Apple Maps, Google Maps, Uber and other Apps on iPhone screen

Travel apps Google Maps, Apple Maps, and Uber on the screen of an iPhone (Getty Images)

COMMERCIAL ROUTE

Apple is planning to put advertising in the Maps app by 2026

Boosting its Services division with a few extra ad dollars sounds nice — but it could drive users away.

Apple is well known for its iconic ads. Now, the same thing that attracted many to the company in the first place could be what deters them from its products. According to a report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman published on Sunday, Apple is moving ahead with plans to put ads in its Maps app.

Like features already incorporated into rival Google Maps and other navigation services, Apple plans to sell prominent space within the app’s search results to restaurants and other businesses. Per Gurman, this will be similar to search ads in the App Store, where developers can buy promoted slots for their software based on queries. Apple also intends to employ AI for its sponsored Maps suggestions to ensure “relevant and useful” results.

Think similar

After years of eschewing ads within its offerings, Apple seems increasingly enamored by in-app marketing — perhaps as a way to bolster its all-important Services division, which keeps the Apple machine ticking along between iPhone purchases. Last year, the segment brought in ~$96 billion in revenue, roughly a quarter of the company’s total.

Home to the App Store, Apple Music, Apple TV+, iCloud, advertising, and more, Apple’s Services revenue has grown fivefold in the past decade alone. Meanwhile, per eMarketer’s estimates, Apple’s ad revenue totaled $6.5 billion last year, or 7% of its Services total.

Though Apple has historically played down its desire to move further into the ad space, in part due to its privacy-conscious data collection terms, “Apple Ads” may now be too fruitful an option for the company not to squeeze for juice (à la Walmart and Amazon), with advertising typically carrying very healthy profit margins.

Still, Apple could face a backlash if it plugs promos too strongly: users have fought against ads featuring in iOS settings; in June, many iPhone customers bemoaned Apple Wallet putting out a push notification to promote “F1: The Movie”; and we all remember that U2 album.

Rani Molla4h

Reuters: Amazon to cut 30,000 corporate jobs

Amazon is planning on cutting as many as 30,000 corporate workers starting on Tuesday, nearly 10% of its 350,000-strong corporate workforce, to “pare expenses and compensate for overhiring during the peak demand of the pandemic,” Reuters reports.

Last week, The New York Times reported Amazon’s plans to automate 75% of its operations in coming years, a move that could lead to 600,000 fewer hires.

Exclusive: Amazon targets as many as 30,000 corporate job cuts, sources say

“Without Elon, Tesla could lose significant value”

Rani Molla8h

Tesla Chair Robyn Denholm sent shareholders a letter today pleading with them to approve CEO Elon Musk’s $1 trillion pay package — which is tied to the company’s performance over the next decade — or risk losing him.

“If we fail to foster an environment that motivates Elon to achieve great things through an equitable pay-for-performance plan, we run the risk that he gives up his executive position, and Tesla may lose his time, talent and vision, which have been essential to delivering extraordinary shareholder returns,” Denholm wrote. “Without Elon, Tesla could lose significant value.”

Many have long tied Tesla’s success to retaining its longtime CEO, even Musk himself. Musk used Tesla’s earnings call last week to plea for approving his pay package, saying that it’s the voting control more than the money that’s important.

“If we build this robot army, do I have at least a strong influence over that robot army?” Musk said.

Rani Molla

AI AI AI

Meta is expected to spend a bigger share of its revenue on capex than ever before

Capital expenditures could represent 37% of Meta’s revenue in Q3, according to analyst consensus estimates.

Rani Molla10/24/25

After Tesla earnings, prediction markets think unsupervised FSD is less likely than ever to be rolled out this year

Tesla’s unsupervised full self-driving technology, which would autonomously ferry passengers around without a human driver having to pay attention, is supposed to help catapult the electric vehicle company’s valuation further into the stratosphere. It was also supposed to be available this year, but prediction markets participants, as well as former Tesla self-driving leaders, no longer think that will happen.

On Tesla’s earnings call this week, CEO Elon Musk said the company now had “clarity” on achieving unsupervised full self-driving — something he’s repeatedly said would be available at least in some markets this year.

The comments seemed to give Polymarket prediction markets participants some clarity. There, the market-implied probability that Tesla will release unsupervised FSD this year reached its lowest point since the event contract was opened in May.

The odds of it happening had been pretty high up until late June, when Tesla’s long-awaited robotaxi launched with a safety driver in the passenger seat. The unsupervised FSD event contract specifies the feature can have “no requirement for human intervention.”

Rani Molla10/24/25

Banks prepare record $38 billion debt financing to fund Oracle-tied data centers

Banks led by JPMorgan and Mitsubishi UFJ are preparing a $38 billion debt offering to fund two Oracle-tied data centers in Texas and Wisconsin, Bloomberg reports. The projects, developed by Vantage Data Centers, will support Oracle’s $500 billion Stargate AI infrastructure push with OpenAI and Nvidia.

The loans — $23.25 billion for Texas and $14.75 billion for Wisconsin — are expected to mature in four years, price about 2.5 percentage points higher than the benchmark rate, and mark the largest AI infrastructure financing to date.

Oracle executives recently said that the company anticipates cloud gross margins will reach 35% and that it expects to see $166 billion in cloud infrastructure revenue by FY 2030.

Oracle is up 1.5% premarket.

Record $38 Billion Debt Sale Nears for Oracle-Tied Data Centers