Wednesday, April 23, 2025

Discord appoints a new CEO

Wednesday, April 23, 2025

Welcome to TC PM! Today we learn that Discord is getting a new CEO; usage numbers for Google's AI chatbot have spiked since last year; and protests against Tesla now pose a material risk to the company. Let's go!

TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto / Getty Images

👾 New CEO, who this? Gaming social network Discord has a new CEO: Humam Sakhnini, the former vice chairman at Activision Blizzard. Jason Citron, a co-founder and current CEO, will remain as an adviser.

📺 Fresh and new: YouTube plans to launch a redesign of its TV app this summer, which will include easier navigation, as well as playback and quality tweaks. It will also include new features like Ask Music, which uses AI to create personalized radio stations based on a prompt.

🐶 Got that dog in me: Cloud monitoring and security company Datadog acquired AI-powered observability platform Metaplane. The deal terms were not disclosed. Datadog said this helps accelerate the company's push into data observability.

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Afternoon must-reads

Image Credits: Thomas Fuller/SOPA Images/LightRocket / Getty Images

💻 Data to dig into: Google's AI chatbot Gemini has 350 million monthly active users (MAUs) as of March. This is a notable spike from October, when the chatbot had 9 million MAUs. Gemini still lags behind competitors like ChatGPT, though, which sees 600 million MAUs.

🕵️‍♀️ More privacy, please: WhatsApp is launching a new feature to increase privacy called the Advanced Chat Privacy setting, which prevents group chat members from exporting chats. It also won't allow media from the chat to automatically download, and it prevents users from asking Meta AI questions in the chat.

⛔️ You can't do that: The European Union has fined Apple and Meta hundreds of millions of dollars for violating the bloc's Digital Markets Act. For Apple, the fines are related to a missing disclosure requirement for app developers. For Meta, the fine is tied to personalized ads.

🤨 Whoops! Health insurance giant Blue Shield of California shared patients' personal health information with Google from 2021 to 2024. The insurance company said it used Google Analytics to track consumer behavior on its websites and didn't know this practice collected patients' personal info.

🎙️ Talkin' tariffs: On today's episode of Equity, Sean West, the co-founder of Hence AI, a startup that helps other companies navigate their global footprint, talks about how companies can navigate geopolitical risk, tariffs, and more.

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Around the web

🤥 When you can't cheat: Cluely, a startup that claims it can help you "cheat on everything," has been causing a stir in Silicon Valley in recent weeks. However, The Verge tested Cluely's product out and found that it had a few too many issues for it to be helpful.

📓 AI in the classroom: Kenya is facing a teacher shortage, leaving many teachers with too many students and too much work. Some teachers are finding relief by using AI to help them craft lesson plans and grade papers, but many teachers can't use AI because they don't have internet access.

Before you go

Image Credits: Rebecca Bellan

😒 Well, well, well: Protests against Tesla, and Elon Musk, have become more frequent in recent months. So much so, in fact, that these protests are now listed as an official "risk factor" for Tesla's business. These updates also said that broader criticism of the brand may hurt Tesla, too.