Happy Memorial Day Weekend. Here are our picks for the week’s noteworthy storylines — from the verdict in the landmark AI trial to the end of a Seattle startup that developed pizza-making robots.
Musk loses: A jury ruled unanimously that Elon Musk waited too long to file his lawsuit against OpenAI, Sam Altman, and Microsoft, finding the defendants not liable on all claims after less than two hours of deliberation. The verdict caps a three-week trial that opened a rare window into the inner workings of AI's most consequential partnership.
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Computer scientist and AI veteran Oren Etzioni writes in a guest opinion that OpenAI's nonprofit-to-for-profit conversion still sets a dangerous precedent for American charity law — and that the real reckoning will have to come from Washington, D.C., not the Oakland courtroom.
Expedia at 30: CEO Ariane Gorin, founder Rich Barton, chairman Barry Diller, and former CEO Dara Khosrowshahi tell the inside story of Expedia's 30-year evolution — from a small project inside Microsoft to a global travel conglomerate now navigating its third major tech disruption with the dawn of AI agents. It's a rare gathering of voices for a company that tends to keep its history close.
Remembering Soma: S. "Soma" Somasegar, the longtime Microsoft developer leader and Madrona managing director, passed away this week at the age of 59. The tributes came from seemingly everywhere — Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella among them — and they painted a consistent picture: he was kind, generous with his time, humble, and a steadying presence. To many, those qualities mattered even more than the investments and decisions he made.
Seattle's image problem: GeekWire co-founder John Cook makes the case that Seattle's increasingly anti-business national image threatens the city's standing as an innovation hub, exactly 30 years after Newsweek celebrated it as one of America's great boomtowns. The piece connects to a broader reckoning playing out across the region this week.
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Business leaders gathered in Bellevue to dissect what's holding Seattle back — taxes, political uncertainty, a strained relationship with large employers. The silver lining: public safety is improving, and the FIFA World Cup offers a chance to prove the city can still put on a show.
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A McKinsey analysis presented at the Tech Alliance annual luncheon warned that Washington's nation-leading economic growth is projected to slow to the national average, driven by negative domestic migration, rising costs, and heavy reliance on a handful of giant employers.
Yusuf Mehdi's exit: One of Microsoft's best-known and longest-serving executives plans to leave next year after a 35-year career that touched Internet Explorer, Bing, Xbox, Windows, and Copilot. The EVP and consumer CMO said he'll work at full intensity through June 2027 before stepping away. His exit is part of a broader reshaping of Microsoft's leadership under Satya Nadella, who is dismantling the company's traditional structure in favor of smaller, flatter teams.
What Bezos is really doing: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos offered the most detailed public description yet of Project Prometheus, calling the secretive startup an "artificial general engineer" building next-generation design tools for physical objects. He has self-funded the venture, valued at $38 billion, and emphasized it has "nothing to do with robotics."
Out of dough: Picnic, the 10-year-old Seattle food automation startup that set out to revolutionize pizza production with robotics, has shut down and sold its assets to a mystery buyer. The company raised about $50 million, placed its pizza-making robots in stadiums, universities, and big-box retailers, and cycled through three CEOs before running out of runway.
Among those left in the lurch was Lee Kindell, owner of Seattle's Moto Pizza, who was one of Picnic's most enthusiastic early customers — and who is now stuck with what he calls a $250,000 "robot aquarium" of idle machines in his restaurant. "I was so pissed I started my own robot company," he said.
On a supersized Memorial Day Weekend edition of the GeekWire Podcast, we dig into SpaceX's massive IPO filing and what it reveals about the Starlink factory in Redmond; Jeff Bezos's hour-long CNBC interview on wealth, inequality, and, oh yeah, tech; and John's World Cup ticketing nightmare with ChatGPT and Gemini as his tech support. Read more and listen here, and subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
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Thanks for subscribing, and have a great holiday weekend. Feedback and news tips: [email protected]. — GeekWire editor Todd Bishop, [email protected]; reporter Kurt Schlosser, [email protected]; and reporter Lisa Stiffler, [email protected].
