We now know how much Tesla paid as it released its annual proxy statement on Wednesday morning, which includes a section on “related person transactions” the company has made.
Tesla has also paid X around $50,000 in 2023 and $30,000 through February 2024 for “commercial, consulting and support agreements.” Likewise, X paid Tesla $1 million in 2023 and around $20,000 through February 2024 for the same unspecified work.
Tesla paid Musk’s tunneling effort, The Boring Company, $200,000 in 2023 and $1 million through February 2024.
“The Committee and its counsel are aware of the media narrative regarding Musk, Tesla, and its Board,” the committee writes in the proxy.
“And the Committee’s work was conducted against a backdrop of unrelenting public interest in whether Tesla would reincorporate and in Musk’s compensation.
Most notably, the company is rolling out a Spotify integration that will allow podcasters on Substack to sync and distribute all of their free and paid episodes to Spotify’s streaming service.
Plus, the integration will allow Substack podcasters’ existing subscribers to listen to paid episodes on Spotify.
Podcasters on Substack can set up a Spotify integration by going into their podcast settings, opening the Spotify dropdown, and then clicking the “Sync to Spotify” option to create a new feed with all current and future episodes.
Paid episodes are labeled with a padlock, and listeners need to link their Substack account to Spotify to listen to paid episodes directly on the streaming service.
Substack plans to make this data accessible via a creator’s Substack podcast stats page in the future.
By the time that Rap Genius graced the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in May 2013, the three had landed funding from Andreessen Horowitz and were on the verge of rebranding Rap Genius as Genius and expanding its remit.
But Moghadam also began attracting attention to the annotation company for belligerent behavior, both public and private.
Indeed, in 2014, after posting tasteless comments as annotations after a mass murderer’s manifesto was posted to Genius’s platform, Moghadam resigned at the urging of Lehman, who was the company’s CEO.
Looking back, Moghadam expressed dismay that Genius contributors weren’t paid for helping to build out the platform.
Slamming the new owners of Genius, Moghadam had added that at “at least the [original] CEO [Lehman] straight up built Genius with his own two hands.
Heya, folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s newsletter recapping the noteworthy happenings in tech over the past several days (and change).
Famed startup accelerator Y Combinator had its Demo Days, and the venture desk took it all in with an appropriately skeptical eye.
Also this week, Microsoft and Quantinuum, a quantum computing startup, made a scientific breakthrough — or so they claim.
NewsCanoo paid for its CEO’s jet: Kirsten reports that EV startup Canoo paid the rent for the CEO’s private jet — $1.7 million— in 2023.
Bonus roundNSFW on X: The social media company has confirmed that authorized users on the platform can create NSFW communities, ahead of a change that’ll see all NSFW content on X filtered by default.
Should artists whose work was used to train generative AI like ChatGPT be compensated for their contributions?
OpenAI is in a delicate legal position where it concerns the ways in which it uses data to train generative AI systems like the art-creating tool DALL-E 3, which is incorporated into ChatGPT.
“Training AI models using publicly available internet materials is fair use, as supported by long-standing and widely accepted precedents,” writes the company in a January blog post.
OpenAI has licensing agreements in place with some content providers, like Shutterstock, and allows webmasters to block its web crawler from scraping their site for training data.
In addition, like some of its rivals, OpenAI lets artists “opt out” of and remove their work from the data sets that the company uses to train its image-generating models.
Why does every startup want to help you get paid?
Then I wrote about Remofirst, a startup out to take on the likes of Deel and Rippling, too, securing $25 million in Series A funding.
Also, Tage wrote about how UAE-based RemotePass announced it had raised $5.5 million in Series A funding led by Istanbul-based 212 VC.
Paris-based business banking startup Qonto is using an undisclosed portion of its cash reserve to acquire Regate, an accounting and financial automation platform.
Argyle raises $30M to expand automated income, employment verificationSynctera raises $18.6M in Series A-1 funding (TC covered Synctera’s Series A here.)
During Target’s investor event on Tuesday, the retail giant announced it is launching a paid membership program, Target Circle 360, on April 7 to compete with rivals Amazon and Walmart.
Target Circle 360 acts as the paid version of its free loyalty program Target Circle, which has existed since 2019.
Additionally, it’s renaming Target RedCard credit and debit cards to Target Circle, which will now give customers an extra 5% off purchases.
However, if you have a Target Circle credit card, it will still cost $49.
Walmart also sees success from its paid membership, Walmart+, which debuted in 2020 for $98/year.
Her company Fuck You Pay Me (FYPM), which is like a Glassdoor for influencers, raised a $275K seed extension solely via Instagram stories, with no pitch deck.
On the platform, creators can review brands they’ve worked with, and share data like how much they were paid, how long it took for them to get paid.
So, with the new funding, Lurgin wants to remove these technical barriers to scale, without damaging the quality of the product.
Lurgin wants to make sure that creators and talent managers can access this information for free, so long as they upload verified reviews.
She also wants FYPM to develop an API, allowing talent companies to upload their own data directly to the platform.
Elon Musk’s own social network X is rolling out the ability to make audio and video calls directly from the app to its Android client.
One of the X engineers working on the project posted about the feature release and said it will be available to Android users after an app update.
audio and video calls on X slowly rolling out for android users today!
It’s one of the long list of things only paid users can do on X.
Users can enable or disable calling through Settingle > Privacy and safety > Direct Messages > Enable audio and video calling.
Creating a startup without a fixed idea is like building a startup backward.
Our journey began when my co-founder, Qi Cao, was exploring various startup ideas.
Due to the increased paid marketing costs, finding new and cheaper ways of acquiring customers through content has become top of mind for startups and small businesses.
Although arguably positive for us as consumers, the privacy trend is causing paid marketing costs to soar.
Keep testing various marketing tactics until you strike gold, and measure your results to see if they were successful.
