Newslit Daily

Today’s pick

SpaceX paid $250,000 to a flight attendant who accused Elon Musk of sexual misconduct. A flight attendant for SpaceX said Elon Musk asked her to 'do more' during a massage, documents show. The billionaire founder exposed his penis to her and offered to buy her a horse, according to claims in a declaration. After she reported the… (Rich McHugh / Business Insider)

At Wells Fargo, a Quest to Increase Diversity Leads to Fake Job Interviews. Joe Bruno, a former executive in the wealth management division of Wells Fargo, had long been troubled by the way his unit handled certain job interviews. For many open positions, employees would interview a “diverse” candidate… (Emily Flitter / The New York Times)

YC advises founders to 'plan for the worst'. Y Combinator, a Silicon Valley kingmaker, is advising its portfolio founders to “plan for the worst” as many startups across the globe scramble to navigate the sharp reversal after a 13-year… (Manish Singh / TechCrunch)

Asia's advanced economies now have lower birth rates than Japan. The list of things for which Japan enjoys a global reputation includes delicious food, cutting-edge technology, an oversupply of karaoke bars and an undersupply of babies. In 1990 it published a record-low fertility rate for the previous… ( The Economist)

GOP-Led Legislation Would Force Breakup of Google's Ad Business. A bipartisan group of senators led by Utah Republican Mike Lee introduced legislation Thursday that would take aim at conflicts of interest in the advertising technology industry and force Google to break up its dominant online-ad business. The… (Keach Hagey / Wall Street Journal)

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Today’s pick

Crypto Exchange FTX Expands Into Stock Trading. Crypto exchange FTX will let customers trade stocks and exchange-traded funds on its popular trading app alongside bitcoin and dogecoin. FTX on Thursday will open access to its new stock-trading service for a limited number of U.S. users, the head… (Alexander Osipovich / Wall Street Journal)

Mark Cuban supports Biden proposal to forgive $10,000 in student debt. Entrepreneur Mark Cuban told Insider that he's in favor of Biden's proposal to cancel $10,000 in student debt per borrower. That's a reversal from his previous position, saying cancellation bails out higher-ed institutions. He said that making sure… (Jason Lalljee via Business Insider)

Why Tesla was kicked out of the S&P 500's ESG index. In a blog post Wednesday, the S&P explained why it kicked Tesla out of its ESG index earlier this month. It said that Tesla's 'lack of a low-carbon strategy' and 'codes of business conduct,' along with racism and poor working conditions reported at… (Lora Kolodny / CNBC)

Meta freezes hiring for shopping team, Messenger Kids, and other products. Meta is pulling back its investments in a number of products, including the teams it spun up early in the pandemic to compete with Zoom and build shopping features, The Verge has learned. In addition to a hiring freeze for certain engineering… (Alex Heath / The Verge)

Plaid officially expands into identity and income verification, fraud prevention and account funding. Fintech decacorn Plaid is expanding beyond its core product of account linking — its first major expansion since its 2013 inception. In conjunction with its “Plaid Forum” event, the startup today unveiled a number of… (Mary Ann Azevedo / TechCrunch)

Thanks for reading to the bottom and soaking in our Newslit fuelled highlights for your morning.

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— Jose Montes de Oca

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Today’s pick

For Tech Startups, the Party Is Over. A dizzying turn in technology-startup investing is undoing the fortunes of founders and investors riding a 13-year bull run. Highflying startups have been grounded, swiftly, by the new climate: layoffs, skeptical investors, an exodus of funds and… (Heather Somerville / Wall Street Journal)

Facebook Killed News Feed Fix for Fear of Conservative Backlash. Facebook said it did not "build and withhold any News Feed changes based on potential impact on any one political party.” Internal documents say otherwise… (Dell Cameron, Shoshana Wodinsky, and Mack DeGeurin / Gizmodo)

Jeff Bezos is not a poster. Friends, I've had alerts on for Jeff Bezos' tweets for a while now, and after some consideration, I'm afraid I have to conclude that this man cannot post. I am, in fact, finding it difficult to believe how bad he is at posting. It's astonishing. If… (Elizabeth Lopatto via The Verge)

Apple Podcasts gains storage clean-up tools, support for annual subscriptions, and a new distribution system. As the battle for podcaster talent and distribution heats up among providers, Apple this morning announced the launch of several new features for its Apple Podcasts service arriving alongside the latest software updates for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. (Sarah Perez / TechCrunch)

Crypto industry wields its influence in Washington after pouring over $30 million into campaigns. U.S. Rep. Ritchie Torres saw two fundraising events organized by crypto-heavy investors after writing an industry friendly op-ed. Over $30 million has been invested into campaigns by crypto executives since the start of the 2020 election cycle. (Brian Schwartz / CNBC)

Thanks for reading to the bottom and soaking in our Newslit fuelled highlights for your morning.

I hope you found it interesting and, needless to say, if you have any questions or feedback let me know by hitting reply or on Twitter.

Take care and see you tomorrow!

— Jose Montes de Oca

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Today’s pick

If Tech Fails to Design for the Most Vulnerable, It Fails Us All. What do Russian protesters have in common with Twitter users freaked out about Elon Musk reading their DMs and people worried about the criminalization of abortion? It would serve them all to be protected by a more robust set of design practices… (Afsaneh Rigot / WIRED)

JetBlue to Launch Tender Offer for Spirit, Urge Shareholders to Vote Against Frontier Deal, Sources Say. JetBlue Airways Corp. plans to launch a hostile takeover attempt for discount carrier Spirit Airlines Inc., according to people familiar with the matter, after Spirit rejected JetBlue's $3.6 billion offer in favor of an existing deal with Frontier… (Alison Sider / Wall Street Journal)

You can now ask Google to remove your personal data from its search results-here's how. Google is finally making it easier for you to make sure your personal information doesn't show up in online search results – and all it took was hundreds of thousands of requests over nearly a decade. (Tom Huddleston / CNBC)

Super Flower Blood Moon of 2022, longest total lunar eclipse in 33 years, wows stargazers. The moon turned an eerie blood-red color in a total lunar eclipse overnight Sunday (May 15) that was visible to potentially millions of stargazers across four continents. The lunar eclipse, celebrated as the Super Flower Blood Moon, was the longest… (Elizabeth Howell / Space)

Francis Suarez backed MiamiCoin-and then it lost nearly all of its value. On Feb. 2, the city of Miami cashed out its cryptocurrency MiamiCoin for the first time, depositing $5.25 million into city coffers. Miami mayor Francis Suarez hailed it as a “historic moment” and predicted the cryptocurrency could… (Scott Nover / Quartz)

Thanks for reading to the bottom and soaking in our Newslit fuelled highlights for your morning.

I hope you found it interesting and, needless to say, if you have any questions or feedback let me know by hitting reply or on Twitter.

Take care and see you tomorrow!

— Jose Montes de Oca

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Today’s pick

Bolt Built $11 Billion Payment Business on Inflated Metrics and Eager Investors. Even in Silicon Valley, a place teeming with entrepreneurs where fortunes are made seemingly overnight, Ryan Breslow stands out. He has promised to shake up the boring but important business of online payments with Bolt Financial, the start-up he… (Erin Woo / The New York Times)

Apple discontinues the iPod after 20 years. Apple has announced that it's discontinuing the iPod Touch, the last remaining model in its lineup of portable music players. In a news post on Tuesday, the company says that it will sell the current Touch “while supplies last.” While… (Mitchell Clark / The Verge)

The 477 Price Checkers Who Determine Inflation. Emily Mascitis has one of the most important jobs you never knew existed. As Americans' monthly bills climb at the fastest rate in four decades, it is Ms. Mascitis's work that confirms the $9 you just paid for a 4-pound bag of… (Rachel Wolfe / Wall Street Journal)

FIFA and EA Sports End Two-Decade Video Game Partnership. After almost three decades, one of the most successful commercial relationships in sports is over. Months of tense negotiations between the video-game maker Electronic Arts and FIFA, soccer's global governing body, ended without an agreement to… (Tariq Panja / The New York Times)

Musk says he would reverse Trump's Twitter ban, calling it 'foolish' and 'morally wrong'. Tesla CEO takes aim at Twitter for ‘strong left bias', blaming the location of its headquarters in San Francisco. Elon Musk has strongly criticised Twitter… ( Financial Times)

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Thanks for reading to the bottom and soaking in our Newslit fuelled highlights for your morning.

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Take care and see you tomorrow!

— Jose Montes de Oca

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Today’s pick

Warhol's 'Marilyn' Sells for $195 Million, Shattering Auction Record for an American Artist. Maybe the image is not racy like the one of Marilyn Monroe with her dress flying up in the movie “ The Seven Year Itch, ” but on Monday night it became the priciest. In under four minutes of bidding, Andy Warhol's 1964 silk-screen of… (Robin Pogrebin / The New York Times)

Crypto's Audacious Algorithmic Stablecoin Experiment Crumbles. Algorithmic stablecoins, like their more “traditional” counterparts, are supposed to provide calm in the chaos of crypto. Instead, as investors in one such token are rapidly finding out, they can serve as lightning rods for… (Stacy-Marie Ishmael / Bloomberg)

Upstart Money Manager Gets Billionaires to Back the Anti-BlackRock. An upstart financial firm backed by Peter Thiel and Bill Ackman has a message for American corporations: Focus on making money, not taking stands. An upstart financial firm backed by Peter Thiel and Bill… (Liz Hoffman / Wall Street Journal)

Clearview AI banned from selling its facial recognition software widely in the U.S. A company that gained notoriety for selling access to billions of facial photos, many culled from social media without the knowledge of the individuals depicted, faces major new restrictions to its… (Taylor Hatmaker / TechCrunch)

Apple is planning to shake up its massive Services business to push further into streaming and advertising. Apple vet Eddy Cue is reorganizing the management structure of its Services business, sources say. The company is pushing harder into areas including streaming and advertising. Cue is giving more responsibility to services VP Peter Stern and ads… (Claire Atkinson / Business Insider)

Thanks for reading to the bottom and soaking in our Newslit fuelled highlights for your morning.

I hope you found it interesting and, needless to say, if you have any questions or feedback let me know by hitting reply or on Twitter.

Take care and see you tomorrow!

— Jose Montes de Oca

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Today’s pick

Stanford Gets $1.1 Billion for New Climate School From John Doerr. John Doerr, one of the most successful venture capitalists in the history of Silicon Valley, is giving $1.1 billion to Stanford University to fund a school focused on climate change and sustainability. (David Gelles / The New York Times)

Fed raises rates by half a percentage point - the biggest hike in two decades - to fight inflation. The Federal Reserve on Wednesday raised its benchmark interest rate by half a percentage point as the most aggressive step yet in its battle against generational highs in inflation. Along with the move higher in… (Jeff Cox / CNBC)

Social-Media Startups Take Aim at Facebook. And Elon Musk. Elon Musk isn't the only entrepreneur with big ideas about how to fix social media. A growing number of startups are emerging to challenge the status quo. Many of them are rooted in their founders' experiences within the industry's leading giant… (Deepa Seetharaman / Wall Street Journal)

TikTok introduces its first ad product to offer a revenue share with creators. TikTok is introducing a new way to lure advertisers to its platform by giving them the ability to showcase their brands' content next to the best videos on TikTok. Ahead of its NewFronts… (Sarah Perez / TechCrunch)

Exclusive: Sonos is about to introduce its own voice assistant. Sonos is preparing to introduce its own voice assistant service within the next few weeks, according to people familiar with the company's plans. The voice functionality will let customers play and control music on Sonos' whole-home audio platform. (Chris Welch / The Verge)

Thanks for reading to the bottom and soaking in our Newslit fuelled highlights for your morning.

I hope you found it interesting and, needless to say, if you have any questions or feedback let me know by hitting reply or on Twitter.

Take care and see you tomorrow!

— Jose Montes de Oca

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Today’s pick

A Supreme Court in Disarray After an Extraordinary Breach. Sources have motives, and the leaked draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade raises a question as old as the Roman Empire. Cui bono? Who benefits? Not the Supreme Court as an institution. Its reputation was in decline even before… (Adam Liptak / The New York Times)

NFT Sales Are Flatlining. The sale of nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, fell to a daily average of about 19,000 this week, a 92% decline from a peak of about 225,000 in September, according to the data website NonFungible. (Paul Vigna / Wall Street Journal)

Tiny Loans Were Going to Solve Global Poverty. Then Big Money Got Involved. Suicides, debtors' prisons and delinquent borrowers forced to sell their land—the grim social costs linked to microfinance a decade ago were supposed to be a relic of the past. But efforts to clean up the industry lost momentum, and today… (Gavin Finch / Bloomberg)

Meta has built a massive new language AI-and it's giving it away for free. “I applaud the transparency here,” says Emily M. Bender, a computational linguist at the University of Washington and a frequent critic of the way language models are developed and deployed. “It's a great move,” says… (Will Douglas Heaven / MIT Technology Review)

We need app store competition, not Apple's 1960s-style paternalistic monopoly. A pair of bills moving through Congress would force some of the largest tech companies to cede control over how people find and use mobile apps, leading to more competition and lower prices. But… (Karen Gullo / TechCrunch)

Thanks for reading to the bottom and soaking in our Newslit fuelled highlights for your morning.

I hope you found it interesting and, needless to say, if you have any questions or feedback let me know by hitting reply or on Twitter.

Take care and see you tomorrow!

— Jose Montes de Oca

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Today’s pick

Facebook Pulls the Plug on Podcast Business After a Year. Facebook is pulling out of podcasts and plans to remove them altogether from the social-media service starting June 3. Facebook will stop letting people add podcasts to the service starting this week, according to a… (Ashley Carman / Bloomberg)

Grindr User Data Has Been for Sale for Years. The precise movements of millions of users of the gay-dating app Grindr were collected from a digital advertising network and made available for sale, according to people familiar with the matter. The information was available for sale since at… (Byron Tau / Wall Street Journal)

Leaked draft Supreme Court decision would overturn Roe v. Wade abortion rights ruling, Politico report says. The Supreme Court is poised to overturn the constitutionally protected right to abortion ensured by the nearly 50-year-old Roe v. Wade decision, according to a leaked initial draft of the new opinion obtained by Politico. The draft is written by… (Dan Mangan / CNBC)

Amazon Kindles finally support the ebooks everyone else sells, sort of. This weekend, a report from Good E-Reader seemed to suggest something truly wild. After 15 years, Amazon was going to finally bow to competition and support the ePub ebook format used by the wide majority of online bookstores, publishers, and… (Alex Cranz / The Verge)

The Facebook Papers: The Algorithms That Control Your News Feed. In a presentation dated May 6, 2018, a Facebook employee asked, “Is Ranking Good?” “Probably. Even asking the question feels slightly blasphemous at Facebook,” the same employee answered in smaller text below. “So… (Dell Cameron, Shoshana Wodinsky, and Mack DeGeurin / Gizmodo)

Thanks for reading to the bottom and soaking in our Newslit fuelled highlights for your morning.

I hope you found it interesting and, needless to say, if you have any questions or feedback let me know by hitting reply or on Twitter.

Take care and see you tomorrow!

— Jose Montes de Oca

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Today’s pick

Apple Abused Dominance in Mobile-Wallets Markets, According to Preliminary EU View. European Union antitrust authorities have told Apple Inc. that they have formed a preliminary view that it has abused its dominant position in markets for mobile wallets. The European Commission said that by limiting technology used for contactless… (Laurence Norman / Wall Street Journal)

Bored Ape Metaverse Frenzy Raises Millions, Disrupts Ethereum. Yuga Labs, the creator of the popular Bored Apes Yacht Club collection of NFTs, shepherded a sale of virtual land related to its highly anticipated metaverse project, raising about $320 million in the largest offering of its kind. Demand was so… (Olga Kharif / Bloomberg)

Warren Buffett gives his most expansive explanation for why he doesn't believe in Bitcoin. Bitcoin has steadily been gaining acceptance from the traditional finance and investment world in recent years but Warren Buffett is sticking to his skeptical stance on bitcoin. He said at the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholder meeting Saturday… (Tanaya Macheel / CNBC)

Automation Isn't the Biggest Threat to US Factory Jobs. The number of American workers who quit their jobs during the pandemic—over a fifth of the workforce—may constitute one of the largest American labor movements in recent history. Workers demanded higher pay and better conditions… (Anna Waldman-Brown / WIRED)

Wikipedia will no longer accept cryptocurrency donations. The Wikipedia community just successfully pushed back against cryptocurrency. On Sunday, the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, which owns and operates Wikipedia, announced that it would no longer accept cryptocurrency donations. The decision was… (Matt Binder via Mashable)

Thanks for reading to the bottom and soaking in our Newslit fuelled highlights for your morning.

I hope you found it interesting and, needless to say, if you have any questions or feedback let me know by hitting reply or on Twitter.

Take care and see you tomorrow!

— Jose Montes de Oca

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