The tech industry is still reeling from massive workforce reductions in 2025. According to a comprehensive report by TechCrunch, over 22,000 employees have already been laid off this year, with February alone seeing more than 16,000 cuts.
Major players across the sector including Microsoft, Google, Intel, Amazon, Apple, and Rivian have announced waves of layoffs, citing automation, AI adoption, and restructuring as key drivers. Startups haven’t been spared either, with companies like GupShup, Bumble, and Eigen Labs reducing staff by significant percentages.
The layoffs span all areas of tech, from software engineering and AI research to sales and marketing, illustrating a sweeping recalibration of the industry amid economic pressures and technological shifts.
TechCrunch continues to maintain a live tracker of layoffs, offering insight into which companies are shrinking and how these changes could shape the future of tech innovation.
For the full breakdown of tech layoffs in 2025, see the original TechCrunch report here.
SpaceX is reportedly preparing a secondary share sale that could value Elon Musk’s rocket company at $800 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal. This would double its most recent $400 billion valuation and surpass OpenAI, making SpaceX the most valuable private company in the United States.
The scale of the offering has not been disclosed, and SpaceX has not provided a comment.
Mega-Valuations in Private Markets
The potential $800 billion valuation reflects the growing trend of mega-valuations in private markets, where startups achieve public-market-scale valuations without going public. Companies like OpenAI, currently valued at $500 billion, and Anthropic, which surged to $350 billion after major investments from Microsoft and Nvidia, highlight how secondary sales provide liquidity for investors while avoiding the scrutiny of quarterly earnings reports.
These secondary offerings allow founders and early investors to cash out while keeping companies private and maintaining operational flexibility.
SpaceX’s Market Dominance
Founded in 2002, SpaceX dominates commercial rocket launches and operates Starlink, its satellite internet service with over 8 million customers worldwide as of November 2025. The company’s dual focus on space exploration and global connectivity has made it a key player in both commercial and government aerospace sectors.
Elon Musk’s vision for SpaceX combines ambitious technological goals, like reusable rockets, with commercial viability, as evidenced by Starlink’s rapid expansion and growing customer base.
Why This Matters
If the secondary sale goes through, SpaceX will set a new benchmark for private company valuations in the U.S., surpassing tech and AI rivals. It also underscores the increasing value of space-related ventures in the private sector, as investors anticipate growth in satellite internet, commercial launches, and interplanetary exploration.
Mega-valuations like this highlight the intense competition among private companies in technology and space, signaling a new era where innovation and market dominance can occur outside public markets.
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When Manuele Aufiero was a child, his parents would take him hiking along a reservoir in northern Italy. It was not just a lake to him. It was alive. Pumps would lift water up when electricity was cheap and let it rush down to generate power when cities needed energy.
That simple idea of moving water uphill and downhill is the foundation of pumped storage hydropower, one of the oldest and most reliable ways to store electricity. Across the world, these reservoirs hold roughly 8,500 gigawatt hours of energy. They act like giant batteries, balancing the ups and downs of solar and wind.
But there is one big problem. Pumped hydro only works where the land allows it. You need mountains, valleys, and water. There are only so many places left to build one.
“I am in love with pumped hydro,” Aufiero told TechCrunch. “It’s just not enough to keep up with renewables.”
So he took the idea somewhere no one had gone before, under the sea.
Aufiero co-founded Sizable Energy, a startup that wants to move the concept offshore. Instead of carving dams into mountains, Sizable builds flexible reservoirs that float and sink in deep water. The company recently raised 8 million dollars in a round led by Playground Global, with backing from EDEN/IAG, Exa Ventures, Satgana, Unruly Capital, and Verve Ventures.
At first glance, Sizable’s design looks like an hourglass. One soft reservoir floats on the surface while another sits on the seabed. A tube connects them, along with a series of turbines. When electricity is cheap, those turbines pump salty water from the bottom up. When the grid needs power, the process reverses the dense brine falls back down, spinning the turbines and generating electricity.
From a physics standpoint, Aufiero says, it is like lifting a heavy block of salt. But instead of cranes and cables, Sizable dissolves the salt in water. The energy is stored as potential weight rather than chemistry, and that makes it scalable and reusable.
On land, each pumped hydro site must be custom-built for its location. Offshore, every Sizable system can be identical. That uniformity means mass production, faster installation, and lower costs.
Sizable has already tested small-scale models in wave tanks and off the coast of Reggio Calabria, Italy. The company plans to deploy a full demonstration unit by 2026 and several commercial sites soon after. Each turbine can generate up to seven megawatts, and deeper ocean sites can store far more energy.
The cost target is about twenty euros per kilowatt hour, roughly one tenth the price of large grid batteries today.
That price could make ocean-based storage a powerful partner for offshore wind projects, which already share transmission lines back to shore. But the same system could connect to any coastal grid as long as the water is deep enough, at least five hundred meters.
“We believe that long duration energy storage is required not only for renewable integration but also to make the grid resilient,” Aufiero said. “We need something new.”
If it works, Sizable Energy could open an entirely new category of energy infrastructure. The ocean is vast. Using it as a global storage network could stabilize renewables at scale, cut costs, and reduce the need for expensive lithium-based systems.
For now, the company is focused on proving it can operate safely and reliably in real ocean conditions. But if Sizable succeeds, it could redefine how the world thinks about storing power not just in batteries, but in water itself.
Read the original report by Tim De Chant at TechCrunch.
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A shocking new report has revealed that data brokers were selling the phone location data of European Union officials, exposing what experts now call the EU phone data breach. The discovery has raised urgent questions about whether Europe’s privacy protections work at all.
Journalists across Europe obtained a dataset from a commercial broker that included 278 million location points. Inside were traces from hundreds of government phones, including those used by senior officials working at the European Commission and European Parliament.
The EU phone data breach included thousands of markers that showed where top policymakers lived, worked, and traveled. All of it came from ordinary apps that quietly sent users’ coordinates to data brokers, who then sold the information to advertisers, governments, and private buyers.
According to the report by Netzpolitik, over 2,000 data points belonged to 264 officials, and nearly 6,000 markers came from 750 phones used inside the Parliament. That means the movement of key decision-makers could be reconstructed in detail.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was meant to make such practices impossible. Yet, as this EU phone data breach proves, the data trade continues to thrive in Europe because enforcement remains weak. Regulators rarely act against data brokers who claim user consent, even when that consent comes from buried app permissions.
Following the revelation, the European Commission issued new internal guidance to protect staff from tracking. But experts say this is only a temporary fix. “Once location data is sold, it cannot be taken back,” said a privacy researcher. “The EU phone data breach shows that even regulators are not safe.”
Last year’s Gravy Analytics incident in the United States revealed similar patterns. That breach exposed the movements of millions of people, proving how location data can easily be used for surveillance, blackmail, or manipulation.
Device makers like Apple and Google have since added features that anonymize tracking IDs, but these safeguards only work going forward. The data already in circulation from the EU phone data breach cannot be erased.
The breach highlights a growing irony. Europe built its reputation on privacy leadership, but the very institutions enforcing those laws are now caught in their own surveillance net.
Read the original coverage at TechCrunch.
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