End of an era: A Seattle tech icon decamps to Las Vegas

End of an era: Rich Barton, who helped define a generation of Seattle tech with his founding roles at Zillow and Expedia, said in a post on X that he’s officially a Las Vegas resident. He cited personal reasons, including an empty nest, but his departure registers as a loss for local tech amid a larger political and economic debate over taxes and the business climate. Read more.

Hydrogen aviation’s hard landing: ZeroAvia, the clean-aviation startup once backed by Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, has all but ceased its Washington operations, its founder-CEO has departed, and it has narrowed its product development to fuel cells. It’s a sign of the challenges facing hydrogen and other alternatives as aviation proves one of the hardest sectors to decarbonize. Read more.

Bold, italics, emojis and more: Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich vibe coded a new tool to add some flair to his frequent LinkedIn posts. The free “LinkedIn Post Formatter,” hosted on GitHub Pages, allows for in-place text formatting that the Microsoft vet calls less “clunky” than other online options. Read more.

Amazon buys more satellite time: The FCC has granted Amazon a conditional waiver, freeing the company from a looming July 30 deadline to deploy half of its 3,232-satellite Amazon Leo broadband internet constellation while keeping its final 2029 milestone intact. Read more.

It was a busy weekend for video games, with companies making announcements at Summer Game Fest, the spiritual successor to the now-defunct E3. Two regional highlights:

• Xbox Showcase: Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution will be Xbox console exclusives, signaling a return to more proven platform strategies under new CEO Asha Sharma, revealed at her first Xbox Games Showcase. Read more.
• Nightdive’s next remaster: Vancouver, Wash.-based Nightdive Studios will remaster “Thief: The Dark Project,” reviving the influential 1998 stealth game for modern consoles and PC this winter. Read more.

Ready for the World Cup? If you are a Seattle area startup founder who loves soccer and is excited for the World Cup, we want to hear from you. Just reach out to GeekWire co-founder John Cook at [email protected] with the subject line “futbol.”

Hot Links:

• Amazon struck a multiyear, multibillion-dollar deal with Corning to supply the fiber-optic infrastructure needed to clear AI network bottlenecks at its U.S. data centers. (CNBC)
• Doodle for Google winner Kameirah Johnson, a senior at Lakeside School in Seattle, is donating part of her winnings — a $50,000 technology package — to Rainier Beach High School. (The Seattle Times, GeekWire)
• Sriram Krishnan, who got his start at Microsoft in Redmond as a founding member of the Windows Azure team, is leaving his post as the White House’s top AI policy adviser at the end of June to launch an outside tech-policy institution. (Reuters)
• Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella publicly rebuked a leaked internal memo that laid out a plan to “make people addicted” to Scout, the company’s new always-on AI agent — calling it “nonsense” and a “non goal,” even though the document was authored by the very executive who leads the Scout team. (404 Media)