Gas?! Where we’re going, we don’t need gas – TechCrunch

Hi there! Welcome to Week in Review, the newsletter where we recap some of the best stories to come across TechCrunch over the last 7 days. If you want it in your inbox every Saturday, sign up here.

The most read this week’s story was about, get this: a DeLorean. Like in the Back to the Future car. Yeah. The short version: The recently relaunched brand released images of the Alpha 5, an electric vehicle built as a homage to the DeLorean of yesteryear, complete with those iconic gull-wing doors. Details like pricing/availability are still under wraps, but for the curious: the company says it’ll do zero to 60 in 2.99 seconds — and, perhaps more importantly, zero to 88 in 4, 35 seconds.

other things

What else happened this week? Here are some of the things people read the most:

WWDC rumbles: Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference kicks off on Monday, June 6, and rumors of what might be announced are already spreading fast. Brian Heater has a roundup covering what he expects to see at the event, and Sarah Perez took a deep dive into what’s likely to change in iOS.

Sheryl Sandberg leaves Meta: After 14 years in the role, Sheryl Sandberg will no longer be the COO of the company formerly known as Facebook. Meta’s Chief Growth Officer, Javier Olivan, will assume the role of COO; Sandberg will remain on Meta’s board of directors.

Amazon kills the Cloud Cam: In 2017, Amazon launched a small smart home camera called Cloud Cam. Then it almost immediately bought two smart camera makers – Blink and Ring. Half a decade later, Amazon is ditching Cloud Cam in favor of the latter two. Cloud Cams will stop working at the end of this year; Existing Cloud Cam users will receive a free Blink Mini camera as a replacement, along with a free year of the Blink Plus plan. If you use a Cloud Cam, be sure to back up your recorded videos before they disappear in December.

Amazon is experimenting with “by invitation” ordering to fight scalpers: If you’re a normal person just trying to buy something like a PlayStation 5 or an Xbox Series X on Amazon, you’ve probably felt the disappointment of being beaten by a billion bots. Amazon announced this week that it will launch “by invitation” orders for certain high-demand items; you’ll “request an invite” and then Amazon will check things like purchase history / account creation date to see who gets the first dibs.

More layoffs: It was still another one brutal week of tech layoffs – 8% from Carbon Health; 14% Loom; 10% of the Gemini crypto platform of the Winklevoss twins; 25% of the IRL of social applications; 10% of TomTom and more.

And Tesla too: First word has come that Elon Musk will require “everyone at Tesla” to be in the office (rather than remote) for a “minimum of 40 hours” per week. Then came news of a company-wide hiring freeze and plans to cut Tesla’s salaried workforce by up to 10%.

sound stuff

You love TechCrunch for your eyes – how about TechCrunch for your ears? We have a bunch of great podcasts, the latest of which Matt Burns summarized here.

Example A: the TechCrunch Live podcast, where this week Burnsy spoke with the CEO and lead investor of Olive — a Columbus, Ohio company that has pivoted 27 times and is now worth billions.

added stuff

We have a paid section of our site called TechCrunch+. It only costs a few dollars a month and it’s full of great stuff! From this week, for example:

VCs on the state of crypto: Almost all major cryptocurrencies have spent the last 6 months in a downward spiral. What do investors think of the space as a whole? Jacquelyn Melinek spoke to a handful of VCs for their thoughts.

How Admin Biden Could Power Solar/Wind Projects“There is an idea floating in the ether (or at least in my ether) that there is enough sunny federal land in Nevada to supply the entire United States with solar energy,” writes Tim De Song. “So why don’t we have more solar and wind power on public lands? »

Even Stripe isn’t immune to a changing market: Fintech companies are hit hard by the crisis; Alex Wilhelm examines how/why “even the biggest and best-known private fintech companies suffer from embarrassing revaluations”.