👉 Last Week - Clubhouse now worth $100M, FB's $500M trojan horse, Musk could do jail time, Kalanik's secret Uber-killer
What happened on Tech Twitter the week of May 10th, 2020
Yo! After Elon Musk sank TSLA stock with a tweet and announced he named his child X Æ A-12 last week and illegally restarted the Tesla factory at risk of arrest this week, I’m thinking we’re reaching peak Elon Twitter. Either way, I’m thankful for people like him. He reminds us of the radical ideas that were the norm in the tech industry when it was a small group of Computer Clubbers, whaling financiers, and hippie counter-culturalistas. He also makes my job finding interesting tweets 1000x easier 😜
Elon aside, it was quite a juicy week on Tech Twitter:
💰 Clubhouse raised at $100M valuation
Our favorite ultra exclusive social audio app that you have to try but you can’t because there’s a long waitlist to get in, Clubhouse, raised a mega Series A from a16z at a $100M valuation.
Of course, there were copious hot takes - even more than we covered before in The Hottest Takes on Clubhouse.
A lot of people were upset:
But others defended the valuation:
What seems clear either way is that social audio is a huge opportunity.
And there will be plenty of competitors coming out of the woodwork. As they say, for every Lyft, there’s an Uber.
As if Rohan’s, co-founder of Clubhouse, life wasn’t crazy enough. He also shared some sad news about his child’s genetic disorder - click in and support him!
💸 FB buys Giphy
My guess is that Giphy will wind down deals with other companies like Twitter, it’s fun to think about what FB gets strategically if that doesn’t happen - see graphic.
👾 Crypto Twitter: “something is happening!”
Crypto Twitter had a pretty exciting week and Vitalik explaining bitcoin to JK Rowling wasn’t even the biggest thing to happen.
😎 VR Twitter: “something is happening!”
Despite the global pandemic seemingly stacking the cards for an explosion in VR adoption, nothing seems to have been happening.
Until this past week when Unreal released UE5. Good god it’s beautiful.
Cue the early internet metaphors.
👌 Other Great Tweets
✌️ Thanks
Have a great week y’all!
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