The Daily Crunch 12/9/16

A new chief executive at Tinder, a lawsuit dredging up texts between Marc Andreessen and Mark Zuckerberg and the passing of an American hero. It's The Daily Crunch for December 9, 2016. (Also, it took an incredible amount of restraint to avoid beginning this newsletter with a "swipe right" pun.)

1. Sean Rad steps down as Tinder CEO again

This is the second time Rad has left the top job at Tinder, though this time he said it's more voluntary. The CEO seat will be filled by Greg Blatt, who's already CEO of parent company Match, while Rad leads a new branch called Swipe Ventures, which will be focused on mergers and acquisitions.

2. Breaking News will shut down on Dec. 31

NBC said it's shutting down Breaking News, the social media newswire that it acquired in 2011. Apparently the company wasn't able to find an effective way to monetize the service. In an internal memo, NBC said it would try to find new roles for the team of around 20 people.

3. Marc Andreessen faces criticism for Zuckerberg texts

New court filings uncovered by Bloomberg show that texts sent by Facebook board member Marc Andreessen to CEO Mark Zuckerberg are being used to argue that Andreessen was protecting the Facebook CEO instead of shareholders. These messages — such as "this line of argument is not helping" and "now we're cooking with gas" — were supposedly sent during conference calls where a committee was meant to be negotiating with Zuckerberg over his voting control of the company.

4. R.I.P. John Glenn

Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, died yesterday. TechCrunch's John Biggs argues that in our era, "We need thinkers and doers and makers and men and women who are not afraid to switch the manual. We need more John Glenns."

5. Nvidia cleared to test self-driving cars

There's a new name on the list of companies that have approval from the California Department of Motor Vehicles to test self-driving cars: Nvidia. It sounds like the graphics card-maker isn't planning to manufacture cars itself, at least not on a mass scale, but it does supply processing units for vehicles built by other companies. To improve those systems, it's building its own test cars.

6. In-flight calls aren't safe from NSA eavesdropping

If you thought you could avoid government snooping by making sensitive calls while in-flight, well, you were wrong, according to a new report from Le Monde and The Intercept. In fact, according to previously unreported content from the files leaked by Edward Snowden, the NSA and its British counterpart GCHQ have a specific program dedicated to tracking targets while they're in the air.