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Sprint and T-Mobile finally agreed to a $26 billion merger, which would shrink the U.S. wireless market to just three national players and give Japan’s SoftBank a bigger foothold in the U.S. The newly combined company will keep the T-Mobile name and will be led by current T-Mobile U.S. CEO John Legere and T-Mobile COO Mike Sievert. Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure and Masayoshi Son, the CEO of Sprint’s parent company, SoftBank, will serve on the board of the new company. If approved, the new $146 billion entity — which will have about 100 million cellphone customers — will be controlled by T-Mobile parent company Deutsche Telekom. [Johana Bhuiyan / Recode]
T-Mobile reports first-quarter earnings today and Apple reports tomorrow. Spotify, Square and Tesla show their hands on Wednesday. [Brian Sozzi / TheStreet]
There have been twice as many tech IPOs in 2018 as at this point in 2017. Two companies took the public plunge on Friday — electronic signature startup DocuSign and software company Smartsheet began trading and saw their share prices jump some 30 percent to 40 percent. This year’s 16 IPOs (excluding Spotify, which didn’t raise any money) generated $8.3 billion for the companies; that figure was only $4.4 billion by this point in 2017. [Theodore Schleifer / Recode]
Adults on tiny electric rental scooters are terrorizing downtown San Francisco in a “Wild West situation.” In a matter of weeks, companies like Bird and LimeBike have launched upward of 2,000 dockless e-scooters in the city, resulting in sidewalk rage and a backlash from regulators and residents alike. It would be easy to write these e-scooters off as a tech fad, but attention should be been paid to the potential that e-scooters and e-bikes have to increase access to transportation and public transit in communities previously underserved by traditional solutions. [Eliot Brown / The Wall Street Journal]
By some estimates, 90 percent of American companies have been hacked. Now, in the wake of the enormous cyberattacks on Uber, Equifax, Yahoo and Sony and Russian hackers’ theft of emails from the DNC’s server, some members of Congress are trying to pass a significant revision of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that would permit companies and private citizens who are victims of cybercrimes to legally “hack back.” [Nicholas Schmidle / The New Yorker]
If you read one article about Michelle Wolf and the White House Correspondents’s Dinner, make it this one. But if you have an hour, watch her excellent HBO special. And if you have another hour, listen to Peter Kafka talk to Larry Wilmore in 2016 — the last time people were surprised that a comedian told jokes at the WHCD. [Jen Chaney / Vulture]
Here’s a rare interview with Jeff Bezos. The Amazon CEO — interviewed by the CEO of Axel Springer, which bought Business Insider, the publisher Bezos invested in years ago — talked about what it’s like to build an empire and become the richest man in the world — and why he’s willing to spend $1 billion a year to fund the most important mission of his life. [Mathias Döpfner/ Business Insider]
Top stories from Recode
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This is cool
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
