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Hello, and welcome to TechScape. In this week’s edition: Elon Musk suffers the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Apple beats itself up over Siri, and Meta goes after one of its own over a tell-all book.
Musk took a beating last week, as did Tesla
My colleague Nick Robins-Early reports:
The past 10 days have marked several of the most significant setbacks for Musk in months. Tesla, arguably his marquee company, continued to fall in value as investors worried about the threat of trade war and possible recession – as well as declining profits. Escalating protests against the company over the billionaire’s role in the government also grew in number and intensity across the US, coupled with rising cases of vandalism and social stigma against his cars. SpaceX has also struggled, with one of its rockets dramatically exploding in midflight last week and then an announcement that it was delaying a rescue mission to retrieve “stranded” astronauts. The company tried again two days later.
Adding to Musk’s headaches, his social media platform, X, experienced widespread outages throughout the day on Monday. During a Fox Business interview, he claimed that it was the result of a “massive cyberattack” that the company had traced to the area of Ukraine.
Musk is also dealing with increasing pushback over his role at Doge. Multiple outlets reported that the “first buddy”, as he’s christened himself, got into a heated exchange with Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, during a White House meeting last week, which ended with Donald Trump appearing to rein in Musk’s power to make staffing decisions at government agencies with a Truth social post. A federal judge in California also issued a preliminary injunction on Thursday to reinstate thousands of the workers that Doge mass fired. Meanwhile, polling this week from Quinnipiac University shows that despite Musk repeatedly declaring that the public loves what Doge is doing, a strong majority of people disapprove of his initiative.
To shore up Musk’s fortune, Tesla held a sales event on the lawn of the White House. Donald Trump browsed several of the company’s vehicles and eventually announced he would purchase one and label vandalism against Tesla showrooms as domestic terrorism.
The scene was a striking use of the presidency to endorse the business of the commander-in-chief’s biggest financial backer. However, the display also gave the impression that Musk needed Trump to reverse his string of losses and quell the backlash against him.
Methinks the CEO doth protest too much. It’s unclear if the maneuver will work. Republicans buy far fewer electric cars than Democrats, and Democrats newly hate Musk, per recent polls and automotive industry consumer data compiled by the New York Times. As one analyst told the paper: “When you make your product unattractive to half the market, I promise you, you won’t increase your sales.”
Tesla’s stock has fallen 37% since the start of 2025. Given so much decline and more on the horizon with Trump’s tariffs and plummeting consumer sentiment, would the company’s board have a fiduciary duty to remove him? In theory and in #Resistance fanfiction, maybe, but in practice, there’s little chance. Will shareholders sue? They have in the past, taking legal issue with his enormous $56bn pay package, and a judge found in their favor twice. However, that pay package was the result of a fundamental truth about Tesla: Elon Musk is synonymous with the company. To serve on the board, to buy its shares, and now even purchase one of the company’s cars is to believe in him. The Cybertruck is as much a Maga emblem as a red hat.
In other Elon Musk news
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How an obscure US government office has become a target of Elon Musk
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‘Deeply uncomfortable’: UK Starlink users switch off over Musk’s political machinations
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Elon Musk targeted me over Tesla protests. That proves our movement is working | Valerie Costa
Apple castigates itself over Siri’s ineptitude
iPhone owners and Wall Street alike have been waiting for Apple to catch up to the artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities of Google, OpenAI, Microsoft and Samsung. If an explosive internal meeting is any indication, they’ll be waiting a lot longer.
Last week, Apple’s senior director, Robby Walker, told the Siri team that their failures had been ugly and embarrassing, according to Bloomberg, in whose pages this saga has primarily played out. For a company that touts its designs as so very beautiful, harmonious and superior, it’s hard to think of a more insulting assessment.
Apple had trumpeted the Siri upgrades at last year’s company conference for software developers. The team had reportedly been cranking deliver new features this spring, only to see their work shelved and executives raise the possibility of scrapping it entirely.
What arrived instead was a public humiliation: the announcement of an indefinite delay on any major changes to Siri. Senior leaders at Apple including software chief Craig Federighi worried that the AI features didn’t work as advertised or even function in a basic manner when they tried it out. Some members of Apple’s AI division think the work on Siri’s new features should be scuttled like a defunct warship and restarted under new leadership, according to Bloomberg. The company has taken down an ad for Siri’s AI enhancements released in 2024.
Since the inception of Siri, Apple’s iPhone homunculus has won infamy as an inept digital assistant. I still can’t cajole her into controlling Spotify accurately or consistently, a problem that has persisted since I owned an iPhone 6. With the advent and proliferation of generative AI, Siri’s problems have been thrown into glaring relief. She can’t compete with ChatGPT’s multiple functions. Compounding Apple’s problems are the baffling, wrong and viral summaries of notifications by Apple Intelligence, a suite of features announced in September alongside the iPhone 16. Meanwhile, Amazon has revamped its line of smart devices with a refreshed Alexa two weeks ago, courtesy of Anthropic’s Claude AI models
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Falling short on AI has mushroomed into a full-blown catastrophe for a company that prides itself on releasing products later than competitors but with more intuitive designs and thoughtful features. I’d consider switching to a Pixel if I wasn’t some 15 years deep into the Apple software ecosystem.
A former director of global policy at Meta has written a tell-all book about her time at the company, and it has incensed her former employer. In Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams writes that Joel Kaplan sexually harassed her, Sheryl Sandberg ordered her to share a bed aboard a private plane, and Mark Zuckerberg was willing to make censorship concessions to re-enter the Chinese market, though nothing came of his genuflection.
The book describes Meta’s leadership as “callously indifferent to the price others would pay for their own enrichment”.
With juicy details, it offers to personalize and personify the motives behind the company’s headline-making public moves, rendering them legible and knowable.
“The people nefariously guiding the technology” ranks among the most appealing kinds of news stories about tech. And the book comes exactly at a time when people are thirsty to read more about figures such as Kaplan and Zuckerberg, who have embraced a starring role in the second Trump administration. Top that off with a profile of Sandberg that runs counter to her public narrative.
For its part, Meta describes the book’s serious allegations as outright false and has taken the extraordinary step of obtaining a legal order to quash Wynn-Williams’ ability to publicize her book. Meta’s lawyer demanded the ability to revise the book, saying her account was full of “overheated and potentially defamatory allegations”, per NBC. It’s a far cry from the response to The Ugly Truth, a 2021 bestseller by two New York Times reporters, which Meta did not take legal action against.
Is everything in Wynn-Williams’ book true? Judge for yourself the answer she gave Business Insider when asked if she had it factchecked:
The accusation of a failure to factcheck comes directly from a Meta spokesperson, Andy Stone, the company’s best attack dog on X and Threads. We would do well to take his jab with a grain of salt, but we would likewise do well to consider Wynn-Williams’ non-answer carefully.
