Nov 14, 2025 5 min read Daily Rundown

⛵ Model War Goes Nuclear

Plus: Cable War Goes Streaming, EU Targets Google Again

Good Morning, Early Adopters!

Tech giants rewriting markets in real time, and everyone else trying to survive the fallout.

Musk Pulls In $15B for xAI as the Model War Goes Nuclear

👀 What’s the move: xAI raised a staggering $15B to buy more GPUs and bulk-build its “Colossus” compute stack. It’s not optional; it’s the price of staying on the same field as OpenAI’s $6.5B raise earlier this year and Anthropic’s eye-watering $50B data-center commitment. Everyone is re-arming faster than they can ship models.

💡 Why it’s not boring: This is the clearest signal yet that capital is no longer a moat, it’s the entry fee. If OpenAI is scaling with sovereign-grade backers and Anthropic is turning into an infra-developer disguised as a lab, then Musk’s only real move is to spend until the lights flicker. The escalation ladder has no top step.

⛵ Key takeaway: In 2025, model quality is downstream of who burns cash fastest — and no one wants to be the first to stop.

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WAR

Disney vs YouTube TV: When the Cable War Goes Streaming

👀 What’s the move: Disney quietly claimed that it has no idea when its blackout on YouTube TV will end. Fourteen days in, Morgan Stanley pegs the losses at $30 million a week — the longest blackout in Disney’s history. The fight started when contract renewals collapsed: YouTube says Disney’s asking price would hike subscription costs, while Disney insists it just wants “fair value.”

💡 Why it’s not boring: This isn’t a mere pricing spat; it’s the unraveling of the cable bundle’s last thread. Disney used to dictate affiliate fees to carriers; now YouTube TV, backed by Google’s ad machine and user data moat, dictates distribution terms. The fight exposes how streaming flipped leverage: content owners are no longer gatekeepers, platforms are. And Disney’s sports rights inflation is turning from moat to liability.

⛵ Key takeaway: The cable wars didn’t end; they just migrated to the algorithm. Disney built the bundle; Google’s unbundling it, one blackout at a time.

LAWSUIT

EU Targets Google Again, but It Looks More Like a Tax Than Tech Governance

👀 What’s the move: The European Union has opened yet another investigation into Google, accusing it of unfairly lowering media visibility under its “anti-spam” policy. Google says it is defending users from scammers, but critics see this as another round of Brussels trying to regulate what it no longer builds. After losing any real leadership in the global tech race, the EU’s antitrust machinery now functions less as oversight and more as taxation by litigation.

💡 Why it’s not boring: This probe is less about fairness in search results and more about fiscal leverage. When you cannot shape the platforms, you shape the penalties. Each fine becomes a substitute for innovation, each rule a reminder that Europe’s power in tech now lies in enforcement, not invention.

⛵ Key takeaway: The EU can’t code the future, so it audits it instead — one billion-euro fine at a time.

STARTUP SPOT

🧩 TuneIn
“Live audio everywhere.”
Global hub for radio, sports, news, and podcasts across 200-plus devices; now folding into Stingray with a cleaner distribution and car-stack angle.
→ Founded by Bill Moore; Sequoia-backed; ~75 M MAUs; acquired 2025 for up to $175M as Stingray bets on a unified audio network.

🪐 Teradar
“Terahertz sensors built for real roads.”
All-weather solid-state THz imaging that hits lidar-like resolution with radar-grade robustness, powered by its Modular Terahertz Engine.
→ Founded by MIT/Stanford veterans Matt Carey, Greg Charvat and Nick Saiz; raised a $150M Series B in 2025 with OEM development deals already in motion.

🧠 Cursor
“AI that writes your codebase.”
Agentic IDE with repo-scale edits, autonomous feature generation, and a fully AI-native dev loop that replaces classic editors.
→ Ex-Anthropic founders; YC S22; hyperscale adoption across millions of developers; latest multibillion raise pushes valuation to $29.3B and cements Cursor as the default AI coding environment.

BAY AREA MEMOS

Stingray acquired TuneIn for 175 million dollars to expand its global radio distribution footprint and boost overall revenue.
Boston startup Teradar raised 150 million dollars for a terahertz solid state sensor that blends radar robustness with lidar clarity.
Figma opened a Bengaluru office to deepen its second largest market and accelerate its shift from a design tool to a full product-building platform.
Ford’s CEO warns that the US faces a severe skilled-trades shortage, with Ford alone holding 5,000 open 120-thousand-dollar positions that remain unfilled.
Singapore and the UK launched an AI-focused finance partnership to share practices and expand cross-border AI opportunities between the two markets.

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