Apple’s Next Chapter, SpaceX and Cursor Strike a Deal, and Palantir’s Controversial Manifesto

This week on Uncanny Valley, the team discusses what’s next for Apple as Tim Cook steps down from his role as CEO. They also go into the reasoning behind SpaceX and Cursor’s surprising deal, and why Palantir’s self-published manifesto drew a lot of heat online. Also, we discuss why some conspiracy theorists are leaving Trump’s side, and how a scammer created an AI-generated woman to attract and grift MAGA men.

Articles mentioned in this episode:

• Tim Cook’s Legacy Is Turning Apple Into a Subscription
• MAGA Is Starting to Look Beyond Trump
• This Scammer Used an AI-Generated MAGA Girl to Grift ‘Super Dumb’ Men

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Transcript

Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.

Brian Barrett: Hey, it's Brian. Zoë, Leah, and I have really enjoyed being your new hosts these past few weeks, and we want to hear from you. If you like the show and have a minute, please leave us a review in the podcast or app of your choice. It really helps us reach more people, and for any questions and comments, you can always reach us at [email protected]. Thank you for listening. On to the show.

Leah Feiger: Zoë, welcome back.

Zoë Schiffer: Thank you. Thank you, thank you.

Leah Feiger: I missed you so much.

Brian Barrett: And I missed you the exact same amount.

Zoë Schiffer: Wow.

Brian Barrett: It's not a contest.

Zoë Schiffer: Oh, my gosh. I feel so loved. I'm going to go away more often. Absence makes the heart go fonder, as we all know, and I'm thrilled to be here. Welcome to WIRED's Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoë Schiffer, director of business and industry.

Brian Barrett: I'm Brian Barrett, executive editor.

Leah Feiger: And I'm Leah Feiger, director of politics and science.

Zoë Schiffer: This week on the show, we're saying goodbye to Apple CEO, Tim Cook, who announced that he is stepping down from the top gig at the company. And, more than just talking about his legacy at Apple, we'll be looking into what this long-awaited shift actually means for the future of one of the world's biggest companies.

Brian Barrett: We'll also get into why SpaceX and Cursor's potential $60 billion deal announced this week is pretty staggering, and we'll get into Palantir's controversial 22-point manifesto. I feel like manifesto's inherently controversial, otherwise they'd be memos that they posted on X this week.

Leah Feiger: And slowly but surely, we have been seeing certain MAGA leaders and supporters move away from Trump. We're going to break down whether these instances are actually building to something meaningful or just some wishful thinking on the behalf of our Bluesky followers.

Zoë Schiffer: So let's kick it off this week with the news that grabbed all of our attention on Monday. It had Brian Barrett calling me, I don't know, 15 times in the span of two minutes. Tim Cook officially stepping down.

Brian Barrett: If you'd picked up, Zoë, I wouldn't have had to.

Zoë Schiffer: Brian, I was trying to fill out the goddamn art request. It was really stressful. He has officially stepped down as the CEO of Apple. I think the official transition is September 1st, but the announcement is out there. John Ternus, a longtime executive at Apple, is taking over the CEO gig. This is a pretty pivotal moment for the company. I mean, Cook's legacy, I think, will be twofold, one in just honing in on Apple's financials. The company was doing really well, but he took it into the trillion dollar range, and he's also perfected its kind of operations and supply chain. He went all in on making Apple a services and subscription business with things like the App Store, iCloud, Apple Pay, all of that. So this doesn't sound quite as sexy as launching the iPhone, but in many ways he's the person that shaped Apple into what it is today. And rumors about Tim Cook stepping down have been swirling for a really long time. Back in 2024, WIRED’s Steven Levy asked him if retirement was on the horizon and Cook responded like this.

Tim Cook, archival audio: I'll do it until the voice in my head says, "It's time," and then I'll go and focus on what the next chapter looks like. My life has been wrapped up in this company, as you mentioned since 1998. This is a long time. It's the overwhelming majority of my adult life, and so it's tough to envision life without Apple.

Leah Feiger: I'm also going to do this job at wired.com until the voice in my head tells me to stop.

Zoë Schiffer: Wow. OK. Well, we're going to table that for another time.

Brian Barrett: Yeah.

Zoë Schiffer: I think what's really interesting about this moment is Apple obviously is doing phenomenally as a company, again, trillion dollars, et cetera, et cetera. However, it does feel like it has missed the boat in the AI era, and I think John Ternus' job will be in part to figure out what is Apple's place in the AI race.

Brian Barrett: Well, I think the fact that it's Ternus in general already sort of speaks to that a little bit. Ternus is a longtime hardware engineer that's continuing Apple's history of product people versus AI people, software people, and I don't think that's a bad thing. I think on the one hand, yes, 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, right?

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, it doesn't think it needs to. Its answer to this, I mean, Steven Levy interviewed Ternus somewhat recently and asked again, "What are you going to do in the AI era?" And his response was very much, "We have the iPhone. We think AI apps will exist in the App Store on iPhones, and that's going to be, in many ways, our answer." Not to say they're not going to try and embed AI in different ways, but I still think they think the primary computing platform is going to be Max and iPhones, the devices that they create.

Leah Feiger: I kind of love this because in an era where we're seeing sneaker companies—shoutout Allbirds’ pivot to AI—I like that there is this massive, very successful tech company that's saying, "Yes, we're going to live with this. We're going to make sure that our subscriptions, our products are adaptable to this clearly very important and instrumental technology, but we don't need to blow up," like Brian said, "our entire business plan to make this a core structure here."

Zoë Schiffer: I like that for Allbirds because those shoes are absolutely hideous.

Brian Barrett: A parallel might be ... So Apple never made a search engine, right? Search is one of the biggest businesses in the world. Apple never made a search engine, but Google pays Apple's billions of dollars to be the primary search engine on the iPhone. I think Apple's bet is that by building relationships with OpenAI, with Google again, with Anthropic at some point, who knows, it can have that similar, "We're just the vessel. We're just the thing." And I like their odds because all of the AI hardware that we've seen so far ... I know that Sam Altman and Jony Ive are cooking something up. I know that everybody's got some sort of pendant or speaker or whatever that they're trying to make happen. At the end of the day, I don't think that AI computing is going to replace your phone. I think fundamentally you're always going to need something with a display and apps, and the broader internet ver