Chief of staff to new top Democrat on antitrust subcommittee lobbied for Apple, Amazon
UNITED STATES – FEBRUARY 28: Rep. Lou Correa, D-Calif., walks down the House steps after the last votes of the week on Friday, Feb. 28, 2020.
Bill Clark | Cq-roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images
The chief of staff to the new top Democrat on the House Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust lobbied on behalf of Amazon and Apple as recently as 2022, including on the very issues the ranking member will oversee in his new role, CNBC found based on public disclosures.
The background of California Democrat Lou Correa’s top staffer is likely to further upset progressives who supported efforts to reform the rules of the road around digital competition. René Muñoz has served as chief of staff to Correa since November 2022, according to Congress-tracking site LegiStorm.
Before that, Muñoz worked at the lobbying firm Federal Street Strategies beginning in May 2020, according to LinkedIn, where his clients included Amazon and Apple, along with other corporations. Earlier, he worked for other Democratic representatives in Congress.
In 2019, when the Democrats were in the majority, Cicilline spearheaded a major investigation into the competition practices of Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook, and hauled their CEOs before Congress before introducing a package of bills to limit their power. Correa voted against the legislation.
Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., later became the top Republican on the subcommittee and was a significant ally to Cicilline in championing the tech antitrust bills. However, once Republicans took control of the House, he was passed over to lead the committee in favor of libertarian Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky.
The tech industry is likely to cheer the shift from antitrust reform advocates like Cicilline and Buck as a reprieve from years of fighting against bills they saw as overly broad or having undue consequences on consumer privacy.
Demand Progress Communications Director Maria Langholz called Correa’s elevation to the role “a profound disappointment,” in a statement after his selection was announced, citing his opposition to a package of tech antitrust bills championed by former subcommittee Chair David Cicilline, D-R.I., who recently left Congress and vacated the spot.
Langholz added that it’s “embarrassing that House Democrats failed to step up and fill the void that was left by Rep. Cicilline’s departure from the subcommittee.”
“The Congressman’s Chief of Staff has spent nearly two decades in public service, most of which being spent in the halls of Congress,” a Correa spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC on which Muñoz was copied.
“He’s fought tirelessly to serve elected representatives from every corner of the country in their missions to uplift their constituents, and better the lives of every working family. It’s because of that unwavering commitment and history of service that Congressman Correa brought him aboard his team —to work by his side in his fight for the hard-working taxpayers he represents right here in Orange County.”
What Muñoz lobbied on
Public lobbying disclosures show that as recently as 2022, Muñoz lobbied Congress on the very issue areas which Correa is now overseeing.
Correa’s ability to influence the agenda while in the minority is limited, but ranking members can often serve an important role in pushing back on the majority or in messaging to industry and agencies. Some fear that should the Democrats take back the House, it will now be harder to replace Correa with a more reform-minded Democrat.
The disclosures do not indicate which specific bills Muñoz lobbied on. However, in filings across multiple quarters, he is listed as one of three lobbyists for Federal Street Strategies who worked on issue areas related to several of the bills that passed through the House Judiciary Committee while Cicilline led the antitrust subcommittee.
For example, in the second and third quarters of 2021, Muñoz is listed as one of three lobbyists who engaged with Congress on behalf of Apple in issue areas related to the six bills that made up Cicilline’s cornerstone package on tech antitrust. That includes the period right around the time that package passed through the House Judiciary Committee in June 2021.
Lobbying disclosures by Federal Street indicate that Muñoz was similarly one of three lobbyists who engaged on behalf of Amazon on issue areas related to those bills during the same period.
Among the bills in the package were the Ending Platform Monopolies Act, which could lead to a breakup of dominant online platforms by prohibiting them from owning business lines that present a conflict of interest. They also included the American Choice and Innovation Online Act, which would prohibit top platforms from favoring their own products over rivals’ in their marketplaces or discriminating against competitors. It was the precursor to a Senate version of the bill that gained steam last year by passing out of the Judiciary Committee in that chamber. But it ultimately failed to reach the floor after significant tech lobbying.
Again, it’s unclear from the filing which exact bills Muñoz lobbied on.
The tech industry and its trade groups have spent millions on lobbying, including against antitrust bills that would restrict key elements of their business models. Apple notably ramped up its overall lobbying spending in 2022, reaching $9.4 million, a 44% increase compared to the prior year. Its fourth quarter filing showed it lobbied on antitrust bills as well as online privacy issues, taxes, semiconductor policy and more.
Amazon spent the most of the tech giants in 2022, coming in at $19.7 million for the year. Amazon also lobbied on tech antitrust as well as issues around cloud computing and counterfeit goods.
Partiful’s CEO, Shreya Murthy, and CTO, Joy Tao
Courtesy: Partiful
When Shreya Murthy and Joy Tao decided to launch a party-planning startup in 2020, they settled on a business goal of “bringing people together in person.”
The Covid-19 pandemic demanded the exact opposite.
Despite the challenge of the pandemic, Partiful survived, and five years later, the New York startup is now used by millions of people to plan events such as birthday parties, housewarmings and weddings.
The app’s a favorite of those ages 20 to 30, and it’s added 2 million new users since January, Partiful CEO Murthy told CNBC. The company has never revealed its exact base of monthly users.
Partiful drew attention on social media after Apple, known for replicating features from popular apps on the iPhone, launched its own event-planning service in February, and the startup posted a joke about “copycats” on its X account.
Of course, Partiful isn’t the first party-planning app. It competes against not only Apple Invites, but also Eventbrite, Evite, Punchbowl and others.
Each service differs slightly in its target markets and features. Evite, for example, uses a “freemium” model, where certain invitation designs and other features are paywalled. Eventbrite is often used to promote and sell admission to large public events.
What sets Partiful apart from its competitors — and appeals to its Gen Z user base — is its often humorous, casual designs, some of which are created by Partiful’s in-house designers.
“Friend invited me to a gathering that doesn’t have a Partiful….feeling lost, confused, unprepared…much like when I (Gen Z) receive a phone call out of the blue,” X user Athena Kan posted in August.
For the first quarter of 2025, Partiful averaged 500,000 monthly active users, up 400% year over year, with 9 out of 10 users on the app based in the U.S., according to estimates provided to CNBC by Sensor Tower, a market research firm. That compares with Eventbrite’s 4.4 million monthly active users, which is up 2% year over year, and Punchbowl with approximately 85,000 monthly users, which is down about 2% compared to a year ago. A spokesperson for Evite told CNBC that the service saw more than 20 million monthly active users for the first quarter of 2025.
It’s unclear how many people still use Facebook’s once-popular event-planning feature Facebook Events. Facebook’s parent company, Meta, shut down the standalone app.
Sample invitations from the Partiful app
Source: Partiful
Bringing people together in real life
Murthy and Tao both went to Princeton University and worked at Palantir Technologies at the same time, but they didn’t meet until they were introduced later by a mutual friend. Both were looking to move to the consumer-facing side of tech.
Tao, then a software engineer at Meta, wanted to leave the company to focus on products that were more relatable to daily life, and said that the social media company’s goal of keeping users engaged on their apps sometimes can create “perverse incentives.”
“For me, driving more people to spend more time staring at their phone, staring at this endless feed of content, wasn’t super motivating, wasn’t super meaningful to me personally,” said Tao, Partiful’s tech chief and a self-described “avid party planner.”
Meta declined to comment.
Tao and Murthy went through a sort of “dating period” where they asked each other what they thought leading a startup together could look like. Among the voids they identified was how intimate social events, such as birthday parties where a host would be likely to see the attendees again, were still planned on text chains that made it difficult to track, communicate or plan an ideal event time with guests.
“If you’re not sure when people are free, that’s a really annoying problem,” Murthy said.
She and Tao took the leap.
With few in-person events happening during the 2020 lockdowns, Partiful’s engineering team focused on building the platform’s text message-based infrastructure so that the service could be used by both iPhone and Android users.
Partiful’s team, which has now grown to 25, operates out of downtown Brooklyn. The service is no longer limited to text messages and its website. The company launched apps for the iPhone and Android devices in 2023 and 2024, respectively, and Partiful now serves as a one-stop destination for organizing the different phases of planning and hosting a party. The company has reportedly raised $20 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Speaking Gen Z’s language
What makes Partiful fun for users is how customizable an invite can be.
Hosts can create a free birthday invite with a lime-green parody cover of Charli XCX’s “brat” album, for example, or plan a girls’ night out with a cover photo of Shrek in sunglasses. They can track “yes,” “no” or “maybe” RSVPs under a portrait of Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg, and invited guests can use a “boop” feature to send random emojis rather than a direct message to each other.
Party planners can also send out uniform text blasts to the group before and after the event and manage an in-app photo album for uploading memories.
Partiful is available for anyone to use, but Murthy said the company sees the most need for the service among young users in the “postgrad” period of life. That’s a stage where people might be moving to new cities and away from their established college friend groups.
“You’re starting your adult life and have to not only figure out, ‘How do I rent an apartment? How do I work a new job? How do I exist in this new version of myself?'” Murthy said. “On top of that, you’re also having to rebuild your entire social circle.”
For the hosts and partiers in its user base, Partiful has become part of their social routine, and it has continued to gain traction online. The company told CNBC that over 60% of its active app users check Partiful every week.
As for Apple, Partiful isn’t sweating its new rival just yet.
Apple Invites requires that users have an iCloud+ subscription to create events, though it’s free to RSVP if a guest doesn’t have an Apple account. That service starts at 99 cents a month in the United States. Apple did not respond to a request for comment.
Partiful is free, at least for now.
Like many other tech companies that rely on distribution services such as Apple’s App Store, Partiful has a nuanced relationship with its much-larger counterpart. Partiful could lose some users to Apple, but it can also benefit from promotion by the app distributor.
That’s what happened in 2024, when Partiful was named a finalist for Apple’s App Store Awards for Cultural Impact, and won Google Play’s “Best App of 2024.” The app remained an “editor’s choice” pick on the App Store as of publication.
For now, Partiful remains confident.
“We haven’t really seen any users that have been leaving Partiful for Apple Invites,” Murthy said.
WATCH: Why iPhones may get more expensive amid Trump tariffs
An attendee wearing a Super Mario costume uses a Nintendo Switch 2 game console while playing a video game during the Nintendo Switch 2 Experience at the ExCeL London international exhibition and convention centre in London, Britain, April 11, 2025.
Isabel Infantes | Reuters
Nintendo on Friday announced that retail preorder for its Nintendo Switch 2 gaming system will begin on April 24 starting at $449.99.
Preorders for the hotly anticipated console were initially slated for April 9, but Nintendo delayed the date to assess the impact of the far-reaching, aggressive “reciprocal” tariffs that President Donald Trump announced earlier this month.
Most electronics companies, including Nintendo, manufacture their products in Asia. Nintendo’s Switch 1 consoles were made in China and Vietnam, Reuters reported in 2019. Trump has imposed a 145% tariff rate on China and a 10% rate on Vietnam. The latter is down from 46%, after he instituted a 90-day pause to allow for negotiations.
Nintendo said Friday that the Switch 2 will cost $449.99 in the U.S., which is the same price the company first announced on April 2.
“We apologize for the retail pre-order delay, and hope this reduces some of the uncertainty our consumers may be experiencing,” Nintendo said in a statement. “We thank our customers for their patience, and we share their excitement to experience Nintendo Switch 2 starting June 5, 2025.”
The Nintendo Switch 2 and “Mario Kart World“ bundle will cost $499.99, the digital version “Mario Kart World” will cost $79.99 and the digital version of “Donkey Kong Bananza” will cost $69.99, Nintendo said. All of those prices remain unchanged from the company’s initial announcement.
However, accessories for the Nintendo Switch 2 will “experience price adjustments,” the company said, and other future changes in costs are possible for “any Nintendo product.”
It will cost gamers $10 more to by the dock set, $1 more to buy the controller strap and $5 more to buy most other accessories, for instance.
WATCH: Nintendo has ‘a lot of work to do’ to convince casual users to upgrade to Switch 2: Kantan Games
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