Design flaws caused a Tesla Model 3 to suddenly accelerate out of control before it crashed into a utility pole and burst into flames, killing a woman and severely injuring her husband, a lawsuit filed in federal court alleges.Another defect with the door handle design thwarted bystanders who were trying to rescue the driver, Jeff Dennis, and his wife, Wendy, from the car, according to the lawsuit filed Friday in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington.Wendy Dennis died in the Jan. 7, 2023, crash in Tacoma, Washington. Jeff Dennis suffered severe leg burns and other injuries, according to the lawsuit.Messages left Monday with plaintiffs’ attorneys and Tesla were not immediately returned.The lawsuit seeks punitive damages in California since the Dennis’ 2018 Model 3 was designed and manufactured there. Tesla also had its headquarters in California at the time before later moving to Texas.Among other financial claims, the lawsuit seeks wrongful death damages for both Jeff Dennis and his late wife’s estate. It asks for a jury trial.Tesla doors have been at the center of several crash cases because the battery powering the unlocking mechanism shuts off in case of a crash, and the manual releases that override that system are known for being difficult to find.Last month, the parents of two California college students killed in a Tesla crash sued the carmaker, saying the students were trapped in the vehicle as it burst into flames because of a design flaw that prevented them from opening the doors. In September, federal regulators opened an investigation into complaints by Tesla drivers of problems with stuck doors.Jeff and Wendy Dennis were running errands when the Tesla suddenly accelerated for at least five seconds. Jeff Dennis swerved to miss other vehicles before the car hit the utility pole and burst into flames, the lawsuit says.The automatic emergency braking system did not engage before hitting the pole, the lawsuit alleges, even though it is designed to apply the brakes when a frontal collision is considered unavoidable.Bystanders couldn’t open the doors because the handles do not work from the outside because they also rely on battery power to operate.. The doors also couldn’t be opened from inside because the battery had shut off because of the fire, and a manual override button is hard to find and use, the lawsuit alleges.The heat from the fire prevented bystanders from getting close enough to try to break out the windows.Defective battery chemistry and battery pack design unnecessarily increased the risk of a catastrophic fire after the impact with the pole, the lawsuit alleges.
Thiessen reported from Anchorage, Alaska.
Mark Thiessen, Associated Press
President Donald Trump is directing the federal government to combine efforts with tech companies and universities to convert government data into scientific discoveries, acting on his push to make artificial intelligence the engine of the nation’s economic future.Trump unveiled the “Genesis Mission” as part of an executive order he signed Monday that directs the Department of Energy and national labs to build a digital platform to concentrate the nation’s scientific data in one place.It solicits private sector and university partners to use their AI capability to help the government solve engineering, energy and national security problems, including streamlining the nation’s electric grid, according to White House officials who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity to describe the order before it was signed. Officials made no specific mention of seeking medical advances as part of the project.“The Genesis Mission will bring together our Nation’s research and development resources combining the efforts of brilliant American scientists, including those at our national laboratories, with pioneering American businesses; world-renowned universities; and existing research infrastructure, data repositories, production plants, and national security sites to achieve dramatic acceleration in AI development and utilization,” the executive order says.The administration portrayed the effort as the government’s most ambitious marshaling of federal scientific resources since the Apollo space missions of the late 1960s and early 1970s, even as it had cut billions of dollars in federal funding for scientific research and thousands of scientists had lost their jobs and funding.Trump is increasingly counting on the tech sector and the development of AI to power the U.S. economy, made clear last week as he hosted Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The monarch has committed to investing $1 trillion, largely from the Arab nation’s oil and natural gas reserves, to pivot his nation into becoming an AI data hub.For the U.S.’s part, funding was appropriated to the Energy Department as part of the massive tax-break and spending bill signed into law by Trump in July, White House officials said.As AI raises concerns that its heavy use of electricity may be contributing to higher utility rates in the nearer term, which is a political risk for Trump, administration officials argued that rates will come down as the technology develops. They said the increased demand will build capacity in existing transmission lines and bring down costs per unit of electricity.Data centers needed to fuel AI accounted for about 1.5% of the world’s electricity consumption last year, and those facilities’ energy consumption is predicted to more than double by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency. That increase could lead to burning more fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas, which release greenhouse gases that contribute to warming temperatures, sea level rise and extreme weather.The project will rely on national labs’ supercomputers but will also use supercomputing capacity being developed in the private sector. The project’s use of public data including national security information along with private sector supercomputers prompted officials to issue assurances that there would be controls to respect protected information.
Thomas Beaumont, Associated Press
I keep coming up against a logical fallacy in strategy that I feel compelled to address. The logic holds that when a company has a shareholder-unfriendly component of its portfolio e.g. the business in question is cyclical, or it is low-growth or low margin the company should diversify to make that business less-shareholder unfriendly. I take on the fallacy in this Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) piece entitled Diversification Cant Disappear a Strategy Problem: It Just Creates a Different Problem. And as always, you can find all the previous PTW/PI here.
The argument
The usual motivator of this argument is cyclicality: We have a cyclical business, and shareholders dont like the ups and downs of that business across the cycle, so they discount our stock because of the volatility of our earnings.
A memorable example of this for me was Alcan in the 1980s, at that time the worlds best aluminum company and arguably Canadas finest company. But it didnt like the cyclicality of its core business, which was making and selling aluminum ingots. The downstream industries that used aluminum in some way appeared alluringly less cyclical. So, Alcan invested in a number of those businesses including packaging and aluminum structured automobiles.
Other shareholder-unfriendly attributes include being a slow-growth business. This causes companies like News Corporation to buy MySpace to get into a fast-growing business Internet services. Another is a business that has experienced a drop in structural attractiveness and hence inherent profitability level, perhaps because buyers are getting more powerful or a supplied input becomes much more expensive.
Unfortunately, these diversification efforts dont often succeed. For Alcan, these downstream businesses turned out to have very little in common with the skills and capabilities involved in making ingots of aluminum and were eventually sold off. For example, the packaging portfolio was sold off to Amcor, a global packaging company that knew how to run a packaging business. And News Corporation exited MySpace with its tail between its legs, selling it for $35 million six years after buying it for $580 million
I am not opposed to the intent
I am in favor of improving ones portfolio of businesses. In fact, I was part of one of the greatest such efforts in recent memory. I was on the board of Thomson Corporation, which started its transformation as the worlds largest newspaper company, the worlds largest textbook publisher (tied with Pearson), Europes largest travel company, and a major player in North Sea oil. It concluded the transformation as Thomson Reuters, the leading supplier of on-line, subscription-based must-have information, analytics, and workflow solutions for legal, financial, accounting, and investor relations professionals having exited its entire starting portfolio.
So, I get it. I like investing in good businesses as much as the next person.
I just hate the logic regarding shareholders
Shareholders arent geniuses I have said that on numerous occasions (e.g. here and here).
But they are not stupid either. Lets say the company is correct that shareholders dont like something about an important business in its portfolio it is cyclical or growing slowly or its industry is becoming less structurally attractive.
If that is true, shareholders will collectively price that negative feature into their valuation of that business as part of their overall valuation of the stock. Lets say the contribution of that shareholder-unfriendly business to corporate earnings per share (EPS) is $4/share and that if it wasnt cyclical, shareholders would put a 20X multiple on those earnings. So, it would have contributed $80 towards the companys overall share price. But lets say that because it is cyclical, shareholders discount the value of those earning to a 15X multiple, meaning that the cyclicality of the business costs the company $20 on its share price (i.e., $4 of EPS X 5 times lower multiple). And if there are 50 million shares outstanding, that is a cost of $1 billion in shareholder value due to the cyclicality of that business. The same calculation would hold if it were a slower growing business on which the shareholders similarly put a 15X multiple instead of 20X. Or if a business has experienced a sharp structural drop in future profit potential.
The bottom line is that because of the features of the existing business, shareholders subtract $1 billion of value from the overall valuation of the business.
Lets continue with the logic. Imagine the company diversifies into a non-cyclical business or fast-growing business or higher profit business. If it is a great business, the shareholders will put a high valuation on it. Lets say that the company buys such a business for $2 billion and it performs so well that shareholders soon value it at $5 billion which makes it a great diversification investment.
But the logic of this argument holds further (implicitly) that over and above the value that shareholders will give to the great new business into which the company diversified, the shareholders will reduce the $1 billion valuation hit that they are applying to the problematic business. Not only can I not think of any reason why shareholders would do that, I have never seen them do it because there is no reason.
In the words of the great Nobel Laureate, the late George Stigler, when I met him in his Chicago apartment, Roger, a company cant use its competitive advantage twice brilliant insight from a brilliant man. In this case, it cant use the plus-$5 billion to disappear the minus-$1 billion. In essence, it will be a plus $5 billion and an unchanged minus $1 billion.
What is the problem?
As I said, I like investing in great new businesses. If there is a $5 billion opportunity available for a $2 billion price, a company is foolish not to grab it. The problem is a company putting itself in the position of believing the presence of the undesirable business creates a requirement to diversify. This is especially the case because the tool used is typically acquisition because organic growth is viewed as taking too long to solve the problem.
And the failure rate in acquisitions is legendarily high in the general case. This is a very specific case that makes doing a successful acquisition even harder. There is a very specific requirement of the acquisition it must reduce our overall cyclicality, or increase our overall growth rate, or increase our overall profit margin. These are hard criteria to meet in an exercise that already has a high degree of difficulty.
Additionally, it works against a key principle that helps determine acquisition success. As Ihave written about previously in Harvard Business Review, acquisitions are more financially and strategically successful if they are more about what the acquiring company can do to help the acquired company than the other way around. When the focus is on what the acquired company can do for the acquirer, the acquirer tends to have to pay top dollar for the acquired company and the acquirer can do little to help pay for the high takeover premium, as with the News Corporation-MySpace acquisition above. News Corporation paid absolutely top dollar and it had no idea how to help MySpace as it faced withering competition.
Thus, in the failure-ridden world of acquisitions, the logic of this diversify-to-eliminate-the-shareholder-problem drives companies toward very low success rate approaches.
Net, there are compounding shortcomings of the approach. First, it doesnt actually solve the problem for which it is designed to solve. And second, it involves engaging in a very high-risk activity. That is not a good combination.
Implications for strategy
As I pointed out previously in yet another Harvard Business Review article, companies are better off if they simply value businesses at what they are worth not their value on the books. They may wish that a business was worth as much as or more than the amount of investment put into it. But the instant the investment is irreversibly made into the business in question, its value becomes a function of its future prospects, not its book value. If it was a poor investment, its true value will go down, and the opposite if it was a good investment.
That is the valuation that shareholders make every trading minute. They revalue your assets continuously by collectively buying and selling your shares. Why shouldnt you revalue similarly? Bad businesses dont have bad shareholder returns shareholders have long since revalued them downwards. And great businesses dont automatically have great shareholder returns shareholders have long since revalued them upwards. Shareholders get valuation.
If you can make a business better great, just do it. But dont try to disguise the shortcomings of a business through diversification. You arent fooling anyone but yourself and certainly not the shareholders.
A far better plan is to suck it up and recognize the true value. And if you dont like what you have, sell it and move on. That is what we did at Thomson Reuters. We didnt attempt to disguise the negative attributes of portfolio companies. We got rid of them to companies that liked their attributes better than we did. For example, we sold our newspaper business to the worlds biggest newspaper company, Gannett, for US$2.2 billion. They were enthusiastic but it ended up being a deal that a Gannett CFO later confessed to me was the worst acquisition deal in his companys history. And even better, we sold the textbook business to a pair of delusional private equity firms for US$7.75 billion, and they resold it three years later for a reported US$2.25 billion ouch! The combined divestiture proceeds of US$10 billion were really helpful in bringing the transformation to fruition.
Practitioner insights
I try hard not to be disrespectful to the status quo. Most things that stick around for a long time do so because they have shown themselves to make sense. But in the world of business ideas, a minority like SWOT, strategies not strategy, and revenue forecasting stick around even if they fail to make any logical sense. You must be ready to reject them when they are demonstrably dumb ideas.
This is one of them. Dont invest in big and high-risk ways to disguise a problem that cant be disguised. It is one of the silliest and most wasteful activities in company life. And there are lots of folks hanging around that make huge returns by whispering in corporate executive ears about this kind of diversification. They are the (so-called) strategy consultants, investment bankers, and M&A lawyers who make countless billions promoting stupid deals, like the disastrous AT&T takeover of Time Warner which AT&T bought for $85 billion and sold for $43 billion three years later. That was the equivalent of the AT&T executive team making a $38 million stack of shareholder money outside AT&T corporate headquarters, pouring gasoline on it and lighting it on fire and repeating that exercise every day for three years. The brilliant deal was purportedly going to get the boring AT&T into the exciting, faster growing and higher margin content business. I predicted at the time that it would be an epic disaster and it most certainly was. It is what happens when you adhere to a loser theory.
Instead, either love a business or get rid of it to someone who will love it more. You cant win in a business that you dont love. Competitors who love their business will wipe the floor with you and yours. Only spend time and resources on businesses that you love. Those are the only ones that will get the care, attention and investment that they need and deserve.
You might think of Walmart as Americas quintessential big box storethe place you can get everything from Hanes T-shirts to large screen TVs to cleats for your kid’s soccer uniform.
But Walmart isn’t defying shaky consumer confidence because of the breadth of its offerings, which impressively stretches to 120,000 products at most stores. Customers aren’t flocking into stores to buy made-in-America T-shirts, as I wrote about in May, thanks to a novel partnership with American Giant. Or because it is adding more high-end products (at lower prices than you’d find anywhere else), as I covered in October in this profile of its chief merchant Latriece Watkins.
Nor is this about breakthrough new products exclusive to Walmart such as Glen Powell’s Smash Kitchen line of condiments, which hit $10 million in revenue in just six months. (I wrote about how Powell and his cofounders pulled off that feat, revealing their growth numbers for the first time, and how products like theirs fit within Walmart’s overall strategy.)
You’re getting warmer, though.
If you want to understand why Walmart is beating the odds, this where you should look: the grocery aisles. Walmart has gone from a general merchandise store that also sells groceries to America’s grocery store that also happens to sell everything else you could imagine.
The Arkansas-based retailer, which generated $648.1 billion in revenue last year (60% of which came from food), accounts for more than a fifth of all grocery dollars in the country.
Since 2019, Walmart has been in the top position when it comes to grocery market share, with Kroger coming in at a distant second at less than 10%.
Walmart’s grocery business has been key to its financial success at a time when many other retailers are struggling. Last week, Walmart posted strong quarterly results, with U.S. sales increasing by 4.5%. It has seen an increase in spending per visit, and gains among families with household incomes higher than $100,000 and $200,000. As a result, Walmart has raised its sales and profit guidance, suggesting that it expects to have a stellar holiday shopping season. In contrast, Target posted a drop in sales, and lowered its full-year profit guidance.
Grocery store as Trojan horse
Walmart’s grocery business has been a Trojan horse. Customers come to the store to stock up their fridge and pantry on low-priced food items, then pick up socks and video games while they’re at it. From the time of Walmart’s founding in 1962, the company’s strategy has been to leverage its enormous buying power to compel brands to sell their products at very low prices.
“For most suppliers, Walmart is their biggest customer,” Rachel Slade, author of Making it in America, told me earlier this year. “It’s almost impossible for them to say no to Walmart’s terms.”
Walmart’s prices are generally between 10% and 25% lower than competitors. As a result, it has put many smaller retailers and mom-and-moms shops out of business. This, in turn, increases it market share. Today, its 4,605 stores are within 10 miles of 90% of the population.
But over the past five years, as the economy has gotten more volatile and inflation has spiked, Walmart’s low grocery prices have begun to appeal to higher income Americans, who feel the need to tighten their belts. The company is doing this in several clever ways.
Last year, it launched Bettergoods, its first new in-house food brand in two decades, that is is perfectly calibrated to the tastes of the higher-income consumer. It has all the markers of a premium brand, with sleek, vibrant branding, but it is also designed to appeal to food preferences of wealthier consumers, including from organic milk to plant-based mozzarella to single origin coffee.
Sucharita Kodali, a retail analyst at Forrester, says that she’s been impressed with the quality of food in her local Walmart’s grocery section in New Jersey. Products are neatly organized and fresh produce is high quality and inviting. “The quality is just as good as Whole Foods,” says Kodali.
This has come in stark contrast to Target, where groceries make up 23% of the products in store. Over the few years, consumers have complained about Target’s grocery and bakery sections being out of stock, messy shelves, and misplaced inventory. Kodali says she’s seen expired food on Target shelves, which is “the worst thing you can do as a retailer.”
E-comm as an entry
The challenge for Walmart is that many of its higher-income consumers aren’t used to visiting Walmart’s stores, and might be bashful about shopping at what is perceived as a budget retailer. But for more than a decade, Walmart has been beefing up its e-commerce capabilities.
When it comes to groceries, it is now significantly ahead of its biggest competitors, capturing 31.6% of grocery e-commerce sales in 2025, ahead of Amazon (22.6%) and Kroger (8.6%). Customers can order groceries online and get them as fast as two hours. And Walmart has a subscription program called Walmart+ that offers free deliver with no order minimum, and is designed to compete directly with Amazon Prime.
But just as with low-income consumers, Walmart wants to encourage these higher income shoppers to buy more than food. As I reported in the latest issue of the magazine, Walmart’s chief merchant, Latriece Watkins, has been on a mission to bring in more premium brands into the store, like Sonos speakers, DeLonghi coffee makers, and LaRoche-Posay skincare. The strategy appears to be working. The latest financial report shows that the average amount consumers are spending per transaction has gone up by 2% from a year ago.
Can Walmart keep this growth streak up? That’s an open question. During the Great Recession of 2008, affluent consumers flocked to Walmart in an effort to stretch their dollars. But when financial pressures eased, the Walmart acknowledges that many of these newfound customers eventually went back to competitors. This time, however, Walmart appears to have a longer-term strategy to keep wealthier consumers coming back, from creating products that cater to their tastes to keeping them locked in with the Walmart+ subscription program. We’ll have to see if these shoppers stick around when the economy gets better.
A copy of the first Superman issue, unearthed by three brothers cleaning out their late mother’s attic, netted $9.12 million this month at a Texas auction house which says it is the most expensive comic book ever sold.The brothers discovered the comic book in a cardboard box beneath layers of brittle newspapers, dust and cobwebs in their deceased mother’s San Francisco home last year, alongside a handful of other rare comics that she and her sibling had collected on the cusp of World War II.She had told her children she had a valuable comic book collection hidden away, but they had never seen it until they put her house up for sale and decided to comb through her belongings for heirlooms, said Lon Allen, vice president of comics at Heritage Auctions. The brothers uncovered the box of comics and sent a message to the auction company, leading Allen to fly out to San Francisco earlier this year to inspect their copy of “Superman No. 1” and show it to other experts for appraisal.“It was just in an attic, sitting in a box, could have easily been thrown away, could’ve easily been destroyed in a thousand different ways,” Allen said. “A lot of people got excited because it’s just every factor in collecting that you could possibly want all rolled into one.”The “Superman No. 1” comic, released in 1939 by Detective Comics Inc., is one of a small number of copies known to be in existence and is in excellent condition. The Man of Steel was the first superhero to enter pop culture, helping boost the copy’s value among collectors, alongside its improbable backstory, Allen said.The previous record for the world’s most expensive comic book had been set last year, when an “Action Comics No. 1” which first introduced Superman to the world as part of an anthology sold for $6 million. In 2022, another Superman No. 1 sold for $5.3 million.A small, in-house advertisement in the comic book helped experts identify it as originating from the first edition of 500,000 Superman No. 1 copies ever printed. Allen estimates there are fewer than 500 in existence today.The copy was not given any special protection, but the cool Northern California climate helped preserve it, leaving it with a firm spine, vibrant colors and crisp corners, according to a statement from Dallas-based Heritage Auctions. The copy was rated a 9.0 out of 10 by comics grading company CGC, meaning it had only the slightest signs of wear and aging.The three brothers, in their 50s and 60s, did not wish to be identified due to the windfall involved nor did the buyer of the comic book, according to the auction house.“This isn’t simply a story about old paper and ink,” one brother said in a statement released by the auction house. “This was never just about a collectible. This is a testament to memory, family and the unexpected ways the past finds its way back to us.”
Brook is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.
Jack Brook, Associated Press/Report for America
Apple said on Monday it is cutting jobs across its sales teams to strengthen its customer engagement efforts, noting that only a small number of roles will be impacted by the layoffs.
An Apple spokesperson told Reuters that the company is continuing to hire and the affected employees can apply for new roles.
The impacted employees include account managers serving major businesses, schools and government agencies, according to Bloomberg News, which had reported the news earlier in the day.
Staff who operate Apple’s briefing centers for institutional meetings and product demonstrations for prospective customers were also affected, Bloomberg said.
One of the major targets of the layoffs was a government sales team working with agencies, including the U.S. Defense Department and Justice Department, per the report.
The team had already been facing tough conditions after the 43-day government shutdown and cutbacks imposed by the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, Bloomberg added.
In the past few weeks, companies including Verizon, Synopsys and IBM have announced job cuts.
Juby Babu and Stephen Nellis, Reuters
Only a week after experiencing a dreaded death cross, and subsequently seeing its value fall to less than $81,000, Bitcoin is showing some signs of recovering.
On Monday, BTC’s price topped $89,000, and as of early Tuesday, are hovering around $87,500.
To be clear, the slump is far from overthe coin saw its price top $124,000 just last monthand no one can predict what will happen next, but it’s a clear upswing in momentum.
All told, when Bitcoin bottomed out at $81,000, it had fallen around 35% off its high. There were several reasons for the selloff, including outflows from large institutional investors and broader economic uncertainty, among other things.
It was a wipeout of around $1 trillion in market value.
Sentiment may be on the upswing
As for this week, its anyone’s guess how much momentum the cryptocurrency will have, but investors appear to be felling a little better.
The Crypto Fear and Greed Index from CoinMarketCap, a sentiment indicator for the crypto market, was at 15 on Tuesday.
Thats still in the extreme fear portion of the spectrum, but it’s up from low pint of 10, where the index was on November 21.
For context, the index hit a high point for 2025 back in May, tallying a 76 and putting it in the greed spectrum. At the time, BTC was trading for around $111,000.
So there has been a wild swing in both momentum and sentiment within the past six months.
And though Bitcoin has regained its footing a bit over the past week, the question is whether that momentum can be sustained and if values can start pushing back toward all-time highs.
What’s next for crypto?
Perhaps the next catalyzing moment for the crypto market will come after the Federal Reserve’s December meeting next month.
The Fed will meet on December 9 and decide whether to cut interest rates further or hold steadya decision that has been made more difficult by a lack of economic data (such as jobs reports) in recent months due to the government shutdown.
The Fed and its chair, Jerome Powell, have been trying to balance concerns about persistent inflation and a weakening labor marketand doing so without data has it flying blind.
Despite that, the odds of a rate cut appear to be the rise, and another cut could spur investors to put more money in stocks and the crypto markets.
This story is developing…
European and Asian shares mostly gained on Tuesday after U.S. stocks rallied on hopes the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates soon.The futures for the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped 0.1%.Germany’s DAX edged 0.1% lower to 23,216.76 and the CAC 40 in Paris added 0.1% to 7,965.77. Britain’s FTSE 100 likewise gained 0.1%, to 9,542.55.In Asian trading, Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 picked up 0.1% to 48,659.52 as a plunge in technology giant SoftBank’s shares weighed on the market. It fell 10.3% on concerns that returns from its heavy investments in OpenAI may be threatened by the next generation Gemini artificial intelligence model that Google launched last week.In South Korea, the Kospi gained 0.3% to 3,857.78. Taiwan’s Taiex jumped 1.5%.Chinese markets also advanced. In Hong Kong, the Hang Seng climbed 0.7% to 25,894.55, while the Shanghai Composite index jumped 0.9% to 3,870.02.E-commerce giant Alibaba, which was due to report its earnings late Tuesday, gained 2.1% in Hong Kong.Australia’s S&P/ASX rebounded to edge 0.1% higher, closing at 8,537.00.U.S. markets will be closed on Thursday for the Thanksgiving holiday. A day later, it’s on to the rush of Black Friday and Cyber Monday.The U.S. stock market rallied on Monday, at the start of a week with shortened trading because of the Thanksgiving holiday.The S&P 500 climbed 1.5% in one of its best days since the summer. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.4%, and the Nasdaq composite jumped 2.7%.Stocks got a lift from rising hopes that the Fed will cut its main interest rate again at its next meeting in December, a move that could boost the economy and investment prices.The market also benefited from strength for stocks caught up in the artificial-intelligence frenzy. Alphabet, which has been getting praise for its Gemini AI model, rallied 6.3% and was one of the strongest forces lifting the S&P 500. Nvidia rose 2.1%.Monday’s gains followed sharp swings in recent weeks, not just day to day but also hour to hour, caused by uncertainty about what the Fed will do with interest rates and whether too much money is pouring into AI and creating a bubble. All the worries are creating the biggest test for investors since an April sell-off, when President Donald Trump shocked the world with his “Liberation Day” tariffs.Despite all the recent fear, the S&P 500 remains within 2.7% of its record set last month.Several tests for the market lie ahead this week. One of the biggest will arrive Tuesday when the U.S. government will deliver data on inflation at the wholesale level in September.Economists expect it to show a 2.6% rise in prices from a year earlier, the same as in August. A higher-than-expected reading could deter the Fed from cutting its main interest rate in December for a third time this year, because lower rates can worsen inflation. Some Fed officials have already argued against a December cut in part because inflation has stubbornly remained above their 2% target.Traders are nevertheless betting on a nearly 85% probability that the Fed will cut rates next month, up from 71% on Friday and from less than a coin flip’s chance seen a week ago, according to data from CME Group.In other dealings early Tuesday, U.S. benchmark crude oil lost 47 cents to $58.37 per barrel. Brent crude, the international standard, shed 49 cents to $62.23 per barrel.The dollar fell to 156.30 Japanese yen from 156.91 yen. The euro rose to $1.1534 from $1.1521.Bitcoin rose 1.6% to $86,836. It was near $125,000 last month.
Elaine Kurtenbach, AP Business Writer
Shares in Alphabet Inc (Nasdaq: GOOG), the company better known as Google, are rising again in premarket trading today.
The stock is currently up by more than 4% following yesterday’s rise of 6.2%. If those gains hold, Google could be set to become the worlds next company with a $4 trillion market cap today.
Heres what you need to know.
Why are GOOG shares rising?
Shares in Alphabet have had a stellar run as of late.
Yesterday, they rose more than 6.2%. Over the past five days, they have been up more than 11.5%. Over the past month, they have jumped more than 22%. And over the past six months, they have been up more than 87%.
And thats before todays further 4% gain in premarket trading.
So why is Alphabet’s share price jumping recently, particularly over the past week?
Theres one big reason: artificial intelligence. But the companys boost from AI is the result of two different factors.
The first: Last week, Google released Gemini 3, its proprietary AI chatbot and LLM. Industry watchers and consumers have widely praised the model for its speed, performance, and capabilities, which, in many tests, have outperformed OpenAIs ChatGPT-5.
Gemini 3s capabilities and Googles decision to quickly integrate it into Search helped spur the stock higher last week.
But that isnt the only AI boost Google that has gotten recently.
On Monday, the Information reported that Facebook owner Meta is considering using Googles AI chips in its data centers in 2027a deal that could be worth billions to Google.
Googles AI chips are the companys tensor processing units (TPUs). Googles TPUs have been around for nearly eight years now, but, as CNBC noted, the company has recently begun designing them to handle AI tasks with efficiency in mind.
Meta is one of the largest buyers of components that go into AI infrastructure, and Nvidia is the leading provider in supplying AI chips.
If Meta is considering opting for Googles TPUs over Nvidias AI chips, it suggests the company has confidence that Googles chips are more than suitable for powering its data centers.
If thats the case, Google could be set to become a serious competitor to Nvidia in the AI hardware race. Indeed, Google investors seem to be celebrating that this morning.
Fast Company reached out to Google and Meta for comment.
Google could become the next $4 trillion company
As of yesterdays market close, Alphabet had a market cap of roughly $3.84 trillion, making it the third-most valuable company after Nvidia and Apple, both of which are currently valued at more than $4 trillion.
But already in premarket trading this morning, GOOG shares have risen by more than 4%.
The companys share price needs to rise by just under 5% over yesterdays close to reach a market cap of $4 trillion. If it does that, Google would become just the fourth company to ever reach that milestone, following Nvidia, Microsoft, and Apple. (Microsofts valuation has currently sunk back below $4 trillion).
Given that Googles stock price is already up around 4% in premarket this morning, it’s possible, but not guaranteed, that the search giant could cross the $4 trillion market cap before markets close today.
Google is the best-performing Magnificent 7 stock of the year so far
Google hasnt had just a great run as of late. When you look back at the companys stock price performance since 2025 began and compare it to the other companies in the Magnificent 7, Google is far and away the best-performing stock in the group so far this year.
As of yesterdays closing price of $318.47 per share, GOOG shares were up over 87% since the year began. Heres how that compares to the other Magnificent 7 stocks:
Alphabet Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG): up 87.79% year to date (YTD)
NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA): up 35.94% YTD
Microsoft Corporation (Nasdaq: MSFT): up 12.46% YTD
Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL): up 10.18% YTD
Meta Platforms, Inc. (Nasdaq: META): up 4.70% YTD
Tesla, Inc. (Nasdaq: TSLA): up 3.45% YTD
Amazon.com, Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN): up 3.14% YTD
Investors will be keenly watching where Googles stock price goes from here. Its impossible to predict which direction that will be, but as of this writing, GOOG is so far the clear winner as far as stock price gains go among the Magnificent 7 in 2025.
After entrepreneur Brynn Putnam sold her smart fitness company, Mirror, to Lululemon for $500 million in 2020, she was looking for her next big idea. It was the middle of the pandemic, and Putnam was living with five kids ranging in age from 2 to 21. She says she often found herself dreaming of an activity that would get her whole family to sit down and connect with each other.
Brynn Putnam [Photo: Board]
When we played games, we were either playing board games like Candyland, so that the littlest ones could participate, or we would try to play video games, but the teenagers who’ve logged a lot of hours on sort of modern controllers would always smoke us, Putnam says. There was a missing product: one that could give you the tactile feel of physical pieces and the face-to-face interaction of sitting around a shared experience, but with the interactivity of video games.
Enter Board, Putnams newest venture. Board is a 24-inch game console that looks a bit like a gigantic iPad. Its function, though, is unlike pretty much any other device on the market: Board combines the setup and feel of a traditional board game with the digital screen of a video game, allowing players to use physical pieces on top of an interactive screen.
[Image: Board]
The console comes with 12 exclusive games and can accommodate up to 10 players in a team setting. It debuted on October 28 for a holiday price of $499, though its standard cost is $699. While the Board team wouldn’t share sales data, they did note that the product already surpassed initial forecasts.
To make Boards premise work, Putnams team designed its own custom hardware and software that can identify different kinds of touch, withstand rough play and spills, and react in real time to players movements. For Putnam, Board represents an entirely new way to use tech; rather than isolating its users, Board is built to provide a social experience.
[Photo: Board]
How Board built a brand-new kind of game
Creating Board started with one major hurdle, says Ryan Measel, the companys chief technology officer: Most touchscreens are only built to recognize 10 fingersand theyre certainly not designed to recognize objects. Board needed to identify not only an unlimited number of fingers, but also the consoles 49 unique game pieces.
Measel explains that, with commercial platforms like Android and iOS, theres a programming layer that limits how many touch pointslike taps and swipesa developer can build into an application. With Board, Measels team built a custom driver that gave them full access to the consoles sensor array, opening up essentially endless possibilities for different interactions with the screen.
[Photo: Board]
Specifically, the Board screen is able to determine whats touching it (and how) through an embedded AI model thats been trained on the systems sensory outputs. It knows, for instance, how to distinguish between a hand accidentally brushing the board, a finger tapping the screen, and an arm passing over the board. It can also tell the difference between all 49 of the consoles game pieces using conductive traces, or unique patterns made out of a conductive material, that are etched onto the bottom of every piece.
30 fingers on the Board during the testing process. [Image: Board]
Alongside the Boards unique ability to distinguish touch, Putnam says, a top concern was the consoles durabilityespecially given that some of its games are designed to be enjoyed by players as young as six. The device comes with a spill-resistant gasket around the display and a tight internal structure to keep it safe from liquids and bumps.
My littlest one is 2, so she tends to use everything as a weapon, Putnam says. We have some great photos and videos from the testing process at the factory of te Board being submerged underwater, dropped from very high heights, and scratched multiple times.
[Image: Board]
How Board works
When users receive their Board, the device comes with 12 games made specifically for the console, as well as unique pieces tailored to each game. Seth Sivak, Boards chief creative officer and former CEO of the game studio Proletariat, led game development. He says the consoles portfolio of games was carefully crafted specifically to offer something for all different kinds of players.
[Photo: Board]
The options run the gamut from 60-second-long arcade-inspired games to an escape room-themed experience that can take up to 90 minutes to complete. Even within the games themselves, players of different ages and skill levels can find roles appropriate to themlike in the chef-inspired game Chop Chop, where the kind of utensil game piece chosen by each participant determines their role in the kitchen.
[Image: Board]
The 2 year old can be the sponge and feel a lot of joy cleaning the kitchen, but it’s very simple and intuitive for them to do, Putnam says. The grown-up can be in charge of managing the order tickets as they come in and strategizing about how to navigate the changing kitchen layout, recipes, and tickets. I think thats really hard to dothere’s not a ton of experiences that really make sure everyone has a seat at the table.
Right now, Sivak and his team are working to build out Boards IP into additional games. At the same time, Putnam says the company is working on making its software development kit available to external developers in order to bring existing games into the Board universe.
[Photo: Board]
Board is combining the old-school nostalgia of game night with all the advantages of digital gamingand it might just be a hit for everyone in the family.
I think for a lot of parents, myself included, you don’t want to pretend like technology doesn’t exist, because technology makes things betterBoard does the rule maintenance for you, it does the score keeping, it does all these things, Putnam says. But you don’t want technology to remove social interaction. It’s important that the screen brings people together. It doesn’t replace your friends or your family, it doesn’t replace your teacher, but it helps make those experiences more rich.
