Will Netflix’s $82.7 billion deal to acquire Warner Bros. get approval from federal regulators?

While Paramount was assumed to be the frontrunner to acquire the storied movie studio thanks to CEO David Ellison’s connections to the Trump administration, new reporting in Bloomberg and The Hollywood Reporter suggests that Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos met with President Donald Trump to discuss a potential deal in November.

Trump reportedly told Sarandos that Warner Bros. should sell to the highest bidder, and the Netflix executive seems to have left the meeting convinced that the president would not immediately oppose the acquisition.

Bloomberg also reports that Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav was reluctant to sell the company and surprised when Paramount began to explore an acquisition — if nothing else, he’d expected Ellison to wait until the studio completed a planned split of its movie and streaming businesses from its cable networks.

Ultimately, Warner Bros. said it would consider other bids, leading to a competitive process that Netflix won — although Paramount could still keep its hat in the ring with a hostile bid.

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Another week, another round of announcements about robotaxis either launching or planning to in cities. 

Let’s take stock. Waymo started testing its autonomous vehicles (with a safety monitor) in Philadelphia and will start manual driving to collect data in Baltimore, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh; Uber and Avride launched a robotaxi service in Dallas that will initially include a human safety operator behind the wheel; and the California Department of Motor Vehicles released revised rules that would allow companies to test and eventually deploy self-driving trucks on public highways in the state.

Autonomous vehicle tech is scaling and the pace is quickening. But should it? 

As autonomous vehicle tech percolates into the cityscape, so has the criticism and challenges. A couple of recent incidents illustrate this point. 

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has asked Waymo for more information about its self-driving system and operations following reports from the Austin School District that its robotaxis illegally passed school buses 19 times this year. The agency already opened an investigation into Waymo’s performance around school buses.

Then there is KitKat, the bodega cat that died after a Waymo robotaxi ran him over on October 27. The company was already facing criticism over the event. And now it might escalate thanks to new video. The NYT tracked down surveillance video that shows a woman crouching beside the Waymo trying to lure KitKat to safety before the vehicle suddenly pulled away.

A little bird

A lot of changes have been happening at Lucid Motors recently, according to some little birds. 

As many of you already know, the company has lost a number of top executives, including former CEO and CTO Peter Rawlinson and most recently, chief designer Eric Bach. Lucid, which is in the middle of ramping up production of its Gravity SUV, has patched some of these vacancies with a mix of internal promotions and outside hires.

And the changes keep coming. A few little birdies told us this week that a handful or more of top managers on its software and electrical teams were let go, including two senior directors who started with Lucid around a decade ago.

Got a tip for us? Email Kirsten Korosec at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com or my Signal at kkorosec.07, or email Sean O’Kane at sean.okane@techcrunch.com.

Deals!

Electric aircraft maker Beta Technologies, which went public last month, is carving out a nice little supplier business for itself. Which is fitting since the Vermont-based company is aiming to be an OEM to the aviation sector.

The company locked in a deal to supply air taxi company Eve Air Mobility with its electric pusher motors. Beta says the agreement is a potential 10-year opportunity valued at $1 billion. 

Of course, “potential” is an important hedge. That $1 billion is not guaranteed, even if shareholders translated it as such (stocks popped 8% following the news). Still, Beta is finding a near-term revenue path as it continues to work toward the commercial certification of its electric aircraft with the Federal Aviation Administration.

The company also reported its third-quarter earnings this week. Beta saw its revenue more than double to $8.9 million from the same quarter last year. Its net losses have also grown. Beta reported net losses of $452 million in the third quarter, a more than fivefold increase from the same year-ago period. 

Other deals that got my attention …

Autolane, a Palo Alto-based startup developing the “air traffic control” for autonomous vehicles, raised $7.4 million in a round led by VC firms Draper Associates and Hyperplane.

Element Fleet Management, an automotive fleet manager, acquired San Francisco-based connected vehicle payments company Car IQ. The terms weren’t disclosed, but sources with information on the deal told TechCrunch the acquisition price was $80 million. History lesson: back in 2024, Canada-based Element Fleet Management acquired fleet optimization software startup Autofleet for $110 million.

ExploMar, a China-based developer of electric propulsion systems for boats, raised $10 million in a Series A round. The investment was jointly led by private equity funds and a listed company in China (not disclosed), with existing shareholder DCM Ventures continuing to participate. 

Heven AeroTech, a startup developing hydrogen-powered drones, raised $100 million in a Series B round led by American quantum computing company IonQ. The company’s post-money valuation is now more than $1 billion. Texas Venture Partners also participated. 

Wayve, the buzzy U.K. self-driving startup backed by Microsoft, Nvidia, and SoftBank Group, acquired German startup Quality Match, which analyzes data used to train AI models for automated driving. Terms weren’t disclosed. 

Notable reads and other tidbits

Amazon is considering ending its long-standing contract with the United States Postal Service and building out its own competing nationwide delivery network.

Tesla owners can text and drive with the latest version of the company’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) driver-assistance software, despite the fact that it’s illegal to do so in most states.

Grand Theft Auto Online has added robotaxis from a fictional-yet-familiar company dubbed “KnoWay,” whose sole purpose appears to be wreaking havoc.

Nvidia announced Alpamayo-R1, an open reasoning vision language model for autonomous driving research.

TechCrunch’s Europe-based reporter Anna Heim gives an inside look at a drone delivery partnership in Finland.

The Trump administration said it will lower fuel economy standards for cars and light trucks sold in the United States, arguing it will make vehicles more affordable. There’s a trade-off, though. Consumers could end up paying more for gas.

The reduction essentially brings vehicles below what they’re achieving already. The proposal would roll fleet-wide fuel economy to 34.5 miles per gallon for 2031 model-year cars. The previous fuel economy standard, set under the Biden administration, mandated fuel economy of 50.4 mpg by 2031. In 2024, automakers had to average 30.1 mpg across their fleets, which they beat, delivering 35.4 mpg, according to CAFE calculations.

One more thing …

Back before Thanksgiving, we did a poll in the Mobility newsletter asking, “When do you expect robotaxis to reach a tipping point of mass adoption that will affect how people move from Point A to Point B?” Most readers picked “before the end of the decade,” which received 47.2% of the vote, followed by the “2030s.” Based on your votes, there appears to be low confidence that 2026 will be the year of the tipping point.

Sign up for the Mobility newsletter to participate in our polls!

A year after being pushed out of Intel, Pat Gelsinger is still waking up at 4 a.m., still in the thick of the semiconductor wars — just on a different battlefield. Now a general partner at venture firm Playground Global, he’s working with 10 startups. But one portfolio company has captured an outsized share of his attention: xLight, a semiconductor startup that last Monday announced it has struck a preliminary deal for up to $150 million from the U.S. Commerce Department, with the government set to become a meaningful shareholder.

It’s a nice feather in the cap of Gelsinger, who spent 35 years across two stints at Intel before the board showed him the door late last year owing to a lack of confidence in his turnaround plans. But the xLight deal is also shining a spotlight on a trend that’s making people in Silicon Valley quietly uncomfortable: the Trump administration taking equity stakes in strategically important companies.

“What the hell happened to free enterprise?” California Governor Gavin Newsom asked at a speaking event this week, capturing the unease that’s rippling through an industry that has long prided itself on its free-market principles.

Speaking at one of TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC events at Playground Global, Gelsinger — who is xLight’s executive chairman — seemed unbothered by the philosophical debate. He’s more focused on his bet that xLight can solve what he sees as the semiconductor industry’s biggest bottleneck: lithography, the process of etching microscopic patterns onto silicon wafers. The startup is developing massive “free electron lasers” powered by particle accelerators that could revolutionize chip manufacturing. If the technology works at scale, that is.

“You know, I have this long-term mission to continue to see Moore’s law in the semiconductor industry,” Gelsinger said, referencing the decades-old principle that computing power should double every two years. “We think this is the technology that will wake up Moore’s law.”

The xLight deal is the first Chips and Science Act award under Trump’s second term, using funding earmarked for early-stage companies with promising technologies. Notably, the deal is currently at the letter of intent stage, meaning it’s not finalized and details could still change. When pressed on whether the funding could end up being double the announced amount — or potentially not materialize at all — Gelsinger was candid.

“We’ve agreed in principle on the terms, but like any of these contracts, there’s still work to get done,” he said.

The technology xLight is pursuing is pretty serious in both scale and ambition. The company plans to build machines roughly 100 meters by 50 meters — about the size of a football field — that will sit outside semiconductor fabrication plants. These free electron lasers would generate extreme ultraviolet light at wavelengths as precise as 2 nanometers, far more powerful than the 13.5 nanometer wavelengths currently used by ASML, the Dutch giant that utterly dominates the EUV lithography market.

“About half of the capital goes into lithography,” Gelsinger explained of the entire semiconductor industry. “In the middle of a lithography machine is light. . . [and] this ability to keep innovating for shorter wavelength, higher power light is the essence of being able to continue to innovate for more advanced semiconductors.

Leading xLight is Nicholas Kelez, whose background is unusual for the semiconductor world. Before founding xLight, Kelez led quantum computer development efforts at PsiQuantum (a Playground Global portfolio company) and spent two decades building large-scale X-ray science facilities at national labs including SLAC and Lawrence Berkeley, where he was Chief Engineer for the Linac Coherent Light Source.

So why is this viable now when ASML abandoned a similar approach almost a decade ago? “The difference was the technology wasn’t as mature,” explained Kelez, who was speaking at the event alongside Gelsinger. Back then, only a handful of extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machines existed, and the industry had already sunk tens of billions into the incumbent technology. “It just wasn’t the time to take on something completely new and orthogonal.”

Now, with EUV ubiquitous in leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing and existing light source technology hitting its limits, the timing looks better. The key innovation, according to Kelez, is treating light like a utility rather than building it into each machine. “We go away from building an integrated light source with the tool, which is what [ASML does] now and that fundamentally constrains you to make it smaller and less powerful,” he said. And instead, “We treat light the same way you treat electrical power or HVAC. We build outside the fab at utility scale and then distribute in.”

The company is aiming to produce its first silicon wafers by 2028 and have its first commercial system online by 2029.

There are, naturally, hurdles, though right now, competing with ASML directly does not appear to be one of them. “We’re working very closely with them to basically design how we integrate with an ASML scanner,” Kelez said. “So we’re working with both them, as well as their providers, [like] Zeiss, who does their optics.”

When asked whether Intel or other major chipmakers have committed to purchasing xLight’s technology, Gelsinger said they have not. “Nobody has committed yet, but the work is going on with everybody on the list that you would expect, and we’re having intense conversations with all of them.”

Meanwhile, the competitive landscape is heating up. In October, Substrate — a semiconductor manufacturing startup backed by Peter Thiel — announced it raised $100 million to develop U.S. chip fabs, including an EUV tool that sounds awfully similar to xLight’s approach. Gelsinger doesn’t see them as direct competition though. “If Substrate is successful, they could be a customer for us,” he said, offering that Substrate is focused on building a full-stack lithography scanner that would ultimately need a free electron laser, which is exactly what xLight is developing.

Gelsinger’s relationship with the Trump administration adds another layer to the story. He brought up xLight to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick back in February, before Playground funded the startup and before Lutnick was confirmed. At that point, Kelez says, he’d already spent more than a year pitching xLight to the government as a way to bring chip manufacturing back to the U.S., but the new arrangement has drawn criticism from some who view the administration’s approach as overreach.

Gelsinger is unapologetic, framing it as necessary for national competitiveness. “I measure it by the results,” he said. “Does it drive the results that we want and that we need to reinvigorate our industrial policies? Many of our competitive countries don’t have such debates. They’re moving forward with the policies that are necessary to accomplish their competitive outcomes.”

He pointed to energy policy as another example. “How many nuclear reactors are being built in the US today? Zero. How many being built in China today? 39. Energy policy in a digital AI economy equals the economic capacity of the nation.”

For xLight, the government stake comes with minimal strings attached. The Commerce Department won’t have veto rights or a board seat, says Kelez (pictured above). “No information rights, nothing,” Gelsinger adds. “It’s a minority investment, in a non-governing way, but it also says we need this company to succeed for national interest.”

xLight has raised $40 million from investors including Playground Global and is planning another fundraising round next month, in January. Unlike fusion or quantum computing startups that need billions, Kelez said xLight’s path is more manageable. “This is not fusion or quantum,” he said. “We don’t need billions.”

The company also signed a letter of intent with New York to build its first machine at the New York CREATE site near Albany, though that agreement also needs finalization.

For Gelsinger, xLight is clearly more than just another portfolio company. It’s a chance to cement his relevance in the semiconductor industry that he helped build, even if his methods put him at odds with Silicon Valley’s traditional ethos.

Asked about navigating his principles in the current political environment, Gelsinger retreated to a more technocratic view of corporate leadership — one where the money is from the U.S. government, administrations are temporary, and CEOs must remain above the fray.

“CEOs and companies should neither be Republican or Democrat,” he said. “Your job is to accomplish the business objective, serve your investors, serve your shareholders. That is your objective. And as a result, you need to be able to figure out what policies are beneficial on the R side or what policies are beneficial in the D side, and be able to navigate through them.”

He added separately of that $150 million from the Trump administration, “Taxpayers will do well.”

When asked if working across 10 startups is enough for someone who used to run Intel, Gelsinger was emphatic. “Absolutely. The idea that I can now influence across such a wide range of technologies — I’m a deep tech guy at the core of who I am. My mind is so stretched here, and I’m just grateful that the Playground team would have me to join them and let me make them smarter and be a rookie venture capitalist.”

He paused, then added with a grin: “And I gave my wife back her weekends.”

It’s a nice thought, though anyone who knows Gelsinger’s reputation as a workaholic might wonder how long that arrangement will last.