| Hey everyone, it's Sarah Frier reporting from New York. Elon Musk may be the most overexposed executive in the world and still somehow the most under-explained. But first… Three things you need to know today: • Apple hit pause on feature development
• Uber released mixed quarterly earnings
• MySpace's co-founder has an AI product By the time Elon Musk purchased Twitter in 2022, he was already its top celebrity, firing off tweets at all hours to about 140 million followers and directing a global news cycle through his stream of consciousness. Musk, mogul of electric vehicles and space travel, wanted more: He now weighs in regularly on politics, interest rates, memes, wars, "woke"-ness, artificial intelligence and human consciousness. There's no hope of keeping track of every wild thing he says (like, last week, that AI will obviate the need for jobs). The level of confusion, panic and intrigue he incites with a post is something we haven't seen since the Donald Trump presidency. Still, Musk is underestimated and poorly understood. His power is only increasing over the way the world works. The billionaire is playing diplomat with world leaders, deploying his Starlink satellites in war zones, controlling automobile charging infrastructure across the US, polluting wetlands to get us into space, sacrificing monkeys to get chips into our brains, trying to persuade us to make more babies. He's the world's most important, polarizing futurist. The best way to make sense of Musk's seemingly unrelated moves and comments is to remember that all six of his companies — Boring, Neuralink, SpaceX, Tesla, X and X.ai — are tangled up in one person's ambitions and whims. As one of his businesses introduces a chatbot, another uses it to sell more social media subscriptions; in return, the X users provide the data to improve the AI company's work. Musk's most loyal executives and engineers often contribute to multiple companies at once. Tesla engineers vetted code by Twitter employees after the acquisition, for instance. A Boring executive then helped Musk run Twitter in its earliest days. If you work for Musk you work for his empire. At Bloomberg, we call it Elon, Inc. We're going to dissect his interconnected web each week in a podcast, helping listeners make sense of his decisions and the impact of his work. These days, the world's richest man has more to lose than ever. His ballooning portfolio of companies appears to distract him from his work on cars and rockets. X is facing mountains of debt and an advertiser exodus. The US 2024 election is coming, and Musk is edging to the right, maybe in an effort to protect Tesla from a union threat. The first episode of the podcast, on Grok AI and that union threat, is out now. Listen here, and let me know what you think. —Sarah Frier Co-working company WeWork once seemed invincible, with practically limitless cash to spend and rapid growth. It's worth looking back at how one of the world's most valuable startups ended up in bankruptcy. PayPal rival Adyen needs to restore investor confidence with a clear plan for growth, analysts said. Design startup Figma has growth its workforce by 60% since announcing a sale to Adobe in 2022. WeWork's bankruptcy cost Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son $11.5 billion and his credibility as a savvy investor. | 
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