🥷 Starbucks steals Chipotle’s CEO

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TOP STORY
🥷 Starbucks steals Chipotle’s CEO

Starbucks, you dirty dog.

Yesterday, the world’s largest coffee chain announced it had hired Brian Niccol, the current CEO of Chipotle, to be their new chief officer starting next month.

A Hall of Fame-level poach if I’ve ever seen one.

• Niccol has been the CEO of Chipotle since 2018 and has taken the Mexican Grill straight to the moon.

• Before Niccol joined the company, Chipotle's annual revenue was about $4.5 billion in 2017; by 2023, it had more than doubled to $9.9 billion.

• Since Niccol took over, Chipotle's stock has surged by over 750%.

That is one helluva run.

However, as helpful as Niccol has been for Chipotle, Starbucks might really need him more.

Starbucks lowered its financial outlook for the second time this year in April due to slower café traffic.

Last quarter:

• Starbucks’ same-store sales dropped 14% in China, their second largest market.

• Traffic to its U.S. stores fell again last quarter, dropping 6%.

However, as helpful as Niccol has been for Chipotle, Starbucks might really need him more.

• Starbucks founder Howard Schultz handpicked Laxman Narasimhan as his successor, but he has fallen short of expectations.

• Over the past 16 months since his hiring, Schultz has publicly criticized the leadership of Narasimhan and other top Starbucks executives.

So, if you think about it, this move is just leveling the playing field in the food industry, right?

TECHNOLOGY
⛓️‍💥 Google is breaking up?

Earlier this month, a federal judge ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly over online search.

Now, the Department of Justice (DOJ) is pushing to potentially break up the tech giant.

Wait, WTF? Can they even do that?

I'm not exactly sure, but what I do know is that DOJ attorneys could ask Judge Amit Mehta—the judge who ruled that Google was a monopoly—to order Google to sell portions of its business.

Here are some options for what the DOJ could do, hypothetically:

• Force Google to sell Android, the most widely-used operating system.

• Require Google to share data with rival search engines like DuckDuckGo and Bing.

• Push Google to sell parts of its business to reduce its monopoly power.

• Limit Google’s AI products to prevent unfair advantages, such as stopping the automatic copying of content for search results.

This monopolistic breakup would be the first since the attempt against Microsoft in 2001, which (obviously) didn’t end up being successful.

But there's still a long way to go before we see Google taken apart like a Lego set.

The big GOOG will be appealing the ruling, duh.

The next round of court proceedings is set for September to determine what happens next.

So, buckle up y’all.

SOCIAL MEDIA
👀 Elon Musk’s “X” busted by the EU

X will no longer be using personal data to train its quirky AI chatbot Grok in the EU after facing nine privacy complaints for training Grok without users' consent.

Late last month, X enabled a setting that would allow them to train the Grok chatbot based on user posts.

That sounds smart—except they never actually informed the users.

Cheeky, cheeky!

How’d they get caught? Last month, an extremely vigilant X user noticed the unsolicited update and decided to let the world know—what an upstanding citizen!

• This discovery eventually reached the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), which ensures that X follows GDPR rules and investigates possible violations.

• Using personal data without a legal basis is a clear violation, which is why the DPC stepped in.

But who actually made these complaints? The nine complaints against X were filed with data protection authorities in Austria, Belgium, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Spain.

Damn, Elon, it seems like all of Europe hates you right now, not just the United Kingdom.

All nine countries accuse X of breaking GDPR rules by using Europeans' posts for AI training without consent.

And Europe has already taken the next step:

The DPC has initiated legal action in the Irish High Court to stop X from using the data of 60 million EU users for AI training without their consent.

I guess it's your move now, X.