Business

A University of Washington experiment with “a machine to create clouds” was shut down by the city of Alameda — because the scientists didn’t bother to tell the locals what they were up to, Politico writes. They were 20 minutes into the test when city officials ended the experiment.

A regulatory filing surfaced Monday morning in Korea showing the underperforming electronics giant won an order to build chips for an unnamed large global tech company in a contract that runs through 2033.

Days after two execs for a data analytics firm were embarrassingly shown on the kiss cam at a Coldplay concert, one of them has resigned, with cofounder Pete DeJoy taking over as interim CEO.

My longstanding personal obsession, Rupert Murdoch, is getting sued by Donald Trump for the story The Wall Street Journal ran yesterday about a letter to noted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

After The Wall Street Journal’s scoop last night on Epstein’s relationship with Donald Trump, I was inspired to go look at some old stories about the sex criminal’s buddies.

In recent years the newsletter platform has tried to expand to micro-blogging, TikTokers, and full websites. Now the company is inching towards something its leadership has long criticized: advertising and social networks.

What do a filmmaker in Wisconsin, billionaire investor Bill Ackman, The Guardian, and a doctor who posted on TikTok all have in common? UnitedHealth has targeted them in an effort to clamp down on criticism. The company’s legal tactics have only intensified after the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, The New York Times reports.

Mark Gurman’s newsletter runs the gamut of Apple nexts this weekend, starting with rumors of the “iPhone 17e” kicking off an annual refresh cycle for cheaper iPhones, more iterative chip-bump updates for the Mac and iPad starting this fall, and Apple’s first new Mac external monitor since 2022’s Studio Display.

“Twenty, 30 years ago, we are really the leader,” CEO Lip-Bu Tan said in a message to employees, as reported by The Oregonian. “Now I think the world has changed. We are not in the top 10 semiconductor companies.”

When Nvidia’s share price rose beyond $164 on Wednesday morning, it was the first company to have a market cap of over $4 trillion. It closed the day up 1.8 percent at $162.88, leaving its current total at $3.97 trillion, leading Microsoft ($3.7 trillion) and Apple ($3.1 trillion).

The airline giant has been promising to accept Bitcoin as a payment method since 2022, but it might finally happen next year thanks to a preliminary deal with Crypto.com to explore integrations with the crypto trading platform’s payment service.

Samsung Electronics keeps promising a turnaround but it’s once again projecting a dismal quarter, with weak AI chip sales to blame for a projected 56 percent plunge in operating profit. At 4.6 trillion won for the April-June period, it would be its weakest result in six quarters.

Bloomberg reports that Mark Zuckerberg’s latest high-priced AI hire is Apple’s foundation AI model leader, Ruoming Pang, based on an offer worth “tens of millions of dollars per year,” plus Yuanzhi Li from OpenAI and Anton Bakhtin from Anthropic.

CoreWeave, which has multibillion-dollar cloud computing deals with OpenAI and Microsoft, has announced plans to buy Core Scientific, a digital infrastructure provider for crypto mining and AI. CoreWeave says the acquisition will help “enhance operating efficiency and de-risk our future expansion.”

The Federal Housing Finance Agency’s director has ordered Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to prepare a framework for considering crypto as an asset in homebuying. “Pulte also instructed the agencies that their mortgage risk assessments should not require cryptocurrency assets to be converted to U.S. dollars.” Great to see crypto is getting what it paid for! If only we all could buy elections, am I right?

to readers of Katherine Losse’s The Boy Kings. The Financial Times makes a compelling case that loser-bro Zuck is who he has always been. Also, his feelings were very hurt when we all had a good laugh about Meta’s avatars (“Legs coming soon!”). No wonder he wants AI friends, who’ll never mock him like that.