We’re kicking off the week with a deep dive from this weekend into the demise of electric vehicle startup Fisker at the hands of its founders’ whims. Fisker, which was founded by famed vehicle designer Henrik Fisker, is on the brink of bankruptcy after only having delivered a few thousand electric Ocean SUVs. The history of this company is plagued by poor management and too many broken promises — and we only scratched the surface in the morning podcast.
That’s not all we talked about on today’s episode of Equity. This morning, Rebecca Bellan talked about X’s new rules to allow adult content (as long as it’s “consensually produced,” whatever that means), and why that’s problematic for the safety of other users — namely women, who are most often the targets of sexually explicit trolling and harassment. We also touched on Trump’s TikTok debut, which came in the wake of the former president’s felony conviction.
To wrap up, Bellan also discussed a story that TechCrunch published over the weekend looking into the new trend of smaller, lesser-known investors getting shares of hot private AI companies like Anthropic, xAI and Perplexity by using special-purpose vehicles, or SPVs. The result has been a Wild West, high-risk, buyer-beware situation, with SPV terms varying wildly.
Haje closed out the show with another Pitch Deck Teardown, this time looking into the Angel pitch deck for RAW Dating App. RAW just raised a $3 million friends and family round to shake up the dating scene by shedding fake, TikTok-ified, heavily filtered photos and replacing them with a more genuine, unvarnished experience.
Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. For the full episode transcript, for those who prefer reading over listening, check out our full archive of episodes over at Simplecast.
