Sep 18, 2025 5 min read Daily Rundown

⛵ Larry Ellison Rides TikTok Wave

Plus: Meta’s iPhone Moment, Beijing Fired Nvidia

Good Morning, Early Adopters!

Larry Ellison just found a new surfboard, and it’s called TikTok.

DEAL

Larry Ellison Rides TikTok Wave

👀 What’s the move: Trump’s latest extension gives TikTok until Dec 16, but now a U.S.–China framework is visible: ByteDance spins off TikTok US, Chinese stakes capped under 20%, and Oracle slides in as both investor and cloud host. Silver Lake and existing VCs are expected to roll over shares into the new entity.

💡 Why it’s not boring: This isn’t just geopolitics—it’s Larry Ellison’s wealth play. By tying Oracle deeper into TikTok’s U.S. future, the deal could juice Oracle’s market cap, cementing Ellison’s climb as the world’s richest man. Beijing signals rare flexibility, while Hollywood investors eye TikTok’s algorithm as the cultural weapon to fight Netflix. The stage is less “ban” and more “power transfer.”

⛵ Key takeaway: The TikTok deal isn’t about data—it’s about Ellison printing another fortune off America’s favorite scroll.

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GLASSES

Meta’s Ray-Ban Display Aims for the Next iPhone Moment

👀 What’s the move: Meta unveiled the $799 Ray-Ban Display, a pair of smart glasses that look like chunky Wayfarers but hide a color display, 5,000-nit brightness, and a neural wristband that reads tiny muscle signals to control apps without lifting a finger. It is not about AR theatrics; it is about folding texting, navigation, video calls, and even live captions into eyewear that passes as fashion.

💡 Why it’s not boring: This release marks a strategic pivot: Meta is not competing with Apple Vision Pro or XREAL on immersion, it is competing with the smartphone itself. By offloading everyday tasks to a discreet wearable, Meta threatens the dominance of phones as the central consumer device. Navigation apps, translation tools, messaging platforms, and even the hearing aid market face disruption once glasses become the interface. If Apple killed the iPod by folding music into the iPhone, Meta could marginalize the phone by embedding it into eyewear.

⛵ Key takeaway: The Ray-Ban Display is less a gadget than a wedge — it turns sunglasses into a Trojan horse for replacing the phone, and that threatens every industry built around the handset.

CHIPS

Beijing Just Fired Nvidia From Its Biggest Side Hustle

👀 What’s the move: China’s cyberspace regulator banned domestic tech giants like ByteDance and Alibaba from buying Nvidia AI chips, even the “China-safe” RTX Pro 6000D. The restriction is aimed primarily at data center and enterprise-level procurement. This isn’t a U.S. export control; it’s Beijing pulling the plug itself, steering demand toward Huawei and other homegrown silicon.

💡 Why it’s not boring: Nvidia’s China revenue was already cratering under U.S. sanctions, but this move slams the door shut. Beijing is signaling it no longer tolerates dependency on Western GPUs, even if it means short-term performance gaps. That forces Chinese cloud, internet, and AI companies into a crash course of domestic chip adoption, giving Huawei, Biren, and local fabs the oxygen they’ve been gasping for. On the flip side, U.S. cloud providers and AI startups just got a relative moat: they’ll keep feasting on the latest Nvidia stacks while Chinese players scramble with less efficient hardware.

⛵ Key takeaway: When China bans Nvidia, it isn’t just chips leaving the market. It’s a decade of AI compounding moving onto two diverging tracks.

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🛡️ Irregular
“Security lab for frontier AI.”
Builds adversarial testbeds to red-team and harden cutting-edge models before deployment. → Founded 2023 by Dan Lahav & Omer Nevo; $80M raised Sept 2025 at ~$450M val; works with OpenAI, Anthropic, gov clients; ships SOLVE scoring framework.

🧥 Ray-Ban
“Iconic frames, now intelligent.”
Classic Aviator & Wayfarer fused with Meta’s AI smart glasses—camera, translation, assistant built-in.
→ Founded 1936 (Bausch & Lomb); acquired by Luxottica 1999; “Ray-Ban Meta” sold ~2M pairs since 2023, scaling to 10M units/year by 2026.

BAY AREA MEMOS

Blacksmith Software raised $10M to rebuild continuous integration on GPUs, making software testing faster and cheaper while removing the bottleneck in the AI era.
Groq raised $750M at a $6.9B valuation to scale its ultra-efficient LPU chips and GroqCloud, aiming to redefine AI inference.
Google and PayPal struck a multi-year deal to embed AI into shopping and payments, deepening integration across their platforms.
Irregular raised $80M at a $450M valuation to secure frontier AI models by detecting risks through advanced simulation and evaluation frameworks.
Reddit is in talks with Google and OpenAI to shift from flat fees to usage-based licensing, aiming to set a new standard for monetizing user content in the AI era.

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