Axios

A San Francisco jury on Friday found Elon Musk and Tesla not liable in a trial over a 2018 tweet in which Musk wrote that he had “funding secured” to take the electric carmaker private..

Why it matters: This is a victory for Musk, who has openly pushed back on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's argument that he broke the law (and imposed a number of sanctions on him).

Consumer-facing companies grow by delighting consumers and providing them with what they want. That's not how they make money, though. They make money by getting a critical mass of customers, locking them in, and then exploiting them. The delight goes away, but the profits roll in.

Why it matters: This cycle — as explicated by Cory Doctorow in Wired — has been seen at every social network, including TikTok, and at a huge number of other companies, too. They start out great, grow to a point at which their sheer size alone becomes self-fulfilling, and then pivot to extracting dividends from their corporate customers. 

Where it stands: Doctorow makes the case that TikTok has now reached that point. The days when it was referred to as "the only good social network" are long gone — the novelty has worn thin, to be replaced by formulaic thirst traps and professional influencers.

• What they're saying: "TikTok is only going to funnel free attention to the people it wants to entrap until they are entrapped," writes Doctorow.

Between the lines: The model here is Amazon, a company that used to put customers front and center but has now become, as John Herrman writes, simultaneously junkier and vastly more profitable.

Driving the news: Amazon's decision last month to abolish its hugely popular Amazon Smile program is instructive.

• Smile was a way that Amazon's customers could give money to charity instead of giving it to Amazon's network of affiliate marketers. If you went directly to the site rather than following a link from a site like Wirecutter, you could effectively pay some of that commission to a good cause of your choice.
• The official announcement says that "as a company, we will continue supporting a wide range of other programs." Which is to say, it's a pivot from customers directing a part of their own purchases, to Amazon directing a part of its own corporate profits.
• The message: We're stuck in Amazon's world, and Jeff Bezos is very thankful.

The bottom line: TikTok may not be a Chinese superweapon that is going to entertain an entire continent into submission. More realistically, its uncannily good algorithm is already being subsumed to capitalist imperatives. It might not be as fun as it used to be, but there's no sign anyone is leaving.

More than 500 tech companies have announced layoffs since July 2022. Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft will each cut more than 10,000 jobs, representing between 5 and 13% of their workforce, per tracking site Layoffs.fyi.

Details: Twitter has cut at least 50% of its workforce since Elon Musk bought the company. At the other end of the spectrum, Apple has so far avoided letting people go.

Activision Blizzard has agreed to pay $35 million to settle an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission over the company’s policies around workplace complaints and whistleblowers.

Why it matters: The settlement concludes one of several investigations the game-maker has faced in recent years involving alleged misconduct at the company.

A pro-Russian hacktivist group's low-level distributed denial-of-service attacks on U.S. critical infrastructure could be a precursor to more serious cyberattacks, health care and security officials warned this week.

Driving the news: Killnet, a politically motivated Russian hacking group, briefly overloaded and took down the websites of some U.S. health care organizations on Monday.

Protocol Labs is laying off 21% of its staff, or 89 people, the company announced today in a blog post.

Why it matters: Protocol Labs launched Filecoin, one of the biggest projects funded in the 2017 initial coin offering boom, raising approximately $257 million in cryptocurrency at the time (its own materials put the number at $206 million).

Alondra Nelson, who served as the first woman of color to lead the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy earlier in the Biden administration, is set to step down from her current post as a deputy director at OSTP on February 10, she told Axios exclusively in an interview.

Driving the news: Nelson is leaving the White House after two years to return to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J.

Electronic Arts' surprise announcement that it will soon shut down Apex Legends Mobile is an indicator that top console and PC publishers’ moves into mobile will not follow a straight line.

Driving the news: EA said on Tuesday that Apex Legends Mobile, launched in May 2022, will go offline May 1, 2023, despite abundant signs of the multiplayer shooting game's apparent success -- and EA’s zeal to expand all of its top series onto phones.

• EA also canceled the development of another major mobile spinoff, Battlefield Mobile, shutting the internal studio developing it as well.

Be smart: The underlying reasons don’t appear to involve game quality or a major struggle to attract a large number of players.

• Apple and Google had both recognized Apex Legends Mobile as their 2022 mobile game of the year.
• The game was downloaded 46 million times, according to the third-party tracking firm data.ai, generating $54 million in consumer spending.

What they're saying: EA CEO Andrew Wilson instead indicated in a call to investors that Apex Legends Mobile’s biggest problem was that it didn’t feel “deeply connected to the broader franchise.”

• Players of a mobile version of a big series want to either compete against their PC/console counterparts or at least feel like progressing in one version of the game benefits them in the other, he said.
• Apex Legends Mobile didn’t do that. The game was developed externally by Tencent’s Lightspeed & Quantum, ran its own seasons, and even has a slightly different roster, compared to the console/PC version of Apex Legends. Battlefield Mobile was set to operate in the same way.

The big picture: The success of Genshin Impact looms large. The 2020 adventure was an outlier in the West when it launched as a game for PlayStation 4 and mobile phones. It continues to thrive.

• EA’s about-face, which has shocked many players, can give EA more control of its Apex on mobile and deliver a more connected experience.
• The unified approach is also being adopted by EA rival Activision, which will soon launch Call of Duty Warzone Mobile with cross progression connecting it to console and PC Call of Duty games.

What’s next: The last two years have been stuffed with signs that the big console and PC publishers want to bring their top series into mobile.

• Much of that, such as Ubisoft’s foray with its Assassin’s Creed and Rainbow Six series, hasn’t yet come to pass.
• EA, meanwhile, is already shifting course. “We've learned a great deal,” Wilson said, "and have plans to reimagine a connected Apex Mobile experience in the future.”

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The ACLU is suing the intelligence community in an attempt to potentially expose abuses of a warrantless surveillance program, just as Congress debates its existence.

Driving the news: The ACLU filed a complaint Friday, a copy of which was shared first with Axios, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against the NSA, CIA, the DOJ and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to compel the release of records related to surveillance.

A group of YouTube contractors in Texas plans to strike later today in protest of rules requiring such workers — even those who have always worked remotely — to report to the office. The workers plan to walk out this morning, with a press conference set for noon, Axios has learned.

Why it matters: The move comes amid increased labor tensions at large tech companies, including Google, which owns YouTube. Some workers at Apple and Amazon have sought to unionize, as have some in the video game industry.

The world's biggest commercial aircraft makers seem increasingly convinced that autonomous passenger flight is a question of when, not if.

Where it stands: Flying today's high-tech passenger jets is often a matter of setting up and overseeing their autopilot and other automated systems — but we're not yet at a point where computer systems can entirely replace human pilots.

This week's earnings reports confirmed that Big Tech companies are taking a hit from a slowing economy — but also that they're still raking in tons of money.

The big picture: Tech companies have been on a decade-long growth jag, creating a generation of investors and workers who are now experiencing their first significant experience of a downturn, layoffs and retrenchment.

Amazon's reset isn't over.

State of play: The tech and logistics giant will stay on the cost-cutting course it started last year as the anomalous and massively beneficial economic conditions for its business created by the pandemic dissipate.