Good morning, Quartz readers!
Here’s what you need to know
Hong Kong is behind Bitcoin’s latest revival. The cryptocurrency rebounded yesterday after Hong Kong approved its first spot Bitcoin and Ether exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
OpenAI is expanding into Asia. Its first office on the continent will be in Tokyo, and Japanese businesses will get early access to a custom GPT-4 model.
Trump Media stock is plummeting as it plans to issue millions of more shares. The audit firm of the company behind former President Donald Trump’s Truth Social is also under new scrutiny.
In other stock news, Salesforce and Informatica investors aren’t thrilled about the companies’ potential tie up. Shares of both organizations were down yesterday. Big bank stocks, on the other hand, had a dandy day.
Everything you need to know about Tesla’s layoffs
Tesla decided Mondays aren’t already hard enough and dished out lots of bad news to employees and investors yesterday.
Three of the most important takeaways:
👋 More than 10% of Tesla’s global workers (14,000 people) are being laid off
👋👋 Key Tesla leaders are calling it quits, raising succession concerns
🤤 Tesla is “lean, innovative and hungry for the next growth phase cycle,” CEO Elon Musk said in a leaked memo to staff
And if that wasn’t a big enough day for Musk, he also said all new X users may have to pay to post.
Charted: Wall Street’s Reddit expectations aren’t reality
Reddit’s stock price fell to a new low yesterday.
But Wall Street has much, much higher ambitions.
What’s going on? Quartz’s Laura Bratton looked at the growing discrepancy.
More from Quartz
🫧 The AI craze is no dot-com bubble. Here’s why
🍗 Bojangles is coming to California for the first time
🎵 Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway keeps buying up Liberty Sirius XM stock
🥾 L.L. Bean is laying off employees as customers move toward online shopping
⚡ BP is scaling back its electric vehicle charging ambitions
🕵️ Microsoft is ‘ground zero’ for foreign state-sponsored hackers, executive says
Surprising discoveries
A million returns are sent to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service every hour on Tax Day. That’s with 70% of the country’s expected returns having already been submitted as of April 5.
An orbital garbage truck is trying to get rid of space debris from 2009. An idea for a new TV show: Space junk hunters.
Pyrite, known as fool’s gold, is actually worth something. The metal may contain lithium, which is in high demand.
Believe it or not, scientists are still looking for a ninth planet. They haven’t found it in 78% of the places it could be, but there’s still a chance it’s in hiding.
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Our best wishes for a productive day. Send any news, comments, orbital trash bins, and celestial hiding places to talk@qz.com. Today’s Daily Brief was brought to you by Morgan Haefner.