Daily Crunch: SpaceX will launch two spacecraft aboard the Falcon Heavy rocket tomorrow

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Last week was one hell of a week in startup news, and Henry wrote a particularly good summary of everything that happened, including Elon Musk’s Twitter purchase, Meta’s troubles, and a minute’s silence for self-driving cars. — Christine and hey

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Flying Chonk makes wheeeeeee: While we were all distracted by Elon Musk’s other pet project, SpaceX launched a Falcon Heavy rocket for the first time in three years. aria has more.
• Swipe right for total chaos: Glitch or not, Instagram has things to do. A number of users woke up with locked accounts this morning. We love aisha‘s caption: “Instagram rivals Twitter as today’s messiest social network.” We agree.
• circle of friends: Egyptian Fintech Money Fellows transferred $31 million in new funding for what days describes as “digitizing money circles” in which people essentially save and borrow money together as a group.

Startups and VCs

Politician-turned-venture-capitalist Bradley Tusk spoke at a recent TechCrunch Live event about how startups should approach regulation, in a session titled How to Introduce a Startup to a Regulated Market. Evan Vandenberg, Dibbs CEO and co-founder, joined the conversation with Tusk. The event is embedded here and both free and well worth seeing.

Invygo, a startup operating in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, has raised $10 million in its Series A funding as it works to expand its rental car service in the region. The Middle East-based startup has raised $14.3 million so far. Ivan reports.

And as always, there are a handful of additional stories. Only 4 this time – there were 5, but then a PR person decided to lift the embargo on an already published story and Haje got all salty and grumpy about it.

6 reasons why you shouldn’t join an accelerator

As director of Techstars’ startup pipeline, Saba Karim spends much of his time highlighting the many ways entrepreneurs can benefit from participating in an accelerator.

But is it the right choice for every founder?

“Remember, financing will solve your money problems, but not everything else,” he says. “You still have to figure out how to attract customers, find the best talent, build an incredible product, assemble a great advisory board, and get the product ready for market.”

Three more from the TC+ team:

TechCrunch+ is our membership program that helps founders and start-up teams stay ahead of the competition. Here you can sign up. Use code “DC” for 15% off an annual subscription!

BigTech Inc.

darrell When we write that Mark Zuckerberg should drop all this Metaverse nonsense and “make a new Twitter,” we want to respond with, “bite your tongue!” But really, as he puts it, “cloning the features of its competitors” is something Meta is good at, and it has the best chance of replicating the user base and monetary value as well. Zuck is unlikely to take the bait, but never say never.

It’s actually a Twitter world and we just live in it. First, Devin writes that Elon Musk has just dissolved Twitter’s board of directors and is now making it sole owner; then Ron Then we looked at what Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor can do now that he’s not on the board. Sarah reports on Twitter Blue’s problems, namely that the subscription service feels blue, that it doesn’t bring in more green. In the meantime, amanda writes about what happens when Twitter starts charging for that little blue tick, and Natasha L reports that Musk may be trying to bring Vine back. Over the weekend, Rebekah wrote about layoffs at the company.

Don’t worry, there was a lot more news:

• purify mind: To get all that Twitter out of your head, try Google’s new Doodle game. Have you ever watched your kid play Snake.io and wondered, “Will I like this?” Well, Google got into the Halloween spirit with today’s Doodle, where you can be a ghost and collect ghost flames as you go play with friends or random people. aisha writes.
• The heat is on: Amazon to remove top seller Appario from Indian marketplace after some retailers claim preferential treatment was given to sellers, Manic reports.
• We have a ticket: WhatsApp users in Bengaluru can now buy train tickets via QR code, Jagmeet reports.
• Bed, Bath & Breach: Bed, Bath & Beyond confirms a data breach that occurred when a hacker gained access to an employee’s hard drive Karly writes.
• Query this data: Ron reports on Pinecone’s new vector database capable of handling hybrid keyword semantic searches.