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On Sunday, “Everest Man” Kami Rita Sherpa, a 56-year-old Nepali mountain guide, completed his 32nd successful Everest summit, breaking his own record. Despite hopeful climbers having to pay more than ever for a permit after Nepal officials raised the price for a spring season pass from $11,000 to $15,000 last September, Everest is still as busy as ever: we charted the number of successful ascents up the 29,032-foot mountain.
Stocks declined on Monday, with the S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, and Russell 2000 posting losses. Energy was the best-performing sector, while information technology was the worst performer. Five of the Magnificent 7 names dropped. |
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Jurors soundly rejected Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s allegations against Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI, and found the defendants not liable on all claims on Monday.
The blockbuster tech trial, which could have seen Altman and Brockman removed from OpenAI’s leadership, took three weeks, but the jury didn’t even need two hours to reach a unanimous verdict: Musk had waited too long to bring his case forward, exceeding the statute of limitations.
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US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who had the ultimate legal authority on the decision, agreed that “there’s a substantial amount of evidence to support the jury’s finding,” and warned Musk’s lawyer, who reserved the right to appeal, that it would be an uphill battle.
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Musk had alleged that OpenAI abandoned its founding mission as a nonprofit dedicated to developing AI for humanity and instead became a profit-driven company closely connected to Microsoft.
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Details around Microsoft’s massive ties to OpenAI also came to light, revealing that the tech giant invested $100 billion in the project despite having doubts about its product.
- The trial also revealed Brockman’s stake in OpenAI is worth $30 billion.
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While Musk was the loser, those of us who enjoy courtroom drama were the winners, with zingers from OpenAI’s lawyer, Sarah Eddy, such as, “Even the mother of [Musk’s] children can’t back his story,” which Elizabeth Lopatto over at The Verge did a hero’s job of rounding up.
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- While any chip company would be hard-pressed to match Nvidia’s size or importance to the AI theme, traders seem more focused on finding firms that will match, or exceed, its growth going forward.
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Price action reflects this quest for what’s next: traders’ desire to chase bottlenecks in memory, networking, and CPUs has led to Nvidia both trailing its peers in the VanEck Semiconductor ETF and becoming a stock that’s less volatile than the overall fund.
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Like a millennial replaced by a Gen Zer, Nvidia has morphed from a high-beta AI leader to a low-beta laggard. The same can be said for another group of mature companies that also happen to be its biggest customers: the Magnificent 7 hyperscalers.
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By and large, this group isn’t trading like clear AI winners, despite their hundreds of billions spent to reorient their future around this theme.
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This continues to tell us a lot about what any “AI bubble” is and isn’t: at this juncture, it’s an attempt to find out the beneficiaries of the hundreds of billions in capex (in some cases, extrapolating demand years down the road), and not a desire to bet on a high ROI from that spending.
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It’s said the stock market can be a Keynesian beauty contest — in which we’re all making decisions based on our guesses about what other people will do, rather than some objective standard of goodness — and in this world, Nvidia’s maturity seems to be a strike against its beauty. |
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