Three news stories summarized & contextualized by analytic journalist Colin Wright.

Office-loan defaults near historic levels with billions on the line

Summary: More than $38 billion-worth of US office buildings are on the brink of defaulting or being foreclosed, marking the highest level of such debt-related distress in this real estate sector since 2012.

Context: Commercial property owners typically borrow half (or more) of the money they invest in a building, so the current high interest rates in the country are making life difficult for those buyers, and the reduction in demand for office buildings has made affording those increased payments tricky, as post-COVID-19 workplace realities have collapsed entire chunks of the market, and tenants are now paying closer attention to their landlords’ financial health, which—for the aforementioned reasons—is tending to be less good than it would have been several years ago, compounding this issue for some property owners.

—The Wall Street Journal

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Tesla to lay off everyone working on Superchargers and new vehicles

Summary: Following a wave of layoffs that saw more than 10% of the company’s employees fired in mid-April, EV company Tesla’s leadership has announced that two key executives—those responsible for new vehicle development and the company’s Supercharger network—have been laid off, along with most of their teams.

Context: This new batch of firings will effect around 500 employees on those two teams, plus the company’s public policy team, and this is being seen as a puzzling move, as Tesla CEO Elon Musk has recently said that he’s doubling-down on efforts to create autonomous robo-taxi networks, which would seem to require more public policy efforts, not fewer; the company’s Supercharger network is also considered to be something of a crown jewel, as it has more fast EV chargers installed around the US than every other company combined, and a recent decision to open those chargers to non-Tesla vehicles has meant more revenue for the company at a moment in which it’s seemingly hemorrhaging money due to heightened competition and the at times bizarre and highly political antics of Musk, himself.

—Ars Technica

OpenAI inks strategic tie-up with UK’s Financial Times, including content use

Summary: The Financial Times, a longstanding London-based news entity, has signed a deal with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI to license their archive for AI-training and information-gleaning purposes.

Context: This deal is being framed as a strategic partnership, and in essence it means that the Financial Times will be paid by OpenAI to allow the latter to use the former’s work to train their AI systems, while also allowing those systems to provide information from the FT to users, when relevant; OpenAI has recently made similar deals with the Associated Press, Axel Springer, and Le Monde, among others, and other AI companies are doing the same, all of them seemingly trying to get ahead of a jumble of legal actions by all sorts of publishing entities aimed at AI companies that are scraping up this sort of work without providing compensation to the owners of said work.

—TechCrunch

While word of TikTok’s potential near-future ban in the US might play a role in Snapchat’s growth in the West, the app has been seeing a huge surge in growth elsewhere around the world for years, with 90% of their new daily active users living outside the US and Canada (two of its biggest markets).

—Sherwood News

52%

Portion of the US public that uses some kind of ad-blocker on the web, according to a new survey conducted by Censuswide.

That’s up from 34% in 2022, and the number is even higher for more experienced web-users like programmers and cybersecurity experts: 72% and 76% of folks working in those trades, respectively, use ad-blockers.

—The Register

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