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In this photo illustration, the image of Elon Musk is displayed on a computer screen and the logo of twitter on a mobile phone in Ankara, Turkiye on October 06, 2022.

Muhammed Selim Korkutata | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images

After closing a $44 billion transaction to take Twitter private, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk — now the de facto CEO of Twitter — announced that he plans to form a “content moderation council” at the social networking company. He says he will not make any “major content decisions” or reinstate any accounts that were previously banned before the council convenes.

In May 2022, after Musk had agreed to buy Twitter at $54.20 per share, he said he would reverse Twitter’s lifetime ban on former President Donald Trump if the acquisition went through.

At the time, Musk said, “I would reverse the permanent ban… I don’t own Twitter yet. So this is not like a thing that will definitely happen, because what if I don’t own Twitter?”

Musk has not yet offered details about how his content moderation council will work, who will be invited to it and whether Twitter’s will be more or less independent or powerful than Facebook’s oversight board.

Twitter rival Facebook has been roundly criticized for using a council approach to making content moderation decisions.

One of Musk’s first big moves after closing the deal was to fire Twitter’s CEO, Parag Agrawal, and other executives including its prior head of safety, Vijaya Gadde, who was involved in the decision to suspend Trump, and ban political advertising on Twitter.

Twitter banned Trump from the platform in January 2021 following the attack by his supporters on the U.S. Capitol, which occurred just as a joint session of Congress met to certify the election of President Joe Biden. The riot was intended to disrupt the counting of the electoral votes.

As CNBC previously reported, Trump was issued a subpoena earlier this month by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot.

The committee, which voted unanimously on this move, is requiring Trump’s testimony under oath next month and records relevant to their probe into the attack, which the panel noted came after weeks of his denying losing the 2020 election to President Joe Biden.

Committee Chair Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and Vice Chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., in a letter to Trump cited what they called his central role in a deliberate effort to reverse his loss in the 2020 presidential election and to remain in power.

As NBC News previously reported, a Twitter employee named Anika Navaroli provided testimony to the Jan. 6 committee suggesting that the social network did not do everything in its power in time to prevent violence on that day.

It was clear that individuals using Twitter were plotting violence, according to her testimony, and Twitter detected a surge in violent tags like “Execute Mike Pence” around Jan. 6, for example. Trump had “fanned the flames” of violent users’ persistent calls to hang Mike Pence, she testified.

CNBC could not immediately ascertain whether Navaroli is still employed at Twitter.

Early in the Trump presidency, Musk served on a White House economic advisory board and a manufacturing jobs initiative council. But he stepped down from both in 2017, after Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris climate accords.

Despite this, Trump praised Musk effusively in 2020, calling him “one of our great geniuses” during an interview with “Squawk Box” co-host Joe Kernen at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Trump praised Musk again on Friday for taking Twitter private. The former president previously said he would not return to the platform, but that could change now that the company is run by Musk.

In May, Musk tweeted, “In the past I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party. But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican.”

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AI voice startup ElevenLabs pushes global expansion as it gears up for an IPO

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AI voice startup ElevenLabs pushes global expansion as it gears up for an IPO

Founded in 2022, ElevenLabs is an AI voice generation startup based in London. It competes with the likes of Speechmatics and Hume AI.

Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

LONDON — ElevenLabs, a London-based startup that specializes in generating synthetic voices through artificial intelligence, has revealed plans to be IPO-ready within five years.

The company told CNBC it is targeting major global expansion as it prepares for an initial public offering.

“We expect to build more hubs in Europe, Asia and South America, and just keep scaling,” Mati Staniszewski, ElevenLabs’ CEO and co-founder, told CNBC in an interview at the firm’s London office.

He identified Paris, Singapore, Brazil and Mexico as potential new locations. London is currently ElevenLabs’ biggest office, followed by New York, Warsaw, San Francisco, Japan, India and Bangalore.

Staniszewski said the eventual aim is to get the company ready for an IPO in the next five years.

“From a commercial standpoint, we would like to be ready for an IPO in that time,” he said. “If the market is right, we would like to create a public company … that’s going to be here for the next generation.”

Undecided on location

Fundraising plans

ElevenLabs was valued at $3.3 billion following a recent $180 million funding round. The company is backed by the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and ICONIQ Growth, as well as corporate names like Salesforce and Deutsche Telekom.

Staniszewski said his startup was open to raising more money from VCs, but it would depend on whether it sees a valid business need, like scaling further in other markets. “The way we try to raise is very much like, if there’s a bet we want to take, to accelerate that bet [we will] take the money,” he said.

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U.S. lifts chip software curbs on China amid trade truce, Synopsys says

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U.S. lifts chip software curbs on China amid trade truce, Synopsys says

Synopsys logo is seen displayed on a smartphone with the flag of China in the background.

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The U.S. government has rescinded its export restrictions on chip design software to China, U.S.-based Synopsys announced Thursday. 

“Synopsys is working to restore access to the recently restricted products in China,” it said in a statement

The U.S. had reportedly told several chip design software companies, including Synopsys, in May that they were required to obtain licenses before exporting goods, such as software and chemicals for semiconductors, to China. 

The U.S. Commerce Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC.

The news comes after China signaled last week that they are making progress on a trade truce with the U.S. and confirmed conditional agreements to resume some exchanges of rare earths and advanced technology.

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Datadog stock jumps 10% on tech company’s inclusion in S&P 500 index

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Datadog stock jumps 10% on tech company’s inclusion in S&P 500 index

The Datadog stand is being displayed on day one of the AWS Summit Seoul 2024 at the COEX Convention and Exhibition Center in Seoul, South Korea, on May 16, 2024.

Chris Jung | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Datadog shares were up 10% in extended trading on Wednesday after S&P Global said the monitoring software provider will replace Juniper Networks in the S&P 500 U.S. stock index.

S&P Global is making the change effective before the beginning of trading on July 9, according to a statement.

Computer server maker Hewlett Packard Enterprise, also a constituent of the index, said earlier on Wednesday that it had completed its acquisition of Juniper, which makes data center networking hardware. HPE disclosed in a filing that it paid $13.4 billion to Juniper shareholders.

Over the weekend, the two companies reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department, which had sued in opposition to the deal. As part of the settlement, HPE agreed to divest its global Instant On campus and branch business.

While tech already makes up an outsized portion of the S&P 500, the index has has been continuously lifting its exposure as the industry expands into more areas of society.

DoorDash was the latest tech company to join during the last rebalancing in March. Cloud software vendor Workday was added in December, and that was preceded earlier in 2024 with the additions of Palantir, Dell, CrowdStrike, GoDaddy and Super Micro Computer.

Stocks often rally when they’re added to a major index, as fund managers need to rebalance their portfolios to reflect the changes.

New York-based Datadog went public in 2019. The company generated $24.6 million in net income on $761.6 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2025, according to a statement. Competitors include Cisco, which bought Splunk last year, as well as Elastic and cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon and Microsoft.

Datadog has underperformed the broader tech sector so far this year. The stock was down 5.5% as of Wednesday’s close, while the Nasdaq was up 5.6%. Still, with a market cap of $46.6 billion, Datadog’s valuation is significantly higher than the median for that index.

— CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.

CNBC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on the cloud computing outlook

Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on the cloud computing outlook

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