🤜 Welcome back to Dog Jail Biz Beat, where we pummel fresh, dripping insights out of the week’s biggest tech and business news.
In this edition, we look at the goth yoga instructor who invented Twitter and also baristas handing you an iPad. And don’t miss: the AI freestyle that is maybe the worst thing we’ve ever read in our entire lives.
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One Big Number:
Instances of the phrase “terrible business decision” in a judicial opinion about Block’s acquisition of Tidal, the Jack Dorsey/Jay-Z team-up that has not, so far, revolutionized the music industry.
While vacationing together in the Hamptons, the Twitter co-founder and his cool rap friend cooked up the plan for Dorsey’s payments company to buy Jay-Z’s faltering streaming service. Last year, shareholders sued, alleging the deal was so stupid that Block’s board must have fucked up on purpose.
On Tuesday, a judge tossed the suit, agreeing that the deal was stupid but finding insufficient proof of intentional up-fucking.
Arrest Report
💀 DEATH ROW: Jesus, Peloton, again? This week it’s a recall of 2.2 million faulty bikes, but what does next week hold for the troubled company? Drawing on historical data, Dog Jail’s forecasting team can offer these exclusive predictions:
“Peloton Settles Class-Action Lawsuit Over ‘Anthrax-Riddled’ Bike Seats”
“Peloton CEO Apologizes for Using ‘Deaf Voice’ on Investor Call”
“Peloton: We Thought Child Workers Were ‘Just Short’”
🚔 IN CUSTODY: Cheating the old-fashioned way. Homework “help” (😉) platform Chegg watched its stock fall 40 percent after disclosing that lazy students are increasingly turning to ChatGPT. Yeah, but can a robot tell you which teachers reuse the same final every year?
🐑 AT LARGE: The legitimacy of cryptocurrency. DeFi win! Crypto reached another important milestone this week when a former Coinbase manager was sentenced to two years in prison for insider trading, the first such case involving made-up computer money.
The Beatdown
The Simone Weil of Silicon Valley is back, baby! In addition to beating a lawsuit over a little $300M acquisition between friends (see “One Big Number” above), Jack Dorsey has a buzzy hit with Bluesky, the decentralized Twitter spinoff he first announced in 2019.
According to CNBC, Bluesky had over 600,000 downloads in April. You can compare that to the mobile app for Mastodon — the “installing Linux on your Mom’s old work computer” of Twitter alternatives — which had just 90,000 downloads that same month.
TWITTER BLUES: Until quite recently, Dorsey has mostly stood by Elon Musk as he fucks up Twitter Classic. Last year, he endorsed Musk’s private ownership of the platform, expressing regret that Twitter — his sweet, simple dream — had become a stock price-driven profit machine. Actually, what Dorsey said was much Goop-ier than that:
In principle, I don’t believe anyone should own or run Twitter. It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company. Solving for the problem of it being a company however, Elon is the singular solution I trust. I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness.
Earlier this month, Dorsey finally admitted that he may have been wrong about the whole “cringey billionaire as the trusted steward of global consciousness” thing. Asked on Bluesky whether he still thought Musk was the best person to lead Twitter, Dorsey said:
No. Nor do I think he acted right after realizing his timing was bad. Nor do I think the board should have forced the sale. It all went south. But it happened and all we can do now is build something to avoid that ever happening again.
For Dorsey, Bluesky seems to be a chance to rewrite the past. As a Bluesky board member, he can be involved with something that looks and acts pretty much like Twitter, but as a decentralized protocol not beholden to government demands, shareholder complaints, and uncomfy moderation questions.
For Bluesky’s actual users, none of that techno-libertarian stuff seems to matter that much. They just like the app’s exclusivity and high level of polish. Or, as a recent Bloomberg headline put it: “How To Get a Bluesky Invite Code: AOC, Dril, Teigen Join Twitter’s Hottest Rival”
UNROLL THREAD: Intermittent eater, bitcoin believer: Jack Dorsey is perhaps the most ideological (in a hazy, big-picture kinda way) of the Web 2.0 billionaires. More so than any of his peers, you get the sense that the guy actually believes all this shit.
As Elon Musk’s Lord of Misrule leadership of Twitter has richly illustrated, being a tech god means that other people have to take your ideas seriously, even if they’re obviously terrible. In recent years, Dorsey has been demonstrating what that dynamic looks like when your little fantasies sound somewhat plausible, maybe almost nice.
THE BOTTOM LINE: Kinda interesting how all the guys telling us how to make the internet more free have like a billion dollars, no?
Ask the Bots
This interview has been edited for length.
This Just In
Vice Media filed for bankruptcy today, shocking current and former employees who expected this to happen years ago. Vice’s lenders have pledged a $20M loan to keep daily operations going during the sale process, which the company says should take less than three months.
Dog Jail Kidz Korner
Uh-oh, kids! Softbank’s Vision Fund posted a record loss of $32 billion — or about the GDP of Honduras. Help Masayoshi Son find a new investment to cash in on the AI hype.
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