Yahoo!: The digital dinosaur has a lot of life left in it

8/29/23 8:00PM

A dotcom dinosaur reborn

‍Yahoo, an early internet trailblazer, yesterday announced its acquisition of venture capital-focused media startup StrictlyVC to bolster its tech news site, TechCrunch. The deal adds to Yahoo's recent shopping spree, following its acquisitions of the social investing platform CommonStock earlier this month, sports betting app Wagr in April, and “unbiased news platform”, TheFactual, last year.

Yahoo was big tech before big tech was the size of countries. In 1994, the company's founders launched "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" — the first version of a directory and web portal that, as Yahoo, would go on to offer search, email, shopping, news and more, propelling the company’s valuation to $125bn during the peak of the dotcom bubble.

Of course, Yahoo stumbled soon after, as fierce competition — particularly from Google and nascent social media sites — ate into at its user base. As the wave of “web 2.0” washed over the world, Yahoo was increasingly left behind. In 2013, the company acquired Tumblr for $1.1bn — which didn’t work out — and eventually, Yahoo itself was bought by Verizon for $4.5bn.

‍Under new management

‍Since then, Yahoo has changed hands again, and today is owned by private equity giant Apollo after a deal in 2021. Now, the company wants to reinvent itself. Management are looking to get competitive again in the world of search, leveraging the core profitability of its legacy businesses, and the 4 billion (!) visits that Yahoo.com still reportedly receives every month.

Jon Keegan22h

FT: Meta considering “tens of billions” in new capital to fund AI

Just days after Google announced a monster $85 billion upsized equity raise, the extremely profitable Meta is seeking to sell “tens of billions of dollars” in stock, according to a new report from the Financial Times.

Meta is planning on spending between $125 billion and $145 billion on AI capital expenditure this year alone.

Shares dropped more than 5% on the news.

Meta weighs big equity raising after blockbuster Google deal

Rani Molla

6/5/26

Meta is supercharging its subscription businesses

The free-app giant never really cared about recurring revenue. Now, it’s launching paid plans for all sorts of stuff.

Jon Keegan6/5/26

FT: Anthropic staff helping the NSA use Mythos for offensive cyberattacks

Anthropic’s Mythos AI model was deemed too dangerous to release to the public, with the company citing its ability to orchestrate novel cyberattacks.

And that’s just what the National Security Agency is doing, with the help of Anthropic staff embedded at the agency, according to a report from the Financial Times.

Only a small number of companies and US allies have been given access to the advanced model, which means America’s adversaries have not had the chance to shore up their defenses against the AI model’s new offensive capabilities.

The arrangement is especially unusual as the Pentagon has deemed Anthropic’s AI a national security supply chain risk — effectively blacklisting it for defense work — in response to the company’s refusal to allow its technology to be used for any legal application, which could include autonomous killing or mass surveillance. Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the determination.

US National Security Agency using Anthropic’s Mythos for cyber attacks

Rani Molla6/5/26

Longtime Tesla bear JPMorgan upgraded Tesla and raised its price target to $475 from $145

For more than a decade, JPMorgan was Wall Street’s most stubborn Tesla skeptic, anchored by auto analyst Ryan Brinkman’s strict focus on traditional car fundamentals and near-term delivery numbers.

But JPM recently handed coverage of the stock to a new analyst, Rajat Gupta, who is throwing that playbook out the window. In a note Friday, the firm upgraded Tesla to “neutral” from “underweight” and raised its price target 228% to $475 from $145. (The analyst consensus on FactSet is $403.) Instead of focusing on the company’s struggling vehicle business, the new analyst is orienting himself more toward Tesla’s idea of the future, now modeling Tesla’s physical AI and robotaxi fleets all the way out to the year 2040.

Here are the main reasons for the capitulation:

Looking past the car lot: Gupta argues that Tesla “is at the forefront of physical AI, entering uncharted TAMs” and therefore “deserves the benefit of the doubt to be valued on LT earnings potential” rather than near-term speed bumps.
Unmatched vertical integration: Tesla’s control over everything from battery cells to custom silicon gives it a massive moat. JPM notes this starting point advantage is “unmatched at an industrial level scale” and “still somewhat under-appreciated and misunderstood.”
The AWS flywheel effect: Deploying Optimus robots inside its own factories “should not only lower COGS for the base automotive business, but more importantly, help validate the product at an industrial scale.” Gupta called it “a classic flywheel effect, somewhat analogous to AWS and Kiva at AMZN.”

For Tesla bulls who have argued for years that this is an AI company and not a carmaker, JPM’s sudden $3.9 trillion valuation model is the ultimate validation.

Anthropic ponders self-improving AI

Anthropic says Claude already writes 80% of its code. A new post asks what happens when the models can improve themselves — and whether anyone could stop them.