Somodevilla via Getty.

The Flaws in FTC’s Amazon Case

By Martin Peers · Sep 26, 2023 5:00pm PDT

Talk about anticlimactic. We’ve been expecting today’s Federal Trade Commission antitrust lawsuit against Amazon since the day commission chair Lina Khan was sworn into office in June 2021. After all, she rose to antitrust fame with her 2017 Yale Law Journal paper arguing that modern competition policy wasn’t equipped to deal with the threat... Talk about anticlimactic. We’ve been expecting today’s Federal Trade Commission antitrust lawsuit...

Photo by Getty

Amazon’s Anthropic Deal Signals Cloud Sector Turbulence

By Martin Peers · Sep 25, 2023 5:00pm PDT

You know the cloud industry is in upheaval when industry leader Amazon Web Services has to copy a tactic used by its smaller rivals to compete more effectively. The Amazon unit’s decision on Monday to invest up to $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic, as part of a broader deal in which AWS becomes the startup’s “primary cloud provider,” looks a... You know the cloud industry is in upheaval when industry leader Amazon Web Services has to copy a...

Photo via Shutterstock

SpaceX, Klaviyo, LLMs: Highlight Stories From This Week

By Akash Pasricha · Sep 22, 2023 4:01pm PDT

Photo via Shutterstock

SpaceX, Klaviyo, LLMs: Highlight Stories From This Week

By Akash Pasricha · Sep 22, 2023 4:01pm PDT

This week we were treated to not one but two big tech IPOs! Plus, two tech juggernauts—Amazon and Microsoft—held big, flashy product launch events. Through it all, The Information’s newsroom pumped out a string of scoops, analyses and meaty newsletters. This week we were treated to not one but two big tech IPOs! Plus, two tech juggernauts—Amazon and...

Photo by Bloomberg via Getty.

Google’s Standoff with AI Chip 'Shark' Broadcom

By Amir Efrati · Sep 21, 2023 5:01pm PDT · 1 comment

Jim Cramer, CNBC’s “Mad Money” host, took a swipe at our report today that Google has set an internal goal to break from Broadcom, its supplier of artificial intelligence chips. Cramer called the story “patently false” on X. Cramer, who has been particularly bullish on Broadcom lately, is often criticized for dispensing bad advice—for example,... Jim Cramer, CNBC’s “Mad Money” host, took a swipe at our report today that Google has set an...

Andrew Bialecki, CEO and co-founder of Klaviyo. Photo by the Boston Globe via Getty.

A Boring—but Important—IPO

By Cory Weinberg · Sep 20, 2023 5:00pm PDT

We tend to lionize founders who start companies with the splashiest, most far-reaching consumer products. So Andrew Bialecki of $10 billion marketing tech startup Klaviyo—a name few people even know how to pronounce (it’s “clay-vee-oh”)—isn’t exactly a favorite to headline the next Code Conference.But Bialecki—a Boston-based, 37-year-old... We tend to lionize founders who start companies with the splashiest, most far-reaching consumer...

Instacart CEO Fidji Simo. Photo by Bloomberg via Getty.

The Instacart IPO’s Fine Print

By Cory Weinberg · Sep 19, 2023 5:00pm PDT

It’s been nearly two years since the last major IPO of a venture-backed company, so in case you forgot what one looked like, Instacart’s big day had many familiar beats. The ringing of the bell. The debate about stock pops. Early investors taking victory laps on TV.The celebration of the long-awaited listing obscured one fact. At the end of the... It’s been nearly two years since the last major IPO of a venture-backed company, so in case you...

Panos Panov. Photo by Getty.

A Microsoft Devices Guru Defects to Amazon

By Nick Wingfield · Sep 18, 2023 5:03pm PDT

Panos Panov. Photo by Getty.

A Microsoft Devices Guru Defects to Amazon

By Nick Wingfield · Sep 18, 2023 5:03pm PDT

This is the time of year when the leaves begin to turn color, Earth, Wind and Fire blares from car stereos, and two tech companies that aspire to be players in consumer hardware—Amazon and Microsoft—show off the gadgets they want you to buy this holiday season. This year, Amazon goes first with an event on Wednesday, followed by Microsoft on... This is the time of year when the leaves begin to turn color, Earth, Wind and Fire blares from...