Twitter Valuation By Stock-$20 Billion; Silicon Valley Bank Picked Up by First Citizens Bank; Apple Watch Glucose Monitor-Still Years Off; Meta Revives Oculus Name

Over the weekend, an internal memo leaked out indicating that Elon Musk will give stock grants to employees of Twitter based on a $20 billion valuation…less than half what he paid to acquire the platform last fall. Theverge.com reports Musk sees a ‘clear but difficult path’ to achieving a $250 billion valuation, which would eventually make Twitter’s current stock grants worth 10 times as much as they are now (if this actually ends up panning out, of course). Just like the Musk-owned SpaceX, Twitter will also reportedly let employees cash in their stock grants at specified periods. Meanwhile, Musk is looking for the culprit or culprits that leaked Twitter source code and made it public. Twitter moved on Friday to have the leaked code taken down by sending a copyright infringement notice to GitHub, an online collaboration platform for software developers where the code was posted, according to a legal filing. 

They may or may not be a white knight, but First Citizens Bank out of North Carolina has purchased all deposits and loans of Silicon Valley Bank. According to geekwire.com, the deal was reported late Sunday night by the FDIC. The 17 branches of the former SVB are now open as locations of First Citizens Bank. First bought around $72 billion in assets at a discount of $16.5 billion. Loans will not change under the new ownership. The FDIC said it will receive up to $500 million in First Citizens stock as part of the deal and expects to book around $20 billion in losses from its Deposit Insurance Fund once it fully terminates the receivership. It still holds $90 billion in securities and other assets from Silicon Valley Bank.

Non-invasive blood glucose monitoring is still a ways into the future, apparently. Appleinsider.com says that it now looks to be three to seven years away. Right now, Apple is working on its “needs to perfect the algorithms and on-board sensors,” such as a silicon photonics chip, to make it viable to use in the Apple Watch. This also includes shrinking it to the “size of a module that can fit in the small and thin package that is an Apple Watch.” That’s according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. We reported earlier that Apple has created a monitor that works, but it takes up a table top. It will be quite a challenge to condense that down to fit into part of an Apple Watch!

Meta has revived the Oculus name, at least for their VR publishing arm. It will now be Oculus Publishing, according to androidcentral.com. More than a name change is going on, too. They have over 150 titles in active development, including Yellow Neighbor VR and  what are termed ‘other highly anticipated upcoming Quest games.’ The Quest 3 will launch with 41 new apps and games. Meta has pumped cash into at least 300 virtual reality titles through Oculus Publishing now. There is an unconfirmed rumor that the company has quietly shut down the insanely expensive Metaverse project, the pet project of Mark Zuckerberg that reportedly cost some $14 billion last year and $10 billion the year before.

I’m Clark Reid, and you’re ‘Technified’ for now.