Good morning. It’s Jason, helping fill in for Andrew, as he takes some time off after welcoming his second son into the world earlier this week.
I’m back on the East Coast, where I’m based, after co-hosting our 24th annual Brainstorm Tech event in Park City this week. At the conference, I had the opportunity to interview the founders and CEOs of innovative companies big and small, from John Furner of Walmart and Tony Xu of DoorDash, to Jeff Wilke and Chris Barman, who’ve incubated and launched the electric truck startup Slate Auto. And during networking breaks and group meals, I met other technology leaders, many of whom are working on solutions to pressing societal issues.
While the business world and the greater world continue to face myriad challenges, these conversations gave me renewed hope that technology and the people behind it can at least serve as part of the answer.
Now for today’s news.
—Jason Del Rey
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Opendoor bets big on a new CEO, and goes ‘founder mode’
Kaz Nejatian on Centre Stage during day two of Collision 2023 at Enercare Centre in Toronto, Canada.
In the meantime, Nejatian will have Opendoor’s founders—Eric Wu and Khosla Ventures’ Keith Rabois—overseeing him on the board. Wu served as Opendoor’s CEO from 2013 to 2022 and chaired the board from 2020 to 2022. Rabois, who served on the boards of Reddit and Yelp and currently serves as a director of Ramp, was appointed chairman.
In a press release, Opendoor said it was “going into founder mode” with Nejatian’s appointment and in luring Rabois and Wu back with seats on the board and new financing. Before joining Shopify, where he was COO, Nejatian cofounded and ran the payments startup Kash; prior to that, he made a brief stop at Facebook as a lead product manager.
One of Nejatian’s stock performance awards is designed like a moonshot, with seven stock price hurdles ranging from $9 to $33. The tranches only vest when the stock hits price milestones of $9, $13, $17, $21, $25, and $33.
If Nejatian can hit all those price targets, he’ll be rewarded with compensation valued at $2.78 billion—and he’ll own 11.6% of the company, double the stake Wu held when Opendoor went public through a SPAC in 2020, Farient Advisors’ vice president Eric Hoffmann told Fortune. If he misses those targets, a base salary of $1 will have to do.—Amanda Gerut
Boring Company halts Vegas tunnel work after ‘crushing’ injury
Boring Company’s tunneling operations in Las Vegas were temporarily suspended after a worker suffered a “crushing injury,” spokespeople from the local fire department and OSHA told Fortune on Thursday.
The incident took place on Wednesday evening along Paradise Road, where the Boring Co. has been working on expanding its tunnel system to the Las Vegas airport. The fire department used an on-site crane to lift the worker out of the tunnel. The department said the victim was in stable condition.
Investigations published by Fortune last year found that dozens of employees had been injured during Boring Co. projects, including the construction of the tunnel to the Wynn and Encore resorts on Las Vegas Boulevard, and that the Las Vegas monorail had to be shut down briefly after Boring Co. workers dug too close to its foundation. After Fortune’s reporting, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority started taking a more hands-on role in safety and appointed an employee to oversee their work. The CEO of the LCVCA toldFortune a few weeks ago that he was not aware of any major safety incidents since that appointment.
Boring is still awaiting permits from the city to start construction on a tunnel within city limits that would run below Las Vegas Boulevard. The company is also starting preparations for another tunnel system below the city of Nashville.
The Boring Company did not immediately respond to a request for comment. —Jessica Mathews
Blockchain lender Figure soars 24% after Nasdaq debut
Blockchain lender Figure Technology is the latest crypto company to go public. On Thursday, Figure began trading on the Nasdaq after raising $787.5 million in its IPO. The company’s shares listed at $25 but soared almost 30% before retreating slightly to close at $31.11, valuing the company at more than $6 billion.
Figure’s business centers around putting mortgages on the blockchain, which the company says speeds up the granting and funding of home loans. The company was founded in 2018. From June 2024 to June of this year, it facilitated about $6 billion in loans, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. And from January to June, it generated more than $190 million in revenue and almost $30 million in net income.
“The IPO is one step in a long process to bring blockchain to all aspects of capital markets,” wrote Mike Cagney, cofounder and CEO of Figure, in a letter to investors in the company’s prospectus.
Figure’s Nasdaq debut comes amid a hot IPO market—especially for crypto companies. In June, the stablecoin issuer Circle went public in a blockbuster IPO, and was followed by the crypto exchange Bullish, led by former president of the New York Stock Exchange Tom Farley, which went public in August.
The crypto IPO rush will soon include Gemini, the Winklevoss brothers’ exchange, which is set to go public on Friday, as well as potentially crypto ETF firm Grayscale and crypto exchange Kraken. —Ben Weiss
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Coupang chief executive officer Park Dae-jun resigned over his failure to prevent South Korea’s largest-ever data breach, which set off a regulatory and political backlash against the country’s dominant online retailer.
The company said in a statement on Wednesday that Park had stepped down over his role in the breach. It appointed Harold Rogers, chief administrative officer for the retailer’s U.S.-based parent company Coupang Inc., as interim head.
Park becomes the highest-profile casualty of a crisis that’s prompted a government investigation and disrupted the lives of millions across Korea. Nearly two-thirds of people in the country were affected by the breach, which granted unauthorized access to their shipping addresses and phone numbers.
Police raided Coupang’s headquarters this week in search of evidence that could help them determine how the breach took place as well as the identity of the hacker, Yonhap News reported, citing officials.
Officials have said the breach was carried out over five months in which the company’s cybersecurity systems were bypassed. Last week President Lee Jae Myung said it was “truly astonishing” that Coupang had failed to detect unauthorized access of its systems for such a long time.
Park squared off with lawmakers this month during an hours-long grilling. Responding to questions about media reports that claimed the attack had been carried out by a former employee who had since returned to China, he said a Chinese national who left the company and had been a “developer working on the authentication system” was involved.
The company faces a potential fine of up to 1 trillion won ($681 million) over the incident, lawmakers said.
Coupang founder Bom Kim has been summoned to appear before a parliamentary hearing on Dec. 17, with lawmakers warning of consequences if the billionaire fails to show.
Park’s departure adds fresh uncertainty to Coupang’s leadership less than seven months after the company revamped its internal structure to make him sole CEO of its Korean operations. In his new role, Rogers will focus on addressing customer concerns and stabilizing the company, Coupang said.
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Ali Ghodsi, the CEO and cofounder of data intelligence company Databricks, is betting his privately held startup can be the latest addition to the trillion-dollar valuation club.
In August, Ghodsi told the Wall Street Journalthat he believed Databricks, which is reportedly in talks toraise funding at a $134 billion valuation, had “a shot to be a trillion-dollar company.” At Fortune’s Brainstorm AI conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, he explained how it would happen, laying out a “trifecta” of growth areas to ignite the company’s next leg of growth.
The first is entering the transactional database market, the traditional territory of large enterprise players like Oracle, which Ghodsi said has remained largely “the same for 40 years.” Earlier this year, Databricks launched a link-based offering called Lakehouse, which aims to combine the capabilities of traditional databases with modern data lake storage, in an attempt to capture some of this market.
The company is also seeing growth driven by the rise of AI-powered coding. “Over 80% of the databases that are being launched on Databricks are not being launched by humans, but by AI agents,” Ghodsi said. As developers use AI tools for “vibe coding”—rapidly building software with natural language commands—those applications automatically need databases, and Ghodsi they’re defaulting to Databricks’ platform.
“That’s just a huge growth factor for us. I think if we just did that, we could maybe get all the way to a trillion,” he said.
The second growth area is Agentbricks, Databricks’ platform for building AI agents that work with proprietary enterprise data.
“It’s a commodity now to have AI that has general knowledge,” Ghodsi said, but “it’s very elusive to get AI that really works and understands that proprietary data that’s inside enterprise.” He pointed to the Royal Bank of Canada, which built AI agents for equity research analysts, as an example. Ghodsi said these agents were able to automatically gather earnings calls and company information to assemble research reports, reducing “many days’ worth of work down to minutes.”
And finally, the third piece to Ghodsi’s puzzle involves building applications on top of this infrastructure, with developers using AI tools to quickly build applications that run on Lakehouse and which are then powered by AI agents. “To get the trifecta is also to have apps on top of this. Now you have apps that are vibe coded with the database, Lakehouse, and with agents,” Ghodsi said. “Those are three new vectors for us.”
Ghodsi did not provide a timeframe for attaining the trillion-dollar goal. Currently, only a handful of companies have achieved the milestone, all of them as publicly traded companies. In the tech industry, only big tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta have managed to cross the trillion-dollar threshold.
To reach this level would require Databricks, which is widely expected to go public sometime in early 2026, to grow its valuation roughly sevenfold from its current reported level. Part of this journey will likely also include the expected IPO, Ghodsi said.
“There are huge advantages and pros and cons. That’s why we’re not super religious about it,” Ghodsi said when asked about a potential IPO. “We will go public at some point. But to us, it’s not a really big deal.”
Could the company IPO next year? Maybe, replied Ghodsi.
Palantir, the artificial intelligence and data analytics company, has quietly started working on a tech platform for a federal immigration agency that has referred dozens of individuals to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for potential enforcement since September.
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency—which handles services including citizenship applications, family immigration, adoptions, and work permits for non-citizens—started the contract with Palantir at the end of October, and is paying the data analytics company to implement “Phase 0” of a “vetting of wedding-based schemes,” or “VOWS” platform, according to the federal contract, which was posted to the U.S. government website and reviewed by Fortune.
The contract is small—less than $100,000—and details of what exactly the new platform entails are thin. The contract itself offers few details, apart from the general description of the platform (“vetting of wedding-based schemes”) and an estimate that the completion of the contract would be Dec. 9.Palantir declined to comment on the contract or nature of the work, and USCIS did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
But the contract is notable, nonetheless, as it marks the beginning of a new relationship between USCIS and Palantir, which has had longstanding contracts with ICE, another agency of the Department of Homeland Security, since at least 2011. The description of the contract suggests that the “VOWS” platform may very well be focused on marriage fraud and related to USCIS’ recent stated effort to drill down on duplicity in applications for marriage and family-based petitions, employment authorizations, and parole-related requests.
USCIS has been outspoken about its recent collaboration with ICE. Over nine days in September, USCIS announced that it worked with ICE and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to conduct what it called “Operation Twin Shield” in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, where immigration officials investigated potential cases of fraud in immigration benefit applications the agency had received. The agency reported that its officers referred 42 cases to ICE over the period. In a statement published to the USCIS website shortly after the operation, USCIS director Joseph Edlow said his agency was “declaring an all-out war on immigration fraud” and that it would “relentlessly pursue everyone involved in undermining the integrity of our immigration system and laws.”
“Under President Trump, we will leave no stone unturned,” he said.
Earlier this year, USCIS rolled out updates to its policy requirements for marriage-based green cards, which have included more details of relationship evidence and stricter interview requirements.
While Palantir has always been a controversial company—and one that tends to lean into that reputation no less—the new contract with USCIS is likely to lead to more public scrutiny. Backlash over Palantir’s contracts with ICE have intensified this year amid the Trump Administration’s crackdown on immigration and aggressive tactics used by ICE to detain immigrants that have gone viral on social media. Not to mention, Palantir inked a $30 million contract with ICE earlier this year to pilot a system that will track individuals who have elected to self-deport and help ICE with targeting and enforcement prioritization. There has been pushback from current and former employees of the company alike over contracts the company has with ICE and Israel.
In a recent interview at the New York Times DealBook Summit, Karp was asked on stage about Palantir’s work with ICE and later what Karp thought, from a moral standpoint, about families getting separated by ICE. “Of course I don’t like that, right? No one likes that. No American. This is the fairest, least bigoted, most open-minded culture in the world,” Karp said. But he said he cared about two issues politically: immigration and “re-establishing the deterrent capacity of America without being a colonialist neocon view. On those two issues, this president has performed.”
Politics8 years ago