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Jeff Bezos To Be A CEO Again
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Jeff Bezos is going to be a CEO once again. Could Tim Cook step down from Apple’s CEO position in a matter of months? Maybe don’t buy an AI teddy bear. What big AI startup would you short, if you could? And data-centers in spaaaaaaacceee…
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Welcome to the Tech We Write home for Monday, November 17, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today Jeff Bezos is going to be a CEO once again. Could Tim Cook step down from Apple's CEO position in a matter of months? Maybe don't buy an AI teddy bear. What big AI startup would you short if you could? And data centers in space? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech, foreign. Business online can feel a little scary these days, especially with AI creating new opportunities for fraud. In fact, Syllent estimates that AI was behind roughly 20% of the fraud perpetrated in 2024. Spotting bad agentic AI while allowing good agents to continue with their tasks isn't easy. Thankfully, Mimoto Continuous Captcha can spot malicious agents pretending to be people at the point of creation or registration. Unlike past Captcha solutions, it runs behind the scenes with no puzzles for users. Full Disclosure I believe in Momoto's mission so much I'm an investor. Through the Ride Home Fund, Momoto is offering techbrew Ride Home listeners early access with a special price for Momoto Continuous Captcha. Right now our listeners can purchase a year of Momoto continuous captcha for $5,000, a 20% discount on their lowest price plan. To learn more, head to Momoto AI Ridehome. That's M Moto AI Ridehome. True players never leave the game for long. Guess what? Jeff Bezos is gonna be the CEO of a company again. It's just not going to be Amazon. Sources tell the New York Times that AI startup Project Prometheus has raised $6.2 billion, including from Jeff Bezos, who it turns out is also its co CEO, making this his first operational role since leaving Amazon in July of 2021. Quote the company called Project Prometheus is coming out of the Gates with $6.2 billion in funding, partly from Mr. Bezos, making it one of the most well financed early stage startups in the world, said three people familiar with the company who spoke on condition of anonymity because details have not yet been made public. This is the first time. Mr. Bezos has taken a formal operational role in a company since he stepped down as chief executive of Amazon in July 20. Though he is deeply involved in Blue Origin, a competitor to Elon Musk SpaceX, his official title at that space company is founder. The new company has until now kept a low profile and when it was started is not even clear. Project Prometheus is focusing on technology that dovetails with Mr. Bezos interest in taking people to outer space. The company is focusing on AI that will help in engineering and manufacturing in a number of fields including computers, aerospace and automobiles. It is unclear where Project Prometheus will be based. Mr. Bezos co founder and co chief executive is Vic Bajaj, a physicist and chemist who worked closely with Google's co founder Sergey Brin at Google's X, a research effort often called the Moonshot factory. Google X produced a wide range of ambitious projects including Wing, a drone delivery service, and the self driving car that became Waymox. In 2015, Dr. Bajaj was among the founders of Verily, a research lab dedicated to the life sciences that, like Waymo and Wing, is operated by Google's parent company Alphabet. Three years later, Dr. Bajaj Co founded and became chief executive of Foresight Labs, an effort to incubate new AI and data science startups. He recently left that job to focus on Project Prometheus, according to the three people who spoke on condition of anonymity. Project Prometheus is among a wave of companies focused on applying AI to physical tasks, including robotics, drug design and scientific discovery. This year, several prominent researchers left Meta, OpenAI, Google, DeepMind and other big AI projects to found a company called Periodic Labs, which is focused on building AI technology that can accelerate new discoveries in areas like physics and chemistry. Last year, Mr. Bezos invested in Physical Intelligence, a startup that is applying AI to robots. But the $6.2 billion in funding behind Project Prometheus potentially gives it an advantage in the expensive race to build AI technologies. Earlier this year, Thinking Machines Lab, founded by a group of former OpenAI employees, raised $2 billion in funding. Project Prometheus has already hired nearly 100 employees, including researchers poached from top AI companies such as OpenAI, DeepMind and Meta. The three people said a number of well known AI companies, including OpenAI, Google and Meta, are already working on technologies meant to accelerate work in the physical sciences. Two researchers at Google DeepMind, the company's PR AI lab, recently won a Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work on a project called AlphaFold, which can help accelerate drug discovery in small but important ways. Executives at these companies and others in the field often say that large language models the technologies that power chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT, will soon achieve significant scientific breakthroughs. OpenAI and Meta say their technologies are already approaching this goal in areas like math and theoretical physics. But companies like Periodic Labs and now Project Prometheus aim to build AI models that learn in more complex ways than chatbots do. The new companies are focusing on systems that can also learn from the physical world. Periodic Labs, which has $300 million in backing, plans to build its own lab in Northern California, where robots will run scientific experiments on an enormous scale. By analyzing this physical trial and error, AI systems can learn to perform experiments largely on their own, at least in theory. Project Prometheus will explore similar work, according to the people familiar with the company's plans. End quote. Over the weekend, there was a high profile story in the FT suggesting that Apple is intensifying its CEO succession planning, as Tim Cook may step down as Apple CEO as early as next year, with John Ternus likely seen as the successor. I've linked to the piece if you want to read it, but what I found More interesting was MG Siegler speculation that the FT's story could actually just be a trial balloon from people close to Cook if Cook decides to leave Apple on a high note after Apple's forthcoming Q1 earnings report, MG notes that Tim Cook quietly turned 65 two weeks ago, putting him within sight of the traditional US retirement age. Whatever his Social Security calculations look like, the real question for Apple is timing when and how he eventually chooses to step away. The fact that the Financial Times put four bylines on this short piece about the succession makes it feel less like idle chatter and more like an intentional trial balloon from people who know what's being discussed. MG says Cook isn't being pushed out. Speculation that he might be nudged aside faded in recent months as Apple's stock soared back on strong earnings and a sense that while Apple has been late on visible AI products, that might not be such a terrible position from a cost and margin perspective. Under Cook, Apple's market cap has gone from roughly $350 billion when he took over from Steve Jobs to around $4 trillion, a staggering 10x from an already enormous base. The only real peer on that score is Satya Nadella at Microsoft. As we've noted recently, MG also points out that Cook's tenure is also longer than Jobs actual time as CEO, and Cook has taken Apple well beyond Jobs original playbook, especially with services which now rivals the iPhone business in scale and importance. That's why this moment is intriguing. Apple stock is near all time highs. It's poised for a blowout holiday quarter, which it usually gets. And there's a natural inflection point after the late January earnings report. If a leader wants to go out on top, MG says this is what the top looks like. The FT reports that John Ternus, Apple's hardware engineering chief, is widely viewed as the leading candidate. He's 15 years younger than Cook, has been at Apple nearly 24 years, and sits at the center of the company's greatest strength, hardware. Jeff Williams, the long rumored heir apparent at Apple, has just formally retired, clearing that lane for Ternus. Apple clearly needs to evolve culturally for the AI era, and a change at the top, perhaps paired with some bold acquisitions, could help. Cook himself has said he favors an internal successor and has, quote, very detailed succession plans. A likely scenario has him stepping into an executive chairman role, staying deeply involved in politics and geopolitics, Trump, China and all the rest, while Ternus becomes the public face of Apple's next chapter. Chapter basically let Cook handle all the messy stuff, quoting from MG's conclusion so yeah, it's pretty clear that Cook is going to retire soon, and it's just a question of when. And while he might have liked to wait to get one more product in particular the Smart Glasses, which other reports had him very focused on out the door. He also has to be considering the macro picture. Not only do things look nice and stable for Apple now, but there are potentially storm clouds on the horizon with AI bubbles and whatnot. If the stock market were to tank for any reason independent of Apple, Cook might have a harder time leaving. I mean, just look at what happened to Disney when Bob Iger left. We've all been there. Too many SaaS tools, not enough visibility at all, and way too much access for you to keep track of. It's the stuff security nightmares are made of. That's where Trelica by1Password comes in. They inventory every app your company uses and create app profiles to help you easily assess risks, manage access, and make sure your password security is locked down tight. With 1Password's extended access management, you can control your company's many, many SaaS tools securely onboard and offboard your people and actually hit your compliance goals. I've been telling you about 1Password Extended Access Management all year, and now Trelica comes along to make things even better. Sleep Easy with Trelica by 1Password Learn more at 1Password.com ride. That's 1Password com ride. 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Learn more@PureStorage.com Morning Brew that's PureStorage.com Morning Brew Speaking of Apple, Mark Gurman says Apple plans three high end iPhones for the fall of next year and lower end iPhones and a new iPhone Air 2 six months later as I have previously reported, this transformative period will continue with Apple's first foldable iPhone next fall, followed by an entirely new high end model in 2027. That device will feature a curved glass screen with a camera that's hidden under the display. But beyond upgrading the products themselves, Apple is changing when it releases new iPhones. First, a little history. The main iPhone models used to come in the summer, June or July, an approach that continued until the iPhone 4S in 2011. That's when Apple began releasing the phones in the fall. Though the shift stemmed from delays tied to iOS 5 iCloud and the Siri Voice Assistant, it turned out to be fortuitous. The change aligned Apple's biggest product with the critical holiday shopping season. Now it's time for another shakeup. In October of last year, I reported that Apple will move away from the annual fall spectacle that it's made so famous over the last decade. In recent years, including 2025, Apple has released four main iPhones, two Pro models and two mid tier versions in the fall, and it occasionally debuted a lower cost SE or E model in the early part of the. But in 2026 and beyond, the company's smartphone release schedule will look markedly different. Apple plans to unveil three high end models, the iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max, and a new foldable in the fall of 2026. Then, roughly six months later, it will roll out the iPhone 18, iPhone 18E, and potentially a refurbished iPhone Air. I expect this pattern to continue for years to come, with Apple launching between five and six new models annually. I'm told that the main focus of the second Air will be a move to a 2 nanometer chip. RA structural changes. The chip upgrade should help improve the Air's battery life, the biggest drawback of the first model. As for the new schedule, Apple aims to have steadier revenue throughout the year, reduce strain on employees and manufacturing partners, and prevent its premium and budget models from cannibalizing each other's marketing. It also gives the company multiple chances each year to counter new releases from competitors like Samsung, which has long spread out its Galaxy and Foldable launches. We're seeing something similar with Apple's software. For years, the company has released its major new operating systems in the fall, occasionally adding a smaller spring update with the iPhone. Launch schedule shifting those spring releases are becoming more critical. We'll get a preview of this approach next spring with the new Siri destined for iOS 26.4 end quote, The Register says. Chinese toymaker Folo Toy has suspended sales of its GPT4O powered teddy bear after researchers found the toy was giving kids harmful respons like about fire and kinks. Imagine it's Christmas morning and your kid's new AI Teddy is happily chatting away until it starts explaining where the knives are and how to light matches. That's the kind of behavior US watchdog Purrg found when it tested several AI powered toys ahead of the holidays. Researchers examined four products and managed to fully test three. The worst offender was Kuma, a scarf wearing teddy from Chinese company Follow toy, which, using OpenAI's GPT4O or or Mistral Large if parents switched models, cheerfully described where to find dangerous objects and how to use matches in longer chats. It also veered into sexual roleplay and kinks without prompting. Other toys like Maiko 3 and Curio's Grock were somewhat better but still offered guidance on finding plastic bags or matches and weighed in on topics like religion and death in battle. Beyond content, Purrg flagged major privacy and behavioral worries always on microphones, data sent to third parties, biometric retention and the theoretical risk of cloned child voices. None of the toys offered real parental controls, and some actively pushed kids to keep playing. Follow Toys says it has paused Kuma sales and is auditing safety. Perg doesn't outright say don't buy these types of toys, but its report makes that conclusion hard to avoid. An informal survey of more than 300 Cerebral Valley AI conference attendees asking which 1 billion dollar plus valuation startup to short if you were going to short any of them, found that most voted for perplexity, followed by OpenAI quoting Business Insider to anyone who follows Silicon Valley Perplexity, an AI search browser trying to take on Google Landing at the top of the list, is maybe not surprising. Perplexity has become the poster child of what what some see as an AI bubble because it's raising back to back funding rounds every few months and seeing voracious investor demand at valuations from 14 to as high as $50 billion, Business Insider recently reported. Asked to comment on the Cerebral Valley survey, Perplexity spokesman Jesse Dwyer replied in an email, geez, it sounds more like the judgmental Valley Conference. OpenAI Landing, second on the list might be a bit more surprising because it's seen as the clear consumer winner of the AI revolution. I will note, though, the list of companies people wanted to put money into there was also an inverse to this poll and that found that in this order, people wanted to put money into anthropic, followed by OpenAI, then cursor, Anduril, SpaceX, open evidence, and then Perplexity. Replit, Stripe and XAI were all about equal, making up the rear. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Sundar Pichai have each recently discussed deploying lunar and orbital AI data centers, which could offer steady solar power with fewer regulations, quoting the journal. To be clear, the current economics of space based data centers don't make sense. But they could in the future, perhaps as soon as a decade or so from now, according to an analysis by Phil Metzger, a research professor at the University of Central Florida and formerly of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The argument essentially boils down to the belief that AI needs are eventually going to grow so great that we need to move to outer space. There, the sun's power can be more efficiently harvested in space. The sun's rays can be direct and constant for solar panels to collect. No clouds, no rainstorms, no nighttime demands for cooling could also be cut because of the vacuum of space. Plus, there aren't those pesky regulations that executives like to complain about slowing construction of new power plants to meet the data center needs in space. No one can hear the NIMBY scream. We will be able to beat the cost of terrestrial data centers in space in the next couple of decades, jeff Bezos said at a tech conference last month. Space will end up being one of the places that keeps making Earth better. It's still early days, though at Alphabet, Google's plans sound almost conservative. The search engine company in recent days announced Project Suncatcher, which it describes as a moonshot project to scale machine learning in space. It plans to launch two prototype satellites by early 2027 to test its hardware in orbit. Like any moonshot, it's going to require us to solve a lot of complex engineering challenges, Sundar Pichai posted on social media Nvidia 2 has announced a partnership with startup Star Cloud to work on space based data centers. Not to be outdone, Elon Musk has been painting his own updated vision for the heavens. On Friday, Musk further reiterated how those AI satellites would be able to generate 100 gigawatts of annual solar power, or what he said would be roughly a quarter of what the US consumes on average in a year. We have a plan mapped out to do it, he told Invest Baron. During an event, it gets crazy. Previously, he has suggested he was four to five years away from that ability. He's also touted even wilder ideas, saying on X that 100 terawatts a year is possible from a lunar base producing solar powered AI satellites locally and accelerating them to escape velocity with a mass driver. Simply put, he's suggesting a moon base will crank out satellites and throw them into orbit with a catapult. And those satellite solar panels would generate 100,000 gigawatts a year. End quote. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.