Business

The $14.8 billion acquisition offer for the German food-delivery giant, would give Uber ownership over services like Glovo and Foodora to expand its reach into 99 markets. In an effort to avoid antitrust scrutiny, it’s selling off operations to an investment firm in 14 markets where Uber Eats and Delivery Hero overlap.

The $53 billion offer was submitted earlier this month, but Stripe and private equity firm Advent have yet to receive a response. They “are seeking to advance discussions in the coming weeks,” according to sources speaking to Reuters.

The WGAE and WGAW are jointly filing a lawsuit alleging the merger violates antitrust law, following a similar lawsuit filed by a dozen state attorneys general. The WGA says it has “opposed the merger since day one,” adding:

The team went up for sale following its Super Bowl win in February. After rumors that Tim Cook or Mark Zuckerberg might buy the team, Vinod Khosla has emerged as the new owner, according to ESPN. The Khosla family will have to give up its ownership stake in the 49ers first, though.

Block has reached a $45 million settlement with 46 US states over allegations of inadequate fraud protection for its mobile payment service. The platform was accused of misleading users about its safety, and for expanding marketing when fraud claims recently spiked instead of strengthening protections. It must now provide 24-hour customer support and cease deceptive marketing.

Once a cutting-edge audio brand, Sonos has lost a lot of its luster. Last month, the company cut three percent of its staff, which we now know included several veteran execs.

After nine straight quarters of growth, worldwide PC shipments dropped by 4.9 percent year-over-year, according to IDC. The research firm places the blame for the decline squarely on the memory chip shortage driven by the AI arms race.

Memory chip demand by AI datacenters continues to be very good for Samsung, and some of its workers who are eligible for average annual bonuses of $340,000 this year. Per Reuters:

ITV is selling its media and entertainment business, including the ITVX streaming platform and free-to-air channels, to Comcast-owned Sky for up to £1.6 billion ($2.13 billion). The acquisition excludes ITV’s studio operations and will create the UK’s largest commercial broadcaster, better positioning it to compete with YouTube and streaming rivals like Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, and Netflix.

The President’s annual disclosure noted that companies owned by Trump and his family received more than $800 million from the WLFI token and $635 million in royalties from Trump memecoins, report Reuters, WSJ, and CNBC.

Before plans to spin up its own prediction market app, Meta explored acquiring Kalshi, NPR reports. Meta is now reportedly working on an app known as “Arena” internally, which would allow users to bet with points rather than real money, as Kalshi and Polymarket do. If an acquisition had happened, it wouldn’t be the first (or second, or third) time Meta piggybacked on what was trendy.

After more than a year and a half in court, satirical news site The Onion is rebooting Alex Jones’ InfoWars — even as the conspiracy channel hangs in legal limbo. Comedian and writer Tim Heidecker has been tapped as creative director, and he came on the show to share his vision for the platform. Also mentioned: peptides, The Beatles, and the state of Tim’s vocal chords. Enjoy!

Forget for a moment that it’s morally disgusting to let people bet on wildfires; people have already spent $1.2 million doing it. The real question is when someone will commit financially-motivated arson in order to win their bet — because unlike other major environmental events, massive fires are easy to create.

The Play design tool for Mac and iPhone won an Apple Design Award for innovation last year, and could be used to prototype iPhone app interfaces before it was pulled from the App Store. Apple doesn’t specifically mention how it’ll use Play, but its IP could be used to improve Xcode developer tools.

SpaceX bonds are creating losses for the fast-money types who piled in at the offering. “Bond types either aren’t sure that SpaceX will hang on to its investment-grade credit ratings, or will only get involved if they get paid a fat risk premium for doing so,” the Financial Times explains. SpaceX stock is, as of this writing, trading below its IPO price. Gee, if only someone had pointed out that this company is a stinker.

You may remember the period when Zuck tried to pretend he was Very Manly (MMA fighting, Joe Rogan appearance). He seems to be walking that back now, like he realized he overstepped with that horrible attempt at streetwear. Gentlemen, if you want to look like a grown-ass man, the kind who is competent and in charge? Make a mood board of Cary Grant outfits. (If you want to go more contemporary, Colman Domingo.) Fashion is only trivial if you’re stupid — your style expresses your persona before you say a single word, and Zuck’s is still “wannabe.”

President and COO Gwynne Shotwell has apparently told investors that SpaceX plans to launch a new terrestrial Starlink service that would sell mobile contracts directly to individuals in the US — a threat that could extract better revenue-sharing deals from its current telecom partners. Analysts think a T-Mobile acquisition makes sense to accelerate the move and solve SpaceX’s spectrum deficit issue.

Malik, who founded the tech blog GigaOm in 2001 before eventually transitioning into venture capital, died on Wednesday at Stanford Hospital “after a long health journey with his heart,” said Om’s family in a post on his website.

You might remember I took a break from Decoder last year — we had a baby, so I took some leave. In my place, we had an excellent slate of guest hosts, and we’ve been working hard to bring you those episodes in full video since we launched our official Decoder YouTube channel.

Neil Vogel, CEO of the publisher formerly known as Dotdash Meredith, brought up his company’s AI licensing deals with Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft in an Axios interview this week. He noted that while it blocks other unlicensed AI crawlers, it can’t block Google’s since it’s the same one used for Google Search.

The company — which provides “Digit” humanoid robots to customers like Amazon and Toyota — is set to merge with acquisition company Churchill Capital Corp and list under the ticker symbol AGLT. Agility CEO Peggy Johnson says that going public will give the company an edge over its competitors “seeking to fill the labor gap.”

That’s a workforce reduction of about 13 percent over the last 12 months, according to a disclosure filed Monday. And Oracle is hardly alone in at least partially attributing the cuts to AI advancements:

The open-source AI startup has a deal through 2029, similar to Anthropic and Google, to rent compute capacity from SpaceX’s Colossus 2 data center for $150 million per month (up to $6.3 billion), reports the Wall Street Journal.

Chipmaker SK Hynix, which supplies high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips to Nvidia and Google, has overtaken Samsung, with Reuters reporting that its market capitalization has now hit $1.35 trillion. Samsung had held the top spot since 2000, prior to the AI boom.

The Roku Netflix Player was originally a streaming box that then-Netflix CEO Reed Hastings decided not to build.