 | Apr 03, 2025 | | | | Supported by  | | | | | Good morning! Mark Zuckerberg lobbies President Trump to settle an antitrust lawsuit against Meta Platforms. Google is in talks to rent Nvidia's new chips from CoreWeave. The White House vows to close the tariff loophole that helped Temu and Shein.
| | | | Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg is lobbying President Donald Trump and his administration to settle a lawsuit that could force the company to sell Instagram or WhatsApp, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. That lawsuit, filed in 2020 by the Federal Trade Commission under Trump's first administration, is scheduled to go to trial on April 14 and has started impacting operations for Meta and its executives. Zuckerberg visited the White House for the third time during this presidency on Wednesday, but some of Trump's aides are frustrated with Meta's lobbying and believe that it has been too aggressive, the Journal reported. A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment. Spokespeople for the White House and the FTC did not respond to requests for comment. Some big tech critics expressed concern about Zuckerberg's lobbying efforts. "I do think that it's fairly troubling to see an executive that's heading up a company that's a defendant in a major lawsuit be able to have such easy access" to the White House, said former FTC chair Lina Khan at an event hosted by Y Combinator on Wednesday. "I think it does raise questions about, are there going to be certain benefits, or value, that is conferred as a result of that access?" | | | | Google is in advanced talks to rent Nvidia's new Blackwell chips from CoreWeave, the upstart cloud provider that went public last week, The Information reported on Wednesday. The potential deal shows how major Nvidia customers like Google are struggling to get enough chips to meet rising demand. It also shows how CoreWeave's special relationship with Nvidia and its ability to move quickly in setting up AI-focused data centers is continuing to attract business from large cloud providers and major AI developers like OpenAI and Meta Platforms. Google and CoreWeave are also in preliminary discussions for a separate deal in which Google would lease space in CoreWeave's data centers to house Google's AI chip, known as the tensor processing unit, suggesting that Google is facing a crunch in data center space for its own chips. CoreWeave shares rose 7% after the publication of the story. Shares of CoreScientific, a firm that is working with CoreWeave on several data centers , rose 8%. | | | | The Trump administration said Wednesday that it's once again ending a trade provision that has attracted scrutiny due to companies like Temu and Shein using it to sell tariff-free Chinese goods to U.S. shoppers. Beginning May 2, packages sent to the U.S. from China and Hong Kong and valued at less than $800 will no longer qualify for the tariff-free import provision, known as de minimis, the Trump administration said in a press release that was part of a broader package of tariff announcements. Those parcels will be subject to a duty of either 30% of their value or a flat fee of $25 per package, which will increase to $50 in June, the White House said. The administration said it's also considering ending de minimis imports for parcels from Macau but did not mention other regions or countries. De minimis has been critical to the growth of Chinese e-commerce firms like Temu and Shein, and has also been used by Amazon through the low-cost Haul store it introduced late last year. In February, Trump had signed a separate executive order that abruptly banned most uses of de minimis, then paused the ban after it caused several days of chaos for e-commerce companies. The new order gives companies and U.S. authorities more time to prepare. | | | | Amazon has submitted a last-minute bid to acquire TikTok's U.S. operations, according to a person familiar with the bid. The company submitted the bid in a letter to Vice President JD Vance and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, the person said, though parties involved in the TikTok sale talks do not appear to be taking Amazon's bid seriously. Amazon declined to comment. The New York Times first reported Amazon's interest on Wednesday. Trump administration officials are meeting on Wednesday to discuss a potential TikTok deal, the person said. The Trump administration has given a deadline of April 5 for ByteDance to divest its U.S. operations or face a ban. Trump said on Sunday he expects to reach a deal before that deadline. | | | | Google is replacing the leader of its Gemini chatbot, a spokesperson said Wednesday, as the company attempts to wrest market share from OpenAI's ChatGPT. Josh Woodward, currently the head of product incubator Google Labs, will now also lead the Gemini chatbot group, known internally as Bard, according to the spokesperson. Sissie Hsiao, a longtime Googler who until Wednesday had been overseeing Bard, will move to a new role within Google. As ChatGPT usage has soared, Google's Gemini chatbot has struggled to keep pace, attracting about one-tenth of ChatGPT's web traffic, according to the analytics firm Similarweb. Woodward's Labs division has created new AI products including AI Studio, software to help developers build applications using Google's Gemini large language models; Project Mariner, an unreleased agent product that can take actions in a web browser; and NotebookLM, which got notoriety last fall after releasing a feature that created an artificial intelligence-powered podcast based on documents people upload to the product. Semafor first reported Woodward's new role. | | | | Tesla had its worst quarter since 2022 as deliveries fell well below expectations. The company delivered 336,681 vehicles in the first quarter, down 13% from 386,810 in the first quarter of 2024. The company widely missed analyst estimates, spurring concerns the electric vehicle maker was damaged by Elon Musk's political activities and had fallen behind other automakers. Musk's role in slashing the federal government spurred protests at dealerships and made the company a political lightning rod. Car sales tumbled overseas, where Musk has backed right-wing candidates and President Donald Trump has threatened tariffs. Tesla shares fell then rebounded on a report by Politico that Trump told his inner circle that Musk would leave soon. Tesla bull Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, called the results, "a disaster on every metric." In a post on X, he called it a "fork in the road movement for Tesla." | | | | The former Rippling employee who allegedly handed information about the company to archrival Deel has confessed to his role in the corporate espionage scheme in a new filing in an Irish court. The former employee, Keith O'Brien, who lives in Ireland, said he struck a deal with Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz in September 2024 to "provide him information regarding Rippling's 'way of doing things' which I understood to mean corporate strategy, customer insights and other interesting company information" for roughly $5,000 a month. O'Brien said Bouaziz was the only person he gave information to, using Telegram's messaging app to communicate with him. They spoke multiple times a day during the work week and sometimes talked on the weekend, too. (As O'Brien searched through Rippling's Slack channels, Rippling says he frequently checked for references to a reporter from The Information who was working on a story on the feud between Deel and Rippling.) When Rippling discovered O'Brien's alleged spying, he was fired in mid-March and for a time sought legal counsel from a Deel attorney, Asif Malik, who allegedly told O'Brien to destroy his phone. (O'Brien followed Malik's advice—smashing it with an axe and throwing the remains down a drain at his mother-in-law's home.) Last week, O'Brien stopped talking with Malik and met with Rippling's attorneys. O'Brien's detailing of his role is an extraordinary turn of events in the saga between Rippling and Deel, which has denied employing O'Brien to spy on Rippling, and captivated Silicon Valley's attention. Bouaziz couldn't immediately be reached for comment on O'Brien's confession. Rippling is suing Deel over the alleged spying. The two companies are ferocious competitors in the business of selling software to handle human resources and other back office tasks to companies. | | | | | Popular articles
By Ann Gehan and Catherine Perloff
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