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Jacob Kastrenakes

Jacob Kastrenakes

Deputy Editor

Jacob Kastrenakes is a deputy editor at The Verge where he oversees the publication's creators, tech, and news coverage. Since joining The Verge in 2012, Jacob has published more than 5,000 stories, produced special issues like Making It Work and Verge 10, and was the founding editor of the site's Creators section. You might have seen him in a video where he drank too much from a Wi-Fi-connected wine bottle.

You can contact Jacob by email or Twitter at the links below. If you want to reach out securely, you can use Signal (412-423-8889; calls and texts are not monitored) or PGP.

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Youtube
Marques goes hands on with the Cybertruck’s windshield wiper

— along with the rest of the truck, too. He’s got a 40-minute video out this morning taking Tesla’s new vehicle for a spin and offering some first impressions.

And yeah, he knows what we’re interested in.


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External Link
More of Apple’s chip supply chain will stay in the US.

The company is working with Amkor to have Apple Silicon chips tested and packaged in Arizona, not far from the TSMC plant in Phoenix where some of the chips are being produced.


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Twitter
“If I’m doing the math right, that means I earned $12.”

Spotify had a bunch of artists record videos to their fans for its year-end Wrapped lists. Weird Al used his to joke about Spotify payouts from right inside Spotify’s platform.


Musk isn’t planning to make a smartphone.

“I’ve got a lot of fish to fry,” he said.

“I think there’s a fundamental challenge that phone makers have at this point,” Musk said, “because you’ve got basically a black rectangle, how do you make that better?”


Musk is pretty critical of the direction OpenAI has gone, too.

“It should be renamed Super Closed Source for Maximum Profit AI. This is what it actually is,” he said. Musk co-founded it as a nonprofit and says its name is meant to reference open source. “I don’t know how you go from here to there, but that seems ... is this legal?”


Musk thinks we’re three years from super intelligent AI.

Once again, we’re finding that definition matters when talking about AI intelligence. But if you’re talking about AI that can “write as good a novel as J.K. Rowling or discover new physics or invent new technology, I would say we’re less than three years from that point,” Musk says.


“Is this coming across clearly?”

At the DealBook event, Musk tried to clarify his comments on Jewish activist groups, but I’m not sure it came across quite as he hoped — still casting blame on Jewish activists and other persecuted groups with broad and generalized accusations.

He said there are activist groups across the US who are supporting Hamas, and “a number of those organizations received funding from people in the Jewish community.” He said the problem was that they supported “persecuted groups in general” and that some of those groups “unfortunately want your annihilation.”

“Perhaps you should not fund them,” he said.


“It’s gonna kill the company.”

Musk says the advertiser boycott could be X’s downfall. He seems somewhere between resigned and mad.

“That will be what bankrupts the company and that is what everybody on Earth will know,” Musk said.

He gave a shoutout to Bob Iger during his “go fuck yourself” bit.