In the fall of 2021, Stuart Cohen and Denny Zane had pretty much given up.

The two California public transit advocates had spent about a year trying to raise money for a state ballot measure that would subsidize electric vehicles and wildfire prevention by raising taxes on California’s millionaires. They’d held a series of symposiums with environmentalists and scientists, who helped shape the idea. And they’d approached Meta, Uber, and “all the biggest tech companies in the Bay Area, except for Apple,” Cohen said, to see if they might throw money behind the effort.

Nobody bit, and by September 2021, they still hadn’t raised the millions of dollars they would need to start collecting signatures. “We mostly left it for dead,” Cohen said.

But the measure, now known as Proposition 30 on the Nov. 8 ballot, didn’t die. It was rescued by Lyft, which went on to spend more than $45 million on the Prop. 30 campaign and now stands as by far its biggest backer — and its biggest liability.

Over the last two months, the fight over Prop. 30 has gotten ugly, with opponents — including California Gov. Gavin Newsom himself — casting the measure as a self-serving plot “devised” by Lyft and writing off the early work of public interest groups almost entirely. “When Newsom came out, I jumped back in,” Cohen said. “I wanted to help have the truth be told.”

That a ballot proposition to raise taxes in an already high tax state would lead to mudslinging was predictable. But the battle lines of the fight have been anything but. The measure has divided the tech industry’s allegiances and has put Newsom on the opposite side of the California Democratic party and many of his allies. In this bizarro world, Newsom and the teachers’ union have teamed up with business groups like the Chamber of Commerce and a whole bunch of billionaires to oppose what they deem to be a corporate carve-out, while environmentalists, labor unions and public interest groups are lining up to defend Lyft’s huge political spending. Uber, which is often aligned with Lyft politically and stands to benefit from the measure just as much as Lyft would, has stayed out of the fight altogether.

Each side accuses the other of putting moneyed interests before the best interests of the state. The No campaign — backed by the likes of Netflix’s Reed Hastings and Sequoia’s Michael Moritz — has cast Prop. 30 as a maneuver to help Lyft make the switch to EVs before a government mandated deadline in 2030. “There’s just zero possibility that it would be on the ballot without Lyft,” Dan Newman, a strategist for Newsom and the No campaign, told Protocol.

On the other side, supporters of Prop. 30 accuse Newsom of spreading misinformation about the measure’s origins and opposing it to appease his biggest donors and to prime the pump for a potential presidential run. “When he says Prop. 30 was devised by a single corporation, I know that’s not true,” said Max Baumhefner, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “I was one of the people who helped write it, amongst many.”

When he says Prop. 30 was devised by a single corporation, I know that’s not true.

So far, it seems the No campaign’s anti-tech strategy is working. Since Newsom cut an ad in September calling Prop. 30 a “Trojan Horse” for Lyft, support for the measure has fallen precipitously from 63% in July to 41% in a poll released this week. “People have believed it,” Cohen said of the opposition’s talking points. “That’s why I got reengaged to tell the origin story, but it was a little late.”

Carrots and sticks

When Cohen and Zane walked away from what would become Prop. 30 in the fall of 2021, they left it in the hands of Nick Josefowitz, chief policy officer of the transit advocacy group SPUR, who had been working with them to develop the measure. Josefowitz, who happens to be married to Lyft’s former vice president of product, is connected to Lyft CEO Logan Green through a mutual friend. In September of 2021, with other options exhausted, Josefowitz gave Green a call to see if Lyft might contribute. It wasn’t an immediate yes, but Josefowitz said Green was excited by Prop. 30’s potential environmental impact.

Of course, there was also a huge upside for Lyft. Months before, California had adopted its new Clean Miles Standard, which requires rideshare companies throughout California to ensure that by 2030, electric vehicles account for 90% of their vehicle miles traveled. That means rideshare companies will have to find ways to entice their drivers to go electric. Lyft had pushed to get the California Air Resources Board to create new EV incentives to go along with the standard. But ultimately, in comments to the board, Lyft said regulators wound up offering only “metaphorical sticks with no carrots.”

Then along came Prop. 30, which is effectively a carrot patch. The measure would raise taxes by 1.75% on about 35,000 Californians whose annual income is over $2 million, and it would use the majority of the money to offer rebates for new EV purchases and to invest in charging infrastructure. The measure places a special emphasis on people from disadvantaged communities in order to subsidize EVs for people who couldn’t otherwise afford them. That includes lots of Lyft drivers.

Josefowitz said he and Lyft’s leaders continued their conversations over the following months, and by January, Lyft made its first of many contributions to the campaign. “I don’t think we ever really knew how much Lyft was planning on investing,” Josefowitz said. “We took it one step at a time.”

Lyft declined to comment for this story and directed Protocol to a corporate blog post by Green, in which he wrote in underlined text: “Not a single dollar of Proposition 30 is earmarked for Lyft or the Ridesharing industry as a whole. Ridesharing drivers will be eligible just like ALL Californians, but they won’t receive any type of priority or preference.”

Lyft’s lawyers and policy experts were at the table in the fall of 2021 when the measure was being drafted, but so were environmental groups like NRDC, Coalition for Clean Air, and California Environmental Voters. “If Prop. 30 was what the billionaires funding the opposition are claiming it is, then we wouldn’t have supported it,” Baumhefner said, emphasizing that Lyft drivers constitute a tiny fraction of all of the Californians who stand to benefit from the measure. By the state of California’s own estimates, rideshare companies like Lyft and Uber combined account for only about 1.25% of annual vehicle miles traveled.

Lyft’s critics point to a provision in the measure that says people who drive “more than 25,000 miles per year on average” should be prioritized for rebates as evidence of Lyft’s imprint on Prop. 30. But Baumhefner argues it’s a common sense requirement if the ultimate goal is reducing emissions. “It makes sense to go after vehicles that drive a lot,” he said.

For a while, things were looking up for the Yes campaign. The measure received unanimous support at the California Democrats’ executive board meeting in July, and the campaign, which had been keeping the governor’s office apprised of its work, was holding out hope Newsom would back the measure. “It felt like it was just the kind of thing we could get a climate champion, progressive Democrat like Gov. Newsom really excited about,” Josefowitz said.

‘A cynical scheme’

Then, in July, when the measure qualified for the ballot and donations began flowing into the No campaign, everything changed. That month, Newsom published a press release formally opposing the measure, along with the California Teachers Association, which dislikes that the measure fails to guarantee any funding for schools. Newsom cast the measure as a “special interest carve-out — a cynical scheme devised by a single corporation to funnel state income tax revenue to their company.”

Newsom’s public resistance to Prop. 30 only grew from there. In mid-September, he appeared in a statewide TV ad opposing Prop. 30, doubling down on the message and dealing a major blow to the Yes campaign. The ad came in the midst of a much broader tech crackdown by Newsom, who once enjoyed a cozy relationship with the industry.

At the same time, Newsom was just days away from signing an audacious $54 billion climate action plan into law, legislation that proves “there’s a much better, more thoughtful way” to invest in the climate, Newman said. “We all agree that we must do more to fight climate change,” he said. “The question is: Can we do it without raising taxes and letting one corporation push their own public policy?”

But if Lyft’s contributions to the Yes campaign have stoked speculation about Prop. 30’s hidden agenda, the No campaign’s lengthy list of billionaire backers has similarly raised questions about Newsom’s motives.

Campaign finance records show Newsom has raised millions of dollars from people who have also thrown their money behind the No campaign. Hastings, who spent $1 million fighting Prop. 30, also contributed $3 million to help Newsom battle a recall last year and has continued donating to the governor’s reelection campaign this year. Zynga founder Mark Pincus has spent nearly half a million on the No campaign and is also supporting Newsom’s gubernatorial race. Other No campaign backers who have contributed to Newsom’s reelection include Sierra Pacific Industries, Gap heirs William and Robert Fisher and Democratic megadonor Mark Heising.

California Governor Gavin Newsom Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Newman called the idea that the governor is being swayed by donors “beyond absurd,” pointing to other Newsom backers, including Ron Conway and Lyft itself, who are funding the Yes campaign. “I assume the accusation would come if he supported it as well,” Newman said. He argues that Lyft’s attempt to frame itself as defender of the climate rings false, particularly since the company has pushed back against past efforts to force rideshare companies to go electric. “That timeline proves that they only care about their profits,” Newman said. “Prop. 30 is by Lyft, and for Lyft.”

While the No campaign has taken on an anti-tech flavor, many of the billionaires bankrolling it actually made their money in tech. That list includes Hastings and Pincus, but also tech investor Arthur Rock, Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick, Intuit co-founder Scott Cook and Sequoia's Moritz, among others. In a recent op-ed in the Financial Times, Moritz referred to Prop. 30 as a “Lyft bailout” and warned that it could drive business leaders to leave California for lower-tax states. “Governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas will be hoping Lyft’s tax bailout succeeds,” the op-ed read.

On the Yes campaign, no one is disputing the fact that but for Lyft’s funding, there would be no Prop. 30. What they refute — emphatically so — is the idea that the measure was “devised” by Lyft and not the transit and climate advocates who say it was their brainchild. “It would have been fair to say this is being funded by a single corporation. That’s the truth,” Cohen said. “But [the opposition] is saying that it was a scheme devised by a single corporation. That’s the difference between misinformation and information.”

Asked to clarify whether the No campaign has any additional evidence to suggest Prop. 30 originated with Lyft, Newman said, “It is because of the money.”

If Prop. 30 does help Lyft in any way, the dozens of climate, health, and public interest groups that have lined up to back it don’t seem to mind. The No campaign, by contrast, has no such institutional support from climate advocates.

And yet, it’s the No side that’s managing to win over voters by the day, turning the cash infusion from Lyft — once Prop. 30’s salvation — into its biggest threat. “The easiest way to peel off the progressives is to say this is all a scheme by a single corporation,” Cohen said. “If they actually focused on the measure, there’s not compelling arguments that peel off progressives and Democrats. Don’t tax the millionaires? Don’t clear the air? Don’t give incentives to low-income folks? None of those work.”

Hello and welcome to Protocol Policy! Today I’m thinking about how we don’t always learn the lessons we could from other countries. Plus, Musk is already shaking things up now that he owns Twitter, the U.S. isn’t done with export controls, and Washington State is super duper mad at Meta.

Don’t be surprised

On Sunday, Brazilians will vote in the second-round contest between arch-conservative President Jair Bolsonaro and leftist former president known simply as Lula. João Brant, a former official in the ministry of culture, told Protocol that Facebook, Instagram, and other social media companies are doing too little to control disinformation about the electoral process in the country — a failure that could result in violence. With the U.S. preparing to vote just days after Brazil, Brant’s warnings echo many of the concerns from platform critics in the U.S., even as the online landscape is rapidly shifting as Elon Musk takes the helm at Twitter.

Some of the biggest threats Brant said he sees come from the platforms’ failure to take down many posts questioning the integrity of the country’s democracy and elections.

• Facebook does ban such ads and some forms of election interference, such as voter suppression in both the U.S. and Brazil — but many critics in the U.S. have said too much gets through, especially when posts don’t focus on particular people or polling places.
• Brant also criticized the exception to disinformation rules social networks regularly make for posts by newsworthy personalities, which often allows politicians and government officials to spread lies.

Brant said in our interview that he was particularly worried these two issues could collide if Bolsonaro, who is lagging in the polls, does come out behind, as he did after the first round.

• Bolsonaro has been railing at those same political surveys for underestimating him before, and Brant worries another miss would add fuel to the fire.
• “If this happens, there will be civil unrest,” Brant said. “The platforms will have to deal with that very quickly and to [decide] if they will allow lies from people who will be … in an insurrection against a democratic result.”

Civil society groups here in the U.S. have almost identical concerns.

• A coalition of more than 60 organizations released a report on Thursday slamming Meta, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube for their lack of readiness to tackle disinformation, including for not reevaluating their treatment of newsworthy content.
• At the same time, some experts are increasingly talking about another “election week” in the U.S. — a period of slow vote-counting in close races, for example due to rules around tabulating mail-in ballots — like the one that added fuel to baseless conspiracy theories about fraud in 2020.
• Those lies eventually led to violence on Jan. 6, and have led to harassment and threats against election workers nationwide.
• And former President Donald Trump is reportedly planning to fan the flames of doubt again and seek to undermine the results.

All of this, of course, comes as Musk’s takeover of Twitter on Thursday evening, including abruptly firing several top executives, could give election deniers a boost on the platform.

• Musk got rid of Vijaya Gadde, who had overseen the site’s policies, including on elections.
• He also reportedly is ready to undo lifetime bans, which would likely mean Trump might return to the site for the first time since he tried to subvert election results — possibly right when he’s ready to do it again.
• Brant, who spoke with me before Musk’s deal went through, did say Twitter did a better job with disinformation aimed at the election system than Facebook and Instagram — but it’s hard to imagine those policies persisting in Musk’s free-speech-above-all approach.

Brant said there are legitimate concerns about both aggressive content moderation and the Brazilian electoral authorities’ recent expansions of their longstanding powers over lies about candidates. Criticism is the heart of free society, and a policy against protesting election results would surely be bad in many places. But, Brant said, platforms need to admit they know which countries are democracies with trustworthy election systems and moderate election content differently than the services might under authoritarian regimes. And, Brant said, he hopes whatever disruptions he fears for Brazil won’t be coming a few days later for the U.S.

— Ben Brody (email | twitter)

​In Washington

A top Commerce Department official signaled export controls against China will continue, according to The Washington Post. Alan Estevez, who leads the Bureau of Industry and Security, said the department would “continue to look at not just what we did with semiconductors, but other areas that the Chinese are using to threaten the United States and its allies.”

The Justice Department is conducting a criminal probe into Tesla’s Autopilot feature. The probe, which began last year but hadn’t been disclosed, reportedly focuses on claims Tesla made about the feature and a series of deadly crashes.

Congress wants to shine a spotlight on ISPs after The Washington Post uncovered abuses of federal funds. Rep. Frank Pallone Jr., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, wrote to major ISPs including AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Comcast expressing concern about potential fraud and abuse of the Emergency Broadband Benefit Program and Affordable Connectivity Program, both of which were introduced to alleviate the cost burden of internet services.

​In the states

The Washington state attorney general won his case against Meta over campaign finance violations. A judge ruled that Meta had to pay $24.6 million for 822 violations of Washington state law.

The National Labor Relations Board alleges Amazon CEO Andy Jassy broke labor laws. In a filed complaint, the NLRB claims Jassy interfered with unionization efforts when he went on CNBC earlier this year to say, among other things, that Amazon employees were “better off” not unionizing.

​A MESSAGE FROM THE FINANCIAL TECHNOLOGY ASSOCIATION

Have you reserved your spot at the FTA Fintech Summit: Shaping the Future of Fintech? There's no better time than now to confirm your seat at the table as we talk fintech, policy, and Washington.

RSVP here today to join us on November 16.

Around the world

Russian officials suggested they could target U.S. commercial satellites being used in Ukraine. Starlink has been among the companies providing satellite-based internet service there.

The Wire apologized to readers for publishing a fabricated story about Indian government officials having backdoor access to Meta platforms. The news outlet had retracted the story on Sunday to review “lapses in editorial oversight.”

​In the media, culture, and metaverse

YouTube launched a program to give special verification to licensed health care providers. The program, intended to ensure better access to quality medical advice, requires practitioners to adhere to “best practices” set out by select health organizations including the World Health Organization.

Meta platforms are being used to promote deceptive, partisan media pieces in the lead up to midterms, Bloomberg reports. So far this year, political organizations on both sides of the aisle spent nearly $4 million on Meta advertisements to circulate articles from “pink-slime” outlets that pose as local media and push partisan stories.

​In data

70%: That’s around how much Meta’s market value has declined in 2022, with the earnings call on Wednesday that kicked off the latest dip. To outsiders, it may appear that the metaverse bet isn’t working — but on a call with analysts, Mark Zuckerberg said he’s “pretty confident this is going in a good direction.” Meta is now worth around $270 billion, down from over $1 trillion.

A MESSAGE FROM THE FINANCIAL TECHNOLOGY ASSOCIATION​

Join founders, industry leaders, regulators, and policy experts at the #FTAFintech Summit. Access exclusive discussions on the power of financial technology to drive competition and break down barriers to financial services. Learn about the need for modernized policies and regulations.

RSVP today to join the conversation.

​Golden parachute

Twitter’s growing cadre of outbound executives are getting a shiny golden parachute to soften the landing: Parag Agrawal is eligible to receive $50 million, CFO Ned Segal could get $37 million, and legal chief Vijaya Gadde could get $17 million, according to Bloomberg calculations. Other folks suddenly finding themselves out of work at Twitter may not be so lucky.

Thanks for reading — see you Monday.

Elon Musk’s reign of terror at Twitter has begun — and it’s already a bloodbath. As the billionaire completed his reluctant $44 billion acquisition of the site Thursday night, he swiftly fired Twitter’s CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, top policy executive Vijaya Gadde, and general counsel Sean Edgett.

“The bird is freed,” Musk tweeted after the work was done.

---

If you’ve got questions about what comes next, well, sit next to us, friend, because we do too.

How can you run a company without four of your most senior leaders?

We’re about to find out. Musk appears to be under the assumption that he doesn’t have to play by anyone’s rules because, in the U.S. at least, there aren’t many rules governing a company like Twitter. But Musk would be wise to take a look around the world, where the legal hurdles to operating a global social media platform have never been higher.

The European Union. India. Vietnam. Brazil. Heck, Texas. It’s hard to find a corner of the planet that’s not trying to dictate the way tech platforms moderate content at this very moment. It would seem a silly time to can your top lawyers, who have at least spent a few years figuring out how to navigate it all.

No doubt Musk has some people in mind that he likes for the roles, but those people will inevitably face a learning curve — and global regulators have long since run out of patience with social platforms.

Will Musk actually become CEO?

Speaking of who Musk has in mind to replace Twitter’s leadership team, Musk is reportedly planning to take on the CEO role himself. If he does, it’ll be one of the rare times a major U.S. social media platform is run by someone who wasn’t there when it all began.

Mark Zuckerberg still has a stranglehold on Meta. Susan Wojcicki didn’t start YouTube, but she was an early Googler and oversaw its purchase of the video site before becoming the YouTube CEO. Twitter’s been led by mostly founders — Ev Williams, then Jack Dorsey — save for a brief spell when Dick Costolo ran it. But even he had at least been COO for a while first. One exception is Reddit, which has had two non-founder CEOs, but their stints were fairly brief, and the company has mostly stayed in the hands of co-founders — with Alexis Ohanian as its former chair and Steve Huffman as its current CEO.

Why does that matter? For all of their faults, most of our social networks have been run by people who have built up institutional memory about their companies’ past mistakes and the unintended consequences of their actions. It’s one thing for Dorsey to step aside and hand the CEO role off to the company’s most trusted engineer, Agrawal. It’s another entirely for a platform’s most nosy user to make himself king and wipe out all of the top brass — and if the reporting is to be believed, a significant chunk of the staff — who might help him understand the turf he’s just seized.

Incidentally, it wouldn’t be the first time Twitter’s CEO had another job at the same time. Dorsey did it too, and look at how well that went.

How long until former President Trump — and other banned-for-lifers — get back on the platform?

Despite the fake Trump statement that began circulating Thursday, the answer to this one is still unclear. But it seems likely that Trump’s account will be reinstated, given Musk’s past comments on the topic: "I do think that it was not correct to ban Donald Trump," Musk said in May. "I think that was a mistake because it alienated a large part of the country and did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a voice."

How much will that matter? Twitter certainly made Trump’s political career. But, as we predicted when Trump was first banned from Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms, the former president hasn’t needed those platforms to maintain power over the Republican party. And while Twitter issued Trump a lifetime ban, other platforms made no such promises. Meta is still mulling whether Trump will be able to return in January, weighing the risk that restoring his account could cause real world harm. If Trump gets back on Twitter, that risk calculus might very well change.

Of course, there are lots of other people who have lifetime bans from Twitter — such as terrorists, neo-Nazis, or leaders of the KKK — who could potentially also make a comeback.

Will users actually revolt? Will advertisers?

Musk may not be buying Twitter to be a money maker, but his plea to advertisers this week at least suggests he wants Twitter to, you know, make money. “Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences!” he wrote.

The thing is: A number of factors, including the economic downturn and Apple’s anti-tracking efforts, are already making the market brutal for ad-based businesses. Twitter is already a dramatically smaller player in digital ads than either Google or Meta, both of which are struggling. Now, Musk’s takeover stands to weaken Twitter’s relationship even further, with some advertisers already promising to pull their business if Trump returns.

That trend could be exacerbated if users actually follow through with all their talk of deleting Twitter. Of course, it’s telling that the most popular venue for talking about deleting Twitter … is Twitter.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled Vijaya Gadde's name and contained an incomplete quote. This story was updated on Oct. 28, 2022.

Good morning! Data shows that Silicon Valley’s political giving supports many Democrats. But the area’s elite — including Marc Andreesen, Sam Bankman-Fried, and Reid Hoffman — are also trying to boost tech in politics. This morning, we're taking a close look at where the money is going.

Big bucks from Big Tech

To get a sense of how the Silicon Valley elite have been channeling their political giving this cycle, Protocol's Ben Brody worked with the Center for Responsive Politics to lay out the donation patterns of tech’s most influential figureheads.

Many major tech players gave to progressives in hot-button contests, which is a pretty typical approach.

• Big money went to the Democratic National Committee, liberal PACs, and Democrats in high-profile races, such as Sen. Raphael Warnock, whose reelection bid in Georgia is one of a handful of races that could determine the balance of power in the Senate.
• California politicians, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Minority leader Kevin McCarthy, pulled in big checks as well.
• GOP groups also raked in millions, such as the RNC, and candidates like Peter Thiel acolyte Blake Masters, who’s seeking an Arizona Senate seat.

Lots of tech dollars also went to tech-specific causes. Take GMI PAC as an example: The crypto-allied, independent, and bipartisan group brought in $6 million from Silicon Valley, making it one of the top 10 recipients of tech dollars.

• GMI received donations from tech investors Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz, FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried, and Anthony Scaramucci’s SkyBridge Capital.
• And GMI isn’t the only group that saw lots of money come in: The Opportunity Matters Fund raised $20 million from Silicon Valley’s power players — but nearly all of it came from Oracle chairman Larry Ellison, a Trump ally.
• Tim Steyer’s main environmental group, NextGen Climate Action, also received more than $4.5 million — mostly from Steyer himself.
• And even DigiDems, which raises money to pay the salaries of advanced tech staffers working on Democratic races, was a popular target for donations, bringing in more than $1 million from 138 contributions, with most of the money coming from Netflix CEO Reid Hoffman and his wife, Michelle Yee.

If you want to understand what’s important to tech’s elite, follow the money. And for the midterms, at least, it seems that Silicon Valley wants to bring more Silicon Valley to the world.

Read More: Tech’s political giving is trying to bring us more tech

Down and to the right?

After a week of Wall Street types freaking out about slowing growth rates for cloud computing services, AWS gave the traders a fresh reason to reach for a new bottle of Tums yesterday, Protocol's Tom Krazit writes.

AWS revenue growth slowed to 27% during the last three months, an enviable pace for anyone not involved in the 15-year cloud infrastructure boom but well below expectations for the quarter.

• Its third-quarter revenue total of $20.5 billion, which was almost as much as AWS recorded during all of 2018, fell below Wall Street estimates of $21.1 billion, according to CNBC.

Earlier this week Microsoft lowered its expectations for Azure growth (a “lackluster” 37% clip) during the current quarter, which sent its stock plunging in after-hours trading.

• But in what some would call a “narrative violation,” Google Cloud grew 38%, better than expected from the financial tarot-card readers.

The consumer economy is on shaky ground heading into the end of the year — that's beyond obvious at this point. And there have been worries throughout enterprise tech that such weakness would eventually carry over into its world.

• But there’s a difference between concerns about the overall health of the enterprise tech sector and concerns that the cloud-stock surge that accompanied the pandemic-fueled growth rates of the past two and a half years is coming to an end: Only one of those concerns is valid.

“It is a strong testament to the benefits of cloud computing that despite two major obstacles to growth the worldwide market still expanded by 24% from last year,” said John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research, in a press release sent after Amazon’s report. If you want to really freak out about the health of a tech sector, talk to somebody at a social media company.

Read more: A version of this story first appeared in the Enterprise newsletter. Sign up here.

A MESSAGE FROM CAPITAL ONE SOFTWARE

Many business leaders aren’t sure where to begin when it comes to migrating to the cloud. To help organizations adapt to this revolution, Capital One launched Capital One Software, a new enterprise B2B software business focused on providing cloud and data management solutions.

Learn more

​Metaverse everywhere all at once

Investors may be taking issue with Meta’s freewheeling metaverse spending, but that isn’t stopping ordinary people from embracing metaverse-like platforms en masse. That’s the gist of a new report from Michael Wolf’s Activate Consulting this week, Protocol’s Janko Roettgers writes.

People aren’t just playing games. Activate interviewed more than 3,000 consumers about their use of online games and metaverse platforms and found that 77% of gamers participated in metaverse-like non-gaming activities within video games in the past 12 months.

• These included watching movies, shows, and other videos (48%), socializing (47%), creating and customizing avatars (34%), and creating virtual places (24%).

That’s good news for companies developing metaverse platforms, but the monetization path for brands looking to hawk their products in the metaverse may be less clear. Only 18% of respondents said they have purchased physical goods in games over the past 12 months.

• As always, there’s a big gap between super users and ordinary folks: 81% of super users spent time in metaverse-ish games and platforms like Roblox, Fortnite, and VRChat in the past 12 months, while only 21% of all other respondents professed to having done so, according to a separate Activate survey.

VR itself is still a small contributor to these trends, but headsets could turn out to be a bit of a gateway drug: Only 25% of headset owners told Activate that they bought their device for social interactions, but 43% ended up using it for that purpose.

• 55% of headset owners told Activate that they use the device at least once a week, but 47% of VR sessions last 15 minutes or less.

Read more: A version of this story first appeared in the Entertainment newsletter. Sign up here.

People are talking

In a tweet directed to advertisers, Elon Musk said he’s buying Twitter because it’s important to create “a common digital town square”:

• “In addition to adhering to the laws of the land, our platform must be warm and welcoming to all, where you can choose your desired experience according to your preferences.”

• "I lose sleep for a lot of other things, but not for that.”

Xbox boss Phil Spencer clarified at WSJ Live that the Activision deal isn’t about stealing players from Sony:

• “This opportunity is really about mobile for us … It’s imperative for our business. There’s no way that you succeed as a gaming company without access to mobile players."

Making moves

Office corporate VP Joe Belfiore is leaving Microsoft after 32 years in various roles at the company. He’ll stay on as an adviser for a few months to help with the transition.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is launching a new Office of Financial Technology early next year in response to the growth of fintech.

Private equity firms Thoma Bravo and Sunstone Partners are buying UserTesting, a consumer insights platform, for $7.50 per share in cash. This values the deal at $1.3 billion.

Sean Cardenas is the new vice president of sales at TripleBlind, a cybersecurity company. Cardenas joins TripleBlind from Incopro, where he led global sales.

Nancy Louisnord is the new global chief marketing officer at Manta, a data lineage platform. She joins the company from EasyVista, where she held a similar role.

In other news

Elon Musk’s Twitter deal closed last night, and he immediately fired CEO Parag Agrawal, chief financial officer Ned Segal and head of policy Vijaya Gadde, The Washington Post reported. Musk is taking the CEO role, according to Bloomberg, and plans to reverse permanent bans on the platform. And here's a rundown of what will be different with Twitter being private.

How bad was this week for tech? Well, Big Tech's market caps are down a combined $800 billion.

Still, Apple avoided the fate of many other tech companies in its earnings, with revenue and profit both beating analysts’ estimates — though it did warn that there could be a slowdown this quarter.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy allegedly violated federal labor laws, according to an NLRB complaint, which points to comments Jassy made earlier this year about workers being better off without a union.

Volkswagen will work with Intel’s Mobileye on automated driving following the dissolution of Argo AI.

The EU’s Digital Services Act has officially been published in the bloc’s Official Journal, leaving tech firms to figure out how to comply with the policy.

Intel is cutting $10 billion in costs by 2028 as hardware sales slump, though it’s unclear which business units this will affect.

One of the biggest climate takeaways from the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook: The world needs more clean power — and lots of it.

Who should pay for internet infrastructure? European telecom groups say that Big Tech should pay more because their services use up so much bandwidth.

Amazon and Google struck a deal that allows Amazon to work with manufacturers like TCL, which also makes Android TVs and phones. The company will release two TV sets running its Fire TV software in Europe this fall through TCL.

Keep an eye on your ballot 

Want to know if your ballot was counted? There’s a website for that.

Voters in almost half the country can now sign up to receive text messages that include information about ballot due dates and whether the ballot was received. This doesn’t do the voting for you — you’re still on the hook for filling out and mailing in your ballot — but it does keep your votes anonymous.

A MESSAGE FROM CAPITAL ONE SOFTWARE

The flexibility of the cloud helps companies like Capital One unlock access to their data with performance that can scale instantly. But this flexibility and scale can also create a unique challenge for organizations and users who are not proficient in cloud optimization.

Learn more

Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to sourcecode@protocol.com, or our tips line, tips@protocol.com. Enjoy your day, see you Sunday.

GMI PAC has been one of the biggest recipients of Silicon Valley's largesse in the leadup to the midterm election. The crypto-allied, independent group focused on races that attracted little national interest, and was almost studiously bipartisan.

In other words, GMI doesn't really look like the stereotype of Big Tech's big giving to progressives in hot-button contests — a caricature that certainly has a big grain of truth.

“Our mission is to keep this a bipartisan issue,” said Michael Carcaise, a strategist for GMI. “That appeals, fortunately.”

GMI, known for the patronage of Anthony Scaramucci’s SkyBridge Capital and FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, seems to represent another side of Silicon Valley’s $291 million in political giving — one that, essentially, is trying to bring more Silicon Valley to the world, whether it’s GMI’s efforts to herald the arrival of the crypto industry as a political force or a PAC that helps Democratic campaigns hire top tech talent.

To get a sense of how the power players of Silicon Valley — the actual geographic region — have been channeling their political giving this cycle, Protocol worked with the Center for Responsive Politics. The nonprofit government transparency group, known for its OpenSecrets.org website, pulled government data on more than 27,000 donations greater than $2,000. The donors listed themselves as coming from ZIP codes on both sides of the Bay associated with Silicon Valley, in six counties from San Jose up to San Francisco and Marin, then back down through Berkeley and Fremont.

The tally, which includes donations made through the end of September, gives insight into what the area’s wealthy — who largely made their money in tech — actually want. There were donations, for instance, from tech and cultural luminaries such as Sheryl Sandberg, Tom Steyer, Peter Thiel, and Larry Ellison. As the data shows, this small but influential group is important because PACs can raise millions from just a dozen wealthy Bay Area donors.

The results of all that giving were in some ways typical: Many donations, and some of the biggest, went to the Democratic National Committee, liberal PACs, and Democrats in high-profile races, such as Sen. Raphael Warnock, whose reelection bid in Georgia is one of a handful of races that could determine the balance of power in the Senate. Millions of dollars also went to multiple GOP groups, such as the RNC, and to candidates such as Peter Thiel acolyte Blake Masters, who’s seeking an Arizona Senate seat. California politicians, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Minority leader Kevin McCarthy, pulled in big totals too.

But then there were groups that focused less on the brawl for gavels in Washington and more on specific issues but that still managed to raise tons of cash from Silicon Valley. GMI pulled in nearly $6 million just from the Bay Area, making it a top-10 recipient, beating out Steyer’s climate group.

GMI’s haul doesn’t represent much grassroots interest, though: Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz each gave $1 million, Bankman-Fried gave $2 million, and his crypto exchange additionally coughed up more than $350,000. (There are no caps on contributions to super PACs such as GMI.) Nonetheless, despite the notion that crypto was emerging as a multifaceted political force, Silicon Valley coalesced relatively quickly on GMI. Its fundraising made it by far the most successful crypto-allied PAC in the region.

Carcaise said GMI tries to support candidates who are knowledgeable about the crypto industry to fill open seats in strongly red or blue states or House districts. “The main mission is: elect people who can tackle this really challenging project of regulating new technology,” Carcaise told Protocol. “It’s the intersection of tech and finance. That throws up a whole bunch of new questions.”

Through its network, GMI supported both Democrats and Republicans in their primary races, although some of the candidates — such as Rep. Markwayne Mullin, who’s poised to become one of Oklahoma’s senators — have reputations as stalwart partisans themselves rather than compromisers who work across the aisle. It also supported incumbents Sen. John Boozman and Rep. Patrick McHenry, both of whom serve as top GOP members of congressional committees overseeing the industry.

GMI ultimately spent about $12 million, Carcaise said, adding that “the vast majority” of the PAC’s work had occurred in the primary season and thus was “completed.” Days later, however, a CNBC report said GMI would fund ads through Election Day.

Beyond ’22

Many industries have long given to both sides of the aisle as a way to give a boost to their policy priorities. Tech has embraced the strategy: The National Venture Capital Association’s PAC, for instance, brought in more than $350,000 with 83 donations from a “who’s who” of VC’s such as Kirsten Green of Forerunner, plus Brook Byers and John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins. Doug Leone, Bill Coughran, and Roelof Botha, all of Sequoia, gave too — but donations to corporate PACs are capped, so their donation totals aren’t as eye-popping compared to super PAC giving. PACs for Intel, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Deloitte collected more than $100,000 each from larger Silicon Valley donors as well.

Donors in the area were — on the surface — also apparently eager to support specific causes. The Opportunity Matters Fund raised more from Silicon Valley’s power players than any group besides the DNC. But essentially all of its more than $20 million came from Oracle chairman Ellison, a Trump ally. The group nominally supports a policy agenda from Republican Sen. Tim Scott, including tax breaks designed to spur investment in “distressed communities” known as opportunity zones, but the fund also seems poised to support Scott if he launches a presidential bid.

Steyer’s main environmental group, NextGen Climate Action, also received more than $4.5 million from donors in the area — mostly from Steyer himself, and other environmental causes like the Sierra Club’s PAC had good hauls. The Lincoln Project and the Republican Accountability PAC — two efforts by current and former Republicans to fight Trumpism — brought in more than $4.5 million between them from nearly 135 of the bigger donors in the six counties. Donors were also eager to give to pro-choice initiatives including Planned Parenthood, to groups including Emily’s List that support women in politics, and to the AAPI Victory Fund, which tries to mobilize Asian American and Pacific Islanders to vote.

In addition, tech elites seem eager to bring their own particular brand of expertise — and perhaps the sense that Silicon Valley can fix broken things — to the political process itself.

DigiDems was a particularly popular target for donations, bringing in more than $1 million from 138 contributions. Most of the donations were repeats by Reid Hoffman and his wife, Michelle Yee, but the group also attracted money from angel investor Ron Conway and from Chris Saccheri, LinkedIn’s original web developer.

DigiDems’ goal is to raise money to pay the salaries of advanced tech staffers working on Democratic races.

“Tech talent’s expensive,” said Kane Miller, the group’s executive director. “These are folks with skills who command higher salaries in the private sector than what we are accustomed to paying in political campaigns.”

Miller said the idea certainly does resonate in Silicon Valley, but insisted that “a wide variety of donors” like the idea of helping to build long-term digital and personnel capacity of Democratic campaigns for 2022 and beyond. Still, about half the group’s nationwide haul for the cycle came from the region.

“People do respond to the fact that this isn’t just a one-off opportunity to make an impact,” Miller said. “This is a chance to infuse new talent in the ecosystem and that’s going to pay dividends in the long run.”