Le Studio Monthly - November

💻 News of the Month

*See, it’s simple: On one side, you have Twitter and Elon…*

🌍 International news round up

QATAR: Soccer world cup is happening right now. Qatar is put on the spot by the public, re. its super restricting laws on alcohol, and with protesters from all nationalities trying to get a bit of the spotlight on the world’s most pressing current issues.
IRAN: protests are still happening, and the regime is suppressing freedom of speech as strongly as ever. Several people have disappeared after speaking up, but it does not stop the protesters.
EGYPT: “Delegates at the COP27 climate summit agreed to create a fund that will compensate lower-income nations for losses and damages they suffer from weather disasters fueled by greenhouse gas emissions spewed by richer nations. But despite that step forward, leaders did not agree to any more ambitious targets for emissions cuts, which would help prevent future costly disasters from happening in the first place” (Text from The Hustle).
USA: Former President Trump announced his candidacy for the 2024 presidential election, telling Republican voters that he could prevent President Biden from controlling the White House for another four years. Queue horror scream.
CHINA: A series of protests occurred in Shanghai, Beijing, and other cities against Covid restrictions. The demonstrators reportedly chanted “Xi Jinping, step down” and “Communist party, step down.” They were also protesting against the censure system in place in China. This kind of public defiance is unprecedented for Xi Jinping’s presidency and could turn into the worst political crisis for Beijing since the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. At the same time, Covid cases in China hit a record for 4 straight days right after Thanksgiving.

💻 Tech news round up

THERANOS: Founder Elizabeth Holmes was sentenced to 135 months (or 11.25 years) in prison. The sentencing judge estimated she caused $121m worth of scamming. The money aside, the consequences of her decision affected the lives of a lot of people, so the sentence seems fair, if not light. As a reminder, Holmes lied by claiming Theranos’ technology could perform tons of tests on a single drop of blood. Spoiler alert: it couldn’t, and the worst part is it didn’t stop her from rolling the tech out to patients.

Twitter’s daily user growth has reportedly hit all-time highs under Elon Musk (The Verge) so it looks like the new regime’s strategy is working. But he also apparently warned some employees that bankruptcy “isn’t out of the question” for Twitter. So really, who knows what’s going on.

Elon Musk reinstated former President Trump’s Twitter account (account suspended after Trump helped incite the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol). The reinstatement was voted by Twitter users. And they, and an untold number of bots, voted 52% in favor.

TWITTER - The Saga: Elon had a busy month with Twitter. After finally agreeing to buy out the company, Elon Musk took his role as majority shareholder very seriously (and the Silicon Valley motto of Move Fast And Break Things to heart) and fired the executive team, as well as almost 50% of the staff (3,700 employees). A lot of employees decided to resign after the first Musk-ian decisions, bringing the company’s headcount to approx 2,000 employees. Talk about downsizing!

After a few days though, Elon called for some employees to come back to work (Bloomberg).
Twitter’s co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey made a public statement, tweeting an apology for growing Twitter’s workforce too fast.
Elon Musk sold an additional $4 billion of Tesla stock after his Twitter deal closed.
Interestingly, SpaceX (led by Elon Musk) bought a major advertising package on Twitter…

From now on, Twitter employees must buy food at the office, a perk that previously cost $13m annually to the company.

In the meantime, his revenue-generating idea of creating a paid blue mark backfired and created an infinity of hilarious new memes, and financial losses for corporate users and advertisers.

META: Meta announced the layoffs of more than 11,000 employees, i.e. 13% of its workforce.

TECH LAYOFFS: 50,000 American tech workers have been laid off since the start of 2022 (Crunchbase). However, this number accounts for less than 1% of the 6 million tech employees in the US.

💵 Venture Capital news round up

VC firms have raised $151 billion in the first 3 quarters of 2022, more than they’ve raised in any full-year period. Firms are sitting on close to $300 billion of dry powder.

The month, VC funding amounted for $27 billion (Crunchbase), which is down more than 50% year over year. Deal count also hit a recent low, falling to 1,800, compared to nearly 2,200 in September and 3,400 in January. Silicon Valley had its lowest share of startup dealmaking ever in Q3.

Meanwhile, Masayoshi Son of Softbank had decided to step out of the spotlight, after his portfolio took more than $35 billion in losses in H1 due to plummeting tech valuations. Masayoshi Son reportedly personally owes SoftBank nearly $5 billion “because of growing losses on the Japanese conglomerate’s technology bets.” Ouch.

😊 HAPPY NEWS CORNER

The Amazon rainforest, when healthy, is able to capture and store the equivalent of Germany’s total greenhouse gas emissions. If all the carbon it is storing was released, it would account for 20 years’ worth of global emissions at current rates (Bloomberg).

On the biodiversity front, the Amazon is home to 14% of the world’s birds and 18% of its vascular plants (Vox). Most interestingly, apparently, a new species of animal or plant is discovered in the Amazon every 3 days on average (World Wildlife Fund). Lots to discover still.

🔢 Data of the Month

Data centers footprint
Google disclosed that its global data centers used roughly 4.3 billion gallons of water in 2021, equal to the amount of H2O needed to “irrigate and maintain 29 golf courses in the Southwest US each year” (blog post). Last year, the company set a goal to produce 120% of the water it consumes by 2030.
Tough loss
The 20 richest tech billionaires have collectively lost almost $500 billion in net worth in 2022.
Mexico’s trending
Americans are moving en masse to Mexico at the fastest pace on record, with permits to temporarily live in the country surging 85% from the year before Covid (Bloomberg). Mexican officials actually are saying the number of recorded American expats is certainly an undercount. For remote workers, the lure of Mexico City is obvious: cheap living, amazing climate, great cultural options, and four of the best 50 bars in the world.
Mastodon
TikTok earned $4B in revenue in 2021 and is on track to earn $12B in 2022.
Growing population
This month the population of Earth reached the 8 billion milestone (UN projections). For reference, there were just 2 billion humans in 1925, and 4 billion as recently as 1974—so we doubled our numbers in less than 50 years.

🔎 Finds of the Month

Next big things in Tech (According to Fast Company)

🕔 LONG-FORM Article

Wonderfully well illustrated article by the NYT on the consequences of Climate Change.

🔉 Podcast of the Month

Karine was interviewed on the Poetry of Impact podcast this month!

💼 Jobs

Some of our companies are hiring! Check out their openings:

Therma

🙌🏼 Thanks for reading! See you next month!

⭐ We'd also love to hear more of your feedback. Tell us what you think and what you want to see in the future in this digest at m.plata@tamar.capital- cheers !