Reading List

The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.

Source: the TikTok US deal values it at just around $14B; TikTok's US entity makes roughly $14B annually in advertising revenues alone, per analyst estimates (Sara Fischer/Axios)

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ByteDance strikes a deal with a group of non-Chinese investors to create a new TikTok US entity and avoid a federal ban, concluding a six-year legal saga (New York Times)

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Apple accuses the European Commission of "political delay tactics", as the EC seems to be preparing to blame Apple for the shutdown of the Setapp app store (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

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Sources: Amazon is planning a second round of job cuts next week as part of its goal of trimming 30,000 corporate workers, after cutting 14,000 jobs in October (Greg Bensinger/Reuters)

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Epic v. Google: Epic and Google have a secret deal involving Unreal Engine, Fortnite, and Android, with Epic spending $800M over six years on Google services (The Verge)

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Capital One agrees to acquire Brex, which specializes in tech to administer corporate credit cards, expenses, and rewards, for $5.15B in cash and stock (Wall Street Journal)

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Intel reports Q4 revenue down 4% YoY to $13.7B, vs. $13.4B est., Data Center and AI revenue up 9% to $4.7B, Q1 guidance below est.; INTC drops 12%+ after hours (Kif Leswing/CNBC)

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Analysis: the top US tech companies spent $109M on DC lobbying in 2025, topping $100M for the first time; Meta spent $26.29M, Amazon $17.78M, and Google $13.1M (Bloomberg)

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Binance files for a European MiCA license in Greece, where it has also set up a holding company (Jeff John Roberts/Fortune)

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LiveKit, which offers tools for building voice, video, and physical AI models, including for ChatGPT's voice mode, raised a $100M Series C at a $1B valuation (Dina Bass/Bloomberg)

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Google launches free SAT practice exams in the Gemini app, providing students with performance analysis and detailed explanations for incorrect answers (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch)

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The curl project plans to end its HackerOne bug bounty program at the end of January, citing a surge in low-quality AI-generated vulnerability reports (Lawrence Abrams/BleepingComputer)

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Elon Musk says Tesla launched robotaxi rides in Austin with no human safety driver; Tesla's AI lead says Tesla is "starting with a few unsupervised vehicles" (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)

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Sources: Apple expanded the job of hardware chief John Ternus to manage design teams at the end of 2025, solidifying his status as a leading CEO candidate (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

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Yelp acquires Hatch, which charges a monthly fee for AI-powered agents that can respond to customer inquiries and make appointments, for $300M (Laura Mandaro/The Information)

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Substack launches its Substack TV app for Apple TV and Google TV in beta for free and paid subscribers, with access matched to their current subscription levels (On Substack)

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The US BOP releases Caroline Ellison, the former FTX executive and ex-girlfriend of Sam Bankman-Fried, after about 14 months; she had a two-year sentence (Business Insider)

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Inside the turmoil at Thinking Machines; sources say Meta discussed buying TML, and CTO Barret Zoph had been in talks since October 2025 about an OpenAI return (New York Times)

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Railway, a cloud platform for software deployment, raised a $100M Series B led by TQ Ventures, bringing its total funding to $130M+, says it has ARR of $10M+ (Chris Metinko/Axios)

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Inferact, founded by the creators of vLLM to create a commercial AI product for cross-hardware efficiency, raised a $150M seed led by a16z at an $800M valuation (Agnee Ghosh/Bloomberg)

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