Week in Review - Trillions are more than billions

Saturday, August 22, 2020 • By Lucas Matney

Howdy friends, welcome back to Week in Review. This past week, I wrote about Apple’s war with Epic and I’m revisiting it again this week. Apologies if you’re sick of the topic, but I actually can’t stop thinking about it so you’ll just have to bear with me.

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The Big Story

As the Apple and Epic Games spat enters another week, I think it’s important to level-set.

The difference between a company worth a few trillion dollars and one worth a few billion, is essentially still a few trillion dollars. Epic Games might be huge and its own games store might have some top titles, but compared to Apple it might as well be someone’s Etsy storefront. Any attempts to frame this as a spat between two megacorps with equal influence is a joke.

At the same time, I don’t think anyone is filling out “get well soon” cards for Epic Games. This spat is them taking an active stance, I don’t think they’re being particularly victimized, Apple is framing this as a self-inflicted wound that Epic Games is bringing on itself. I don’t think this saga will increase empathy for the Fortnite maker, but Apple definitely comes off looking like a bully.

It seems increasingly likely that Apple will win this fight, I would imagine they’ll have luck in shutting down the developer accounts for the Unreal Engine and at that point it just doesn’t become worth it anymore for Epic. They’ll still get the opportunity to capitulate on in-app purchases in Fortnite while still crying monopoly. In the long run, I think they’ll get what they wanted though.

By swatting down Epic, Apple’s image as a hostage-taker becomes a bit more real to the developers in their ecosystem. Thirty percent feels like an unsustainable sum, but holding onto it for dear life may cost Apple even more. Apple is teeing itself up to become the tech company with the cleanest antitrust antidote. Forcing alternative app stores onto iOS would be huge, but the fact that the Mac has already operated in this doom-free environment quells some of Apple’s broader statements around how dangerous this would be for consumer protections.

See Apple’s legal response filed yesterday here.

Image Credits: Bloomberg / Getty Images

SMS strategies to hit your revenue holiday goals

Apple hits $2 trillion market cap
I’m old enough to remember when Apple was only worth $1 trillion. This week, the company doubled down as it passed another major milestone. Read more here.

Uber and Lyft win temporary stay in California case
Uber and Lyft aren’t shutting down in California quite yet, a judge granted the companies a temporary stay allowing them to continue business as usual and figure out their next steps to stay compliant in California after the state ruled that they must classify their drivers as employees. Read more here.

Palantir is losing big sums of $$$
We got our eyes on leaked financial data for the soon-to-be-public Palantir, turns out they have a few high paying customers but they’re still losing lots of money. Read more here.

TechCrunch Disrupt

Although the media industry is currently in the midst of a long-overdue reckoning over diversity, representation and racism, Morgan DeBaun and Angie Nwandu have been building a more diverse digital media landscape for years. And we’re excited to welcome them to Disrupt 2020 this September.

DeBaun co-founded Blavity, a digital media company focused on Black millennials, back in 2014, responding to what she said was a need for more information and connection in the aftermath of Michael Brown’s death. The company has since raised funding from GV, Comcast Ventures and Plexo Capital, and DeBaun is still its CEO.

Nwandu, meanwhile, is no-stranger to Disrupt. I had a chance to speak to The Shade Room’s founder onstage in 2017 about building a huge social media audience for Black celebrity news. Back then, The Shade Room had more than 8.9 million Instagram followers, a number that has more than doubled to 19.9 million.

This time, we’ll be hearing from both DeBaun and Nwandu. I’ve got a lot that I want to ask them, so I’ll do my best to squeeze it all in: How they built their companies, the challenges they currently face with a pandemic roiling the ad industry, how media companies (including TechCrunch) should be responding to the current political/cultural moment and much more.