Tech
Vinod Khosla publicly disavows Keith Rabois’ comments on ICE shooting
To understand the stance of an unwavering Trump loyalist after a federal border patrol agent shocked the nation this weekend by shooting an American citizen in Minneapolis, look no further than Khosla Ventures partner Keith Rabois.
Rabois’ public support for Border Patrol’s actions in the killing of Alex Pretti, made via posts on X, was so vehement that Khosla Ventures partner Ethan Choi and firm founder Vinod Khosla both publicly disavowed it.
Rabois argued that Pretti was at fault, writing that the protester was committing a “felony.” One of Rabois’ posts said, “no law enforcement has shot an innocent person. illegals are committing violent crimes every day.” Another said: “he unequivocally attempted to draw his weapon. fuck you.” In another post that discussed citizens’ ability to exercise their First, Second, and Fourth Amendment rights, the VC weighed in: “yes but interfering w a law enforcement operation is not protected by any of those amendments.”
Among other comments, Rabois went on to say he doesn’t believe that the Minneapolis police could be credible sources in an investigation: “i don’t think you should ask any law enforcement in MN. But i am very open to reading views from any other urban jurisdiction.” He instead blamed the city’s police for the situation: “Because the MN police’s refusal to cooperate is exactly what is leading to these treacherous conditions (for everyone).”
And so on.
X reacted as you might expect. Other Trump supporters cheered Rabois on, while those who condemn ICE’s actions argued with and condemned the investor.
The situation spiraled so much that when one person suggested that founders remove Khosla Ventures from their cap tables altogether, Khosla partner Choi piped up to distance himself.
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Choi posted: “I want to make it clear that Keith doesn’t represent everyone’s views here at @khoslaventures, at least not mine. What happened in Minnesota is plain wrong. Don’t know how you could really see it differently. Sad to see a person’s life taken unnecessarily.”
Then the founder of the firm, Khosla himself, stood by Choi. “I agree with @EthanChoi7. Macho ICE vigilantes running amuck [sic] empowered by a conscious-less administration,” he said in his post on X.
Under normal circumstances, opposing political points of view can be a strength for a VC firm. Whatever anyone thinks of Rabois’ politics, he’s been a very successful investor backing such companies as DoorDash, Affirm, Faire, and Stripe, as well as co-founding Opendoor, among other startups.
But sometimes they are internally disruptive.
Sequoia was embroiled in a controversy over partner Shaun Maguire’s comments attacking New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. Maguire (whose comments over the weekend on ICE align with Rabois’) remains as an investor at Sequoia. But its leader at the time of the Mamdani controversy, Roelof Botha, stepped down as senior steward in November. Botha was replaced by Alfred Lin and Pat Grady (neither of whom weighed in over the weekend).
In this case, the rift between Khosla partners spilled out publicly. But note that Khosla did not directly chastise Rabois. (The company did not respond to our request for comment.)
When Khosla Ventures rehired Rabois in 2024, the firm knew it was bringing in an outspoken, self-proclaimed “contrarian” into its ranks, of the ilk that liked to blame the “woke” and praise President Trump. For Rabois’ part, he knew he would be working for a vocal Trump critic (Vinod Khosla has made his point of view on Trump very clear for years).
Will there be continued fallout? Perhaps — but only if founders really do start dumping Khosla Ventures from their cap tables.
Tech
Tesla brings its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston
Tesla is expanding its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston, according to a social media post from the company.
The post says simply that “Robotaxi is now rolling out in Dallas & Houston 🤠” and includes a 14-second video showing Tesla vehicles driving without human monitors or drivers in the front seat.
The company now offers robotaxi service in three cities, all of them in Texas, after launching in Austin last year and starting to offer rides without safety drivers in January 2026. In a February filing, Tesla said that its Austin robotaxis have been involved in 14 crashes since launch.
It also offers a more limited ride service with human drivers in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Tesla may not be running many vehicles in either of these new markets yet, with crowdsourced data on the Robotaxi Tracker website only registering a single vehicle in each city (compared to 46 active vehicles logged in Austin).
Tech
Netflix plans to add a vertical video feed, use AI for recommendations
Netflix is going to launch a TikTok-like vertical video feed within its apps this month, and plans to use AI broadly for content creation and recommendations, the company said on Thursday.
Netflix has been testing a vertical video feed since last year. The short video feature could aid users with discovering video podcasts, along with the current slate of shows and movies. The company is also leaning more into using AI for recommendations after launching a ChatGPT-powered search feature last year.
“We have been in personalization and recommendation for two decades, but we still see tremendous room to make it better by leveraging newer technologies,” Netflix co-CEO Gregory Peters said during the company’s first-quarter conference call. “Recommendation systems based on new model architectures not only improve current personalization but also let us iterate and improve more quickly — adding support for different content types much more efficiently.”
Co-CEO Ted Sarandos said he sees AI tools improving the entire content creation process. “In general, we expect GenAI to make content better; better tools, better processes […] It takes a great artist to make great art, and AI won’t change that. But AI will give those artists better tools to bring those visions to life,” he said.
Last month, Netflix bought Ben Affleck’s AI creation company InterPositive, which, Sarandos said, has garnered interest from creators.
“With our acquisition of InterPositive, we think it accelerates our GenAI capability because it is proprietary technology created specifically for filmmakers and filmmaking, different from other GenAI video applications. While our ownership of InterPositive is very new, we have generated interest with creators who have spent time with the tools, and we are seeing momentum build around adoption,” he noted.
Netflix also mentioned that it wants to use AI to improve its ad suite, and allow for new formats and customization to get better returns. The company expects to generate ad revenue of $3 billion this year.
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Netflix reported revenue of $12.25 billion in Q1 2026, up 16.2% year-year-year, and said profit jumped 83% to $5.28 billion. Alongside the first-quarter results, Netflix said its co-founder and chair, Reed Hastings, is leaving the company’s board this summer.
Notably, the company hiked subscription prices in the U.S. late last month, which could have a positive impact next quarter. The company said it ended 2025 with 325 million paying subscribers.
Tech
Bluesky confirms DDoS attack is cause of continued app outages
Bluesky’s website and app are still struggling on Friday after experiencing service interruptions that chief operating officer Rose Wang attributed to an ongoing cyberattack.
On Thursday evening, the social media company confirmed that a “sophisticated Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack” was to blame for the issues, which had originally started on April 15 at around 8:40 p.m. ET.
Distributed denial-of-service attacks often involve pummeling apps or websites with large amounts of junk web traffic aimed at overloading and knocking its servers offline. While these kinds of cyberattacks do not involve intrusions into a company’s systems, these incidents can still be disruptive to both the company and its users.
In a post on the Bluesky account, the company shared the cause of the problem and noted that the attack was “impacting our operations, with users experiencing intermittent interruptions in service for their feeds, notifications, threads, and search.”
Bluesky said that it has not seen any evidence of unauthorized access to private data, however.
When originally reached for comment on Thursday, Bluesky only pointed us to the status.bsky.app page and account (@status.bsky.app) for updates. The company did not provide an estimated time for a fix.
The network’s status page is currently not working, however.
Bluesky said it will provide another update on the status of the attack and its mitigation by 1 p.m. ET on Friday.
Because the outages are intermittent, the Bluesky site and app will load at times, slowly, and other times will display error messages.
For instance, switching to a particular feed within the app could display a message that says, “This feed is currently receiving high traffic and is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later. Message from server: Rate Limit Exceeded.”
Popular feeds like Discover or the official Bluesky Team’s feed often see this problem, even as users’ own personal feeds are functional.
Other times, like when trying to visit a user’s profile, the site will display an error message, forcing you to refresh and try again.
Bluesky protocol engineer Bryan Newbold remarked around 3:46 a.m. ET on Wednesday, “oof, our services are getting hit pretty hard tonight.”
Notably, the service disruptions are impacting Bluesky, but other communities, like Blacksky, that run their own infrastructure on the underlying protocol that powers the decentralized social network, are still functioning.
Blacksky’s team told TechCrunch that the Bluesky outage has led to a “significant spike” in migration requests from Bluesky users over the past 12 hours, as users, devs, and other ATmosphere founders like Sebastian at Eurosky have been promoting its services.
It was clear that Bluesky’s team was in a hectic state this week while facing these issues, as one message on its status page had a typo: ” investigating an incident with service in one of our reginos [sic].”
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