Welcome back to Lately, The Globe’s weekly tech newsletter. If you have feedback or just want to say hello to a real-life human, send me an e-mail.
In this week’s issue:
🤑 Tesla shareholders approve Elon Musk’s nearly US$1-trillion pay package
🕵🏻 An overlooked subscription fee could get even pricier
🤖 Federal budget outlines a plan for artificial intelligence
🎶 New lawsuit against Spotify alleges “billions” of fraudulent streams
TESLA
Tesla shareholders approve Elon Musk’s US$1-trillion compensation plan
The face of (possibly) the world's first trillionaire.Evan Vucci/The Associated Press
On Thursday, Tesla shareholders approved a nearly US$1-trillion pay package to Elon Musk, the largest corporate payout in history that could also turn Musk into the world’s first trillionaire.
But there’s a catch: Musk will need to meet some lofty milestones first, including growing Tesla’s stock market valuation to US$8.5-trillion from around US$1.4-trillion over the next 10 years, while also hitting multiple sales targets for robotaxis and humanlike robots. The proposal was approved with 75 per cent of shareholder support. Shares of Tesla rose modestly, about 1 per cent, in after-hours trading.
The approved pay plan is an endorsement of Musk’s vision of morphing the EV maker into an AI and robotics juggernaut, and also aims to quell investors’ concerns that the CEO had become too preoccupied with his political affairs.
But detractors have aired concerns that the pay package gives too much wealth and power to one person. Even Pope Leo XIV has weighed in, saying in an interview with the Catholic news site Crux that the pay package exemplifies society’s wealth disparity. According to Bloomberg’s billionaire tracker, Musk is worth more than $460 billion, making him the richest person in the world.
GOVERNMENT
Federal budget outlines AI plans
Prime Minister Mark Carney has been bullish on artificial intelligence since he was first elected: he appointed Canada’s first-ever minister of AI, Evan Solomon, and later signed a non-binding deal with Toronto firm Cohere to look for ways to deploy the technology across the public sector. This week, Carney’s first federal budget laid out plans for expanding the use of the technology across the government’s vast operations.
The budget tasks Solomon with identifying and negotiating “new promising AI infrastructure projects” with local industry. The budget earmarks a $925.6-million commitment over five years to build large-scale sovereign compute capacity – Canadian-owned and operated data centres for cloud computing and AI – though $800-million of that was set aside in the 2024 budget.
The budget also pledged to introduce a federal framework to regulate the issuance of stablecoins – cryptocurrencies pegged one-to-one to fiat currencies like the Canadian dollar, or commodities. The plan follows warnings from the Bank of Canada and industry groups that the country was falling behind in the race to modernize payments.
THE CLOUD
The shrinking free cloud storage
If it feels like your Google Drive, iPhone or smartwatch is constantly warning that you’re “almost out of storage,” know that you’re not alone. As the Globe’s consumer affairs reporter Mariya Postelnyak writes this week, major companies are trimming their free storage tiers, while at the same time changing default settings to upload more data to the cloud. For example, Microsoft used to save documents to your local computer, but now the default is uploading those files to the cloud.
As we spend more of our lives online, we’re likely to spend more on cloud storage, Postelnyak writes: “And with just a handful of companies dominating the market, the biggest players are cashing in.” If you need to do a digital audit of your storage, some apps can make the process less tedious. Postelnyak recommends Clever Cleaner, which helps you delete duplicate photos for free, as well as Slider and Swipewipe. Read the full story here.
What else we’re reading this week:
The inside story of how Gen Z toppled Nepal’s leader and chose a new one on Discord (WIRED)
Why Gen Z is addicted to location sharing (Maclean’s)
What happened when small-town America became data center, U.S.A. (Wall Street Journal)
Adult Money
PLANNING
Hearth Display, $975
This centralized family is pricey, but promises to offload the burden of scheduling.Hearth Display/Supplied
With the feverish pace of modern life, families are relying on a growing array of high-tech tools to help them navigate days scheduled to the hilt. As my colleague Zosia Bielski writes, these solutions include specialized smartphone calendars; apps designed to manage numerous sports teams and other extracurriculars; and centralized digital planners like Hearth Display.
Hearth is a large digital calendar that colour codes commitments and to-dos, and nudges children to “take charge of their day, take ownership over their own responsibilities,” according to the company’s website. Using AI, it uploads existing calendars onto its centralized screen, scans e-mails, paper itineraries and screenshots of texts.
Culture radar
STREAMING
Lawsuit against Spotify claims Drake’s streaming numbers inflated
A new lawsuit claims Drake's Spotify streaming numbers are fraudulent.Sammy Kogan/The Canadian Press
A new class action lawsuit against Spotify alleges that the company ignored fraudulent streaming on its platform, calling out Drake’s streaming numbers specifically. Filed in California District Court over the weekend, the lawsuit states that “billions of fraudulent streams are generated from fake, illegitimate, and/or illegal methods,” and that this scheme “causes massive financial harm to legitimate artists, songwriters, producers and other rightsholders.”
On Spotify, royalties are paid out not per individual stream, but through a “streamshare” model where subscription and ad dollars are decided based on an artist’s share of the total streams. Therefore the most popular artists on the platform, such as Drake, get the largest pool of money.
Although Drake is not a defendant in the case, the lawsuit claims that hundreds of thousands of the rapper’s streams were from bot accounts and other accounts located in “areas whose population could not support” the high volume of streams. The suit’s lead plaintiff is rapper RBX, who is also a cousin of Snoop Dogg.