Just as we were mourning the departure of CNBC’s Rick Santelli, the God of our personal amusement has brought back The Rightful Empress of Tech, Marissa Mayer. Fresh off closing her startup lab, Sunshine, she’s back with Dazzle AI, an assistant to manage your phone’s camera roll. Hell yeah, we’re along for the ride starting now.
California says Lyft will pay $272.5M to resolve driver-pay claims <California Labor Commissioner>
The state calls it its largest wage-and-hour settlement; 87% is slated to go directly to drivers over alleged 2016–20 violations, before Proposition 22 changed the rules.
Reddit is closing the free pipes to its data <TechCrunch>
RSS ends November 13 and public API access in March 2027; meanwhile, Reddit’s “other revenue” rose 24% to $43 million as licensing grows—leaving moderators, researchers and third-party tools to find another route in.
Bending Spoons’ acquisition machine lifted revenue to $1.31 billion <Euronews Next>
Most of the company’s revenue jump since 2023 came from acquisitions, while subscriptions supplied 84% of first-quarter sales; the roll-up still has to keep users through post-deal changes.
According to court documents publicly refiled September 30, Matt Mullenweg was talking about going “full nuclear with WPE,” with “partnerships/merger/M&A as an exit,” before the WordPress feud went public.
The August 15, 2024 Slack message was put to Mullenweg during his deposition. He said he didn’t recall it but could see it in the document; he wanted more context before explaining “full nuclear.”
Another refiled exhibit opens a window onto WordPress.org’s “Mission Control” dashboard. Automattic CTO Barry Abrahamson testified that it graphed active installations of rival WP Engine’s ACF Pro plugin “that WordPress.org knows about.” The data came through WordPress.org’s API; he said it was anonymized and aggregated before storage.
A curious development in the Eric Jackson–SRX mystery is yesterday’s announcement that SRX has invested in a company called Onconetix, betting on its pending acquisition of Realbotix. The pitch? Robotic eyeballs with an AI vision system. Mmmmk.
No investment size or purchase price was disclosed, nor was any word of Eric Jackson’s involvement. Given his history as a high-profile investor, you’d think there would at least be a cursory mention of his endorsement. In fact, he didn’t even seem to re-circulate the news on either his X or LinkedIn pages.
“If they don’t take the carrot we’ll give them the stick.”
That’s internal correspondence quoted by WP Engine and reproduced in a September 24 court order reviving its antitrust claims against Automattic and Matt Mullenweg.
The carrot was a trademark license: WP Engine could pay Automattic a percentage of its revenue. The stick? Well, as we saw, Mullenweg: blasted WP Engine at WordCamp US, blocked its access to WordPress.org, and added a login checkbox requiring users to declare they weren’t affiliated with WP Engine. In WP Engine’s account, that’s what refusing the carrot got you.
WP Engine alleges at least 11 competitors were targeted for multimillion-dollar deals. The order recounts an alleged “Restriction of choice plan”—a remarkably candid name for something happening around open-source software.
Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín found the allegations sufficient to let four antitrust claims proceed. The WordPress.org checkbox requiring users to deny any affiliation with WP Engine also supports a plausible illegal-tying claim: access conditioned on not dealing with a competitor.
These remain allegations, not a liability finding. In the order, Automattic also won dismissal of WP Engine’s computer-fraud-law extortion claim without leave to amend.
I haven’t kept up with Eric Jackson closely, but he seems to be up to some…interesting things. I first remember him from his absolutely devastating presentation on Marissa Mayer’s terrible tenure at Yahoo. Last year, I was surprised to see him pop up with the crowd pushing Opendoor on socials, going so far as to (bizarrely) post videos of himself outside Drake’s house.
This morning I was looking through random microcaps and came across SRX Global (SRXH), which earns most of its paltry revenue from selling dog food. Jackson has been closely tied to SRX since the firm purchased his AI-crypto-type company, EMJX, in June. What the hell?
The stock has been in total freefall since the deal closed. The December 16 deal announcement initially sent it up 23.8%, to $22.62. Through September 23, it has lost 92.5% of that value.
Digging deeper, I found something else that raised more questions. Jackson was originally supposed to become CEO and chairman, and the company was supposed to go so far as to change its name to EMJX as part of the deal announced last December. Investors had been promised EJ would run the company.
When the deal closed in June, incumbent CEO Kent Cunningham kept his job. Jackson became president of the EMJX platform and head of asset management. The company changed its name from SRx Health Solutions to SRX Global, rather than EMJX, and kept its ticker.
The change in Jackson’s job was agreed to in a March 11 amendment that appeared in an April 14 SEC filing. Jackson signed it. What we haven’t found is a clear explanation of why. An April shareholder letter offered some language about aligning with shareholders. The August earnings call didn’t answer the question either.
Jackson gave slightly more info in a video posted June 26:
“I signed a deal back in December. Along the way, that deal changed. I had a decision to make.”
He doesn’t say why the change was made or who wanted it.
His tone sounds just a little bitter to me. I get the impression there was some acrimony, but there’s a chance I’m reading too much into too little. He’s plainly irritated with online critics and cites Steve Jobs and Elon Musk as models in how he’s going to ignore his critics. He does note that he bought shares of SRX himself before closing and is underwater, along with friends and family who had bought in… So I guess he’s still invested in the deal and making it work?
Jackson and CEO Kent Cunningham are appearing on a webinar September 30th and I’ll definitely be tuning in for that.
We haven’t checked in on our favorite strip club stock lately so I thought I’d just see what they were up to. Apparently, they had some issues filing reports over the summer. Whoops.
RCI’s overdue reports became a chain reaction. Here’s how the excuses piled up before it regained Nasdaq filing compliance in May.
December 15, 2025: More audit work. RCI blamed its late annual report on additional audit procedures connected to the New York indictment.
February 9, 2026: Still waiting on that annual report. RCI said it couldn’t finish the December-quarter report because the annual report remained unfinished.
May 11: The earlier delays made us late again. The annual report arrived March 19; the December-quarter report, May 7. That left a “late start” on the March-quarter report. RCI said it hadn’t had “sufficient time.”
Its May 11 release announced restored Nasdaq filing compliance—and the next delay. Same release. It didn’t expect to meet the extension period, either.
June 1: Finally, the cure. RCI announced it had filed the March-quarter report May 28. Nasdaq restored filing compliance May 29.
It’s down a few percentages today, but oft-featured Super Micro, seems to be holding most of the 30% it has gained this month.
This, despite the fact, that their auditors fired them because “they couldn’t trust management”, being threatened of de-listing by Nasdaq, and oh yeah: one of their founders being charged by the feds for violating export laws to China. Don’t worry, though. The company’s own internal investigation has cleared the company and its CEO from any wrongdoing.
Sasan Goodarzi, the CEO of Intuit, wants you to know he doesn’t read books. Thinks they’re a waste of time. But if you put a gun to his head and made him recommend one? Angela Duckworth’s Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.
Let that settle in for a second.
The man running a $160 billion company is publicly bragging that books are beneath him, and his one exception is the most airport-bookstore, LinkedIn-influencer, TED-talk-to-paperback title of the last decade. A book whose thesis can be summarized in four words: try hard, don’t quit.
Groundbreaking stuff.
Mobileye, the crown jewel of Intel’s garage sale, is trimming another 200 employees from the payroll. Despite actually beating revenue expectations recently, stock of the robotaxi maker is still in a down nearly 27% over the last year. Management is calling this a “strategic adjustment,” which is the PR way of saying “we need to make the balance sheet look pretty before Intel dumps another billion-dollar chunk of us.”
After already killing off their LiDAR and Lane Departure units over the last two years, this latest round of layoffs equates to around 4% of global staff. But don’t worry, the suits say they’re still “recruiting for positions required to realize long-term plans.” Translation: We’re firing the expensive veterans today so we can hire cheaper replacements tomorrow. If you’re currently drawing a paycheck at the Mobileye campus, keep your resume on a thumb drive and your eyes on the door, because the most reliable “autonomous” driving from this company is its stock going off a cliff.
