Jul 24, 2025 5 min read Daily Rundown

⛵ Tesla Eats Big Macs

More Stories: Windsurf Got Vaporized, Daddy Behind Circle

Good Morning, Early Adopters!

Tesla cooks. Circle floats. Coinbase cashes in. If this is the future of coordination, you might want to swim.

DINNING

Tesla Dines Out, McDonald’s Cries in the Parking Lot

👀 What’s the move: Tesla just opened a 1950s-themed diner + Supercharger station in LA and raked in $47K in 6 hours—30% more than the McDonald's next door makes in a full day. The silver-saucer aesthetic comes with charging ports, cocktails, and Elon’s usual expansion plans. Next stop? A Shanghai clone by Lunar New Year.

💡 Why it’s not boring: This isn’t about burgers. It’s about Tesla turning real estate into brand theaters. While auto brands fight over autonomy, Tesla’s building lifestyle infrastructure—one diner at a time. Fast food, gas stations, and roadside real estate just got a new competitor with its own EV-powered foot traffic.

⛵ Key takeaway: Tesla didn’t open a restaurant—it opened a Trojan horse for global retail dominance disguised as a milkshake.

TOGETHER WITH PLESK

All-in-One Server Panel

Plesk is a commercial WebOps control panel for managing Windows or Linux servers via an intuitive web interface. It supports website, domain, email, and database management, plus integrated security tools like firewalls, SSL, and automatic updates.

With extensibility through 100+ plugins—including Docker, Git, SSL, and WordPress Toolkit—it suits developers, agencies, and hosting providers.

Try now👉

Windsurf Got Vaporized in a Weekend

👀 What’s the move: Windsurf was days from a $3B OpenAI acquisition when Microsoft nixed the deal. Within 48 hours, Google scooped up the founders and core tech in a stealth acquihire. The rest of the team? Ghosted, gutted, and handed off to Cognition in a garage-sale buyout.

💡 Why it’s not boring: This wasn’t just a startup fumble—it was a full-on collapse of the Valley’s social contract. Founders walked with Google bags while 250+ employees, who took equity over salary, were left holding nothing but Slack logins and “be grateful” memos. The AI tooling market’s moat vanished overnight, and Windsurf became a cautionary tale for anyone betting on platforms they don’t control.

⛵ Key takeaway: When exits get hot, founders cash out—and employees learn just how optional they really are.

STABLECOIN

Who's Your Stablecoin Daddy?

👀 What’s the move: The USDC revenue breakdown is now public. Coinbase keeps 100% of the interest earned on its platform and splits off-platform yield equally with Circle. In 2024 alone, it earned nearly $1.5B from USDC—23% of its net revenue. While Circle remains the nominal issuer, it's Coinbase that effectively controls the protocol—retaining the power over USDC issuance and mechanics, yet still splitting the spoils with Circle.

💡 Why it’s not boring: Coinbase’s rumored $5B bid to buy Circle wasn’t just about the yield—it was about the keys to the protocol: USDC smart contracts, multi-chain deployment, and CCTP. Whoever owns these doesn’t just issue a stablecoin—they run the rails of DeFi, payments, and regulatory strategy. Circle’s recent IPO may have iced the acquisition, but the strategic tension is far from over.

⛵ Key takeaway: USDC may be Circle’s baby, but Coinbase turned it into a money printer—and own the pipes too.

STARTUP SPOT

🧠 Gupshup
“AI agents for global messaging.”
Conversational AI platform powering chatbots, RCS, WhatsApp & voice—Auto Bot Builder + enterprise-grade AI agents → processes 120B+ msgs/yr for 50K+ customers across 130+ countries, with Juniper/IDC awards for innovation.
→ Founded 2004 by Beerud Sheth (Upwork co‑founder, MIT/IIT alum); $544 M raised over 10 rounds; deep expertise via Dotgo, Active.ai, Knowlarity acquisitions. Just closed $60 M combo equity/debt from Globespan & EvolutionX Jul 2025 to scale AI‑agent offering in India, ME, LATAM, Africa; exploring India IPO domicile switch; profitability growing, revenue tripled since '21.

🪙 Circle
“USDC infra for global finance.”
Stablecoin issuer powering fast, programmable USD onchain—$168B+ in Treasuries, live on 16+ chains. APIs for wallets, payments, trading, AI wallets.
→ Founded 2013 by Jeremy Allaire; IPO’d June 2025 (CRCL); raised $1.1B; partners: Visa, BlackRock, OKX; pushing for OCC charter, GENIUS Act in flux.

🧠 Cognition
“Devin, your AI software teammate.”
Autonomous coding agent with full IDE integration—plans, writes, debugs entire apps using codebase-wide context → beating benchmarks (SWE‑Bench 13.9% vs 1.9% prior) → Founded 2023 by IOI gold medalists Scott Wu, Steven Hao & Walden Yan; backed by Founders Fund, Khosla, 8VC; soared from $350M → $2B → $4B+ valuation as of March 2025. Just acquired Windsurf IDE for $82M ARR and 350+ enterprise customers. Valued at ~$4B, stacking capabilities amid intensifying AI‑developer platform race

BAY AREA MEMOS

Google's DeepMind is using an AI named Aeneas to accelerate the interpretation of damaged ancient Roman inscriptions.
Neuralink is reportedly aiming to generate at least $1 billion in annual revenue by 2031 by scaling up its brain implant procedures.
Conversational commerce platform Gupshup raises a $60 million mixed equity and debt round as it focuses on AI-powered growth and acquisitions.
Sony is reportedly considering a spinoff of its chip division to sharpen its strategic focus on the entertainment business.
The Nintendo Switch 2 has become the fastest-selling video game hardware launch in United States history.

TOGETHER WITH US

AI Secret Media Group is the world’s #1 AI & Tech Newsletter Group, boasting over 1 million readers from leading companies such as OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Microsoft. Our Newsletter Brands: