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Me again! I’m on my way home after a beautiful week in Laguna Beach, Calif., for our WSJ Tech Live conference. Didn’t read our special mid-week edition? Check it out here, and catch up on my interviews with Snap CEO Evan Spiegel and two top Apple executives, who broke some news on the iPhone and USB-C. But that wasn’t the only crazy tech news this week! Elon Musk acquired Twitter, Apple released a bunch of new software updates and Meta’s stock crashed—again—after its latest earnings report. Plus, an iPhone tip for making your green message bubbles even greener.
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PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: ELENA SCOTTI/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, GETTY IMAGES (2)
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Well, it happened. After more drama than any Oscar-winning film, Elon Musk has bought Twitter. After the deal closed Thursday evening, Musk fired CEO Parag Agrawal and CFO Ned Segal and tweeted “the bird is freed.” Starting today, the New York Stock Exchange has suspended Twitter shares from trading. Musk also made the officially official move of changing his Twitter bio to “Chief Twit.”
Even to those of us who watched the whole story unfold, it’s still shocking the Tesla and SpaceX CEO now owns a major social network. Here we go! But…where exactly? What happens next? What will Twitter become?
“The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence,” Musk said in a tweet addressing advertisers this week.
We’ll learn more about his vision for the company—the business and products—over the next few weeks. Meanwhile, here’s my best sense of the Chief Twit’s priorities, based on what he’s shared over the last six months:
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Kill fake accounts:
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Remember the bots? Of course you do. Back in June, Musk named spam and fake accounts on the platform as the reason he no longer wanted to buy the company. Trying to eliminate the “bot armies” is a top priority, he has said.
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Build a super app:
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Earlier this month, Musk tweeted: “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.” It sounded a lot like the idea of a “super app,” a one-stop shop for communications, shopping, payments, games, etc.—think China’s WeChat. Turning Twitter into that sort of platform sounds like an interesting…fantasy. Facebook and others haven’t had much success trying to do the same. And that was before regulatory scrutiny intensified.
Earlier this week, I asked Snap CEO Evan Spiegel about the super-app phenomenon. He said it’s harder to do in the U.S. and Europe, where there are more longstanding competitors in the payment space.
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Sweet Sixteen ⬇️📱
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Apple released iOS 16.1, iPadOS 16.1 (it skipped 16.0) and MacOS Ventura on Monday. With them, you get iCloud Shared Photo Library, which you can set up so you instantly share images and videos with your family and friends in the Photos app. If you’ve got MacOS Ventura and an up-to-date iPhone, you can finally try out Continuity Camera, which allows you to turn your iPhone into a webcam. Check out my iOS video to see how to do that:
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CREDIT: JACOB REYNOLDS/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
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Shutterstock 🤝Dall-E 👩🎨🤖
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Last week I covered the world of AI art and how tools such as OpenAI’s Dall-E 2 can now generate images of pretty much anything you want—no human artists, photographers or designers involved. Stock image library company Shutterstock announced it will integrate Dall-E into its tools, allowing subscribers to generate images based on the criteria they type on Shutterstock.com. But this isn’t the start of the Shutterstock-Dall-E relationship: OpenAI used Shutterstock photos to train the AI. Given that, Shutterstock plans to compensate artists whose works helped develop Dall-E.
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MAMAA Mia! 💰📉
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Right now it’s all about the MAMAA (Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon) earnings. I took particular interest in Meta, which posted its second revenue decline in a row. Shares fell 25% on Thursday, putting Meta’s market value below $300 billion for the first time since early 2016. The company is battling it all—the macroeconomic climate, stronger regulation, fierce competition from TikTok and the revenue fallout from Apple’s ad-tracking changes. Plus, it’s investing billions in AR/VR/metaverse stuff, which I’ve said before is like betting on a turtle in a track race.
Some of those issues are being felt across the industry: On Tuesday, Google’s YouTube unit posted a decline in ad revenue. And Amazon on Thursday projected sales this holiday season would be far below prior expectations, sending its stock down.
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📰 Catch up on the headlines, understand the news and make better decisions. Sign up for What’s News, free in your inbox on weekday evenings and Sunday afternoons.
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At the Tech Live conference this week, I asked Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, why Apple didn’t bring iMessage to Android. Past emails from him, revealed in the Epic Games v. Apple lawsuit, said he thought it could hurt iPhone sales. On stage, he said that he was afraid that the app would have hindered Apple from innovating Messages for iPhone customers. “This seemed like a throwaway that wasn’t going to serve the world,” Federighi told me.
What isn’t serving the world? The broken experience when iPhone users and Android users try to message each other. iPhone owners know it as the Battle of the Green Bubble, because their messages appear a blinding neon green instead of a calming blue. Well, you can’t fix that, but I recently found out that you can change the color to a more chill forest green:
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CREDIT: JOANNA STERN/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
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Open Settings > Accessibility. Scroll to Per-App Settings at the bottom of the screen, then tap Add App, and add Messages. Then tap Messages > Increase Contrast > On. There you have it! Your messages should now be darker across your Messages app.
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PHOTO: JERRY KURINSKY
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Jerry Kurinsky from Katy, Texas
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Flip Mino Video Camera (First Generation)
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The small size and the pop-out USB that allowed you to plug it into a computer.
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Some of the videos I found on it when I plugged it in might have been lost to time had I not pulled it out to contribute to “Throwback Thing.” They included some nice slices of life: pinewood derby races, an elementary-school concert, the pope blessing the crowd at the Vatican and more.
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It still works. I was able to view and download the videos that were on it, and it still records video, too.
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📷 Got an idea for a throwback? Reply to this email with a photo of your old tech and tell us why you loved—or hated—it. 📷
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A jury has convicted Trevor Milton, the founder of electric-truck company Nikola, in his federal fraud trial. In our podcast, engineers who worked on the Nikola One say what Milton was promising didn’t match what they were building.
Listen to Episode 3 of Bad Bets Season 2: The Unraveling of Trevor Milton.
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Reply to this email and share your feedback and suggestions.
User-submitted content has been edited for clarity and length. This week’s newsletter was curated and written by Joanna Stern and Cordilia James.
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