Tech
The billionaires made a promise — now some want out
In 2010, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates launched a disarmingly simple campaign they called the Giving Pledge: a public commitment, open to the world’s wealthiest people, to give away more than half their fortune during their lifetime or upon their death. The moment seemed to call for it. Tech was minting billionaires faster than any industry in history, and the question of how those fortunes would impact society was just beginning to take shape. “We’re talking trillions over time,” Buffett told Charlie Rose that year. The trillions materialized. The giving, less so.
The numbers are no longer shocking to anyone paying attention. The top 1% of American households now hold roughly as much wealth as the bottom 90% combined — the highest concentration the Federal Reserve has recorded since it began tracking wealth distribution in 1989. Globally, billionaire wealth has grown 81% since 2020, reaching a whopping $18.3 trillion, while one in four people worldwide don’t regularly have enough to eat.
This is the world in which a small group of extraordinarily wealthy people are now debating whether to honor — or walk away from — a voluntary and unenforceable promise to give away half of what they have.
The Giving Pledge’s numbers, reported Sunday by the New York Times, trace a steady decline. In its first five years, 113 families signed the Pledge. Then 72 over the next five, 43 in the five after that, and just four in all of 2024. The roster includes Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, and Elon Musk — some of the most powerful people in the world, and yet, in Peter Thiel’s words to the Times, it is a club that’s “really run out of energy . . .I don’t know if the branding is outright negative,” Thiel told the outlet, “but it feels way less important for people to join.”
The language of doing good in Silicon Valley has been wearing thin for years. Back in 2016, the HBO series “Silicon Valley” was so relentless in mocking the industry — its characters forever insisting they were “making the world a better place” while chasing valuations — that it reportedly changed actual corporate behavior. One of the show’s writers, Clay Tarver, told The New Yorker that year: “I’ve been told that, at some of the big companies, the P.R. departments have ordered their employees to stop saying ‘We’re making the world a better place,’ specifically because we have made fun of that phrase so mercilessly.”
It was an hilarious joke. The trouble is the idealism being satirized was also, at least partly, real — and what replaced it isn’t so funny. Veteran tech investor Roger McNamee, in the same piece, recalled asking Silicon Valley creator Mike Judge what he was really going for. Judge’s answer: “I think Silicon Valley is immersed in a titanic battle between the hippie value system of the Steve Jobs generation and the Ayn Randian libertarian values of the Peter Thiel generation.”
McNamee’s own read on things was less diplomatic: “Some of us actually, as naïve as it sounds, came here to make the world a better place. And we did not succeed. We made some things better, we made some things worse, and in the meantime the libertarians took over, and they do not give a damn about right or wrong. They are here to make money.”
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A decade later, the libertarians McNamee was describing have moved well beyond Silicon Valley. Some are now in the Cabinet.
Not everyone agrees on what “giving back” even means. To the libertarian wing of tech — and it’s an increasingly significant wing — the entire framework is wrong. Building companies, creating jobs, and driving innovation are the real contributions, and the pressure to layer philanthropy on top of them is, at best, a social convention and, at worst, a shakedown dressed up as virtue.
Few figures captures the current mood quite like Thiel, who, notably, never signed the Pledge himself and is no fan of Bill Gates (among other things, he has reportedly called Gates an “awful, awful person“). In fact, Thiel tells the Times he has privately encouraged around a dozen signers to undo their commitments and has even gently pushed those already wavering to make their exits official. “Most of the ones I’ve talked to have at least expressed regret about signing it,” Thiel said, calling the Giving Pledge an “Epstein-adjacent, fake Boomer club.”
He has urged Musk to unsign, for example, arguing his money would otherwise go “to left-wing nonprofits that will be chosen by” Gates. When Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong quietly let his letter disappear from the Pledge website in mid-2024 without a word of public explanation, Thiel sent him a congratulatory note.
But Thiel also told the Times something worth a harder look: that those who stay on the Pledge’s public roster feel “sort of blackmailed” — too exposed to public opinion to formally renounce a non-binding promise to give away vast sums of money.
It’s a claim that’s difficult to square with the public behavior of some of the people Thiel has in mind. Musk has shown little interest in managing public perception, and at this point, a majority of Americans already view him unfavorably. Zuckerberg spent nearly a decade facing some of the most sustained regulatory and public hostility any tech exec has endured and came out the other side more sure of himself, not less.
A different picture is meanwhile taking shape on the ground. GoFundMe reported that fundraisers for basic necessities — rent, groceries, housing, fuel — surged 17% last year. “Work,” “home,” “food,” “bill,” and “care” were among the top keywords in campaigns that year. When the 43-day federal shutdown halted food stamp distribution this past fall, related campaigns jumped sixfold. “Life is getting more expensive and folks are struggling,” the company’s CEO told CBS News, “so they are reaching out to friends and family to see if they can help them through.”
Whether these trends are connected to decisions made in philanthropy boardrooms is a matter of debate, but they’re happening at the same time, and the timing is hard to ignore.
It’s worth separating the fate of the Pledge from the fate of philanthropy more broadly. Some of the wealthiest people in tech are still giving; they’re just doing it on their own terms, through their own vehicles, toward their own chosen ends. At the start of 2026, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) cut about 70 jobs — 8% of its workforce — as part of a move away from education and social justice causes toward its Biohub network, a group of nonprofit, biology-focused research institutes operating across several cities. “Biohub is going to be the main focus of our philanthropy going forward,” Zuckerberg said last November.
The CZI cuts look, at least on paper, less like the couple is retreating from philanthropy than recalibrating their approach. The Zuckerbergs have, after all, committed through the Pledge to give away 99% of their lifetime wealth.
Not everyone is redefining the terms, either. Gates announced last year that he’d give away virtually all his remaining wealth through the Gates Foundation over the next two decades — more than $200 billion — with the foundation closing permanently on December 31, 2045. Invoking Carnegie’s old line that “the man who dies thus rich dies disgraced,” he wrote that he was determined not to die rich.
It’s happened before, this standoff between concentrated wealth and everyone else. The last time wealth concentrated at anything like these levels — the original Gilded Age, the 1890s through the early 1900s — the correction didn’t come from philanthropists. It came from trust-busting, the federal income tax, the estate tax, and eventually the New Deal. It arrived as policy that was driven by political pressure too powerful to be ignored. The institutions that forced that correction — a functional Congress, a free press, an empowered regulatory state — look considerably different today.
What isn’t in dispute is the pace of change. These fortunes have been built in years, not generations, at the same moment the safety net is being cut. The wealth gained by the world’s billionaires in 2025 alone would have been enough to give every person on earth $250 and still leave billionaires more than $500 billion richer, according to Oxfam’s 2026 global inequality report.
The Giving Pledge was always, as Buffett said from the start, just a “moral pledge” — no enforcement, no consequences, no one to answer to but yourself. That it once carried weight says something about the era that produced it. That Thiel now frames staying on the list as a form of coercion — and that the Times found that argument worth reporting at length — says something about the one we’re in right now.
Tech
Marc Lore says that AI will soon enable anyone open a restaurant
Marc Lore, the veteran e-commerce entrepreneur who sold his previous startups to Amazon and Walmart, has big plans to infuse AI into his current venture, Wonder.
The centerpiece of those plans is Wonder Create, an initiative that would let anyone — from food entrepreneurs to social media influencers — use AI to design and launch their own restaurant brand in under a minute. The virtual restaurant would then go live across Wonder’s growing network of tech-enabled kitchen locations, currently numbering 120 and expected to reach 400 next year.
Lore’s startup, a vertically integrated dining and delivery platform, has evolved from food trucks to fast casual restaurants with 10 to 20 seats. These are not normal restaurants, though; they are “programmable cooking platforms” capable of operating as 25 different types of restaurants based on cuisine, within their all-electric kitchens that are increasingly becoming robotic.
Speaking at The Wall Street Journal’s “Future of Everything” conference this week, Lore said these kitchens have a 700-ingredient library. The “restaurants” they house actually consist of many different brands that operate from within these locations.
In addition to a staff of up to 12 people in these kitchens, cooking tech, like conveyors and robotic arms, are involved in the cooking process. The company also just bought Spice Robotics, a maker of an automatic bowl-making machine previously used by Sweetgreen. Next year, it plans to offer an “infinite sauce machine” that can make bout 80% of all the sauces found in recipes on the internet today.
Wonder Create was announced earlier this year as a way for anyone to use Wonder’s software to launch their own restaurant brand and recipes.
Lore offered more details as how this would work by leveraging AI technology, describing the plan as something like a “Shopify front-end with an AI prompt.”
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“You type in what kind of restaurant you want to build. It builds the restaurant — AI does — in under a minute. It does the name, branding, description, pictures, pricing, health information, and all the recipes for your restaurant,” Lore explained during an interview at the WSJ event. The would-be restaurateur could then refine the prompt if changes were needed. When ready to go live, the restaurant would launch across all of Wonder’s locations.
The company currently has 120 of these “programmable cooking platforms” in operation, a number that’s expected to grow to 400 next year. As it adds robotics to the equation, the company won’t necessarily reduce headcount, Lore noted. Instead, it will increase the number of meals a kitchen can produce in a given period.
“We have about 7 million throughput capacity with 12 people,” he said. “We see a path to getting to 20 million throughput out of 2,500 square feet with just 12 people. The goal also is…I guess by 2035, to have 1,000 unique restaurants operating out of the 2,500 square feet,” Lore added.
The goal with these AI-created “restaurants” is to allow people to experiment with food in new ways. A restaurateur could test recipes to gauge customer reaction before adding dishes to his own brick-and-mortar locations, for example.
Lore sees other use cases for the platform, too, like letting influencers connect with their audience through their own “restaurant” brands without having to actually launch their own chains.
“It could be a mega-influencer, a micro-influencer — anyone that wants to monetize their following,” Lore said. “Or it could be a private trainer that wants to make specific bowls. It could be a not-for-profit. It could be Disney for [marketing] their new movie. Anybody can make a restaurant.”
Whether that many people actually want to is an open question. Ghost kitchens — a similar concept that promised to let brands sell food without owning a restaurant — had a rocky run in the early 2020s, with several high-profile operators scaling back or shutting down after struggling to build customer loyalty. Wonder’s added layer of automation and AI may address some of those pitfalls, but the model is still unproven at scale.
MrBeast Burger, a famous ghost kitchen experiments, vividly illustrated the challenge. The brand faced widespread complaints over inconsistent food quality — a consequence of relying on dozens of different contracted kitchens and staff. Wonder’s programmable, increasingly automated kitchens are designed to solve exactly that problem.
There are still limits to this idea, Lore admitted. Wonder’s team (including its robots) can’t do things like toss and stretch pizza dough or slice and roll sushi. Instead, Wonder’s focus is on simpler basics like burgers, chicken wings, fried chicken, and bowls.
The whole plan comes together with Lore’s other acquisitions — Grubhub for its 250 million-deliveries-per-year business and Blue Apron for its meal kit business. Now, Wonder is focused on buying restaurant brands, like New York City-based Blue Ribbon Fried Chicken, which it snapped up for $6.5 million in February.
“When you buy a brand — and you can buy a brand that has 10 locations, or even 50 locations — and then overnight put it in 1,000, there’s just an incredible arbitrage there,” Lore noted.
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Tech
Peter Sarlin’s QuTwo reaches $380M valuation in angel round
QuTwo, the Finnish AI lab founded by former AMD Silo AI CEO Peter Sarlin, is now valued at €325 million (approximately $380 million) after raising a €25 million angel round ($29 million). It’s a sign of enduring tailwinds for AI, quantum computing, and sovereign tech, especially for Europe-made companies.
QuTwo’s name is a nod to quantum computing, but it hasn’t gone all-in on quantum. Its core product, QuTwo OS, is an orchestration layer that directs tasks to classical, quantum or hybrid architectures — with the idea that enterprise use cases are often best served by “quantum-inspired” computing, which uses classical chips to simulate quantum behavior on more reliable hardware.
Enterprise AI will be QuTwo’s bread and butter. The company already secured some $23 million in committed revenue thanks to design partnerships with the likes of retail giant Zalando, for which it helped develop AI assistants. “AI is the North Star that we will continue to aim for. Quantum is just a new type of compute,” said Sarlin, who is adamant that QuTwo is an AI company.
Momentum has been building around Europe-based AI labs, and several of them have become overnight unicorns. Just last week, former DeepMind researcher David Silver secured $1.1 billion for his new endeavor, Ineffable Intelligence. QuTwo’s valuation and round size are somewhat modest in comparison but will let it pursue its roadmap under less pressure.
According to Sarlin, who serves as QuTwo’s executive chairman, this was a decision he also made for his previous company, Silo AI, which AMD acquired for $665 million in 2024. “I had a lot of investors who would have wanted to pour a lot of money into making Silo into Europe’s OpenAI, but I didn’t believe in that play,” he told TechCrunch.
The main difference is that QuTwo wants the freedom to think long term, with a five- to ten-year horizon. “We are on a mission to build the globally leading AI company for the next paradigm, given that Europe did not succeed in building the AI company for this era,” Sarlin said.
It’s not that Sarlin is bearish on European AI, of which he is a prolific backer. Nor is he necessarily critical of extra-large rounds — he volunteered that he is also an investor in Yann LeCun’s Ami Labs, which raised $1.03 billion, and in British-American venture Recursive Superintelligence, which is rumored to be following the same path. But he didn’t see a billion-dollar round as the right fit for QuTwo — nor VC money, at least for now.
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Until recently, QuTwo was solely funded through Sarlin’s family office, PostScriptum, which also incubated NestAI, the other company where he serves as executive chairman. But whereas NestAI raised some $115 million in a funding round led by Finland’s sovereign fund and Nokia, QuTwo wasn’t seeking to raise external funding.
However, when the lab’s soft launch generated significant interest earlier this year, Sarlin decided he would say no to checks from VCs and strategic investors, but yes to an angel round in part due to the geopolitical moment Europe is currently navigating.
With Europe increasingly looking to favor local alternatives to U.S. tech providers, there are tailwinds for AI made in Finland. But there is also investor appetite for a company that promises to facilitate more ambitious R&D initiatives in the fields where the region already has strong players, such as the automotive, life sciences and gaming sectors.
Conversely, Sarlin expects that QuTwo’s angel investors could open doors across Europe. There are definitely quite a few introductions he could request from this group, which includes Yuri Milner, Xavier Niel, Nico Rosberg, Dieter Schwarz and Niklas Zennström, and as well as many startup founders from Hugging Space, Legora, Miro, Skype, Supercell, Wolt, and more.
This will also support QuTwo’s growth. It recently expanded into Sweden, and has been hiring. According to Sarlin, some 50 quantum and AI scientists have joined the team, which includes two other second-time entrepreneurs: his former cofounder at Silo, Kaj-Mikael Björk; and Kuan Yen Tan, a cofounder at IQM, the Finnish quantum company that is set to go public.
QuTwo’s connection with IQM is also a reminder that the company believes we are about to enter the quantum era — it just can’t wait. “The question for repeat founders like [us] is how can we have even a larger impact. In the long term, it’s important for Europe that we build the AI company for the next paradigm out of Europe. But, in the short term, we can have a significant impact in driving ambitious R&D moon shots in Europe,” Sarlin said.
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Tech
reMarkable’s new Paper Pure tablet goes back to basics with a monochrome screen
After exploring the bigger market for productivity tablets featuring color displays with the Paper Pro and the smaller Paper Pro Move, E Ink tablet maker reMarkable is returning to its roots with a new monochrome device called the Paper Pure.
The new, $399 Paper Pure succeeds the monochrome reMarkable 2 after six years, and comes with more powerful hardware as well as modern software features that make it competitive in today’s tablet market.
The Paper Pure has a 10.3-inch display when measured diagonally, the same as the reMarkable 2, but the new one is wider, which, the company says, makes it easier to take notes and read text. Notably, the resolution hasn’t changed between the two tablets, staying at 1872 x 1404 pixels with a pixel density of 226 PPI.
The tablet also comes with 32GB of storage, four times the amount you got on its predecessor, and is also about 40 grams lighter, weighing 360 grams.
ReMarkable said the Paper Pure is 50% more responsive than the reMarkable 2, and offers 30% more battery life with its 3,820 mAh battery.
The company has added a slew of new features to the tablet to bring it up to par with modern productivity tools, including support for a web app. The Paper Pure lets you sync your calendar, as well as take and share notes for a particular meeting. And if you import documents from cloud storage services, the online sync service will automatically convert them into a notebook suited for reading and annotating on the tablet itself. The company said it also comes with better handwriting search capabilities.
The Paper Pure integrates with Slack, too, so you can convert handwritten notes into typed text that you can share. It also integrates with collaboration tool Miro, letting you share sketches and the like.
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The Norwegian company said it now plans to sunset production of the reMarkable 2, but will still offer software updates and support to existing customers.
The Paper Pure’s base model comes bundled with a stylus, and the costlier $449 version gets you a fancier stylus, dubbed Marker Plus, that includes an eraser function, plus a sleeve folio in various colors. Users can order the device starting today, and shipping is expected to start in early June.
The company said it has sold more than 3.5 million devices so far, and that it has 1.2 million subscribers for its Connect service, which offers unlimited cloud storage, exclusive templates, and the ability to create links to share notes or sketches.
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