After a very profitable decade on Microsoft’s board, Reid Hoffman is stepping down, the company announced Thursday. Hoffman joined the board after Microsoft bought his company LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in 2016. Hoffman was on Microsoft’s board when it invested its first $1 billion into OpenAI in 2019. Hoffman was one of OpenAI’s original investors…
Asking venture capitalists for investment is a rite of passage for tech founders. This has led to another universal experience: the VC pitching horror story. A massive conversation sharing such stories has taken place all week on X with the comments both funny and infuriating. We read through them all to find the most interesting…
A former IBM cybersecurity executive accused the company of getting hacked three times in the previous decade by foreign governments and then covering up the breaches. In a lawsuit unsealed this week but filed in 2020, William Barlow, who was IBM’s vice president of threat intelligence until August 2019, said IBM concluded Chinese hackers breached…
Founders, your window to enter Startup Battlefield 200 closes in just three short days. Applications for Startup Battlefield 200 officially close on June 8, 11:59 p.m. PT. Now’s not the time to wait any longer. Secure your shot at competing on the Disrupt Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 this October at San Francisco’s Moscone West. Thousands of startups have already stepped forward. If you’re building…
SpaceX has lined up another compute deal ahead of its historic IPO, this time with Google. The company announced the deal in a regulatory filing on Friday. Under the terms of the deal, Google will pay SpaceX $920 million per month from October 2026 through June 2029 for access to “approximately 110,000 NVIDIA GPUs, CPUs,…
Hidden among the architectural landmarks of General Motors’ sprawling Warren Tech Center outside Detroit is a new cornerstone of the automaker’s $900 million bet on its electric future. The nondescript 500,000-square-foot pair of off-white boxes, which houses GM’s new Battery Cell Development Center, might not look like much. But locked inside is the key to…
Supabase, the open source database of choice for the vibe-coding world, has raised a $500 million Series F at a $10 billion pre-money valuation, the company announced Friday. That’s about $10.5 billion after the investment. The newly minted decacorn has been doubling its valuation every few months for a couple of years now, as vibe-coding…
Across the industry, companies are starting to balk at the price of AI. Uber blew through its entire 2026 AI coding budget by April. Microsoft revoked its developers’ Claude Code licenses months after enabling them. A Priceline employee told TechCrunch that a routine Cursor contract renewal came back 4-5x more expensive. Even though per-token prices…
NASA has told five astronauts aboard the International Space Station to shelter in a docked SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft while their Russian counterparts try to repair a leaking service module. NASA spokesperson Bethany Stevens wrote in an X post on Friday that Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, had discovered new leaks in its service module, and…
Blackstone-backed data center operator AirTrunk said on Thursday it would invest $30 billion in India by 2030, adding to a wave of commitments from technology and infrastructure groups seeking to expand computing capacity in the country. The Australian company said it would develop 5 gigawatts of new data center capacity in India, one of the…