Month: September 2018

The roar on the track is a siren call for Porsche owners and fans. The German luxury auto brand is holding Rennsport Reunion VI at the famed Laguna Seca Raceway outside Monterey, California. The weekend gathering of Porsche owners and enthusiasts is a chance for the faithful to revel, and in some cases race, vintage

“The last three years have been great and a lot of Americans have gone back to buying big SUVs,” he said. “But when gas prices start to go up, and they are already starting to, a lot of those people who made those decisions a few years ago are going to pay for it. And

Elon Musk has long established himself as a both a visionary CEO and a lightning rod for attention, good and bad. The bad reared its head dramatically this week as the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Musk with securities fraud for misleading investors with August tweets about taking Tesla private. The commission wants to bar

Tesla CEO Elon Musk thinks the fraud case the SEC filed against him on Thursday is flawed, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal citing a person familiar with the matter. Musk reportedly believes the SEC is wrong to contend that he needed a written agreement and price before sending a tweet on

General Electric’s painful year as been a boon for investors who have placed big bets against the legacy industrial conglomerate. And Wall Street’s outlook for the company’s fourth quarter isn’t getting any rosier. GE has proven to be this year’s second-most profitable short trade, according to financial technology firm S3 Partners. It is the third

There are significant, real-world benefits to having an accepted and recognized identity. That’s why the concept of a digital identity is being pursued around the world, from Australia to India. From airports to health records systems, technologists and policy makers with good intentions are digitizing our identities, making modern life more efficient and streamlined. Governments

Margrethe Vestager, the European commissioner for competition, is surely the most feared person in Silicon Valley. She fined Apple $15 billion for tax avoidance. She brought forward multiple antitrust investigations against Google. Just before arriving in the US this week, she announced that she had started to take a keen interest in Amazon. I sat

The ability to personalize a product to your preference is the next major theme of the world’s digital revolution, CNBC’s Jim Cramer said Thursday, speaking from CNBC’s 1Market studio in the tech capital of San Francisco. “The investable theme everybody’s talking about right here, right now? Personalization. It’s everywhere,” the “Mad Money” host said. “Technology

Facebook’s head of policy, Joel Kaplan, was sitting in the U.S. Senate gallery Thursday behind Judge Brett Kavanaugh as he responded to allegations of sexual misbehavior when he was in high school. Kaplan attended in a personal capacity as a friend of Kavanaugh’s, according to a Facebook spokesperson. Both Kavanaugh and Kaplan worked for President

In June 2014, two years after Facebook bought Instagram, I visited Instagram cofounders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger to see how things were going. They were exceedingly, outrageously happy. “When acquisitions are on the docket, I think entrepreneurs look to Instagram to say, ‘How’s it gone for them?’” Systrom told me at the time. “We’re

Iridium Communications announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services on Thursday, to develop a satellite-based network called CloudConnect for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. “We’re really covering the whole planet … with terrestrial networks today it’s still only 10 percent or 20 percent” of the Earth, Iridium CEO Matt Desch told CNBC. “Everybody today can

Anxiety is expensive for U.S. employers. The amount of money companies spend on the mental health of their employees has been rising at a rapid clip — with annual costs increasing twice as fast as all other medical expenses in recent years, according to data from Aetna Behavioral Health. And people with mental health conditions

British cybersecurity start-up Darktrace has raised $50 million in a funding round that values the firm at $1.65 billion. The investment, announced on Thursday, was led by European private equity firm Vitruvian Partners and includes backing from existing investors KKR and TenEleven Ventures. Cambridge-headquartered Darktrace, founded in 2013, uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning technology

For all the advances being made in the field, artificial intelligence still struggles when it comes to identifying hate speech. When he testified before Congress in April, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said it was “one of the hardest” problems. But, he went on, he was optimistic that “over a five- to 10-year period, we will

Google’s first public attempt to explain its reported interest in entering the Chinese market failed to appease critical members of Congress at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on Wednesday. The hearing, which was attended by Google, as well as by Amazon, Apple, AT&T, and Charter Communications, began as a broad discussion of possible privacy legislation.

John Schnatter is having trouble letting go. The ousted founder of the Papa John’s pizza chain has reached out to a number of private equity firms in recent weeks to discuss partnering in a bid to buy the company, sources familiar with the situation tell CNBC. Schnatter, who already owns roughly 30 percent of Papa

Coraline Ada Ehmke has been writing software professionally since 1994. For the past decade, she’s been active in the Ruby programming language community and has created numerous open source tools to help fellow Ruby programmers. But these days she’s best known for a different type of code altogether. Ehmke is the original author of Contributor

Delta Air Lines said it resumed operations after a “technology issue” briefly halted domestic departures on Tuesday evening. The second-largest U.S. airline had issued a ground stop for U.S. flights, which prevented planes from departing. It said there had “been no disruption or safety issue with any Delta flight currently in the air.” Delta tweeted

The price of crude oil rose above $70 a barrel on Tuesday, and while CNBC’s Jim Cramer admitted that he miscalculated its last breakthrough, he insisted that this time, the circumstances have changed. “First, President Trump went hardline against Iran and their oil exports have plummeted while Venezuelan exports continue to dwindle, and demand is

Executives from Amazon, Apple, AT&T, Charter Communications, Google, and Twitter are heading to Washington Wednesday to testify before the Senate Commerce Committee on the topic of privacy. As ever, the main question will be: Are these companies doing enough to protect consumer privacy, and if not, what should Congress do about it? It has been

On Monday night, when the cofounders of Instagram announced that they had quit Facebook, reportedly over Mark Zuckerberg’s meddling, it marked the end of an era in more ways than one. It shattered the partition that protected the beloved photo-sharing app from the sins of its parent company. The departures also extinguished the idea of

The parent company of Arby’s and Buffalo Wild Wings is acquiring burger chain Sonic in a deal valued at $2.3 billion, the companies announced on Tuesday. The deal, which will pay Sonic shareholders $43.50 per share in cash, assumes all debt and represents a 19 percent premium on Sonic’s Monday close.The company’s stock rose more

Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the co-founders of the photo-sharing app Instagram, have resigned and plan to leave the company in coming weeks, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter. The exits add to the challenges facing Instagram’s parent company, Facebook. Mr. Systrom, Instagram’s chief executive, and Mr. Krieger, the chief technical officer,

Hurricane Florence caused between $2.8 billion and $5 billion in insured losses when it blew into North Carolina earlier this month, according to an estimate from global risk modeling firm RMS. Wind alone caused damage worth between $1.3 billion and $2.6 billion, with storm-surge and inland flooding damages totaling between $700 million and $1.2 billion.

Microsoft, SAP and Adobe on Monday announced that their companies are working together on a new initiative to help customers do more with their own data. The move comes as their customers increasingly adopt cloud software and infrastructure, which can make it more difficult to draw conclusions based on all the data stuck in various

Last Tuesday, Disney‘s Marvel Studios released the much-anticipated trailer for 2019’s “Captain Marvel,” and it is a big deal: It is the first female superhero-led franchise for Marvel’s cinematic universe. The film stars Brie Larson as Captain Marvel in the starring role, with supporting roles for Samuel L. Jackson and Jude Law. Marvel Studios’ president,

President Donald Trump’s tweeting habits are lifting oil prices, and the U.S. leader should stop posting on social media to alleviate the spike in prices, according to one Iranian official. “The Trump administration is pushing politics into the OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries), and is aiming at spreading the members and securing their own

Clocks, microwaves, sub-woofers oh my: In its quest to dominate the smart home, Amazon revealed 15 new Alexa-enabled products this week, including revamped versions of its Echo speakers. The blockbuster event drew comparisons to Apple’s relatively lackluster launch the week before, and has set the stage for Google’s own big hardware event on October 9.

Twenty-First Century Fox and Comcast have entered into the third round of bidding in a one-day auction for Sky, sources familiar with the matter told CNBC Saturday. According to the sources, the first two bidding rounds for Sky have been completed, with the auction entering its third and final phase. Those people could not say

There’s a building material that could keep houses intact during hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes and fires. While it’s been widely used around the world, the U.S. is a laggard in adopting the construction technique. One company trying to change that is RSG 3-D, which is bringing a building material known as 3D cementitious sandwich panel for