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Inside the MAGA-fueled fever dream of the 2024 Bitcoin Conference. There were rumors that Elon Musk would introduce former President Donald Trump before his keynote speech at the 2024 Bitcoin Conference. Musk had pledged to donate tens of millions to a Trump super PAC; he was close with JD Vance, Trump’s vice presidential nominee; he was into crypto and memes. People tracked Musk’s jet and noticed it was reducing altitude over Tennessee. It was happening. It would be historic.
The Bitcoin Conference is an annual affair, and each year, it’s bigger and flashier than the one before. The last few were in Miami, Florida; this time, the conference was moved to Nashville, Tennessee, to take place only a week after the Republican National Convention. My seatmate on the flight down told me he never misses a conference. He and his friends call it “Bitcoin prom,” a weekend that is just as much about partying as it is about networking. But things were different this year: scheduled to speak at the conference were more than a half-dozen Republican politicians, prostrating themselves before the crypto gods, chasing money and support from a community that once defined itself by its resistance to the government. And then there was Trump, the centerpiece of it all, hoping to welcome the techno-libertarians and the finance bros into his ever-expanding coalition.
The Bitcoiners were ready for Trump, and Trump was ready for their votes. But this marriage of cryptocurrency and the Republican political machine was off to a rocky start as the conference struggled to handle the logistics of hosting the former president and his retinue.
It was, frankly, a shitshow.
On the day that Trump was set to speak, I was told the Secret Service canceled Bitcoin Yoga. I was also told that Bitcoin Yoga had happened yesterday (it had; I was too tired from a late night of Bitcoin Topgolf to make it to yoga on time) and was not on the schedule for today (it was, in a timeslot an hour and five minutes before a session on “Self-Governance: Bitcoin and Beef”).
I was told the Secret Service canceled Bitcoin Yoga
As the staffers behind the help desk tried to get to the bottom of whether Bitcoin Yoga was actually on the schedule (it was), whether Bitcoin Yoga was happening (it wasn’t), and whether the Secret Service was responsible for its cancellation or there had just been some sort of miscommunication (a Secret Service spokesperson later told me the agency “did not request any cancellation of any conference events”), a Bitcoin Magazine writer inquired about his backpack, which he’d left in the “whale VIP room” overnight and which had since disappeared. He was told the Secret Service probably took it during their security sweep; maybe he could check the lost and found?
At the press desk, a crypto beat reporter was indignant to learn he wouldn’t be getting a “green pass,” the mysterious, higher-tier credential that conference organizers were giving to select reporters that allowed them to skip to the front of the Secret Service line. A different crypto beat reporter I’d met at a party had also been snubbed; he was a “small fry,” he told me. I had originally been denied one of these passes as well, a problem that could only be resolved after a frenzy of phone calls and emails from multiple editors. The press desk staffers told me the distribution of the passes had been decided by the Secret Service and said there was nothing they could do to get me on the list. A Secret Service spokesperson later told me that the “issuance of media credentials and the selective distribution of media credentials” didn’t “fall under our purview,” claiming those responsibilities were handled by the conference staff. As far as I could tell, the publications that were getting the press pass fell into two buckets: big names like The New York Times and right-wing media. It felt these outlets were being prioritized over the trade publications that had been covering Bitcoin for years. Was the Bitcoin Conference even a Bitcoin conference anymore?

Photo by Jon Cherry / Getty Images
Trump’s face was inescapable at the Bitcoin Conference, as was his merch.

This was the final day of the conference, and everyone was on edge waiting for Trump’s scheduled speech that afternoon. Every crypto cause célèbre and fever dream was a possibility. Maybe he’d announce a plan to create a strategic Bitcoin reserve, a bulwark against inflation. Maybe he’d promise to fire Gary Gensler, the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, whose name had been uttered hundreds of times over the weekend, never without contempt. Maybe he’d promise to pardon Ross Ulbricht — the operator of the Silk Road, a covert marketplace that ran largely on Bitcoin — who is currently serving a life sentence in prison. Maybe he’d reveal himself to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious, reclusive creator of Bitcoin, who in these circles was regarded as a prophet or maybe a god. Maybe, probably, none of that would happen — but the man was here, with us, and that was all that mattered.
Eight hours before Trump was scheduled to speak, the line spilled out the door and around the block
A bullet had narrowly missed Trump’s skull at a rally two weeks prior, so security was extra tight. Around 8AM, eight hours before Trump was scheduled to speak, the line to get into the Music City Center spilled out the door and around the block. Everyone around me was wearing red MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN hats or red $MAGAA memecoin hats or red BITCOIN MADE IN AMERICA hats or orange MAKE BITCOIN GREAT AGAIN hats, the latter of which, I’d learn, were being given out for free by a crypto retirement platform called Bitcoin IRA. There were shirts that said DONALD PUMP, shirts that showed Trump in the aftermath of being shot, his fist in the air, that said FIGHT! FIGHT!, and shirts that said FREE ROSS VOTE TRUMP that, like the orange hats, had been given away for free.
The guards at the door said no bags or outside food or drinks were allowed. A quartet of well-coiffed women demanded to be let in with their handbags, security rules be damned — they had Secret Service clearance, they said. They were told to find someone inside with the campaign or the conference who could vouch for them. “This is not a regular day,” one of the guards barked at another woman who asked if she could bring in a sandwich. Banal contraband piled up outside the glass building like offerings before a temple: tote bags, half-full water bottles and coffee cups, the remnants of breakfast.
This was only the first step. Getting to the main stage required passing through a metal detector, ascending a staircase and an escalator, and walking past a stage upon which a rotating cast of local musicians performed for an audience that mostly ignored them. From there, you would join the very back of a line that snaked through the expo floor. After a 45-minute wait and a second security screening — this one conducted by the Secret Service and the TSA — you’d be in the room where it happens, the Nakamoto stage. Leaving for any reason short of going to the bathroom, because thankfully there were bathrooms, meant doing it all over again: the line and the pat-down, the waiting, the anticipation.

The lines had been even longer on Friday, before the implementation of the no-bag rule. Unlike other events with Secret Service protection that I’d covered in the past, the Bitcoin Conference had no dedicated media entrance. There was a makeshift press room downstairs stocked with free coffee, tea, and water, but there was no expedited entry for journalists who wanted to see the show on the main stage. Vivian Cheng, the media liaison, escorted me to the front of the Secret Service line on Friday and told me not to count on her help again; after this, I was on my own. As we walked past the hundreds of people who had waited — were still waiting — for hours to get in, I asked if the rumors about the no-bag policy on Saturday were true. She wasn’t sure. And laptops? Also unsure.
Trapped amid what meager audience had made it past the screenings thus far, I attempted to make the best of the situation by listening in on panels I had planned on skipping. The tenor of the conversations was more politicized than the event descriptions had led me to believe. A panel that was ostensibly about the risks and rewards of public mining companies gave way to discussions of President Joe Biden’s “whole-of-government attack” on cryptocurrency, as Jason Les, the CEO of the Bitcoin mining company Riot Platforms, put it. “President Trump, on the other hand, has been very positive.”
And what about the presumptive Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris? (She had been invited to the conference but declined to attend.) “Harris hasn’t commented, but her political perspectives have historically been more to the progressive side than President Biden,” said Fred Thiel, the CEO of Marathon Digital Holdings (no known relation to the Peter). What do Bitcoiners want? “We don’t need anything,” Les said. “We just need an active campaign to not fight against us.”
The problem with crypto law, they told me between rounds, was that there were no laws, so the government just makes up whatever rules it wants
This attitude tracked. The previous night, at a Bitcoin Topgolf party hosted by podcaster Crypto Megan and actor / alleged sex criminal T.J. Miller, a group of crypto attorneys complained to me about SEC regulations. The problem with crypto law, they told me between rounds, was that there were no laws, so the government just makes up whatever rules it wants to go after you. The oldest among them said the fact that Trump — someone who “legitimized white nationalism” — had embraced cryptocurrency wasn’t an entirely positive development. But we weren’t here to talk politics. One of the young lawyers handed me a golf club and told me to take a swing.
Yet politics seemed to be all anyone could talk about inside the convention center. “Under a Trump administration, we’re going to see Bitcoin mining flourish,” Thiel said. “Under a Harris administration, we have no idea what the energy policies are going to be.” To ensure its ongoing success, the Bitcoin community needs to have “the right pro-Bitcoin politicians in office, no matter the side of the aisle,” Les said. One side of the aisle had sent its presidential nominee and several sitting members of Congress to court Bitcoiners. The sole representative for the Democratic Party was Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), who had come to make the “progressive case for Bitcoin.” And then there was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., representing both and neither.

Photo by Jon Cherry / Getty Images
During his keynote speech, RFK Jr. said Trump was “early in the Bitcoin learning curve.”

Exhausted and hungry, I abandoned my post at the Nakamoto stage after realizing I could no longer sit in the cold, dim room without any caffeine or calories to sustain me. At a nearby coffee shop, I sipped on a cold brew and eavesdropped on a job interview; everyone involved had conference wristbands around their arms. One interviewer asked the interviewee his SAT score, and the group commiserated about the now-scrapped writing section, which was too subjective to be of any real use in college admissions. Back at the convention center, the line to get into the main stage area was the longest I had seen it yet, wrapping all the way around the expo floor. After a few minutes of waiting, I decided to try flashing my press credentials to the security guards working the door and asking if they’d let me skip the line, figuring the worst they could do was say no. (A spokesperson for the Secret Service later told me the decision to allow certain press pass holders to skip the line was not made by the agency.) I interrupted the guys behind me, who were having an impassioned conversation about the perils of DEI in the workplace, and asked them to hold my spot in case I came back.
Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) took the stage with Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) to talk about their love of country and Bitcoin
I got in without issue, somewhere near the middle of Bitcoin evangelist Michael Saylor’s diatribe about the power of holding your coin. Saylor spoke with messianic fervor: the people in this room would get rich, would stay rich, while everyone who failed to get on board would be left behind. Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) took the stage with Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) to talk about their love of country and Bitcoin and the liberatory power of cryptocurrency. (Lummis, who unveiled a draft bill that would require the Treasury secretary to establish a network of Bitcoin storage facilities across the country, was supposed to be joined by former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who was taken off the program at the last minute.) “Free at last, free at last,” Scott proclaimed, seemingly evoking Martin Luther King Jr.
Edward Snowden took a more sober tone. He appeared virtually and was greeted with a standing ovation, before revealing that because of the technical setup, he could neither see nor hear the audience. (The crowd’s enthusiasm immediately deflated.)
“I spoke recently at the Bitcoin Conference in Amsterdam and the things we talked about were very different. The last time, the topic was about how the game is rigged but we can’t leave,” Snowden said. The amount of political representation at this year’s conference, he said, was a “wonderful, remarkable thing,” but it was also cause for concern. “Cast a vote, but don’t join a cult,” he told the audience. “They are not our tribe, our personality — they have their own interests, their own values, their own things they’re chasing.”

Photo by Jon Cherry / Getty Images
Edward Snowden, appearing virtually, temporarily killed the MAGA vibe by cautioning Bitcoiners to “cast a vote, but don’t join a cult.”

Snowden received far less applause when the speech ended, possibly because the crowd didn’t appreciate him killing the vibe, possibly because the audience knew he couldn’t hear them. Then it was time for RFK Jr. — introduced as “the next president of the United States” — who told the Bitcoiners that they have it all right.
“Bitcoin is the currency of hope,” he declared to roaring applause. “It is the perfect currency. It is an elegant, poetic, beautiful, pure specie.” If you fix the money, he said, you fix the world.

That night, I found myself at a party for Joe Allen, a tech correspondent for Steve Bannon’s War Room who had just published a book on transhumanism and the war against humanity. “What I see there,” he said of the Bitcoin Conference, “is an opportunity on the one hand, but it’s also a very dark temptation.” Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen are “every bit as perverse and Satanic” as the globalists toward whom Bannon and others on the nationalist right usually direct their ire, he said.
“These guys represent an ideology that is fundamentally hostile to anything like traditional religion and anything like an organic, as we would know it, existence for human beings,” Allen told me later. However, he took a remarkably pragmatic view on the perverse and Satanic. “In the long term, I think we are fundamentally opposed. In the short term, politics is dirty business.”
Few questioned whether the MAGA tent was big enough to cover the tech futurists and the evangelical Christians
But not many at the convention center shared Allen’s sentiment; few questioned whether the MAGA tent was big enough to cover the tech futurists and the evangelical Christians, the cattle ranchers who just want the Department of Agriculture out of their business, and the crypto bros who want the SEC out of their wallets. The movement, it turns out, is big enough for all of them: their disagreements on certain subjects are less salient than their disdain for the regulatory state — their desire to liberate themselves from the authorities who want to tell them what to do and how to live, who want to take their money and give it to people who didn’t work for it. The bureaucrats want to implement central banking digital currencies, to track what we buy and who we buy it from, to cut dissidents off from the economy. Bitcoin isn’t just a way to get rich; Bitcoin is a way to break free.
“Bitcoin is about decentralization, freedom, and getting to the source,” Grant, a 31-year-old from Arizona told me ahead of Trump’s speech. Neither side, he said, is going to stop printing money; the right is “pandering to voters” by taking a pro-Bitcoin stance, but it’s better than what the Democrats are doing. Like many of the other conference attendees, he proudly displayed his ideology on his shirt, which read STOP SUBSIDIZING VEGANS. The shirt, he explained, was merch from his company, CrowdHealth, a health insurance crowdfunding platform that describes itself as helping people “break free from corporate run sick care.” As we spoke, a woman approached us and asked how exactly we were subsidizing her vegan lifestyle. Then they, too, found common ground: both are RFK Jr. supporters and plan on voting for him in the presidential election.

Photo by Jon Cherry / Getty Images
All weekend long, I watched party buses full of bachelorettes roll past this display of Trump’s face.

But most people I spoke to were not at the conference for the fringe player. They were there to see Trump, to hope the Republican presidential candidate would openly declare his allegiance to cryptocurrency. An hour before Trump was scheduled to speak, I got an email inviting me to watch the speech at the DNA House, a pop-up event space hosted by an asset management fund. “Skip the lines and yes you can bring a bag and have a drink,” the email read. Between the suffocating crowds, the harsh austerity of the Nakamoto stage, and the ominous alleged Secret Service seizures of other reporters’ backpacks, the invite was extremely tempting. I left.
The convention center was full of politicians and grifters and hangers-on, as were the surrounding events. The weekend kicked off with Bitcoin Karate, which I skipped because it sounded annoying, only to learn that both RFK Jr. and the “Hawk Tuah” girl had been in attendance. By the time I got there, the expo floor had booths for Bitcoin coffee grown in El Salvador and a booth where an artist painted Pepe portraits of attendees. People working a booth operated by The Daily Wire, the conservative news website, handed out SCAMALA signs to people waiting in line to see Trump. Upon entering the main stage area, attendees were greeted by a man handing out signs that said BITCOIN 2024 on one side and IN SATOSHI WE TRUST on the other. Everyone was selling or promoting something. Milling around the conference floor, I saw Madison Cawthorn, the erstwhile Gen Z member of Congress outside the main stage, and interviewed no fewer than six people involved with different MAGA-adjacent altcoins.

Photo by Bloomberg
Trump and Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the Silk Road, depicted on trading cards.

DNA House carried a promise of something different. I’d gone to a party there the night before after a brief interlude at a meetup for $EGIRL, a Musk-adjacent reactionary memecoin, at which I was one of approximately four women in attendance (not including a group of girls waiting to ride a mechanical bull). At DNA House, I was surprised to encounter a more or less “normie” crowd of crypto bros and finance types. The first man I met that night rattled off a list of his accomplishments: founder, chairman, cofounder, and so on. On the stairs outside, I smoked a cigarette with a compliance auditor who told me and a crypto beat reporter about his project to, if I understood him correctly, mine Bitcoin using hydrogen cells. Inside, people danced awkwardly to EDM and added each other on LinkedIn. There were very few women there, as was the case everywhere I went.
In the light of day, DNA House was more intimate, though the crowd was no less male. One man told me this was where the “whales” were; another invited me to a private afterparty at “Taylor Swift’s recording studio.” There was a catered lunch — grilled salmon, broccoli, a rice pilaf situation — and an open bar, one screen set to the livestream of the conference, another displaying the live price of both Bitcoin and the $MAGAA memecoin. The people at DNA House may have been less overtly MAGA than those at the convention center, but only marginally so. I overheard a bearded man tell someone he works with Young Americans for Liberty. Before Trump’s speech, someone told me he and several others had attended a $3,000-a-person event at the Westin Hotel rooftop the night before hosted by the $MAGAA coin developers at which Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr. both spoke.
Trump was late, as he always was, and everyone assumed there had to be a good reason, maybe a special guest like Elon Musk. When he finally took the stage, around an hour after he was scheduled, Musk was nowhere to be found, and most of the people around me were too absorbed in conversation to notice that the stream had stopped working. We caught the highlights: in between his usual stump speech about the border and wokeness, Trump pledged to fire Gary Gensler and then repeated himself when he realized the audience had worked itself into a frenzy. It “sent the crowd into ecstasy,” a reporter friend who stayed behind at the convention center texted me. The same was true for the spectators at DNA House, though they were far less interested in the rest of Trump’s policies and couldn’t even spare a little applause for his promise to stop taxing tipped wages. (The audience at the convention center was much more impressed.)

Photo by Jon Cherry / Getty Images
Trump may have taken the stage later than expected, but he told the crowd (almost) everything they wanted to hear.

Still, they were hooked. Everyone was waiting for the same thing: for Trump to announce a plan to create a strategic Bitcoin reserve. He got close, danced right up to the line, and said that under his presidency, the US would never, ever sell its Bitcoin holdings. The room broke out in applause. People stood up. They pulled out their phones, ready to capture the moment their wealth doubled or tripled. “He’s going to announce it,” Scott Walker, a cofounder of DNA Fund said from a small stage. The price of Bitcoin shot up briefly, for a split second, then went back down. And then it was over.
Trump moved on. He promised to commute Ross Ulbricht’s sentence and the audience at the conference roared again. There was a smattering of applause from the crowd at DNA House, too, but the mood in the room had shifted. People had put their phones away.
“Have a good time with your Bitcoin, and your crypto, and everything else that you’re playing with,” Trump told an enthusiastic convention center audience. “We’re going to make that one of the greatest industries on earth.”
The DNA House set was pleased but not thrilled; they were trying to manage their expectations. Sure, Trump hadn’t given them what they wanted, but he had come close. He wasn’t fighting them. He was still their guy.
“Trump went out there, he kind of promised, or kind of came up with a minimum of a promise, but he did not follow through,” Walker said after Trump’s speech. After a weekend of anticipation, the pomp and grandeur of the conference, all the waiting and every interminable line, the Bitcoin diehards and tryhards had been let down.
“I expect the market will react neutral at best,” Walker said.
“I expect the market will react neutral at best.”
Trump had a much better night than the Bitcoiners who were hoping to see their assets appreciate, rather than (briefly) decline. That night, while the DNA Fund hosted another party, Trump raked in a reported $21 million at a fundraiser where seats sold for as much as $800,000 a person. The biggest players were staying the course. The market would adjust. And maybe the Democrats would, too.
After the conference, I talked to Kyle Lawrence, a partner at Falcon Rappaport & Berkman, a crypto law firm based in New York City, whom I had met on the flight to Nashville. He’d watched Trump’s speech from an overflow room at the convention center, surrounded by people in MAGA hats, and told me that he hoped that rather than turning Bitcoin into a partisan issue, Trump’s speech would show Democrats the power of the crypto constituency. “It basically opened the door for Kamala Harris to change her party’s tune on cryptocurrency,” he said.
Someone I spoke to at the DNA party the night of Trump’s speech put it more bluntly: if Harris promises to fire Gary Gensler, or if Biden does it now, the Democrats can claw back some support from the Bitcoiners.
The morning after, almost everyone I saw at the Nashville airport had a hat or tote bag or shirt or wristband identifying them as a Bitcoin Conference attendee. Here we were, together, returning to reality, and everything still felt surreal. As I made my way to my gate, I walked past a man wearing a FREE ROSS VOTE TRUMP shirt who looked curiously like Martin Shkreli. It was the pharma bro himself, seemingly delighted to have been recognized. When I identified myself as a reporter and asked if he wanted to talk about the conference, he laughed and walked away.
At the gate, a couple, both of whom were crypto content creators, asked what I thought of the conference. “The crowd was electric,” one of them said of the reaction to Trump’s speech. But, the other said, Trump didn’t fully deliver. Her fiancé disagreed; this was huge. Behind us, a man told his friend he skipped the entire conference on Saturday because he knew it’d be “such a shitshow” with Trump.
The friend told him he’d missed out. “It was historic.”

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge; Getty Images

Inside the MAGA-fueled fever dream of the 2024 Bitcoin Conference.

There were rumors that Elon Musk would introduce former President Donald Trump before his keynote speech at the 2024 Bitcoin Conference. Musk had pledged to donate tens of millions to a Trump super PAC; he was close with JD Vance, Trump’s vice presidential nominee; he was into crypto and memes. People tracked Musk’s jet and noticed it was reducing altitude over Tennessee. It was happening. It would be historic.

The Bitcoin Conference is an annual affair, and each year, it’s bigger and flashier than the one before. The last few were in Miami, Florida; this time, the conference was moved to Nashville, Tennessee, to take place only a week after the Republican National Convention. My seatmate on the flight down told me he never misses a conference. He and his friends call it “Bitcoin prom,” a weekend that is just as much about partying as it is about networking. But things were different this year: scheduled to speak at the conference were more than a half-dozen Republican politicians, prostrating themselves before the crypto gods, chasing money and support from a community that once defined itself by its resistance to the government. And then there was Trump, the centerpiece of it all, hoping to welcome the techno-libertarians and the finance bros into his ever-expanding coalition.

The Bitcoiners were ready for Trump, and Trump was ready for their votes. But this marriage of cryptocurrency and the Republican political machine was off to a rocky start as the conference struggled to handle the logistics of hosting the former president and his retinue.

It was, frankly, a shitshow.

On the day that Trump was set to speak, I was told the Secret Service canceled Bitcoin Yoga. I was also told that Bitcoin Yoga had happened yesterday (it had; I was too tired from a late night of Bitcoin Topgolf to make it to yoga on time) and was not on the schedule for today (it was, in a timeslot an hour and five minutes before a session on “Self-Governance: Bitcoin and Beef”).

As the staffers behind the help desk tried to get to the bottom of whether Bitcoin Yoga was actually on the schedule (it was), whether Bitcoin Yoga was happening (it wasn’t), and whether the Secret Service was responsible for its cancellation or there had just been some sort of miscommunication (a Secret Service spokesperson later told me the agency “did not request any cancellation of any conference events”), a Bitcoin Magazine writer inquired about his backpack, which he’d left in the “whale VIP room” overnight and which had since disappeared. He was told the Secret Service probably took it during their security sweep; maybe he could check the lost and found?

At the press desk, a crypto beat reporter was indignant to learn he wouldn’t be getting a “green pass,” the mysterious, higher-tier credential that conference organizers were giving to select reporters that allowed them to skip to the front of the Secret Service line. A different crypto beat reporter I’d met at a party had also been snubbed; he was a “small fry,” he told me. I had originally been denied one of these passes as well, a problem that could only be resolved after a frenzy of phone calls and emails from multiple editors. The press desk staffers told me the distribution of the passes had been decided by the Secret Service and said there was nothing they could do to get me on the list. A Secret Service spokesperson later told me that the “issuance of media credentials and the selective distribution of media credentials” didn’t “fall under our purview,” claiming those responsibilities were handled by the conference staff. As far as I could tell, the publications that were getting the press pass fell into two buckets: big names like The New York Times and right-wing media. It felt these outlets were being prioritized over the trade publications that had been covering Bitcoin for years. Was the Bitcoin Conference even a Bitcoin conference anymore?

This was the final day of the conference, and everyone was on edge waiting for Trump’s scheduled speech that afternoon. Every crypto cause célèbre and fever dream was a possibility. Maybe he’d announce a plan to create a strategic Bitcoin reserve, a bulwark against inflation. Maybe he’d promise to fire Gary Gensler, the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, whose name had been uttered hundreds of times over the weekend, never without contempt. Maybe he’d promise to pardon Ross Ulbricht — the operator of the Silk Road, a covert marketplace that ran largely on Bitcoin — who is currently serving a life sentence in prison. Maybe he’d reveal himself to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious, reclusive creator of Bitcoin, who in these circles was regarded as a prophet or maybe a god. Maybe, probably, none of that would happen — but the man was here, with us, and that was all that mattered.

A bullet had narrowly missed Trump’s skull at a rally two weeks prior, so security was extra tight. Around 8AM, eight hours before Trump was scheduled to speak, the line to get into the Music City Center spilled out the door and around the block. Everyone around me was wearing red MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN hats or red $MAGAA memecoin hats or red BITCOIN MADE IN AMERICA hats or orange MAKE BITCOIN GREAT AGAIN hats, the latter of which, I’d learn, were being given out for free by a crypto retirement platform called Bitcoin IRA. There were shirts that said DONALD PUMP, shirts that showed Trump in the aftermath of being shot, his fist in the air, that said FIGHT! FIGHT!, and shirts that said FREE ROSS VOTE TRUMP that, like the orange hats, had been given away for free.

The guards at the door said no bags or outside food or drinks were allowed. A quartet of well-coiffed women demanded to be let in with their handbags, security rules be damned — they had Secret Service clearance, they said. They were told to find someone inside with the campaign or the conference who could vouch for them. “This is not a regular day,” one of the guards barked at another woman who asked if she could bring in a sandwich. Banal contraband piled up outside the glass building like offerings before a temple: tote bags, half-full water bottles and coffee cups, the remnants of breakfast.

This was only the first step. Getting to the main stage required passing through a metal detector, ascending a staircase and an escalator, and walking past a stage upon which a rotating cast of local musicians performed for an audience that mostly ignored them. From there, you would join the very back of a line that snaked through the expo floor. After a 45-minute wait and a second security screening — this one conducted by the Secret Service and the TSA — you’d be in the room where it happens, the Nakamoto stage. Leaving for any reason short of going to the bathroom, because thankfully there were bathrooms, meant doing it all over again: the line and the pat-down, the waiting, the anticipation.

The lines had been even longer on Friday, before the implementation of the no-bag rule. Unlike other events with Secret Service protection that I’d covered in the past, the Bitcoin Conference had no dedicated media entrance. There was a makeshift press room downstairs stocked with free coffee, tea, and water, but there was no expedited entry for journalists who wanted to see the show on the main stage. Vivian Cheng, the media liaison, escorted me to the front of the Secret Service line on Friday and told me not to count on her help again; after this, I was on my own. As we walked past the hundreds of people who had waited — were still waiting — for hours to get in, I asked if the rumors about the no-bag policy on Saturday were true. She wasn’t sure. And laptops? Also unsure.

Trapped amid what meager audience had made it past the screenings thus far, I attempted to make the best of the situation by listening in on panels I had planned on skipping. The tenor of the conversations was more politicized than the event descriptions had led me to believe. A panel that was ostensibly about the risks and rewards of public mining companies gave way to discussions of President Joe Biden’s “whole-of-government attack” on cryptocurrency, as Jason Les, the CEO of the Bitcoin mining company Riot Platforms, put it. “President Trump, on the other hand, has been very positive.”

And what about the presumptive Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris? (She had been invited to the conference but declined to attend.) “Harris hasn’t commented, but her political perspectives have historically been more to the progressive side than President Biden,” said Fred Thiel, the CEO of Marathon Digital Holdings (no known relation to the Peter). What do Bitcoiners want? “We don’t need anything,” Les said. “We just need an active campaign to not fight against us.”

This attitude tracked. The previous night, at a Bitcoin Topgolf party hosted by podcaster Crypto Megan and actor / alleged sex criminal T.J. Miller, a group of crypto attorneys complained to me about SEC regulations. The problem with crypto law, they told me between rounds, was that there were no laws, so the government just makes up whatever rules it wants to go after you. The oldest among them said the fact that Trump — someone who “legitimized white nationalism” — had embraced cryptocurrency wasn’t an entirely positive development. But we weren’t here to talk politics. One of the young lawyers handed me a golf club and told me to take a swing.

Yet politics seemed to be all anyone could talk about inside the convention center. “Under a Trump administration, we’re going to see Bitcoin mining flourish,” Thiel said. “Under a Harris administration, we have no idea what the energy policies are going to be.” To ensure its ongoing success, the Bitcoin community needs to have “the right pro-Bitcoin politicians in office, no matter the side of the aisle,” Les said. One side of the aisle had sent its presidential nominee and several sitting members of Congress to court Bitcoiners. The sole representative for the Democratic Party was Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), who had come to make the “progressive case for Bitcoin.” And then there was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., representing both and neither.

Exhausted and hungry, I abandoned my post at the Nakamoto stage after realizing I could no longer sit in the cold, dim room without any caffeine or calories to sustain me. At a nearby coffee shop, I sipped on a cold brew and eavesdropped on a job interview; everyone involved had conference wristbands around their arms. One interviewer asked the interviewee his SAT score, and the group commiserated about the now-scrapped writing section, which was too subjective to be of any real use in college admissions. Back at the convention center, the line to get into the main stage area was the longest I had seen it yet, wrapping all the way around the expo floor. After a few minutes of waiting, I decided to try flashing my press credentials to the security guards working the door and asking if they’d let me skip the line, figuring the worst they could do was say no. (A spokesperson for the Secret Service later told me the decision to allow certain press pass holders to skip the line was not made by the agency.) I interrupted the guys behind me, who were having an impassioned conversation about the perils of DEI in the workplace, and asked them to hold my spot in case I came back.

I got in without issue, somewhere near the middle of Bitcoin evangelist Michael Saylor’s diatribe about the power of holding your coin. Saylor spoke with messianic fervor: the people in this room would get rich, would stay rich, while everyone who failed to get on board would be left behind. Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) took the stage with Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) to talk about their love of country and Bitcoin and the liberatory power of cryptocurrency. (Lummis, who unveiled a draft bill that would require the Treasury secretary to establish a network of Bitcoin storage facilities across the country, was supposed to be joined by former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who was taken off the program at the last minute.) “Free at last, free at last,” Scott proclaimed, seemingly evoking Martin Luther King Jr.

Edward Snowden took a more sober tone. He appeared virtually and was greeted with a standing ovation, before revealing that because of the technical setup, he could neither see nor hear the audience. (The crowd’s enthusiasm immediately deflated.)

“I spoke recently at the Bitcoin Conference in Amsterdam and the things we talked about were very different. The last time, the topic was about how the game is rigged but we can’t leave,” Snowden said. The amount of political representation at this year’s conference, he said, was a “wonderful, remarkable thing,” but it was also cause for concern. “Cast a vote, but don’t join a cult,” he told the audience. “They are not our tribe, our personality — they have their own interests, their own values, their own things they’re chasing.”

Snowden received far less applause when the speech ended, possibly because the crowd didn’t appreciate him killing the vibe, possibly because the audience knew he couldn’t hear them. Then it was time for RFK Jr. — introduced as “the next president of the United States” — who told the Bitcoiners that they have it all right.

“Bitcoin is the currency of hope,” he declared to roaring applause. “It is the perfect currency. It is an elegant, poetic, beautiful, pure specie.” If you fix the money, he said, you fix the world.

That night, I found myself at a party for Joe Allen, a tech correspondent for Steve Bannon’s War Room who had just published a book on transhumanism and the war against humanity. “What I see there,” he said of the Bitcoin Conference, “is an opportunity on the one hand, but it’s also a very dark temptation.” Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen are “every bit as perverse and Satanic” as the globalists toward whom Bannon and others on the nationalist right usually direct their ire, he said.

“These guys represent an ideology that is fundamentally hostile to anything like traditional religion and anything like an organic, as we would know it, existence for human beings,” Allen told me later. However, he took a remarkably pragmatic view on the perverse and Satanic. “In the long term, I think we are fundamentally opposed. In the short term, politics is dirty business.”

But not many at the convention center shared Allen’s sentiment; few questioned whether the MAGA tent was big enough to cover the tech futurists and the evangelical Christians, the cattle ranchers who just want the Department of Agriculture out of their business, and the crypto bros who want the SEC out of their wallets. The movement, it turns out, is big enough for all of them: their disagreements on certain subjects are less salient than their disdain for the regulatory state — their desire to liberate themselves from the authorities who want to tell them what to do and how to live, who want to take their money and give it to people who didn’t work for it. The bureaucrats want to implement central banking digital currencies, to track what we buy and who we buy it from, to cut dissidents off from the economy. Bitcoin isn’t just a way to get rich; Bitcoin is a way to break free.

“Bitcoin is about decentralization, freedom, and getting to the source,” Grant, a 31-year-old from Arizona told me ahead of Trump’s speech. Neither side, he said, is going to stop printing money; the right is “pandering to voters” by taking a pro-Bitcoin stance, but it’s better than what the Democrats are doing. Like many of the other conference attendees, he proudly displayed his ideology on his shirt, which read STOP SUBSIDIZING VEGANS. The shirt, he explained, was merch from his company, CrowdHealth, a health insurance crowdfunding platform that describes itself as helping people “break free from corporate run sick care.” As we spoke, a woman approached us and asked how exactly we were subsidizing her vegan lifestyle. Then they, too, found common ground: both are RFK Jr. supporters and plan on voting for him in the presidential election.

But most people I spoke to were not at the conference for the fringe player. They were there to see Trump, to hope the Republican presidential candidate would openly declare his allegiance to cryptocurrency. An hour before Trump was scheduled to speak, I got an email inviting me to watch the speech at the DNA House, a pop-up event space hosted by an asset management fund. “Skip the lines and yes you can bring a bag and have a drink,” the email read. Between the suffocating crowds, the harsh austerity of the Nakamoto stage, and the ominous alleged Secret Service seizures of other reporters’ backpacks, the invite was extremely tempting. I left.

The convention center was full of politicians and grifters and hangers-on, as were the surrounding events. The weekend kicked off with Bitcoin Karate, which I skipped because it sounded annoying, only to learn that both RFK Jr. and the “Hawk Tuah” girl had been in attendance. By the time I got there, the expo floor had booths for Bitcoin coffee grown in El Salvador and a booth where an artist painted Pepe portraits of attendees. People working a booth operated by The Daily Wire, the conservative news website, handed out SCAMALA signs to people waiting in line to see Trump. Upon entering the main stage area, attendees were greeted by a man handing out signs that said BITCOIN 2024 on one side and IN SATOSHI WE TRUST on the other. Everyone was selling or promoting something. Milling around the conference floor, I saw Madison Cawthorn, the erstwhile Gen Z member of Congress outside the main stage, and interviewed no fewer than six people involved with different MAGA-adjacent altcoins.

DNA House carried a promise of something different. I’d gone to a party there the night before after a brief interlude at a meetup for $EGIRL, a Musk-adjacent reactionary memecoin, at which I was one of approximately four women in attendance (not including a group of girls waiting to ride a mechanical bull). At DNA House, I was surprised to encounter a more or less “normie” crowd of crypto bros and finance types. The first man I met that night rattled off a list of his accomplishments: founder, chairman, cofounder, and so on. On the stairs outside, I smoked a cigarette with a compliance auditor who told me and a crypto beat reporter about his project to, if I understood him correctly, mine Bitcoin using hydrogen cells. Inside, people danced awkwardly to EDM and added each other on LinkedIn. There were very few women there, as was the case everywhere I went.

In the light of day, DNA House was more intimate, though the crowd was no less male. One man told me this was where the “whales” were; another invited me to a private afterparty at “Taylor Swift’s recording studio.” There was a catered lunch — grilled salmon, broccoli, a rice pilaf situation — and an open bar, one screen set to the livestream of the conference, another displaying the live price of both Bitcoin and the $MAGAA memecoin. The people at DNA House may have been less overtly MAGA than those at the convention center, but only marginally so. I overheard a bearded man tell someone he works with Young Americans for Liberty. Before Trump’s speech, someone told me he and several others had attended a $3,000-a-person event at the Westin Hotel rooftop the night before hosted by the $MAGAA coin developers at which Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr. both spoke.

Trump was late, as he always was, and everyone assumed there had to be a good reason, maybe a special guest like Elon Musk. When he finally took the stage, around an hour after he was scheduled, Musk was nowhere to be found, and most of the people around me were too absorbed in conversation to notice that the stream had stopped working. We caught the highlights: in between his usual stump speech about the border and wokeness, Trump pledged to fire Gary Gensler and then repeated himself when he realized the audience had worked itself into a frenzy. It “sent the crowd into ecstasy,” a reporter friend who stayed behind at the convention center texted me. The same was true for the spectators at DNA House, though they were far less interested in the rest of Trump’s policies and couldn’t even spare a little applause for his promise to stop taxing tipped wages. (The audience at the convention center was much more impressed.)

Still, they were hooked. Everyone was waiting for the same thing: for Trump to announce a plan to create a strategic Bitcoin reserve. He got close, danced right up to the line, and said that under his presidency, the US would never, ever sell its Bitcoin holdings. The room broke out in applause. People stood up. They pulled out their phones, ready to capture the moment their wealth doubled or tripled. “He’s going to announce it,” Scott Walker, a cofounder of DNA Fund said from a small stage. The price of Bitcoin shot up briefly, for a split second, then went back down. And then it was over.

Trump moved on. He promised to commute Ross Ulbricht’s sentence and the audience at the conference roared again. There was a smattering of applause from the crowd at DNA House, too, but the mood in the room had shifted. People had put their phones away.

“Have a good time with your Bitcoin, and your crypto, and everything else that you’re playing with,” Trump told an enthusiastic convention center audience. “We’re going to make that one of the greatest industries on earth.”

The DNA House set was pleased but not thrilled; they were trying to manage their expectations. Sure, Trump hadn’t given them what they wanted, but he had come close. He wasn’t fighting them. He was still their guy.

“Trump went out there, he kind of promised, or kind of came up with a minimum of a promise, but he did not follow through,” Walker said after Trump’s speech. After a weekend of anticipation, the pomp and grandeur of the conference, all the waiting and every interminable line, the Bitcoin diehards and tryhards had been let down.

“I expect the market will react neutral at best,” Walker said.

Trump had a much better night than the Bitcoiners who were hoping to see their assets appreciate, rather than (briefly) decline. That night, while the DNA Fund hosted another party, Trump raked in a reported $21 million at a fundraiser where seats sold for as much as $800,000 a person. The biggest players were staying the course. The market would adjust. And maybe the Democrats would, too.

After the conference, I talked to Kyle Lawrence, a partner at Falcon Rappaport & Berkman, a crypto law firm based in New York City, whom I had met on the flight to Nashville. He’d watched Trump’s speech from an overflow room at the convention center, surrounded by people in MAGA hats, and told me that he hoped that rather than turning Bitcoin into a partisan issue, Trump’s speech would show Democrats the power of the crypto constituency. “It basically opened the door for Kamala Harris to change her party’s tune on cryptocurrency,” he said.

Someone I spoke to at the DNA party the night of Trump’s speech put it more bluntly: if Harris promises to fire Gary Gensler, or if Biden does it now, the Democrats can claw back some support from the Bitcoiners.

The morning after, almost everyone I saw at the Nashville airport had a hat or tote bag or shirt or wristband identifying them as a Bitcoin Conference attendee. Here we were, together, returning to reality, and everything still felt surreal. As I made my way to my gate, I walked past a man wearing a FREE ROSS VOTE TRUMP shirt who looked curiously like Martin Shkreli. It was the pharma bro himself, seemingly delighted to have been recognized. When I identified myself as a reporter and asked if he wanted to talk about the conference, he laughed and walked away.

At the gate, a couple, both of whom were crypto content creators, asked what I thought of the conference. “The crowd was electric,” one of them said of the reaction to Trump’s speech. But, the other said, Trump didn’t fully deliver. Her fiancé disagreed; this was huge. Behind us, a man told his friend he skipped the entire conference on Saturday because he knew it’d be “such a shitshow” with Trump.

The friend told him he’d missed out. “It was historic.”

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Cath Virginia / The Verge

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has reportedly launched two separate probes into Nvidia regarding antitrust concerns about the computing giant’s AI-focused business dealings. The first investigation, reported by Politico, will see the DOJ examine Nvidia’s buyout of Run:ai, while the second, as reported by The Information, will assess if Nvidia abused its dominance in AI chips to discourage customers from using competing products.
In April, Nvidia reportedly spent $700 million to acquire Run:ai, the Israeli startup specializing in GPU management software. While specific concerns surrounding the Run:ai purchase haven’t been disclosed, both US and international regulators have closely scrutinized big tech acquisitions of late over issues like anticompetitive business practices and market monopolies. AI acquisitions have been of particular interest, with a joint statement issued by major US, EU, and UK regulators in July pledging to “safeguard against tactics that would undermine fair competition or lead to unfair or deceptive practices in the AI ecosystem.”

The second investigation being launched by the DOJ comes in response to complaints from competitors. It will examine whether Nvidia abused its market dominance to pressure cloud providers into buying its products. The probe will also investigate claims that Nvidia overcharges its customers for networking equipment if they opt to purchase AI chips from rival companies like AMD and Intel.
“We compete based on decades of investment and innovation, scrupulously adhering to all laws, making Nvidia openly available in every cloud and on-prem for every enterprise, and ensuring that customers can choose whatever solution is best for them,” Nvidia spokesperson Mylene Mangalindan said in a statement to Politico. “We’ll continue to support aspiring innovators in every industry and market and are happy to provide any information regulators need.”
Nvidia is estimated to control between 70 percent and 95 percent of the market for chips needed to train AI models. Nvidia’s dominance has drawn ire from other global regulators, with Reuters reporting last month that the company may face French antitrust charges for alleged anti-competitive practices. In June, Nvidia briefly overtook Microsoft as the world’s most valuable company, a feat largely propelled by booming demand for AI technology.

Cath Virginia / The Verge

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has reportedly launched two separate probes into Nvidia regarding antitrust concerns about the computing giant’s AI-focused business dealings. The first investigation, reported by Politico, will see the DOJ examine Nvidia’s buyout of Run:ai, while the second, as reported by The Information, will assess if Nvidia abused its dominance in AI chips to discourage customers from using competing products.

In April, Nvidia reportedly spent $700 million to acquire Run:ai, the Israeli startup specializing in GPU management software. While specific concerns surrounding the Run:ai purchase haven’t been disclosed, both US and international regulators have closely scrutinized big tech acquisitions of late over issues like anticompetitive business practices and market monopolies. AI acquisitions have been of particular interest, with a joint statement issued by major US, EU, and UK regulators in July pledging to “safeguard against tactics that would undermine fair competition or lead to unfair or deceptive practices in the AI ecosystem.”

The second investigation being launched by the DOJ comes in response to complaints from competitors. It will examine whether Nvidia abused its market dominance to pressure cloud providers into buying its products. The probe will also investigate claims that Nvidia overcharges its customers for networking equipment if they opt to purchase AI chips from rival companies like AMD and Intel.

“We compete based on decades of investment and innovation, scrupulously adhering to all laws, making Nvidia openly available in every cloud and on-prem for every enterprise, and ensuring that customers can choose whatever solution is best for them,” Nvidia spokesperson Mylene Mangalindan said in a statement to Politico. “We’ll continue to support aspiring innovators in every industry and market and are happy to provide any information regulators need.”

Nvidia is estimated to control between 70 percent and 95 percent of the market for chips needed to train AI models. Nvidia’s dominance has drawn ire from other global regulators, with Reuters reporting last month that the company may face French antitrust charges for alleged anti-competitive practices. In June, Nvidia briefly overtook Microsoft as the world’s most valuable company, a feat largely propelled by booming demand for AI technology.

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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Although there’s no fix for Intel’s crashing 13th and 14th Gen Intel Core processors, the company is trying to make things somewhat better for customers who are stuck with potentially damaged chips by extending their warranty for two additional years.
“Intel is committed to making sure all customers who have or are currently experiencing instability symptoms on their 13th and / or 14th Gen desktop processors are supported in the exchange process,” reads a statement from Intel’s Thomas Hannaford to The Verge. “We stand behind our products, and in the coming days we will be sharing more details on two-year extended warranty support for our boxed Intel Core 13th and 14th Gen desktop processors.”

Intel’s boxed CPUs already have a three-year limited warranty, so this change should mean that most affected CPUs will now have a 5-year warranty. Last week, the company wouldn’t comment to The Verge about whether it would extend the warranty on the chips.
Intel has said that a primary cause of the instability issues for the desktop CPUs was due to an “elevated operating voltage” and that it was working on a patch for mid-August that addresses the root cause of that. But the patch apparently won’t fix any damage that’s already happened, meaning the best way to fix a damaged chip is to replace it.
Here Intel’s full statement:

Intel is committed to making sure all customers who have or are currently experiencing instability symptoms on their 13th and/or 14th Gen desktop processors are supported in the exchange process. We stand behind our products, and in the coming days we will be sharing more details on two-year extended warranty support for our boxed Intel Core 13th and 14th Gen desktop processors.
In the meantime, if you are currently or previously experienced instability symptoms on your Intel Core 13th/14th Gen desktop system:
For users who purchased systems from OEM/System Integrators – please reach out to your system manufacturer’s support team for further assistance.
For users who purchased a boxed CPU – please reach out to Intel Customer Support for further assistance.
Intel is also investigating options to easily identify affected processors on end user systems and will provide additional guidance as soon as possible.
At the same time, we apologize for the delay in communications as this has been a challenging issue to unravel and definitively root cause.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Although there’s no fix for Intel’s crashing 13th and 14th Gen Intel Core processors, the company is trying to make things somewhat better for customers who are stuck with potentially damaged chips by extending their warranty for two additional years.

“Intel is committed to making sure all customers who have or are currently experiencing instability symptoms on their 13th and / or 14th Gen desktop processors are supported in the exchange process,” reads a statement from Intel’s Thomas Hannaford to The Verge. “We stand behind our products, and in the coming days we will be sharing more details on two-year extended warranty support for our boxed Intel Core 13th and 14th Gen desktop processors.”

Intel’s boxed CPUs already have a three-year limited warranty, so this change should mean that most affected CPUs will now have a 5-year warranty. Last week, the company wouldn’t comment to The Verge about whether it would extend the warranty on the chips.

Intel has said that a primary cause of the instability issues for the desktop CPUs was due to an “elevated operating voltage” and that it was working on a patch for mid-August that addresses the root cause of that. But the patch apparently won’t fix any damage that’s already happened, meaning the best way to fix a damaged chip is to replace it.

Here Intel’s full statement:

Intel is committed to making sure all customers who have or are currently experiencing instability symptoms on their 13th and/or 14th Gen desktop processors are supported in the exchange process. We stand behind our products, and in the coming days we will be sharing more details on two-year extended warranty support for our boxed Intel Core 13th and 14th Gen desktop processors.

In the meantime, if you are currently or previously experienced instability symptoms on your Intel Core 13th/14th Gen desktop system:

For users who purchased systems from OEM/System Integrators – please reach out to your system manufacturer’s support team for further assistance.

For users who purchased a boxed CPU – please reach out to Intel Customer Support for further assistance.

Intel is also investigating options to easily identify affected processors on end user systems and will provide additional guidance as soon as possible.

At the same time, we apologize for the delay in communications as this has been a challenging issue to unravel and definitively root cause.

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#STK473 Net Neutrality

Net neutrality is officially on hold after the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals blocked the rule from taking effect.
The court granted a stay, extending an earlier temporary pause. This time, net neutrality will be blocked until the court says otherwise after reviewing the petitions from broadband providers who opposed the rule. Those internet service providers (ISPs) successfully showed they would likely succeed on the merits of their challenge, the panel of judges wrote.
“The American public wants an internet that is fast, open, and fair,” Federal Communications Commission Chair Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement on the stay. “Today’s decision by the Sixth Circuit is a setback but we will not give up the fight for net neutrality.”
The FCC voted to restore net neutrality rules earlier this year, after years of back and forth on the rule. Net neutrality is the concept that ISPs shouldn’t discriminate against different websites by blocking or throttling speeds or access. The controversial part of the policy is the mechanism by which the FCC has tried to enforce these rules: by reclassifying ISPs as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act. ISPs have resisted this reclassifying in large part because they say it could lead to even greater government control over their businesses that they say would stifle innovation. For example, they say the classification could be used to impose price regulations, though the FCC has said it’s not planning on it.

While restoring net neutrality was always going to be contentious, its fate looked even bleaker after the Supreme Court gutted Chevron deference, a legal standard where courts deferred to expert agencies in many cases about regulation. Experts predicted net neutrality would be ripe for disruption after Chevron’s downfall, and the judges’ opinion notes that prior courts that upheld net neutrality relied on Chevron.
In a concurring opinion, Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton writes that the FCC’s flip-flopping on net neutrality between administrations makes it difficult to even apply the lower standard of Skidmore deference, thought to potentially be a fallback now that agencies can no longer rely on Chevron deference. Citing Skidmore, Sutton writes, “An agency’s power to persuade turns on the thoroughness of its reasoning, its technical expertise, and its ‘consistency with earlier and later pronouncements,’” especially those contemporaneous with the statute’s enactment,” he writes. “The problem is, we do not know which group of experts to respect.”
He adds, “The consistency query makes matters worse. The Commission’s ‘intention to reverse course for yet a fourth time’ suggests that its reasoning has more to do with changing presidential administrations than with arriving at the true and durable ‘meaning of the law.’”

#STK473 Net Neutrality

Net neutrality is officially on hold after the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals blocked the rule from taking effect.

The court granted a stay, extending an earlier temporary pause. This time, net neutrality will be blocked until the court says otherwise after reviewing the petitions from broadband providers who opposed the rule. Those internet service providers (ISPs) successfully showed they would likely succeed on the merits of their challenge, the panel of judges wrote.

“The American public wants an internet that is fast, open, and fair,” Federal Communications Commission Chair Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement on the stay. “Today’s decision by the Sixth Circuit is a setback but we will not give up the fight for net neutrality.”

The FCC voted to restore net neutrality rules earlier this year, after years of back and forth on the rule. Net neutrality is the concept that ISPs shouldn’t discriminate against different websites by blocking or throttling speeds or access. The controversial part of the policy is the mechanism by which the FCC has tried to enforce these rules: by reclassifying ISPs as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act. ISPs have resisted this reclassifying in large part because they say it could lead to even greater government control over their businesses that they say would stifle innovation. For example, they say the classification could be used to impose price regulations, though the FCC has said it’s not planning on it.

While restoring net neutrality was always going to be contentious, its fate looked even bleaker after the Supreme Court gutted Chevron deference, a legal standard where courts deferred to expert agencies in many cases about regulation. Experts predicted net neutrality would be ripe for disruption after Chevron’s downfall, and the judges’ opinion notes that prior courts that upheld net neutrality relied on Chevron.

In a concurring opinion, Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton writes that the FCC’s flip-flopping on net neutrality between administrations makes it difficult to even apply the lower standard of Skidmore deference, thought to potentially be a fallback now that agencies can no longer rely on Chevron deference. Citing Skidmore, Sutton writes, “An agency’s power to persuade turns on the thoroughness of its reasoning, its technical expertise, and its ‘consistency with earlier and later pronouncements,’” especially those contemporaneous with the statute’s enactment,” he writes. “The problem is, we do not know which group of experts to respect.”

He adds, “The consistency query makes matters worse. The Commission’s ‘intention to reverse course for yet a fourth time’ suggests that its reasoning has more to do with changing presidential administrations than with arriving at the true and durable ‘meaning of the law.’”

Read More 

Image: NZXT

Want to get into PC gaming and feel like you don’t have enough pricey subscriptions in your life? Desktop PC builder and retailer NZXT can ship you a whole gaming rig for as little as $59 per month — as long as you provide your own mouse, keyboard, and monitor.
The Flex subscription program has been available for at least several months, based on NZXT’s posts, and the pricing and specs of the machines listed have changed over time. Now, it’s updating its three-tiered approach to PC renting with new specs, with its base Player: One entry-level sub running $59 per month for a tower running an Intel Core i5 14400F and Nvidia RTX 4060 GPU. Stepping up to the mid-tier Player: Two costs $119 per month for an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X CPU and RTX 4070 Super GPU, and the top-tier Player: Three package costs $169 per month with an Intel Core i7 13700KF and RTX 4070 Ti Super.
All three tiers also require a $50 “setup and shipping fee” that will include the return label if you decide to cancel your subscription.

Image: NZXT

The NZXT site indicates that subscribers can expect to have a new or like-new Flex PC delivered within three to five days on a month-to-month term that’s free to cancel anytime. Customers will also have access to free replacements with 24/7 customer support if something should go wrong and guaranteed hardware upgrades every two years.
Two years is a pretty long period, and even with the cheapest Player: One model, you’ll have spent $1,416 to use that 4060 through 2026 (though, there should be a free upgrade at some point in that timeline). The Player: Three tier with 4070 Ti Super would cost $4,056 to rent for two years.
That’s the kind of money you could potentially spend to build your own 4090-level desktop that’s much more capable for 4K gaming. Woof.
We’ve reached out to NZXT for clarification on what the full specs are for each updated tier (including RAM and storage) and if subscribers have any incentives like rent-to-own pricing if they can buy their rented Flex computer.

Image: NZXT

Want to get into PC gaming and feel like you don’t have enough pricey subscriptions in your life? Desktop PC builder and retailer NZXT can ship you a whole gaming rig for as little as $59 per month — as long as you provide your own mouse, keyboard, and monitor.

The Flex subscription program has been available for at least several months, based on NZXT’s posts, and the pricing and specs of the machines listed have changed over time. Now, it’s updating its three-tiered approach to PC renting with new specs, with its base Player: One entry-level sub running $59 per month for a tower running an Intel Core i5 14400F and Nvidia RTX 4060 GPU. Stepping up to the mid-tier Player: Two costs $119 per month for an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X CPU and RTX 4070 Super GPU, and the top-tier Player: Three package costs $169 per month with an Intel Core i7 13700KF and RTX 4070 Ti Super.

All three tiers also require a $50 “setup and shipping fee” that will include the return label if you decide to cancel your subscription.

Image: NZXT

The NZXT site indicates that subscribers can expect to have a new or like-new Flex PC delivered within three to five days on a month-to-month term that’s free to cancel anytime. Customers will also have access to free replacements with 24/7 customer support if something should go wrong and guaranteed hardware upgrades every two years.

Two years is a pretty long period, and even with the cheapest Player: One model, you’ll have spent $1,416 to use that 4060 through 2026 (though, there should be a free upgrade at some point in that timeline). The Player: Three tier with 4070 Ti Super would cost $4,056 to rent for two years.

That’s the kind of money you could potentially spend to build your own 4090-level desktop that’s much more capable for 4K gaming. Woof.

We’ve reached out to NZXT for clarification on what the full specs are for each updated tier (including RAM and storage) and if subscribers have any incentives like rent-to-own pricing if they can buy their rented Flex computer.

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Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Apple announced its latest iPad Pro and iPad Air tablets a few months ago, and after several quarters of soft sales, the new products led to a significant boost for the company’s iPad division. Combined with strong performance in services and Mac, Apple posted quarterly revenue of $85.8 billion, up 5 percent from the year-ago quarter. iPhone and wearables revenue was relatively flat as consumers await a new wave of products soon.
By the time Apple reports its next earnings, the company will have introduced the iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Plus, iPhone 16 Pro, and iPhone 16 Pro Max. Among other improvements, the Pro models will have slightly larger displays, while the standard iPhones will pick up the Action Button that debuted last year. Those devices are expected to arrive in September along with new AirPods earbuds and refreshed Apple Watch hardware. Apple is also rumored to be working on spec bumps for its MacBook Pro and Mac Mini, which are both likely to be upgraded with the M4 chip sometime this fall.
On the software side, the company is in the midst of public betas for its forthcoming iOS 18, iPadOS 18, tvOS 18, macOS Sequoia, and watchOS 11 releases. For the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, these updates will mark Apple’s big entrance into generative AI features, which will include some integrations with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The company is planning to roll out this Apple Intelligence suite of software capabilities with iOS 18.1.
“What we’ve done is we’ve redeployed a lot of people onto AI that were working on other things,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told CNBC. “Certainly embedded in our results this quarter is an increase year over year in the amount we’re spending for AI and Apple Intelligence.”
Elsewhere, Apple is facing a high-profile antitrust case from the Justice Department — a courtroom showdown that the company is trying to have dismissed — and is still in the early months of loosening its grip on the App Store by allowing third-party alternatives (in the EU) and letting emulators into the store (everywhere) for the first time.

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Apple announced its latest iPad Pro and iPad Air tablets a few months ago, and after several quarters of soft sales, the new products led to a significant boost for the company’s iPad division. Combined with strong performance in services and Mac, Apple posted quarterly revenue of $85.8 billion, up 5 percent from the year-ago quarter. iPhone and wearables revenue was relatively flat as consumers await a new wave of products soon.

By the time Apple reports its next earnings, the company will have introduced the iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Plus, iPhone 16 Pro, and iPhone 16 Pro Max. Among other improvements, the Pro models will have slightly larger displays, while the standard iPhones will pick up the Action Button that debuted last year. Those devices are expected to arrive in September along with new AirPods earbuds and refreshed Apple Watch hardware. Apple is also rumored to be working on spec bumps for its MacBook Pro and Mac Mini, which are both likely to be upgraded with the M4 chip sometime this fall.

On the software side, the company is in the midst of public betas for its forthcoming iOS 18, iPadOS 18, tvOS 18, macOS Sequoia, and watchOS 11 releases. For the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, these updates will mark Apple’s big entrance into generative AI features, which will include some integrations with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The company is planning to roll out this Apple Intelligence suite of software capabilities with iOS 18.1.

“What we’ve done is we’ve redeployed a lot of people onto AI that were working on other things,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told CNBC. “Certainly embedded in our results this quarter is an increase year over year in the amount we’re spending for AI and Apple Intelligence.”

Elsewhere, Apple is facing a high-profile antitrust case from the Justice Department — a courtroom showdown that the company is trying to have dismissed — and is still in the early months of loosening its grip on the App Store by allowing third-party alternatives (in the EU) and letting emulators into the store (everywhere) for the first time.

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The Twelve South AirFly Duo has dropped to $29.99, which is a new all-time low. | Image: Twelve South

When you’re flying, noise-canceling earbuds like the AirPods Pro are great for tuning out the world, but they come with one drawback: they don’t work with the in-flight entertainment systems on airplanes. Luckily, Bluetooth transmitters like Twelve South AirFly Duo exist that solve that problem for you, and right now, you can buy one for an all-time low price of $29.99 ($15 off) at Amazon and Best Buy.

With its integrated 3.5mm cable, the Duo is dead simple to use: just plug into the headphone jacks on seatback entertainment systems, pair up your Bluetooth-equipped wireless headphones or earbuds, and you’re good to go. The beauty of this is that you’ll probably end up enjoying even better audio quality, too, as in all likelihood, your own set of Bluetooth headphones is better than the wired earbuds planes typically offer. Plus, if you and your travel companion want to watch the same shows together, you can even connect it to a second pair.
Aside from audio sharing, the wireless headphone adapter also has other things going for it that make it a great buy. When it’s time to recharge, you can do so pretty quickly thanks to USB-C support. The Duo will also come in handy long after your flight ends, too, because it can connect wireless headphones to other devices as well, ranging from a Nintendo Switch to compatible treadmills.

The Twelve South AirFly Duo has dropped to $29.99, which is a new all-time low. | Image: Twelve South

When you’re flying, noise-canceling earbuds like the AirPods Pro are great for tuning out the world, but they come with one drawback: they don’t work with the in-flight entertainment systems on airplanes. Luckily, Bluetooth transmitters like Twelve South AirFly Duo exist that solve that problem for you, and right now, you can buy one for an all-time low price of $29.99 ($15 off) at Amazon and Best Buy.

With its integrated 3.5mm cable, the Duo is dead simple to use: just plug into the headphone jacks on seatback entertainment systems, pair up your Bluetooth-equipped wireless headphones or earbuds, and you’re good to go. The beauty of this is that you’ll probably end up enjoying even better audio quality, too, as in all likelihood, your own set of Bluetooth headphones is better than the wired earbuds planes typically offer. Plus, if you and your travel companion want to watch the same shows together, you can even connect it to a second pair.

Aside from audio sharing, the wireless headphone adapter also has other things going for it that make it a great buy. When it’s time to recharge, you can do so pretty quickly thanks to USB-C support. The Duo will also come in handy long after your flight ends, too, because it can connect wireless headphones to other devices as well, ranging from a Nintendo Switch to compatible treadmills.

Read More 

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Intel’s on a long, long road to recovery, and over 15,000 workers will likely no longer be coming along for the ride. The chipmaker just announced it’s downsizing its workforce by over 15 percent as part of a new $10 billion cost savings plan for 2025, which Intel says will mean a headcount reduction of greater than 15,000 roles. The company currently employs over 125,000 people, so layoffs could be as many as 19,000 people.
Intel will reduce its R&D and marketing spend by billions every year; it will reduce capital expenditures by more than 20 percent this year; it restructure to “stop non-essential work,” and review “all active projects and equipment” to make sure it’s not spending too much.
“This is painful news for me to share. I know it will be even more difficult for you to read,” reads part of a memo from Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger to staff, which you can also read in full at the bottom of this post.
The company just reported a loss of $1.6 billion for Q2 2024, substantially more than the $437 million it lost last quarter. “Our Q2 financial performance was disappointing, even as we hit key product and process technology milestones,” admitted Gelsinger in the company’s press release. “Our revenues have not grown as expected – and we’ve yet to fully benefit from powerful trends, like AI,” he writes in his employee memo.
It’s not like all Intel’s businesses are failing; while Intel has absolutely been losing money on its chipmaking Foundry business as it invests in new factories and extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, to the tune of $7 billion in operating losses in 2023, the company products themselves aren’t unprofitable.
Almost all the losses this quarter and last quarter came from Foundry, while its sales continue to stay relatively stable and its PC and server businesses stay profitable. (The PC sales slump ended earlier this year.)
But investors didn’t seem happy that the company kept itself on a knife’s edge: over the past two years before this quarterly loss, it had continued to swing between losses and profits overall, for just $1.1 billion in profit between Q2 2022 and Q1 2024. “Intel is now the worst-performing tech stock in the S&P 500 this year,” CNBC wrote in April.

From a tech leadership perspective, Intel’s not yet a big growing player in AI server chips like Nvidia (maybe not even a notable small one like AMD), its relatively recent entry into graphics has yet to impress, and it had to overhaul its flagship laptop chips significantly to address the existential threat of Arm chips from the likes of Qualcomm and Apple, which can offer more battery life than Intel. Like competitors, the company now partially relies on TSMC, not just its own foundries, to help produce some of its most advanced chips.
Microsoft recently followed Apple’s lead in ditching Intel chips for its latest slate of consumer hardware, including the Surface Laptop and Surface Pro, and launched its Copilot Plus PC initiative exclusively with Qualcomm, without waiting for Intel (or AMD)’s new flagship laptop chips to join them.
Intel previously had a big round of layoffs in October 2022, when it also announced it would cut between $8 billion and $10 billion in costs every year through 2025. But the company didn’t shrink all that much as a result. While headcount dipped roughly 5 percent in 2023 (from 131,900 employees to 124,800 employees), Intel hired its way back to 130,700 employees as of March 30th, 2024, its financial records show.
Intel says it’ll complete the majority of the layoffs it’s announcing today by the end of 2024, and spokesperson Penelope Bruce confirms that they are new layoffs — the 4 percent dip from 130,700 employees in March to 125,300 employees in June is not included in the total.
Gelsinger writes that Intel will offer a “companywide enhanced retirement offering for eligible employees” and let employees broadly apply for voluntary layoffs starting next week — not every employee departure will come as a painful surprise.
Intel says it’s now restructuring, suspending its dividend, and spending less, period, but will “maintain its core investments to execute its strategy and build a resilient and sustainable semiconductor supply chain in the U.S. and around the world.”
Here’s the full memo from Gelsinger:

Team,
We have moved our All Company Meeting to today, following our earnings call, as we are announcing significant actions to reduce our costs. We plan to deliver $10 billion in cost savings in 2025, and this includes reducing our head count by roughly 15,000 roles, or 15% of our workforce. The majority of these actions will be completed by the end of this year.
This is painful news for me to share. I know it will be even more difficult for you to read. This is an incredibly hard day for Intel as we are making some of the most consequential changes in our company’s history. When we meet in a few hours, I’ll talk about why we’re doing this and what you can expect in the coming weeks. In advance of that, I wanted to preview some of what’s on my mind.
Simply put, we must align our cost structure with our new operating model and fundamentally change the way we operate. Our revenues have not grown as expected – and we’ve yet to fully benefit from powerful trends, like AI. Our costs are too high, our margins are too low. We need bolder actions to address both – particularly given our financial results and outlook for the second half of 2024, which is tougher than previously expected.
These decisions have challenged me to my core, and this is the hardest thing I’ve done in my career. My pledge to you is that we will prioritize a culture of honesty, transparency and respect in the weeks and months to come.
Next week, we’ll announce a companywide enhanced retirement offering for eligible employees and broadly offer an application program for voluntary departures. I believe that how we implement these changes is just as important as the changes themselves, and we will adhere to Intel values throughout this process.
Why Now?
Since introducing our new operating model, we have taken a clean-sheet view of the business and assessed ourselves against benchmarks for high-performing foundries, fabless product companies and corporate functions. This work made it clear our cost structure is not competitive.
For example, our annual revenue in 2020 was about $24 billion higher than it was last year, yet our current workforce is actually 10% larger now than it was then. There are a lot of reasons for this, but it’s not a sustainable path forward.
Beyond our costs, we need to change the way we operate – something many of you shared as part of our Employee Experience Survey. There’s too much complexity, so we need to both automate and simplify processes. It takes too long for decisions to be made, so we need to eliminate bureaucracy. And there’s too much inefficiency in the system, so we need to expedite workflows.
Key Priorities
The actions we are taking will make Intel a leaner, simpler and more agile company. Let me highlight our areas of focus:
Reducing Operational Costs: We will drive companywide operational and cost efficiencies, including the cost savings and head count reductions mentioned above.
Simplifying Our Portfolio: We will complete actions this month to simplify our businesses. Each business unit is conducting a portfolio review and identifying underperforming products. We are also integrating key software assets into our business units so we accelerate our shift to systems-based solutions. And we will narrow our incubation focus on fewer, more impactful projects.
Eliminating Complexity: We will reduce layers, eliminate overlapping areas of responsibility, stop non-essential work, and foster a culture of greater ownership and accountability. For example, we will consolidate Customer Success into the Sales, Marketing and Communications Group to streamline our go-to-market motions.
Reducing Capital and Other Costs: With the completion of our historic five-nodes-in-four-years roadmap clearly in sight, we will review all active projects and equipment so we begin to shift our focus toward capital efficiency and more normalized spending levels. This will reduce our 2024 capital expenditures by more than 20%, and we plan to reduce our non-variable cost of goods sold by roughly $1 billion in 2025.
Suspending Our Dividend: We will suspend our stock dividend beginning next quarter to prioritize investments in the business and drive more sustained profitability.
Maintaining Growth Investments: Our IDM2.0 strategy is unchanged. Having fought hard to reestablish our innovation engine, we will maintain the key investments in our process technology and core product leadership.
The Future
I have no illusions that the path in front of us will be easy. You shouldn’t either. This is a tough day for all of us and there will be more tough days ahead. But as difficult as all of this is, we are making the changes necessary to build on our progress and usher in a new era of growth.
When we began this journey, we set our sights high, knowing that Intel is a place where big ideas are born and the power of what’s possible triumphs over the status quo. After all, our mission is to create world-changing technologies that improve the lives of every person on the planet. And at our best, we have exemplified these ideals more than any company in the world.
To live up to this mission, we must continue to drive our IDM 2.0 strategy, which remains the same: re-establish process technology leadership; invest in at-scale, globally resilient supply chain by expanding manufacturing capacity in the U.S. and EU; become a world-class, leading-edge foundry for internal and external customers; rebuild product portfolio leadership; and deliver AI Everywhere.
Over the past few years, we have rebuilt a sustainable innovation engine that is largely in place and on track. It’s now time to focus on building the sustainable financial engine needed to drive our performance. We must improve our execution, adapt to new market realities and operate as a more agile company. That’s the spirit of the actions we are taking – knowing that the choices we make today, as difficult as they are, will strengthen our ability to serve our customers and grow our business for years to come.
As we take these next steps in our journey, let’s not forget that there has never been a greater need for what we do. The world will increasingly run on silicon – and the world needs a healthy and vibrant Intel. That’s why the work we are doing is so consequential. Not only are we remaking a great company, but we are also creating technology and manufacturing capabilities that will reshape the world for decades to come. And this is something we should never lose sight of as we push forward in pursuit of our goals.
We’ll talk more in a few hours. Please come with your questions so we can have an open and honest discussion about what comes next.

Developing… we’re adding more, and will add more context from Intel’s earnings call soon as well.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Intel’s on a long, long road to recovery, and over 15,000 workers will likely no longer be coming along for the ride. The chipmaker just announced it’s downsizing its workforce by over 15 percent as part of a new $10 billion cost savings plan for 2025, which Intel says will mean a headcount reduction of greater than 15,000 roles. The company currently employs over 125,000 people, so layoffs could be as many as 19,000 people.

Intel will reduce its R&D and marketing spend by billions every year; it will reduce capital expenditures by more than 20 percent this year; it restructure to “stop non-essential work,” and review “all active projects and equipment” to make sure it’s not spending too much.

“This is painful news for me to share. I know it will be even more difficult for you to read,” reads part of a memo from Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger to staff, which you can also read in full at the bottom of this post.

The company just reported a loss of $1.6 billion for Q2 2024, substantially more than the $437 million it lost last quarter. “Our Q2 financial performance was disappointing, even as we hit key product and process technology milestones,” admitted Gelsinger in the company’s press release. “Our revenues have not grown as expected – and we’ve yet to fully benefit from powerful trends, like AI,” he writes in his employee memo.

It’s not like all Intel’s businesses are failing; while Intel has absolutely been losing money on its chipmaking Foundry business as it invests in new factories and extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, to the tune of $7 billion in operating losses in 2023, the company products themselves aren’t unprofitable.

Almost all the losses this quarter and last quarter came from Foundry, while its sales continue to stay relatively stable and its PC and server businesses stay profitable. (The PC sales slump ended earlier this year.)

But investors didn’t seem happy that the company kept itself on a knife’s edge: over the past two years before this quarterly loss, it had continued to swing between losses and profits overall, for just $1.1 billion in profit between Q2 2022 and Q1 2024. “Intel is now the worst-performing tech stock in the S&P 500 this year,” CNBC wrote in April.

From a tech leadership perspective, Intel’s not yet a big growing player in AI server chips like Nvidia (maybe not even a notable small one like AMD), its relatively recent entry into graphics has yet to impress, and it had to overhaul its flagship laptop chips significantly to address the existential threat of Arm chips from the likes of Qualcomm and Apple, which can offer more battery life than Intel. Like competitors, the company now partially relies on TSMC, not just its own foundries, to help produce some of its most advanced chips.

Microsoft recently followed Apple’s lead in ditching Intel chips for its latest slate of consumer hardware, including the Surface Laptop and Surface Pro, and launched its Copilot Plus PC initiative exclusively with Qualcomm, without waiting for Intel (or AMD)’s new flagship laptop chips to join them.

Intel previously had a big round of layoffs in October 2022, when it also announced it would cut between $8 billion and $10 billion in costs every year through 2025. But the company didn’t shrink all that much as a result. While headcount dipped roughly 5 percent in 2023 (from 131,900 employees to 124,800 employees), Intel hired its way back to 130,700 employees as of March 30th, 2024, its financial records show.

Intel says it’ll complete the majority of the layoffs it’s announcing today by the end of 2024, and spokesperson Penelope Bruce confirms that they are new layoffs — the 4 percent dip from 130,700 employees in March to 125,300 employees in June is not included in the total.

Gelsinger writes that Intel will offer a “companywide enhanced retirement offering for eligible employees” and let employees broadly apply for voluntary layoffs starting next week — not every employee departure will come as a painful surprise.

Intel says it’s now restructuring, suspending its dividend, and spending less, period, but will “maintain its core investments to execute its strategy and build a resilient and sustainable semiconductor supply chain in the U.S. and around the world.”

Here’s the full memo from Gelsinger:

Team,

We have moved our All Company Meeting to today, following our earnings call, as we are announcing significant actions to reduce our costs. We plan to deliver $10 billion in cost savings in 2025, and this includes reducing our head count by roughly 15,000 roles, or 15% of our workforce. The majority of these actions will be completed by the end of this year.

This is painful news for me to share. I know it will be even more difficult for you to read. This is an incredibly hard day for Intel as we are making some of the most consequential changes in our company’s history. When we meet in a few hours, I’ll talk about why we’re doing this and what you can expect in the coming weeks. In advance of that, I wanted to preview some of what’s on my mind.

Simply put, we must align our cost structure with our new operating model and fundamentally change the way we operate. Our revenues have not grown as expected – and we’ve yet to fully benefit from powerful trends, like AI. Our costs are too high, our margins are too low. We need bolder actions to address both – particularly given our financial results and outlook for the second half of 2024, which is tougher than previously expected.

These decisions have challenged me to my core, and this is the hardest thing I’ve done in my career. My pledge to you is that we will prioritize a culture of honesty, transparency and respect in the weeks and months to come.

Next week, we’ll announce a companywide enhanced retirement offering for eligible employees and broadly offer an application program for voluntary departures. I believe that how we implement these changes is just as important as the changes themselves, and we will adhere to Intel values throughout this process.

Why Now?

Since introducing our new operating model, we have taken a clean-sheet view of the business and assessed ourselves against benchmarks for high-performing foundries, fabless product companies and corporate functions. This work made it clear our cost structure is not competitive.

For example, our annual revenue in 2020 was about $24 billion higher than it was last year, yet our current workforce is actually 10% larger now than it was then. There are a lot of reasons for this, but it’s not a sustainable path forward.

Beyond our costs, we need to change the way we operate – something many of you shared as part of our Employee Experience Survey. There’s too much complexity, so we need to both automate and simplify processes. It takes too long for decisions to be made, so we need to eliminate bureaucracy. And there’s too much inefficiency in the system, so we need to expedite workflows.

Key Priorities

The actions we are taking will make Intel a leaner, simpler and more agile company. Let me highlight our areas of focus:

Reducing Operational Costs: We will drive companywide operational and cost efficiencies, including the cost savings and head count reductions mentioned above.

Simplifying Our Portfolio: We will complete actions this month to simplify our businesses. Each business unit is conducting a portfolio review and identifying underperforming products. We are also integrating key software assets into our business units so we accelerate our shift to systems-based solutions. And we will narrow our incubation focus on fewer, more impactful projects.

Eliminating Complexity: We will reduce layers, eliminate overlapping areas of responsibility, stop non-essential work, and foster a culture of greater ownership and accountability. For example, we will consolidate Customer Success into the Sales, Marketing and Communications Group to streamline our go-to-market motions.

Reducing Capital and Other Costs: With the completion of our historic five-nodes-in-four-years roadmap clearly in sight, we will review all active projects and equipment so we begin to shift our focus toward capital efficiency and more normalized spending levels. This will reduce our 2024 capital expenditures by more than 20%, and we plan to reduce our non-variable cost of goods sold by roughly $1 billion in 2025.

Suspending Our Dividend: We will suspend our stock dividend beginning next quarter to prioritize investments in the business and drive more sustained profitability.

Maintaining Growth Investments: Our IDM2.0 strategy is unchanged. Having fought hard to reestablish our innovation engine, we will maintain the key investments in our process technology and core product leadership.

The Future

I have no illusions that the path in front of us will be easy. You shouldn’t either. This is a tough day for all of us and there will be more tough days ahead. But as difficult as all of this is, we are making the changes necessary to build on our progress and usher in a new era of growth.

When we began this journey, we set our sights high, knowing that Intel is a place where big ideas are born and the power of what’s possible triumphs over the status quo. After all, our mission is to create world-changing technologies that improve the lives of every person on the planet. And at our best, we have exemplified these ideals more than any company in the world.

To live up to this mission, we must continue to drive our IDM 2.0 strategy, which remains the same: re-establish process technology leadership; invest in at-scale, globally resilient supply chain by expanding manufacturing capacity in the U.S. and EU; become a world-class, leading-edge foundry for internal and external customers; rebuild product portfolio leadership; and deliver AI Everywhere.

Over the past few years, we have rebuilt a sustainable innovation engine that is largely in place and on track. It’s now time to focus on building the sustainable financial engine needed to drive our performance. We must improve our execution, adapt to new market realities and operate as a more agile company. That’s the spirit of the actions we are taking – knowing that the choices we make today, as difficult as they are, will strengthen our ability to serve our customers and grow our business for years to come.

As we take these next steps in our journey, let’s not forget that there has never been a greater need for what we do. The world will increasingly run on silicon – and the world needs a healthy and vibrant Intel. That’s why the work we are doing is so consequential. Not only are we remaking a great company, but we are also creating technology and manufacturing capabilities that will reshape the world for decades to come. And this is something we should never lose sight of as we push forward in pursuit of our goals.

We’ll talk more in a few hours. Please come with your questions so we can have an open and honest discussion about what comes next.

Developing… we’re adding more, and will add more context from Intel’s earnings call soon as well.

Read More 

Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo by Bloomberg, Getty Images

Apple has asked a federal judge to dismiss the Justice Department’s antitrust case against it, claiming that the government is asking the court “to sanction a judicial redesign of one of the most innovative and consumer-friendly products ever made: iPhone.”
The DOJ and 16 state and district attorneys general claimed in their March lawsuit that Apple has illegally monopolized the US smartphone market. The government claimed Apple broke the law by maintaining a closed ecosystem for the iPhone in pursuit of profits and at the expense of consumers and innovation. The government pointed to several examples in its complaint, including allegedly suppressing message quality between iPhones and competing platforms like Android and preventing third-party developers from making competing digital wallets for the iPhone with tap-to-pay functionality.
Apple says in a new filing that the DOJ’s argument “is based on the false premise that iPhone’s success has come not through building a superior product that consumers trust and love, but through Apple’s intentional degradation of iPhone to block purported competitive threats.” It calls that idea “outlandish” and says that antitrust law protects its ability “to design and control its own product” rather than cater to third-party developers.
And Apple says it has given third-party developers “exceptionally broad” access to the iPhone platform “while also enforcing reasonable limitations to protect consumers.” Apple characterizes the third-party developers at issue in the complaint not as small upstarts, but rather as “well-capitalized social media companies, big banks, and global gaming developers, all of whom are formidable competitors in their own right and none of whom have the same incentives to protect the integrity or security of iPhone as Apple has.”
Apple lays out five main reasons for which it says the court should dismiss the DOJ’s lawsuit:

Apple is not obligated to work with any third-party developers, and choosing not to work with them is not exclusionary conduct.
The DOJ doesn’t adequately connect Apple’s approach to messaging apps, “so-called ‘super apps,’” cloud streaming apps, smartwatches, or digital wallets to how consumers decide what smartphone to buy.
Apple does not control enough of the smartphone market to be fairly considered a monopolist.
The DOJ hasn’t sufficiently shown Apple’s intent in its attempted monopolization claim.
The DOJ has made its case overly broad “by making cursory references to numerous Apple products and services.”

Apple requests oral arguments to debate its motion to dismiss the lawsuit. Apple says if the government gets its way, it would “harm innovation and risk depriving consumers of the private, safe, and secure experience that differentiates iPhone from every other option in the marketplace.”
The DOJ did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo by Bloomberg, Getty Images

Apple has asked a federal judge to dismiss the Justice Department’s antitrust case against it, claiming that the government is asking the court “to sanction a judicial redesign of one of the most innovative and consumer-friendly products ever made: iPhone.”

The DOJ and 16 state and district attorneys general claimed in their March lawsuit that Apple has illegally monopolized the US smartphone market. The government claimed Apple broke the law by maintaining a closed ecosystem for the iPhone in pursuit of profits and at the expense of consumers and innovation. The government pointed to several examples in its complaint, including allegedly suppressing message quality between iPhones and competing platforms like Android and preventing third-party developers from making competing digital wallets for the iPhone with tap-to-pay functionality.

Apple says in a new filing that the DOJ’s argument “is based on the false premise that iPhone’s success has come not through building a superior product that consumers trust and love, but through Apple’s intentional degradation of iPhone to block purported competitive threats.” It calls that idea “outlandish” and says that antitrust law protects its ability “to design and control its own product” rather than cater to third-party developers.

And Apple says it has given third-party developers “exceptionally broad” access to the iPhone platform “while also enforcing reasonable limitations to protect consumers.” Apple characterizes the third-party developers at issue in the complaint not as small upstarts, but rather as “well-capitalized social media companies, big banks, and global gaming developers, all of whom are formidable competitors in their own right and none of whom have the same incentives to protect the integrity or security of iPhone as Apple has.”

Apple lays out five main reasons for which it says the court should dismiss the DOJ’s lawsuit:

Apple is not obligated to work with any third-party developers, and choosing not to work with them is not exclusionary conduct.
The DOJ doesn’t adequately connect Apple’s approach to messaging apps, “so-called ‘super apps,’” cloud streaming apps, smartwatches, or digital wallets to how consumers decide what smartphone to buy.
Apple does not control enough of the smartphone market to be fairly considered a monopolist.
The DOJ hasn’t sufficiently shown Apple’s intent in its attempted monopolization claim.
The DOJ has made its case overly broad “by making cursory references to numerous Apple products and services.”

Apple requests oral arguments to debate its motion to dismiss the lawsuit. Apple says if the government gets its way, it would “harm innovation and risk depriving consumers of the private, safe, and secure experience that differentiates iPhone from every other option in the marketplace.”

The DOJ did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Read More 

Image: The Verge

In an interview with CNBC, Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said the July 19th outage caused by a CrowdStrike update cost his company half a billion dollars in five days. Delta canceled more than 5,000 flights that weekend and had blue error screens still visible at airports days after the initial crash. Among the costs Bastian said Delta incurred were more than 40,000 servers that “we had to physically touch and reset” as well as compensation payments to travelers left in the lurch.
Asked about a continuing relationship with Microsoft after the crash, Bastian said he regards it as “probably the most fragile platform” and asked the question, “When was the last time you heard of a big outage at Apple?” He placed some blame on the valuations of big tech companies, which lately have been lifted by generative AI hype, saying, “…they’re building the future, and they have to make sure they fortify the current.”

Apparently, the only thing offered to Delta so far from the two companies was free consulting advice, so it seems their IT department wasn’t on the list for one of CrowdStrike’s $10 UberEats cards. CNBC previously reported Delta has hired attorney David Boies to seek damages.
Delta isn’t alone — CrowdStrike shareholders filed a proposed class action lawsuit this week, reports Reuters. The suit cites CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz’s comments on a March 5th call that its software was “validated, tested, and certified.” The shareholders now regard those claims as false and misleading since CrowdStrike wasn’t performing the same level of testing on Rapid Response Content updates as it does on other updates, and its Content Validator checks didn’t catch the bug that caused the global IT crash.

As described in Tom Warren’s recap of the events on the 19th, unlike Microsoft, Apple has in recent years restricted the access third-party developers have to the kernel of macOS. A Microsoft spokesperson said to The Wall Street Journal that it “cannot legally wall off its operating system in the same way Apple does because of an understanding it reached with the European Commission following a complaint.” The European Commission disagrees, telling The Verge, “Microsoft is free to decide on its business model and to adapt its security infrastructure to respond to threats provided this is done in line with EU competition law.”
Bastian also derided both the flaw that caused the issue and CrowdStrike’s deployment processes, saying, “If you’re going to have priority access to the Delta ecosystem… you’ve gotta test this stuff. You can’t come into a mission-critical, 24-7 operation and tell us, ‘We have a bug.’ It doesn’t work.”

Image: The Verge

In an interview with CNBC, Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said the July 19th outage caused by a CrowdStrike update cost his company half a billion dollars in five days. Delta canceled more than 5,000 flights that weekend and had blue error screens still visible at airports days after the initial crash. Among the costs Bastian said Delta incurred were more than 40,000 servers that “we had to physically touch and reset” as well as compensation payments to travelers left in the lurch.

Asked about a continuing relationship with Microsoft after the crash, Bastian said he regards it as “probably the most fragile platform” and asked the question, “When was the last time you heard of a big outage at Apple?” He placed some blame on the valuations of big tech companies, which lately have been lifted by generative AI hype, saying, “…they’re building the future, and they have to make sure they fortify the current.”

Apparently, the only thing offered to Delta so far from the two companies was free consulting advice, so it seems their IT department wasn’t on the list for one of CrowdStrike’s $10 UberEats cards. CNBC previously reported Delta has hired attorney David Boies to seek damages.

Delta isn’t alone — CrowdStrike shareholders filed a proposed class action lawsuit this week, reports Reuters. The suit cites CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz’s comments on a March 5th call that its software was “validated, tested, and certified.” The shareholders now regard those claims as false and misleading since CrowdStrike wasn’t performing the same level of testing on Rapid Response Content updates as it does on other updates, and its Content Validator checks didn’t catch the bug that caused the global IT crash.

As described in Tom Warren’s recap of the events on the 19th, unlike Microsoft, Apple has in recent years restricted the access third-party developers have to the kernel of macOS. A Microsoft spokesperson said to The Wall Street Journal that it “cannot legally wall off its operating system in the same way Apple does because of an understanding it reached with the European Commission following a complaint.” The European Commission disagrees, telling The Verge, “Microsoft is free to decide on its business model and to adapt its security infrastructure to respond to threats provided this is done in line with EU competition law.”

Bastian also derided both the flaw that caused the issue and CrowdStrike’s deployment processes, saying, “If you’re going to have priority access to the Delta ecosystem… you’ve gotta test this stuff. You can’t come into a mission-critical, 24-7 operation and tell us, ‘We have a bug.’ It doesn’t work.”

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