Top stories today:

1. TikTok ban, $95B foreign aid passes in Senate by 79-18
2. Tesla's net income -55% to $1.1B, as Elon promises cheaper car, robotaxis
3. Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses add multimodal AI, new designs
4. Perplexity raises $63M at $1.04B valuation

0. Data and calendar

1. TikTok ban, $95B foreign aid passes in Senate by 79-18, as Biden says he will sign it today

• Similar margin as in the House, where the TikTok ban, $61B in Ukraine aid, $26B in Israel/Gaza aid, and $8B in Indo-Pacific aid was voted on separately.

• 360 days for ByteDance to divest TikTok, or else face a ban. (90 days of which are subject to a presidential waiver.)

• Sanctions on Iran's oil sector were also included in the bill.

2. Tesla's revenue -13% to $17.4B, net income -55% to $1.1B, as Elon promises cheaper car, robotaxis

• As soon as this year, from late-2025 previously: goal to start production of cheaper car.

  • Comes after media reports that Tesla was canceling the project, which highlights that reported rumors are not necessarily true.

• Late 2024: Tesla's Optimus robot to start performing “useful tasks,” said Elon.

Tesla also previewed its robotaxi ride-hailing app, promised for Aug. 8

4. Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses add multimodal AI, new designs

• Reviews of the AI are mixed, with the glasses giving confidently wrong information some of the time, as most AIs today do.

• Multimodal AI available in U.S. and Canada in beta.

• Sharing your view on a video call with WhatsApp and Messenger is another new feature.

6. Perplexity raises $63M at $1.04B valuation, reportedly exploring new $250M+ raise at $2.5-3.0B

• Existing investors NEA and IVP are looking to lead the new round.

• 169M queries/mo being served by Perplexity.

• Perplexity Enterprise Pro is their new $40/mo service that includes the advanced version of their answer engine and access to GPT-4 Turbo, Claude 3 Opus, and other top models.

7. 44.6% federal capital gains tax proposed by Biden, highest since inception in 1922

8. Pre-seed rounds see valuations caps flat in Q1, as SAFEs dominate

Priced equity only becomes more popular than SAFEs at the $2M-$3M mark

9. Interesting videos, posts, and memes

10. Other headlines

AI

• OpenAI introduces more enterprise features for API customers.

• SK Hynix plans new $15B memory chip complex in South Korea.

• China's Pony.ai gets approval for NYSE listing.

• China's SenseTime stock +36% after SenseNova 5.0 AI reveal.

Tech

• Skild, robotics software startup, raises $300M at $1.5B valuation.

• Vision Pro shipments cut by Apple to 400K-450K units.

• X TV app confirmed by Linda Yaccarino.

• Spotify's revenue +20% to $3.8B as paid subscribers +14% to 239M.

• Google delays end of 3rd-party cookies on Chrome to “early next year.”

• iPad event announced for May 7: OLED iPads expected.

• IBM nears acquisition of cloud software provider Hashicorp.

Tech & law

• EU approves right-to-repair bill by 584-3.

Biotech

• Xaira, AI for drug discovery led by Stanford's ex-president, raises $1B.

• Ochre unveils $1B partnership with Boehringer Ingelheim on liver disease.

Business

• China tells brokers to limit exposure to “snowball” derivatives.

• Taylor Swift's new album streamed record 300M times in 1st day on Spotify.

Crypto

• CZ deserves 3 years in prison: DOJ.

• Terraform Labs, Kwon ought to receive $5.3B in fines: SEC.

• Block announces finished development of 3nm Bitcoin mining chip.

• Jailed Binance exec's bail hearing in Nigeria postponed until May 17.

• Ethereum ETF decision delayed once again by SEC.

U.S. politics

• Noncompete contracts effectively banned by FTC.

• Mandatory overtime pay: new rule extends it to ~4M salaried workers.

• Trump's NY criminal trial sees testimony of tabloid publisher David Pecker.

World

• Rafah invasion "very soon” after mass evacuation: IDF.

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