Josh Raffaelli, who has long roots as a Silicon Valley investor and has backed a number of Elon Musk companies, is suing his former employer, the massive trillion-dollar AUM Brookfield Asset Management, reports the New York Times.
Much of Raffaelli’s complaint concerns how Brookfield covered pandemic-related real estate losses and alleges the company fired him after he filed a whistleblower complaint at the SEC. His suit makes allegations like fraud and bribery, while Brookfield vehemently denies any wrongdoing, it told the Times.
In February, Brookfield quietly shuttered the venture capital unit run by Raffaelli and rolled some assets into another unit, Bloomberg reported at the time. One of Raffaelli’s complaints in the suit is that Brookfield didn’t buy as much stock in Musk-owned companies as he had secured the ability to buy.
Raffaelli had deals to buy into Musk companies like SpaceX, xAI and the Boring Company, the suit alleges. Raffaelli’s Brookfield fund was, however, a big backer of Musk’s takeover of Twitter, Bloomberg reported.
The lawsuit is a very public battle for Raffaelli, who previously worked as a partner at the VC firm then known as Draper Fisher Jurvetson. (Today, it’s a collection of funds.) While at DFJ, Brookfield helped that firm’s make investments into Musk companies like SolarCity (acquired by Tesla), SpaceX, and Tesla.
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Microsoft employees aren’t allowed to use DeepSeek due to data security and propaganda concerns, Microsoft vice chairman and president Brad Smith said in a Senate hearing today.
“At Microsoft we don’t allow our employees to use the DeepSeek app,” Smith said, referring to DeepSeek’s application service (which is available on both desktop and mobile).
Smith said Microsoft hasn’t put DeepSeek in its app store over those concerns, either.
Although lots of organizations and even countries have imposed restrictions on DeepSeek, this is the first time Microsoft has gone public about such a ban.
Smith said the restriction stems from the risk that data will be stored in China and that DeepSeek’s answers could be influenced by “Chinese propaganda.”
DeepSeek’s privacy policy states it stores user data on Chinese servers. Such data is subject to Chinese law, which mandates cooperation with the country’s intelligence agencies. DeepSeek also heavily censors topics considered sensitive by the Chinese government.
Despite Smith’s critical comments about DeepSeek, Microsoft offered up DeepSeek’s R1 model on its Azure cloud service shortly after it went viral earlier this year.
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But that’s a bit different from offering DeepSeek’s chatbot app itself. Since DeepSeek is open source, anybody can download the model, store it on their own servers, and offer it to their clients without sending the data back to China.
That, however, doesn’t remove other risks like the model spreading propaganda or generating insecure code.
During the Senate hearing, Smith said that Microsoft had managed to go inside DeepSeek’s AI model and “change” it to remove “harmful side effects.” Microsoft did not elaborate on exactly what it did to DeepSeek’s model, referring TechCrunch to Smith’s remarks.
In its initial launch of DeepSeek on Azure, Microsoft wrote that DeepSeek underwent “rigorous red teaming and safety evaluations” before it was put on Azure.
While we can’t help pointing out that DeepSeek’s app is also a direct competitor to Microsoft’s own Copilot internet search chat app, Microsoft doesn’t ban all such chat competitors from its Windows app store.
Perplexity is available in the Windows app store, for instance. Although any apps by Microsoft’s archrival Google (including the Chrome browser and Google’s chatbot Gemini) did not surface in our webstore search.
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In April, South Korea’s telco giant SK Telecom (SKT) was hit by a cyberattack that led to the theft of personal data on approximately 23 million customers, equivalent to almost half of the country’s 52 million residents.
At a National Assembly hearing in Seoul on Thursday, SKT chief executive Young-sang Ryu said about 250,000 users have switched to a different telecom provider following the data breach. He said he expects this number to reach 2.5 million, more than tenfold the current amount, if the company waives cancellation fees.
The company could lose up to $5 billion (around ₩7 trillion) over the next three years if it decides not to charge cancellation fees for users who want to cancel their contract early, Ryu said at the hearing.
“SK Telecom considers this incident the most severe security breach in the company’s history and is putting forth our utmost effort to minimize any damage to our customers,” a spokesperson at SKT told TechCrunch in an emailed statement. “The number of customers affected and the entity responsible for the hacking is under investigation,” the spokesperson added.
A joint investigation involving both public and private entities is currently underway to identify the specific cause of the incident.
The Personal Information Protection Committee (PIPC) of South Korea announced on Thursday that 25 different types of personal information, including mobile phone numbers and unique identifiers (IMSI numbers), as well as USIM authentication keys and other USIM data, had been exfiltrated from its central database, known as its home subscriber server. The compromised data can put customers at greater risk of SIM swapping attacks and government surveillance.
After its official announcement of the incident on April 22, SKT has been offering SIM card protection and free SIM card replacements to prevent further damage to its customers.
“We detected possible information leakage regarding SIM on April 19,” the spokesperson at SKT told TechCrunch. “Following the identification of the breach, we immediately isolated the affected device while thoroughly investigating the entire system.”
“To further safeguard our customers, we are currently developing a system that can protect users’ information through the SIM protection service while allowing them to use roaming services seamlessly outside of Korea by May 14,” the spokesperson said.
To date, SKT has not received any reports of secondary damage and no verified instances of customer information being distributed or misused on the dark web or other platforms, the company told TechCrunch.
SKT detected abnormal activities on April 18 at 11:20 p.m. local time. SKT found unusual logs and signs of files having been deleted on equipment that the company uses for monitoring and managing billing information for its customers, including data usage and call durations.
The company identified a data breach on April 19 in its home subscriber server in Seoul, which typically houses subscriber information, including authentication, authorization, location, and mobility details.
SKT reported the cyberattack incident toKorea’s cybersecurity agency.
SKT confirmed on its website that it detected suspicious activity, indicating a “potential” data breach involving some information related to users’ USIMs data.
SKT began replacing mobile SIM cards of 23 million users, but the company has faced shortages in obtaining sufficient USIM cards to fulfill its promise to provide free SIM card replacements.
South Korean police began investigating SKT’s suspected cyberattack on April 18.
According to local media reports, many South Korean companies, including SKT, use Ivanti VPN equipment, and that the recent data breach may be connected to China-backed hackers.
Per a local media report, SKT said it received a cybersecurity notice from KISA instructing the company to turn off and replace the Ivanti VPN.
TeamT5, a cybersecurity company based in Taiwan, alerted the public to the worldwide threats posed by a government-backed group linked to China, which allegedly took advantage of vulnerabilities in Ivanti’s Connect Secure VPN systems to gain access to multiple organizations globally.
Some 20 industries have been affected, including automotive, chemical, financial institutions, law firms, media, research institutes, and telecommunications, across 12 countries, including Australia, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States.
A team of public and private investigators discovered an additional eight types of malware in SKT’s hacking case. The team is currently investigating whether the new malware was installed on the same home subscriber server as the original four strains or if they are located on separate server equipment.
Tae-won Chey, the chairman of SK Group, which operates SKT, publicly apologized for the first time for the data breach, some three weeks after the breach occurred.
As of May 7, all eligible users have been signed up for the SIM protection service, except those living abroad using roaming services and temporarily suspended, the spokesperson told TechCrunch, adding that its fraud detection system has already been set up for all customers to prevent unauthorized login attempts using cloned SIM cards.
SKT is currently assessing how to handle the cancellation fees for users affected by the data breach incident. About 250,000 users have switched to another telecom provider following the breach, according to the company’s chief executive at a National Assembly hearing.
South Korean authorities, meanwhile, announced that 25 types of personal information were leaked from the company’s databases during the cyberattack.
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Autonomous vehicle technology company Aurora Innovation plans to expand on the success of its first driverless commercial launch and add night driving to its operations.
Aurora said Thursday that in the second half of 2025, it will start sending its self-driving trucks out at night and during adverse weather conditions like rain or heavy wind. The company, which provided the update in its first-quarter shareholder letter, also plans to expand its driverless trucking route beyond Dallas to Houston, and into El Paso and Phoenix.
“We’d like to have a high return on asset for every truck that we have, and so we’ll try to drive efficiency to get as many miles on as many trucks as fast as possible,” Aurora CFO Dave Maday said Thursday during the company’s first-quarter earnings call. “We should be able to double our drive time as soon as we unlock night. And that’s our next key milestone.”
Aurora already runs freight with self-driving trucks in those conditions, but with a human safety operator behind the wheel. The company said it has completed more than 4,000 miles in a single self-driving truck without a driver running freight for its launch customers Hirschbach Motor Lines and Uber Freight.
In the week since Aurora’s commercial launch, the company has already expanded to two driverless trucks operating on a daily basis and says it expects to operate “tens of trucks” by the end of 2025.
The milestone and future plans come alongside another major shift at the company: the resignation of co-founder and chief product officer Sterling Anderson.
Aurora shared new details Thursday in its first-quarter shareholder letter about plans to grow its autonomous freight service, signaling it will offer more specific timelines for key milestones as it expands.
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Aurora realized $871,000 in pilot revenue from its drivered commercial freight runs, which was up 22% on a quarterly basis and 54% compared to the same time last year, per Maday.
“At commercial launch, we will begin recognizing revenue,” he said Thursday during Aurora’s first-quarter earnings call. “This will include driverless revenue, as well as continued pilot revenue … With our deliberate approach to launch, we expect our 2025 revenue to be modest, in the mid-single-digit millions. For modeling purposes, we expect revenue to build sequentially throughout the year.”
The company reported $211 million in operating expenses, including $153 million for R&D. It used $142 million in operating cash and $8 million in capex in the first quarter, ending with nearly $1.2 billion in cash and short-term investments. Aurora expects to spend $175 million to $185 million per quarter for the rest of this year.
In the short-term, Aurora plans to own, operate, maintain, and insure its own trucks — made available on the Uber Freight network — for customers. The company is working with partners Paccar and Volvo Trucks to build self-driving trucks at scale. Starting in 2027 or earlier, Aurora expects customers to buy those trucks directly from manufacturers so it can shift to a driver-as-a-service model and achieve “high gross margins,” per Maday.
This article was updated with more information about Aurora’s recorded revenue and the company’s next milestones.
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Sterling Anderson, a veteran of the nascent autonomous vehicle sector and co-founder of Aurora, is resigning just a week after the company launched its commercial self-driving truck service in Texas.
Anderson held the chief product officer position at Aurora. The resignation was posted in a regulatory filing along with the company’s first-quarter earnings report. His resignation will go into effect June 1. He will leave the board August 31.
The company said in the filing that his resignation from the board “did not result from any disagreement with the Company concerning any matter relating to its operations, policies, or practices. The Company and the entire Board are deeply grateful for Mr. Anderson’s service and his immense contributions to the Company over the years in his role as founder, Chief Product Officer and a member of the Board.”
Anderson could not be reached for comment.
Anderson was director of Tesla’s Autopilot program when he left to co-found Aurora in 2017 alongside CEO Chris Urmson, the former head of the Google self-driving project, and Drew Bagnell, who was leading Uber’s autonomy and perception team. The trio, considered pioneers of the autonomous vehicle industry, gave Aurora immediate buzz, helping it attract high-profile investors like Sequoia Capital, Amazon, and T. Rowe Price Associates as well as a slew of partnerships.
Aurora gained more cachet in December 2020 when it reached an agreement with Uber to buy the ride-hailing firm’s self-driving unit in a complex deal that valued the combined company at $10 billion. Under the terms of that acquisition, Aurora did not pay cash for Uber ATG, a company that was valued at $7.25 billion following a $1 billion investment in 2019 from Toyota, DENSO and SoftBank’s Vision Fund. Instead, Uber handed over its equity in ATG and invested $400 million into Aurora. Uber received a 26% stake in the combined company, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Within four years the company went from buzzy startup to publicly traded company via a merger with special purpose acquisition company Reinvent Technology Partners Y. The SPAC was launched by LinkedIn co-founder and investor Reid Hoffman, Zynga founder Mark Pincus, and managing partner Michael Thompson.
Aurora, a deep tech company still in development and years from steady revenue, has faced headwinds since it went public in 2021. The company focused its efforts on self-driving trucks, putting other projects like robotaxis to the side.
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Late last month, Aurora announced it successfully launched a self-driving truck service in Texas, just squeaking in under its own deadline.
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Over $10 billion — that’s how much revenue Apple’s U.S. App Store raked in last year, according to a new analysis by app intelligence provider Appfigures.
The firm’s estimates indicate that U.S. App Store revenue from commissions more than doubled between 2020 and 2024. In 2020, Apple’s share of App Store commissions was approximately $4.76 billion, growing to over $10.1 billion by 2024.
Based on Appfigures’ data, U.S. App Store developers generated $33.68 billion in gross revenue from their apps and games using Apple’s payments system in 2024, and took home $23.57 billion after Apple’s cut.
Though Apple doesn’t typically break out its App Store revenue during earnings, it did publish a report in May 2023 where it said the App Store globally generated $104 billion in estimated billings for digital goods and services in 2022.
However, Appfigures’ analysis found the App Store made $61.5 billion globally in 2022, which grew to $91.3 billion in 2024. From this, Apple made more than $27.39 billion in commissions globally last year, Appfigures also said.
That leads to a discrepancy between Appfigures’ analysis and Apple’s own.
This can be explained by an important caveat found in Apple’s report. Under Apple’s chart, it states that its “billings and sales” figures are “not the same as App Store billings.” That’s important here.
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When Apple wrote its report, the company was trying to show how big the App Store is and how key it is to the overall economy, so it merged App Store revenue with revenue generated outside the App Store to generate its total for the “Billings and Sales” category.
In the report, Apple calculated the portion of an app’s total revenue that is facilitated by the App Store, even if the purchase was made elsewhere. For instance, if a user buys a subscription to Hulu on the web, but then spends 60% of their time streaming Hulu on Apple devices, Apple credits itself with facilitating 60% of that user’s spend. (To determine usage, the report relied on third-party sources, like market research firms, to estimate how much usage occurred on smartphones versus tablets, desktops, or TVs.)
Apple also allows enterprises to distribute apps with in-app purchases, but these aren’t visible in the App Store.
Examining the numbers around U.S. Apple App Store revenue is more relevant than ever in the wake of the recent court ruling that now prevents Apple from charging a 27% commission on transactions that take place outside the App Store.
Apple initially attempted to comply with the court’s injunction resulting from its antitrust battle with Fortnite maker Epic Games by making changes that wouldn’t harm App Store profits.
To do so, Apple last year gave developers a way to apply for an exception to its App Store rules so they could add web links inside their apps that directed customers to external purchases. However, Apple continued to charge a 27% commission on those purchases and dictated how the website links should appear. (This even included the use of “scare screens” to warn consumers of the dangers of making purchases outside the App Store.)
Last week, a judge ruled that Apple was in “willful violation” of the 2021 injunction by continuing to collect fees on purchases made outside apps and by creating new anticompetitive barriers.
This decision forced Apple to update its U.S. App Store rules, which now allow developers to link out to other ways for consumers to make purchases, without obstacles or commissions. Since then, several apps have taken advantage of the ability to introduce web payments, including Spotify, Amazon Kindle, and Patreon. One small game emulator called Delta is now supporting itself via Patreon memberships, too.
Apple is appealing the decision, arguing in its most recent filing that the ruling causes Apple “grave irreparable harm.”
“These restrictions, which will cost Apple substantial sums annually, are based on conduct that has never been adjudicated to be (and is not) unlawful,” Apple’s filing stated. “Rather, they were imposed to punish Apple for purported non-compliance with an earlier state-law injunction that is itself invalid.”
This argument won’t likely go over well with developers, as many believe Apple should have lowered commissions for everyone years ago, not just for small business developers.
Appfigures’ analysis also broke down U.S. App Store revenue by apps and games, which generated Apple approximately $6.28 billion and $3.83 billion, respectively, in 2024.
Together, these figures highlight how critical App Store revenue remains to Apple’s bottom line, and why it’s fighting so hard to retain control.
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