Business, Financial & Legal - Page 21

Only two days after Elon Musk's X, formerly Twitter, filed a lawsuit against the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), alongside video platform Rumble. Both platforms accused GARM of boycotting companies by withholding advertising revenue in order to pressure X into compliance and limit choices for consumers.

A new report from Business Insider revealed the advertising trade group The World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) informed its members it was "discontinuing" activities with GARM, following the filing of the X lawsuit. According to the WFA's CEO Stephan Loerke, the decision was "not made lightly," but GARM is a non-profit organization that has limited resources at its disposal.

Initially, the WFA and GARM were intending to contest X's allegations, which alleged that GARM's members colluded to "collectively withhold billions of dollars in advertising revenue" from the social media platform. GARM members named in the suit were: Unilever, Mars, CVS, and Ørsted.

Intel has been in hot water lately, and it seems a fresh pan of boiling water has just been thrown on the company, as its CEO and CFO have now been wrapped up in a new class-action lawsuit.

The class-action lawsuit was filed in northern California Wednesday, with the Construction Laborer's Pension Trust of Greater St Louis alleging that Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger and Intel CFO David Zinsner mislead of hoodwinked investors about the health of its foundry business, or Intel's fabrication labs that are being constructed in various locations around the world.

The company has poured billions of investors' money into developing these foundry labs in the following locations: Arizona, Ohio, New Mexico, Ireland, Germany, and Israel. According to the plaintiffs, Intel's CEO and CFO made misleading statements to investors between January 25 and August 1, 2024. These statements allegedly misrepresented the overall health of these foundries, which artificially raised share prices.

SK hynix has announced it has signed a non-binding preliminary memorandum of terms with the U.S. Department of Commerce.

The South Korean memory giant will receive up to $450 million in proposed direct funding and access to proposed loans of up to $500 million as part of the CHIPS and Science Act, which will go towards its investment to build a production base for semiconductor packaging in Indiana, USA.

Not only that, but SK hynix also plans to seek from the US Department of Treasury a tax benefit equivalent of up to 2% of the qualified capital expenditures through the Investment Tax Credit program. SK hynix has said that it "deeply appreciates" the US government's support, and that it will comply with the requirements for the remaining procedures until the proposed funding is finalized.

Elon Musk's X has filed a lawsuit against multiple major companies, alleging they conspired to boycott the social media network, having a negative impact on its revenue. Elon Musk said he tried peacefully to sort this out for two years, but "now, it is war".

X CEO Linda Yaccarino highlighted the negative effects of the advertising boycott on free speech, with the lawsuit filed in Texas, looking to address the financial and operational damages that X has gone through.

X filed a lawsuit against a global cabal of advertisers and many major companies, including the likes of Mars and CVS Health, with the social media network accusing the companies of unlawfully conspiring to boycott X, causing it to lose revenue. X filed the lawsuit in the federal court in Texas against the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), Unilever, and Danish renewable energy company Orsted.

It was only a few days ago Delta Air Lines' CEO sat down for an interview to candidly express how catastrophic the CrowdStrike outage was for the airline, which the CEO said cost the company $500 million in revenue.

For those who don't know, here is a quick recap of what happened. CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company that has its software on millions of Windows machines, rolled out a faulty update to its Falcon sensor, which operates in the kernel of a Windows machine. The fault in the driver caused an error in the kernel, ultimately leading to an estimated 8.5 million Windows machines being thrown into infinite boot loops.

Delta was hit the hardest of any airline, with the company's CEO saying it was required to manually reset 40,000 servers and cancel more than 5,000 flights. Delta has hired a new legal team to pursue damages from Microsoft and CrowdStrike for the loss of revenue, costs associated with the outage, and brand damages.

Elon Musk's social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, has filed an antitrust lawsuit against the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), which accuses the international advertising group of boycotting companies by withholding advertising revenue in order to pressure X into compliance and limit choices for consumers.

The lawsuit comes after the mass advertising exodus that occurred after Elon Musk took over then-Twitter and changed its content policy guidelines, which resulted in many advertisers being concerned their products would appear alongside content that was previously banned on the platform. These content policy changes, which widened the scope of what content is allowed on now-X, caused many advertisers to pause or completely withdraw all advertising expenditures.

Now, X Corp CEO Linda Yaccarino announced via a new video on her personal X account that X will be suing the international advertising group for key advertisers participating in a conspiracy to boycott X and other unfavored social media platforms. Rumble has also accused GARM of using "one-size-fits-all standards to perpetrate an advertiser boycott against Rumble and other platforms."

An assassination attempt can't be memory holed from the world, and President Trump hasn't stopped since... and now President Trump announced he'll do an interview with Elon Musk on Monday night.

The former president and Republican presidential nominee announced on his personal Truth Social account: Trump said: "ON MONDAY NIGHT I'LL BE DOING A MAJOR INTERVIEW WITH ELON MUSK - Details to follow!"

President Trump was banned from Twitter (it wasn't X back then) in January 2021, while his account was reinstated on X once Elon Musk purchased the company and took it over. Elon Musk will interview President Trump at a pivotal time, as his rival Kamala Harris just recently announced Minnesota Gov Tim Walz as her pick for Vice President.

Uh... well, Google isn't in a good spot right now, with a US federal judge ruling that the US-based search giant abused a monopoly over the search industry.

Judge Amit Mehta of the US District Court for the District of Columbia wrote in the ruling: "Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly. It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act".

At the time of writing, Mehta hasn't imposed any remedies on Google, but the judge may order the search giant to change how it operates or sell parts of its business. The lawsuit itself claims that Google acted illegally to keep its dominant position in the search industry through multiple actions.

NVIDIA is the company powering this global push into artificial intelligence-powered systems, tools, and software, as the Jensen Huang-led GPU maker currently creates the best hardware to train AI models.

The value of NVIDIA's AI GPUs caused the company to skyrocket to the peak of the tech industry, briefly earning itself a staggering $3.3 trillion market valuation and becoming the most valuable publicly traded company in the world.

The valuation of NVIDIA has since corrected, but it's market dominance in the AI chip market has remained the same, which has caught the attention of numerous government regulators. Authorities with the European Union, Britain, and China have already asked for information on NVIDIA's sales of its AI chips, allocation of supplies, investments in other companies, and more.

Elon Musk has filed a new lawsuit against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman for allegedly being tricked into funding what turned into a for-profit business.

The new lawsuit comes after Musk dropped a previous lawsuit back in June, and much like the previous lawsuit, Musk's legal team alleges Altman and OpenAI deceived Musk by "preying on Musk's humanitarian concern about the existential dangers posed by artificial intelligence." The new lawsuit is much larger than the previous one and alleges Musk agreed to fund OpenAI with $44.6 million between 2016 and 2020 under the assumption that OpenAI was going to use the overall initiative of open-sourcing artificial intelligence development.

However, according to the suit the Altman and OpenAI made promises to Musk they intentionally knew they weren't going to keep, and that Musk's funding was misappropriated for purposes that would result in for-profit business ventures. Musk has previously stated it was very important for OpenAI's research to be publicly available, or open-source, hence the name - OpenAI. Additionally, the lawsuit points out OpenAI's articles describing its mission to make its technology available to the public.

President Donald Trump jumped into a Tesla Cybertruck with Kick streamer Adin Ross, and vibed to some beats. Check it out:

President Trump remarked that he loved the Tesla Cybertruck and its huge 18.5-inch display, swiping through Spotify to pick out a song after Ross asked him his top 3 artists. The first one that President Trump chose was California Dreamin' and then switched over to some Beach Boys, before playing one of my favorites: The Beach Boys' "God Only Knows".

Adin Ross presented the former President with some expensive, and beautiful gifts including a gold Rolex and a custom-wrapped Tesla Cybertruck. Ross said as he started his Kick stream on Monday after many doubted he landed an interview with President Trump, where he said: "Today is going to be the most important stream I've ever done".

The US woke up to over $2 trililon wiped away from the stock market, with virtually all companies impacted. But... a new development has occurred: trading platforms are going down as the market issues continue across the US.

We're talking about major players going down as the US stock market is falling, including Vanguard, Fidelity, and TD Ameritrade, as well as E-Trade, and Charles Schwab. Wall Street and the crypto market have seen a sea of red today, both bleeding trillions of dollars.

The Dow opened down over 1000 points, the S&P 500 was down over 4.2% this morning, and the Nasdaq Composite dropped over 6% according to CNN. The US stock market dropping so hard and so far, forced five trading platforms to go down as the markets were plunging into the red.

It's a hot August so far with the US stock market seeing a mammoth $2 trillion wiped away from stocks including Microsoft, Google, Apple, NVIDIA, Meta, and more.

There are fresh smells of recession fear in the air throughout the global financial markets, forcing the Federal Reserve to consider reducing interest rates before its upcoming meeting in September. The stock exchange isn't the only one in the red, with the cryptocurrency market seeing over $340 billion in outflows from crypto products, and that's just at the start of the day. The overall figure fells to $1.8 trillion, when it was over $2.1 trillion the day before.

Recession concerns have seen the Taiwan stock market plummet down into its worst losses since 1967, while the stock market in Japan has been rocked with its worst loss since 1987. The day has only started in the US, so we still have many hours to go and our eyes will be peeled to those digits.

TSMC will host a groundbreaking ceremony next month in Dresden, Germany, to celebrate its first semiconductor plant in Europe.

The milestone is a big one as TSMC expands its global semiconductor production footprint, with TSMC Chairman and CEO C.C. Wei leading a delegation from the company and host equipment and material suppliers, clients, and government officials on August 20 as a sign of TSMC's commitment to its investments into Germany.

TSMC's semiconductor plant in Dresden was formally known as European Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. (ESMC) is scheduled to begin operation in late 2027, according to sources of Nikkei Asia. The new semiconductor plant in Dresden will represent a "new dimension for sustainable semiconductor production in Europe" according to the invitation to TSMC's event, as seen by Nikkei Asia.

AMD posted some better-than-expected Q2 2024 earnings this week, but its gaming business took a rather large 59% revenue drop year-over-year.

During its Q2 2024 earnings report, it was noted that gaming revenues dropped 59%, which covers the Radeon GPU business and semi-custom chips provided by AMD (made by TSMC) to Microsoft for its Xbox Series X/S consoles and Sony for its PlayStation 5 consoles.

Microsoft announced earlier today its Q4 2024 earnings results, with its Xbox sales dropping 42% year-over-year, which brings down AMD's gaming revenue. Radeon sales haven't been anywhere near as strong compared to NVIDIA's Ada-tight grip on the gaming GPU market with its GeForce RTX 40 series GPUs... and RTX 50 series GPUs only months away.

AMD has beaten analyst revenue and EPS estimates with its recent Q2 2024 earning report, with $5.8 billion in revenue, beating analysts' expectations of $5.72 billion.

One of the biggest highlights is that the AI division within AMD helped expand Data Center revenue by 115% annually, with Data Center revenue operating income increasing 405% annually. These huge leaps in income helped the massive slump that the gaming and embedded businesses divisions are going through right now, with gaming revenue down a shocking 59% annually with just $648 million for Q2 2024.

AMD Chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su, said: "We delivered strong revenue and earnings growth in the second quarter driven by record Data Center segment revenue. Our AI business continued accelerating and we are well positioned to deliver strong revenue growth in the second half of the year led by demand for Instinct, EPYC and Ryzen processors. The rapid advances in generative AI are driving demand for more compute in every market, creating significant growth opportunities as we deliver leadership AI solutions across our business".

Intel has plans to lay off thousands more staff as the company wants to reduce costs and fund an "ambitious effort" to rebound from an earnings slump, market share losses, and the debacle surrounding dying 13th Gen and 14th Gen Core CPUs.

In a new report from BNN Bloomberg, we're learning that the reduction in Intel's workforce might be announced as "early as this week, according to people familiar with the matter". Intel is scheduled to report its Q2 2024 earnings on Thursday, with around 110,000 staffers worldwide, excluding workers at units that are being spun out of Intel.

Intel wants to return to dominating the semiconductor industry, with CEO Pat Gelsinger spending big money on research and development to improve its in-house technology. AMD has caught up and taken large chunks of its consumer, workstation, and server processor markets, with an Intel spokesperson declining to comment on the situation.

The US State of Texas sued Facebook parent company Meta in 2022, allegedly the Mark Zuckerberg-run company "unlawfully" used facial recognition technology on Texans without any prior consent, which is a violation of the state's 2009 Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier (CUBI) Act.

Meta has agreed to a settlement with the state of Texas by agreeing to pay out $1.4 billion over five years, but never admitted any wrongdoing. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton includes a subtle warning to all other tech firms that any violation of Texas' laws surrounding abusing sensitive data of Texans will be "met with the full force of the law."

The settlement is actually a new record in terms of the maximum amount of action brought by a single state, according to Paxton. Notably, the lawsuit included Facebook's 2011 photo tagging feature that used facial recognition software to identify the people in images. Once identified, the feature suggested a user tag that individual in the image, which embedded a link to that person's profile.

CrowdStrike rolled out an update earlier this month that caused an estimated 8.5 million Windows machines to crash worldwide. The outage affected many forms of infrastructure, particularly airlines that were unable to access systems that were caught in infinite blue screen of death boot loops.

The severity of the outage in terms of loss of revenue has yet to be measured exactly, but last week, it was estimated by Parametrix, a cloud monitoring and insurance company, the CrowdStrike outage loss of revenue globally is approximately $15 billion. Out of that $15 billion, Parametrix estimated airlines lost $860 million, which they will likely want returned to them if it were legally possible. Furthermore, the insurance company estimated $5.4 billion was lost from Fortune 500 companies, not including Microsoft.

Delta is the first to seek damages for the event as reports indicate the company has hired prominent attorney David Boies, the chairman of the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner, who rose to fame for his role in the landmark case the US government won against Microsoft, his participating in overturning California's ban on gay marriage, and his work with Harvey Weinstein, the now imprisoned Hollywood producer.

TSMC is currently scurrying to get fabs built on US soil right now, with Intel and its own semiconductor business with Intel Foundry, poaching TSMC senior engineers to help its long-term growth in the semiconductor industry... against TSMC.

Intel has been poaching senior engineers away from TSMC as they are coming into the US to help the Taiwan semiconductor giant set up its foundries in Arizona, USA. Intel is recruiting the TSMC staffers for its own Intel Foundry business, which is kind of dog as TSMC is helping Intel, and Intel is poaching staff out from under them.

On top of that, Intel has outsourced the production of its next-gen Core Ultra 200V "Lunar Lake" CPUs to TSMC using its 3nm process nodes for the CPU, GPU, NPU, and on-package memory on a single chiplet on a compute tile on 3nm. The SoC and I/O dies will are the only part of the chiplet made on TSMC's 6nm process node.