2026-06-25 23:45:32
Just how big of a deal are these price increases for Apple? Well, just look at their strategy for announcing them.
While Tim Cook and team have been hinting for months that the unprecedented situation with memory chip demand was likely to impact their margins, as time went on and it was clear the situation was not resolving itself, those whispers started to shift towards actual price increases. While others had taken such action already, others don't operate like Apple, where the pricing simplicity and consistency has long been a point of pride. While prices have evolved over time, if anything, Apple's products are now cheaper, relatively speaking, than they've ever been.
This is sort of a "narrative violation" when it comes to Apple – long seen to many as the sort of unnecessarily expensive option with big margins. But often left unsaid about Apple's margins is that just as big of a factor in them being nice and fat was the command Apple had over their manufacturing capabilities and the sway over their component suppliers. Even as inflation ravaged economies around the world, Apple was able to hold prices fairly firm.
But this situation is clearly quite different. Last week, Apple had obviously seen enough to know it wasn't going to ease any time soon.1 Tim Cook gave an interview to Rolfe Winkler at The Wall Street Journal to tell the market that price increases were coming. There was a question as to just how soon – could Apple hold out until the iPhone 18 event in September, a more "natural" time to shift prices? The answer, of course, was "no." A week after that interview, the increases are here.
But even this execution is interesting in that Apple actually didn't increase the all-important iPhone prices. Yet. And that last bit is the key, as such increases for Apple's top-selling device are clearly coming as well. But Apple didn't want to shock the system all at once. Today's increases, in a way, are also a path to guide towards the inevitable iPhone price increases coming in September – assuming Apple can hold out that long!
Wall Street doesn't seem to be appreciating the nuance here, with Apple's stock currently dropping around 5% in trading – pushing it back below Google and risking falling below the $4T market cap mark. But Apple is clearly worried about the bigger picture here.
The iPhone isn't just a part of their product lineup, it's the device that dominates it, both in terms of volume and revenue. While Services has been slowly chipping away at the lead, the iPhone is still the product that consistently brings in over half of Apple's revenue each quarter. Even with all the product diversification over the years, it's still very much as goes the iPhone, so goes Apple.
And so if and when Apple has to raise the price of that device, it's going to have an impact on the business, obviously. And sadly for Apple, it's unlikely to be the Veblen variety – where higher prices lead to more sales. Instead, higher prices are going to lead people to push out would-be purchases. And that is going to hurt Apple's quarterly earnings, obviously.
So the move to increase prices nearly across the board today – from the HomePod to the MacBook Pro to even the sad selling Vision Pro – is yet another signal of what's to come. That way, when John Ternus takes the stage in early September – in his first event as Apple's CEO – when he announces the iPhone 18 models with a new, higher starting price, the market is fully braced for it. Apple will have guided towards the change, twice.
In a way, it's probably a good thing that Apple is said to be splitting the iPhones 18 unveiling into two timetables going forward. The 'Pro' models are set to be unveiled this Fall, with the 'regular' models due in the Spring. Given Apple's clear reluctance to raise prices, they probably didn't make this change on purpose, but it could end up a bit lucky because the would-be 'Pro' buyers are naturally going to be less price-sensitive than the 'regular' model buyers. And by the time those devices come next Spring, they'll effectively have had three warnings of pricing changes.
That's not going to make the new iPhone Ultra/Fold price any easier to swallow – could the thought-to-be $1,999 starting price now look more like $2,499?! – but it's something.
Another interesting wrinkle to watch for here: if this price change telegraphing actually pulls forward iPhone sales this quarter leading up to the new iPhone launch. Another way to look at what Apple is saying in not raising the iPhone price now is: get your orders in now if you want to lock in the current price. Normally, this would be the worst time to buy the current generation of iPhone models, with new ones so close, but now it might actually be the best time – especially if you're in the market for the 'regular' models or the iPhone Air, again, both of which are not expected until the Spring. This could lead to a weird situation where Apple's numbers actually jump this quarter to get ahead of the price changes.
Regardless, this is an unprecedented time for Apple – certainly the modern Apple. Yes, that's true for many companies given the chip shortages, but as the most important consumer device company, it's especially true for Apple. And it's yet another sign of the shifting landscape in which they operate.
For years, Apple has been able to dominate and dictate to their suppliers thanks to their scale. But the Asian operations which Tim Cook so famously set up, have been upended, like most everything else, by AI. From TSMC on down, Apple is no longer the customer dictating terms for the entire industry, it's now the company which has taken over the mantle as the most valuable one in the world: NVIDIA.
And so it leads to situations like this one as relayed by Winkler in his story on the price hikes today for The Wall Street Journal:
In an interview Wednesday night, Micron Chief Business Officer Sumit Sadana said the company couldn’t make investments during the memory market’s last downturn, when Micron’s gross profits went negative, in part because certain customers took advantage to pay rock-bottom prices.
“We told a couple of the customers who were being very aggressive with pricing at that time that this is not constructive,” he said, without naming Apple, adding that low prices discouraged capital investments. “A lot of the industry investments got shut down in 2023 because of really poor pricing and really poor margins.”
Again, he didn't explicitly call out Apple there, but come on. Apple is widely known to be a major Micron customer. And the company was obviously taking advantage of the last contracts they negotiated to hold prices steady as market prices surged. Micron clearly didn't like that situation too much! But whereas previously they may have had to grin and bear it given Apple's position and importance in the industry, there's a new world order now, in terms of who orders for the world.
Perhaps Apple would have been better positioned had they taken the AI wave more seriously to start. But again, they're hardly alone here. The only companies in great positions here right now are the memory chip makers. If the "Tim Cook Doctrine" had guided them in that direction, Apple would certainly be a $5T company now. But that's easy to say in hindsight – then again, Samsung is right there!
And NVIDIA is right there, first in line, not Apple.
Apple is used to shifting markets. To bending others to their will. Now Apple is the one being bent. Being forced to shift strategy. It must be uncomfortable.
1 And the worst news on that front is buried in today's WSJ piece: Micron now thinks the pressure on memory chip supply will last throughout not just 2026, but all of 2027 too... ↩
2026-06-24 01:10:20
Why did Amazon walk from their OpenAI movie? It doesn't seem too hard to figure out. Last I checked, $50B is bigger than $50M. And that, mixed with the notion that the film may not just be anti-OpenAI, but anti-AI in general and, well...
Inklings is a newsletter featuring links and commentary from M.G. Siegler on timely topics found around the web.
😎 The 'Meta Glasses' – I think their strategy is smart here. Meta started with a known/proven brand and style in Ray-Ban (and later Oakley) and are now branching out on their own (still with the help of EssilorLuxottica – in which Meta is now a large shareholder, remember). And they don't have Meta's dumb, droopy logo front-and-center (which must have been tempting given that the logo looks like goggles), but rather hidden on the back of the stems. And the glasses look... good? Pretty standard stuff. But one suspects it's easy to get this wrong given that they're front-and-center on your face. The most important aspect, of course, is what it means for the price: $299 – a full $80 cheaper than the latest Ray-Ban branded variety. It's a solid price point and a further poke in the eye of their old rival Snap, as this makes their um, $2,195, price point for Specs seem all the more untenable. Yes, they're different – one is pretty full-on AR while the other are just glasses with AI – but my point would be that we're not ready for the AR variety yet anyway so... releasing the Specs at that price point just looks like a sort of silly move to many, including Wall Street. Anyway, the "Kylie" variety of Meta's glasses are obviously not meant for me, but I'm genuinely curious how well (or not) those sell in the market. Meta loves to try to get celebrities involved in their products (I mean, so do all the tech companies with marketing teams) but it doesn't ever seem to work as they'd hope. But hey, they have a gemstone here. And yes, her AI voice. Will their 'Muse Spark' models be fully up to the task? Can Meta fully escape their brand baggage? The "glasshole" issue? Your move, Apple. [Wired 🔒]
☁️ Microsoft’s Hybrid AI Dreams — The strangest thing about Satya Nadella’s ongoing blitz against Big AI — well, beyond the fact that Microsoft is deeply partnered with all the players, and yes, owns 25%+ of OpenAI — is that they just started going full bore at creating their own frontier models. Is the goal not to get the most amount of people to use those? Or perhaps it’s an acknowledgement that no matter the work they may do at the frontier, they’re not going to be able to catch Anthropic and OpenAI at this point. Or perhaps it’s simply Nadella reading the room and tea leaves, thinking that the ‘Fable’ situation is another DeepSeek moment where it causes everyone to rethink how they’re working on AI. An acknowledgment that Anthropic’s tussle(s) with the US government is causing many to think that they shouldn’t be all-in with one AI provider — even if it’s one of the Big Tech players. That instead, they should seek a diversified provider of models, like, say, Microsoft. Which, by the way, is happy to offer you DeepSeek models! Why? Costs. The other elephant in this room Nadella may be reading. Even if Microsoft can catch up on the frontier, their customers may not want to pay for such compute — certainly not for everything. Here, open source models are their friend, even if they may have been distilled from their partner OpenAI… [WSJ 🔒]
📉 Is Google Behind In AI? Again?! — Speaking of, at least Wall Street seems concerned that the departure of both Noam Shazeer — not even two years after bringing him back on board for $2.7B, now bolting for rival OpenAI — and now their Nobel Prize-winning DeepMinder John Jumper — who is John jumping to rival Anthropic — signals a problem within Google’s AI ranks. Again. That mixed with the fact that their latest Gemini flagship models weren't ready for their I/O conference, and still have yet to be released, and whispers that when they are, they still won’t be Mythos/Fable caliber… It’s obviously hard to know exactly what is going on here until those models are out in the world but there are definitely some Meta Llama vibes out there at the moment. But if Nadella’s read per the above note is correct, how much should Google even care about being at the absolute bleeding edge? It’s optically a black eye, obviously when a company with basically infinite resources can’t compete with the startups. But those have their own advantages too in being more nimble and not being bogged down by the baggage of billions of users across a wide range of products in a wide range of industries. But if costs start to matter more and there’s a push for more hybrid AI systems… Google should be fine. Just like Apple, which of course fumbled the AI bag far worse! But it is a weird vibe! [Bloomberg 🔒]
👁️ OpenAI Takes Their Ads Pitch to the Ads Pitchers — Increasingly, this does feel like the single-most important thing for OpenAI at the moment. If they can jumpstart their ads business, they suddenly have a narrative that Anthropic can't — because they won’t — match. It won’t totally negate the fact that Anthropic’s top and bottom lines now look more attractive, but given ChatGPT’s scale, it can be compelling. If the ads work, that is. And the jury is still very much out there. I’m still of the mind that they need to come up with new formats that are AI-native as CPC and CPM models don’t seem to make much sense, at least with the way the chatbots are currently built and serve up information. For queries with commerce intent, you can probably see it — and OpenAI says 1/5th of the queries they see are in that vein? — but shopping has already had fits and starts for them. The fact that Google is already working on this too is actually good news for OpenAI. If anyone can figure it out… But the bigger concern may remain that OpenAI clearly wants to be in the business that Anthropic is currently dominating and has diverted most resources in that direction. Can they really do both here? [FT 🔒]
🕹️ The Chip War Could Kill Consoles — Valves new Steam Machine sounds (and looks) interesting. As with the Steam Deck, it feels like they’re one step ahead of Microsoft. But the problem, of course, is price. It starts at $1,049 and goes all the way up to just under $1,500. The latter is double the highest end Xbox price. It’s triple the Switch 2 price. Yes, it’s a PC too, but if you wanted to use it as a PC, you should… buy a PC? The whole value proposition is the ease of use and access to gaming in the living room, but it’s not exactly plug-and-play — at least not yet. And it’s apparently no more powerful than a PS5 — which is over 5 years old (that itself is sort of wild). Anyway, it points to the bigger issue in the console market itself which is under siege due to the component prices. That basically makes any PS6 or ‘Project Helix’ Xbox a non-starter anytime soon. Xbox may really want to get back to being Xbox, but it’s going to be tough if the next Xbox is $1,000 or more. [Verge]
"You can’t say, hey, all white-collar jobs are gone and this could even be a weapon and we will use all the power to build data centers."
– Satya Nadella, making a simple point about the rhetoric coming out of many of the AI companies. It's obviously exaggerated to make the point, but it's also not wrong! No one should be confused why AI has a bad reputation, certainly in the US. It may be more than a messaging problem, but it's also a messaging problem!
And yes, such talking points are coming back to bite in other ways too. Shocking, I know.
Not bad. Nothing groundbreaking design-wise. And they're certainly not Specs...
"I think you need to take anything they do seriously. They’re good at hardware, they’re good at design. There’s a number of places where we won’t necessarily be able to build the same quality consumer experience when paired with the phone, and so I think they’re taking advantage of that."
– Alex Himel, Meta's head of wearables, when asked about the prospects of Apple entering the smartglasses space. Kudos for answering the question, but he was also clearly coached to bring up the connection talking point.
I suspect we're going to hear this come up from Meta more and more over the next year – especially once Apple actually enters the space. There will obviously be a push to deem the pairing with the iPhone as anticompetitive. The EU will probably launch a probe just based off of the rumors of such a product.
Technical connection capabilities aside, the dominance of the iPhone clearly remains a problem for Meta. And will remain one for some time, one imagines...
🎶 Listening to "Unbroken Horses" by John Mark McMillan
🍺 Enjoying a Guinness
☘️ Sent from Dublin, Ireland
2026-06-22 04:01:58
Don't meddle. It's one of those oft-stated golden rules of Hollywood that has been broken left and right by the movie studios basically since the dawn of the industry. Apple even more or less has an entire show built around the premise in The Studio. Still, it's considered a cardinal sin for a studio – and certainly any corporate parent – to mess with the creative process of making a movie. And it has come up more often in recent years with all the change happening in Hollywood and all the studios changing hands once again – and especially with Big Tech giants now fully wading into the Hollywood waters.
That's sort of the undercurrent of the news that Amazon MGM is ditching Artificial, Luca Guadagnino's movie about OpenAI. No one is coming out and directly saying it, but it's pretty clear what's going on here: Amazon is meddling.
Now, to be clear and fair, they're not messing with the actual creative process. The movie is basically done, to the point where it is being screen for test audiences (we'll come back to that). But what Amazon is doing is arguably worse: they're meddling with the distribution of the film. It's not exactly muzzling Guadagnino – at least not yet, but if they can't find a new home for Artificial, that's effectively what they're threatening.
You have to believe they'll find a home, because it's a movie about OpenAI! Even if you don't buy that there will be general interest in the overall AI narrative, and even if you don't think the always-in-the-news nature of OpenAI will help this movie garner buzz, the fact that there's a pretty direct, successful analog in David Fincher's 2010 film The Social Network, which won three Oscars and was nominated for Best Picture while earning over $200M at the box office, seems like a good signal.1 It's a movie that was so successful, that it's getting a sequel in this year's The Social Reckoning. But the premise of Artificial feels far more Social Network in nature. So yeah, someone is going to pick it up. If nothing else, this new controversy around Amazon dropping it can probably only help its prospects!
If it wasn't a must-see movie before, it is now!
That's part of why it's wild that Amazon is doing this. But the bigger part is the fact that they greenlit and saw the entire product through to completion. Various executives at Amazon MGM read the various iterations of the screenplay. They hired the acclaimed director to helm it. They watched cuts of the movie as it progressed. They were all-in, until suddenly they weren't.
So what happened?
Well, again, they're not directly saying it, but it's pretty clearly related to Amazon's relationship with OpenAI. When the movie was greenlit and being made, Amazon had only a loose relationship with the startup for some cloud dealings. Instead, they were the big backer of Anthropic, OpenAI's chief rival, which of course is comprised of a disgruntled team which spun-out of OpenAI. I won't go so far as to say that a sort of anti-OpenAI movie was set up on purpose to help Anthropic, but it couldn't have hurt Amazon's big AI bet!
But then OpenAI changed their arrangement with Microsoft. And that suddenly opened them and their models for business beyond Azure. So it was only natural that the biggest cloud company, Amazon, would seek to sell the models from the biggest AI company, OpenAI. Just how interested was Amazon in getting OpenAI sold through AWS? Well, how does $50B sound? As in the amount Amazon has promised to invest in OpenAI through a series of equity investments tied to their partnership.
Of course that partnership goes both ways. And so if, say, OpenAI doesn't like something about the way Amazon is treating them and thinks it's not helping said partnership well... What I'm saying is that a $50M movie that seemingly casts OpenAI and certainly CEO Sam Altman in a bad light is probably a pretty easy thing for Amazon to walk away from rather than their $50B deal with said company.
Is it possible that the movie is just bad? I suppose that's possible, but even if that's true and Amazon wants to distance themselves from a stinker, the comments being made here and the reports on the matter don't suggest that. Also, it's Hollywood. A ton of bad movies – truly bad movies – are made every year. They still get released. If Amazon didn't think Artificial was good but already bankrolled the entire thing through to completion, they could have put it on Prime Video after perhaps a limited theatrical run to keep Guadagnino happy (more on this general strategy in a minute). Even if it's bad, given the hot topic and talent, it undoubtedly would have done well on streaming. Amazon uses their streaming service to salvage bad movies all the time. It just doesn't make sense for Amazon to walk away from this movie if it's simply and subjectively "bad". I don't buy that. Again, just look to the statements on the matter:
"We have the utmost respect and admiration for Luca Guadagnino as an award-winning filmmaker—not to mention a longstanding relationship that we hope to continue. We believe that 'Artificial' will be better served if it were released by a different studio and are working closely with the filmmaking team to find the film a new home."
That doesn't read like a studio trying to ditch a bad movie. That sounds like a studio trying to not directly come out and say that they need to not be associated with the project now for other reasons. "We believe" and "better served" are the two key phrases. It's as if to say, "it's not you, it's us."
Added to all of this is what's referenced here: Amazon MGM and Guadagnino have worked together in the past on his films After the Hunt and Challengers. They're not just burning a relationship, they're potentially burning a long-standing partnership. Here's Guadagnino's statement on the matter:
...
Yeah, he's pissed. Obviously. "Shocked" says at least one source to Nicole Sperling at The New York Times.
But should he have been "shocked"? Perhaps not if he's been following the entire OpenAI saga, which presumably he has given, you know, the film. Maybe he thought his relationship with Amazon MGM was strong enough to counter any risk here. Or maybe he simply thought Amazon wouldn't dare. After all, again, the movie was done and they were a part of it every step of the way. But perhaps that aforementioned screening played a role. Here's Ellise Shafer and Alex Ritman for Variety:
Variety understands that, prior to being dropped by Amazon, “Artificial” already had several test screenings, which went down very positively, and screened for other studios on Thursday. According to an insider who has seen the movie, the characters of Altman and Musk are the least sympathetic and the ones audiences would “like the least.” It’s also understood that Amazon had seen all the early iterations of the script, before Guadagnino boarded the project.
First and foremost, "very positively" would seem to negate the notion of the movie being bad. Yes, it's subjective. And yes, people who get to see movies early tend to like them more than they might normally, but test screenings are both and art and a science. The studio would be able to gauge if a movie is a disaster-in-the-making and saying the screenings went down not just positively, but "very positively" suggests the quality is not the issue. But the substance may be... at least for Amazon.
Again, who is surprised by this reaction? Given all the endless reporting – and now legal testimony – on the matter, was Amazon expecting a movie in which anyone, let alone Altman, came out looking good?
And then there's Elon Musk. Would Amazon sweat pissing off the world's first trillionaire? Given that he's the chief rival of their founder, probably not. Then again, given that he controls a certain social network, perhaps there was some level of concern. But certainly not to the level of OpenAI. Again, now a massive strategic partner and investor. Also, a friendship between those two founders probably didn't help this situation:
It’s known that Altman and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos have a relationship and Altman even attended Bezos’ wedding in Italy last year.
One has to imagine that subsequent reporting will pull out a bit more here. Was Altman concerned that such a movie is going to lead to more threats against him or his family? That certainly seems more legitimate than just the ongoing concern about the backlash against AI more generally – but it's impossible to know without actually seeing the movie if there's any merit to that, I'm just trying to come up with some sort of scenario that could quickly change Amazon's mind.
Amazon is clearly positioning this as a Mike Hopkins decision. Here's Matt Belloni, who originally scooped this shitshow for Puck:
One source familiar with Amazon’s rationale told me the tone of Artificial shifted markedly darker in the final product from the script by Simon Rich (SNL, Pixar) and how the project was pitched and developed by Guadagnino, who previously directed Challengers and After the Hunt for Amazon. Hopkins watched a cut of the film and decided to pull the plug.
Sure, the Amazon MGM/Prime Video studio boss may have technically made the call. But he also doesn't live in a vacuum. And he certainly doesn't work in one! He's clearly making that decision recognizing all of the above. And so it's really a call of whom he wants to piss off: OpenAI/Sam Altman or Luca Guadagnino and all the talent involved with Artificial? Again, one is a $50B deal, the other is a $50M deal. We're talking three orders of magnitude here. It's just math.
Of course, it isn't just math. Just ask Apple.
One can't help but be reminded of their call a couple years back to kill the wide theatrical release of Wolfs. While that had nothing to do with the subject matter of the movie – Apple seemingly wasn't worried about the hit man lobby – it did still have to do with the math. As in, Apple seemed pretty certain there was no way the movie would work at the box office. At least not to the extent it would need to in order to at least look like a hit – a feat they did manage to pull off with their barely (if at all) profitable, but feted F1.
But with Wolfs, the problem was twofold: George Clooney and Brad Pitt. As in, the stars. Apple risked pissing them off by pulling the plug but felt like they had to do so anyway – perhaps part of the pitch was that it wouldn't look good for any of them if/when the movie flopped at the box office. They made the right call but arguably a dumb decision given the reputation risk associated with killing Wolfs – again, a movie that was done and on the verge of release.
And sure enough, shortly after the decision was made, the director, Jon Watts, let his true feelings be known. He felt betrayed because he was betrayed. But there, at least Apple still released the movie – just on a much smaller theatrical scale and with a wide push to Apple TV.2 With Artificial, Amazon just wants it gone.
And beyond the Guadagnino situation, there are massive stars in Andrew Garfield and the clearly on-the-rise Monica Barbaro. How are they going to feel about taking their next movie to Amazon MGM?
Movies switching studios isn't completely unprecedented, but it is pretty unprecedented for this particular reason. And it undercuts the credibility of the entire studio at a time when they perhaps need it most as they gear up to start production on the first James Bond film fully under their purview. The director they landed for that endeavor, Denis Villeneuve, is well known for his strong stances on cinema and artist integrity. So yeah, I can't wait to hear what he thinks about this! Maybe he should poke the bear and make Blue Origin the new SPECTRE?
Or maybe Luca Guadagnino should have just sucked it up and done what Amazon really wanted, which is to make a movie in the style of the "documentary" of Melania Trump.
The fact that this is the other narrative floating in the background here makes this all extra wild. The last time Amazon was in the news in a major way for a film was when they not only bought the Melania doc, but they apparently paid $75M for it – way, way, way above market, with potentially $28M going straight to Mrs. Trump herself. Oh yes, and it was made by a director who was fully cancelled and ostracized in Hollywood. Somehow, Brett Ratner returned, one might say.
But really, somehow none of that managed to derail that movie. In fact, it got a White House premiere! Tim Cook came! Bezos is proud of it. What a fucking farce.
Look, at the end of the day money always talks and more often than not wins. So perhaps none of this has actual long term ramifications for Amazon. But if Artificial turns out to be good and perhaps wins awards if not the box office,3 this whole narrative will keep coming up. That Amazon meddled.
Update June 22, 2026: A bit more unfolding of this narrative...
No home yet for Artificial, but it sounds like things are getting close with Mubi, but perhaps more interesting is all those that passed:
Several of the buyers who screened Luca Guadagnino’s hotly anticipated “Artificial” in the days after Amazon MGM Studios abruptly dropped the film have passed on acquiring it, sources tell Variety.
Focus Features, Warner Bros.’ Clockwork, A24 and Netflix have all stepped away, according to those sources. But the Sam Altman drama, which is nearly completed, isn’t without suitors. Variety has learned that Mubi is pursuing the film, with Neon also possibly circling.
Each of those smaller houses (and Netflix) would seem to be right in the wheelhouse for this type of movie. So what's going on? Maybe it is just bad?
I continue to believe it has little to do with quality and more to do with a fear of pissing off the powers-that-be in AI. In particular, if it leads to lawsuits:
The picture is rumored to be portraying Altman as a pathological liar and Musk (Ike Barinholtz) as highly antipathetic.
This is a company and industry in the midst of a perception crisis. They're going to push back against any negative portrayal and it's sounding a lot like this one may cast them all in an extremely negative light. In that way, one can't help but be reminded of another film that had a hard time getting distribution a couple years back. But yes, was good. And yes, ended up as an awards contender. The topic of the film though was highly controversial. And the subject powerful. Not to mention litigious...
One more thing:
Even for independent companies with AI ambitions or big tech entanglements, there could be reasons for being cautious around the film. A24, for instance, is backed by Josh Kushner’s Thrive Capital, which holds a seat on the board and ranks among OpenAI’s largest and most high-profile backers.
Yeah, that would seem to be an easy no-go.
1 The fact that both feature Andrew Garfield helps too! ↩
2 A more interesting parallel may be with Savant the Jessica Chastain-led Apple TV show that Apple pulled shortly before release – and right after the murder of Charlie Kirk. ↩
3 The fact that the screenings all seem to suggest the movie is good adds yet another wild layer to this. That doesn't mean it will be a hit, of course. But you could certainly see it as the type of movie that taps into the zeitgeist at the right time. Much like The Social Network did once upon a time! ↩
2026-06-20 02:43:36
For all the talk about how "hackquisitions" were circumventing the traditional guardrails around M&A, we seem to have overlooked something vital: for such deals to work, they have to actually, you know, work. And the early returns suggest that perhaps they're not really working out...
Inklings is a newsletter featuring links and commentary from M.G. Siegler on timely topics found around the web.
🐥 Amazon Chickens Out of OpenAI Movie – I was just wondering what was going on with Artificial given that filming wrapped months ago, but we hadn't yet seen a trailer. Well, now we may know why... The movie is suddenly homeless. Regardless of how anti-OpenAI and/or anti-Altman this movie is, it's obviously an awful look for Amazon to kill it. After it's done, no less. The message from all of the tech players playing in Hollywood has always been that it's about the art and that they wouldn't meddle in artistic decisions. I mean, I guess they're not here, technically, just opting not to distribute the movie after promising to do so. That's arguably worse. And it's especially worse seeing as it's the same company that paid $75M to make a documentary about the President's wife. To keep layering on: the Melania movie featured a disgraced director exiled from Hollywood, while Artificial has one of the hottest directors in the world. If all of that gave Amazon pause, it certainly didn't stop them. Once they saw a cut, they clearly thought it was better to cut ties here, rather than risk angering their AI partner in which they have a massive equity stake. Yes, those deals came about after the movie was greenlit, but my god, how shortsighted. Artificial will obviously find a new home – Amazon better hope the movie isn't any good. But I'm not sure how much it will matter in Hollywood with the Scarlet Letter of meddling now firmly affixed to Amazon's studios. What does, say, Denis Villeneuve think of this, one wonders... [Puck 🔒]
📺 Netflix as the New Cable TV Front-End – Their deal with France's TF1 (which I first wrote about a year ago when it was announced, noting that Netflix really is now TV) makes Netflix the hub for both services, blending recommendations, 'Continue Watching', etc. This is a far deeper integration than what Amazon and others are doing with their 'Channels' strategy and clearly seems to be the future of streaming in many countries (Amazon has similar deals in place around the world for Prime Video). And as YouTube TV continues to eat traditional cable's lunch, might we see other regional cable providers in the US hand over the keys to Netflix? Comcast, the largest, would presumably try to do it through Peacock? But Peacock remains a far smaller player. More interesting would be if YouTube tries to get into this game. There's probably too much conflict with YouTube TV, but it increasingly feels like Netflix and YouTube are on a collision course to be the main hub/UI of streaming. I mean, they already are in many ways, but with others' content – including perhaps Peacock and the like. This also takes Netflix deeper down the live content rabbit hole, of course – and advertising too, though it sounds like those details are still in progress. [THR]
👻 Snap Spins Off An AI Company – This almost reads like a reverse-"hackquisition" in a way. 'Dotmo' will take a team from and have a licensing agreement with Snap, in return, Snap will get a large equity stake in the stand-alone company. But they won't be investing at all – because this is about Snap saving money, after all – but Snap co-founder Bobby Murphy will be in a personal capacity. Spin-offs are nothing new, of course. But again, not investing but having a co-founder invest is an interesting hack. As I wrote earlier this week, it feels increasingly like Snap made the wrong bet on AR versus AI – yes, they were betting on both to some degree, but it was clearly the wrong mix. At the same time, now they don't have the capital or the mandate from Wall Street to invest in both going forward so... Dotmo will go it "alone". And presumably have no trouble raising more outside funding as an AI company. Perhaps at a large enough valuation, it can reverse-acquire Snap, Elon-style?[TechCrunch]
🐆 Kissing the Leopard's Ass Before He Eats Your Face – How shocking it must be for Zuckerberg and Bezos to learn that President Trump is mocking them behind their backs, showing off the private messages they send him to others to showcase them "kissing my ass". Ahead of the inauguration, as Zuck embarrassingly scrambled to showcase his new allegiance, I asked, "What's the world record for kissing ass? We're likely to find out." Trump clearly agrees! And can't stop telling everyone all about it. With Tim Cook too. Even more embarrassing for these guys: one of the people Trump likes to show these message too is Elon – his on-again/off-again PaidPal. "First-class groveling," was his quoted assessment as he must have laughed while Bezos tried to convince Trump to ditch SpaceX for Blue Origin for some contracts. That's the thing: given their business interests, what choice do these guys have but to grovel? If they don't, they get thrown into the doghouse. They undoubtedly could be less overt, but Trump loves the performative nature of such things. Hence, Cook's golden trinket. And you could probably argue that this humiliation has paid off, quite literally! But the real price was dignity, which they'll have to live with selling off. Which will look especially bad when all of them inevitably start to turn on Trump again as he becomes a lame duck. [Wired 🔒]
"When I told that story to George Lucas in 1977, when we were in Hawaii together getting ready for the release of Star Wars: A New Hope, he said, ‘I have something better than Bond. It’s called Indiana Smith,’ which is what it was called at the time. He told me the premise of the Indiana Jones series, and that’s how I got that job."
– Steven Spielberg, revealing how the Cubby Broccoli rejecting him on the notion of directing a James Bond film (twice) led to Raiders of the Lost Ark. I linked to this last week too, but the quotes are just amazing.
🎶 Listening to Fantastic Cat - So Glad You Made It
🍺 Enjoying a Stroud LOL Light Lager
🇬🇧 Sent from London, England
2026-06-19 23:19:07
The news that Noam Shazeer is (once again) leaving Google seems like a big deal. The news that he's joining OpenAI, which turned the transformer paper he helped write into a product that he couldn't launch (in his first stint) at Google seems like an even bigger deal. Bigger still may be the fact that he had rejoined to help the Gemini product take on ChatGPT, which was seemingly working, at least to some degree. But actually, the biggest deal has to be the actual deal that brought him back to Google. Because it wasn't even two years ago when Google paid $2.7B to bring Shazeer back.
And like that – poof – he's gone.
To be fair, there were others on the Character.ai team that Google seemingly wanted too. The non-exclusive licensing rights for Character? Probably less so. If anything, that aspect of the deal has ranged from a headache to a nightmare.1 But clearly it was a deal structure in such a way to get Shazeer back with an offer he couldn't refuse. And he didn't. Until he did. Again.
That deal structure, of course, was one of the early "hackquisitions" – a deal to bring on a company's key talent without acquiring the company itself. Because that clearly would have been messy from a regulatory perspective for any of Big Tech. If nothing else, such deals would be bogged down for months while they're scrutinized. A "hackquisition", by contrast, could be done almost instantly. Because they were structured to leave the actual company behind as a sort of hollowed-out husk. Not exactly a carcass because they weren't exactly dead but not fully alive either. A place to pick up the phone if the government calls. And to collect licensing fees.
And again, the deals were set up in ways so that those with power couldn't really say "no" – be it the founding team or investors. The employees left behind sometimes got screwed, but the "hackquiring" company often tried to do the right thing so as not to draw that eye and ire of Washington.
As such deals kept happening, Washington obviously started to look at these deals anyway. But the pace at which Washington moves have allowed them to continue unabated. Of course, something else now runs the risk of ending such deals: the fact that they don't seem to be working out. Let's look back at some of the big ones.
The first such "hackquisition" clearly drew inspiration from the deal Microsoft almost did with OpenAI employees (from Sam Altman on down) during "The Blip". Such a deal, had it happened, would have looked pretty wild now given that OpenAI is valued at $852B. And, of course, constantly clashing with their benefactor. Anyway, as a result of Altman and OpenAI getting back to work, Microsoft turned their gaze elsewhere – to the AI startup co-founded by their board member Reid Hoffman.
But that deal wasn't about bringing Hoffman on board beyond the board, it was seemingly all about bringing on Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of DeepMind who left after the Google acquisition and started Inflection with Hoffman, raising a ton of money (for the time) in the process. After failing to get any sort of early traction and undoubtedly needing to raise billions more to effectively compete, it was seemingly an easy call when Microsoft came calling with $650M.
Again, not for the company, but for Suleyman and his team (and for the investors, which, yes, also included Hoffman). Fast-forward to today, just over two years later and Microsoft is certainly more independent in AI. But they're not necessarily in a better place, as the many re-orgs and re-brandings of Copilot have showcased. Meanwhile, Suleyman himself was recently moved from spearheading that product and team to focusing on foundation models instead.
$650M is relatively small by today's AI standards, but it's not clear what Microsoft actually got out of it. The consumer version of Copilot made to look like Pi, Inflection's product, clearly hasn't worked. And the team is now led by someone else so...
A few months after the Inflection deal, that other Seattle-based tech company tried their hand at a "hackquisition". The deal for Adept was roughly half the size at $330M, but the idea was the same: get the co-founders on-board with Amazon's AI team. Most notably, David Luan was tasked with starting their "AGI Lab".
We're not even two years removed from that deal and yet 4 of the 5 Adept co-founders have already left Amazon. That includes Luan, who had previously worked at both Google and OpenAI, and left this Amazon past February. That team did launch one product, Nova Act, but it's not clear how useful that actually is to Amazon.
This deal, just a couple months later, was more under-the-radar than Adept, but may have actually been slightly larger. It has also been an even bigger headache, with a whistleblower saying that the left-behind Covariant company is just a "zombie" shadow company. Still, Amazon may have gotten some robots out of the deal even if the team seems to be pretty much gone.
We've been over this one.
The big one. While the nearly $15B deal technically structured a bit different than the other "hackquisitions" – namely in that Meta acquired a very specific 49% stake in Scale – the idea was still the same: bring AI talent on board to Meta, fast.
And specifically, Mark Zuckerberg zero'd in on Alexandr Wang as the guy who would reboot Meta's AI efforts, putting their Llama out to pasture, as it were. We all know what happened from here – mega offers led to mega chaos both around the entire AI ecosystem and within Meta itself. The latter is still playing out, with at least some believing that Wang's Scale culture and techniques are eating Meta alive from within.
At the same time, the new "Superintelligence" group has be able to build and ship their first models in record time. They're not yet frontier, but by all accounts they're good. So Zuckerberg, at least for now, has gotten the outputs he's wanted, though the inputs remain perhaps an issue. And Meta's stock has been hammered hard with investors still concerned about Meta's AI path going forward given the billions spent, with hundreds of billions more to come.
This is still more TBD – like the name of the sub-group Wang runs – but it's not trending particularly well if the moves really end up ripping Meta apart.
A strange deal even by "hackquisition" standards. Meta essentially bought the book of Nat Friedman's and Daniel Gross' fund so that they could bring those two on board to help with their AI efforts. But that also mean Gross would have to leave the AI startup where he was not only a co-founder, but the CEO: Safe Superintelligence. Ilya Sutskever did not seem happy about that, as you might imagine. Especially since Zuckerberg had tried to "hackquire" SSI, but Sutskever shot him down (though Meta did apparently invest).
Friedman's role has seemingly shifted a couple times with constant re-orgs and shuffles in the aforementioned chaotic Meta environment. Gross is now working on Meta's infrastructure build-out for AI.
This was a layered shitshow as OpenAI had originally agreed to acquire – as in actually acquire – Windsurf, then backed out (perhaps due to Microsoft). Google then stepped in to save the day – except the "hackquisition" nature of the deal led to a huge backlash because of the group being left behind, apparently without any sort of compensation. And so another AI startup, Cognition, stepped in to save the day from the already saved day. Fun times.
That brings us to today, while there have been a few other "hackquisitions", they're either too small or too new – most notably, NVIDIA's $20B mega deal to bring on board Groq talent, where yes, the IP license actually seems to matter – to know how well they'll play out. But it's pretty clear that the first crop didn't pan out as the "hackquirerers" would have hoped. At best, the situations are messy. At worst, they're shitshows – or really no-shows, with the talent now gone.
Shazeer is the biggest of those to date – again, in less than two years after a $2.7B deal. Can't wait to hear more about what happened there. But it could be as simple as these "hackquisitions" not aligning incentives very well...
1 And yes, there are reports that Shazeer was a headache for Google too internally in this second stint. ↩
2026-06-18 23:17:14
Snap's stock is down again today and it's now below an $8B market cap. Safe to say the market doesn't think Specs will ignite a turnaround. But they're also in a weird position where thanks to super-voting shares, the "normal" market mechanisms, don't really apply here. So is it crazy to think they should team up with PE and go private again?
Inklings is a newsletter featuring links and commentary from M.G. Siegler on timely topics found around the web.
🍎 “Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable." – It has come to this. Apple, the company which prides themselves in price stability for consumers is being forced to raise prices due to the chip crunch. Tim Cook clearly knows what a shock to the system it will be – even a $100 raise here or there will undoubtedly dent sales, and if the iPhone price increase needs to be substantial, watch out. It's really pretty wild that this is one of Cook's last moves as CEO. The operations master who has priced Apple products to perfection (from a margin-perspective) has been sideswiped by the market. And it's coming at the worst possible time given that the new Siri AI functionality relies on more RAM, which means Apple has to boost it across their devices to ensure the features will work well – so they can't really just offer options with less memory. A real sort of changing of the guard moment, not just for Apple (John Ternus will have to be the one on stage in September unveiling the new iPhone pricing) but also for the industry, as it's now the various AI players, led by NVIDIA, that commands inventory more so than Apple. Rolfe Winkler has a nice, quick overview video for his scoop too. [WSJ 🔒]
⚔️ Epic's 'Team Open' Plea – When he's not busy battling Apple in (and out of) court, Tim Sweeney returns to his day job running Epic Games which, App Store issues aside, is... in a bit of a precarious place. Why? Roblox. Sweeney is clearly terrified that it's eating Fortnite and making the case that it's taking the whole industry with it. So he's calling on everyone else to link arms and fight for an "open" ecosystem – which sounds less like an "open" alliance and more like an anti-Roblox alliance. Only tangentially stated is his hope/belief that Epic will power all of this via their Unreal Engine and/or – more ideally – banding together with Fortnite directly. He obviously still wants to make the Metaverse – his Metaverse – happen, and he sees it slipping away. Help us, Josh D'Amaro, you're our only hope? That is, unless maybe Microsoft wants to shed Mojang to merge Minecraft into the effort? [GamesBeat]
🔨 Siri to the Studs – Why does the new Siri work now whereas previous attempts the past 15 years or so have not? They had to completely rebuild it from scratch. So said team lead Mike Rockwell at the smaller, more technical event following the WWDC keynote last week. He noted that while they quickly built a new version last year that was on top of the existing Siri, it was "sort of incremental", so they scrapped it and completely rebuilt it, which obviously took longer. In other words, it sounds like Apple went through the exact same exercise that Amazon did with Alexa. This could not be less surprising to me as I've written about this very topic numerous times – that Apple and Amazon were in particularly bad spots when the LLM revolution came because of their previous success with Siri and Alexa, respectively. While those original systems seem comically rudimentary by today's AI standards, they were breakthroughs at the time and as such, gained millions of users – users neither company wanted to just abandon. But whereas both clearly thought you could build a bridge between the two technologies, you really couldn't. Even Google keeps seeing endless edge cases break as they update 'Assistant' with Gemini. Anyway, good to see Apple took the harder, needed steps, though they probably should have known they'd need to do that a few years ago... [9to5Mac]
"This is a hundred-year flood. I’ve never seen anything like it in any area in over 40 years."
– Tim Cook, in his interview linked to above about Apple's need to raise prices due to memory chip shortages.
Below, members of The Inner Ring will find thoughts on:
• AirPods with Cameras Set for Late 2027
• OpenAI Poaches Google's Hackquired Talent
• SpaceX's "Cheap" $60B Deal
• Anthropic's Breach... of Trust
• Meta's Ongoing Turmoil