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Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX is expected to soar to a $24 billion valuation, which would make it the third-highest-valued private company in the United States, behind Uber and Airbnb. The new valuation comes courtesy of a $500 million funding round; SpaceX requires incredible amounts of money to finance its launches and to meet ambitions like city-to-city rocket travel, which SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said this week would be doable “within a decade.” [Theodore Schleifer / Recode]
Facebook is having a negative impact on society, according to Mark Zuckerberg’s former personal pollster, Tavis McGinn. After tracking the public’s perception of CEO Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg, McGinn left Facebook after six months to launch his own independent polling company, Honest Data. In a recent survey, McGinn found that Facebook is not well-regarded in many parts of the world; 32 percent of Americans — the equivalent of 54 million people — considered Facebook less of a societal ill than Marlboro cigarettes but worse than McDonald’s fast food. [Rani Molla and Kurt Wagner / Recode]
We’re not quite done talking about Facebook. After two days of testimony before Congress, here’s a list of all 43 things Zuckerberg said he and his team will follow up on. And on the latest episode of the Too Embarrassed to Ask podcast, Recode’s Kurt Wagner and The Verge’s Casey Newton offer a first-person recap of Zuckerberg’s marathon testimony and talk about whether Facebook will be regulated.
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek is coming to the Code Conference in May. This will be Ek’s first public interview since taking his streaming music company public this month. [Peter Kafka / Recode]
WeWork is paying $400 million for Chinese co-working startup Naked Hub. It’s WeWork’s sixth acquisition in the past eight months. Most of the deals have been outside of WeWork’s core business of renting out work space, from education tech to apps for construction workers. Check out Recode’s ongoing list of WeWork’s acquisitions. [Shirin Ghaffary / Recode]
We check our phones an average of 47 times a day — every 19 minutes of our waking lives — and spend roughly five hours total peering at their silvery glow. Does that count as addiction or obsession? A new Venice Beach-based startup called Boundless Mind, started by former Google employee Tristan Harris and early Facebook investor Roger McNamee, wants to break Silicon Valley’s unique business model, which relies on keeping us in the thrall of our screens. [Haley Sweetland Edwards / Time]
Top stories from Recode
ESPN is launching ESPN+, its $5 streaming service that is not ESPN.
Disney has big plans to sell stuff directly to consumers. This is a first step.
It was once a hot market. Is it still?
This is cool
Amazon apologizes for shipping 10,000 copies of James Comey’s book to the White House. (Not really.) (Here’s the NYT review. Comey narrates the audiobook!)
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
