Tech Brew Ride Home - The Amazon Layoffs

Episode Date: January 28, 2026

The Amazon layoffs showed up on schedule. Is Tether behind the rise in the price of gold? A new type of privacy screen tech from Samsung. Elon wants to IPO on his birthday. Anthropic raises more ahead of its IPO. And AI is finding weird stuff in Space. Amazon says it is laying off 16,000 employees (TechCrunch) Tether Is Shaking Up the Gold Market With Massive Metal Hoard (Bloomberg) Samsung confirms Galaxy S26's insane 'pixel level' privacy feature (SamMobile) SpaceX weighs June IPO timed to planetary alignment and Elon Musk’s birthday (FT) Anthropic doubles VC fundraising to $20bn on surging investor demand (FT) Anthropic Hikes 2026 Revenue Forecast 20% but Delays When It Will Go Cash Flow Positive (The Information) Astronomers used AI to find 1,400 ‘anomalous objects’ from Hubble archives (The Verge) RideHomeFund News: CrowdStrike buys identity security startup SGNL for $740 million in latest deal push Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Welcome to the TechBrew right home for Wednesday, January 28th, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough today. The Amazon layoffs showed up on schedule. Is tether behind the rise and the price of gold? A new type of privacy screen tech from Samsung. Elon wants to IPO on his birthday. Anthropic raises more ahead of its IPO, and AI is finding weird stuff in space. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech.

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check it out. Right now, my listeners get exclusive early access to Rubrik Agent Cloud. Head to rubric.com. That's rubr-b-r-k dot com. Well, we did know it was coming, and here you go, quoting TechCrunch. Amazon said today it is cutting 16,000 jobs across the company. This reduction comes after the e-commerce company laid off 14,000 people in October. In a letter to employee's senior VP of People Experience and Technology, Beth Galletti, said that these layoffs were made. for reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy. She noted that the reason for the second round of massive layoffs within three months was that several teams in the company hadn't finished their restructuring. Galletti didn't outright deny that there might be more job slashes

in the company, but said that the company is not trying to create a pattern of large layoffs every few months. Some of you might ask if this is the beginning of a new rhythm where we announce broad reductions every few months, that's not our plan. But just as we always have, team will continue to evaluate the ownership, speed, and capacity to invent for customers and make adjustments as appropriate, she said in a blog post. In October, Amazon said that it had 1.57 million employees and had registered single-digit growth in the past five quarters prior to that, according to the company's Q3-2020 filings. The company is set to publish its Q4-2020 results next week. In its latest blog post, Galletti said that despite these job cuts, the company will continue to hire

in strategic areas. Last year, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote a memo that said because of AI, the company will need fewer people, quote, doing some of the jobs that are being done today and more people doing other types of jobs. He also indicated that the company's corporate workforce will see a reduction in the next few years. On Tuesday, Amazon also said that it is closing its physical Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh stores to concentrate on increasing capacity for same-day grocery delivery. The company instead plans to expand Whole Foods' footprint and open 100 new stores over the next few years, end quote. Is this why gold has been surging of late? Palo Ardoino says Tether now holds 140 tons of gold worth around $23 billion and has been buying one to two tons of gold per week

and plans to keep doing so for the next few months. Quoting Bloomberg, there are roughly 370,000 nuclear bunkers in Switzerland, a legacy of the Cold War that are now rarely used. One of them, though, is a hive of activity. Every week, more than a ton of gold is hauled into the high-security vault, owned by Crypto Giant Tether Holdings S.A., which is now the world's largest known horde of bullion outside of banks and nation states. Over the past year, Tether has quietly become one of the biggest players in the global gold market, the embodiment of a meeting of the crypto and gold worlds, whose shared distrust of government debt is a major factor behind the surge in prices to never-before-seen highs above $5,200 an ounce. And yet, relatively little is known

about Tether's inner workings or its gold strategy. When two of the most senior gold traders quit leading Bullion Bank HSBC holdings last year, the industry was a buzz with gossip about where they would head next. Few guess that the answer was Tether. In an interview with Bloomberg, Chief Executive Ardoino described the company's role in the gold market as similar to that of a central bank and predicted that Washington's geopolitical rivals would launch a gold-backed alternative to the dollar. He revealed that it plans to keep plowing its enormous profits into gold while also beginning to compete with banks in trading the metal. It has rapidly stepped up its purchases buying over 70 tons of gold over the course of the last year for its reserves and its own gold stable coin, according to a Bloomberg calculation.

That's more than was reported by almost any single central bank, only Poland, which added 102 tons to its reserves, made larger declared purchases. It is also more than was bought by any but the three largest exchange traded funds, which represent the collective activity of tens of thousands of individual traders and investors. The company holds around 140 tons of gold, according to Arduino, most of which are its own reserves, along with the bullion backing its own gold token. That amount of metal is worth approximately $24 billion, the largest known hoard outside of those held by central banks, ETFs, and commercial banks, whose vaults underpin the main trading hubs. And it's only growing.

Ardoino said that Tether had been buying at a rate of about one to two tons a week and intended to continue doing so for, quote, definitely the next few months. Then, of course, based on the market, we are going to decide, but yeah, I think we will continue in this direction. The 41-year-old Italian added. Tether makes money from its dollar stable coin that is the giant of the sector with $186 billion in circulation. The company takes in real dollars in exchange for that USDT token and invests them in treasuries and other assets, such as gold, reeking in billions in interest and trading profits. Possessing the physical metal is crucial, Arduino said so much so that the company has taken the unusual step of storing the bullion itself in that former nuclear bunker

in Switzerland, guarded by multiple layers of thick steel doors. It's a James Bond kind of place, Arduino said. It's crazy, end quote. Samsung says it'll introduce a display feature for the Galaxy S26 series that improves privacy at a pixel level to protect users from what it calls shoulder surfing. Quoting, Sam Mobile. The company stopped short of directly calling it a privacy display, but its wording leaves little room for doubt.

In a new press release, Samsung talks about privacy at a pixel level and protecting users from shoulder surfing, which clearly points to a display technology that limits what others can see on your screen. The idea behind a privacy display is simple. The screen remains clear when viewed straight on, but becomes harder to read when seen from the side. This lines up with earlier leaks, including an animation found in Samsung's 1 UI 8.5 beta that shows the display darkening as the phone is tilted left or right. Samsung's mention of pixel-level privacy also suggests this isn't just a software trick. It points to dedicated display hardware, possibly the Flex Magic Pixel OLED technology, Samsung

showcased at Mobile World Congress in 2025. That would explain why this feature has been years in development and why it's being introduced on a new hardware device rather than existing devices. Early leaks suggested that Samsung uses AI to help manage how the privacy display works. However, Samsung's teaser doesn't mention AI at all, so that part remains unconfirmed for now. What Samsung has confirmed is that the feature will be highly customizable. Users will be able to choose which apps automatically trigger the privacy display. It can also activate when entering passwords or typing into sensitive fields.

Visibility levels will be adjustable as well, allowing users to control how much the screen darkens based on the viewing angle. Samsung is positioning this feature as part of its wider security ecosystem alongside Knox and Knox Vault. Because it works at the hardware level, it should be more reliable than privacy features that rely only on software. That also means the privacy display won't be coming to older galaxy devices through a simple software update.

It's still unclear whether this feature will be available across the entire Galaxy S-26 lineup or just the Ultra. Samsung is expected to officially unveil the Galaxy S-26 series in late February, likely on February 25th, and those details should become clearer then, end quote. Study and play! Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, College students get

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$1.5 trillion valuation. Quote, the rocket maker is targeting mid-June for its IPO when Jupiter and Venus will appear very close together known as a conjunction for the first time in more than three years, said five people familiar with the matter. If SpaceX succeeds in raising at its intended valuation, it would make it the largest IPO in history and far exceed the $29 billion raised by Saudi Aramco in 2019. The insiders cautioned that all figures remain preliminary and may change. The F.T. last week reported the company was lining up Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase and Morgan Stanley for lead roles in the Blockbuster deal. On June 8th and 9th, Jupiter and Venus will be, quote,

within a little more than one degree of each other in the sky about the width of a thumb held at arm's length, according to nonprofit organization, the Planetary Society. A few days later, Mercury will also align diagonally with the two planets. Another reason to target that month is Musk's birthday, which is on June 28th, the people said, end quote. You know who Elon is racing to beat to the public markets, Anthropic. Quoting the FT again. Anthropic is set to raise about $20 billion from venture capitalists and other investors double the amount it had targeted in a sign of surging investor enthusiasm for the high-profile AI startup. The fundraising deal, which is close to being finalized, would value the company at $350 billion, said people familiar with the matter.

The upsized transaction underscores Anthropics' growing momentum as chief rival to the chat GPT maker OpenAI. Anthropic had been in talks to raise about 10. $10 billion from investors to finance its expansion plans. However, that amount has since doubled because of the high level of investor demand to back the company. The startup received interest totaling five to six times the original target, said one investor in the round. Anthropic will lock in an initial $10 to $15 billion from investors as early as today before completing the raise in the coming weeks, the people said. Investors view Anthropic as an attractive company to back, given its focus on providing AI for businesses, the stability of its leadership, and the popularity

of its coding tool-clawed code. Singaporean sovereign wealth fund GIC and U.S. investor Co2 are leading the deal. Sequoia Capital is also making a big investment in Anthropic as part of the round the FT previously reported. Existing backers including iconic capital, altimeter capital, light speed venture partners, Menlo Ventures, G-squared, and factorial funds are also expected to participate in the round, said people with knowledge of the deal. As part of the funding discussions, and in addition to the $20 billion from financial groups, tech groups, Microsoft, and Nvidia have also committed to invest a total of up to $15 billion in the company, end quote. Well, all of that is probably informed by all of this, quoting the information. Anthropic has hiked its revenue forecast for the

next several years, projecting that sales will quadruple this year to as much as $18 billion and will hit $55 billion next year. It is aiming to shrink the revenue gap with Open AI, its older arch rival. The revenue projections, which haven't previously been reported, are significantly higher than the ones Anthropic made last summer. But expenses, including those from training and running its AI models, are also growing more quickly, outstripping revenue. As a result, Anthropic has delayed when it expects to be cash flow positive to 2028 a year later than its previous projections, according to the forecasts. That extra extra. cash burn could weigh on investors' minds ahead of its public offering, which investment bankers

expect could happen as soon as late this year. Anthropic leaders still believe the company will hit that free cash flow milestone before Open AI does. The chat GPT maker last summer projected it would be free cash flow positive in 2030 after it burned more than $100 billion in the preceding five years or so. Anthropic has projected it will burn about $11 billion this year and $11 billion next year. The new projections appear to reflect Anthropics' recent successes, including the growth of its coding agent Claude Cod Code. That product was generating more than $1 billion in annualized revenue in November, or about 14% of total annualized revenue at the time. That helped the company hit more than $9 billion in annualized revenue at the end of last year.

Altogether, Anthropic increased its revenue outlook in its optimistic projections by about 40% for 2025 through 2028. The revised outlook predicts revenue rising as high as $148 billion in 2020, alone, about $3 billion higher than OpenAI's revenue projection for that year. The chat GPT maker made that projection last summer, and it's possible the company will raise its forecast the way Anthropic has, end quote. And finally today, some AI science news. ESA astronomers say they used AI model anomaly match to scan 100 million image cutouts from the Hubble Legacy Archive in about two and a half days, finding around 1,400 what they call anomalous

objects. Quoting the verge. Studying space is hard. There's lots of it. It's noisy, and the flood of data generated by tools like the Hubble Space Telescope can overwhelm even large research teams. And sometimes space is weird, very weird. So enter AI, which is great at sifting through massive amounts of information to spot patterns, flagging the oddities astronomers might otherwise miss. The model used by the astronomers dubbed Anomaly Match, scanned nearly 100 million image cutouts from the Hubble Legacy Archive, the first time the dataset has been systematically searched for anomalies. Think weirdly shaped galaxies, light warped by the gravity of massive objects or planet-forming disks seen edge on. Anomily match took

just two and a half days to go through the data set far faster than if a human research team had attempted the same task. The findings published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics revealed nearly 1400 anomalous objects, most of which were galaxies merging or interacting. Other anomalies included gravitational lenses, light warped into circles or arcs by massive objects in front of them, jellyfish galaxies which have dangling tentacles of gas and galaxies with large clumps of stars. Perhaps most intriguing of all, there were several dozen objects that defied classification altogether, said ESA in a blog post. This is a fantastic use of AI to maximize the scientific output of the Hubble Archive, said Gomez, finding so many anomalous objects in Hubble data, where you might

expect many to have already been found is a great result. It also shows how useful this tool will be for other large datasets, end quote. The last link in the show notes today is to some old news. A few weeks ago, CrowdStrike acquired AI Identity Security Startup Signal for $740 million. I'm mentioning this here because Signal is a ride home fund investment, one of our portfolio companies. Very nice exit for us. So quick reminder that the ride home Fund exists that for a somewhat attainable investment amount, any accredited investors can invest alongside me and alongside fellow listeners of this podcast in pre-seed and seed stage companies like Signal. You can find out more at ridehomefund.com, and if you need more info, I'd be happy to

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