Welcome to Cautious Optimism, a newsletter on tech, business and power.
Thursday. The United States is gearing up to remit tax revenue derived from tariffs to farmers impacted by China moving away from American soybeans. In a sense, the move is reasonable. Nations want a reasonably strong agricultural sector, and letting the businesses that comprise that sector fail would be unpleasant. But because the soybean issue was caused by the same tariffs that might partially repay farmers impacted, the move is an excellent example of smart-dumb thinking. Sure, as a band-aid goes, the move makes some sense. But sans tariffs, farmers could have sold their crops to China freely (China has responded to American tariffs by buying more crops from Brazil, and Argentina, which we’re also bailing out), and the larger economy wouldn’t have had to deal with sharply higher import taxes.
Anyway, the government is still shut down and, naturally, the Nasdaq is up in early trading. Meanwhile, Americans are howling about the price of groceries. To work! — Alex
📈 Trending Up: Antisemitic violence … American academic freedom … AMD-Intel ties? … alternate browsers … a two telecom+internet world … global power demand … $600M deals … slop defense … Better Tomorrow Ventures …
Quote of the Day: “We have deep respect for the financial system’s ability to conceal leverage in unexpected places, especially when it is in the grip of a ‘next big thing’ narrative.”
📉 Trending Down: The FBI … traditional asset management … US GDP … bullying … US-India relations … trade freedom in Europe … peace in Gaza … humans at the wheel …
Things That Matter
Are we still doing copyright? OpenAI’s new Sora app — discussion from TWiST yesterday here — is impressive and fun. But it also appears to generate quite a lot of copyright-protected IP. Here’s Pikachu at D Day, for example. 404 Media notes that you canh also make things like Nazi SpongBob characters. In short, it appears that the Sora 2 model is leaking its training data, and I am completely unsure if the product is IP-compliant or not. Jason thinks not. OpenAI’s lawyers, buoyed by the lack of pain caused by its Studio Ghibli moment earlier this year, appear unconcerned.
Over in India, Google is in the soup after “Bollywood stars [asked] judges to protect their voice and persona in the era of artificial intelligence,” including on YouTube.
Meanwhile, OpenAI wrapped its $6.6 billion tender offer, allowing employees to sell shares in the company at a $500 billion valuation. Given OpenAI’s cash burn, lowering external demand (by raising supply) is an interesting approach to fundraising.
Can’t kill the portal: Having both worked for AOL (which at one point owned TechCrunch), and later for Yahoo (which at one point owned TechCrunch), I can confirm that portals are hard to kill. The traffic that Yahoo and AOL receive is material. Hell, Yahoo currently owns the 8th, 13th, and 17th most trafficed websites per SEMRush. AOL still ranks number 201, which implies a hefty slug of daily traffic.
Which is why it may be worth $1.4 billion to Bending Spoons, the Italian IAC-lookalike which has also purchased Evernote (2022), Meetup (2024), and Vimeo (2025). Presumably, the Spoons organization intends to curtail costs and ride out a tasty cash flow until the wheels fall off the portal world. Which probably won’t happen for years yet. MSN is the 20th most visited website in the world, after all.
DeepL preps for IPO: German AI translation service is considering a US IPO at a valuation of as much as $5 billion, Bloomberg reports. DeepL reportedly reached a $50 million annual run rate in 2022, and in 2023 TechCrunch reported that the company said that it had “more than 1000,000 businesses and organizations using its tools.”
A European company listing in the United States is normal; American capital markets remain the best place to list growth assets.
Recent complaints from European technologists at the exit of the continent’s early winners like Sana to American tech shops underscore that many across the pond want to keep their tech leaders indie. Going public is a good way to do just that.
Satya Nadella dropping some work tasks is brilliant: Early-stage startups often thrive on founder-led sales, a model under which the corporate principal takes on direct responsibility for sales. Founders are a persuasive type, and selling as the CEO or similar can help get deals done. But after at time, founders and the c-suite tend to get a bit less in the weeds on sales. They have other tasks.
So my mind did not explode when Microsoft CEO — and early honcho in its now tectonic Azure business — Satya Nadella announced that he was shifting commercial responsibilities to internal executive Judson Althoff, who will now hold the CEO title for Microsoft’s commercial business. (Having layered CEOs — think OpenAI with Fidji taking on the CEO of Applications role under Sam Altman — is better than having co-CEOs.)
Nadella isn’t angling to do less work. Instead: