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Elizabeth Holmes, founder of Theranos Inc., left, arrives at federal court in San Jose, California, on Tuesday, Oct. 12, 2021.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

SAN JOSE, CALIF. — A third juror was dismissed in Elizabeth Holmes’ criminal trial on Friday for what the judge said was “good cause.” That leaves only two alternates in a trial that’s expected to last until December.

U.S. District Court Judge Edward Davila told prosecutors and defense attorneys for Holmes that he received an email from juror No. 5 on Friday morning. The judge, along with Jeffrey Schenk, an assistant U.S. attorney, and Kevin Downey, a defense attorney for Holmes, spoke with the juror in chamber.

“The court had found good cause to excuse a juror,” Davila told the courtroom upon his return. There was no explanation given for excusing the female juror.

An alternate juror was selected to join the main bench. The impaneled jury deciding the fate of Holmes consists of eight men and four women.

“The juror raised the issue on their own, so they began to believe their ability to serve as an impartial juror was compromised,” said Danny Cevallos, an attorney and NBC News legal analyst, in an interview. “Apparently the court agreed with them,” said Cevallos, who’s been following the case but was not present in the courtroom.

Holmes’ high-profile trial began in San Jose seven weeks ago. The second juror was removed two weeks ago after revealing that, due to her Buddhist beliefs, she could not in good conscious return a verdict that may send Holmes to prison. Last month, a 19-year-old juror was dismissed for financial hardships.

Losing too many jurors runs the risk of a mistrial. However, Cevallos said that, according to a federal rule, after a jury has started deliberations a judge may permit a jury of 11 to return a verdict.

Holmes has pleaded not guilty to ten counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Federal prosecutors allege Holmes and her co-conspirator, former company president Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, engaged in a decade-long multimillion-dollar scheme to defraud investors and patients with regards to Theranos’ blood-testing technology.

Holmes and Balwani were indicted in 2018. Her trial has been delayed multiple times due to pandemic-related challenges and Holmes’ pregnancy. Balwani, who also pleaded not guilty, will face a separate trial next year.

Even in the case of a mistrial, Holmes would not be in the clear.

“A retrial, which the government certainly would do, would put Elizabeth’s life on hold again and drain her accounts even further,” Cevallos said. “So as much as a mistrial isn’t a conviction sometimes you’d rather get to the verdict.”

Skepticism from Pfizer

Following the juror’s departure, a scientist at Pfizer, Shane Weber, took the stand. Weber evaluated Theranos in 2008, and reviewed documents related to the blood-testing technology. He later concluded that Pfizer should not pursue a deal with the company.

In his December 2008 summary of a report, Weber recommended that “Theranos does not at this time have any diagnostic or clinical interest to Pfizer,” but he recommended the company revisit the matter every six months.

Weber’s report was shown to jurors. In it, Weber wrote, “Theranos has provided a poorly prepared summary document of their platform for home patient use with anti-angiogenic therapies.”

Further down, he wrote, “Theranos has provided non-informative, tangential, deflective or evasive answers to a written set of technical due diligence questions.”

Weber told his supervisors in an email in January 2009, that he spoke to Holmes to explain that Pfizer would not be using Theranos’ at-home products for patients.

“I was polite, clear, crisp and patiently firm as she pushed back,” the email said. “She asked for other names at Pfizer to approach and I politely deflected.”

Jurors were shown a version of a Theranos report that Holmes had sent to Walgreens executives with the Pfizer logo on it. Weber testified that Pfizer didn’t approve the use of its logo on the report.

“Would it be fair to say in 2010 or after that Pfizer endorsed Theranos technology?” Robert Leach, an assistant U.S. attorney, asked.

Weber responded, “Uh, no.”

Under cross-examination, Weber told jurors that his report on Theranos was never sent to Holmes.

‘Keep things under wraps’

Also on Friday, jurors heard from Bryan Tolbert, who made an investment in Theranos in 2006 and 2013 through Black Diamond Ventures. The firm, which was founded by by Chris Lucas, invested $5 million in the start-up.

Tolbert told jurors that there was limited information about Theranos at the time, but “it felt like a revolutionary technology and you wanted to preserve to your advantage.”

“Chris and I wanted more information, more financial information, more visibility about what was going on,” Tolbert said. “I certainly thought it was intentional they were trying to keep things under wraps.”

WATCH: Another Theranos insider testifies against founder Elizabeth Holmes

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Broadcom beats on earnings and revenue

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Broadcom beats on earnings and revenue

A sign is posted in front of a Broadcom office in San Jose, California, on Dec. 12, 2024.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

Broadcom reported second-quarter earnings on Thursday that beat Wall Street expectations, and the chipmaker provided robust guidance for the current period.

Here’s how the chipmaker did versus LSEG consensus estimates:

  • Earnings per share: $1.58 adjusted versus $1.56 expected
  • Revenue: $15 billion versus $14.99 billion expected

Broadcom said it expects about $15.8 billion in third-quarter revenue, versus $15.70 billion expected by Wall Street analysts. Revenue in the latest quarter rose 20% on an annual basis.

The company said net income increased to $4.97 billion, or $1.03 per share, from $2.12 billion, or 44 cents per share, in the year-ago period. The company instituted a 10-for-1 stock split a year ago.

Broadcom shares are up 12% this year after more than doubling last year on investor optimism for the company’s custom chips for artificial intelligence. In March, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan said it was developing AI chips with three large cloud customers.

Broadcom said that it had $4.4 billion in AI revenue during the quarter, attributing the sales to its networking parts that connect complicated server clusters.

Tan said in a statement that Broadcom expects $5.1 billion in AI chip sales in the third quarter, adding that the company’s “hyperscale partners continue to invest.”

Hyperscalers are companies that build out large cloud systems to rent out to their own customers. They include Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

Those sales are reported in the company’s semiconductor solutions business, which had $8.4 billion in revenue during the quarter, a 17% increase from last year, and above $8.34 billion analyst estimate, according to StreetAccount.

The company’s software business, which includes VMware, grew 25% year-over-year to $6.6 billion in sales, beating the StreetAccount estimate.

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Microsoft’s stock hits fresh record, rallying despite drop in broader market

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Microsoft's stock hits fresh record, rallying despite drop in broader market

Microsoft Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella speaks during the Microsoft Build 2025, conference in Seattle, Washington, on May 19, 2025.

Jason Redmond | AFP | Getty Images

On a down day for the market, Microsoft reached a record high for the first time in 11 months.

Shares of the software giant rose 0.8% to close at $467.68. Microsoft has once again reclaimed the title of world’s largest company by market cap, with a valuation of $3.48 trillion. Nvidia has a market cap of $3.42 trillion, and Apple is valued at $3 trillion.

Microsoft last recorded a record close in July 2024. The stock is now up 11% for the year, while the Nasdaq is flat.

Tech stocks broadly dropped on Thursday, led by a plunge in Tesla, as CEO Elon Musk and President Donald Trump escalated their public beef. Musk, who was leading the Trump Administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) until last week, has slammed the Trump-backed spending bill making its way through Congress, a spat that has turned personal.

But Microsoft investors appear to be tuning out that noise.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella focused on his company’s tight relationship with artificial intelligence startup OpenAI in an interview with Bloomberg, some portions of which were published on Thursday.

“Why would any one of us want to go upset that?” he told Bloomberg. Nadella told analysts in January that OpenAI had made a large new commitment with Microsoft’s Azure cloud. In total, Microsoft has invested nearly $14 billion in OpenAI.

WATCH: Trade Tracker: Jim Lebenthal buys more Cisco and Qualcomm and trims Microsoft

Trade Tracker: Jim Lebenthal buys more Cisco and Qualcomm and trims Microsoft

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Anduril raises funding at $30.5 billion valuation in round led by Founders Fund, chairman says

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Anduril raises funding at .5 billion valuation in round led by Founders Fund, chairman says

The Anduril Industries headquarters in Costa Mesa, California, US, on Thursday, Dec. 14, 2023. 

Kyle Grillot | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Defense tech startup Anduril Industries has raised $2.5 billion at a $30.5 billion valuation, including the new capital, Chairman Trae Stephens said on Thursday.

“As we continue working on building a company that has the capacity to scale into the largest problems for the national security community, we thought it was really important to shore up the balance sheet and make sure we have the ability to deploy capital into these manufacturing and production problem sets that we’re working on,” Stephens told Bloomberg TV at the publication’s tech summit in San Francisco.

Reports of the latest financing surfaced in February, around the same time the company took over Microsoft‘s multibillion-dollar augmented reality headset program with the U.S. Army. Last week, Anduril announced a deal with Meta to create virtual and augmented reality devices intended for use by the Army.

The latest funding round, which doubles Anduril’s valuation from August, was led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. The venture firm contributed $1 billion, said Stephens, who’s also a partner at the firm.

Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus and Anduril Industries, speaks during The Wall Street Journal’s WSJ Tech Live conference in Laguna Beach, California on October 16, 2023.

Patrick T. Fallon | AFP | Getty Images

Stephens said it’s the largest check Founders Fund has ever written.

Since its founding in 2017 by Oculus creator Palmer Luckey, Anduril has been working to shake up the defense contractor space currently dominated by Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.

Anduril has been a member of the CNBC Disruptor 50 list three times and ranked as No. 2 last year.

Luckey founded Anduril after his ousting from Facebook, which acquired Oculus in 2014 and later made the virtual reality headsets the centerpiece of its metaverse efforts.

Stephens emphasized the importance of the recent partnership between the two sides, and “Palmer being able to go back to his roots and reach a point of forgiveness with the Meta team.”

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In April, Founders Fund closed a $4.6 billion late-stage venture fund, according to a filing with the SEC. A substantial amount of the capital was provided by the firm’s general partners, including Stephens, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC at the time.

Anduril is one of the most highly valued private tech companies in the U.S. and has been able to reel in large sums of venture money during a period of few big exits and IPOs. While the IPO market is showing signs of life after a three-plus year drought, Anduril isn’t planning to head in that direction just yet, Stephens said.

“Long term we continue to believe that Anduril is the shape of a publicly traded company,” Stephens said. “We’re not in any rapid path to doing that. We’re certainly going through the processes required to prepare for doing something like that in the medium term. Right now we’re just focused on the mission at hand, going at this as hard as we can.”

WATCH: Why Palantir, Anduril are Washington’s new tech favorites

Why Palantir, Anduril are Washington's new tech favorites

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