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Greetings! Exciting news on the home front: Today, we launched a powerful new AI chatbot, The Information Deep Research, trained on over a decade of our exclusive reporting on the most important tech companies and people, including our stories, org charts and proprietary data. You can use it to generate reports on the top talent at Nvidia and Meta Platforms, summarize key trends in initial public offerings and to do so many other things. Check it out! Now back to our regular programming… The post–Tim Cook era at Apple got a bit less fuzzy today. The company announced that Jeff Williams, its chief operating officer, will retire at the end of the year and pass the COO baton to Sabih Khan, Apple’s senior vice president of operations. Apple portrayed the change as an orderly changing of the guard, describing it as “part of a long-planned succession.” But the change also offered further hints about who might eventually take over for Cook as CEO. As our Apple reporter Aaron Tilley pointed out in his brief on today’s news, Williams was for some time widely considered a possible successor to Cook. The two men earned their bona fides turning Apple’s supply chain operations into the envy of the tech industry, so it would have been logical for Cook to hand the leadership of the company to someone in his mold. But Williams is only two years younger than Tim Cook, who is now 64. Setting up Williams as a successor may not have been the best message to send to Apple employees and shareholders, as Apple’s product line is looking a little long in the tooth, and the rise of artificial intelligence creates possible new threats for the company. That may be why in recent years, there’s been growing buzz about John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, who is 50, as a possible Cook successor. With Williams leaving the scene, Ternus’ status as heir apparent becomes, well, even more apparent. Apparently, not all of Elon Musk’s investors are worried that he’ll take his eye off the ball again. SpaceX, his rocket company, is considering a plan to raise funds and allow insider share sales, in a deal that would value the company at $400 billion, Bloomberg reported today. That figure would represent a 14% increase from SpaceX’s $350 billion valuation in December during a secondary offering of insider shares. It’s a good time to be a SpaceX investor! The vibes among shareholders in Musk’s other big company, Tesla, are not nearly so good. The electric vehicle maker’s shares are down 26% over the same period that saw SpaceX’s valuation leap. As we noted in yesterday’s briefing, Tesla’s shareholders were particularly rattled on Monday when Musk said he planned to form his own political party, the America Party, to challenge the Democrat-Republican duopoly in American politics. That sent the company’s shares down nearly 7% as investors worried about politics and the prospect of a continued feud with President Donald Trump distracting Musk from the task at hand. There are a number of reasons for the split in shareholder sentiment. SpaceX’s defensive moat around its main businesses—rocket launches and satellite internet service—is deep, and it could take rivals years to challenge its business with real competition. Musk also has a clear No. 2 at SpaceX, Gwynne Shotwell, who has shown she can run the company without him around. SpaceX is a private company, unlike Tesla, and many of its shareholders have deep, long-term connections to Musk and his companies. That may make its valuation less sensitive to the kinds of issues that would rattle retail investors in a public company. Tesla, in contrast, is facing serious near-term competition in the EV market, particularly in China. Musk is betting the house on speculative new businesses—robotaxis and humanoid robots—with huge technical hurdles. And at times, he seems openly disdainful of the hassles of running Tesla as a public company, which probably doesn’t endear him to some shareholders. In the latest example, Musk on Tuesday told one prominent financial analyst, Daniel Ives, to “shut up” after Ives advised Tesla’s board of directors to make a series of Musk-related changes. For now, SpaceX investors don’t have to endure that kind of abuse, at least not in public. • Meta acquired just under a 3% stake in EssilorLuxottica, the maker of Ray-Bans and other eye glasses, Bloomberg reported. The company is considering further investments that could raise its stake to around 5%. • Shein filed confidentially for an IPO in Hong Kong, the Financial Times reported. • Hundreds of entrepreneurs signed an open letter to Sequoia Capital asking the firm to distance itself from remarks by one of its partners, Shaun Maguire. Maguire had accused New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani of advancing an “Islamist agenda.” AI Agenda by Stephanie Palazzolo separates hype from reality and explains how AI is transforming industries. The 4x/week newsletter details the innovation and disruption happening in AI, from the AI startup funding frenzy to the major technological breakthroughs that will set the agenda for decades to come. Sign up today. | 
