Please re-xeet this podcast episode

Here’s the rundown from this morning: Stocks are mixed around the world: Chinese equities sold off while American shares were set to rise at the open. A massive run of earnings this week should shake up the stock market for tech companies and their traditional brethren alike. In crypto-land, prices are back to where they were pre-XRP decision. I don't know what to make of that, but do know that Worldcoin is still a thing and is now actually out. Twitter's new brand: All hail X, I suppose. Musk's work to defenstrate what we all knew about Twitter, the company is being rebranded to X, which the company intends to be a superapp of sorts. Cool if it works, embarrassing if not. Spotify is finally raising prices, and all I can say is thank god. It was getting weird to get all the world's music for what felt like a song. I want to pay more making the price hike welcome, if still far smaller than it should be. SF really is the new AI hub. Ahead we have Disrupt, which is taking up more and more of my time. See you there! For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders and more! Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:10Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome back to Equity, the TechCrunch podcast where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is Alex. Good morning and happy Monday to you. This, of course, is our weekly kickoff show where we look back at the weekend and take a peek at the week ahead. Today is July 24, 2023, and on today's show, well, it's earnings season, which means big names are dropping numbers this week and the next. Crypto prices have managed to come all the way back around. And also, we have Twitter's new brand raising digital prices at Spotify and where the AI jobs are and aren't. All right, to work.

• 0:49Speaker 00

  Starting as we always do with a look at the world of money. Stocks in Asia were lower in China, but up in Japan and South Korea. In China, concerns about major companies in its housing and construction market were partially to blame. Shares were broadly lower in Europe today, but stocks are set to rise in the US with green flashing for the Dow Jones Industrial Average, among other major indices. Now, I mentioned earnings up at the top of the show, and I was absolutely 100% not kidding. So on Monday, we have F5. On Tuesday, you have Microsoft, Alphabet, Visa, Verizon, and Snap. Then Wednesday is going to be Meta, aka Facebook, ServiceNow, AT&T, and eBay. And then Thursday, if we're all still standing, we'll hear from Comcast,

• 1:32Speaker 00

  T-Mobile, Intel, Roku, Juniper Networks, AppFolio, and CoreSara. It's going to be busy, busy, busy, and busy. Lots of data coming in for enterprise software, consumer advertising, and social, telco, hardware. It's a big old mix and will let us know how key startup sectors are performing. So strap in. It's going to be a lot of numbers, and I'm going to frickin' love it. But enough about the stock market. Let's talk about crypto. After gaining some ground in recent days, the price of Bitcoin is back around the $29,000 mark, and Ethereum's token is once again worth around 1,800. We are back to where we were pre-XRP decision in other Words. I'm actually not sure what really drives changes in crypto prices,

• 2:14Speaker 00

  which are all more correlated than make sense. But regardless, the crypto winter persists for now. Also, if you're looking ahead, Coinbase will drop its own earnings on August 3rd. So mark your calendars. But that's not all in the world of crypto. WorldCoin launched today and TechCrunch has the story. I'm going to loosely quote here for a bit. "WorldCoin, Sam Altman's audacious eyeball-scanning crypto startup, has started the global rollout of its services to help build a reliable solution for, quote, 'distinguishing humans from AI online.' It also wants to enable, quote, 'global democratic processes,' and, I quote, 'drastically increase economic opportunity.' Other than that, no ambitions. The startup, which has raised about a quarter billion dollars, counts Andreessen Horowitz,

• 2:57Speaker 00

  Coastal Ventures and Reid Hoffman amongst its backers, and says that it's rolling out its identity technology as well as its token internationally. Individuals can now download World App, the startup's protocol-compatible wallet software, and then visit, I kid you not, an orb, the startup's helmet-shaped eyeball-scanning verification device to receive their World ID. I don't know if this is going to work. Also, I'm not going to take part. I don't want to give my eyeballs to the blockchain. I don't think I have to explain why. But we'll see. Perhaps it will be popular. After all, with $250 million in funding, there's a lot riding on WorldCoin being a worldwide success.

• 3:37Speaker 00

  Next up, we're going to talk about big news that matters. And today's top story is the Twitter-to-X.com transition is underway. Here's my question. Does Elon Musk actually like Twitter? Between gutting the company's staff and levering it to the gills, it's left Twitter Corporation diminished and under pressure, and now its new owner is ripping up its branding and replacing it with X. X.com, of course, has a prior history with Musk from the PayPal era. If you don't know that story, go look it up. Anyways, there's a new logo out. It's an X. And Twitter's punitive CEO, Linda Iaccarino, had the following to share over on the X app. Quote, "X is the future state of unlimited interactivity centered in audio, video, messaging, payments."

• 4:20Speaker 00

  Banking, creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities powered by AI. X will connect us all in ways we're just beginning to imagine. So it's centered in audio and it's centered in video and it's centered in messaging and it's centered in payments and banking. And it's going to be the global marketplace essentially for ideas, which are ephemeral, goods, which are physical, services, which are actions and opportunities, which are potentials. That's a lot of different things at once. Anyways, the super app idea, of course, is not new, but is yet to win in the US where apps that have narrower and more discrete use cases are popular. And finally, I'll just say this, of all the AI pitches that I've seen, the X idea sounds the most like a word salad.

• 5:05Speaker 00

  Next up in news that matters, Spotify is finally raising its prices. Thank God y'all, Spotify is going to charge me more for its service. TechCrunch reports that the music streaming giant, which claims some 500 million users globally, 40% of which are premium subscribers, revealed that its main premium ad-free plan will be increasing from $9.99 per month in the US to $10.99. If you use the duo plan, it's going to cost you $2 more a month. The family plan, $1 more per month. And the student plan, the cheapest, is also going up by $1 per month. Now, this hike in prices is not limited just to the US market. Spotify has confirmed they will also raise prices in dozens of markets, including the

• 5:45Speaker 00

  EU, the UK, chunks of South and Central America, Asia, and Oceania, most places, in other words. Why do we care about this? Well, most digital services have seen their prices increase over time, except Spotify. Even arch rival Apple Music raises prices to the same $10.99 per month late last year. Spotify is therefore a laggard. Now, why is that? Eh, well, perhaps it was hoping that the price differential between itself and Apple Music would yield more subscribers? I don't know. Anyway, here's hoping that by charging us more, Spotify will be able to make streaming more valuable to the artists that truly make it a valuable product. And Spotify, if you want to charge me 30 bucks a month, the answer is sure.

• 6:30Speaker 00

  Love it or hate it, San Francisco is back. There has been lots of chatter about how San Francisco hobbled somewhat during the pandemic and its resulting economic dispersion thanks to remote work is coming back to prominence thanks to technologist, founder, and investor interest in new AI products and services. Well, it turns out that's actually true. Axios reports, then I quote, "The latest tech boom is highly concentrated. 60% of new generative AI job postings are located in just 15 metro areas, with San Francisco topping the list," according to a new Brookings Institution report. So how top-heavy is this list? Well, of the Forbes AI 50, there were 43 American interests, and Axios notes that all of those were from four states. And

• 7:14Speaker 00

  California topped the charts with 35 of the 50 companies, to which I'll just say, goddamn.

• 7:22Speaker 00

  All right, looking ahead, TechCrunch is still digging into Q2 2023 venture capital data. So if we haven't gotten to your favorite sector or region yet, don't worry, it's coming. Also, we recently had Kyle Stanford, an analyst over at PitchBook on the show to talk about the Q2 venture market from the US perspective. Go look that up if you haven't heard it yet. Earnings, as we mentioned, will keep the summer slowdown from getting too dull because there's so much coming in the next few weeks. And IPOs could be making a very, very slow comeback thanks to a few recent and oddly high-profile debuts. Now, no new filings yet as of this morning, but we may not be too far off from things getting somewhat interesting. And Disrupt is

• 8:03Speaker 00

  less than two months away, which means I need to go shoe shopping and generally get my shit together. It's going to be a massive do this year. I'm hosting one of the stages for several days, and Equity this very show will, as we did last year, kick off the show. That is all we have time for today, my friends. Don't forget Equity is back on Friday, and we are back on Wednesday as well. You can follow the show on Threads and Twitter, where we thread and tweet under the handle EquityPod, or as we zit on the X.com under EquityPod. I don't know. We're also on Blue Sky, where we skeet under the handle Equity. Of course, Chain Reaction and Found are our sister podcasts. They are fantastic. Take a look at them, and we will see you back here on Wednesday. Thank you. Goodbye.

• 8:44Speaker 00

  Equity is hosted by myself, editor in chief of TechCrunch Plus Alex Wilhelm, and TechCrunch senior reporter Mary Ann Azvedo. We are produced by Teresa Loconsolo, with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our illustrator, and a big thank you to the audience development team, and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch Audio Products. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next time.