transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] K-Pop Demon Hunters, Saja Boys Breakfast Meal and Huntrix Meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that, Rumi? It's not a battle.

Speaker 2:
[00:10] So glad the Saja Boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day. It is an honor to share.

Speaker 1:
[00:16] No, it's our honor.

Speaker 2:
[00:17] It is our larger honor.

Speaker 1:
[00:19] No, really, stop. You can really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side.

Speaker 3:
[00:28] And participate in McDonald's while supplies last.

Speaker 4:
[00:34] Welcome to the Tech Brew Ride Home for Tuesday, April 21st, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Apple names John Ternus as its new CEO, with Tim Cook stepping up to Executive Chairman on September 1st. Amazon agrees to invest up to $25 billion more in Anthropic. Jeff Bezos' Project Prometheus nears a $10 billion raise, and SpaceX's IPO Prospectus reveals Musk is doubling down. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Disguises are getting pretty good these days, and I'm not just talking about when you throw a pair of glasses on and a hoodie and hope you won't be recognized. We're talking about the kind of disguises that end up in your inbox or your phone or on the web, blending in as your everyday internal email, casual text message or normal website. Doppel strengthens team resilience by giving employees the tools and defenses they need to protect themselves from increasingly sophisticated social engineering threats. Their digital risk protection takes it one step further by keeping an eye on every channel to connect patterns and shut them down fast. From deep fakes to bad links to impersonation attempts, Doppel helps you stay ahead of these threats with their AI native social engineering defense platform. Learn more at doppel.com. That's doppel.com. Well, we sort of knew this was coming, but the timing of it is interesting. Quoting CNBC, Apple said on Monday that John Ternus is succeeding Tim Cook as CEO, with Cook assuming the role of Executive Chairman on September 1st. Ternus, a Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering, will join Apple's Board of Directors when he becomes Chief. Apple's Non-Executive Chairman Arthur Levinson will become the iPhone maker's lead independent director at that time. Cook will continue in his role as CEO through the summer, as he works closely with Ternus on a smooth transition, Apple said in a press release. The company said in a filing that the Board made the appointment on Friday. It's the first CEO transition for Apple since Cook, now 65, succeeded Steve Jobs at the helm in 2011, shortly before Jobs' death. Ternus will become Apple's eighth CEO. It has been the greatest privilege of my life to be the CEO of Apple and to have been trusted to lead such an extraordinary company, Cook said in a statement. I love Apple with all of my being, and I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to work with a team of such ingenious, innovative, creative, and deeply caring people who have been unwavering in their dedication to enriching the lives of our customers and creating the best products and services in the world. Apple also said that Johnny Shruji will become the Chief Hardware Officer taking over for Ternus in an expanded role. Shruji, who most recently served as the company's Senior Vice President of Hardware Technologies, will also lead Hardware Engineering. Apple's market cap increased by more than 20-fold on Tim Cook's watch, closing on Monday at $4 trillion. Cook took home $74.6 million in total compensation last year, including a $3 million base salary and millions more in stock awards, according to recent regulatory filings. Forbes estimates his net worth at close to $3 billion. However, as Cook exits, Apple faces numerous challenges, including an increasingly complex supply chain, geopolitical tensions, the Trump administration's tariffs, and a memory crunch tied to soaring demand for AI chips. Ternus, 50, has been Apple's hardware boss and has worked at Apple for about half his life, joining just four years after he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in Mechanical Engineering. He's been widely viewed as the next in line with recent profiles in the New York Times and Bloomberg. His portfolio has included oversight of the hardware engineering teams behind the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, AirPods, and Vision Pro. Ternus came to Apple in 2001 after a four-year stint as a Mechanical Engineer at Virtual Research Systems at Apple. He worked on the product design team and in 2013, he became a Vice President of Hardware Engineering. Let me back up and underline a few things here. First, Tim Cook's 15-year legacy by the numbers. Apple's market cap grew from $350 billion in 2011 to $4 trillion plus now. Net income rose 700 percent to $112 billion for fiscal year 2025. Apple says Tim Cook as Executive Chairman, will assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policy makers around the world. And they say, Johnny Shrooge will assume an expanded role, leading both Hardware Engineering and other stuff. Quoting Bloomberg, Apple's newly combined Hardware Engineering and Hardware Technologies division will be organized across five key areas, its new leader told staffers on Monday. Johnny Shrooge, who was named Chief Hardware Officer at the same time John Ternus was promoted to Chief Executive Officer, made the disclosure in an email to Apple employees. He said the team will be organized into Hardware Engineering, Silicon, Advanced Technologies, Platform Architecture, and Project Management Divisions. The change aims to simplify the structure of his organization, which will add thousands of employees and responsibility over the engineering of the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and other products. Under Shrooge, Apple's Hardware Engineering Unit will now be run by Tom Mariab, an Intel veteran who joined Apple in 2019 to run a team responsible for the quality and hardware integrity of products. The Silicon team will be overseen by long-time executive Sri Santhanam. Platform architecture will be led by Tim Millett. Advanced technologies will be overseen by Zongjian Chen and Donny Nordhus will run product management. Shrooge also touched on Ternus' appointment and CEO Tim Cook's departure in his email, proclaiming that Cook made the very best choice for who should succeed him. Those of us who have had the chance to work closely with John know how thoughtful and capable he is, Shrooge said. The decision to combine the Hardware Engineering and Hardware Technologies teams takes Apple back to a structure it used over a decade ago. The group was one team under former Hardware Chief Bob Mansfield, but was split up upon his first retirement in 2012. That move eventually gave way to Ternus and Shrooge rising within Apple. The new management structure elevates Shrooge, who told Cook last year that he was considering leaving for another role to the clear top of the management chain under Ternus. The change helps cement hardware and engineering as the company's central priorities. So there are of course lots of encomiums about Cook out there, as you'd imagine. John Gruber says Tim Cook reshaped Apple in his own image and exits as CEO on his own terms, seemingly picking the right successor in John Ternus, much like Jobs did with Cook. Mark Gurman's sources say Ternus will bring back Jobs-era decisiveness shifting from Cook's era when decisions were made by collective by top executives as a group. And Ben Thompson says that Tim Cook had an extraordinary run and impeccable timing and stepping down with Apple in a better place than it has ever been as AI becomes its next big test. Quoting Ben, under his watch, the iPhone not only got better every year, but expanded its market to every carrier in basically every country and expanded the line from one model to two colors to five models and a plethora of colors sold at the scale of hundreds of millions of units a year. Cook was without question an operational genius. Moreover, this was clearly the case even before he scaled the iPhone to unimaginable scale. When Cook joined Apple in 1998, the company's operations centered on Apple's own factories and warehouses were a massive drag on the company. Cook methodically shut them down and shifted Apple's manufacturing base to China, creating a just in time supply chain that year after year coordinated a worldwide network of suppliers to deliver Apple's ever expanding product line to customers' doorsteps and a fleet of beautiful and brand expanding stores. There was not, under Cook's leadership, a single significant product issue or recall. Cook also oversaw the introduction of major new products, most notably AirPods and Apple Watch. The wearables, home and accessories category delivered $35.4 billion in revenue last year, which would rank 128th on the Fortune 500. Still, both products are derivative of the iPhone. Cook's signature 0-1 product, the Apple Vision Pro, is more of a.5. Cook's more momentous contribution to Apple's top line was the elevation of services. The Google search deal actually originated in 2002 with an agreement to make Google the default search service for Safari on the Mac and was extended to the iPhone in 2007. Google's motivation was to ensure that Apple never competed for their core business, and Cook was happy to take an ever-increasing amount of pure profit. But the irony is, Tim Cook built what is arguably Apple's most important technology, its ability to build the world's best personal computer products at astronomical scale, and did so in a way that leaves Apple more vulnerable than anyone else to the deteriorating relationship between the United States and China. China was certainly good for the bottom line, but was it good for Apple's long-run sustainability? Apple is in terms of its traditional business model in a better place than it has ever been. The iPhone line is fantastic and selling at a record pace. The Mac, meanwhile, is poised to massively expand its market share as Apple's Silicon, another jobs initiative appropriately invested in and nurtured by Cook, makes the Mac the computer of choice for both the high end, thanks to Apple Silicon's performance and unified memory architecture, and the low end, the iPhone chip-based MacBook Neo, significantly expands Apple's addressable market. Meanwhile, the services business continues to grow. Cook is stepping down after Apple's best-ever quarter, a milestone that very much captures his tenure for better and for worse. At the same time, the AI question looms, and it suggests that something is rotten in the state of Cupertino. The new series still hasn't launched, and when it does, it will be with Google's technology at the core. That was, as I wrote in an update, a momentous decision for Apple's future. Apple's plans are a bit like the alcoholic who admits that they have a drinking problem but promises to limit their intake to social occasions. In short, I think Apple has made a good decision to partner with Google for short-term AI reasons, but I don't think it's a short-term decision. I strongly suspect that Apple, whether it has admitted it to itself or not, has just committed itself to depending on third parties for AI for the long run. As I noted above and in that update, this decision may work out. If it doesn't, however, the sting will be felt long after Cook is gone. To that end, I certainly hope that John Ternus, the new CEO, was heavily involved in the decision. Truthfully, he should have made it. To that end, it's right that Cook is stepping down now. Jobs might have been responsible for taking Apple from zero to one, but it was Cook that took Apple from one to $436 billion in revenue and $118 billion in profit last year. It's a testament to his capabilities and execution that Apple didn't suffer any sort of post-founder hangover. Only time will tell if along the way Cook created the conditions for a crash out by virtue of he himself forgetting the Cook Doctrine and what makes Apple, Apple. End quote.

Speaker 3:
[11:45] So you're saying with Hilton Honors, I can use points for a free night stay anywhere?

Speaker 4:
[11:49] Anywhere.

Speaker 3:
[11:50] What about fancy places like the Canopy in Paris?

Speaker 4:
[11:53] Yeah, Hilton Honors, baby.

Speaker 3:
[11:55] Or relaxing sanctuaries like the Conrad and Tulum?

Speaker 1:
[11:58] Hilton Honors, baby.

Speaker 3:
[12:00] What about the five-star Waldorf Astoria in the Maldives? Are you gonna do this for all 9,000 properties?

Speaker 2:
[12:07] When you want points that can take you anywhere, anytime, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Book your spring break now.

Speaker 4:
[12:15] Amazon has agreed to invest up to $25 billion in Anthropic on top of the $8 billion it has already invested. Anthropic is committing to spend more than $100 billion on AWS over the next 10 years, quoting CNBC. In the announcement on Monday, Anthropic said it's committed to spending more than $100 billion on Amazon Web Services technologies over the next 10 years, including current and future generations of Tranium, Amazon's custom AI chips. Anthropic said it's secured up to 5 gigawatts of capacity for training and deploying its cloud AI models. Anthropic's commitment to run its large language models on AWS Tranium for the next decade reflects the progress we've made together on custom silicon as we continue delivering the technology and infrastructure our customers need to build with generative AI, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a statement. Amazon's investment includes $5 billion into Anthropic now with up to $20 billion in the future tied to, quote, certain commercial milestones according to a release. The initial investment is at Anthropic's latest valuation of $380 billion. Anthropic said in the release that it will bring nearly one gigawatt total of Tranium 2 and Tranium 3 capacity online by the end of the year. With all of the major hyperscalers competing to build out AI capacity as quickly as possible, Amazon said in February that it expects to shell out roughly $200 billion this year on capital expenditures mostly on AI infrastructure. Amazon's investment lands just two months after e-commerce giant agreed to invest up to $50 billion in OpenAI Anthropics chief rival. End quote. The FT says that Jeff Bezos' Project Prometheus is close to a $10 billion fundraising deal, which includes an initial $6.2 billion raise in November at a $38 billion post-money valuation, which is interesting because it's giving away what? 25-ish percent of equity right away. Quote, Jeff Bezos is close to a $10 billion fundraising deal from investors at a $38 billion valuation for his lab, which is focused on AI that can understand the physical world and transform engineering and manufacturing. The agreement, which would make the company one of the best financed early stage startups globally, includes an initial $6.2 billion raised in November, but has been extended because of demand the people added. Bezos himself is among the initial investors. The Amazon founder's AI venture marks the first time he has served in an operational role since stepping down as chief executive of Amazon in 2021. The new funding is separate from a holding company that Prometheus is also raising tens of billions of dollars for, which aims to acquire equity stakes in businesses that it anticipates will be disrupted by the technology it is building, as previously reported by the FT. This could include engineering, architecture and design companies. The investment holding company would have access to data from its portfolio businesses to train Prometheus' AI systems. Bezos and co-chief executive Vikram Bajaj have been leading both fundraising efforts. JP Morgan and BlackRock are among the investors in the new round. Said a person familiar with the matter, the round is expected to close soon but has not yet been finalized. The company, based in San Francisco with offices in London and Zurich, is working on AI systems that understand the laws of physics and can be applied across physical industries. It aims to use specialist models to speed up manual processes and make them less resource intensive. It has hired hundreds of staff to support efforts including AI scientists, experts in specific industries and people who have experience building out computing infrastructure. End quote. And finally today, a draft of SpaceX's confidential IPO perspectives suggests that Elon Musk has increased his stake in SpaceX last year by purchasing $1.4 billion of stock from current and former employees, quoting the information. The large secondary stock purchase was made through the Mega Billionaires Trust. It was disclosed in a draft of SpaceX's confidential IPO perspectives, reviewed by the information. The document also revealed a new plan to award Musk with tens of millions of additional shares if SpaceX's market cap increases to as high as $6.6 trillion. It was unclear at what valuation Musk bought the stock last year. His company has seen a sharp increase in valuation over the past year through secondary share sales and an acquisition of his artificial intelligence company XAI. SpaceX doubled its valuation to $800 billion in an employee share sale last December and was valued at $1.25 trillion after it merged with XAI this February. Another move that increases his influence, the prospectus, indicates that SpaceX will adopt a dual-class share structure that would give Elon Musk super voting Class B shares, in which each share is worth 10 votes, according to a person familiar with the matter. Musk's total ownership stake and voting control wasn't immediately clear. The document says that the dual-class structure concentrates voting control with Mr. Musk and other shareholders of our Class B common stock. End quote. I've had the saxophone part from Careless Whisper stuck in my head all day long, so now congratulations. If you think about it, it'll be stuck in your head too. Talk to you tomorrow.