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🏠 Twitter's Ready For A Fight

🏠 Twitter's Ready For A Fight

It's not your dad's Twitter

Stephen Flanders
June 30, 2023

Gm. Being back home in New Jersey this week has made me appreciate how nice it is to have somebody else pump your gas. I don’t care if it makes me lazy. I don’t care if it makes the gas more expensive. It is hard to find something better than feeling the words “fill her up, regular” leave your lips.

— Stephen Flanders

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🏠 TECH

Linda Yaccarino’s Twitter Fight

Elon isn’t the only person at Twitter preparing for a scrap.

New Chief Twit Linda Yaccarino is telling staffers to be ready for “hand-to-hand combat” as part of her vision for Twitter 2.0.

However, this fight is much more innocent (and important) than Elon’s quest to bash Zuck’s teeth in.

Enter Twitter 2.0

It’s all a part of Yaccarino’s plan to turn Twitter profitable by beefing up the company’s advertisement revenue, which includes:

Full-screen, sound-on video ads that are shown while scrolling through TikTok’s Twitter’s short-form video feed.
Meeting with media partners, publishers, and talent agencies in order to woo more celebrities, political figures, and creators to Twitter in an effort to get a positive flywheel going between advertisers and creators.
Recruiting big brands in person, which is the aforementioned “hand-to-hand combat”. A little bit dramatic, but hey, face-to-face interaction is scary these days.

It’s an ambitious plan, but if anyone can do it, it’s “The Velvet Hammer” (Yacarrino’s extremely dope nickname).

More Money Baby

And boy could Twitter really benefit from Yacarrino coming through.

Elon, for all the good he’s done with Twitter, hasn’t exactly had the golden touch with advertisers. In fact, it’s been quite the opposite: ad revenue’s been in the toilet since the Dogefather took over.

Not what you want to see for a company with an ad revenue-based business model.

But, if Yacarrino is able to turn things around, then the sky’s truly the limit. We may even finally see X.

The Big Picture: Yacarrino increasingly looks like the right CEO for Twitter.

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🏠 SCIENCE

Virgin Galactic Takes Flight

Super cool futuristic science news coming at ya.

It’s been a great year for space tech:

SpaceX’s Starship is absolutely revolutionary.
Starlink is beaming high-speed internet down from above.
NASA wants to develop oxygen and water on the moon within the next decade.

And now Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic has finally completed their first flight, Galactic 01. This means that commercial space travel is now possible for the first time in human history.

A new industry was literally born today.

And that’s great news for Virgin Galactic and their backlog of 800 passengers, all of whom bought their tickets for between $200,00 and $450,000.

So yeah, probably a bit out of our price range at the moment. However, the Delta fleet that can fly once a week is in development, and that will hopefully drive down prices.

With any luck, we’ll all be able to touch the heavens soon.

The Bottom Line: Virgin Galactic’s stock is somehow down 10% since the news of the successful flight. And this is why I’m not a trader.

🏃‍♀️ QUICKIES

What else is going on?

OpenAI is going to London.
The FTC is about to take a sledgehammer to Amazon.
The ChatGPT mobile app can now search the web…if you have premium.
YouTube is cracking down on ad blockers. Damnit.

Stat: $1.3B: The amount that AI startup Inflection just raised at a $4B valuation. They are about a year old and have just 35 employees. Are things getting a bit frothy, or is this just our new AI reality?

Rabbit hole: Building God (Strange Loop Cannon)

🤑 FUNDING FRIDAY

If you want a boring list of startup raises, look away now. If you want the 2 coolest raises of the week, then you’ve come to the right place.

🛰️ Apex Space

The future of space involves lots and lots of payload. Right now, getting payloads up into space costs a pretty penny. Apex Space and their freshly earned $16M Series A round is on a quest to fix this by designing better satellite buses, the part of the spacecraft that holds the payload.

⚡️ Focused Energy

We are already on the record for being fans of fusion energy. Thus, it should come as no surprise that we are big fans of Focused Energy, who are developing laser-based nuclear fusion energy and just raised an $11M Series A to develop even harder.