It’s hot IPO summer, and the MANGOS are ripe

The IPO market is back, and it's not the same companies leading the charge. FAANG had a good run, but a new acronym is taking over: MANGOS — Meta (or Microsoft, depending on who you ask), Anthropic, Nvidia, Google, OpenAI, and SpaceX. Half of that bunch is heading to public markets in the same window, and it's a stress test for investors, for valuations, and for what we can even expect from a public tech company in 2026. On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane break down what this IPO moment actually means beyond the headline numbers, and who stands to benefit. Listen to the full episode to hear: Why Apple's biggest WWDC announcement might matter less than how they showed it, and what a $250M settlement had to do with the change How Waymo just turned Apple's abandoned self-driving dream into its next big proving ground What a $920 million-per-month compute deal between Google and SpaceX says about who's leading the AI infrastructure race How Sam Bankman-Fried's pardon request and a new Zuckerberg biopic somehow ended with the Equity team getting cast by ChatGPT Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome to Equity TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. Today is Friday, June 12th. I'm Kirsten Korosec, Transportation Editor here at TechCrunch, and I'm joined, as always, by our Senior Reporter, Sean O'Kane, and Weekend Editor, Anthony Ha. How are you guys handling the beginnings of summer?

• 0:21Speaker 01

  Well, it's very, very hot. And for those of you who are watching the video, you may see me start to sweat as this episode goes on. But I'm also been really tickled to see that Sam Bankman-Fried is back in the news. You guys remember him, sort of notorious in the crypto world, a massive meltdown. And he's now asking President Trump for a pardon. What do we think are the likelihoods of that happening?

• 0:47Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 0:47Speaker 02

  Not great.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  I mean, Trump has pardoned a lot of people from the crypto world, including the guy from finance, although I guess SBF is sort of, for a while at least, was sort of notorious for being kind of the liberal or Democrat crypto executive as opposed to the conservative one.

• 1:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't think that's working in his favor. Also, you know, maybe this is just like a vibes thing, but it feels like, and this is not to excuse SBF's behavior at all, but like, it feels like everything has kind of gone even worse for him since going into prison, you know? Like, and people keep sort of pulling out like, oh, look at all the stuff he had in his portfolio, like back when he was investing all the money he was getting, you know, making out of Alameda Research and FTX. And it's like, he could be sitting on a lot of that right now if it hadn't been clawed back and sent back to investors. And like, he also just, he went through the formal pardon process, which like, if you look at who's been pardoned, including all of the white collar criminals,

• 1:45Speaker 02

  like, they don't do that. Like, this is such a like, I did the test the right way kind of thing. And it's just, you know, it's very funny to me.

• 1:56Speaker 00

  That is actually hilarious. Like, of all the things that he did and follow the rules on, this was the one thing in which the outcome is worse for you if you do follow the rules on this one. But that reminds me, didn't he also get a movie already?

• 2:12Speaker 01

  Sort of. And I had completely forgotten that this was happening, because I think, like, that sometimes the kind of startup backlash cycle moves so fast that these things get greenlit and then shut down. But, yes, there is an SBF TV show, Netflix TV show in the works. It's called The Altruists. It's gonna be starring this guy Anthony Boyle, not a huge celebrity, but I've seen him in this show, The Plot Against America, and he was really, really good in that. Julia Garner is gonna be playing Carolyn Ellison, and so that has already filmed. It'll be coming to Netflix at some point soon.

• 2:43Speaker 00

  Well, one movie that the trailer just dropped for that I am super looking forward to is The Social Reckoning, which is, you know, I guess the sequel to The Social Network. I'm wondering if you, either of you, listened to, listened and watched, that's important to say, listened, to the trailer.

• 3:01Speaker 01

  I saw it, yeah. And I, it was pretty much exactly what I expected, I suppose. I mean, maybe the most kind of surprising thing, although it shouldn't have been surprising, was just the extent to which Jeremy Strong, who I think most people will know from Succession, it really does seem to be doing a Mark Zuckerberg impression. I mean, way more so than Jesse Eisenberg did in The Social Network. And that was, that was disconcerting, I would say, but also funny.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  New voice dropped.

• 3:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  We had a new voice to play with.

• 3:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was pretty funny. I was inspired by this because, and Anthony, you know the history here, but for many years, there was this question in our, I guess you could call it like our internal Slack messaging system, which was, who would play, like, the various, who would play us in TechCrunch the movie?

• 3:53Speaker 01

  Yes, and I think like all good in-jokes, it's almost impossible to explain because I think anytime I try to explain it, it's just deeply, deeply unfunny, but for a period, it was the funniest thing in the world to us. And to me, it also sort of exemplified the fact that like, and sometimes people talk about the fact that TechCrunch is less weird now than it used to be, which is true and it has its pluses and minuses. And I think both a plus and a minus is we don't have insane in-jokes that we put on the blog quite as often anymore.

• 4:24Speaker 00

  No, not as often anymore. We're a little bit more, I guess, professional. The point is, is that this has gone on for years. I'm coming up actually on my eighth anniversary here at TechCrunch. So it's been going on since pre-me. And so I had a little fun and I was inspired by The Social Reckoning and we were talking about who would play who. And I put all of our bios in ChatGPT.

• 4:45Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 4:45Speaker 00

  So first of all, they determined, Anthony, that you are less a hard-charging beat reporter chasing billion-dollar scoops and more the thoughtful observer of the intersection of tech and media. They called you the newsroom philosopher and they have.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  I'll take that.

• 5:03Speaker 00

  And they felt the best, they, as in ChatGPT, I should say, it felt that the best option for you was John Choi. But there were some other, like, other interesting options in there. Randall Park was one and Ben Feldman was one. Sean, they, ChatGPT decided that you were the reporter who's, quote, "always on signal with three whistleblowers, two engineers and a lawyer while everyone else is still reading the press release." And they cast you as Jake Gyllenhaal or Gyllenhaal.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  Gyllenhaal.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  Flattered.

• 5:42Speaker 00

  Yes. And then I was skeptical, no-nonsense, has the ability to project authority without seeming theatrical. So there you go. And their best pick for me was Carrie Coon, who we know from like The White Lotus, which I thought was like, okay. But also in the strain of succession, Sarah Snook, if you remember her.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 6:06Speaker 00

  Please. Yeah, so there you go. We should probably talk about some deals and stuff too, though, besides just movies. So on the show today, we have deals of the week with Waymo and SpaceX. And then we're going to talk about the hot IPO summer and Apple's WWDC event.

• 6:33Speaker 00

  Let's kick it off with Waymo.

• 6:37Speaker 02

  Waymo bought some land, and not for storing its robo taxis.

• 6:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:41Speaker 02

  You know, you came across this originally, Kirsten. I'm always, you know, I love a story that has to do with documents. I love stories that have to do with real estate. This had both of it. People who have followed the industry closely might know about this place, but Apple, for many years, was working on its sort of Project Titan, you know, electric car, autonomous car, spent billions of dollars, as far as we know. Ultimately, that went nowhere. But while they were working on it, they had acquired this proving ground in Arizona that used to be run by Fiat Chrysler, which is now Stellantis. And in fact, Apple was there for quite a long time. Like, they leased this space to test its prototypes from Fiat

• 7:23Speaker 02

  Chrysler for a while, and then actually bought it for 125 million a few years ago. And it's funny, it's one of those things where it's like, when the program shut down, there was a lot written about it. But, you know, I don't think a lot of people were really thinking about what happens to this land. And so Waymo bought it for $220 million. So Apple made a cool, you know, sort of almost $100 million off this deal. And, uh, and yeah, I'm curious to know, you know, what you guys think. This is not their first proving ground, but it seems like this is going to be its the largest. And clearly, we have Waymo moving into new form factors, like the Zeekr van, or the Hyundai Ioniq 5. So I'm curious what they're gonna, you know, how they're gonna use this facility, and whether we can sort of glean

• 8:07Speaker 02

  anything from this as far as understanding what the company's intentions are.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I'm definitely curious about what it means for Waymo. I think it's also an interesting marker for Apple because, first of all, you know, their self-driving car project was, I mean, it's just kind of remarkable that it's this thing that was such an open secret, everybody knows about it, and also like never officially confirmed. And so on some level, it's still just the kind of, you know, in this gray area of like existed, didn't exist. And so the fact that there is this very large physical artifact of the fact of, you know, attesting to the fact that this was actually something they're pursuing, and now that they've sold it. So it's actually over. The dream of the Apple self-driving car is truly over at this point.

• 8:51Speaker 00

  You know, I think that like reporters who covered transportation, it was like one of those things we were all waiting for, like the big Apple car announcement. And I think that this has now officially been sunsetted. Who knows? Maybe it'll come back one of these days, but it's done. And the proving ground, I think, for people who aren't familiar with this area, it is in the middle of nowhere, this area called Whitman, Arizona. There's a lot of proving grounds out there, actually. Like Toyota has a massive proving ground out there. A lot of companies have these, they do like heat testing, but they're closed courses. There are oftentimes big tracks. The one that Waymo bought from Apple is massive. It's 5,500 acres.

• 9:36Speaker 00

  This includes an entire little mini-city as well as a massive track. So they're going to be able to do a lot of scaling here. And Sean, you're right, they do have, they use two other proving grounds. And I'm wondering, Anthony, I don't know if you ever got a chance to, or if either one of you ever got a chance to go to Castle, but that was their other like quote-unquote "secret" one in California, which I've been to. That was like super early days.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  No, I've never been Waymo. You can definitely invite me and I will absolutely go for that. Even though I'm not really a transportation reporter, I would happily go.

• 10:10Speaker 00

  I don't think they have any proving grounds in New York City. It seems a little bit congested there, so, you know.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  Makes sense.

• 10:16Speaker 00

  Well, I want to get to another. Very lucrative deal, which is Google paying SpaceX $920 million per month for compute. So I just want everyone to like, think about that for a second before we jump in. That's a lot of money.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  Nice work if you can get it.

• 10:35Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly. But to me, what was most interesting about this is of course, what it means for the IPO, which we should say, and we're going to say this repeatedly today, when this episode comes out, SpaceX will be making its IPO debut, right? So there's going to be a lot that maybe we don't get to on this episode that will be happening in real time. But let's talk about this. I mean, what is your initial thought besides this is a, just a ton of money?

• 11:02Speaker 02

  I mean, it's a ton of money. It also shows that this is maybe a more, I mean, listen, SpaceX is nothing but a bunch of pivots over the last year in a lot of ways, right? Like this company wasn't even talking about going public like six or seven months ago, and now it's about to have the biggest stock market debut in history. In large part, that's built on the sort of hopes and dreams that get pinned on Elon Musk. This goes some way into helping build some foundation. I don't want to go, you know, too far out over my skis here, but like, you know, this and the Anthropic deal, which is similar in size, give the company like something. It is now a company whose AI arm more closely

• 11:45Speaker 02

  resembles like CoreWeave versus like the Frontier Labs, which is, you know, sort of how SpaceX positions itself. It likes to think of Grok as competing with Codex and Claude Code. But now the company has realized for, you know, a number of really fascinating reasons that there are, it's just a ton of demand for compute. There, we're seeing delays on construction for data centers around the country. And in, in large part because Grok has stumbled so hard, they have a bunch of compute that they built in Tennessee that they can lease out. And you know, the big caveat here is this is just like Anthropic. It can be canceled at any point with just 90 days' notice. But you know, as long as these deals hold, we're looking at like more

• 12:29Speaker 02

  Than double Starlink's revenue last year just got added to SpaceX's books, you know, sort of moving forward with these two deals. And it's, it's just really fascinating.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  It's really striking to me, like, reading the article about it also, how the company seems to be kind of downplaying the deal too, to an extent, and, and sort of saying, listen, this is just a short term thing. Don't make a whole big deal out of it. And which I think is, yeah, incredible to say about something that's essentially, you know, just short of a billion dollars a month that's, that's changing hands. But I can see why, you know, and Sean, I think you've, you've kind of explained this pretty well, both just now and in previous episodes. SpaceX doesn't necessarily want to make too big a deal out of this because in some ways it is counter to the narrative that they want to tell about themselves, where essentially like, I think for SpaceX to justify the amount of money, the valuation, I mean, that they're hoping for in this IPO, and it sounds like there's a good chance they'll, they'll get there at least initially,

• 13:25Speaker 01

  is basically you have to believe that we're going to have a human colony on Mars built by SpaceX and that like SpaceX is going to be the leading AI company. And if you, if on the AI side, if it's just, well, it's this chatbot that, you know, has done a bunch of bad things, is not really cutting edge. And now we don't, you know, we're bringing in some short term revenue by like, you know, selling out this compute. That's not really tying in with the bigger narrative that they want to tell, even if it is bringing in, you know, a lot of money every month.

• 13:54Speaker 00

  You mean, you can't have one of the world's largest IPOs ever on the back of the success of Grok? I mean, I think they, they might, but it might, you know, I, whether that works out in the long term,

• 14:06Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm more, more skeptical. I mean, I, I personally, yeah, I'm, I'm skeptical that it's worth, you know, the amount of money that's, that seems like is about to go into it. But that doesn't mean the IPO is not going to be successful in the short term.

• 14:18Speaker 00

  That was actually a rhetorical question. I wasn't expecting you to actually answer that.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  I have thoughts on everything.

• 14:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, you do. What I will say is that they are, SpaceX is kind of caught in this like interesting moment because on the one hand, they really do want to show that there is revenue and Starlink is like the big, you know, the darling within the business right now because everything else is just like eating up so much cash. So in the short term, they can show that they have this like other source of revenue, which is good, but they do not, to your point, want to be cast as, you know, a data center infrastructure provider. I mean, they're supposed to be far more futuristic and innovative and not, you know, launching rockets. And so. I totally understand why they're downplaying this, but when you get down to it,

• 15:06Speaker 00

  it is generating revenue for them, and that's a good thing for the company and for shareholders. I think the question is, what do they do two years from now? And can they move past that, or do they just turn into this?

• 15:20Speaker 02

  I want to point out just a couple of quick things. One is that like, I don't think this is actually that far from the vision they're trying to sell, because one of the things they're trying to sell with, you know, the total addressable market is AI compute infrastructure in space, like quote unquote orbital data centers. So like, you know, yes, they're going to use a lot of that themselves, I'm sure. But also, I imagine they are considering, you know, there's been reporting that Google's already talking to SpaceX about using that orbital compute, should that idea pan out? And so this is like, you know, the terrestrial version of that. I don't think we're going to see more of it, because I don't think SpaceX is going to put in the capital to build another new data center here on Earth at this point. But I just wanted to put that out there.

• 16:03Speaker 02

  The other thing is like, to the point about how tenuous these might be.

• 16:08Speaker 02

  Like, both of these companies are companies that Elon Musk has had quite loud disagreements with, to put it nicely. Like, he started OpenAI in large part because he was afraid that DeepMind was going to reach AGI, and now DeepMind's a part of Google, right? And he was afraid of sort of, I forget, was it Larry or Sergey? He said, you know, he thought that these people were sort of like, not putting the future of humanity in mind when developing AI. And so that is just that. And then you take also the fact that Anthropic is a company that he has like bashed repeatedly in public. He's clearly happy to take their money, but like, it just makes me wonder if like, any

• 16:49Speaker 02

  of those past sins that he's seen at these companies will be enough for him to yank these deals down the road. And when you think about like, post-IPO, yeah, the IPO is probably going to be huge. But like, where do we get into a situation where, is Elon Musk going to be on these earnings calls? And if he is, is he going to be downplaying those? It's one thing to fire off Tweet now pre-IPO, but if you're on an earnings call and you're like really hammering like, hey, guys, this deal is really temporary and don't think of it as like a long-term revenue generator. And like, maybe he tips over into like smashing one of these companies on the call, then we have a live stock that is, you know, we're in this situation that he has tried to avoid for so long with Tesla, where everything he says can affect the company's stock, including negatively.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  Well, I want to zoom out a little bit also from just the SpaceX IPO because beyond the sort of Elon Musk of it all, which I'm sure we can continue about talking about in different ways, it's also kind of the beginning of the, what could be a bunch of different IPOs for different AI companies. We've talked about Anthropic, you know, confidentially filing to go public and now OpenAI has done the same. How excited are, you know, either of you about this?

• 17:56Speaker 00

  Well, I want to start off by saying that I love Julie Board's story. It's not Fang anymore, it's mangoes. And the idea that, of course, Fang being Facebook, which is now Meta, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google, now Alphabet, and now it's shifted. And we've got Meta, Anthropic, Nvidia, Google, OpenAI, SpaceX. And to me, it signals still massive tech companies, surely, but there is a shift here, right? I mean, first of all, we've got a bunch of AI labs in there and that's very different. You know, Netflix gets booted out of there, you know, a giant streaming

• 18:34Speaker 00

  service. And so to me, it's an interesting shift in terms of public markets and the vast amount of money and capital available in the public markets, shifting away from consumer in a way, like social networks and things like that, towards specifically AI labs and other more innovative deep tech, such as SpaceX.

• 18:56Speaker 02

  You know, once upon a time, I wanted to be a lawyer. And one of the reasons I didn't was because I hated the paperwork that was going to be involved in being a lawyer. And here I am, looking forward to reading hundreds more pages of SEC filings this summer. Talk about a beach read. Yeah, I don't, and it's like, this is. This is a moment, it's a moment we've been anticipating for a while. We've spent the last few years really wondering if the IPO market was going to sort of, you know, quote unquote, open back up after, you know, a lot of consternation about private markets and sort of mockery about people reaching their like series M fundraising round or whatever. And so this is a good sort of stress test.

• 19:36Speaker 02

  I mean, good, take that word however you want, a good stress test of public markets in general, right? Like, we have SpaceX not only sucking up just a huge chunk of the money that's available on public markets, but also really stress testing the limits of what a public company can be and how much it can be controlled by one single person. My eye is really on these other tech companies that will go public and trying to see how much they will try to emulate. You know, a thing that I keep saying and thinking about with SpaceX is they're really trying to take some of the most extreme aspects of Google and Meta's original IPOs back in the early 2000s and mashing it up with that kind of we'll lose money forever with Amazon.

• 20:21Speaker 02

  And I'm curious like how much Anthropic and OpenAI will try to do the same. Like, will they remake themselves in the image of SpaceX or will they try to, you know, put themselves in a different light when they come to the public markets?

• 20:33Speaker 01

  One aspect that I, I think, you know, I'd read about and thought about a little bit, but, but really kind of like, kind of got driven home as I was reading about the OpenAI IPO is also the, the extent to which some of this is also a little bit of a race in terms of timing. I mean, I think we can confidently say at this point SpaceX is, you know, kind of one is, you know, coming in first, it's first at the gate, which I think probably has some advantages and disadvantages. It's also a bit of a different company because it's, it's building itself as an AI company, but obviously has a bunch of other stuff going on too. But there is a sense in, at least according to, you know, some analysts, that, that OpenAI and Anthropic may both want to go before the other one because there's, you know, at

• 21:16Speaker 01

  least in theory, of only a finite amount of capital, a finite amount of interest. You know, at some point, some of these, you know, valuations have to start coming back down to earth and, and so that they may both be scrambling to be first. I have no inside information, but that, that is just a fun way to think about it.

• 21:32Speaker 00

  There's very much a race between Anthropic and OpenAI. I mean, you're even seeing OpenAI talk about like price slashing prices, I think, in in competition with Anthropic. They're certainly going to be competing on the IPO calendar. But that is very short term thinking, I think. You really need to be, you know, once you're public, you're public unless you decide to reverse that strategy. So really, if they're smart, they should be much more concerned about long term, the long term play here. To me, what's really interesting is while Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX all prepare for these moments, there are a host of other companies

• 22:12Speaker 00

  out there that are raising money on the backs of the success of companies like SpaceX, or, you know, going into SPACs. So just today, for instance, or as we're recording this, I should say, a company called Quantum Space is doing a SPAC and absolutely trying to ride that SpaceX IPO wave. We've got other, a host of other startups that our reporter Tim Farnol says reported on that are clearly, they're not going to go public, right? But if SpaceX is successful with space data centers, they're raising money off of that potential

• 22:52Speaker 00

  and they're building businesses on that potential. So there is a ripple effect that's happening throughout the market that I think is probably even more interesting than just the headline, you know, SpaceX makes Elon a trillionaire.

• 23:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like, you know, the sort of common accepted theory in Silicon Valley is that like AI is remaking the economy. But like, because of its use, AI is actually already remaking the economy just because of, you know, how people are trying to build it. We have everything that you just described. We have these other companies sort of rushing to public markets. And I think that's a really good point to think about, like, will they ever regret rushing to public markets, you know, and certainly something for us to watch. But we even have companies like Ford and General Motors, who are sort of pivoting their unused battery creation capacity.

• 23:45Speaker 02

  To be, you know, being energy providers for data centers and Ford's stock shot up when it sort of announced what is honestly a pretty modest looking energy storage business in comparison to something like Tesla. And Tim Deschamps had a really great series of stories this week about GM's pivot as well. And so like, the economy is already being remade, you know, whether that's durable, again, you know, that's the question, but it but it's happening right now.

• 24:12Speaker 00

  That is actually a really good point because to me, remember, like, I want to say, what, five, six, seven, eight years ago, there were all these headlines of like, the next Tesla killer and and what automakers. And it's like, these automakers and other companies are still chasing, trying to recreate all these various businesses and specifically the strategies of Elon Musk based businesses. And it's like, they haven't learned their lesson. I it's, it's, I wish if I could, you know, communicate this to all the automaker CEOs out there is, I get it that you have a lot of unused batteries and you want to

• 24:51Speaker 00

  pivot to something else. But trying to model your business after Tesla or SpaceX and others, it's doesn't always work. So, you know, perhaps look elsewhere, I guess.

• 25:05Speaker 02

  So Ford shouldn't get into space data centers?

• 25:08Speaker 00

  No, they shouldn't. But just watch, just just watch. This is going to happen. This is going to happen. I mean, I think that there's the battery piece does make sense. But also, it's just fascinating to me that like Tesla has been in this energy storage business for a very long time. And say what you will about Tesla, surely there's lots of critics out there. But they were very forward thinking and, you know, pushed into a market that didn't totally exist. And now have, you know, a good solid decade behind them. And suddenly, legacy automakers are trying to jump in because of all of the EV demand that has settled down. And that was created from when the first time they were

• 25:53Speaker 00

  chasing Tesla into the EV market. So, you know, it's.

• 25:58Speaker 00

  Forever fascinating to me, the choices that these companies make.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  You know, you were talking about this being this kind of pivotal moment for the startup ecosystem as well, and all these companies that are probably going to sort of be riding on the coattails of these IPOs. And I definitely think that's true. I think, you know, it also becomes this moment of reality, where reality starts to sink in because, you know, I think before any of these companies go public, you can just have these kinds of crazy numbers getting thrown around about what the total market size is. And that if you're a startup raising fund, you'd be like, yeah, great, like, that's what the total market size is. And we'll get 10% of that market, and we can be worth however many billions or trillions of dollars. And then you start to see, you know, well, okay, where is the ceiling? I mean, and, you know, we actually, we mentioned Netflix earlier, and there was like a specific

• 26:44Speaker 01

  moment, you know, when Netflix suddenly, their user growth kind of stalled, and suddenly throughout the streaming ecosystem, the mindset just completely changed. It wasn't growth at all costs, it was suddenly about profitability, because people started to see the ceiling. And I think you're gonna start to see that here as well.

• 27:01Speaker 00

  I would agree. I'm wondering if we have like, just a little bit of time to talk about this other small company called Apple. And Apple had WWDC, and I don't know, maybe it was me, I mean, we had a lot of coverage of it, but it just didn't seem like people were as interested in what was going on with Apple as what was going on with SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic. And maybe that's just a reflection of the times. But Tim Cook kind of gave a salute goodbye, which was, I think, super notable. Of course, we saw that coming. And then, of course, Apple had a ton of products that they announced, including a bunch of updates.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  The obvious thing, of course, is the revamp of Siri, the, you know, kind of the promises about Apple Intelligence. And it seemed exciting, but also, I think, part of the muted response is this feeling of, hey, we've seen this show before, you know, Apple had, you know, an AI presentation, you know, two years ago, and made all these promises, and didn't really live up to them. And I think there's a number of things they did differently this time to try to suggest that, hey, this isn't going to be like 2024, the initial rollout of Apple Intelligence. But it's sort of like, what they say on stage matters a lot less now than what they actually, like, you know, roll out to consumers. So I think what happens over the next few months is going to matter a lot more than than what they said on stage this week.

• 28:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, this to me felt like a very almost expected sort of transition period event. I mean, we should say this is the developer conference that they do. This is not like their premiere event every year, even though it does get a lot of attention. And so it is a little bit more focused on the kind of nuts and bolts stuff versus, you know, a big new iPhone. But I think we saw a level of, you know, I don't want to say like it was a big mea culpa, but like we saw the company sort of walking back a lot of things like allowing people now to adjust the sort of translucent or transparent nature of liquid glass. And that, you know, they're, they're taking a lot of things. They were quite literally on stage saying like, we heard you and making some announcements

• 29:09Speaker 02

  related to the feedback that they've gotten of the last two years, basically. And, you know, we've seen behind the scenes through reporting from folks like Mark Gurman about like the number of people who have been cast out, who kind of were behind a lot of those decisions. And when you think about that, and also the fact that John Turnus is about to start as CEO relatively soon, it's just a moment for the company to change direction a little bit, even if it's just in sort of how it talks about itself and how it presents itself. I think in general, like I saw that they did a, a sort of like onstage, so still in like a theater, but like kind of a Q and A with reporters after the event, which is like not a thing that they normally do.

• 29:51Speaker 02

  And it was something, you know, from what I read, more closely resembled the kind of like in-person onstage events that we were used to for so long in the Jobs era, you know, instead of these highly produced videos that we get now at these events.

• 30:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was, that was, I wanted to jump in on that one because to me, this felt like very much a do-over. And specifically with the onstage piece and also some of their demos seemed a lot more real. And that is the consequence of this $250 million false ad settlement. So. I would call this event do-over plus. And it's like, this time, we hear you, we heard you, we're going to correct some mistakes. And oh, here are a few things you actually won.

• 30:41Speaker 01

  One thing that kind of gave me a double take as I was reading all the coverage was, you know, we've talked about or alluded to the fact that they did the demos differently this time. And I found myself sort of nodding along as I'm reading them like, yeah, yeah, that makes sense that they do it. It's closer to live, you can actually see, it seems like you're actually seeing the product work on somebody's phone. And then I just started laughing because like to explain how it's closer to live, but not still not actually a live demo still seems so convoluted. And again, it's like this weird compromise of how Apple has to do it, do its events now. Because I think they've they discovered during the pandemic, they really liked these like super polished, pre-recorded events. But then, you know, because I think there's so much skepticism, particularly on the demo side now,

• 31:25Speaker 01

  they can't just take that approach, but they don't want to go, it seems like they don't want to go back to what they did before. And so there's this in-between that it makes sense, but it is also kind of funny to me that they can't just do a live demo.

• 31:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I don't want to spend too much time on this, but I will say this. I think that they're behind the times. I think that people are actually looking to do more things in real life. And those like, look at how video has changed and look at how, you know, the era of the highly polished video is doesn't exist as much anymore. I mean, people want to feel like they're talking to a real person. And I think that that's partly, you know, coming out of COVID, you know, it's been six, six years. But also a pushback on AI slop. And so I like a live demo, you know, and I think that people want that sort of in-real-life piece again.

• 32:18Speaker 00

  And I'm curious to see if other companies are going to take, you know, the cue from consumers and sort of start doing this, like what Apple did isn't quite there.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  I think part of the vision for Siri that our colleague Amanda did a really great piece about, and this has been how they've been pitching Siri forever. Again, knock on all the wood in my room, maybe that's what they're getting towards now is this idea of a real personal assistant, essentially, again, it's the promise of the AI agents. And I think it's hard to dig into exactly how Siri's going to do that, but we do have an upcoming interview with NAI partner Tiffany Luck that's going to be talking about that bigger vision. I mean, there's going to be a lot more to talk about after the SpaceX IPO and seeing all this roll out. But Equity will be back next week. Until then, you can follow us at EquityPod on X and Threads.

• 33:11Speaker 03

  Equity is hosted by TechCrunch senior reporters and produced by Teresa Locan Solo with editing by Kel. Subscribe on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts and find out what's next at techcrunch.com/events. Thanks so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.