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Kevin Stratvert produces videos at his home in Seattle.
Tara Brown

When Microsoft updated its Teams communication app with a more sophisticated way to give PowerPoint presentations in January, the company published a 500-word blog post on the feature. People could read the blog post and try to figure out how to use it, or they could consult YouTube.

On the video service owned by arch-rival Google, a former Microsoft employee named Kevin Stratvert published a video on Presenter Mode to his more than 800,000 subscribers, garnering more than 180,000 views and hundreds of comments. Microsoft itself had not published a video on the topic.

“I’ve built a Microsoft audience,” Stratvert said in an interview with CNBC. “Microsoft content drives a lot more viewership than non-Microsoft content. I’ve done Gmail and a few others, but they haven’t done quite as well.”

That might have to do with the reach of Microsoft’s products. The company held 86% of the email and authoring market in 2020, according to technology research firm Gartner, with 1.2 billion Office users.

Not every one of those 1.2 billion knows how to do everything in Office, though, and people also need to keep up with the latest updates that Microsoft pumps out. Videos from Stratvert and his YouTube contemporaries are helping with that — and sometimes getting more eyeballs than Microsoft’s official videos.

Much better off

Stratvert arrived at Microsoft in 2006, the same year Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion. His first YouTube video showed footage from a drone flying over a town in New Jersey. Then Stratvert filmed videos of his travels in the Puget Sound and beyond. How-to videos and gadget-review videos followed.

In 2017 he posted his first Microsoft-related video, in which he toured treehouses on the company’s campus with his wife, Kerry Stratvert, a manager at the company. In the video description, he included a disclosure saying that he was a Microsoft employee.

Two months after the treehouse video, Stratvert was working on the small development team behind Office.com, a website that gives fast access to online versions of Excel spreadsheets and other Office documents. The site was not well known, especially compared with Office applications for PCs, so Stratvert and colleagues asked their peers in marketing if they could spread the word about Office.com. The marketers didn’t have enough resources to help, Stratvert said.

So Stratvert produced a video showing how people could use Office.com to get most features of Microsoft Office free of charge. It performed well, and his manager told him he had done a good job.

He went on to make videos about Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Teams, Windows and Word. Microsoft employees on other teams noticed and started asking him to make videos about their products. They saw how many people were watching and recognized that getting him to talk about their products could bring in new users, which in turn could mean more favorable employee reviews.

“It’s almost like teams appreciate that there’s this other outlet that’s kind of unofficial,” he said.

Then, in July 2020, months after the pandemic sent the Stratverts home, he gave up his position at Microsoft and began making five times as many videos as he was before. He no longer needed to include disclosures in videos that he was a Microsoft employee, and he could talk more freely about competing products such as Slack and Zoom.

YouTube users have hit the subscribe button. Today he has 85% more subscribers than the official Microsoft 365 YouTube channel focused on Teams and other Office applications, which he said has a team of 20 to 30 people producing content.

“Economically I’m much better off,” he said. His wife still works at Microsoft.

Promoting external creators

Historically, developing and maintaining products has been the core of Microsoft. Today nearly 50% of employees work in engineering. Marketing is a considerably smaller part of the business, and employees work on ads, materials for Microsoft’s website, events and other methods of promotion.

In the past few years, a group inside Microsoft began focusing more on YouTube.

“On YouTube specifically, we’re starting to explore the concept of what it looks like to do something native to YouTube,” Sonia Atchison, a market research lead who worked on the Microsoft Creators Program, said on a podcast last year.

People often turn to YouTube when they want to get a better understanding of Microsoft software, and while Microsoft has plenty of its own videos available on YouTube, they don’t always come up at the top of the site’s search results, Atchison said. Videos from outsiders can receive higher rankings.

Sometimes a video from a Microsoft employee might be there. The company does have employees with large audiences, including Mike Tholfsen, a 26-year company veteran whose videos show how teachers and students can use Teams and other applications.

Microsoft wanted more people like Tholfsen. The company formed a group to help people working on different products learn how to build sizable YouTube channels, said Jon Levesque, who posted YouTube videos as a senior platform evangelist at Microsoft before taking a job at DocuSign in March. There were issues at times. Some employees asked why they were concentrating on a service owned by a top competitor, and teams didn’t always agree with everything that employee-creators said in videos, Levesque said.

The effort didn’t get far, and Microsoft began promoting videos from non-employees instead, with the establishment of the Microsoft Creators Program. The company started including outsiders’ videos in its video playlists, and it offered to use their videos for customer support. That led to some additional video views, said Jason Sele, whose YouTube channel goes by the name Sele Training. In late June, Microsoft announced plans to put the program on pause.

Among the dozens of people who joined the Creators Program, the most popular is Leila Gharani, a software instructor in Vienna, with over 900,000 subscribers. After picking up skills in Excel and other software on the job, Gharani began teaching classes in person and online. She made her YouTube debut in 2016, with the hope of enhancing her filming skills.

The channel took off, and that brought in money, plus it drew more students to her premium courses, which her company, XelPlus, continues to offer. With the company growing, her husband left his position as a chief financial officer to join her. They brought on an editor and a writer, too.

Many of Gharani’s YouTube videos detail parts of Excel. That doesn’t mean she completely ignores the competition. One of her more popular videos in 2020 was called “Google Sheets BEATS Excel with THESE 10 Features!”

Like Stratvert, Gharani has heard from Microsoft employees. After she posted a video on the Whiteboard app, a program manager said the team loved her video and offered to show her updates that were coming soon. The program manager didn’t tell her to make a video but instead wanted to see if she thought the enhancements would be video-worthy, Gharani said.

She said users might ascribe greater authority to YouTube creators who work at Microsoft, unlike her.

“People appreciate that they’re at Microsoft,” she said. “‘They must know what they’re saying. They’re not going to say it if it’s not true. That authority thing does come with it. But not a lot.”

Jason Sele makes YouTube videos from a high-tech RV.
Jason Sele

It hasn’t stopped Gharani from growing into a major entity. She boasts more subscribers than almost all of Microsoft’s YouTube accounts. The Xbox channel remains a top attraction, with over 4 million subscribers.

Sele would love the type of YouTube success that Gharani and Stratvert have had. Videos of his that contain tips and tricks on Excel and other applications have received more than 1 million views, but he’s not an on-camera star. Sele, who makes videos from his RV after 25 years of exposure to Microsoft products as a director of information technology, narrates while giving all the visual attention to the video feed from his computer. He said he spends time carefully writing and editing scripts before hitting record. The YouTube money is enough to live on, he said.

He said he isn’t worried about competing with Microsoft. “They’ll crank out all this training, but it really isn’t training you can just hand to your employees,” he said. “It’s either too high-level or low-level.”

Entertainment

While YouTube has no shortage of software walk-throughs, YouTube is more than just a destination for careful learning. It’s a venue for entertainment. Gharani gets that.

“It’s more passive, they don’t have to really concentrate,” she said of people who watch her videos. “They can let themselves also think about other things and come back and just watch and still get something out of it. You can’t get that out of writing.”

She strives to keep her YouTube videos moving along at a fast pace. She doesn’t want the videos to be too boring. Otherwise she won’t have many people watching.

“It’s not necessary that they actually learn something, but they just see the potential that they could learn something, or they feel like they’ve learned something,” she said. Her online courses have a different purpose. There’s no background music, they’re slower, and there’s less of her talking on camera.

The thumbnail images for her videos on YouTube always show her face, and her channel uses her full name, rather than some jumble of words such as OfficeIsSuperGreat, which helps her work stand out in search results.

The same can be said about Stratvert’s channel.

But his videos can be longer. Some run well past 20 or 30 minutes. He keeps them from becoming tedious by talking about how he uses software inside his made-up corporation, the Kevin Cookie Company. In one video about holding webinars in Teams, Kerry Stratvert made an appearance, posing as a Kevin Cookie Company employee who wanted to air her concerns. As the person running the meeting, he turned off her microphone and camera, demonstrating what webinar hosts can do in that situation in real life.

For years she had called Stratvert’s YouTube channel a hobby and pointed out that he hadn’t recouped the investment in production equipment. She didn’t think he could ever go full time. Then, last year, he did.

“It’s done extremely well,” he said. “My wife looks at that — ‘Oh, man, working at home, cranking out a video a day, maybe I should do this, too. Maybe I should pull together videos.’ Same with her sister, too.”

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Tesla must pay portion of $329 million in damages after fatal Autopilot crash, jury says

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Tesla must pay portion of 9 million in damages after fatal Autopilot crash, jury says

A jury in Miami has determined that Tesla should be held partly liable for a fatal 2019 Autopilot crash, and must compensate the family of the deceased and an injured survivor a portion of $329 million in damages.

Tesla’s payout is based on $129 million in compensatory damages, and $200 million in punitive damages against the company.

The jury determined Tesla should be held 33% responsible for the fatal crash. That means the automaker would be responsible for about $42.5 million in compensatory damages. In cases like these, punitive damages are typically capped at three times compensatory damages.

The plaintiffs’ attorneys told CNBC on Friday that because punitive damages were only assessed against Tesla, they expect the automaker to pay the full $200 million, bringing total payments to around $242.5 million.

Tesla said it plans to appeal the decision.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs had asked the jury to award damages based on $345 million in total damages. The trial in the Southern District of Florida started on July 14.

The suit centered around who shouldered the blame for the deadly crash in Key Largo, Florida. A Tesla owner named George McGee was driving his Model S electric sedan while using the company’s Enhanced Autopilot, a partially automated driving system.

While driving, McGee dropped his mobile phone that he was using and scrambled to pick it up. He said during the trial that he believed Enhanced Autopilot would brake if an obstacle was in the way. His Model S accelerated through an intersection at just over 60 miles per hour, hitting a nearby empty parked car and its owners, who were standing on the other side of their vehicle.

Naibel Benavides, who was 22, died on the scene from injuries sustained in the crash. Her body was discovered about 75 feet away from the point of impact. Her boyfriend, Dillon Angulo, survived but suffered multiple broken bones, a traumatic brain injury and psychological effects.

“Tesla designed Autopilot only for controlled access highways yet deliberately chose not to restrict drivers from using it elsewhere, alongside Elon Musk telling the world Autopilot drove better than humans,” Brett Schreiber, counsel for the plaintiffs, said in an e-mailed statement on Friday. “Tesla’s lies turned our roads into test tracks for their fundamentally flawed technology, putting everyday Americans like Naibel Benavides and Dillon Angulo in harm’s way.”

Following the verdict, the plaintiffs’ families hugged each other and their lawyers, and Angulo was “visibly emotional” as he embraced his mother, according to NBC.

Here is Tesla’s response to CNBC:

“Today’s verdict is wrong and only works to set back automotive safety and jeopardize Tesla’s and the entire industry’s efforts to develop and implement life-saving technology. We plan to appeal given the substantial errors of law and irregularities at trial.

Even though this jury found that the driver was overwhelmingly responsible for this tragic accident in 2019, the evidence has always shown that this driver was solely at fault because he was speeding, with his foot on the accelerator – which overrode Autopilot – as he rummaged for his dropped phone without his eyes on the road. To be clear, no car in 2019, and none today, would have prevented this crash.

This was never about Autopilot; it was a fiction concocted by plaintiffs’ lawyers blaming the car when the driver – from day one – admitted and accepted responsibility.”

The verdict comes as Musk, Tesla’s CEO, is trying to persuade investors that his company can pivot into a leader in autonomous vehicles, and that its self-driving systems are safe enough to operate fleets of robotaxis on public roads in the U.S.

Tesla shares dipped 1.8% on Friday and are now down 25% for the year, the biggest drop among tech’s megacap companies.

The verdict could set a precedent for Autopilot-related suits against Tesla. About a dozen active cases are underway focused on similar claims involving incidents where Autopilot or Tesla’s FSD— Full Self-Driving (Supervised) — had been in use just before a fatal or injurious crash.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration initiated a probe in 2021 into possible safety defects in Tesla’s Autopilot systems. During the course of that investigation, Tesla made changes, including a number of over-the-air software updates.

The agency then opened a second probe, which is ongoing, evaluating whether Tesla’s “recall remedy” to resolve issues with the behavior of its Autopilot, especially around stationary first responder vehicles, had been effective.

The NHTSA has also warned Tesla that its social media posts may mislead drivers into thinking its cars are capable of functioning as robotaxis, even though owners manuals say the cars require hands-on steering and a driver attentive to steering and braking at all times.

A site that tracks Tesla-involved collisions, TeslaDeaths.com, has reported at least 58 deaths resulting from incidents where Tesla drivers had Autopilot engaged just before impact.

Read the jury’s verdict below.

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Crypto wobbles into August as Trump’s new tariffs trigger risk-off sentiment

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Crypto wobbles into August as Trump's new tariffs trigger risk-off sentiment

A screen showing the price of various cryptocurrencies against the US dollar displayed at a Crypto Panda cryptocurrency store in Hong Kong, China, on Monday, Feb. 3, 2025. 

Lam Yik | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The crypto market slid Friday after President Donald Trump unveiled his modified “reciprocal” tariffs on dozens of countries.

The price of bitcoin showed relative strength, hovering at the flat line while ether, XRP and Binance Coin fell 2% each. Overnight, bitcoin dropped to a low of $114,110.73.

The descent triggered a wave of long liquidations, which forces traders to sell their assets at market price to settle their debts, pushing prices lower. Bitcoin saw $172 million in liquidations across centralized exchanges in the past 24 hours, according to CoinGlass, and ether saw $210 million.

Crypto-linked stocks suffered deeper losses. Coinbase led the way, down 15% following its disappointing second-quarter earnings report. Circle fell 4%, Galaxy Digital lost 2%, and ether treasury company Bitmine Immersion was down 8%. Bitcoin proxy MicroStrategy was down by 5%.

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Bitcoin falls below $115,000

The stock moves came amid a new wave of risk off sentiment after President Trump issued new tariffs ranging between 10% and 41%, triggering worries about increasing inflation and the Federal Reserve’s ability to cut interest rates. In periods of broad based derisking, crypto tends to get hit as investors pull out of the most speculative and volatile assets. Technical resilience and institutional demand for bitcoin and ether are helping support their prices.

“After running red hot in July, this is a healthy strategic cooldown. Markets aren’t reacting to a crisis, they’re responding to the lack of one,” said Ben Kurland, CEO at crypto research platform DYOR. “With no new macro catalyst on the horizon, capital is rotating out of speculative assets and into safer ground … it’s a calculated pause.”

Crypto is coming off a winning month but could soon hit the brakes amid the new macro uncertainty, and in a month usually characterized by lower trading volumes and increased volatility. Bitcoin gained 8% in July, according to Coin Metrics, while ether surged more than 49%.

Ether ETFs saw more than $5 billion in inflows in July alone (with just a single day of outflows of $1.8 million on July 2), bringing it’s total cumulative inflows to $9.64 to date. Bitcoin ETFs saw $114 million in outflows in the final trading session of July, bringing its monthly inflows to about $6 billion out of a cumulative $55 billion.

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Google has dropped more than 50 DEI-related organizations from its funding list

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Google has dropped more than 50 DEI-related organizations from its funding list

Google CEO Sundar Pichai gestures to the crowd during Google’s annual I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California, on May 20, 2025.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Google has purged more than 50 organizations related to diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, from a list of organizations that the tech company provides funding to, according to a new report.

The company has removed a total of 214 groups from its funding list while adding 101, according to a new report from tech watchdog organization The Tech Transparency Project. The watchdog group cites the most recent public list of organizations that receive the most substantial contributions from Google’s U.S. Government Affairs and Public Policy team.

The largest category of purged groups were DEI-related, with a total of 58 groups removed from Google’s funding list, TTP found. The dropped groups had mission statements that included the words “diversity, “equity,” “inclusion,” or “race,” “activism,” and “women.” Those are also terms the Trump administration officials have reportedly told federal agencies to limit or avoid.

In response to the report, Google spokesperson José Castañeda told CNBC that the list reflects contributions made in 2024 and that it does not reflect all contributions made by other teams within the company.

“We contribute to hundreds of groups from across the political spectrum that advocate for pro-innovation policies, and those groups change from year to year based on where our contributions will have the most impact,” Castañeda said in an email.

Organizations that were removed from Google’s list include the African American Community Service Agency, which seeks to “empower all Black and historically excluded communities”; the Latino Leadership Alliance, which is dedicated to “race equity affecting the Latino community”; and Enroot, which creates out-of-school experiences for immigrant kids. 

The organization funding purge is the latest to come as Google began backtracking some of its commitments to DEI over the last couple of years. That pull back came due to cost cutting to prioritize investments into artificial intelligence technology as well as the changing political and legal landscape amid increasing national anti-DEI policies.

Over the past decade, Silicon Valley and other industries used DEI programs to root out bias in hiring, promote fairness in the workplace and advance the careers of women and people of color — demographics that have historically been overlooked in the workplace.

However, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision to end affirmative action at colleges led to additional backlash against DEI programs in conservative circles.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order upon taking office in January to end the government’s DEI programs and directed federal agencies to combat what the administration considers “illegal” private-sector DEI mandates, policies and programs. Shortly after, Google’s Chief People Officer Fiona Cicconi told employees that the company would end DEI-related hiring “aspirational goals” due to new federal requirements and Google’s categorization as a federal contractor.

Despite DEI becoming such a divisive term, many companies are continuing the work but using different language or rolling the efforts under less-charged terminology, like “learning” or “hiring.”

Even Google CEO Sundar Pichai maintained the importance diversity plays in its workforce at an all-hands meeting in March.

“We’re a global company, we have users around the world, and we think the best way to serve them well is by having a workforce that represents that diversity,” Pichai said at the time.

One of the groups dropped from Google’s contributions list is the National Network to End Domestic Violence, which provides training, assistance, and public awareness campaigns on the issue of violence against women, the TTP report found. The group had been on Google’s list of funded organizations for at least nine years and continues to name the company as one of its corporate partners.

Google said it still gave $75,000 to the National Network to End Domestic Violence in 2024 but did not say why the group was removed from the public contributions list.

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