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Andrew Bosworth AKA Boz, an advertising expert for Facebook, gives a talk at the Online Marketing Rockstars marketing trade show in Hamburg, Germany, 03 March 2017. Photo: Christian Charisius/dpa | usage worldwide (Photo by Christian Charisius/picture alliance via Getty Images)
Christian Charisius | picture alliance | Getty Images

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is turning to an old friend and former Harvard teaching assistant, Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, in a time of trouble for the company.

Last week, a damaging series of reports in The Wall Street Journal showed major problems in the company’s ecosystem, including a lack of content moderators for markets outside the U.S., an avalanche of anti-vaccine misinformation in user comments, and Facebook-owned Instagram’s negative effect on teens’ mental health.

Some of the reports said Facebook employees and execs knew of these problems but could not or would not fix them. Lawmakers have already pledged to question execs from Facebook and other Big Tech companies over social media’s effects on teens.

On Wednesday, Facebook shuffled its leadership. Mike Schroepfer, its CTO of more than eight years, will resign next year and will be replaced by Bosworth.

It’s not clear why Schroepfer is leaving, or whether it has anything to do with the Journal reports. In his note announcing his resignation, he said he hoped to dedicate more time to family and philanthropy while still helping out with recruiting and with artificial intelligence technologies as the company’s first senior fellow.

With Bosworth, Zuckerberg is once again turning to one of his most trusted deputies.

Since joining in 2006, Bosworth has gained a reputation as Zuckerberg’s go-to-fix-it guy. He has developed key products and turned around crucial divisions, including hardware and Facebook’s bread and butter: advertising. He has a reputation for being direct with his peers and subordinates. He also frequently posts his thoughts on technology, leadership and personal growth — internally and on his public blog.

Some of these thoughts are unusually blunt for a corporate exec. For instance, in a leaked memo from January 2020, Bosworth said Facebook was more like sugar than a toxin.

“While Facebook may not be nicotine I think it is probably like sugar,” he wrote. “Sugar is delicious and for most of us there is a special place for it in our lives. But like all things it benefits from moderation.”

In a 2016 memo that leaked, he wrote about an attitude among some Facebook employees that connecting people is “de facto good” even if it sometimes leads to bad outcomes, like bullying or a “terrorist attack coordinated on our tools.” After the leak, Bosworth and Zuckerberg explained that the memo was meant to criticize this mindset among Facebook employees rather than defend it.

Bosworth is also one of Facebook’s most accessible executives, posting frequently on Twitter or holding Q&A sessions on Instagram. Most recently, he launched a podcast called “Boz To The Future” where he and guests discuss the latest in technology.

He is a polarizing figure within the company as well. One former employee who spoke on condition of anonymity so as to not break is non-disclosure agreement with Facebook told CNBC that Bosworth thinks he’s a genius, but probably just got lucky in his career. However, a former company executive who worked directly with Bosworth for several years told CNBC that Bosworth is a passionate leader to work for who demands greatness out of his employees.

Facebook declined to comment.

News Feed, ads and hardware

Bosworth met Zuckerberg at Harvard as a teaching assistant in an artificial intelligence class. After Zuckerberg founded Facebook in 2004, Bosworth joined the company in January 2006 as one of the company’s earliest software engineers.

Within months, Bosworth had left his mark. He was one of the few software engineers who built what is now the most significant Facebook feature, News Feed. Prior to News Feed’s launch in September 2006, Facebook was a bunch of profiles users could jump between, leaving posts on each other’s “walls” as desired. News Feed brought all of these posts together in a single, never-ending screen, where the content just kept coming. Bosworth is regarded as the godfather of News Feed, a former executive told CNBC.

Some Facebook users were initially upset that their messages to one another were now easily visible for all their friends to see. But the feature eventually became a hit.

As Facebook transitioned from being primarily web-focused to mobile-first in 2012, Zuckerberg tapped Bosworth to lead the development of the company’s advertising products. In that role, Bosworth took a dysfunctional hodge-podge of products in a division that had been struggling, the former Facebook executive told CNBC, and he turned it into a a nearly $27 billion money-maker by the end of 2016.

In August 2017, Facebook announced that Bosworth would manage consumer hardware, including the company’s struggling skunkworks division of Building 8.

Even though Bosworth had no experience working on hardware, Zuckerberg turned to him to fix the teams, which included the virtual reality division Oculus acquired in 2014 for $2.3 billion. Oculus had barely released its first consumer headset, the Rift, a year earlier with little consumer success, and Building 8 was struggling to deliver products at the overzealous pace Facebook was expecting.

Over the past four years, Bosworth has reorganized and refocused Facebook’s hardware unit, which is now called Facebook Reality Labs.

Now, the company finally has a broad stable of hardware gadgets available for purchase. These include the Oculus Quest headset, the Portal, Portal Go, Portal+ and Portal TV video-calling devices, and smart glasses built in conjunction with Luxottica called Ray-Ban Stories. Earlier this year, Facebook also announced a new team within Reality Labs that will focus on the metaverse — a future space in virtual reality where people can meet.

Facebook has yet to break out specific sales figures for its hardware devices, but the company’s other revenue category, which includes Facebook’s Workplace enterprise software division, has grown to nearly $1.8 billion in 2020, up nearly 118% from $825 million in 2018.

Now, with a key spot needing to be filled, Zuck is turning to Bosworth again.

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AppLovin and Robinhood added to S&P 500

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AppLovin and Robinhood added to S&P 500

Robinhood finally wins spot in S&P 500

Shares of advertising technology company AppLovin and stock trading app Robinhood Markets each jumped about 7% in extended trading on Friday after S&P Global said the two will join the S&P 500 index.

The changes will go into effect before the beginning of trading on Sept. 22, S&P Global announced in a statement. AppLovin will replace MarketAxess Holdings, while Robinhood will take the place of Caesars Entertainment.

In March, short-seller Fuzzy Panda Research advised the committee for the large-cap U.S. index to keep AppLovin from becoming a constituent. AppLovin shares dropped 15% in December, when the committee picked Workday to join the S&P 500. Robinhood, for its part, saw shares slip 2% in June when it was excluded from a quarterly rebalancing of the index.

The S&P 500 already has a heavy concentration of large technology companies. Datadog and DoorDash entered earlier this year.

It’s normal for stocks to go up on news of their inclusion in a major index such as the S&P 500. Fund managers need to buy shares to reflect the updates.

Read more CNBC tech news

AppLovin and Robinhood both went public on Nasdaq in 2021.

Robinhood has been a favorite among retail investors who have bid up shares of meme stocks such as AMC Entertainment and GameStop.

AppLovin itself became a stock to watch, with shares gaining 278% in 2023 and over 700% in 2024. As of Friday’s close, the stock had gained only 51% so far in 2025. AppLovin’s software brings targeted ads to mobile apps and games.

Earlier this year, AppLovin offered to buy the U.S. TikTok business from China’s ByteDance. U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly extended the deadline for a sale, most recently in June.

At Robinhood’s annual general meeting in June, a shareholder asked Vlad Tenev, the company’s co-founder and CEO, if there were plans for getting into the S&P 500.

“It’s a difficult thing to plan for,” Tenev said. “I think it’s one of those things that hopefully happens.”

He said he believed the company was eligible.

Shares of MarketAxess, which specializes in fixed-income trading, have fallen 17% year to date, while shares of Caesars, which runs hotels and casinos, are down 21%.

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FTC commissioner questions status of Snap AI chatbot complaint: ‘People deserve answers’

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FTC commissioner questions status of Snap AI chatbot complaint: 'People deserve answers'

FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter on President Trump's latest attempt to fire her

U.S. Federal Trade Commission Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter raised questions on Friday about the status of an artificial intelligence chatbot complaint against Snap that the agency referred to the Department of Justice earlier this year.

In January, the FTC announced that it would refer a non-public complaint regarding allegations that Snap’s My AI chatbot posed potential “risks and harms” to young users and said it would refer the suit to the DOJ “in the public interest.”

“We don’t know what has happened to that complaint,” Slaughter said on CNBC’s ‘The Exchange.” “The public does not know what has happened to that complaint, and that’s the kind of thing that I think people deserve answers on.”

Snap’s My AI chatbot, which debuted in 2023, is powered by large language models from OpenAI and Google and has drawn scrutiny for problematic responses.

The DOJ did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Snap declined to comment.

Slaugther’s comments came a day after President Donald Trump held a White House dinner with several tech executives, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Apple CEO Tim Cook.

Read more CNBC tech news

“The president is hosting Big Tech CEOs in the White House even as we’re reading about truly horrifying reports of chatbots engaging with small children,” she said.

Trump has been attempting to remove Slaughter from her FTC position, but earlier this week, U.S. appeals court allowed her to maintain her role.

On Thursday, the president asked the Supreme Court to allow him to fire her from the post.

FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson, who was selected by Trump to lead the commission, publicly opposed the complaint against Snap in January, prior to succeeding Lina Khan at the helm.

At the time, he said he would “release a more detailed statement about this affront to the Constitution and the rule of law” if the DOJ were to eventually file a complaint.

WATCH: FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter on President Trump’s latest attempt to fire her.

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Google leads monster week for tech, pushing megacaps to combined $21 trillion in market cap

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Google leads monster week for tech, pushing megacaps to combined  trillion in market cap

Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai meets with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk at Google for Startups in Warsaw, Poland, on February 13, 2025.

Klaudia Radecka | Nurphoto | Getty Images

From the courtroom to the boardroom, it was a big week for tech investors.

The resolution of Google’s antitrust case led to sharp rallies for Alphabet and Apple. Broadcom shareholders cheered a new $10 billion customer. And Tesla’s stock was buoyed by a freshly proposed pay package for CEO Elon Musk.

Add it up, and the U.S. tech industry’s eight trillion-dollar companies gained a combined $420 billion in market cap this week, lifting their total value to $21 trillion, despite a slide in Nvidia shares.

Those companies now account for roughly 36% of the S&P 500, a proportion so great by historical standards that Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at S&P Dow Jones Indices, told CNBC by email, “there are no comparisons.”

Read more CNBC tech news

There was a certain irony to this week’s gains.

Alphabet’s 9% jump on Wednesday was directly tied to the U.S. government effort to diminish the search giant’s market control, which was part of a years-long campaign to break up Big Tech. Since 2020, Google, Apple, Amazon and Meta have all been hit with antitrust allegations by the Department of Justice or Federal Trade Commission.

A year ago, Google lost to the DOJ, a result viewed by many as the most-significant antitrust decision for the tech industry since the case against Microsoft more than two decades earlier. But in the remedies ruling this week, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta said Google won’t be forced to sell its Chrome browser despite its loss in court and instead handed down a more limited punishment, including a requirement to share search data with competitors.

The decision lifted Apple along with Alphabet, because the companies can stick with an arrangement that involves Google paying Apple billions of dollars per year to be the default search engine on iPhones. Alphabet rose more than 10% for the week and Apple added 3.2%, helping boost the Nasdaq 1.1%.

Analysts at Wedbush Securities wrote in a note after the decision that the ruling “removed a huge overhang” on Google’s stock and a “black cloud worry” that hung over Apple. Further, they said it clears the path for the companies to pursue a bigger artificial intelligence deal involving Gemini, Google’s AI models.

“This now lays the groundwork for Apple to continue its deal and ultimately likely double down on more AI related partnerships with Google Gemini down the road,” the analysts wrote.

Mehta explained that a major factor in his decision was the emergence of generative AI, which has become a much more competitive market than traditional search and has dramatically changed the market dynamics.

New players like OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity have altered Google’s dominance, Mehta said, noting that generative AI technologies “may yet prove to be game changers.”

On Friday, Alphabet investors shrugged off a separate antitrust matter out of Europe. The company was hit with a 2.95-billion-euro ($3.45 billion) fine from European Union regulators for anti-competitive practices in its advertising technology business.

Broadcom pops

Broadcom shares spike briefly on Q4 beat

While OpenAI was an indirect catalyst for Google and Apple this week, it was more directly tied to the huge rally in Broadcom’s stock.

Following Broadcom’s better-than-expected earnings report on Thursday, CEO Hock Tan told analysts that his chipmaker had secured a $10 billion contract with a new customer, which would be the company’s fourth large AI client.

Several analysts said the new customer is OpenAI, and the Financial Times reported on a partnership between the two companies.

Broadcom is the newest entrant into the trillion-dollar club, thanks to the company’s custom chips for AI, already used by Google, Meta and TikTok parent ByteDance. With Its 13% jump this week, the stock is now up 120% in the past year, lifting Broadcom’s market cap to around $1.6 trillion.

“The company is firing on all cylinders with clear line of sight for growth supported by significant backlog,” analysts at Barclays wrote in a note, maintaining their buy recommendation and lifting their price target on the stock.

For the other giant AI chipmaker, the past week wasn’t so good.

Nvidia shares fell more than 4% in the holiday-shortened week, the worst performance among the megacaps. There was no apparent negative news for Nvidia, but the stock has now dropped for four consecutive weeks.

Still, Nvidia remains the largest company by market cap, valued at over $4 trillion, with its stock up 56% in the past 12 months.

Microsoft also fell this week and is on an extended slide, dropping for five straight weeks. Shares are still up 21% over the last 12 months.

On the flipside, Tesla has been the laggard in the group. Shares of the electric vehicle maker are down 13% this year due to a multi-quarter sales slump that reflects rising competition from lower-cost Chinese manufacturers and an aging lineup of EVs.

But Tesla shares climbed 5% this week, sparked mostly by gains on Friday after the company said it wants investors to approve a pay plan for Musk that could be worth up to almost $1 trillion.

The payouts, split into 12 tranches, would require Tesla to see significant value appreciation, starting with the first award that won’t kick in until the company almost doubles its market cap to $2 trillion.

Tesla Chairwoman Robyn Denholm told CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin the plan was designed to keep Musk, the world’s richest person, “motivated and focused on delivering for the company.”

WATCH: Tesla board chair on Elon Musk’s pay plan

Tesla Chair Denholm: New pay plan designed to keep Musk motivated & focused on delivering for Tesla

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