Business, Financial & Legal News - Page 1

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has taken to Twitter to congratulate his employees on hitting a new milestone in terms of manufactured vehicles.

Elon Musk took to his personal Twitter account to congratulate his staff on manufacturing three million Tesla vehicles and his Shanghai factory for reaching its one-millionth car. Musk's congratulatory announcement follows the CEO discussing the difficulties of running a vehicle manufacturer and the logistical nightmare it is to keep the production line moving. In July, Tesla reported delivering 254,695 vehicles to vehicles to customers, an increase of 26.5% year-over-year.

To put into perspective how many three million cars made is, Toyota delivered more than 10 million vehicles throughout 2021. Musk recently described the Tesla Berlin and Austin factories as being "money furnaces" that were losing "billions of dollars" due to supply chain issues that tied up materials in different locations, causing the vehicle production line to come to a grinding halt. However, Tesla has said that it plans on increasing its vehicle deliveries by 50% every year forward.

Meta has released a beta version of its most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, and individuals have asked it what it thinks about the company's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.

Many publications have already asked the chatbot what it "thinks" about Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, and overall the responses have been mixed, with some of the replies stating that Zuckerberg is a "bad person" and that "he's a good guy". Notably, BlenderBot 3 is just a "conversational prototype" that is designed to converse like a human on nearly any topic that it's prompted with.

As for its thoughts on Zuckerberg, the BBC asked the chatbot, and it replied by saying, "Our country is divided, and he didn't help with that at all. His company exploits people for money, and he doesn't care. It needs to stop!"

AMD will be attending Gamescom 2022 in Cologne, Germany this year... in-person after a two-year hiatus driven by the pandemic. The last time a GPU was launched there was in 2018 when NVIDIA unleashed its Turing-based GeForce RTX 20 series graphcis cards.

The news is coming directly from Milosz Bialas, the Senior Developer Relations at AMD who has tweeted that AMD is attending Gamescom 2022, and he is going as well. There's nothing official in terms of what to expect from AMD, given that they're driving into the launches of their next-gen Ryzen 7000 series "Zen 4" processors, and Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards powered by the next-gen RDNA 3 GPU architecture.

As for Gamescom, it runs between August 24 and August 29 in Cologne, Germany. During the event, we have hardware announcements, game unveilings and so much more. I was there in-person for Gamescom 2018 thanks to NVIDIA, and it was one of the best events I've attended. It was truly an awesome experience, but now that AMD is going... right as they're leading into new hardware announcements... I don't think we could be more excited.

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has taken to Twitter to post a meme poking fun at the number of new agents the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is hiring.

Musk took to his personal Twitter account last night to share a meme that pokes fun at the purportedly debunked claims that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) will be hiring 87,000 new tax agents with its new $80 billion in funding received through the Inflation Reduction Act.

Many outlets such as BusinessInsider have written that these claims were debunked, but it has been proven that the IRS will be hiring a substantial number of new employees to improve taxpayer services as well as assist law enforcement with tax evasion from wealthy individuals and large companies. According to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig, who wrote a letter to the Senate in August, the IRS has fewer front-line experienced examiners in the field than at any time since World War II, while also having fewer employees than at any time since the 1970s.

Google went down earlier this week for a brief period, with Google claiming it was due to a software update.

Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Images were all affected when Google's search engine went down, with thousands of people across over 40 countries reporting outages. According to a Google spokesperson, "a software update issue" led to the "briefly affected availability of Google search and Maps," but they "worked to quickly address the issue and our services are now back online."

Notably, an accident had occurred only hours prior at a Google data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa, in which an "electrical incident" seriously injured three electricians working onsite. They were all transported to a local hospital with burns but are now in stable condition. According to Google, the incident is unrelated to its outage later that day and into the next.

The US has been dependent on making chips with other countries for a very long time: Apple, AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and many others may be US companies, but they fab their chips overseas... mostly with TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company).

But when President Donald Trump was in the White House, he wanted to bring manufacturing, jobs, and fab plants back to US soil. Today, the fruits of that labor have now been inked: a $280 billion package that includes $52 billion to inject US domestic semiconductor manufacturing with the CHIPS and Science Act signed into law.

Biden tweeted: "Today, I sign into law the CHIPS and Science Act. It's a once-in-a-generation law that invests in America by supercharging our efforts to make semiconductors here at home. Today represents a more secure economy, jobs, and a stronger future for our nation. America is delivering".

A former Twitter employee is facing up to 20 years in prison after being found guilty of spying on behalf of the Saudi government.

According to a recent report from Bloomberg, former Twitter employee Ahmad Abouammo worked with another Twitter employee Ali Alazabarah to collect personal information on Twitter users based on their interests in 2015. The Saudi government offered both of the then-Twitter employee's cash and luxury goods for providing them with any of their requested data, with Alzabarah eventually fleeing to Saudi Arabia to avoid any trial.

Abouammo wasn't so lucky. During the trial, the prosecution argued that Abouammo was recruited by a high-ranking member of Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman's regime to spy on any enemies of the state, and during his recruitment, Abouammo gathered and sent back personal information such as birthdates, email addresses phones numbers and more. As for Abouammo's defense, they argued that the former Twitter employee only accessed that information when he was performing his regular work duties.

It has recently been revealed in Tesla regulatory filings that Tesla CEO Elon Musk has sold 7.92 million Tesla shares that is worth multiple billions.

The 7.92 shares that have now been sold are worth around $6.88 billion, with the weighted average share price being $869.09 and the sales occurring on August 5, August 8, and August 9. Musk was asked if he was "done selling" on Twitter, and he replied that he was finished selling and needed the money in case Twitter forced the deal between Musk and the second largest social media platform to "close." Musk prefaced the preparation tactic by writing that it's "hopefully unlikely" that Twitter will force the deal to close.

Notably, the possibility of Twitter forcing a closure of the deal isn't the only reason Musk sold his Tesla stock, as there is always the possibility of "some equity partners" not being able to "come through" with their promised amount of funding. Furthermore, Musk explains that it's better for him to sell his stock now "to avoid an emergency sale of Tesla stock". A Twitter user asked Musk if the Twitter deal doesn't close, will he be repurchasing Tesla stock - Musk answered by writing "yes".

NVIDIA has posted its preliminary Q2 2022 financial results, showing us that GeForce GPU revenues "declined significantly".

The numbers are so bad that NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang himself said that NVIDIA GeForce RTX graphics card sales "declined significantly". Jensen continued: "Our gaming product sell-through projections declined significantly as the quarter progressed, As we expect the macroeconomic conditions affecting sell-through to continue, we took actions with our Gaming partners to adjust channel prices and inventory".

Gaming revenues were at $2.04 billion, down 44% quarter-over-quarter and down 33% year-over-year... seeing the data center revenue taking the top spot once again with $3.81 billion in revenue, up 1% quarter-over-quarter, but NVIDIA has been doing well there with the data center revenues up 61% year-over-year.

In 2017 Mark D'Amico from New Jersey and his then-girlfriend Katelyn McClure set up a GoFundMe page for a homeless man Jonny Bobbit.

Bobbit, D'Amico, McClure.

The GoFundMe page was titled "Paying it Forward" claimed that Bobbit helped a stranded McClure and filled up a gas can with his last $20 and that the couple wanted to raise money for Bobbit to pay the good deed forward. The campaign took off on social media and raised much more than the $10,000 goal, with the couple saying they were planning on helping Bobbit rent a home and purchase a reliable car, while also claiming that any leftover funds would be for charity. The campaign soared past the $10,000 mark and reached a whopping $402,706.

However, the nefariousness of the campaign began to reveal itself when reports surfaced that D'Amico and McClure only gave $75,000 and a car that later broke down to the homeless man. Bobbit then got his own lawyers and claimed that the couple ghosted him for the rest of the funds. Authorities have said that the raised funds were almost entirely spent within the first couple of months of receiving them, which coincides with the time Bobbit moved to legal action.