| |  | Aug 18, 2025 | | | | | Supported by |  | | | | | | Welcome back! Current and former OpenAI employees plan to sell $6 billion worth of shares at a $500 billion valuation. The U.S. and Europe trade deal is stalled by disagreements over Europe's regulation on tech. Lyft abandons dual class share structure as cofounders leave its board.
| | | | Current and former OpenAI employees plan to sell around $6 billion worth of shares at a $500 billion valuation, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. Thrive Capital, SoftBank Group Corp, and Dragoneer Investment Group are among the investment firms expected to buy the shares. The secondary sale, which is still early in its process, is higher than OpenAI's last private market valuation of $260 billion before the $40 billion investment. OpenAI employees have already sold $3 billion worth of shares; the new sale would push total cashouts to about $9 billion if completed. Bloomberg was first to report the deal news. | | | | The very final part of America's trade deal with the European Union has been delayed by the EU's desire to continue forcing tech companies to more actively police their sites. The US and the EU had already been expected to release a statement with the terms they reached last month, but disagreements over possible concessions to Europe's Digital Services Act, which became law in 2024, have stalled the release of a formal joint statement. | | | | Lyft, the no.2 ridehailing firm, on Friday dissolved its dual-class shareholding structure, eliminating a class of stock that had 20 votes each, so that all shareholders will now have one vote per share. Lyft's move, disclosed in a securities filing, came the day after Lyft's two cofounders and the holders of the class B shares, left the board. The two men, Logan Green and John Zimmer, had a voting stake of 30% despite owning just 2.3% of the stock between them. Green and Zimmer had stepped down from executive management roles two years ago, in favor of David Risher, who became CEO. Lyft stock rose 8.2% on Friday. | | | | The Federal Reserve said Friday it will end its program that scrutinized fintech and crypto activities by banks, months after it stopped requiring banks to obtain advanced permission before engaging in crypto businesses. The Fed said it has strengthened its understanding of these activities and their risks, and will instead monitor them the same way it handles other issues. Under President Donald Trump, federal banking regulators broadly have pivoted to ease banks' path to offer crypto-related services, such as crypto trading, custody and stablecoins. The program was launched in the aftermath of the 2023 regional banking crisis to increase the Fed's scrutiny of crypto and fintech activities, including their risks to the banking system. Bank trade groups called for rescinding the program earlier this year. | | | | The CEO of home-buying service Opendoor Technologies, Carrie Wheeler, said she was stepping down effective immediately. The company said Shrisha Radhakrishna, who is Chief Technology & Product Officer, would succeed Wheeler on an interim basis while the board looks for a new CEO. Wheeler's departure followed weeks of blistering criticism of her management online, led by investor Eric Jackson with support from Keith Rabois, a co-founder of Opendoor and a onetime executive chair of the company. Opendoor's stock had dropped to as low as 50 cents in mid-July, from $2.50 last August, sparking an online campaign from Jackson that the company was worth more but that Wheeler was not the right fit. Wheeler had been appointed to replace co-founder Eric Wu in late 2022, as Opendoor was reeling from the impact of rising interest rates on the housing market. Over the past couple of years, she cut costs and stabilized the business. But her critics argued Opendoor needed a more dynamic leader. | | | | Japanese mobile payment app PayPay has confidentially filed for a U.S. listing, a move that could help fund owner Softbank's AI ambition, the company announced Friday. Founded in 2018, PayPay is the largest mobile payment app in Japan with more than 70 million users. It also issues credit cards and provides banking services. Softbank is seeking to raise more than $2 billion for PayPay, which could value the company at more than $10 billion, the Financial Times reported. If the listing goes through, it will likely be the largest initial public offering for a Japanese company on a US stock exchange, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The listing could help finance SoftBank's massive ambition in AI. Its founder Masayoshi Son has pledged $500 billion to the Stargate project and is exploring a massive robotics and AI complex in Arizona, among other AI investments. | | | | Activist investor Starboard Value increased its stake in Salesforce by almost 50% during the second quarter of the year, according to a filing. It's a sign that Salesforce could face renewed pressure to make changes to its business, three years after Starboard and other activist investors managed to get co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff to hold off on big acquisitions and take other steps to improve sales growth and profitability. Benioff has Salesforce focused on Agentforce, an AI product it launched last fall to help customers automate customer service and other business functions, but customer adoption has been slowed by technical glitches and cost concerns. In February, former Chief Financial Officer Amy Weaver said the company expected "modest" sales of Agentforce over the next year. Meanwhile, Salesforce shares are down nearly 27% since the start of the year. Revenue growth dropped to 9% in the year to January and the company expects growth to slow further to between 8% and 9% this year. While Benioff and his team have cut costs through multiple rounds of layoffs and consolidating layers of management, more belt-tightening measures may be coming. | | | | Vercel, a nine-year-old San Francisco cloud startup, has received unsolicited offers from investors to put hundreds of millions of dollars into the company at a valuation between $8 billion and $9 billion, according to a person with direct knowledge. The new funding would nearly triple Vercel's $3 billion valuation from a financing about 15 months ago, The Information reported earlier today. The deal talks, which are early, could not result in a deal. The interest comes after the company's annual recurring revenue reached $200 million in May, doubling from $100 million in early 2024 and up from $67 million in 2023. Vercel's gross margins from its main web hosting and cloud service were about 76% earlier this year, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The San Francisco-based startup has about 650 employees and burned roughly $11 million in the first quarter, or an implied burn of around $44 million for the year. Vercel, which competes with Amazon Web Services and Cloudflare, hosts and develops websites and AI apps for customers including OpenAI, UnderArmour and PayPal. Its AI-powered coding assistant, v0, launched in 2023 and now automatically generates code and helps customers build websites. | | | | | Popular articles
By Catherine Perloff and Theo Wayt
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