🌏 Tesla’s autopilot problem

Good morning, Quartz readers!

HERE’S WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

Doge, Pepe, and Popcat are having a collective 2024 that is no joke. The memecoin cryptocurrencies are actually doing pretty well this year.

Maybe Spirit Airlines should have never abandoned its Frontier Airlines merger. The founder of JetBlue Airways certainly thinks so.

23andMe’s CEO is betting she can overcome the company’s entire board resigning. “I think we can navigate and land this plane,” she said in an interview.

The AI industry’s going nuclear on big tech’s climate goals. Data centers that power various machine learning models require unbelievable amounts of energy.

Amazon has a solution for employees who don’t want to give up remote work. The company is telling its workers they can quit their jobs instead.

Teslas are self-driving themselves into trouble

The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration is investigating a spate of incidents where Teslas with Full Self-Driving technology were involved in crashes. One of them was fatal.

Though the electric carmaker has faced prior scrutiny for its autonomous offerings, federal regulators are still trying to get to the bottom of what keeps going wrong. The latest evaluation will involve 2.4 million Tesla models.

Does this spell trouble for Elon Musk’s car company? Quartz’s William Gavin explains what has caught the government’s eye this time.

Crypto investing looks like gambling if you squint

Trump Media shares and loads of digital currencies get a lot of attention online, but to some observers, their ubiquity belies their unstable natures. Actually putting money on them, in fact, might be more gambling than investing.

Doug Cohen, managing director at Fiduciary Trust International, is one of those observers. “Some of these meme stocks could double by the time we finish this conversation and that some people are gonna make a lot of money on that, but that’s not investing,” he said in an interview.

When does it make sense to plow some savings into that flashy asset you heard about on Reddit? Andy Mills spoke to Cohen to give people a sense of sensible action in Wall Street’s Wild West.

THIS WEEK AT QUARTZ

Look for stories about:

🌟 How to be good at giving performance reviews (by The Conversation’s Kip Holderness, Kari Olsen, and Todd Thornock)

🔋 Sam Altman’s favorite energy companies (by Britney Nguyen)

🤖 A guide to Microsoft’s AI strategy (by Jackie Snow)

👠 Fictional characters who inspired real-life fashion trends (by Madeline Fitzgerald)

🕵️ Four women who became infamous crypto fraudsters (by Vinamrata Chaturvedi)

SURPRISING DISCOVERIES

An Elon Musk political group is playing both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Future Coalition PAC is using micro-targeted online ads to simultaneously undermine Kamala Harris’s stance to Muslim voters in Michigan and Jewish voters in Pennsylvania.

Britons kinda like American football. Three London-based NFL games sold 53% of their tickets to UK-based fans. (paywall)

The trees used in the topiary arts can outlive the people who plant them. Yew saplings can continue growing for a thousand years or more. (paywall)

Tasmanian tigers might soon come back from extinction. A team of scientists want to decode the long-lost animal’s DNA and genetically modify a “hamster-sized marsupial called the fat-tailed dunnart” to make new tigers.

There’s a vacuum cleaner out there smaller than a dust bunny. Indian student Tapala Nadamuni designed one such fully functioning device that’s a mere 6.5 mm long.

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Our best wishes on a safe start to the day. Send any news, comments, geriatric topiary trees, and remote-friendly Seattle-area job offers to [email protected]. Today’s Daily Brief was brought to you by Melvin Backman and Audrey McNamara.