Good morning. Did you know that ChatGPT will now remind you to take a break if you’re in a particularly long conversation with the chatbot?
OpenAI says its goal “isn’t to hold your attention, but to help you use it well.” That makes all the sense in the world for a business model that involves selling subscriptions and the like, though one wonders if that will still be true as the company investigates adding advertising as a revenue stream.
Or as Digiday put it in May: “You don’t bring in the architect of Meta’s monetization engine”—incoming CEO of Applications Fidji Simo—“if you’re not planning to build one of your own.” Hmm.
Today’s tech news below. —Andrew Nusca
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Elon Musk retains title as the highest-paid CEO in history
The Tesla board has reinstated Elon Musk as the highest-paid CEO in history with a staggering new $29 billion pay package.
His new deal with the $970 billion electric-vehicle maker comes after a Delaware judge twice rescinded Musk’s previous moonshot mega-grant.
Musk’s pay has been held up in litigation for the past seven years.
“It is imperative to retain and motivate our extraordinary talent, beginning with Elon,” Tesla board chair Robyn Denholm and fellow director Kathleen Wilson-Thompson wrote in a letter to shareholders.
Even in that select group, “no one matches” Musk, the board members wrote.
Thus the nearly $30 billion award is essential to keeping Musk focused on Tesla—and getting him to recruit new talent to keep the electric automaker competitive, according to the board.
Unlike Musk’s previous pay plan, which included significant shareholder value hurdles he had to overcome, all Musk has to do to collect the new award is remain with Tesla as CEO or in a senior executive role for the next two years.
He also has to hold the stock until 2030, according to the terms of the award, which will boost his ownership stake from around 13% to 15%.
Brian Dunn, a 40-year compensation practitioner and director of the Institute for Compensation Studies at Cornell University, told Fortune that Musk’s new award resembles what some experts have referred to as “fog-the-mirror grants.”
“If you’re around and have enough breath left in you to fog the mirror, you get them,” said Dunn. “These don’t have performance targets.” —Amanda Gerut
The next tech startups to ride the IPO wave
Will Figma’s sensational public debut last week entice other startups to jump into the fray, bringing an end to the tech industry’s IPO drought?
And if so, who’s next?
There’s a long list of late-stage VC-backed tech companies with strong customer bases that Wall Street investment bankers would love to take public. Among them: Databricks, Klarna, Stripe, and SpaceX.
And then, of course, there’s the crop of richly valued AI startups, from OpenAI and Anthropic to Elon Musk’s xAI.
Yet in conversations I had with several investors, other names came up as more likely to IPO sooner, including Canva, Revolut, Midjourney, Motive, and Anduril.
Though Figma is profitable and has a strong set of integrated AI capabilities, these qualities are not essential to companies bound for IPO success, says Kyle Stanford, the director of research on US venture capital at PitchBook.
Investors prefer companies to generate a minimum of $200 million in revenue that grows at high rates and prioritize positive free cash flow over profitability, he said. An AI story is also “very important.”
Multiple investors told me Canva may be the most compelling IPO candidate since it’s a design company with similar fundamentals to that of Figma.
Another: Chipmaker Cerebras, which filed an S-1 in September 2024 but saw its IPO delayed by regulators concerned about a $335 million investment by UAE-based G42.
Just 18 venture-backed companies have gone public through June 30 of this year, Stanford said.
But as Kirsten Green, founder and managing partner at Forerunner Ventures, whose portfolio company Chime recently went public, put it: “Having positive IPOs is a good signal for everybody.” —Alexandra Sternlicht
Vietnam’s Vinfast eyes the Indian car market
Vietnamese automaker Vinfast has begun production at a $500 million electric vehicle plant in southern India.
The move is part of the Haiphong-based company’s plans to invest $2 billion in India—the world’s third-largest car market, and one that has heavily incentivized domestic manufacturing—and expand its footprint in Asia.
The factory, located in the port city of Thoothukudi in the state of Tamil Nadu, will make 50,000 electric vehicles each year. It has an expanded capacity to output 150,000 vehicles.
According to the Associated Press, the investment of Vinfast, owned by Vingroup, in India could lead to other parts of its parent conglomerate entering the country.
Vingroup was founded in 1993 as an instant noodle company and now owns hospitals, schools, and myriad other ventures.
Vinfast has been selling vehicles in the U.S. and Europe—its all-electric VF 8 model is an occasional sight on Southern California streets—but it has struggled to find its footing.
Vinfast sold just under 100,000 vehicles last year, but just one in 10 were sold outside of Vietnam.
Vinfast’s India investment is part of a refocus on Asia markets. The automaker is currently building an electric vehicle factory in Indonesia and expanding its presence in Thailand and the Philippines in a bid to challenge the success of Chinese EV brands in the region. —AN
More tech
—Google will moderate its AI power draw. In an agreement with two utilities, it will pause nonessential AI workloads during peak demand or adverse weather events.
—Lyft, Baidu partner on autonomous vehicles. They’re set for Germany and the U.K. in 2026.
—Perplexity is allegedly shadow crawling websites for its AI, Cloudflare says.
—Vine is risen, sort of. The archive of the former Twitter video product will be revived in some fashion, X CEO Elon Musk says.
—Spotify raises prices for Premium subscribers in South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Latin America, and the Asia-Pacific.
—TSMC fires workers. Alleged violations involving sensitive information about chip technology.
—Amazon blows up Wondery. Parts of the podcast network will fold into Audible; others will support creator vodcasts, or video podcasts, like the Kelce brothers’ New Heights.
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