 | May 29, 2025 | | | | | | Happy Thursday! Elon Musk is leaving the Trump administration. U.S. restricts the sale of chip design software to China. Tesla will launch robotaxi in Austin in June.
| | | | Elon Musk is leaving the Trump administration after a tumultuous period leading an effort to cut government spending that involved dismantling federal agencies and laying off thousands of federal workers. Musk posted to X on Wednesday that his time as a special government employee was coming to an end, adding that the "mission" of his Department of Government Efficiency "will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government." The billionaire, who became a close advisor to President Donald Trump, has been spending less time in Washington recently as he turns his attention back to his businesses. In recent interviews, Musk also criticized Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill," which he said undermined the work DOGE is doing, and said he planned to do a "lot less" political spending in the future. Musk, who initially claimed DOGE could achieve massive savings, acknowledged in an interview with The Washington Post that cutting the size of the federal government was more difficult than he expected. | | | | The U.S. government recently ordered American vendors that sell software for chip design to obtain export licenses first before selling to China, the Financial Times reported, citing people familiar with the move. The new policy could further hurt American chip-design software companies and their Chinese customers, which still rely on U.S. vendors for the software, known as Electronic Design Automation. Since 2022, the U.S. government has restricted the sale of some types of the software meant for designing cutting-edge chips, but the new rules have been expanded to include all products. Reuters separately reported that Commerce will review the licenses to China on a case-by-case basis Commerce sent notices about the new rules to some of the major players in the industry including Cadence, Synopsys and Siemens EDA, the newspaper reported. But not all vendors said they received the notice. Synopsys' CEO Sassine Ghazi said in an earnings call Wednesday that the company hadn't received any official communication from the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security, which handles the U.S. semiconductor industry's export regulations. However, Ghazi said Synopsys expected revenue from China to decline because of the tighter export controls. Cadence's stock price fell by 11%, while Synopsys' dropped by 13% after the Financial Times report. | | | | Tesla is targeting June 12 to launch its driverless taxi service in Austin, Texas, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, noting that the date was still subject to change. Bloomberg also reported that Tesla conducted the first test with no one in the driver's seat this week. A Tesla engineer was riding shotgun, and there was no remote operation. The company has been testing the cars with a human safety driver behind the wheel, and had not done fully unsupervised testing by the end of April, The Information reported previously. Elon Musk has said the long-anticipated service would include about 10 Model Y cars operating in a limited part of the city where autonomous Waymo cars currently operate. They are expected to be remotely monitored by human Tesla workers. | | | | Nvidia on Wednesday projected that the Trump administration's new export controls, preventing it from selling chips to the Chinese market, would cost it $8 billion in revenue in its second quarter ending July, roughly 15% of what its revenue would have been otherwise. Even so, Nvidia projected $45 billion in revenue for the second quarter, which would still be a 50% increase from the same period last year. The maker of specialized AI chips, which has seen its business explode in the past two years, reported 69% growth in revenue to $44.1 billion in the quarter ending in April, continuing a streak beating its own growth projections. The strong result was despite the imposition of the tighter export controls during the quarter. Nvidia said it sold $4.6 billion worth of those chips before the new controls were introduced and was unable to ship an additional $2.5 billion worth of chips to China. The company said it took a charge of $4.5 billion due to excess inventory it could no longer sell. The Information previously reported that Chinese firms placed at least $16 billion in orders for Nvidia's H20 chips in the first three months of the year. Nvidia said the charge lowered the firm's margins to 60%. Had it been able to sell the H20 chips, Nvidia said its margin would have been 71.3%. Nvidia's stock was up more than 4% in afterhours trading. | | | | Instacart named Chris Rogers, its chief business officer, to succeed Fidji Simo as CEO. Simo had previously said she would leave to join OpenAI. On Wednesday, Instacart said in a securities filing that her departure was effective on Aug. 15. Rogers, who lives in Toronto in Canada, has been with Instacart since 2019, after spending 11 years at Apple, and before at at Procter & Gamble. In a blog post, Simo said Rogers got the top job "because the company needs a leader who understands all our partners deeply, has immense operational experience and can mobilize teams around our vision." Rogers is taking the helm of a company which is growing slowly and facing intensifying competition from companies such as DoorDash and Uber. The stock rose marginally on Wednesday morning. | | | | Reed Hastings, cofounder and former CEO of Netflix, has joined Anthropic's board of directors, the company announced in a blog post on Wednesday. Hastings joins the four existing directors on Anthropic's board, which include CEO Dario Amodei, president Daniela Amodei, Spark Capital general partner Yasmin Razavi and Confluent CEO and cofounder Jay Kreps. Anthropic's board members are chosen by shareholders and its Long Term Benefit Trust, a group that owns special shares in Anthropic that allow it to select some directors but do not give it any economic stake in the company. | | | | Dbt Labs, a 9-year-old startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, launched a new version of its main product, which lets data analysts extract business insights from corporate data, such as customer purchasing patterns and supply chain operations. The new product, called Fusion, has been rebuilt to offer significantly faster response times when analysts are accessing data, dbt Labs founder and CEO Tristan Handy said in an interview. Data analysts will be able to complete large-scale projects much more quickly than they've been able to do with the existing product, he said. But dbt Labs is also changing its software licensing with the launch of Fusion. Until now, dbt Labs has offered a free version of its product and a paid version with advanced support and management features. Dbt Labs will continue offering the free version, as well as a free version of Fusion with limited features, but users that opt for the latter won't be allowed to use it in products that directly compete with dbt Labs, Handy said. The licensing changes suggest that dbt Labs, which was valued at $4.2 billion after its last funding in 2022, has been too generous with its free product, thereby missing out on potential revenue, said a former dbt Labs employee. By offering a more powerful product in Fusion, dbt Labs is also hoping to generate more business from large companies, the person added. | | | | Elon Musk sought to block an OpenAI deal to build a huge artificial-intelligence data center in Abu Dhabi, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. According to the report, Musk on a call told officials from AI firm G42, which is developing the data center site, that the plan would not get the green light from President Donald Trump unless Musk's firm, xAI, was involved. After Musk lodged his complaints, Trump and his team reportedly looked over the terms and decided to proceed. OpenAI announced the deal last week. Musk, who spent more than $300 million to get Trump elected, was reportedly angered when Altman was included in the president's Middle East trip in May. The billionaire has made no secret of his animus toward Altman in the years since the pair co-founded OpenAI in 2015. Musk left the company in 2018. | | | | Salesforce shares rose nearly 2% after its first-quarter earnings report, as the software provider exceeded its revenue forecast by more than $60 million and bumped up its full-year forecast by $400 million. While Salesforce's revenue growth has slowed in recent years, that's poised to change as more customers adopt its data management and AI agent-building products, co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff said on an earnings call. Salesforce is designating some of the 1,000 to 2,000 new salespeople it pledged to hire in December to sell these products to customers in the lower end of the market, where the company sees untapped growth potential, he said. Benioff also touted Salesforce's $8 billion acquisition of data management firm Informatica, announced earlier this week, as a linchpin for helping more customers get their data into a format suitable for using AI agents. Salesforce now has over 4,000 paying customers for its AI agent product, up from more than 3,000 last quarter. For its April quarter, Salesforce's revenue grew 8% to $9.8 billion compared to last year. Salesforce also raised its full-year forecast by $400 million to between $41 billion and $41.3 billion, representing growth of 8% to 9% compared to last year. | | | | Telegram founder Pavel Durov said Wednesday that his messaging app will offer access to Grok, the AI chatbot from Elon Musk's xAI. The deal expands Grok's distribution to Telegram's more than one billion users. XAI will pay Telegram $300 million in cash and equity as part of the deal, as well as a 50% cut of revenue from xAI subscriptions sold on the platform. "Together, we win!" Durov wrote. Grok has long been available on X, Musk's social media app, allowing users to request more background on posts. A standalone tab allows people to chat directly with the artificial intelligence model, which cites its sources and was originally billed as a less filtered alternative to ChatGPT and Google Gemini. Telegram was started with a similar goal of allowing uncensored conversations. | | | Popular articles
By Wayne Ma and Aaron Tilley
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