In early June, Netflix content chief Ted Sarandos met with several dozen of his middle-ranking and senior film and TV executives and delivered a blunt message: Be more careful with money.

Mr. Sarandos told the group that spending on film and TV projects, particularly big budget movies, needed to be more cost-effective, according to people familiar with the meeting. Netflix has long ...

Xiaohongshu, a Chinese startup that’s a mashup of Instagram and Pinterest, is in talks to raise as much as $500 million at a valuation that could reach $6 billion, said four people familiar with the matter. The talks defy a slowdown in technology funding deals in China. 

A social media and online retailing startup that lets users post reviews and recommendations, and make purchases, ...

Facebook has publicly tried to distance itself from the Libra digital currency it is creating, signing up more than two dozen companies to help run an organization to manage the currency called the Libra Association. But behind the scenes, Facebook has exerted early influence over the makeup of the association by hiring the handful of executives who already work there, The Information has ...

In the fall of 2014, a little-known Chinese entrepreneur named Zhang Yiming toured Silicon Valley, visiting the offices of Facebook, Tesla and Airbnb. One thing that struck Mr. Zhang, whose startup in Beijing was beginning to gain traction, was China’s growing influence. He met some Facebook and Twitter employees who loved Xiaomi phones, for example. He noticed how Alibaba’s U.S. ...

In a sign of how Hulu’s programming decisions have shifted since Disney took control of the streaming service, Hulu executives have begun telling outside studios that Disney will likely have partial ownership in most shows Hulu buys, according to multiple studio executives and Hollywood agents.

In recent weeks, Hulu executives have told outside studios that in the future most of ...

At the CES trade show in Las Vegas in January, Lime showed off a new model of its electric scooter with thicker tires, color display screens between the handlebars and stronger aluminum to help the vehicles last longer. But months later, the custom-designed scooter, called Gen 3, is having problems of its own. The screens frequently crack or malfunction, and repairing brakes and other parts ...

Critics who believe Amazon has gotten too big and powerful often quote estimates that the company accounts for nearly 50% of online sales in the U.S. But one widely cited source for that figure—the research firm eMarketer—recently revised Amazon’s market share estimate sharply downward after the ecommerce giant disclosed new data.

A spokesperson for eMarketer told The ...

When Thomas Kurian, a high-profile former Oracle executive, left the software company last September, his peers at the database software company expected Oracle to replace him.

But Larry Ellison, Oracle’s co-founder and chief technology officer, had other plans. Mr. Kurian had been leading Oracle’s response to a growing threat from Amazon, which offers online alternatives to ...

In the latest sign of how streaming services are shaking up traditional TV, Disney’s majority-owned Hulu and fully owned cable channel FX have jointly bought the rights to show Lionsgate’s recently released movies starting next year, according to people familiar with the situation.

FX and Hulu are buying rights now held by MGM’s TV channel Epix. Lionsgate’s slate in 2020 ...

The hiring boom in artificial intelligence research is finally slowing down.

The frenzied competition for talent that drove the cost of hiring data scientists and AI researchers into the stratosphere appears to have sharply cooled. At both Alphabet and Microsoft, two of the biggest recruiters of AI talent, the growth rate of hiring for “pure” AI research positions is declining, ...

Uber’s sluggish public market debut has meant losses for some investors. But CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is sitting on healthy paper gains, thanks to changes that were made to his stock options before the company went public.

The exercise price of Mr. Khosrowshahi’s options was lowered to $33.65 per share by the company early last year, eight months after they were issued at $41.65. Such ...

As Cruise set out in 2017 to verify the safety of its self-driving vehicles, it came up with a set of milestones to measure progress in its software development. These milestones, which measure the frequency and severity of safety incidents, offer a rare view of how autonomous vehicle developers judge the quality of their software, and the progress they’re making toward commercializing ...

Uber is among the robotaxi developers that have been trying to improve the way they measure software quality, to help prepare for the launch of commercial services. The company recently discussed tracking precisely where cars with its software appear to drive better than human drivers and where they won’t. Uber would then assign “confidence scores” for different areas of a ...

In the middle of April, Honda Motor CEO Takahiro Hachigo hopped into a self-driving car prototype made by General Motors’ Cruise Automation for a demonstration ride. It didn’t go well. About 20 minutes in, the car’s software suddenly turned itself off even as the car kept moving. A man sitting behind the wheel—the backup driver—had to take control. Attempts to ...