Hi Everyone. This is Take Off. We're like a hidden Easter egg in your favorite video game - surprising, delightful, and adding an extra layer of fun to your tech news consumption.

Here's what we're serving up today:

• Softbank’s $70 Billion Lottery 💰

• CashApp puts the “Cash” in the “App” 🪙💵

• Asteroids ☄️

Softbank’s $70 Billion Lottery 💰

If there’s one thing that investors love more than the term “EBITDA Positive”, it's an IPO. Unfortunately, there has been a lull in Big Tech IPOs the past couple of years.

But that’s about to change this year. Softbank owned Arm is gearing up for a listing on the NYSE targeting a valuation for ~$70 billion.

Arm sells the blueprints needed to design microprocessors and their technology is present in almost every smartphone on the planet. But as the smartphone market is stagnating, the company is targeting to go after the next gold rush.

The company is hoping to raise around $10 billion from the listing, which would make it one of the biggest tech listings ever.

Arm wants to cash in on the AI gold rush and the company is ramping up technology to target the chips industry for data centers and AI, where the profit margins are much juicier compared to the smartphone industry.

Softbank bought Arm for $32 billion in 2016 and is now ready to cash in, finally hoping for a big day.

Softbank hasn’t had good luck with some of their past investments (*cough WeWork *cough) to put it mildly.

Their revolutionary Vision Fund has been a bit blurry racking up losses of $48 Billion in the past 2 years due to some failed startups (*cough FTX *cough).

However, Masayoshi Son believes Arm’s IPO will bring back the investment company’s glory ‘ol days.

What do you think about this? Can Arm be the next Alibaba for Softbank?

Synthetic Data’s puzzle 🧩 💻️ 

Ever wished to have your cake and eat it too? Well, healthcare companies are grappling with that classic conundrum in the form of synthetic data.

Synthetic data, a dazzling brainchild of artificial intelligence, is created from real data sets. And it promises to make the painstakingly arduous drug and health research process as easy as a piece of cake while also maintaining the typical privacy and regulatory hurdles.

But, while synthetic data is revving up self-driving cars, it’s hitting roadblocks in health and drug research due to these “fab-four” reasons.

• Healthcare companies want their synthetic data to feel more like real data.

• The price tag for synthetic data is higher than a coffee in a San Francisco café.

• The vendor market is as sparse as hen's teeth.

• Privacy vs. accuracy. The more accurate the data, the more likely it is to leak.

Yikes!

Take it from Johnson & Johnson's CIO, Jim Swanson, "You can create synthetic data easily enough, but is it correlated enough to give you a specific and an accurate example? That’s the problem you have to solve."

Jokes aside, while synthetic data may have some growing pains, the future still seems bright. Who knows, we may soon find the Harry Potter of synthetic data waving his wand and solving these tricky issues.

☄️ Asteroids ☄️

The cage match is back on! Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg might duke it out in a charity cage match which will be live-streamed on X, according to Musk. 🥊 🌟 

Astra lays off 25% of workforce, reallocates engineers in an effort to fight dwindling cash reserves. Looks like the space business is not all rocket rides and stargazing. 🚀⭐

SoftBank sues IRL over ‘elaborate scheme’ that swallowed $150M. Seems IRL's user metrics weren't as 'real' as they claimed. Even Gen Z apps aren't safe from bot invasions! 🤖👻

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