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Elon Musk was dealt a significant setback in a court fight over compensation sought by the top Twitter Inc. executives he fired when he took over the company in 2022.

A judge ruled late Friday that former chief executive officer Parag Agrawal and other high-ranking officers can proceed with claims that Musk terminated them right as he was closing the deal to cheat them out of severance pay before they could submit resignation letters.

Elon Musk was dealt a significant setback in a court fight over compensation sought by the top Twitter Inc. executives he fired when he took over the company in 2022.

A judge ruled late Friday that former chief executive officer Parag Agrawal and other high-ranking officers can proceed with claims that Musk terminated them right as he was closing the deal to cheat them out of severance pay before they could submit resignation letters.

The world's biggest digital advertising companies saw significant sales growth last quarter, driving momentum for the U.S. stock market ahead of the 2024 election and foreshadowing a lucrative holiday season.

The big picture: After years of pandemic-driven volatility, the global ad market is finally starting to stabilize this year.

Today, Perplexity announced a dedicated hub for U.S. general election information. Populated by data from The Associated Press and Democracy Works, the company described it in a blog as “an entry point for understanding key issues.”

“Starting Tuesday, we’ll be offering live updates on elections by leveraging data from The Associated Press so you can stay informed on presidential, senate, and house races at both a state and national level,” Perplexity wrote. “Thank you to Democracy Works for granting us access to your Elections API to help power these experiences.”

Perplexity did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request about whether it is compensating the AP and Democracy Works for that data.

In a surprise Friday announcement, Pixelmator, the team behind the Mac image editing app, announced that it is being acquired by Apple. Posted to the company's blog on Friday, Pixelmator shares the news that it has been picked up by Apple. The acquisition, the terms of which are unknown, brings the Pixelmator, Pixelmator Pro, and Photomator apps under Apple's ownership.

The team has signed an agreement for acquisition, but it still needs to receive regulatory approval before it completes.

For Musk, the platform has become a useful political weapon of confusion, a machine retrofitted to poison the information environment by filling it with dangerous, false, and unsubstantiated rumors about election fraud that can reach mass audiences. How much does it cost to successfully (to use Steve Bannon’s preferred phrasing) flood the zone with shit? Thanks to Musk’s acquisition, we can put a figure on it: $44 billion.

Nothing better encapsulates X’s ability to sow informational chaos than the Election Integrity Community—a feed on the platform where users are instructed to subscribe and “share potential incidents of voter fraud or irregularities you see while voting in the 2024 election.” The community, which was launched last week by Musk’s America PAC, has more than 34,000 members; roughly 20,000 have joined since Musk promoted the feed last night. It is jammed with examples of terrified speculation and clearly false rumors about fraud.

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Skydio, the US’s largest drone maker and a supplier to Ukraine’s military, faces a supply chain crisis after Beijing imposed sanctions on the company, including banning Chinese groups from providing it with critical components.

Skydio is rushing to find alternative suppliers after Beijing’s move, which also blocks battery supplies from its sole provider, said people familiar with the situation.

The drone maker has sought help from the Biden administration. Chief executive Adam Bry last week met US deputy secretary of state Kurt Campbell and held discussions with senior officials at the White House.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has warned that the Department of Justice's proposed remedies for Google's monopolistic behaviour could impact US leadership of the global tech market – after announcing enormous growth in the megalithic firm's ad business.

The conglomerate on Tuesday announced [PDF] Q3 2024 revenue of $88.25 billion – a nice jump from the $76.7 billion from the same quarter last year. Net income was $26.3 billion, up from $19.7 billion last year.

Execs told investors Google continues to "re-engineer the cost base," but the many rounds of job cuts we've reported have seen headcount fall by just 1,112 – to 181,269 – in the last year.

A more significant cut was made to the cost of serving AI Overviews – the prose summaries of search results that Google produces using generative AI. That figure dropped by 90 percent.

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The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission has granted Google a five-year exemption from the Online News Act, ordering it to pay $100 million to Canadian news outlets within 60 days. Google agreed last year to pay Canadian news publishers $100 million a year in order to be exempt from the law, which compels tech companies to enter into agreements with news publishers.

Google has tasked the Canadian Journalism Collective with distributing the money to news outlets.

Indonesia blocked Apple Inc. from selling its latest iPhones in Southeast Asia’s largest economy, saying the company has yet to meet local investment requirements.

The iPhone 16, launched in September, cannot be marketed domestically as local unit PT Apple Indonesia hasn’t fulfilled the country’s 40% domestic content requirements for smartphones and tablets, the Ministry of Industry said in a statement on Oct. 25. Apple’s older products can still be sold in Indonesia.

That’s a road bump for Apple, which has enjoyed healthy initial sales of its flagship product in other Asian markets such as China. While Apple ranks outside the top six smartphone brands in Indonesia, it’s a potential growth market with a young, increasingly tech-savvy population. The $1 trillion economy has over 350 million active mobile phones — much more than the nation’s 270 million population, according to government data.

As expected, the M4 chip in the iMac is available with up to a 10-core CPU and up to a 10-core GPU. Apple says the iMac with the M4 chip is up to 1.7x faster for daily productivity tasks, and up to 2.1x faster for demanding workflows like photo editing and gaming, compared to the iMac with the M1 chip. In the iPad Pro, the M4 chip is up to 25% faster than the M3 chip, and this year-over-year improvement should be similar for the iMac.

The new iMac comes with a minimum of 16GB of RAM, compared to 8GB for the previous base model, and it can be configured with up to 32GB of RAM and up to 1TB of SSD storage.

For the first time, the iMac can be configured with a nano-texture display, which has a special coating that better scatters light to further minimize glare on the screen.

The rear USB-C ports on the new iMac now support Thunderbolt 4, compared to Thunderbolt 3 on the previous model.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds on Wednesday affirmed the removal last week of about a dozen kernel maintainers associated with Russia.

On October 18, Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman published a message to the Linux kernel mailing list showing that a handful of Linux developers in the MAINTAINERS file had been removed.

His explanation was vague. "Remove some entries due to various compliance requirements," Kroah-Hartman wrote. "They can come back in the future if sufficient documentation is provided."

Tech behemoth OpenAI has touted its artificial intelligence-powered transcription tool Whisper as having near “human level robustness and accuracy.”

But Whisper has a major flaw: It is prone to making up chunks of text or even entire sentences, according to interviews with more than a dozen software engineers, developers and academic researchers. Those experts said some of the invented text — known in the industry as hallucinations — can include racial commentary, violent rhetoric and even imagined medical treatments.

Experts said that such fabrications are problematic because Whisper is being used in a slew of industries worldwide to translate and transcribe interviews, generate text in popular consumer technologies and create subtitles for videos.

More concerning, they said, is a rush by medical centers to utilize Whisper-based tools to transcribe patients’ consultations with doctors, despite OpenAI’ s warnings that the tool should not be used in “high-risk domains.”

Meta has released an “open” implementation of the viral generate-a-podcast feature in Google’s NotebookLM.

Called NotebookLlama, the project uses Meta’s own Llama models for much of the processing, unsurprisingly. Like NotebookLM, it can generate back-and-forth, podcast-style digests of text files uploaded to it.

NotebookLlama first creates a transcript from a file — e.g. a PDF of a news article or blog post. Then, it adds “more dramatization” and interruptions before feeding the transcript to open text-to-speech models.