Uber found a regulation it likes

Uber has reversed its long-standing opposition to regulation, now supporting a federal framework for autonomous vehicles that would preempt state-level rules, marking a significant policy shift for the ride-hailing giant.

Uber found a regulation it likes Tuesday. Inflation ticked lower in June https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm , with the consumer price index CPI falling 0.4% seasonally adjusted . That rate was good for a +3.5% inflation rate over the last 12 months, down from +4.2% in May. Falling energy prices helped. However, oil prices are once again rising https://www.barrons.com/articles/oil-prices-strait-hormuz-brent-wti-6054983a after the United States declared sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz https://www.npr.org/2026/07/14/nx-s1-5893257/us-iran-updates . Alas. Today we’re peeking at banking profits, why Saronic is having a beast of a year, a positive change to X , IBM earnings, state capitalism, Uber’s u-turn into protectionism, and more. To work — Alex 📈 Trending Up … Apple market share in China token demand https://x.com/ceo clickhouse/status/2076748940628967831 … token demand https://openrouter.ai/rankings … investing in chip startups https://siliconangle.com/2026/07/14/custom-ai-chip-design-startup-tylsemi-launches-43m-early-stage-funding/ …… DeepSeek’s valuation, again Windows’ usability https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/microsoft-announces-major-windows-11-search-overhaul-that-prioritizes-clearer-local-results-and-removes-ads … big aspirations https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/softbank-groups-ceo-says-5-112543307.html … crypto https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/crypto/article/crypto-buyers-may-be-emerging-from-their-winter-hibernation-135203854.html ? … GDP in Kazakhstan https://timesca.com/kazakhstans-gdp-growth-tops-4-in-first-half-of-2026-despite-lower-oil-output/ … Banking profits: JPMorgan Chase earnings https://www.jpmorganchase.com/content/dam/jpmc/jpmorgan-chase-and-co/investor-relations/documents/quarterly-earnings/2026/2nd-quarter/6cded9fd-a164-4e6c-8cff-377357cf105c.pdf beat expectations in the quarter, with net income rising from $15.0 billion in Q2 2025 to $16.5 billion in Q1 2026 to $21.2 billion in the second quarter of this year. Yahoo Finance called it https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/article/jpmorgan-notches-the-highest-quarterly-profit-in-us-banking-history-110031854.html “the highest quarterly profit in US banking history.” Also this morning, Goldman Sachs reported https://www.goldmansachs.com/pressroom/press-releases/2026/2026-07-14-q2-results per-share profit of $20.98, far above an anticipated $14.50 result. Wells Fargo beat https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/wells-fargo-profit-beats-estimates-103844480.html . Bank of America beat https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/bofa-profit-soars-stock-traders-110446921.html , too. - What drove the results? Goldman saw crushing revenue growth in investment banking +55%, driven by “significantly higher net revenues in Equity underwriting” . Equities revenue at the bank rose 72%, to $7.42 billion. JPMorganChase reported that “revenue in each line of its business hit a new record,” including 27% growth in its commercial and investment banking group. Similarly, Wells Fargo reported that each of its “operating segments generat ed strong revenue growth” in the quarter. - It’s a great time to be a bank. Whether the same sunshine reaches Revolut , Monzo , and Chime is less clear, but fintech VCs must feel vindicated. Saronic: At the end of the first quarter, autonomous warship startup Saronic closed a massive $1.75 billion Series D https://medium.com/saronic-technologies/saronic-closes-1-75b-series-d-at-9-25b-valuation-to-accelerate-a-new-era-of-maritime-autonomy-a801be818746 , valuing the private company at $9.25 billion. Little did its investors know how great a year the company would have from a warfighting standpoint. First, Saronic’s drone boats helped rescue two American https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2026/06/saronic-usv-rescues-two-u-s-army-pilots-downed-by-iran/ pilots, and this week the United States military used “ three Saronic Corsair unmanned surface vessels to strike a docked Ghadir-class midget submarine at Iran’s Bandar Abbas Naval Base https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2026/07/centcom-saronic-corsair-usv-strike-iran-submarine-bandar-abbas/ .” - The U.S. military called the mission “the first time American forces have employed sea drones in combat operations.” - Sure, we’re behind Ukraine when it comes to drones, but this is the future. And companies from Helsing to Quantum Systems in Europe to Saronic and Anduril in the United States are feasting. Recall that the two European companies in the list recently raised huge rounds https://www.cautiousoptimism.news/the-new-enterprise-mantra-if-i-pay-your-margin-i-keep-my-data/ . Twitter, incredibly: SpaceX’s social network X has consistently evolved away from its original ‘ follow people and see their posts in a time-series list‘ setup. Today, to access the Old Fashioned Twitter experience, X users have to first tell the app they only want to see posts from people they follow, and then click another button to indicate that they really do want to see those tweets in order, not ranked by an internal algorithm. The direction was clear: X wanted to mediate what you saw on its app with a TikTok-esque promoted feed, and encouraged well-behaved creators with regular cash payments for playing by its new rules. As a result of the change, my tweets posts? became desiccated little flowers left in a dry river bed this had the nice side effect of fewer people yelling at me . Now, X has announced that it is “rolling out a small tweak to boost visibility of your posts to your mutuals people who you follow back .” No shit? That’s almost a good feed decision from X But wait, there’s more from head of product Nikita Bier https://x.com/nikitabier/status/2076747704248758617 : We noticed this data was missing from the algo and it made your friends appear less in your replies. This resulted in the reply section feeling more like a battleground with people you don’t recognize. That’s not quite what we might have hoped for, but anything that makes X more about who you follow and less about who is attention-hacking sounds delightful. 📉 https://finance.yahoo.com/news/servicenow-pledges-1-5bn-investment-110000403.html Trending Down 📉 https://finance.yahoo.com/news/servicenow-pledges-1-5bn-investment-110000403.html Sneaking Nvidia Chips to China https://www.ft.com/content/7c146c56-cc7a-40ec-93cb-58106a012421 … our collective intelligence https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/07/13/nearly-6-in-10-young-women-get-health-and-wellness-information-from-influencers/ … clean government https://t.co/RwgEkhMkj2 … large data centers in New York https://www.theverge.com/policy/965110/new-york-ai-data-center-moratorium … Meta’s ability to not step on its own genitals https://variety.com/2026/biz/news/meta-suspends-ai-image-instagram-feature-backlash-1236806989/ … IBM, after earnings: Shares of IBM got nuked this morning, falling some 24% in early trading. What happened? IBM’s “ selected preliminary second-quarter 2026 financial results https://newsroom.ibm.com/2026-07-14-Arvind-Krishnas-Letter-to-IBM-Investors ” came up drastically short https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/ibm-expects-second-quarter-revenue-111029599.html , with software and infra revenues showing particular shortfalls when compared to expectations. CEO Arvind Krishna explained that the company’s mainframe product, the z17, stumbled. Not only did the massive box have technical issues, but two things happened externally to Big Blue that made its life exceedingly hellacious in the quarter: In the last few weeks of June, we saw clients shift their quarterly capex spend toward servers, storage, and memory purchases to secure supply-constrained infrastructure ahead of expected price increases. … In addition, clients were distracted with rapidly-evolving, industry-wide cybersecurity concerns in the quarter. It’s AI’s fault Data center demand is driving bonkers pricing in compute components, changing the buying patterns of IBM’s mainframe customers, and the same customers were super busy preparing for a post-Mythos world during the quarter instead of waiting patiently for the z17 to get sorted. Not a great time to sling underperforming on-prem systems Intel, after truth: News that the EU approved €659 million in https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip 26 1585 state investment in Germany for four semiconductor facilities is a reminder that state capitalism is popular around the world. I just didn’t expect to see so much of it here, in the United States. Intel’s 2026 glow-up is partly predicated on rising demand for CPUs shoutout AI agents and partly on the government forcing American tech companies to do business with a partially nationalized chip company. The WSJ reports https://www.wsj.com/tech/the-white-house-intel-trump-apple-84fe833e Apple agreed to “invest hundreds of billions of dollars more in the U.S.” to earn an exemption on chip import tariffs, and chose Intel to build some of its chips after President “Trump and Howard Lutnick urged Cook to use Intel’s manufacturing plants.” More on Lutnick here https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/22/us/politics/howard-lutnick-donation-house-republicans.html . - “The administration has taken a hands-on approach to the company, twisting the arms of major potential customers and partners including Apple, Nvidia and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, all of which have signed deals with Intel since the government stake was announced,” the Journal continues. This is the bad place https://x.com/scottlincicome/status/2076634295985140067 . Shares of Intel fell yesterday, though how much of the decline could be attributed to reporting https://finance.biggo.com/news/06626fcf-6740-48a7-bbca-54e9b60a195a on how it earned some recent contracts is unclear. Uber’s market reputation: Speaking of using the government to your advantage, Wired reports https://www.wired.com/story/ubers-autonomous-vehicle-strategy-slow-their-adoption/ that Uber’s lobbyists are aggressively working to limit self-driving companies’ ability to operate fully autonomous fleets. One example: “In New Jersey, a lobbyist representing Uber circulated legislative language that would require any platform offering driverless ride-hailing services to have human drivers serve 85 percent of its rides” for three years. So much for the Waymo app, in other words. Wired then drops the most hilarious paragraph I’ve read in some time: In a written statement to WIRED, Uber spokesperson Noah Edwardsen says that the company supports the expansion of autonomous vehicle technology, but that policy proposals from the AV industry have been “largely unworkable” because they have failed to address workers’ issues and or “have tried to cynically lock out competitors and create monopolies.” Edwardsen says that the industry’s failure to pass autonomous vehicle regulations in several states this year, including Maryland and New York , is evidence that “clearly it’s time to try a different approach.” Uber, a company famous for treating regulation like toilet paper, is now agitating for rules that favor itself You could laugh, but, frankly, what we’re seeing here is simply what happens to companies once they reach a certain size and have legacy cash flows to protect. Someone wrote a book about the idea https://www.amazon.com/dp/0062060244?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback , I think. Yes, we can use the cliché: You either die a ~~hero~~ disruptor, or you live long enough to see yourself become the ~~villain~~ rent-seeking incumbent https://x.com/tszzl/status/2076444723255083365 . Uber seeking to slow pure-play self-driving services? I’d bet you $10 that Alphabet and Tesla aren’t pleased. How to lose friends and distance people The rebuild https://openai.com/chatgpt-work/ of OpenAI’s Codex app to include both ChatGPT and the developer-focused Codex tool is a hit. Reporting rapid growth, the newly christened ChatGPT Work app has crossed the seven million active user mark https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2076735790567338203 , up from five million in June https://openai.com/index/codex-for-knowledge-work/ . 40% growth in a month or two is pretty damn good. On the other end of the spectrum, SpaceXAI faceplanted yesterday after users of its Grok CLI noticed https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1ut7tis/grok build cli uploads your whole repo full git/ that the service was uploading entire codebases to the cloud. Storing your users’ private code is a choice . After developers went ballistic, SpaceXAI told the market it cares “ deeply https://x.com/SpaceXAI/status/2076692402442846289 ” about privacy. That wasn’t enough, so SpaceX CEO Elon Musk weighed in https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2076739687658496209 : As a precautionary measure, all user data that was uploaded to SpaceXAI before now will be completely and utterly deleted. Zero anything whatsoever will remain. X replies to Musk’s attempt at feather-smoothing were sharply negative, with users decrying the breach of trust being resolved by a request for faith in the company’s decision to make its prior choice right. After it got caught. For SpaceXAI, the misstep was timed to perfection. Riding high on the successful launch of its new Grok 4.5 model praised for its comparatively low cost for the level of intelligence it offers and its ongoing absorption of Cursor, xAI could have simply cruised to greater developer market share and all the financial benefits that would entail. Instead, SpaceXAI had a terrible, self-inflicted day. Speaking of which, we spent most of yesterday https://www.cautiousoptimism.news/the-new-enterprise-mantra-if-i-pay-your-margin-i-keep-my-data/ discussing the current enterprise data freakout. The gist is that even as major AI labs promise not to train their models on customer data and prompts/outputs, many companies think they are still giving up too much information to companies increasingly willing to directly compete in their core markets. SpaceXAI just pissed in the collective goodwill punch.