10 THINGS IN TECH

Do you have an inner Elon? I'm Diamond Naga Siu, and please let me know whether you have one. I'm digging deep to feel the inner Elon that Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff apparently experiences.

In an exclusive interview with my colleagues Ashley Stewart and Ellen Thomas, Benioff said executives are all currently asking themselves: "Do they need to unleash their own Elon within them?"

This "existential" question is pretty open-ended — being Elon is a hefty task. He slashed the majority of Twitter's staff. He bombastically tweets his thoughts. And he maintains a fervent fanbase.

But Benioff is likely referencing cost-cutting, since he's leading Salesforce through it for the first time ever.

Dissatisfied investors are heavily scrutinizing Benioff. We'll be watching too. But first, let's dive into today's tech.

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1. Leaked audio reveals Google Cloud CEO giving a fiery speech on AI. During an internal town hall, Thomas Kurian slammed people for saying Google is late to the AI competition. He rallied employees around the technology and said the race is just beginning.

Kurian's monologue reflects Google's urgency to develop its (ridiculed, at least internally) chatbot Bard. The CEO of OpenAI — the company that created the buzzy ChatGPT — previously called Google a "lethargic search monopoly."
"You are all living in a moment where people are going to look at Google and say, 'How did we perform through this period?'" Kurian said during his impassioned spiel.
My colleagues Eugene Kim and Hugh Langley obtained the recording and transcript of the speech.

Read his monologue in the "middle of history" here.

2. The ultimate case study on flooding young, inexperienced founders with money. The founders of fintech startup Vise raised $120 million by the time they were 21-years-old. Current and former employees, investors, and potential customers told Insider how the explosive growth — and the lavish lifestyles it enabled — gave them plenty of headaches.

3. Twitter's shrinking hierarchy. About half of the 20 people who reported to Elon Musk after his takeover have quit or been fired — and most haven't been replaced. See who's left and who's recently been hired.

4. Testing different conversation styles in Microsoft's new Bing. The AI chatbot now has three different modes: creative, balanced, and precise. We asked the same five questions in each style and compared the results. Here's how it responded.

5. Big media v. Big Tech. AI chatbots like Google's Bard and Microsoft's new Bing rely on news articles as training content. Media companies are eyeing a big payout from Big Tech for using their content this way. Go behind-the-scenes of the brewing tension here.

6. The Amazon-Advertising-to-C-suite pipeline. Companies like Walmart and Netflix are keen to poach Amazon Advertising veterans for their C-suite. Here are nine who made the jump.

7. Cheap EVs are just a promise — with not much backing it. Tesla still isn't ready to deliver affordable EVs. Its first-ever Investor Day was filled with fanfare and promises of everything but economical vehicles. More on Elon Musk's unfulfilled vision here.

8. Experts ranked the top self-driving car companies. Tesla regularly touts its self-driving technology. But the embattled car company didn't even crack the top 10. Instead, it continued a pattern of being near the bottom. Check out the full list here.

Odds and ends:

9. Welcome to the "Big City Renaissance." City downtowns were hollowed out when the pandemic first hit. But the era of remote work could spark a new urban boom. Enter the future of cities here.

10. A hotel president apologized for only changing the water in a spa bath twice per year. The offending water had 3,700 times the permitted level of legionella bacteria. The hotel prez said in his apology that he previously thought it was a common, safe bacteria. More on the potentially deadly situation here.

The latest people moves in tech:

Apple permanently closed a North Carolina store. It was located in a mall that experienced three shootings within 75 days.
Facebook is stripping managers of their teams. Some are getting demoted and being forced to compete with their former direct reports.
Twitter and Disney are the latest to slash their headcounts. Here's the full list of US companies that have laid off employees so far this year.
PayPal is currently hunting for its next CEO. These six execs are top contenders for the role.
These 20 execs were tasked with turning around Meta's flailing ads business. Meet all the key players here.
The Boring Company CEO Steve Davis is reportedly the leading candidate to replace Elon Musk as the chief Twitter exec, insiders say.

Curated by Diamond Naga Siu in New York. (Feedback or tips? Email dsiu@insider.com or tweet @diamondnagasiu) Edited by Matt Weinberger (tweet @gamoid) in San Francisco and Nathan Rennolds (tweet @ncrennolds) in London.