Gm. We can’t believe this app is free…
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Welcome to Issue 09 of The Quest Digest, where we break down Silicon Valley news for you every week, in 3 minutes.
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Elon wins bid to buy Twitter
Twitter’s board accepted Elon Musk’s offer to buy the social media company and take it private in a $44B deal (priced at $54.20 per share).
The stock closed up 5.6% for the day after it was halted for the news.
After the deal was made, Musk has claimed, “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.”
He also hopes to make Twitter better with new features, open source algorithms to increase trust, defeating spam bots, and authenticating humans.
Our Take
Freedom of speech is a beast of a problem to tackle (see Ex-founder of Reddit’s take on it). Since the news broke out hundreds of thousands of Twitter users have left the platform in protest while right-wing politicians have seen an increase in followers.
Even in the short time after news broke out, more right-wing politicians have grown a platform which will affect the discourse we see on the platform in the short-term.
And in regards to Musk’s ambitions… There’s no doubt in the CEO’s managerial ability to improve Twitter as a product. Even Jack Dorsey is all for the change. But time will tell how Musk will tackle the balance between freedom of speech and hate speech.
Tech earnings in Q1 this year…
As a Recap:
Alphabet: Revenue grew by 23% YoY but missed top and bottom line projections due weaker than expected results in YouTube ad revenue
YouTube: Ad revenue grew by 49% YoY. YouTube Shorts is generating 30B views/day
Microsoft: Revenue grew by 22% to $45.3B
Meta: DAUs are up a little from last quarter (1.92B → 1.96B). Meta’s Reality Labs operated at a loss of $2.96B
Spotify: The Joe Rogan debacle didn’t hurt their Q1 – MAUs grew by 19% to 422M, while revenue grew by 24% to $2.8B
Robinhood: Yahoo Finance analysts expect a loss of $0.36 per share against revenue of $355.8M. The CEO announced it was laying off 9% of its full-time employees
Our Take
Earnings this quarter have broadly been pretty good given geopolitical conditions. But to the general public, it hasn’t mattered very much to the stock story with the Nasdaq dropping 4pc – its worst trading day since September 2020.
Markets are now facing an indiscriminate phase of selling and fear due to the Fed lifting rates, China, COVID, and concerns of Russia and Ukraine. And it might go on for a while… 😬
$34M lost, locked in the AkuDreams contract
The Friday launch of the NFT profile project Akutars didn’t go to plan… Because of a bug in the smart contract code, $34M in ETH was locked up forever.
The team explained not everyone who big on the project as been refunded yet but are taking full responsibility for the bug.
Our Take
For devs, the project goes to show you can never be too careful. Test your contracts and or have contracts professionally audited by a third party to avoid devastating mistakes 💀
🔥 Press Worthy
TikTok was the top app by worldwide downloads in Q1 2022
Central African Republic becomes second country to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender
Reddit launches Community Funds program with a $1M investment
CNN+ streaming service shuts down a month after launch
Jack in the Box is piloting burger making robot, Miso
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The Quest Digest is written by Hannah Ahn and edited by Brent Liang, two dropouts who hate long tech newsletters. You can sign up to our next issue below.