Author: Jaxon Bennett

Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for freeYour guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the worldNick Clegg, the president of global affairs at Meta, is leaving the social media platform and will be replaced by Joel Kaplan, a prominent Republican known for overseeing the company’s relationships with conservatives.In a post on Meta’s Facebook on Thursday, Clegg, a former leader of the Liberal Democrats and deputy prime minister in the UK, said he was departing the company after seven years. He added he would spend “a few months handing over the reins” and representing the social…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Perplexity, an artificial intelligence-driven search engine, has closed its fourth funding round this year, tripling its valuation to $9bn as it seeks to compete with offerings from Google and OpenAI.The $500mn round was led by Institutional Venture Partners. Previous investors have included SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2, Nvidia and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, as well as several prominent names from the AI industry such as OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy and Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun.The San Francisco-based group has grown rapidly this…

Hitachi’s new chief executive Toshiaki Tokunaga, announced on Monday, is facing high expectations and the challenge of further internationalising a standard-bearer for Japanese manufacturing whose shares have trebled in value over the past two years.Fifteen years ago, Hitachi was on the brink of bankruptcy after posting the biggest-ever loss for a Japanese manufacturer of $8bn. It had become a symbol of the Asian economy’s tired and unwieldy industrial conglomerates.But the 114-year-old poster child of Japan’s decade-long corporate governance reforms has recovered by transforming itself into an industrial software and hardware provider since 2009. It has reaped the rewards of the…

Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for freeYour guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the worldOpenAI chief executive Sam Altman will donate $1mn of his personal money to Donald Trump’s inaugural fund, the company confirmed on Friday, the latest in a series of gifts from Big Tech and Silicon Valley to show their support for the US president-elect.The move comes just days after Amazon and Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, announced their own $1mn donations to the Trump fund. Perplexity, an AI-driven search engine, also confirmed it had donated $1mn to the fund…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Reddit, the social media platform known for its devoted online communities and raucous debates, surprised Wall Street by turning a profit for the first time just months after going public, sending shares up 25 per cent to a record high. On a call with analysts, Reddit’s executives said that investments in its ad tech, designed to improve the performance of ads, were bearing fruit, as was its move to use “machine translation” to automatically translate its content into languages to boost its…