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Hi, this is Dror Globerman with Skip Intro: innovation, technology, and you.
This week:
- How Do You Get 35,000 Employees into the AI Car?
- Google's Gemini Spark: A Powerful Tool - with a Powerful Price Tag.
- Four Years Ago, No One Thought Musk Was on His Way to a Trillion.
- Even Now It Makes No Sense. Except for One Factor: Musk.
- You’ll Never Guess Which Book I’m Recommending Today.
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“You probably shouldn’t talk about that here, because everything’s blocked.”
That’s the boss asking me to make sure I don’t accidentally get her employees excited, during my talk, about AI tools and processes they won’t actually be allowed to use at work. Legal or Cyber Security haven’t approved them yet.
But do you really want to limit their thinking, imagination and conversation to whichever tools you happen to have right now? I ask, appealing to her better judgement. After all, you invited me because something much bigger is happening here - something that requires us to rethink the world, the business and the nature of work itself. So are we trying to teach them how to ride a bicycle, or how to understand transportation?
Usually, that does the trick. Sometimes there’s a follow-up question: But then they’ll come up with all sorts of upgrades and improvements, and start asking us to approve more tools!
Brilliant, I tell her. That’s exactly what an AI-minded person should be doing. Those are precisely the employees you want.
But what do the employees themselves want?
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A sneak peek at the first video in a series I created for Teva.
Many thanks to Michael Misrachi and Ella Khodorov at Teva, and to Yanai Zaguri, Dalit Shapira and Keren Shechter Yaffe at Experteam. A dream team.
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Let’s take this a step further.
The challenge set for me by Teva, Israel’s leading pharmaceutical company, was to create a learning programme that would persuade 35,000 employees across dozens of countries to change their habits and dive into the AI tools the company was offering them.
For the company, the benefits are obvious: greater efficiency, time saved and new opportunities created. But what’s in it for the employees themselves?
Let’s look at it from their point of view, I suggested to my colleagues at Teva. An employee who is invited to learn AI is really being given an opportunity to increase their own value in the workplace. They can move from being a static professional - and therefore vulnerable - to someone adaptable, evolving and ultimately more valuable.
What else is in it for them? It’s exciting, interesting and full of possibilities. It helps them make sense of the world. And it can help them manage their own lives far more effectively.
So I built all of that into Teva’s lessons: tools, use cases and practical tricks for work, but also for life outside work.
At first glance, that may sound slightly unusual. Your employer is helping you plan a better holiday or manage your personal finances?
Yes. Because one of the best ways to overcome people’s fear of change at work is to tap into their enthusiasm for improving their personal lives - and use that momentum to encourage them to do the same at work.
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Gemini has launched Spark in Israel - a personal AI agent that can carry out tasks around the clock for work, study and everyday life.
What sort of tasks? Scan the credit-card statements in your inbox and flag only unusual transactions. Summarise the newsletters in your email. Go through the list of children taking part in a class evening, assign them tasks, notify each one, turn everything into a table and confirm attendance with them.
For now, it’s available only on Ultra, Google’s most expensive plan, which costs USD 100 or NIS 390 a month. Hopefully that will change. In principle, you can do similar things with ChatGPT and Claude by connecting them to your email and calendar, and on a much cheaper subscription. The difference is that you generally have to trigger those tools manually from your computer, or schedule routines using Claude Cowork.
Spark runs in the cloud rather than on my computer, which means it can keep working in the background and carry out scheduled tasks even when my laptop is switched off. So you can give it conditional instructions such as: “If my flight is delayed, send me a notification,” or, “On the first of every month, pull my reported hours from the spreadsheet, generate an invoice and place it in a draft email to the right client.”
Spark can turn a single instruction into a workflow involving several agents working in parallel. Ask it to prepare you for an upcoming meeting, for example, and a research agent will scan the web for updates about the participants, a documents agent will retrieve relevant files from Google Drive, and a communications agent will review recent email exchanges to understand the context. The system then combines all of their work into one clear, organised meeting brief before you even log on.
Gemini Spark can also browse websites remotely, interact with pages, fill in forms and add products to a shopping basket on your behalf. When it reaches the final payment decision, it asks you to step in and approve it.
In other words, these are excellent capabilities - but I’m not sure they justify paying an extra NIS 330 a month.
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If Musk really mapped out this entire journey towards the trillion-dollar mark four years ago, when he bought Twitter, someone needs to find me a tasty hat - urgently.
Because when Musk was making a mess of the Twitter acquisition in the name of some dubious notion of “radical free speech”, and ended up being forced to pay roughly three times what it was worth, much of the world saw it as a narcissistic whim with no business logic whatsoever. It appeared to have grown out of a throwaway exchange on Twitter and looked capable of costing him both his fortune and his standing.
It was a bad, failing deal, and the main agenda Musk presented was essentially to take control of the swamp in which he was the chief narcissist - then make it even more toxic with violence and racism.
But was that merely a cover story for the real objective: to weld the social network together with artificial intelligence, reusable rockets and satellite internet, then spin the whole thing into stories about AI in space and the conquest of Mars, worth $2 trillion?
That was not how it was openly described at the time of the purchase. But within about two years, Musk was explicitly presenting Twitter - by then renamed X - his AI company xAI, and his rocket company SpaceX as parts of a single system: from social data, through AI models, all the way to space and Mars infrastructure.
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When Musk took the whole thing public at the end of last week, the market pounced, sending nearly $90 billion his way at a valuation of $1.77 trillion. Over the next few trading days, the shares kept soaring, almost pushing the company past the $3 trillion mark (now back at 2.42 trillion)
How unhinged is that? Put simply, there is no conventional business logic under which a company generating less than $20 billion in revenue and losing more than $4 billion a year should be worth that much.
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That surge in SpaceX shares during its first week of trading had little to do with the underlying business. It was about the owner’s bottomless virality, and about TikTok and Robinhood investors chasing the next big trend.
Musk poured more fuel on the excitement with another deal: the $60 billion acquisition of Cursor, the software that has become a central tool for programmers in the AI era. Two days later came a leak about how the US military had used Musk’s AI system, Grok, during its military campaign in Iran. That is significant. It matters. But it still does not make the numbers add up.
Then again, Musk has already shown that the normal rules of business do not seem to apply to him. In his own private economic universe, he controls everything, promises investors and users the moon, and somehow sustains fantastical valuations compared with the dry business fundamentals.
Tesla, after all, does not even rank among the world’s ten largest carmakers by sales volume, yet it is valued at roughly as much as all of them combined.
Why? Because Musk.
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"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.
The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move.
BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran".
This is the opening of George Orwell’s 1984 - a book whose title has been used so often that it has become a cliché, and which, perhaps for that very reason, people have stopped actually reading.
So here is my heartfelt recommendation: today, in June 2026, this is exactly the right moment to read 1984.
It has everything: a deeply human story, alienation and estrangement, past and future, suspense and horror. The writing is masterful. Classics do not become classics by accident.
But be warned: the parallels with our own world are chilling. Artificial intelligence and social media. Technological surveillance and control. Fake news and permanent war. Fear and hatred.
It is all there.
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