Now Elon Musk doesn’t want Don Lemon on X

Welcome to TechCrunch PM! There is a lot of social media news today, led by Don Lemon losing his talk show on X and the U.S. House voting to move forward a bill banning TikTok. There’s also some climate tech funding, Austin is getting Waymo and a new tool to make Ethereum faster.

— Christine

TechCrunch PM Top 3

Don Lemon loses X show: The former CNN anchor was initially encouraged by Elon Musk to create a talk show on X. However, that deal has now gone sideways.

House passes TikTok ban bill: The bill would require TikTok parent ByteDance to sever its connection with the social media channel. Taylor Hatmaker has even more on what all of this means. Meanwhile, a USA Today reporter wants to know why only TikTok is being singled out in this way.

Stripety Stripe Stripe: The payments infrastructure company says it is “robustly cashflow positive” in 2023 and plans to be so again in 2024. That, and the $8.7 billion in total venture capital funding it raised over the years, means it likely won’t have to raise any more before going public.

More top reads

Climate tech funding: If you think it’s getting hot in here, it’s just Furno developing a new way to make cement. It grabbed $6.5 million in seed funding to develop a cement kiln that’s smaller, more efficient and more flexible than the massive ones favored by industry today. Meanwhile, Orbio Earth raised $4 million to find methane leaks that apparently are costing companies $9 billion this year.

Waymo’s robotaxi service is coming to Austin: When the autonomous vehicle company goes online in Austin by the end of the year, it will be the fourth one. Those in Los Angeles can see it in action this week.

Making Ethereum faster: That’s the goal of Sei Labs, which launched the Parallel Stack, a free tool for crypto developers that aims to improve the performance of transactions per second of Ethereum Virtual Machine–based layer-2 blockchains.

Zendesk acquires Ultimate.ai: Generative AI is everywhere, and Zendesk is showing how much so with the acquisition of Ultimate, a German customer automation startup.

Quit playing games with my DeepMind: Google DeepMind researchers have created a model that learns to play multiple 3D games like a human, and does its best to understand and act on your verbal instructions.

Out of stealth: IO River is tapping into the changing world of content-delivery networks, enabling the ability to make it so you can easily mix and match them. Investors like it so much they poured $5.4 million into the company.

15-love: You’ll always have a tennis partner with Volley. The new sports tech startup wants to launch balls at your head via its AI-enabled sports training machine.

One of Withings’ most requested features is now on ScanWatch: The menstrual cycle tracking feature enables users to log their cycle stages, including symptoms, flow and period dates. Once the app gets to know your typical cycle, it predicts future period dates, helping users create personal routines that align with their monthly needs and optimize sleep, activity and nutrition.

Around the web: There’s a generational shift going on in Silicon Valley, according to The New York Times. Meanwhile, CBS News reports that Dollar Tree is not looking too good, and MarketWatch reports some analysts are bearish on Tesla.

TechCrunch Minute

The TikTok ban, or at least the effort to force its sale, is gaining steam: And some folks are pretty mad about it, according to Alex Wilhelm. In today’s video, he discusses the aftermath of a House subcommittee passing a bill that would force a sale of TikTok or ban the app from American app stores. The whole debate reignited around the internet about whether or not the social service should face such harsh choices. Take a look.

On the pods

It’s the Wednesday episode of Equity, and that means we dig into critical startup news to stay abreast of what founders and venture capitalists are working on, including:

• New data from Carta digging into startup compensation, and how it is changing.
• How one startup is profiting off death, but in a way that is actually great.
• Bear Robotics, and its killer new round for cute serving robots.
• New stuff from Bluesky (all about moderation and choosing one’s own adventure) and Brave (getting a boost from the EU’s DMA).
• And finally, some venture capital news that was a legit surprise.

Listen here.

• Unified Technology Solutions Supervisor at Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission (Middletown, PA, United States)
• Principal Software Engineer/Developer at Health Research, Inc. (Menands, NY, USA)
• Systems Administrator II at City of Newport (Newport, Oregon, USA)
• Product Manager at imgix (San Francisco, CA, USA)
• Senior Cloud Engineer at imgix (San Francisco, CA, USA)

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