Welcome to Axis ProRata, where we take just 10 minutes to get you smarter on the collision of tech, business, and politics.

Sponsored by Bridge Bank, be bold, venture wisely. I'm Danper Mack. On today's show, ride hail drivers suffer a new indignity, and President Trump doesn't want to talk about his alleged

role in a major media merger.

But first, Apple stops getting chippy.

So yesterday, the tech world was stunned when Apple and Qualcomm announced they had settled

a bitter dispute over patent royalties, just as the case was going to trial in San Diego.

So here's how we'll break it down.

So for Qualcomm,

the settlement matters because it basically saves its entire business model, in which customers have to buy both chips and access to patents for those chips. Not surprisingly, Qualcomm stock

spiked 23% in the hour after the announcement, adding around $16 billion in market cap

and was up another 13% in early trading

on Wednesday morning. Now for Apple, this saves a giant legal headache, but more importantly,

solidifies its path to 5G for the iPhone. But let's talk here now the rest of us. So for the rest of

it matters because we all might become reliant on Qualcomm, even though very few of us ever buy a specific

Qualcomm product. That's because the only other major U.S. chipmaker involved in 5G, Intel,

said that the settlement will cause it to reevaluate its 5G efforts, which most folks read

as a decision to bail altogether. And given how national security officials are terrified

by all Chinese efforts to move

into US 5G, it could eventually give Qualcomm a de facto monopoly on what runs most of our future

phones, particularly if we start to see trade war and national security concerns with Europe,

which has been signaled out of the White House. The bottom line here is that we now have

one major U.S. mobile phone maker, Apple,

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