When the world was turned upside down by COVID-19, some companies suddenly found a new lease on life as we pivoted to at-home work, fitness, and everything else. Many of those companies, however, have since experienced a profound fall from grace. The Financial Times reported in May that the 50 companies with the biggest pandemic-era gains have collectively lost $1.5 trillion in market value since the close of 2020.

So where are some of those companies now, and how are they doing?

You’re Muted

Zoom is still chugging along, although its share price has fallen nearly 90% since October 2020. Ironically, it even enforced a hybrid work week, ordering staff back to the office for a minimum of two days per week. Zoom has outlived Houseparty, the social video call app that flourished during lockdowns but was shuttered in 2021.

Then there’s Peloton, which once hit a valuation of $46 billion but is closer to the $1.5 billion mark. The company has slashed costs and partnered with Amazon and hotel chains to find a new market niche for its exercise equipment, but the prognosis still isn’t good. Recent reports suggest that it might get snapped up by a private equity firm. 

The picture is more mixed for the companies that delivered to us while we were all locked down:

• As restaurants closed, DoorDash rose to prominence, commanding 67% of monthly meal delivery sales according to Bloomberg Second Measure. While it’s yet to deliver a profit, some analysts are holding out hope for 2024. Its stock is down about 52% since peaking in late 2021 but has been on the upswing for the past seven months.
• While DoorDash brought us our takeout, Amazon brought practically everything else. The e-commerce giant doubled its warehouse footprint during the pandemic to accommodate the tidal wave in demand. Once we re-emerged into the sunlight, the company realized in 2022 it had too much space and too many workers. Amazon’s share price also suffered as part of a broad selloff in tech stocks in 2022, but it’s up 19% in 2024.

Remember me? Does Clubhouse still ring a bell? In 2021, it was the hottest new audio-based chat room app in town, so hot that people were clamoring to get an invite. Unfortunately for Clubhouse, Twitter launched a clone in November 2020 called “Spaces,” eating into Clubhouse’s reputation as a place to go for big public discussions between important people. So Clubhouse did what troubled tech companies always do — it pivoted. Clubhouse said last fall it was shifting toward traditional social media, i.e. just a place for you and your friends, rather than the entire world. We’ll see if the entire world needs another WhatsApp wannabe.

Life imitates art. And so does artificial intelligence.

OpenAI recently debuted its latest edition of ChatGPT, a voice assistant called GPT-4o. The problem? One of the voices users can select, a personality called Sky, sounds eerily similar to actress Scarlett Johansson, and, specifically, her voice performance as an AI assistant in the 2013 movie Her. Too similar, says Johansson, who said she turned down an offer to provide her voice last year and is threatening legal action.

Wind Beneath Her Wings

OpenAI is no stranger to legal trouble concerning both the massive amounts of data it inputs into its large language models and the output of said LLMs. Perhaps most notably, The New York Times sued the tech firm for “mass copyright infringement” and the ​​“unlawful copying and use of The Times’s uniquely valuable works.” Johannson’s case, however, is more complicated. OpenAI says Johannson’s voice wasn’t used to develop Sky, a claim supported by a recent Washington Post investigation which found the actress whose voice was actually used. That means any legal action pursued by Johannson will likely be on grounds outside of copyright law, Kirk Sigmon, a partner at intellectual property law firm Banner & Witcoff, told The Daily Upside.

Instead, Sigmon said, Johannson’s most likely legal recourse will be on likeness rights, a slightly more nebulous corner of law that unsurprisingly is most codified in Hollywood’s home state of California. “The basic idea is you can’t use someone’s likeness… in a manner that is sort of against their will,” Sigmon said. And though OpenAI didn’t use Johannson’s voice to train Sky, the end product may be similar enough to be considered an infringement on her likeness rights (an analysis from Resemble AI’s speaker identification model found a “high similarity” between Sky and Johannson’s voice). 

In fact, Signon says, a decades-old lawsuit from another Hollywood star provides a useful history lesson:

• In 1988, Bette Midler sued Ford after it released a series of advertisements featuring a voice impersonator who sounded impeccably similar to the singer-actress.
• Eventually, Midler won the case, with an appellate court ruling that the voice-over was too similar to Midler, whose voice was famous enough to make the ads an infringement on her likeness.

Still, “the technology is moving faster than the law ever will,” Sigmon said. In other words, the saga is just the latest conflict in AI’s rapidly developing legal ramifications.

Departures: The Johannson debacle isn’t the only crisis at OpenAI. The firm has faced an exodus of high-profile leaders on its safety and compliance team, with one tweeting that “safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman surely misinterpreted the cautionary tale of  Her. Here’s hoping he has a slightly better understanding of the Terminator films.

Though it flies in the face of The Who’s 1971 hit, we probably will get fooled again.

In 2023, scammers stole a record $10 billion from Americans, according to the Federal Trade Commission, and in many cases, the swindlers were emboldened by impersonating familiar and popular companies like Amazon, Best Buy, and Apple. 

Gone Fishing

If the Frank Abignale biopic “Catch Me If You Can” taught us anything, it’s that it’s pretty easy to impersonate someone else. Just put on some aviators and a captain’s hat and — BOOM! — you’re a pilot. But in the age of digital transactions, fake emails, and burner phones, playing Pan Am dress-up is a little overkill.

Now, it’s as simple as saying you’re part of a major company that people interact with on a daily basis. Impersonation frauds were the most common scams reported to the FTC in 2023, accounting for $2.7 billion in losses. And the scams come in all different forms including requests for cryptocurrencies, bank transfers, and even Target gift cards:

• Last year, consumers submitted roughly 52,000 reports of scammers impersonating Best Buy or its Geek Squad tech support brand, making the electronics outlet the most popular choice among grifters. The second most impersonated business was Amazon, with 34,000 consumer reports, followed by PayPal with 10,000. Norton/Lifelock, Apple, Comcast/Xfinity, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo were also among the most impersonated companies. 
• Though ranking just fourth and fifth, respectively, for the number of reports, scammers impersonating Microsoft and Publishers Clearing House, famous for its oversized checks, tricked Americans out of $60 million and $49 million, respectively — the largest sums among the most impersonated companies. 

Fool Me Once, Fool Me Twice: The FTC just started enforcing a new rule that it say “gives the agency stronger tools to combat and deter scammers who impersonate government agencies and businesses, enabling the FTC to file federal court cases seeking to get money back to injured consumers and civil penalties against rule violators.” That wasn’t being done already?!