Hustle culture may be the norm at tech companies in the AI era, but the work will stop tomorrow at publishing platform Medium. Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine is giving the company’s employees permission to take the day off to participate in tomorrow’s nationwide general strike protesting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. Activists behind the general strike are calling for “no work, no school, and no shopping” amid a push to defund ICE, which has escalated raids in U.S. cities, killing several people, including two U.S. citizens earlier this month in Minneapolis. In a Slack message shared today with…

Apple exceeded expectations when it reported its quarterly earnings on Thursday, revealing that it made $143.8 billion in revenue for a 16% year-over-year increase. As analysts peppered CEO Tim Cook with softball questions during Apple’s earnings call, one analyst dared to ask the question that seemingly no one in Silicon Valley is willing to ask. “When I think about your AI initiatives, you know, it’s clear there are added costs associated with that… Many of your competitors have already integrated AI into their devices, and it’s just not clear yet what incremental monetization they’re seeing because of AI…,” started Morgan…

Ethos Technologies, a San Francisco-based provider of software for selling life insurance, debuted on the Nasdaq on Thursday. As one of the year’s first major tech IPOs, the insurtech platform is being closely watched as a bellwether for the 2026 listing cycle. The company and its selling shareholders raised approximately $200 million in the offering, selling 10.5 million shares at $19 each under the ticker symbol “LIFE” — one of the more on-the-nose choices in recent memory. The name fits. Ethos runs a three-sided platform where consumers buy policies online in 10 minutes without medical exams. It says over 10,000…

Apple had a great Q1, though iPhone sales were the real standout. The company reports that its signature device had its best quarter ever, thanks partially to a surge of sales in regions like China and India. “iPhone had its best-ever quarter driven by unprecedented demand, with all-time records across every geographic segment,” said CEO Tim Cook during the company’s earnings call Thursday. Apple’s earnings report shows the company sold $85 billion worth of iPhones during its first quarter, up from $69 billion in the same period last year. During the call’s Q&A portion, Cook revealed that China had seen…

Three of Elon Musk’s companies — SpaceX, xAI, and Tesla — are in play for a potential merger. While the talks appear to be in the early stage, according to reports from Bloomberg and Reuters, it could eventually lead to at least one company folding into SpaceX. Two scenarios are being hashed out. In one, SpaceX and Tesla would merge, per Bloomberg, citing unnamed insiders. In another, SpaceX and aXI (which already owns Musk’s social media platform X) would combine. According to reporting by Reuters, a merger between SpaceX and xAI could take place ahead of a planned SpaceX IPO…

OpenAI, a company already valued at $500 billion, has made it known that it’s on the hunt for another $100 billion in investment. Such a funding round could lead the company’s valuation to shoot up to a titanic $830 billion. The Wall Street Journal is now reporting that Amazon may contribute at least $50 billion of that record-breaking investment. Not much is known about the potential deal, although the Journal notes that Amazon’s CEO, Andy Jassy, is currently leading the negotiations with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. TechCrunch reached out to Amazon and OpenAI for comment. In its pursuit of additional…

Fintech firm Marquis told customers that it plans to seek compensation from its firewall provider after blaming the company for a breach that allowed hackers to steal its customers’ personal and financial data. In a memo shared with customers this week and seen by TechCrunch, Marquis said it believes that its August 2025 ransomware attack happened because the company’s firewall service provider SonicWall had its own data breach that exposed critical security information about its customers’ firewalls. That earlier breach of SonicWall allowed hackers to obtain credentials needed to launch a ransomware attack against Marquis, the memo said. Marquis said…

Microsoft delivered a solid earnings report on Wednesday with $81.3 billion in revenue for the quarter (up 17%), net income profits of $38.3 billion (up 21%) and a record breaking Microsoft cloud revenue of over $50 billion.  But the stock was getting pounded on Thursday as investors worried about how much the tech giant was spending to build out its cloud and questioned whether that investment would pay off. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says, yes  — and spent considerable time on the earnings call trying to make that point Microsoft has spent almost as much on capital expenditures in the…

After years of negotiations and false starts, Waymo is now allowed to operate a robotaxi service to and from the San Francisco International Airport (SFO). The Alphabet-owned company said in a blog post Thursday it will begin offering access to SFO to a select number of riders before offering it to all customers in the coming months. Pickups and drop-offs will occur at the SFO Rental Car Center, which is accessible via AirTrain. Waymo said it plans to serve additional airport locations in the future. Waymo’s SFO win comes as the company faces criticism and concerns about safety in some…

Google DeepMind is opening up access to Project Genie, its AI tool for creating interactive game worlds from text prompts or images.  Starting Thursday, Google AI Ultra subscribers in the U.S. can play around with the experimental research prototype, which is powered by a combination of Google’s latest world model Genie 3, its image generation model Nano Banana Pro, and Gemini.  Coming five months after Genie 3’s research preview, the move is part of a broader push to gather user feedback and training data as DeepMind races to develop more capable world models.  World models are AI systems that generate…