Dec 15, 2025 4 min read Daily Rundown

⛵ Tesla Skips Permits

Plus: Tech Jobs Broke in 2025, A Business Backbone

Good Morning, Early Adopters!

In 2025, speed is replacing compliance as strategy, and the true backbone of the tech economy is being redefined in real time.

ROBOTAXI

Tesla Skips Permits, Ships Robotaxis

👀 What’s happening: Tesla has begun testing fully driverless robotaxis on Austin streets without human safety monitors, confirmed by Elon Musk after videos showed empty Model Y vehicles in motion. The active fleet sits at 31 cars, with Musk targeting a jump to 500 by year end. Crucially, Tesla is operating under Texas’ permissive testing framework, not a city level robotaxi operating license. This is expansion by legal gray zone, not formal approval.

🔥 How this hits reality: Waymo earns autonomy one city permit at a time. Tesla bypasses the city entirely. By framing deployment as testing, Tesla gains near full road access without negotiating municipal robotaxi licenses. Scaling this fast forces regulators into a reactive stance and floods Tesla’s system with real world data at volumes Waymo cannot legally match. The risk is public incidents. The upside is compounding learning speed and regulatory fait accompli.

⛵ Our take: Waymo waits for permission. Tesla manufactures inevitability. In autonomy, cities that regulate slowly risk discovering the system is already live before the rules exist.

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REPORT

Big Tech Jobs Broke in 2025

👀 What’s happening: Business Insider published a year-end report arguing that 2025 was the year the Big Tech job market cracked. The piece is built on interviews with more than 20 laid-off tech workers, combined with aggregate data from Challenger, Layoffs.fyi, Indeed, and Greenhouse. The numbers converge in one direction: layoffs surged, hiring stalled, and competition spiked. Roughly 154,000 US tech layoffs were announced through November, while job postings fell sharply and interview pipelines dried up.

🔥 How this hits reality: This was not a cyclical slowdown. It was a structural reset. Big Tech shed tens of thousands of roles while AI tooling flattened entry-level leverage and flooded hiring funnels with automated applications. Recruiters raised the bar without raising headcount. Senior talent priced itself, juniors never got in, and mid-career workers burned savings waiting for a rebound that never arrived. The quiet winners were non-tech corporates absorbing talent at discounts. Big Tech’s employment brand took the real hit.

⛵ Our take: Big Tech stopped being a career escalator in 2025 and started looking like any other capital-efficient industry, just faster to fire and slower to rehire.

NEW LAUNCH

World App Makes Identity a Business Backbone

👀 What’s happening: Sam altman's World has launched a redesigned World App that turns its proof-of-human system into a full consumer platform with encrypted chat, borderless payments, digital wallets, and in-chat Mini Apps. The product now serves over 10 million users, embedding verified identity into everyday activity. It moves World ID from a controversial biometric experiment built on iris scanning via the Orb into a utility layered over communication and money, signaling a shift from niche crypto tool to mainstream infrastructure.

🔥 How this hits reality: This matters because identity is a linchpin across digital markets. Iris Verified humans drastically reduce fraud and bot-driven distortion in the AI era while cutting KYC and trust costs for platforms. That shifts competitive advantage toward players with access to reliable human graphs. Payments, wallets, marketplaces, and social apps risk commoditization as World bundles communications, finance, and authentication in one account. Incumbents may lose control of identity while World captures it upstream.

⛵ Our take: World is not a wallet or messenger but an identity platform sliding into every stack that depends on trust, and that makes it strategically dangerous to incumbents.

BAY AREA MEMOS

India’s new SIM-binding rules could disrupt WhatsApp’s heavily relied-on consumer and small-business use in its largest market.
Microsoft is buying 3.6 million tons of carbon removal from a Louisiana bioenergy plant to offset emissions from data center expansion.
Zevo plans to add Tensor’s autonomous vehicles to its car-share fleet to explore a decentralized robotaxi model.
1X is deploying its consumer-marketed Neo humanoid robots into factories and warehouses through a large-scale partnership with EQT.
ServiceNow is reportedly in advanced talks to acquire cybersecurity firm Armis for up to $7 billion to expand its enterprise security capabilities.

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