Hello everyone! Welcome back to Week in Review, the newsletter where we recap some of the top TechCrunch stories from the last 7 days. If you want it in your inbox every Saturday, sign up here. the most read This week’s story was about, get this: a DeLorean. Like in the car from Back to the Future. Yes. The short version: The recently revived brand released images of the Alpha 5, an electric vehicle built in homage to the DeLorean of yesteryear, complete with those characteristic gullwing doors. Details like price/availability are still under wraps, but for the curious: the company says it will do zero to 60 in 2.99 seconds and, perhaps more importantly, zero to 88 in 4.35 seconds.
other things
What else happened this week? Here are some of the things people were reading more about:WWDC roars: Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference kicks off on Monday, June 6, and rumors about what might be announced are already spreading fast. Brian Heater has a recap covering what he hopes to see at the event, and Sarah Perez delved into what’s likely to change in iOS.Sheryl Sandberg leaves Meta: After 14 years in the role, Sheryl Sandberg will no longer be the chief operating officer of the company formerly known as Facebook. Meta’s chief growth officer, Javier Olivan, will assume the role of chief operating officer; Sandberg will remain on Meta’s board of directors.Amazon kills the Cloud Cam: In 2017, Amazon released a small smart home camera called the Cloud Cam. Then, almost immediately, it bought two smart camera makers: Blink and Ring. Half a decade later, Amazon ditches Cloud Cam in favor of the latter two. Cloud Cams will stop working at the end of this year; Existing Cloud Cam users will get a free Blink Mini camera as a replacement, along with a free year of the Blink Plus plan. If you’re using a cloud camera, be sure to back up your saved videos before they’re gone in December.Amazon experiments with “invitation-based” ordering to fight resellers: If you’re a regular person just casually trying to buy something like a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X on Amazon, you’ve probably felt the disappointment of being beaten down by a billion bots. Amazon announced this week that it will launch “invitation-based” ordering for select high-demand items; you’ll “request an invite” and then Amazon will check things like purchase history/account creation date to determine who gets the first dibs.More layoffs: It was another brutal week of tech layoffs: 8% from Carbon Health; 14% Loom; 10% of the Winklevoss twins’ Gemini crypto platform; 25% from IRL social apps; 10% off TomTom and more.and tesla too: First came the news that Elon Musk will require “everyone at Tesla” to be in the office (rather than remote) for a “minimum of 40 hours” per week. Then came news of a company-wide hiring freeze and plans to cut up to 10% of Tesla’s salaried workforce.
audio stuff
You love TechCrunch for your eyes, how about TechCrunch for your ears? We have a ton of super cool podcasts, the latest of which Matt Burns rounded up here.Example A: the TechCrunch Live podcast, where this week Burnsy spoke with the CEO and principal investor of Olive, a Columbus, Ohio company that has turned over 27 times and is now worth billions.
things added
We have a paid section on our site called TechCrunch+. It’s only a few bucks a month and it’s packed with great stuff! As of this week, for example:VC on the state of cryptocurrencies: Virtually all major cryptocurrencies have spent the last 6 months in a downward spiral. How do investors feel about the space in general? Jacquelyn Melinek signed up with a handful of venture capitalists to get her thoughts.How the Biden admin could push solar/wind projects: “There is an idea floating in the ether (or at least in my ether) that there is enough sunny federal land in Nevada to power the entire United States with solar energy,” writes Tim De Chant. “So why don’t we have more solar and wind power on public land?”Even Stripe isn’t immune to a changing market: Fintech companies are being hit hard by the recession; Alex Wilhelm takes a look at how and why “even the largest and most well-known private fintech companies are suffering from embarrassing revaluations.”
