Elon Musk completes Twitter purchase, Meta’s in trouble and it’s time to admit self-driving cars ain’t gonna happen

The place where we point you to the hottest stories of the past seven days is called "TechCrunch Week in Review". Don't worry, Greg will be back soon, I'm stepping in front of the laptop for him.

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most read (Elon edition, somewhat)

He bought the social networking site. The platform's new owner fired the CEO, CFO, and head of legal, policy and trust on the first day. This week was no different, as months of ups and downs came to an end. Darrell put together some highlights.

Last week, Musk said he would lay off 75% of the staff at his company, but this week he said he wouldn't do that.

Darrell's headline says it all, "Apple's Elon problem could soon become Apple's Musk problem, too." Apple updated its guidelines this week and one of them seeks rent on revenue made by social networks around promoted posts.

A startup with $1 billion in sales has shut down. It's parts are being absorbed into its two main funders.

Darrell took to the site to explore the fact that there aren't going to be self driving vehicles.

The headline is " Meta is in trouble". The third-quarter results were not great. Taylor writes that Meta has quintupled down on the metaverse without examining if it even knows what users want. There are no easy takes-backs after changing the name of the company. It was a perfect word.

Haje noticed a reflection caused by the reflective chrome surrounding the phone's camera lens after taking a picture through an airplane window. It is a common use case for most photography applications, which makes it hard to complain about how bad that experience is.

audio roundup

• On Equity this week, we share with you one of Natasha Mascarenhas’s Disrupt panels. She talked to Chief co-founders Lindsay Kaplan and Carolyn Childers about the future of their private membership club for women in leadership positions.
• This week on Found, Darrell and Jordan sat down with Shanthi Rajan from construction management software company Linarc to discuss breaking into a slow-changing industry, building a team with talent across the globe and working with customers to build the most useful product possible.
• And on Chain Reaction, Anita and Jacquelyn chat about Apple’s new App Store guidelines, Reddit’s foray into the NFT space and whether the U.K.’s new prime minister will live up to the hype he’s received from the crypto community.

techcrunch+

There are a lot of tips for launching in a crowded market. The steps that will make you stand out are explained by the contributor.

The pitch deck was torn down for a project. The Palau Project was founded by a professional kite-surfer who is taking on climate change, and Haje went for tearing down pre-seed rounds.