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Not to get all GrumpyManYellsAtCloud.gif, but I’m getting pretty tired of the myth of the dropped-out-of-college founders. Investors — and the broader ecosystem — have known for a long time that while there are some high-profile outliers, it’s much easier to build a startup if you have a fat Rolodex, some experience, and perhaps a few failures under your belt. I know Hollywood doesn’t think it’s nearly as good of a story, but . . . perhaps it’d be good to balance things out a little on that front.
Apropos even more meddling: It seems that even very experienced founders get things pretty wrong from time to time, too — Elmo isn’t done running Twitter into the ground, it seems. This week, the burning wreckage of a social media site officially changed its logo to X. That has had some, er, curious side effects, including a lot of rebranding and renaming. Uniting the themes of smut and social media, Twitter Videos has so far resisted to rename itself, and one social media account (NSFW) seems to hint at why.
More AI. Always more AI
Image Credits: nadia_bormotova / Getty Images
I know, it seems like there’s always an AI section in Startups Weekly at the moment. Don’t blame me — blame the flamin’ hot news coming out of that vertical at the moment.
Meanwhile, OpenAI just released a neat feature that introduces customized instructions for ChatGPT. Instead of having to type “write me a three-section newsletter in the style of TechCrunch’s Startups Weekly, and smatter in some really dumb jokes,” you can configure that as the default behavior. Writing newsletters is going to be so quick in the future, I swear. (Just kidding: I’ve tried. ChatGPT’s attempts at writing this thing were as dull as dishwater. My job is safe for another week or two.)
I’m sure that wasn’t a stressful job: After just 18 months in the job, OpenAI’s head of trust and safety Dave Willner steps down. The company’s CTO Mira Murati will manage the team on an interim basis while they find a replacement.
Let’s translate this from corporate-ese into bot-speak: A startup that’s building tools to help prepare enterprise data to get gobbled up into large language models, Unstructured raises $25 million.
The art of changing your mind
Image Credits: Images by Christina Kilgour / Getty Images
While on the topic of replacements — Sequoia Capital’s Michael Moritz moves on, almost 40 years after he joined the influential venture fund. He’s going to continue board work with a handful of companies but is planning to hand over most of the workload to other Sequoia partners.
Companies are still going public. Just not startups: It’s been a drought in the tech startup IPO space, but on TC+, Alex crunched the numbers and realized that there’s still a lot of activity — and it’s making startups look silly as hell.
Meanwhile, peeking at Tesla’s business fundamentals, Rebecca reminds us that the company is an automaker, not a tech company — and that its margins look a lot more like Ford than, say, Salesforce.
In addition to some of the big hitters sprinkled throughout above, here are some of our mustn’t-miss stories for the week:
Maybe it’s just taking a nap?: I argued that VR as a category is dead and failed to find a killer app. AR is picking up the mantle, but we’ll see if it can do better.
I dunno, maybe hide better?: Zack reports that North Korean hackers targeting JumpCloud may have forgotten to mask their IP addresses properly, researchers say.
Buy it, then kill it: Aria reports that SpaceX has made only one acquisition to date (that we are aware of), but Swarm Technologies is halting new device sales. It seems that the acquisition may have been an aqui-hire, as Swarm’s founders are finding senior positions across SpaceX.
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New research published Thursday offers an unprecedented dive into political behavior across Facebook and Instagram — two major online hubs where people express and engage with their political beliefs. The studies, published by an interdisciplinary set of researchers working in tandem with internal groups at Meta, encompasses four papers published in Science and Nature examining behavior on both platforms around the time of the 2020 U.S. election.
The papers — only the first wave of many to be published in the coming months — grew out of what’s known as the 2020 Facebook and Instagram Election Study (FIES), an unusual collaboration between Meta and the scientific research community. On the academic side, the project was spearheaded by University of Texas Professor Talia Jomini Stroud of the school’s Center for Media Engagement, and NYU’s Professor Joshua A. Tucker, who serves as co-director of its Center for Social Media and Politics.
The findings are myriad and complex.
In one study on Facebook’s ideological echo chambers, researchers sought insight about the extent to which the platform’s users were exposed only to content that they were politically aligned with. “Our analyses highlight that Facebook, as a social and informational setting, is substantially segregated ideologically—far more than previous research on internet news consumption based on browsing behavior has found,” the researchers wrote.
At least two very interesting specific findings emerged out of the data. First, the researchers found that content posted in Facebook Groups and Pages displayed much more “ideological segregation” compared to content posted by users’ friends. “Pages and Groups contribute much more to segregation and audience polarization than users,” the researchers wrote.
That might be intuitive, but both Groups and Pages have historically played a massive role in distributing misinformation and helping like-minded users rally around dangerous shared interests, including QAnon, anti-government militias (like the Proud Boys, who relied on Facebook for recruitment) and potentially life-threatening health conspiracies. Misinformation and extremism experts have long raised concerns about the role of the two Facebook products in political polarization and sowing conspiracies.
“Our results uncover the influence that two key affordances of Facebook—Pages and Groups—have in shaping the online information environment,” the researchers wrote. “Pages and Groups benefit from the easy reuse of content from established producers of political news and provide a curation mechanism by which ideologically consistent content from a wide variety of sources can be redistributed.”
That study also found a major asymmetry between liberal and conservative political content on Facebook. The researchers found that a “far larger” share of conservative Facebook news content was determined to be false by Meta’s third-party fact-checking system, a result that demonstrates how conservative Facebook users are exposed to far more online political misinformation compared to their left-leaning counterparts.
“… Misinformation shared by Pages and Groups has audiences that are more homogeneous and completely concentrated on the right,” the researchers wrote.
In a different experiment conducted with Meta’s cooperation, participants on Facebook and Instagram saw their algorithmic feeds replaced with a reverse chronological feed — often the rallying cry of those fed up with social media’s endless scrolling and addictive designs. The experience didn’t actually move the needle on the how the users felt about politics, how politically engaged they were offline or how much knowledge they wound up having about politics.
In that experiment, there was one major change for users who were given the reverse chronological feed. “We found that users in the Chronological Feed group spent dramatically less time on Facebook and Instagram,” the authors wrote, a result that underlines how Meta juices engagement — and encourages addictive behavioral tendencies — by mixing content in an algorithmic jumble.
These findings are just a sample of the current results, and a fraction of what’s to come in future papers. Meta has been spinning the results across the new studies as a win — a view that flattens complex findings into what is essentially a publicity stunt. Regardless of Meta’s interpretation of the results and the admittedly odd arrangement between the researchers and the company, this data forms an essential foundation for future social media research.
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Leaders from the AI research world appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee to discuss and answer questions about the nascent technology. Their broadly unanimous opinions generally fell into two categories: we need to act soon, but with a light touch — risking AI abuse if we don’t move forward, or a hamstrung industry if we rush it.
The panel of experts at today’s hearing included Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei, UC Berkeley’s Stuart Russell and longtime AI researcher Yoshua Bengio.
The two-hour hearing was largely free of the acrimony and grandstanding one sees more often in House hearings, though not entirely so. You can watch the whole thing here, but I’ve distilled each speaker’s main points below.
Dario Amodei
What can we do now? (Each expert was first asked what they think are the most important short-term steps.)
1. Secure the supply chain. There are bottlenecks and vulnerabilities in the hardware we rely on to research and provide AI, and some are at risk due to geopolitical factors (e.g. TSMC in Taiwan) and IP or safety issues.
2. Create a testing and auditing process like what we have for vehicles and electronics. And develop a “rigorous battery of safety tests.” He noted, however, that the science for establishing these things is “in its infancy.” Risks and dangers must be defined in order to develop standards, and those standards need strong enforcement.
He compared the AI industry now to airplanes a few years after the Wright brothers flew. There is an obvious need for regulation, but it needs to be a living, adaptive regulator that can respond to new developments.
Of the immediate risks, he highlighted misinformation, deepfakes and propaganda during an election season as being most worrisome.
Amodei managed not to bite at Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R-MO) bait regarding Google investing in Anthropic and how adding Anthropic’s models to Google’s attention business could be disastrous. Amodei demurred, perhaps allowing the obvious fact that Google is developing its own such models speak for itself.
1. Limit who has access to large-scale AI models and create incentives for security and safety.
2. Alignment: Ensure models act as intended.
3. Track raw power and who has access to the scale of hardware needed to produce these models.
Bengio repeatedly emphasized the need to fund AI safety research at a global scale. We don’t really know what we’re doing, he said, and in order to perform things like independent audits of AI capabilities and alignment, we need not just more knowledge but extensive cooperation (rather than competition) between nations.
He suggested that social media accounts should be “restricted to actual human beings that have identified themselves, ideally in person.” This is in all likelihood a total non-starter, for reasons we’ve observed for many years.
Though right now there is a focus on larger, well-resourced organizations, he pointed out that pre-trained large models can easily be fine-tuned. Bad actors don’t need a giant data center or really even a lot of expertise to cause real damage.
In his closing remarks, he said that the U.S. and other countries need to focus on creating a single regulatory entity each in order to better coordinate and avoid bureaucratic slowdown.
1. Create an absolute right to know if one is interacting with a person or a machine.
2. Outlaw algorithms that can decide to kill human beings, at any scale.
3. Mandate a kill switch if AI systems break into other computers or replicate themselves.
4. Require systems that break rules to be withdrawn from the market, like an involuntary recall.
His idea of the most pressing risk is “external impact campaigns” using personalized AI. As he put it:
We can present to the system a great deal of information about an individual, everything they’ve ever written or published on Twitter or Facebook… train the system, and ask it to generate a disinformation campaign particularly for that person. And we can do that for a million people before lunch. That has a far greater effect than spamming and broadcasting of false info that is not tailored to the individual.
Russell and the others agreed that while there is lots of interesting activity around labeling, watermarking and detecting AI, these efforts are fragmented and rudimentary. In other words, don’t expect much — and certainly not in time for the election, which the Committee was asking about.
He pointed out that the amount of money going to AI startups is on the order of 10 billion per month, though he did not cite his source on this number. Professor Russell is well-informed, but seems to have a penchant for eye-popping numbers, like AI’s “cash value of at least 14 quadrillion dollars.” At any rate, even a few billion per month would put it well beyond what the U.S. spends on a dozen fields of basic research through the National Science Foundations, let alone AI safety. Open up the purse strings, he all but said.
Asked about China, he noted that the country’s expertise generally in AI has been “slightly overstated” and that “they have a pretty good academic sector that they’re in the process of ruining.” Their copycat LLMs are no threat to the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic, but China is predictably well ahead in terms of surveillance, such as voice and gait identification.
In their concluding remarks of what steps should be taken first, all three pointed to, essentially, investing in basic research so that the necessary testing, auditing and enforcement schemes proposed will be based on rigorous science and not outdated or industry-suggested ideas.
Sen. Blumenthal (D-CT) responded that this hearing was intended to help inform the creation of a government body that can move quickly, “because we have no time to waste.”
“I don’t know who the Prometheus is on AI,” he said, “but I know we have a lot of work to make that the fire here is used productively.”
And presumably also to make sure said Prometheus doesn’t end up on a mountainside with feds picking at his liver.
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Welcome back to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B. Your usual host Kirsten Korosec is still away, so you have me for one more week. Let’s jump in.
U.S. policymakers and agencies are looking for ways to regulate autonomous vehicles on a larger scale.
First, there’s the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which plans to announce a new rule-making in September that could benefit AV companies like Cruise and Zoox, both of which have plans to launch purpose-built robotaxis that don’t have steering wheels or pedals.
General Motors, which owns Cruise, submitted a petition in February 2022 to NHTSA to deploy up to 2,500 of the Cruise Origins annually without human controls and may soon have an answer.
At a congressional level, lawmakers will host a hearing on July 26 aimed at reviving long-delayed legislation on the safe and regulated adoption of self-driving cars. The panel will consider separate draft legislation from Representative Bob Latta (R-OH) and Representative Debbie Dingell (D-MI).
The hearing will be convened by a House subcommittee titled “Self-Driving Vehicle Legislative Framework: Enhancing Safety, Improving Lives and Mobility, and Beating China.” That last bit is important. American industry for decades has used the threat of some other great superpower gaining the upper hand as a narrative to drive forward technological progress, for better or worse.
Before we dive in, a quick highlight of my TechCrunch+ story this week that looks into Tesla’s stock price, which has dropped about 10% since the company reported Q2 earnings (more on that below), and why it’s priced as a tech company when its margins scream automaker.
Some more grim news from VanMoof as the e-bike darling that was venture backed to the tune of $189.1 million filed for bankruptcy. VanMoof is considering a third-party sale so that its activities can continue. Those activities being the highly customized parts and the unique digital unlock key that’s connected to VanMoof’s servers. We reported that Cowboy came up with an app to let VanMoof owners retail digital keys to their bikes, but the access is limited.
TechCrunch how the company managed to go bankrupt in a booming e-bike market. One industry insider told us that VanMoof spent big on marketing and over-ordering and neglected to think about supply chain and unit costs.
As TC’s Ingrid Lunden pointed out: “If the unit economics of the bikes never worked out, and an app can be built in a day to unlock those bikes that are in the market already, why would anyone want to assume the assets of the failed startup?”
In other news…
Bird is officially back in compliance with the NYSE.
London-based bike-share HumanForest has launched a new feature, Forest Parcel, to provide a zero-emission, on-demand parcel-delivery service.
Taur, the front-facing scooter manufacturer, has launched its second model, the Taur II, on Kickstarter. The scooter has up to 40 miles of range.
Taur also started a campaign to challenge the U.K. government on their stance on owned scooters, which are still illegal to ride on public roads. There are, however, shared scooter pilots, which often serve to sway government and public opinion away from scooters as a viable transportation option due to the behavior of renters and potential for street clutter. The company said it would reimburse the fines of any Taur customer who is fined by the police for riding on U.K. roads. And if the scooter is confiscated, Taur will replace it free of charge.
Commsignia launched a V2X device for e-bikes and other micromobility vehicles that broadcasts messages about the cyclist’s position and direction from other road users. It also receives messages from other vehicles and alerts the rider to potential hazards.
Deal of the week
Autonomous vehicle company Aurora Innovation has sold $820 million worth of stock. About $220 million came from a public offering that priced the stock at $3 per share, and the remaining $600 million came from a concurrent private offering of stock priced at $2.70.
Aurora, a pre-revenue company building frontier technology, has been spending a pretty penny in its pursuit of commercializing self-driving trucks by the end of 2024. In 2022, the company lost about $1.7 billion.
Aurora hasn’t been shy about its need to raise more funds in order to make it to commercialization and beyond. The company said it has about $785 million in cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments as of June 30, 2023. This infusion of capital gives Aurora another $1.6 billion to play around with. The company is hoping the funds will take it “well into 2025.”
Other deals that got my attention…
Alpha Grid, a San Francisco–based EV charging deployment optimization startup, raised a $2.5 million pre-seed led by Asymmetric Capital Partners. Twine Ventures also participated.
Lithium-ion battery recycling company Aqua Metals has entered into a strategic partnership with Yulho, a battery materials company based in South Korea. The partnership includes a $5 million equity investment from Yulho into Aqua.
Berlin-based Cycle has secured $11.3 million in Series A funding to expand its e-bike subscription model for the last-mile delivery industry. The funds will be used to expand geographically throughout Europe, including the U.K.; bring on new customers in parcel and mail logistics; and grow its fleet size.
EVgo and its eXtend partners received $13.8 million in funding from Ohio’s DOT to deploy 20 fast-charging stations.
Farizon, Geely’s electric and hybrid truck unit, has raised $600 million to expand outside of China.
Fortescue Future Industries, a global green energy and metals company, will acquire EV truck maker Nikola’s Phoenix Hydrogen Hub project for $24 million.
Singapore’s ride-hailing and food delivery company Grab, via its car rental unit Grab Rentals, will acquireTrans-Cab, the city-state’s third-largest taxi operator. The terms weren’t disclosed, but the acquisition size is estimated at around $75 million.
New York–based supply chain and visibility startup Leverage raised $7 million in a round led by Chicago Ventures.
Auto supplier Magna is investing a whopping $790 million to build three new supplier facilities in West Tennessee, including the first two onsite at Ford’s BlueOval City.
Indonesia EV maker Maka Motors raised $37.6 million in seed funding to mass produce its two-wheeled EVs. Maka will start deploying its first pilot EVs this month and is aiming for volume production in late 2024.
Redwood Materials, the battery recycling startup founded by Tesla co-founder J.B. Straubel, is reportedly in talks to raise $700 million at a $5 billion valuation. The company would not confirm the reports.
Hong Kong–based delivery robot startup Rice Robotics raised $7 million in additional seed funding from Alibaba Entrepreneurs Fund, Soul Capital, Audacy Ventures and others.
Truckstop was acquired by FreightFriend, a platform for capacity and freight management tools.
Notable news and other tidbits
ADAS
Mobileye has introduced a vision-only speed assist solution for automakers. The camera-based Intelligent Speed Assist is launching in production vehicles this year and lets cars sense speed limits without needing to rely on third-party map and GPS data.
Autonomous vehicles
Cruise’s full-page ad in several newspapers calling humans terrible drivers got the attention of the former NHTSA head. “Using the pain and suffering of those deaths for self-promotion of an unproven and unsafe product is unscrupulous,” said Joan Claybrook.
Another Cruise-related issue. The California Public Utilities Commission — the agency that has the power to give Cruise and Waymo final sign-off on their plans to expand commercial robotaxi services across San Francisco 24/7 — will question the two companies over how they will deal with robotaxis malfunctioning and blocking access from first responders. The July 31 meeting, which will also hear from city agencies that are opposed to the expansion, might change the terms of the permits.
Kodiak Robotics is working with Drivewyze to launch a weigh station program for self-driving trucks on Texas interstates. The goal is to address how trucks will handle weigh station inspections without a driver present to facilitate the process.
Earnings
Online used car retailer Carvana reported higher-than-expected earnings of $2.96 billion in Q2, with adjusted EBITDA totaling $155 million. The company sold 76,530 cars during the quarter, which was slightly fewer than expected by analysts.
Carvana also announced it will reduce its outstanding debt by over $1.2 billion by exchanging existing unsecured debt with new notes. The company might also sell up to $350 million in new stock as part of the restructure.
The combined news of healthy earnings and debt exchange deal caused Carvana’s stock to spike Wednesday as high as $60.90. The company’s stock has come back down to earth somewhat, settling at around $47 Thursday at market close.
Tesla hit $25 billion in revenue in the second quarter, which just beat Wall Street estimates. Despite the record revenue, Tesla’s stock started to slide in after-hours and the next day by as much as 10%. That was likely a response to Tesla’s continued hit to automotive gross margins after a series of price cuts. Margins slid to around 18%, which is down from the 25% Tesla was rocking a year ago.
Ford has slashed the price of its F-150 Lightning, in some trims by as much as $10,000. The automaker cited manufacturing efficiencies as the cause of the lower price.
Ford is also being questioned by House Republicans over its battery cell technology deal with China’s CATL in its upcoming $3.5 billion battery cell plant in Michigan.
General Motors is experiencing downtime at its CAMI plant in Canada (which builds the BrightDrop commercial EVs) in order to manage parts-availability issues. Regular operations will resume July 31, and it won’t affect GM’s overall EV production targets in North America — 50,000 in the first half and 100,000 in the second.
Remember the Kia Boys? The people who had been following a viral trend on TikTok to steal Kias using a USB cord? A 14-year-old Texas boy has been linked to nearly 40 thefts.
The NHTSA has opened up its third special investigation into a Tesla crash this year. This is related to a fatal crash involving a 2018 Model 3 and connected to the vehicle’s Autopilot system.
Nissan has joined the ranks of automakers that have adopted Tesla’s NACS charging standard for its Ariya and future EV models.
Rivian can move ahead with its EV facility production plans in Georgia after the state’s Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to the validity of about $700 million in tax breaks the EV startup expects to receive.
Stellantis has signed $11.2 billion worth of contracts through 2030 to secure semiconductors needed for its EVs and high-performance computing functions.
India’s Tata Motors plans to build a 40 GWh battery cell gigafactory in the United Kingdom. The over $5.16 billion investment will deliver batteries for JLR and Tata Motors, with supplies beginning in 2026.
Vietnam’s VinFast will hold a groundbreaking ceremony at its electric vehicle factory in North Carolina on July 28. The company expects to invest $4 billion in the factory, which is designed to reach a capacity of 150,000 vehicles per year.
Volkswagen’s Knoxville Innovation Hub has published research breakthroughs to increase EV range and recycle vehicle materials, the company said. These include a wireless EV charging concept.
TeslaCrunch
It was another big week of Tesla news, especially with the automaker kicking off earnings season. Let’s dive in.
During Tesla’s Q2 earnings call, Elon Musk confirmed that Tesla was in talks with a major OEM to license its FSD software and hardware out to them. FSD (“full self-driving”) is Tesla’s advanced driver assistance system that is NOT fully autonomous, despite the tech’s confusing name. Musk also said that for Q3 only, Tesla owners looking to upgrade to newer models could transfer their FSD over.
Earlier in the week, Tesla announced that drivers with home solar and a Powerwall charger now have an in-app option to exclusively charge up their vehicle via excess solar energy.
The automaker also showed off its first Cybertruck built at Giga Texas over the weekend, to much fanfare but few specifics. We’re still wondering about production capacity and price, which were not addressed during the earnings call.
Outside the U.S., Tesla is hoping to expand its German factory, but residents want assurances on water use, biodiversity protection and environmental impact.
Also, Tesla directors, including Musk, will have to pay $735 million back to the company to settle claims from shareholders that they excessively overpaid themselves. As part of the deal, the directors also agreed not to receive compensation for 2021, 2022 and 2023.
Miscellaneous
ByteDance’s Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok) is doing food delivery now? So food delivery giant Meituan decided to add more video to its app in kind.
Policymakers have introduced a bill that would increase fuel taxes for private jet travel from the current $0.22 to $1.95 per gallon, and remove existing fuel tax exemptions for logging and oil or gas exploration. The idea is that if the rich want to pollute our skies, they can pay extra. The revenue generated by the so-called FATCAT Act would be transferred to a fund that would support air monitoring for environmental justice communities.
Spotify is bringing a new experience to Teslas that will make displaying content bolder and more accessible. Drivers can take advantage of features like QR codes for easy log-in, access to audiobooks, and one-touch jump to artists and album pages.
Uber Freight has laid off almost 50 brokerage employees.
People
EVTOL startup Archer has brought on Nikhil Goel, co-founder of Uber Elevate, as the company’s chief commercial officer. This comes on the heels of adding former FAA administrator Billy Nolen.
Ride-hail
InDrive has launched its bid-based ride-hail app in Miami, its first U.S. market. The company’s business model is based on customers naming their own fare and nearby drivers accepting, declining or countering the offer.
Revel, the Brooklyn-based startup doing shared e-mopeds, EV charging hubs and an all-electric, all-employee ride-hail service, announced that it has hired over 1,000 New Yorkers as Q2 employee drivers.
The California Supreme Courtrejected an argument by Uber that hoped to limit the ability of its drivers to take employment-related disputes to court. The court unanimously determined that the defendant, driver Erik Adolph, couldn’t sign away his right to represent his peers in a class-action lawsuit, even though his contract requires him to take any employment-related disputes to arbitration. This ruling could have ripple effects in the gig economy space.
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Hey, folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular roundup of the past week in tech. Too busy to check the headlines this week? Don’t sweat it. That’s why WiR exists — we’ll get you caught up to speed.
This edition of WiR features pieces about a fake AI-generated “South Park” episode; the surging downloads of Threads, an app that shares the same name as Meta’s Twitter competitor; and Tesla’s first Cybertruck build. We also recap the CEO of OnlyFans stepping down; Wix’s new tool that can create websites on the fly, using generative AI; and Plex’s free Winamp-inspired music player.
That’s a lot to cover, so let’s get cracking. Oh, and if you haven’t already, sign up here to get WiR in your inbox every Saturday.
Most read
Poor timing for AI-generated TV: AI startup Fable Studios demoed its platform this week, using it to create a full, fake “South Park” episode in which Cartman tries to apply deepfake technology to the media industry. The tech was impressive, Devin writes, but — juxtaposed against the ongoing strike of creatives in TV and film — the stunt came across as a tad inartful.
Not a good look for Microsoft security: Microsoft still doesn’t know — or want to share — how China-backed hackers stole a key that allowed them to stealthily break into dozens of email inboxes, including those belonging to several government agencies. The company first disclosed the incident last Tuesday, attributing the monthlong activity to a newly discovered espionage group it’s calling Storm-0558, which it believes has a strong nexus to China.
The other Threads surges to new heights: Instagram’s Twitter clone Threads enjoyed a fairly fruitful first week in existence, sailing past 30 million users in the first 24 hours. But it’s had the unintended effect of thrusting Threads, an unrelated app first pitched as a Slack alternative, into the spotlight. Threads (the Slack alternative) reportedly racked up more than 880,000 downloads on iOS between July 6 and July 12, after Meta’s Threads launched, having had few downloads prior to this point.
Telsa unveils the first Cybertruck build: Tesla over the weekend said its first, much-anticipated Cybertruck came off the production line in Texas. The debut of the long-delayed, futuristic-looking pickup truck comes in the lead-up to Tesla’s second-quarter 2023 earnings call.
OnlyFans CEO steps down: After about two and a half years at the helm, Ami Gan is leaving OnlyFans. Chief strategy and operations officer Keily Blair will take over as CEO. As Amanda writes, OnlyFans is perhaps the best-known creator platform that supports adult content; according to Gan, the company paid out $10 billion to creators while she was CEO.
New sites, generated by AI: Wix, a longtime fixture of the web-building space, is betting that today’s customers don’t particularly care to spend time customizing every aspect of their site’s appearance. The company’s new AI Site Generator tool, announced this week, will allow Wix users to describe their intent and generate a website complete with a homepage, inner pages and text and images — as well as business-specific sections for events, bookings and more.
Plex makes its Winamp-inspired player free: Plexamp, the music player originally incubated by the Labs division of media company Plex, is now free. The project was first launched in 2017 as a subscription-based spin on the classic Winamp media player app, offering visualizations to accompany your tunes, tools for programming mixes, and more recently, a ChatGPT-powered “Sonic Sage” feature that builds unique playlists from users’ music libraries.
VanMoof e-bikes, saved: Since struggling e-bike startup VanMoof confirmed it has asked for a deferment of payment in Holland, there’s been a question hanging over the VanMoof bikes out there in the wild. Riding to the rescue, somewhat improbably, is Cowboy, VanMoof’s e-bike competitor over the border in Belgium. Cowboy’s “Bikey” app enables VanMoof riders to generate their unique digital key and keep riding, Mike writes.
Audio
TechCrunch’s roster of podcasts is, as the kids say, giving. Tune in for great new content this week.
On Equity, PitchBook venture guru Kyle Stanford came to riff with the crew on the venture capital in Q2 2023: the good, the bad, and the late stage.
The latest episode of Found, meanwhile, spotlighted Catherine Tabor, the founder and CEO of Sparkfly, a company that helps brands with marketing and customer engagement. Tabor talked about building a company fluid enough to adapt to changing technology trends over the last decade and how she was dismissed by venture capitalists despite landing notable customers.
TechCrunch+
TC+ subscribers get access to in-depth commentary, analysis and surveys — which you know if you’re already a subscriber. If you’re not, consider signing up. Here are a few highlights from this week:
Electric utilities drive customers to startups: Of all the companies that should be eager to embrace the electric transition, electric utilities would seem to be at the top of the list. Yet they also appear to be some of the most hesitant. Startups are taking advantage of the situation, Tim writes.
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The YouTuber apology video is an art form. A penitent creator must be remorseful, but not theatrical. Concise, but not rehearsed. Honest, but not defensive. Above all, an apology video cannot be memeable, or it’ll never be taken seriously.
Colleen Ballinger’s apology saga, however, will be one of the most memorable in YouTube history because it just keeps getting worse.
Representatives for Ballinger, who built a devoted following of young viewers as the satirical and often offensive character Miranda Sings, are now denying claims that she filed copyright infringement claims on videos reacting to her ukulele apology song.
The song, in which Ballinger addresses allegations of fostering inappropriate and exploitative relationships with her teenage fans, is one of the most absurd attempts at apologizing ever documented online. The fans coming forward accuse Ballinger of sending them unsolicited nudes of another creator to make fun of her body, using her group chat of underage fans as on-call emotional support throughout her divorce, exploiting and humiliating minors during her live shows and above all, abusing the power dynamic between herself and her fans.
Her response? A song about the “toxic gossip train” — an agonizing 10-minute lyrical car crash that dismisses the allegations as misinformation fueled by the “mob mentality” of the internet.
“Everyone just believes that you are the type of person who manipulates and abuses children. I just wanted to say that the only thing I’ve ever groomed is my two Persian cats,” Ballinger croons. “I’m not a groomer, just a loser who didn’t understand I shouldn’t respond to fans. And I’m not a predator, even though a lot of you think so, because five years ago I made a fart joke.”
It’s a mess. Here’s what’s going on.
Who is Colleen Ballinger?
Colleen Ballinger, 36, started posting YouTube videos as Miranda Sings in 2008. “Miranda” is a self-obsessed young woman who’s obsessed with stardom, despite her inability to actually sing. The character, who wears bright red lipstick and has a speech impediment, is egotistical, socially awkward and largely ignorant of current events.
Ballinger’s musical parodies as Miranda became a viral sensation, and at her peak she had roughly 19 million YouTube subscribers between her personal channel and her Miranda Sings channel. Her videos consisted of vlogs (both as Colleen and as Miranda), trending YouTube challenges, satirical vocal lessons and off-key covers of pop songs. Ballinger was particularly popular with children, and featured other kids’ creators like JoJo Siwa and Sophia Grace Brownlee on her channel.
As Miranda, Ballinger made offensive jokes that revolved around incest and racist stereotypes. Image Credits: Gregg DeGuire/Getty Images for Nickelodeon
As Miranda, she often made jokes about pedophilia, incest and racially insensitive stereotypes — invideos, Miranda would reference the “Daddy Saddle,” an object that allowed her to ride around on her “Uncle Jim.” Affinity Magazinecriticizedthe character for mocking disabled people and perpetuating harmful stereotypes about disabilities. In 2020, sheapologizedfor impersonating Latina women in a since-deleted video with her sister.
She also regularly toured as Miranda, performing live variety shows blending comedy and music. Ballinger was in the middle of a national tour last month when former fans alleged that she had inappropriate and exploitative relationships with them when they were minors. In the aftermath of her apology video, the remaining tour dates were quietly canceled,NBC News reported.
The first wave of allegations
In a2020 YouTube video, then-17-year-old Adam McIntyre said that he had been ghostwriting some of Ballinger’s tweets as her “social media intern” without pay, and alleged that she had abused her power as a creator to foster inappropriate relationships with her young fans.
He said that the relationship started when he was 13 years old, and that at one point, Ballinger sent him lingerie. In 2017 and 2018, Ballinger told him that Miranda Sings wasn’t doing well “because she couldn’t really be problematic as the character anymore,” McIntyre said in his video, and that she eventually asked him for help with rebranding the character.
He began suggesting social media ideas for both Miranda Sings and Ballinger’s personal accounts, and she gave him access to the Miranda Sings Twitter account in March 2020. In screenshots McIntyre shared in his video, Ballinger told him that she wasn’t “planning on taking advantage” of his help and intended to pay him.
That month, McIntyre suggested that Miranda should “come out” as a Meghan Trainer fan — which Ballinger approved over direct message. When she received backlash for “queerbaiting,” however, she told McIntyre that she would “never post something like that.” She never responded to McIntyre after that, and allegedly never paid him.
Ballinger responded in avideotitled “addressing everything.” She admitted to sending McIntyre a bra and underwear in 2016, and said she believed it was “no different” than the other items she sent fans “as a joke.” Ballinger also said that she was breastfeeding her son when she approved the Megan Trainor tweet.
“This was my fault. He sent me a very long list of a ton of different things he wanted to post and I did not look over it closely enough,” Ballinger said.
Grooming allegations resurface
In June, YouTuber Kodee Tyler Dahl, 33, posted anow-deleted videoabout why they left Ballinger’s fandom, and shared screenshots of a Twitter chat called “colleeny’s weenies group chat.”
The group chat was for the select inner circle of Ballinger’s fans, most of whom were minors, to directly talk to Ballinger herself. The messages Ballinger sent were highly inappropriate. In one responding to then-15-year-old McIntyre’s request for questions to answer in a YouTube Q&A video, Ballinger asked, “Are you a Virgin?” She was in her 30s by then. In another, McIntyre told the group chat that his “ass looks good today.” Ballinger responded with “pics adam.”
Days later, McIntyre posted an hour and 45 minute video titled “my relationship with colleen ballinger” corroborating Dahl’s allegations. He shared screenshots of interactions in the group chat that he and other members saved, including one of Ballinger asking him what his favorite sex position was. In another, she asked the girls in the chat to tell her about their first time getting their periods.
“She would just come in randomly and stay stuff like that,” McIntyre said in the video. “To a lot of people who were underaged.”
Ballinger treated the group chat of teenagers as her confidants, and shared personal details about her divorce from YouTuber Joshua Evans. She told the “weenies” that Evans was “emotionally abusive” — an allegation that Evans denied in aninterviewwith HuffPost. Ballinger publicly called on her fans to remain respectful to Evans, but never discouraged group chat members from attacking him in social media comments and on gossip forums.
Another former fan, Johnny Silvestri, came forward the same week in avideotitled “There’s More to the Story (my experience with Colleen Ballinger).” Silvestri, who was not part of the “weenies” chat, accused Ballinger of taking advantage of her fans’ labor. His relationship with Ballinger started after he attended a Miranda Sings show when he was 16, and Ballinger’s then-husband Evans gave him his personal phone number on stage.
By 2018, when he was 22, Ballinger hired Silvestri as an assistant on her tour. He was paid $125 per show. He accused Ballinger’s close friend and collaborator Kory DeSoto of bullying him throughout the tour, which Ballinger knew of but did not stop, and said that Evans exploited the friendship he started with Silvestri for free help running his social media accounts. Silvestri also said that Ballinger made cruel jokes about her fans and encouraged him to join in on the trolling. In one message she sent Silvestri, she mocked a fan for changing her gender pronouns.
“I found solace and safety in this online group of people,” Silvestri toldRolling Stone. “And these grown-ass adults abused it.”
Evans has since publicly apologized to Silvestri, and in atweetposted after Silvestri’s video, acknowledged that he “failed” at being a “friend and internet big brother.”
Silvestri also accused Ballinger of sending him unsolicited nudes of YouTuber Trisha Paytas in messages mocking Paytas’ body, and shared screenshots of the messages innow-deleted tweets.
Ballinger allegedly sent Paytas’ explicit content to McIntyre, who was a minor at the time, as well. In avideotitled “dear trisha paytas…,” McIntyre accused Ballinger of buying subscriptions to Paytas’ paywalled sites, downloading her explicit content, and sending it to him when he was 14. McIntyre said he was initially reluctant to speak out about it until he connected with Silvestri.
Silvestri alleged that Ballinger hosted “viewing parties” of Paytas’ explicit content in order to make fun of her body. McIntyre similarly alleged that Ballinger encouraged him to body shame Paytas.
Paytas, who is also an OnlyFans creator and vocal about sex work, posted aresponsetitled “colleen.” She and Ballinger became friends by bonding over being new mothers, and had just launched a podcast together. Paytas said that Ballinger denied the allegations when directly asked, and that Paytas didn’t believe the former fans until she saw the screenshots shared online. She described the messages as barbaric, misogynistic and “downright cruel” and said that the podcast she co-hosted with Ballinger is over after just three episodes.
“We already have a lot of stigma, misconceptions, allegations against us as sex workers … I do not condone at all unsolicited nudes, sending unsolicited nudes to anybody. Sex worker or not, I think using someone’s nudes as a way to hurt them, make fun of them, make light of them or be mean is the lowest form of human,” Paytas said in the video.
She added that the content Ballinger sent to fans is paywalled for a reason, and that viewers must be at least 18 to access it.
Audience interactions
Other fans spoke out about the uncomfortable interactions they had onstage during Ballinger’s live shows.
Her shows often included a “porn bit” and “yoga bit” which used volunteers from the audience. In the “porn bit,” Ballinger (in character as Miranda) would select a fan wearing skimpy clothing and compare them to a fan dressed more modestly. The fan wearing more revealing clothing was “porn,” Ballinger would declare. For the “yoga bit,” Ballinger would attempt difficult, borderline sexual poses with an audience member.
Becky, a Twitter and TikTok user who goes by noitsbecks,postedthat she was chosen for the “yoga bit” at a 2019 Miranda Sings show. She was 16 at the time. During the show, Ballinger had Becky lay on her back, while she held up Becky’s legs and spread them in front of the audience. Becky, who wore a loose romper that didn’t stay up during the pose, said she felt “terrified” and sexually violated. She also said she felt unsafe leaving the show because of the way she was exposed on stage. She posted a photo from the show on Twitter.
“Colleen exploited my minor body for entertainment and money and did not protect my safety at this show,” Becky said in a TikTok video. “As an outside looking into the situation, it may seem like this wasn’t a big deal. But this was really pretty scary for my teenage self, especially as someone who loved and looked up to Colleen.”
Other former fans spoke out about Ballinger’s “search for a bae” bit, which involved Miranda stuffing the front of her pants with a bag of cheese balls, and inviting audience members to grab the snack. Inresurfaced videoson YouTube and Reddit, Ballinger performed the act with children as young as six.
Other controversies
Yes, there’s more!
YouTubers who have been around since the platform’s earliest days often have unsavory, insensitive content in their archives. Comedy has evolved over the last few decades, and the crass humor that was excusable years ago can be pretty offensive. But Ballinger’s jokes were especially racist, and as clips of her old content resurface in wake of the allegations against her, many online question how she managed to stick around for so long in the first place.
An unlisted video on her Miranda Sings channel shows Ballinger performing a parody of Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” on stage, with a dark paint smeared across her face. Twitter users questioned whether she was performing in blackface. The video, which was posted in 2018, appears to be a recording from Ballinger’s 2010 tour in London, according to YouTuber Paige Christie. The only way to find the video was byscanning a QR codein her 2018 book “My Diarrhe.”
Ballinger’s legal representatives toldVarietythat she was wearing green face paint, not black, and that before the recording started, Ballinger performed the number “As Long as You’re Mine” from “Wicked.” She painted her face green to imitate the protagonist, Elphaba, in her duet with Oliver Tompsett, who starred in the musical’s original London cast.
But other old clips aren’t so easily explained.
In herparodyof the Korean pop song “Gangnam Style,” Ballinger recited gibberish mixed with Japanese words like “tamogatchi” in a vaguely East Asian accent. Inanotheroffensive caricature — this time attempting to imitate Native American cultures — she wears a feathered headdress and speaks in gibberish in a reenactment of the first Thanksgiving.
April Quioh, a writer who worked on Ballinger’s brief Netflix series “Haters Back Off,” described working with Ballinger as “so, so uncomfortable” in a recentnewsletter. Ballinger would often pitch scenes that involved Miranda and Uncle Jim getting caught in “compromising positions or stomach-churning intimacy,” Quioh wrote, and she would try to shove “as much incestual innuendo into the show as possible while assuaging the growing behind-the-scenes concerns that the show would be alienating to the intended audience” of children.
Quioh also alleges that Ballinger insisted that the show cast “limited POC background actors” since it was set in Washington, and once demanded that “all the Asian shit” would be removed from a scene filmed in an Asian supermarket. Ballinger once bragged that she would never be “stupid enough” to get caught saying a racial slur, Quioh continued. Quioh pointed out that Ballinger said the racial slur itself in this boast.
“It was almost like she took a weird pleasure in making me uncomfortable and knowing that even if I wanted to, there was absolutely nothing I could do about it,” Quioh wrote.
The apology video
Ballinger responded to the allegations in a June 28video, which started with her sighing, reaching out of frame and picking up a ukulele. Then, she began strumming a cheery tune.
“A lot of people are saying things about me that aren’t quite true,” Ballinger said over the chords. “But it doesn’t matter if it’s true, though, as long as it’s entertaining. All aboard!”
She then began singing about the “toxic gossip train” — a hook that returns over and over again throughout the 10-minute video. Her team advised her against saying anything about the allegations, she continued, but they didn’t tell her she couldn’t sing.
She acknowledged that she may have “overshared” with fans, but accused her critics of trying to ruin her life by dramatizing lies and profiting off of the backlash.
“I didn’t realize that all of you are perfect, so please criticize me, bring out the daggers from your perfect past, and stab me repeatedly in my bony little back,” Ballinger continued. “I’m sure you’re disappointed in my shitty little song. I know you want me to say I was 100% in the wrong. Well, I’m sorry I’m not gonna take that route, of admitting to lies and rumors that you made up for clout.”
The video immediately went viral as an example of the worst possible way to apologize. Screenshots from the video became reaction memes. Clips circulated on TikTok. YouTubers posted reaction videos breaking down the song’s comically flippant lyrics.
Evans, who stopped posting on YouTube about a year ago, responded onTwitter.
“This behavior was my reality anytime I spoke up & disagreed with her actions & rhetoric during 2009-2016. I was gaslit too. I was made to feel like I was always the problem,” he wrote. “Any pain I felt was an inconvenience and was belittled. Every ounce of what you’re feeling, I understand.”
Soon after Ballinger posted the apology song, certain YouTube videos that included clips of the song were flagged for copyrighted material. The song was also uploaded to Spotify and Apple Music. It has since been removed from all streaming platforms.
YouTuber and H3H3 Podcast host Ethan Kleintweetedthat the song “Toxic Gossip Train” was uploaded to the music distributor CD Baby, and that a recent H3H3 episode discussing the apology was tagged for revenue sharing with the copyright holder.
Another Twitter user said that theirRoblox videothat used the song was also flagged. YouTuber JabroneyTVtweetedthat they uploaded the apology video on an unmonetized channel, and immediately received a copyright strike.
Twitter users speculated that Ballinger was either trying to shut down criticism by copyright claiming videos reacting to the song, or that she was trying to profit by getting a cut of ad revenue from every monetized video that includes the song.
Representatives for Ballinger disputed rumors that she was behind the copyright claims in a statement to BuzzFeed News. They did not respond to TechCrunch’s requests for comment.
What’s next?
Ballinger has not posted publicly on any of her social media accounts since uploading her apology song.
When creators post a Notes App apology, they’ll likely continue existing online with few, if any, real repercussions. If the offending action is so egregious that it calls for an apology video, creators tend to lay low for an amount of time, before slowly emerging from their shame den with more content.
James Charles, for example, has beenrelentlessly pushing forwardwith his comeback into beauty content after apologizing, coming back and apologizing again for inappropriately texting underage fans. Shane Dawson, who left both the internet and California afterold racist videos resurfaced in 2020, is back on YouTube and moved back to Los Angeles. Sienna Mae, who allegedlysexually assaultedher former friend and fellow Hype House member Jack Wright, is back on TikTok despite the heat she got for her infamousinterpretative dance apology video.
Few actually stay offline — Jenna Marbles, the YouTuber who called out her own racist videos in 2020 in an effort to hold herself accountable, is one of the only creators who followed through.
Ballinger’s apology was performative, defensive and all too easily turned into meme fodder. Like other disgraced creators, she’ll have to keep a low profile. Whether she’ll actually be able to make a comeback, considering the allegations that continue to pile up against her and the absolute absurdity of apologizing via ukulele, is questionable. What’s certain, however, is that in an ever-growing history of YouTuber apologies, Ballinger’s video will always stand out as a cautionary tale to creators: If your team tells you not to say anything, that’s not an excuse to sing it.
