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C’mon Apple, Buy HBO!
00:19:12
HBO Max might be on the market and I want Apple to buy it! Coinbase is on an acquisition tear. Is the Amazon job apocalypse nigh? Is OpenAI plotting to take over Wall Street in a literal sense? And a brain implant startup has leapfrogged Neuralink in terms of helping blind people see again.
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Welcome to the Tech Brew Ride home for Tuesday, October 21st, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, HBO Max might be on the market and I want Apple to buy it. Coinbase is on an acquisition tear. Is the Amazon job apocalypse nigh? Is OpenAI plotting to take over Wall street in a literal sense? And a brain implant startup has leapfrogged Neuralink in terms of helping blind people see again. Here's what you missed today in the world of foreign Big day for HBO or HBO Max, nay Max or whatever they're calling themselves now. HBO Max raised prices across all plans. Basic with ads increases by $1 a month to $10.99 per month, standard goes up by $1.50 per month to $18.49 per month and the premium plan is up by $2 a month to $22.99. But then news from CNBC that says parent company WBD is open to a sale after receiving unsolicited interest from multiple parties. Sources say the parties include Netflix and Comcast. Earlier this year, WBD announced plans to split into two separate entities, a streaming and studios business and a global networks business. It's also been fielding takeout interest from the newly merged Paramount Skydance. But on Tuesday, WBD said it's received, quote, unsolicited interest from multiple parties and will now review all options. In the meantime, it's still moving toward the previously announced separation, the company said. We continue to make important strides to position our business to succeed in today's evolving media landscape by advancing our strategic initiatives, returning our studios to industry leadership and scaling HBO Max globally, CEO David Zaslav said in a statement. We took the bold step of preparing to separate the company into two distinct leading media companies, Warner Brothers and Discover Every Global, because we strongly believe this was the best path forward, end quote. It is unclear how serious potential offers outside of Paramount would be. Netflix was not interested in buying legacy media assets, but didn't want WBD to go to another buyer at a low price, a source familiar with the matter said. For any buyer that just wants WBD's studio and streaming assets. Acquiring them after a split later this year is better for tax purposes, end quote. Yeah, but going public with this now means that they want to start a bidding war, right? And why not? This would be an incredible asset for somebody, strategic or otherwise, either the whole studio or just hbo. And look, that's my pitch. Longtime listeners will know it's a bugbear of mine that hbo, which was once the Tiffany TV channel, has been so run into the ground it's a crime. So Apple, just do it. Buy hbo, save hbo. Come on Tim, Apple, make this be your big swan song. Media Acquisition Coinbase has agreed to acquire Echo, a blockchain platform that lets crypto companies quickly raise capital for around $375 million. Now, I'm marking this not because Echo is especially interesting to me, but because this is Coinbase's eighth acquisition of the year. They are on an acquisition tear. Fintech folks, it's back quoting the Journal Coinbase is using a mix of cash and stock to fund the deal, which is set to be announced later Tuesday. Coinbase has a market value of around $90 billion with its shares up about 40% so far this year. Echo is privately held. Echo's platform facilitates fundraising and investing by letting crypto users participate in both private and public token sal. A private token sale is offered to a select group of qualified investors such as venture capitalists, while public token sales are open to the general public and often in the final stages of a fundraise. Coinbase hopes the deal will give its customers access to more investment opportunities and allow Coinbase to offer more services to early stage companies. Echo was founded by well known crypto trader Jordan Fish, known online by the pseudonym Cobie. Echo has helped crypto related projects raise more than $200 million since making a debut last year. Earlier this year it launched a new product called Sonar that lets founders host public token sales. Capital formation on the blockchain has gained momentum as more crypto businesses launch this way. With the Echo deal, Coinbase envisions becoming a one stop shop for businesses to raise money, list and distribute capital. Our goal is to make capital markets more open and accessible, sean Agrawal, Coinbase's chief business officer, told the Journal. Coinbase has been active in making crypto industry acquisitions. The largest deal came in May when it agreed to buy Deribit, the world's biggest trading platform for bitcoin and Ether options, for roughly $2.9 billion. Coinbase has done more than 40 deals in total since its 2012 founding. End Quote. Anthropic has announced Claude Code on the web and in the Claude iOS app, available in beta as a research preview for Pro and Max users. Quoting TechCrunch, Anthropic launched a web app on Monday for its viral AI coding assistant, Claude Code, which lets developers create and manage several AI coding agents from their browser. Claude Code for Web is now rolling out to subscribers to Anthropic's $20 per month Pro plan, as well as its $100 and $200 per month Max plans. Pro and Max users can access Claude Code on the web by navigating to Claude AI the same website for Anthropic's consumer chatbot, and clicking into the Code tab or through the Claude iOS app. The launch marks Anthropic's latest attempt to evolve Claude Code beyond a command line interface tool that developers access from a terminal. By putting Claude Code on the Web, Anthropic hopes developers will spin up AI coding agents in more places. It's increasingly competitive for tech companies trying to make their AI coding tools stand out. While Microsoft's GitHub Copilot once dominated the space cursor, Google OpenAI and Anthropic now have highly performant AI coding tools of their own, many of them already available on the web. That said, Claude Code is arguably one of the most popular. Anthropic's flagship coding tool has grown 10x in users since its broader launch in May, and the product now accounts for more than $500 million of the company's revenue on an annualized basis. Anthropic product manager Kat Wu tells TechCrunch in an interview that she attributes a large part of Claude Code's success to the company's AI models, which have become a favorite among developers in recent years. However, Woo also says the Claude Code team deliberately tries to sprinkle in some fun to the product wherever they can. Wu said that Anthropic will continue to put Claude Code in more places, but the terminal will likely remain the home base for their AI coding product. Anthropic claims that 90% of the Claude Code product itself is written by the company's AI models. Wu, who was previously an engineer, said that she rarely ever sits down at a keyboard to write code anymore, and mostly just reviews Claude Code's outputs. Early AI coding tools worked like an autocomplete tool, finishing lines of code as developers wrote them. But the Agentic generation of AI coding tools, including Claude Code, allow developers to spin up agents that work autonomously. This shift has made millions of software engineers act more like managers of AI coding assistants in their day to day jobs. End quote. The New York Times says that they have seen internal Amazon documents and spoken with sources who say that executives believe Amazon is on the cusp of replacing more than 500,000 jobs with robots and aims to automate 75% of its operations. A loss of half a million jobs would have an impact on the economy, no quote. Amazon's US workforce has more than tripled since 2018 to almost 1.2 million people. But Amazon's automation teams expect the company can avoid hiring more than 160,000 people in the United States it would otherwise need by 2027. That would save about 30 cents on each item that Amazon picks, packs and delivers to customers. Executives told Amazon's board last year that they hoped robotic automation would allow the company to continue to avoid adding to its US Workforce in the coming years, even though they expect to sell twice as many products by 2033. That would translate to more than 600,000 people whom Amazon didn't need to hire at facilities designed for super fast deliveries. Amazon is trying to create warehouses that employ few humans at all, and documents show that Amazon's robotics team has an ultimate goal to automate 75% of its operations. Amazon is so convinced this automated future is around the corner that it has started developing plans to mitigate the fallout in communities that may lose jobs. Documents show. The company has considered building an image as a good corporate citizen through greater participation in community events such as parades and toys for tots. The documents contemplate avoiding terms like automation and AI when discussing robotics, and instead use terms like advanced technology or replace the word robot with cobot, which implies collaboration with humans. Amazon said in a statement that the documents viewed by the Times were incomplete and did not represent the company's overall hiring strategy. Kelly Nantel, a spokeswoman for Amazon, noted that the company planned to hire 250,000 people for the coming holiday season, though the company declined to say how many of those roles would be permanent. Amazon's plans could have profound impacts on blue collar jobs throughout the country and serve as a model for other companies like Walmart, the nation's largest private employer, and ups. The company transformed the US Workforce as it created a booming demand for warehousing and delivery jobs. But now, as it leads the way for automation, those roles could become more technical, higher paid and more scarce. Nobody else has the same incentive as Amazon to find the way to automate, said Darren Acemoglu, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies automation and won the Nobel Prize in economic Science last year. Once they work out how to do this profitably, it will spread to others, too. If the plans pan out, one of the biggest employers in the United States will become a net job destroyer, not a net job creator, Mr. Asamoglu said.
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The digital world is more connected behind the scenes than you may realize Interconnected is a video podcast series by Equinix that explores the hidden infrastructure behind our connected future. From data centers to cloud ecosystems to the platforms and people who use them, Interconnected's hosts bring tech leaders, industry experts and innovators together in candid conversations to break down and discuss the future of global connectivity. The third episode of Interconnected, for example, covers the digital infrastructure for a food secure world. They discuss how farmers are moving from 20th century operations to AI and machine learning that analyzes soil, weather and crop data to tackle 21st century risks. Plus how digital platforms are now connecting local producers to global demand through cloud. Linked supply chains follow Interconnected on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If your startup needs a little extra support. And let's be honest, who doesn't need a little help now and then, then you're in for a pleasant surprise with Fidelity. Fidelity Private Shares helps and growth stage companies stay investor ready with cap table, data room and scenario modeling all in one place. A messy or missing cap table might not just slow you down, it could cost you your next fundraising round. VCs are flooded with pitches, and if your equity is confusing or missing, they'll move on fast. Fidelity Private Shares gives founders the structure and simplicity to focus on what actually matters building your company. If you stay investor ready, you don't have to get investor ready. Check out fidelity privateshares.com TechBrew to learn more. That's fidelityprivateshares.com TechBrew One of the things in the background with OpenAI has always been if you really believe you can create artificial general intelligence, do you really need any other product? Can't you just, I don't know, use AGI to invent anything? Well, Bloomberg has seen documents that suggest OpenAI has more than 100 ex investment bankers they are paying $150 an hour to to train its AI to build financial models as part of its secretive Project Mercury. What is Project Mercury? Well, what if it was a plan to take over Wall Street? Quote the group, which includes former employees of JP Morgan Chase & Co. Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, is part of a secretive project inside the startup that's codenamed Mercury, according to documents seen by Bloomberg. Participants are paid $150 per hour to write prompts and build financial models for a range of transaction types, including restructurings and initial public offerings, according to a person familiar with the effort. The company has also granted the contractors early access to the AI it's creating that aims to replace entry level tasks at investment banks. Investment banking analysts typically spend upwards of 80 hours a week at their desks when working on live deals, building detailed models in Microsoft's Excel program for mergers and leveraged buyouts alike. They often face a steady stream of requests from higher ups to make tweaks to PowerPoint side decks and then tweaks to those tweaks, a culture that spawned Wall Street's Please Fix meme. The application process for Project Mercury involves almost no human interaction, according to the person familiar with the matter, who asks not to be named discussing non public information. The first step is a roughly 20 minute interview with an AI CH chatbot, which asks questions based on the applicant's resume. The second phase tests candidates on their knowledge of financial statements. The final stage is a modeling test. The job is flexible and contractors are expected to submit one model per week, the person said. Instructions include writing prompts in simple terms, then executing the model. Participants receive feedback from a reviewer and are expected to fix any issues before their work is ultimately plugged into OpenAI systems, the person said. Project Mercury has so far drawn participants who've previously worked at a variety of Wall street outposts, including Brookfield, Mubadala, Evercore and kkr. The documents show some current MBA candidates at Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology are also participating in the effort. End quote. Finally today, apparently Brain Computer interface company Science Corp's Prima device, comprised of a retinal implant and special glasses, has been able to restore vision in some blind patients, quoting MIT Technology Review Science Corporation, a competitor to neuralink, founded by the former president of Elon Musk's Brain Interface venture, has leapfrogged its rival after acquiring at a fire sale price a vision implant that's in advanced testing. The implant produces a form of artificial vision that lets some patients read text and do crosswords, according to a report published in the New England Journal of Medicine today. The implant is a microelectronic chip placed under the retina using signals from a camera mounted on a pair of glasses. The chip emits bursts of electricity in order to bypass photoreceptor cells damaged by macular degeneration, the leading cause of vision loss in elderly people. The magnitude of the effect is what's notable, says Jose Alain Sahel, a University of Pittsburgh vision scientist who led testing of the system, which is called Prima. There's a patient in the UK and she is reading the pages of a regular book, which is unprecedented. Until last year, the device was being developed by prixiam Vision, a French startup co founded by Sahel, which faced bankruptcy after it couldn't raise more cash. That's when Science Corporation swept in to purchase the company's assets for about 4 million euros, according to court filings. Science was able to buy it for very cheap just when the study was coming out, so it was good timing for them, says Sahel. They could quickly access very advanced technology that's closer to the market, which is good for a company to have. Science was founded in 2021 by Max Hodak, the first president of Neuralink, after his sudden departure from that company. Since its founding, Science has raised around $290 million, according to the venture capital database PitchBook, and used the money to launch broad ranging exploratory research on brain interfaces and new types of vision treatments. The ambition here is to build a big, standalone medical technology company that would fit in with an Apple, Samsung or an Alphabet, hodak said in an interview at Science Labs in Alameda, California in September. The goal is to change the world in important ways, but we need to make money in order to invest in these programs. By acquiring the Prima implant program, Science effectively vaulted past years of development and testing. The company has requested approval to sell the ICHIP in Europe and is in discussions with regulators in the U.S. unlike Neuralink's implant, which records brain signals so paralyzed recipients can use their thoughts to move a computer mouse, the Retina chip sends information into the brain to produce vision. Because the retina is an outgrowth of the brain, the chip qualifies as a type of brain computer interface. So today I learned the Retina is an outgrowth of the brain. Talk to you tomorrow.