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CEO of The Production Board David Friedberg walks to a morning session at the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference on July 09, 2021 in Sun Valley, Idaho.
Kevin Dietsch | Getty Images

David Friedberg is known in Silicon Valley as an early Google executive who started farming insurance company Climate Corporation and sold it to Monsanto for $1 billion in 2013.

More recently, Friedberg has gained the nickname Queen of Quinoa on the popular All-In podcast with investors Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya and David Sacks. The lifelong vegetarian earned the nickname when he purchased Canadian quinoa supplier NorQuin in 2014.

Friedberg remains board chairman at NorQuin and is chair of Metromile, a software-powered auto insurance provider that he started a decade ago and took public through a special purpose acquisition company earlier this year.

But he’s spending the bulk of his time on a project he started four years ago with the help of old friend and Google co-founder Larry Page.

After leaving Monsanto in 2015, Friedberg began talking with Page about a way to build and finance a whole new batch of start-ups focused on agriculture technology, sustainability and advancements in life sciences. He didn’t want to return to Google, so Page — through parent company Alphabet — agreed to help finance a holding company that Friedberg would operate.

Google CEO Larry Page holds a press annoucement at Google headquarters in New York on May 21, 2012. Google announced that it will allocate 22,000 square feet of its New York headquarters to CornellNYC Tech university, free of charge for five years and six month or until the university completes its campus in New York.
EMMANUEL DUNAND | AFP | Getty Images

Friedberg launched The Production Board in 2017. He’s now revealing Alphabet’s and Page’s involvement for the first time.

The company, which Friedberg describes as a venture foundry, just raised $300 million from Alphabet along with investors including Baillie Gifford, Allen & Co., BlackRock, Koch Disruptive Technologies and Morgan Stanley’s Counterpoint Global.

While Page was the initial Alphabet sponsor, Friedberg said the Google co-founder hasn’t been involved in the company for a while. Alphabet’s Anil Patel, who leads investments for the Other Bets segment, is on TPB’s board.

TPB is an investment company, but it’s not set up as a venture fund. That means Alphabet and other outside investors own shares in the parent entity but not the portfolio companies. They only get liquidity if TPB goes public or gets acquired.

“If one of our companies were to go public or get sold, we don’t take that capital and distribute it back to our shareholders,” Friedberg said in an interview this week. “It stays on the balance sheet and we keep building.”

No shortage of problems

Friedberg said neither he nor his investors need money, but they’re all trying to find solutions to some of the planet’s gravest existential challenges. With climate disasters emerging across the globe and more parts of the world becoming uninhabitable, TPB is investing in science and research to create new systems for food, agriculture and health.

“At least for my lifetime, I don’t think there’s going to be any shortage of problems and opportunities to go after,” the 41-year-old Friedberg said. “If we have a liquidity event, we should be able to recycle that capital and use it for new work.”

Friedberg said TPB has only 15 employees but its companies have hundreds of workers combined. His strategy is to hire top scientists, follow research trends for breakthroughs in genomics and life sciences and then fund R&D to determine if his team can develop a marketable product.

If there’s a business opportunity, TPB will spin the company out and give it a CEO, management team and lab space, while still offering centralized services for legal, human resources and finance. Some of the companies have raised additional capital from other venture investors.

“They can focus on getting a product built or getting product-market fit, and then over time as they mature, we start to hand some of those operating functions off so they can operate independently,” Friedberg said.

TPB’s existing investments include Soylent, the meal replacement beverage and nutrition company, and bioreactor lab Culture Biosciences.

Soylent
Josh Edelson | AFP | Getty Images

In a blog post Friday announcing the new investment, Friedberg is naming five foundry companies that TPB launched and turned into businesses. They include Pattern Ag, which is using precision engineering to help farmers make their land more productive; UR Labs, which makes a meal replacement shake to help people with diabetes lower their blood sugar; and Ohalo Genetics, a company using gene-editing tools to breed plants that use less land and water.

TPB also started Triplebar, a company using biotechnology to try to make food production, processing and packaging more sustainable. To run Triplebar, Friedberg teamed with Jeremy Agresti, a scientist and former Harvard fellow whose research was central to the creation of 10x Genomics.

Friedberg said seeking out and recruiting talent is a major part of his job.

“I love science,” he said. “Finding awesome scientists and trying to convince them to do this work is fun for me and a good use of my time.”

Along with hiring and raising capital, Friedberg has also been busy working on a SPAC. In February, he filed a prospectus for a blank-check company called TPB Acquisition, with plans to raise $250 million. He later reduced the target to $200 million.

The SPAC is looking for companies in the same markets that interest TPB. According to the filing, the transaction could even merge one of TPB’s businesses with another company.

“We will not, however, complete an initial business combination with only TPB or a portfolio company of TPB,” the filing said.

The SPAC hasn’t started trading or announced a deal, and Friedberg said he can’t talk about it at the moment.

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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.

Don’t miss these cryptocurrency insights from CNBC Pro:

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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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