 | May 01, 2025 | | | | | | Happy Thursday! Tesla Chair Robyn Denholm denies plans to look for a new CEO to replace Musk. A federal judge accuses Apple of violating an earlier antitrust ruling. One of Tesla's most senior battery executives is leaving the company.
| | | | Tesla Chair Robyn Denholm on Thursday denied a Wall Street Journal report that said the electric car maker's board of directors contacted executive search firms to look for a replacement for Elon Musk as the company's CEO. In a post on Tesla's X account, Denholm called the Journal's report "absolutely false" and said the board is "highly confident" in Musk's ability as CEO. The Journal earlier reported that Tesla's board reached out to several executive search firms about a month ago. Around the time that the conversations with those firms began, board members told Musk—who was working on the Trump administration's government efficiency initiatives—that he needed to spend more time at Tesla, according to the Journal. | | | | In a blistering ruling, a federal judge accused Apple of defying an earlier decision in a longrunning antitrust case related to its App Store policies and asked federal prosecutors to investigate whether criminal contempt charges against the company are merited. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of the U.S. District Court in northern California said that Apple had violated an injunction that the court had issued in the 2021 case, in which the videogame developer Epic Games accused Apple of anticompetitive conduct. While the ruling in that case mostly went in Apple's favor, the judge ordered Apple to let app developers offer methods of making purchases outside of the App Store. Instead, she wrote, "Apple, despite knowing its obligations thereunder, thwarted the Injunction's goals, and continued its anticompetitive conduct solely to maintain its revenue stream." The judge criticized the company for imposing a new 27% commission on off-app purchases and creating new impediments to consumers making those purchases outside the App Store. In her ruling, the judge said an Apple executive—Alex Roman, vice president of finance—"outright lied under oath." She said that Cook sided with his finance team instead of another Apple executive, Philip Schiller, who had advocated that Apple comply with the injunction. "Cook chose poorly," she wrote. In a statement, an Apple spokesperson said: "We strongly disagree with the decision. We will comply with the court's order and we will appeal." This brief has been updated with a statement from Apple. | | | | Vineet Mehta, a longtime Tesla veteran and one of its most senior battery executives, is leaving the company, according to people close to the situation. It is the second significant departure of a member of Tesla's battery braintrust in the last year: Last April, Drew Baglino, head of battery and powertrain, left the company. Mehta, Tesla's director of battery technology and powertrain architecture, joined the EV maker in 2007, when the company was developing its first electric vehicle, the Roadster. He appears to have first widely informed his staff of his departure on Tuesday. There is no indication of Mehta's plans or when his departure will take effect. Mehta and Tesla did not respond to messages. Mehta was involved with Tesla's battery innovations throughout its history. During his tenure, Tesla revolutionized the use of batteries in EVs, pioneering the corralling of thousands of individual cylindrical cells into massive battery packs that power its EVs. For the Model S, Tesla introduced an entirely new form factor—the 2170 battery. In the Cybertruck, the company has deployed yet another new battery—the 4680, a fist-size battery with multiple times the energy of the 2170. The 4680 includes numerous innovations, including a dry anode, which can reduce the amount of equipment required in a battery factory. Mehta's departure comes as CEO Elon Musk has diminished the company's emphasis on EVs and pushed into artificial intelligence products such as Robotaxis and humanoid robots. In June, Musk plans to deploy the first Robotaxis in Austin, Texas, and later this year has said he will release the driverless Cybercab. | | | | Glean, a startup that builds search chatbots for businesses, is in advanced talks to raise a new financing round led by asset manager Wellington Management that would value the startup at about $7 billion, two people familiar with the matter said. The deal would indicate investors are still willing to pay high prices for fast-growing artificial intelligence startups despite stock volatility that threatened to cool dealmaking. Glean passed $100 million in annual recurring revenue, or sales of subscriptions over the next 12 months, earlier this year. The new round would make it one of the most richly valued mature startups on that basis. The funding is expected to total about $150 million, one of the people said. It would come after the company announced a $260 million round of funding in December, at a $4.6 billion valuation. Wellington would join Glean's existing investor roster that includes Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital. A Glean spokesperson didn't comment on the funding. A Wellington spokesperson didn't respond to a request for comment. | | | | Microsoft said Wednesday that its revenue grew 13% in the three months ending in March, a slightly faster rate than the quarter prior. Meanwhile, its revenue in its Azure cloud computing unit grew 33%, slightly higher than the growth the company had forecasted, reversing a slight slowdown in recent quarters. Shares jumped more than 5% in after-hours trading. The growth would have been two percentage points higher if not for foreign exchange fluctuations, the company said. CEO Satya Nadella attributed the uptick in sales to customers who are using Microsoft's cloud and AI software to "reduce costs and accelerate growth." Microsoft has previously touted its rapid growth in AI products, including selling access to software from OpenAI and other AI providers to Microsoft cloud customers. Microsoft said on Wednesday that its AI business growth was driven in part by a new Azure commitment from OpenAI, while its overall Azure growth was bolstered by higher than expected sales of traditional, non-AI cloud services. The company's capital expenditures were $21.4 billion in the most recent quarter, slightly down from $22.3 billion in the quarter prior. Microsoft has said it's on track to spend $80 billion in capex this year as it builds out new data centers, but more recently the company said it was slowing data center expansion in certain regions. CFO Amy Hood said on Wednesday that its capex will grow in the coming year, although at a slower rate than in the year prior. The moderation comes as one of Microsoft's biggest customers, OpenAI, recently embarked on a new data center that will be built by Oracle, after previously relying solely on Microsoft for cloud computing. | | | | Meta Platforms on Wednesday reported first-quarter revenue of $42.3 billion, up 16% from a year earlier. That exceeded its own forecast of $39.5 billion to $41.8 billion, showing the strength of its digital advertising business, but marked a slowdown from fourth-quarter growth of 21%. (If foreign exchange movements are taken into account, revenue growth was a healthier 19%, however). Meta's forecast for second-quarter revenue suggested growth of between 9% and 16%, including a one percentage point boost from foreign exchange movements. Chief Financial Officer Susan Li said that there was "uncertainty, obviously, in how the macro[economic] environment will evolve over time" and that the company had "seen some reduced spend in the U.S. from Asia-based e-commerce exporters, which we believe is in anticipation of the de minimis exemption going away." But she added that generally trends so far in April were "healthy." The parent of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp raised its estimate for capital expenditures this year to $64 billion to $72 billion, which means its expenses could grow as much as 83% from a year earlier. Meta said that it was making "additional data center investments to support [its] artificial intelligence efforts" and that it expected "infrastructure hardware," like the chips used to train and run AI models, to become more expensive. Meta also lowered its estimate for total expenses this year to $113 billion to $118 billion, down from a previous forecast of $114 billion to $119 billion. Li said that the company had updated its expectations for employee compensation and other operating expenses, which was "partially offset" by higher costs related to infrastructure and Reality Labs, its augmented and virtual reality unit. Meta's first-quarter profits rose 35% to $16.6 billion. The company's share price rose in after-hours trading, at one point spiking more than 5%. | | | | Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Apple CEO Tim Cook had at least a "couple" of phone calls last year where Pichai made the case for Apple integrating Google's Gemini AI chatbot app into iPhones, Pichai testified in court on Wednesday. Cook wanted to understand Google's AI roadmap, Pichai testified, and as part of that the two discussed Google's plans for distributing Gemini's app. Teams on each side were working through details of a potential distribution arrangement, but Apple in the end decided to integrate OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot in its Apple Intelligence feature. Cook told Pichai he plans to add other AI chatbots this year, including a Gemini deal possibly by the middle of this year, Pichai confirmed in response to Justice Department questioning. Pichai was testifying as part of a hearing on how the court should overhaul Google's operations to remedy its illegal search monopoly. The Justice Department wants the court to require Google to divest its Chrome browser, to end its exclusive distribution deals for Google apps on phones and to share search data. Under questioning from a Google lawyer, Pichai testified that the government's data sharing proposal felt like a "de facto divestiture" of Google's intellectual property related to search, built up over years of research and development. He said that if Google was forced to share its data without restrictions, it wasn't clear how Google could differentiate its product. Pichai also testified that the net impact of the government's proposals would be to make it "unviable" for Google to invest in research in the way Google had in the past decade to build Google search. | | | | Meta Platforms planned to release a reasoning version of its flagship large language model Llama 4 earlier this month, and then pushed back its release date, The Information reported. Some developers expected Meta to release such a model at its inaugural LlamaCon developer conference on Tuesday. The reason for the delay couldn't be learned, but Meta previously delayed other versions of Llama 4 over performance problems during its development. Many of Meta's rivals, including OpenAI and Google, have already released reasoning models, which take more time to "think" before responding to a query. When Meta ultimately released the first versions of Llama 4, known as Scout and Maverick, on April 5, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post on Instagram that "we're going to have more news to share on that [the reasoning version of Llama 4] in the next month." Kevin McLaughlin also contributed to this article. | | | | Visa unveiled new tools to facilitate purchases made by artificial intelligence agents Wednesday, following a similar announcement by rival Mastercard earlier this week. Visa will create tokenized cards agents can use for purchases, to encrypt sensitive information like card numbers and demonstrate to retailers that users have authorized agents to buy things. Payment companies and retailers are starting to focus on preventing fraud and verifying transactions made by AI agents, as more shoppers use the automated AI tools to find and buy products. They're also looking at ways to make shoppers more confident about sharing their sensitive payment information with agents, while also reducing the likelihood of shoppers disputing charges made by AI agents. The tools, known as Visa Intelligent Commerce, also include a personalization API that will allow users to share data about previous purchases with agents to improve their product recommendations and selections. They will also allow shoppers to set spending limits and for Visa to ensure that transactions match user instructions, as well as handle disputes and fraud. Visa said it partnered with companies including Anthropic, IBM, Microsoft, Mistral AI, OpenAI, Perplexity, Samsung and Stripe on the new features. | | | | Amazon is planning to open dozens of new warehouses over the next 18 months to handle deliveries to rural areas, the company announced on Wednesday. The company is planning to triple the size of its rural delivery network by the end of 2026, bringing the total number of rural delivery stations in the U.S. to more than 200, the company said. Amazon will have spent more than $4 billion in total on the expansion from the time it opened the first rural delivery station in 2020, according to the company. The announcement comes one day after United Parcel Service said it planned to lay off 20,000 employees and close 73 facilities as part of a cost-cutting drive, due in part to the company handling fewer Amazon packages. | | | Popular articles By Cory Weinberg and Michael Roddan
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