Wired’s Uncanny Valley podcast — hosted by executive editor Brian Barrett, director of business and industry Zoë Schiffer, and director of politics and science Leah Feiger — covered three stories in its latest episode: Apple’s CEO transition, a reported deal between SpaceX and Cursor, and Palantir posting a 22-point manifesto to X.
Note: The Wired source is paywalled and could not be verified at time of publication. The following is drawn from the publicly available episode description and summary only.
Apple’s leadership shift
Tim Cook announced he will step down as Apple CEO, with the transition set for September. John Ternus, a hardware engineering executive at Apple, is taking the top role. According to the episode description, Schiffer described Cook’s legacy as including taking the company’s financials into the trillion-dollar range and building Apple into a services and subscription business through the App Store, iCloud, and Apple Pay.
Barrett, according to the public summary, described Ternus as a hardware engineering product person — continuing Apple’s history of prioritizing product leaders. Barrett is quoted in the publicly available description as saying: “Apple is behind in this AI race. On the other hand, Apple hasn’t set fire to hundreds of billions of dollars in pursuit of a race that maybe it doesn’t even need to win.” He drew an analogy to search: Apple never built a search engine, but Google pays to be the default. Barrett’s read, per the summary, is that Apple’s bet is to occupy a similar platform position with AI, building relationships with OpenAI, Google, and potentially Anthropic.
The episode includes archival audio of Cook previously telling Wired’s Steven Levy that he would continue as CEO “until the voice in my head says ‘It’s time.’”
SpaceX and Cursor
The episode covered a reported deal between SpaceX and Cursor in which a $60 billion figure was mentioned. The publicly available summary does not detail the deal’s structure or what it means for either company.
Palantir’s manifesto
Palantir published a 22-point manifesto to X that drew attention and commentary. Barrett is described in the summary as observing that “manifestos are inherently controversial, otherwise they’d be memos.” The publicly available excerpt does not reproduce or summarize the manifesto’s contents.
The episode is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, and Pocket Casts.