| |  | Nov 07, 2025 | | | | | Supported by |  | | | | | | TGIF! Tesla's shareholders approve a $1 trillion pay package for Elon Musk. OpenAI expects $20 billion in annualized revenue run rate by the end of this year. SpaceX is buying another $2.6 billion worth of wireless spectrum licenses.
| | | | More than 75% of Tesla shareholders voted in favor of Elon Musk's $1 trillion pay package, the company announced at Tesla's shareholder meeting on Thursday afternoon. On a shareholder proposal that Tesla invest in Musk's xAI, Tesla announced that more votes were cast in favor than against but "there was a significant number of abstentions". The board "will examine next steps in light of the shareholder support," Tesla said. The big majority in favor of the pay package—which requires Tesla to meet a variety of goals, including reaching a market capitalization of $8.5 trillion before Musk collects the stock—followed an intense campaign by both Musk and Tesla chair Robyn Denholm in recent weeks. Denholm said the board was concerned Musk would leave if the proposal wasn't approved. At the same time, shareholder advisory firms ISS and Glass Lewis had recommended shareholders vote against the proposal, while Norway's sovereign wealth fund and a 1.1% shareholder voted against it. But Tesla has a big group of individual shareholders—holding more than one-third of the stock—who tend to be big supporters of Musk. | | | | OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he doesn't want the government to bail them out if the company fails. "If we screw up and can't fix it, we should fail, and other companies will continue on doing good work and servicing customers," Altman said in an X post on Thursday. Altman also said that OpenAI expects future revenue growth, ranging from hardware AI devices to robotics to an "AI cloud" to drive revenue growth that could help the company fund its $1.4 trillion in commitments over the next eight years. Altman's comments come after OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar, on Wednesday, suggested a federal backstop could support financing AI chips and data centers that could help the U.S. stay competitive globally. "We're looking for an ecosystem of banks, private equity, maybe even governmental, the ways governments can come to bear," she said. Friar later walked back her comments in a LinkedIn post, stating that OpenAI isn't seeking a government backstop for its infrastructure projects. In his X post, Altman added that while OpenAI doesn't have a government backstop for its data center projects, OpenAI has discussed government loan guarantees to support the development of semiconductor fabrication plants in the U.S. in order to strengthen the domestic chip supply chain. | | | | SpaceX is buying another $2.6 billion worth of wireless spectrum licenses from telecommunications firm Echostar, building on a separate $17 billion deal announced in September. Echostar said Thursday it will receive $2.6 billion in SpaceX stock in exchange for the spectrum, which will help the Elon Musk-led company accelerate its efforts to offer service directly to mobile phones from its satellites in space. Echostar shares were down about 1% Thursday morning. SpaceX's deals with Echostar give the company an increasing ability to offer satellite connectivity directly to cell phones. The deals are putting pressure on Apple to do a deal with Musk, who has previously pitched Apple on providing satellite capabilities for iPhones, The Information has reported. Apple currently works with SpaceX rival Globalstar, which is looking for a buyer, The Information has reported. | | | | Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on Friday that there are "no active discussions" about selling the company's most advanced Blackwell chips to China. In a televised interview with reporters in Taiwan, Huang also said Nvidia is currently not planning to ship any products to China. The White House has told other federal departments that the U.S. won't allow Nvidia to sell a scaled-down version of its Blackwell chips to China, The Information reported this week. While the U.S. hasn't banned Nvidia from selling its less powerful H20 chip in China, the Chinese government has told local tech companies to avoid purchasing all Nvidia chips. Huang said in the interview that it is up to China to decide whether Chinese companies can purchase Nvidia products again. "I look forward to them changing their policy," he said. Huang said he was in Taiwan to visit Nvidia's longtime partner, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, and participate in the company's sports day. "Business is very strong," he said. "So I came back to encourage my TSMC friends." | | | | Bryan Rosenblatt, a partner at Craft Ventures, is planning to leave the firm at the end of the year to start his own investment firm, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter. Rosenblatt's departure continues the trend of experienced investors leaving their jobs to start their own, solo operations. Rosenblatt's firm, named Sandlot, has started fundraising talks for its first fund, targeting a $50 million close, according to one of the people. The fund and existence of the firm has not been previously reported. Craft Ventures, started eight years ago by David Sacks, shifted its focus to later-stage investments from very early stage investments earlier this year and restructured its team, The Information previously reported. Sandlot will back young startups across all sectors, including artificial intelligence and consumer. | | | | Soumith Chintala, who co-created Meta Platforms' open-source machine learning library PyTorch, is leaving the company, according to three people with direct knowledge of the matter. He joined Facebook in 2014, according to his profile on LinkedIn. Chintala also worked on artificial intelligence infrastructure, such as how to group chips and how to design technology components for software. His most recent title at Meta was "AI fixer," which included working on Meta's open-source large language model Llama. He reported to Aparna Ramani, who leads AI infrastructure at the company's new AI organization, Meta Superintelligence Labs. Chintala's departure from Meta comes after the company earlier this year overhauled its efforts in AI. In June, Meta hired former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman to co-lead its new AI organization. In the months following the overhaul, some AI leaders at Meta have discussed developing closed AI models. | | | | Meta internally projected that 10% of its revenue last year, or $16 billion, came from ads promoting fraudulent products or schemes, Reuters reported. These include ads for fake products, sextortion schemes or crypto scams. Reuters cited an internal document prepared in December 2024 which estimated that Meta shows users 15 billion ads each month that show clear signs of promoting fraud of some kind. While Meta has rules against running such ads, the team that vets advertisers wasn't allowed to block the ads if doing so would cost Meta more than 0.15% of its revenue, the report said. One solution Meta devised last year to deal with these scammers was to charge the scammers more, to disincentivize them from buying more ads. A Meta spokesperson told Reuters that the true percent of revenue coming from scam ads was lower, and the 10% figure was "overly-inclusive." The spokesperson said the 0.15% threshold for taking action to enforce rules against scammy ads was not a hard limit and that charging scammy advertisers more for ads led to a decline in both scam reports and ad revenue. | | | | Amazon Web Services currently sells a smorgasbord of cloud servers equipped with chips from various manufacturers, as well as ones it has developed in-house. And according to Shaown Nandi, director of technology at AWS, that menu is poised to expand in the coming years. "You will see us offering not just Intel silicon, AMD silicon, Nvidia silicon, and our own silicon, but I suspect others in the future as well," Nandi said in an appearance on The Information's TITV. Nandi didn't provide additional details, so it's not clear what other chips AWS might offer. One possibility is RISC-V (pronounced risk five), an open-source chip design that competes with chip designs from Arm Holdings. In any event, Nandi isn't really going out on a limb here. He's repeating Amazon's longstanding mantra of giving customers the largest possible array of choices. At the same time, he seems to be suggesting that customers' chip needs could evolve in the coming years, and that AWS will move to address those. | | | | Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, are restructuring their philanthropy, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The charity on Thursday said it would now focus on using artificial intelligence to research disease and combine its scientific teams into a new organization, Biohub. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative also said it has acquired EvolutionaryScale, a startup developing AI that can generate new proteins, and named Alex Rives, the startup's co-founder and chief scientist, as its head of science. Rives was previously a research scientist at Meta. Previously, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative had also focused on social issues like racial equity and immigration reform. In February, the philanthropy ended diversity-based recruiting and laid off or reassigned employees who worked on diversity programs. | | | | Brian Benedict, former sales chief at AI startup Hugging Face, is co-founding a new consulting firm, called Eliza, that aims to help large companies get practical value from OpenAI's ChatGPT and other AI services. In an interview, Benedict said Eliza, which works with OpenAI customers, isn't part of the crowded market for AI strategy consulting. The idea is for employees in companies to move beyond simple ChatGPT tasks like summarizing text into more advanced ones like creating custom AI models, said Benedict, whose title is chief commercial officer. One factor working in Eliza's favor is its connections to customers of multiple cloud and AI providers. Its CEO and co-founder Stephen Garden is the former CEO and co-founder of Onica, a consulting firm that helped Amazon Web Services customers adopt cloud products before being acquired by Rackspace in 2019. Garden is also vice chairman at Caylent, an AWS consulting firm, and a board member at 66degrees and phData, which work with Google Cloud and Snowflake customers respectively. | | | | | | | | | Opportunities Empower your teams to stay ahead of market trends with the most trusted tech journalism.
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