While the normies were resting, I was mainlining tech discourse all weekend to bring you the latest trends, rumors, fights, and innovations from the sweatiest corners of the internet. This week: Twitter debates who’s the most fascinating person in town, tech ads infiltrate the moviegoing experience, and SpaceX stock is plummeting towards Earth.
This is Manic Monday.
Who is the most fascinating person in San Francisco (and other questions one asks after interviewing Mark Zuckerberg)?
That’s what Emily Sundberg, a Substack writer, wanted to know yesterday morning — and boy did the people of Twitter have answers for her. The sincere answers included Stewart Brand (Long Now co-founder), Messy Marv (rapper), and Calvin Hom (chic septuagenarian about town). The corporate shill answers included corporate shills pitching Emily their startup. Then there was the round up of the city’s silly little freaks, including the “katana guy at the end of Pier 39,” whichever Alcatraz tour guide “is the most powerful,” and this guy at a dog park who appears to be some sort of pirate. It all made me giggle. Of course we know that the most fascinating person in the city is probably living such a strange and wonderful life and is nowhere near the orbit of tech twitter or whatever consumable good Sundberg is plugging this week. As this wise commenter put it, “This is like asking who’s the most hydrated person in the desert.”
Robot maker gives a journalist the finger
The product designer of a humanoid robot company called 1X is extremely peeved at Wired for running a story last week that pointed out that the way the company markets its robot’s hyper-dexterous fingers is, let’s just say, suggestive. “I gave WIRED the exclusive on our hands launch, and they wrote a really weird article about how we are sexualizing robots,” the designer, Dar Sleeper, posted on X last weekend. He goes on to say he felt “betrayed” because the journalist didn’t tell him sexy robot fingers would be the angle, and that he regrets trusting his PR team for encouraging him to give Wired the exclusive. Even considering the normalization of tech-friendly “new media," it’s a childish reaction to a review that, really, is more teasing than seriously critical. The article only focuses on the sexy robot fingers for a single paragraph. And to be fair, 1X’s “hands launch” video literally shows those sexy robot fingers unzipping someone’s jacket. Unzipping slowly. It would’ve been bad journalism not to point out the signals here. Boone Ashworth, the journalist in question, has not responded to Sleeper, likely because he knows he’s right, and because what would defending his work do for the sorry state of media literacy anyway?
Waymo still lame-o
No amount of music video placements or pop culture-themed vehicle decals will really change the fact that Waymo’s reputation among the general public is in the pits. This Saturday, a shirtless man in East Hollywood was arrested after cracking an autonomous taxi’s windshield and smacking the sensor on a Waymo while holding a bent windshield wiper. People really didn’t care much online; there wasn’t even much performative outrage about vandalism and traffic jams typical with this kind of viral act. On a much, much smaller scale, the early Sunday afternoon screening of The Invite (which is quite good!) at the AMC Bay Street drew some early jeers when a Waymo commercial came on. (Sidenote: What’s going on with AMC running tech ads in between trailers for, like, Practical Magic 2 and the new Spider-Man?) The rest of the world, or at least San Francisco, is inundated with ads for Claude and Waymo and what have you; leave me to watch Nicole Kidman in peace. —Joshua Bote
Against all odds (take a look at knee now)
It was the blown knee heard around the world. Saturday night was supposed to be the glorious return of Conor McGregor, the big-mouthed UFC superstar who took five years away from fighting after suffering a broken left leg in 2021. Instead, all it took was one clumsy flying kick at the starting bell to destroy his right knee. McGregor kept trying to fight, but he stumbled repeatedly to the ground as his opponent, fellow legend Max Holloway, yelled at the ref to end it.
The fight was a disaster for McGregor, but at least he gets to keep his $15 million payday; the bettors who put their money on him, meanwhile, are inconsolable. That includes one man who claims he lost $1.5 million on the online casino Stake, a loss so bad that the exec who helped build Stake suggested the bettor take a break from the action. Meanwhile, PrizePicks has straight-up voided all bets on the fight (enraging Holloway bettors), and conspiracies abound wondering whether insiders knew McGregor had a bum knee before the fight. Personally, I blame the “Drake curse,” in which every athlete Drake bets on loses. (He blew $1 million.) McGregor is an asshole and a sexual abuser, so pardon me while I laugh heartily at his corny Polymarket commercial. “Against all odds,” indeed! —Eddie Kim
The boosters fall off SpaceX
SpaceX stock price is plummeting, sending waves of panic to those who want to make a buck off Elon. The stock is now down about 7 percent from its $150 first trade back on June 12 — an inauspicious turn just a few days after its debut on the Nasdaq-100, and the downward trend continues. No matter for the bullish, who expect the price to soar toward the $250; that group includes most Wall Street analysts, though at least one expert, stock research company The Motley Fool, is calling BS. “This already looks exceedingly optimistic for a stock that came out of the gate at an inflated valuation when it went public last month,” Motley Fool’s David Jagielski wrote today.
Longtime Fidelity fund manager George Noble has been sounding the alarm, too, dubbing the IPO as “the largest exit liquidity operation in history,” designed for early buyers in SpaceX to fleece incoming retail investors. Is Noble right that SpaceX stock is “the most grossly overpriced stock at scale that I have ever seen”? I dunno — I don’t have the capital to find out! —E.K.
