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Apple TV may have dropped the plus sign, but it still knows how to do addition: starting October 20, customers will be able to bundle Apple TV and Peacock for 30% off the price of streaming them separately, in what an NBCUniversal exec called a “perfect combination of entertainment.” Maybe there’s a big overlap between “Poker Face” fans and “Severance” watchers, but we’d bet on another reason. Any way you slice it, Apple has more pressing issues than its lack of viewers, as we discuss in our main story below.
Test your knowledge of this week’s news with our Snacks Seven Quiz. Here’s a fun one: |
Bitcoin, banks, and speculative pockets of the market beloved by retail traders (from quantum computing to nuclear energy) were bludgeoned on Thursday. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 closed 0.4% and 0.6% lower, respectively, while the Russell 2000 fell about 2%.
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Apple’s increasingly desperate efforts to get back into the AI race took another hit with news from Bloomberg that the head of AI search for a revamped Siri is leaving for Meta, which has pursued the strategy of loading money into a cannon and shooting it wherever there’s a glimmer of AI talent not nailed down.
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- According to the report, Ke Yang took charge of Apple’s “Answers, Knowledge and Information” team just weeks ago.
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The team is reportedly targeting a March 2026 launch for the new version of Siri, which will feature the ability to search the web for answers to user queries. Sure, that’ll do it.
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Yang’s exit is the latest in a series of executive departures that have plagued Apple, and continues Meta’s hiring spree across the tech industry to lure top AI talent to the company with reported eye-popping nine-figure pay packages.
- Bloomberg reports that roughly a dozen members of the Apple Foundation Models team have also departed recently, many joining Meta’s “superintelligence” team.
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Apple has been behind the eight ball for much of the AI trend, despite being relatively early to the voice assistant game with Siri. That being said, Siri never really managed to become the kind of killer product that Apple executives were clearly hoping for, and consistently fell short of expectations when it came to its ability to actually execute the tasks intended.
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Ultimately, this departure is just the latest in a long line of missed opportunities for Cupertino, which finds itself without answers, lacking knowledge, and bereft of information to win this.
But hey, at least they’ve got television figured out, right? Right? |
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StartEngine Has Raised $80M+ From the Crowd. Now, They’re Back.
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StartEngine doesn’t just talk about democratizing finance. They live it. Since 2014, they’ve built one of the leading alternative investing platforms in the U.S. With $80M+ raised to date and 50K+ shareholders across all offerings, their momentum keeps compounding: |
- $1.5B invested on the platform with a community of 2.1M+.1,2
- 3x revenue YoY in H1 2025 with a record total revenues for H1 2025 of $70M. (Up from $48M annual revenue in 2024)2
- Supported by Activision Co-Founder and strategic advisor Kevin O’Leary.3
- Growth driven by StartEngine Private, offering exposure to the likes of Databricks and xAI.4
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Salesforce finished the day up 4% Thursday after issuing an upbeat revenue target and projecting a return to “double-digit growth” within the next 12 to 18 months. |
- At an investor event Wednesday, the software maker said it expects annual revenue to top $60 billion by fiscal 2030, ahead of Wall Street’s $58.37 billion estimate, per CNBC.
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The new outlook comes less than six weeks since Salesforce issued underwhelming Q3 revenue guidance, extending a slowdown to single-digit sales growth since mid-2024 — as the company has yet to translate the AI hype into cold, hard cash.
- Salesforce’s biggest bet is Agentforce, the AI assistant launched a year ago that CEO Marc Benioff calls “the core of every product we make now.”
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Still, AI is likely to make up just ~3% of the company’s FY 2026 revenue, with concerns emerging that new AI tools could replace legacy software providers like Salesforce — a notion that Benioff called “nonsense.”
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Chief Financial and Operating Officer Robin Washington acknowledged the company had “some lower-stage growth for a while,” but said it’s now “reaccelerating.” |
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Earlier this week, Salesforce rolled out Agentforce Voice, which allows AI agents to handle customer calls, and expanded partnerships with Anthropic and OpenAI to integrate their latest models into its platform. Despite the bump today, investors do seem pretty spooked about what widespread AI adoption might do to a company like Salesforce. Shares remain down 26% year to date and 32% below their peak last December.
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Speculative pockets of the market, featuring companies with no to low revenues, had a rough ride on Thursday. There’s no material news driving the price action in these groups, which have very different business models but a thing or two in common: most are names that retail traders love and/or had displayed strong positive price momentum that now seems to have flipped on its head. In other words, they’re stocks with common owners, and that has given them common cause to act alike.
More on the spec wreck |
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