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2 years agoon
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adminAhmad Abu Daher repairing mining equipment in the basement of a home in Zaarouriyeh.
Ahmad Abu Daher
It takes a lot to keep a grassroots cryptocurrency mining business up and running in Lebanon. Ahmad Abu Daher says he and his team of more than 40 Lebanese and Syrian employees are working around the clock to man thousands of machines across the country.
“We can’t sleep. We can’t have any break,” the 22-year-old Abu Daher told CNBC at 2:36 A.M. Lebanon time. “All of my team are still awake. They don’t sleep. Our shift is working 16 hours per day, and sometimes, up to 18 or 19 hours.”
Abu Daher’s voice competes with the sound of machines whirring in the background, each crunching thousands of complicated math equations to produce a mix of crypto tokens – now a vital source of income in a country where money has stopped making sense.
Lebanon once boasted a thriving and resilient banking sector that attracted the world’s elite. But after decades of war, bad spending decisions by the government, and financial policies that the World Bank has compared to a Ponzi scheme, the country’s economy is in ruin.
Mining equipment at one of Ahmad Abu Daher’s crypto farms in Lebanon.
Ahmad Abu Daher
The local currency has lost more than 95% of its value since 2019, the minimum wage has plunged to $17 a month, pensions are virtually worthless, and bank account balances are just numbers on paper. Banks close without warning and ATMs are often either out of cash or entirely offline from nationwide blackouts. When locals are able to gain access to their accounts, many tell CNBC that they have grown accustomed to withdrawing money at 15% of its original worth.
Against this backdrop, Abu Daher jumped into the crypto mining business a little over two years ago. He and a friend began with three machines running on hydroelectric power in Zaarouriyeh, a town 30 miles south of Beirut in the Chouf Mountains.
“When we started, it was our great idea to make money while sleeping or eating,” said Abu Daher. Nowadays, Abu Daher says he is online 20 hours a day.
An architect by training, Abu Daher saw several other university students unable to find work after graduation, so he realized he had to be proactive, teaching himself various technical tasks by watching YouTube videos.
Ahmad Abu Daher repairing mining equipment in the basement of a home in Zaarouriyeh.
Ahmad Abu Daher
It has been 26 months since Abu Daher first set up shop, and he says that business is thriving.
He now has about 400 crypto farms with between 5 and 100 machines each, in 42 villages across the country running on a mix of hydropower, solar power, and fuel. Abu Daher says that he pulls in about $20,000 a month, and typically, half of those proceeds come from mining and the other half from selling machines and trading in crypto.
When CNBC asked for crypto exchange statements and copies of bank balances to corroborate the estimate, Abu Daher said that the figure was pieced together from trading, mining, and selling machines, in a mix of transactions involving cash, checks, and tether, as well as multiple crypto wallets.
Abu Daher certainly has the trappings of a mining baron.
“When Ahmad pulled up in a white Range Rover to greet us and take us for a tour of the town, I was kind of impressed,” said Mohamad El Chamaa, a journalist at L’Orient Today who previously reported on Abu Daher’s crypto mines. “I had known him before Covid when he was a college student at the architecture department and I was his TA. It looked like the crypto business was treating him well.”

Building a bitcoin mining business
Abu Daher had a few black swan events on his side soon after he broke into crypto mining.
In May 2021, China expelled crypto miners, flooding the market with cheap, used mining rigs and reducing competition. This happened as cryptocurrency prices climbed toward all-time record highs.
As geopolitics permanently reshaped the landscape of the crypto mining industry, Abu Daher and his team began to build out their own farms across Lebanon with rigs acquired at fire sale prices from miners in China. Paying for those machines was not always straightforward.
“Due to sanctions controls, difficulty with using cash, and specifically in Lebanon, the banking system and the inability to use dollars or wire money, USD tether is essentially a key intermediary currency between people in the Chinese hardware market to Lebanese purchasers,” said Nicholas Shafer, a University of Oxford academic studying Lebanon’s crypto mining industry.
Detailed administrative and political vector map of Lebanon.
Getty Images
Abu Daher’s farms span the country, with roughly half of his equipment in the hydro-rich Chouf range, and the remaining 50% scattered throughout Lebanon, including in the Beqaa Valley, which is close to the Syrian border, and offers solar power as an alternative electricity source. (Though, as Shafer notes, the problem with solar is capacity — solar typically does not produce enough megawatts to mine at scale.)
Abu Daher also started to host rigs for people living across Lebanon, who needed stable money but lacked technical expertise and access to cheap and steady electricity, as the nation often experiences blackouts.
The mining boss does appear to be sharing those profits with his team. Shafer, who conducted field research at some of Abu Daher’s mining sites, says that of Abu Daher’s 40 employees, all receive a formal salary ranging from $800 to $4,000 per month in U.S. dollars or in tether. The blacksmith, who makes the least of any of Abu Daher’s staff, earns more than 26 times the minimum wage in Lebanon, according to Shafer.
Abu Daher mines for a mix of cryptocurrencies, including litecoin, dogecoin, bitcoin, and ethereum classic — and in some cases, he has programmed the machines to switch to mine whichever is the most profitable coin that day. He uses software called TeamViewer to remotely monitor and keep track of all this hardware.
“Each machine can mine many coins, and each coin has their specific equations,” explained Abu Daher. “Maybe today the best coin to mine is bitcoin, tomorrow it’s litecoin, and the day after that, it’s ethereum. We are always moving to have the most profit that we can.”
Around two-thirds of his customers are Lebanese, including some mining for bitcoin, dogecoin, or litecoin as a way to get spending money for daily expenses like fuel and food. One-quarter are Syrian, and the remaining 8% are a mix of people living in Egypt, Turkey, France, and the United Kingdom.
With some of his clients, Abu Daher is merely a custodian of the machines — housing them, cooling them, and providing steady electrical power and strong internet access. He charges a fee and in exchange, he gives them a cut of the mining proceeds in crypto. Others just ask him to broker the equipment sale and install it.
Ahmad Abu Daher and his friend began mining ether with three machines running on hydroelectric power in Zaarouriyeh, a town 30 miles south of Beirut in the Chouf Mountains. Abu Daher has since scaled his business to thousands of machines spread across Lebanon.
Ahmad Abu Daher
Unlike the massive mining farms of Texas that stack hundreds of thousands of machines into buildings the size of multiple football stadiums, Abu Daher prefers to spread out his electrical footprint, divvying up his thousands of miners in places like stores, basements, and apartments, each with 10 to 20 machines, unless it’s a house where he can split up groupings of miners into different rooms. In exchange for the space, Abu Daher pays rent in cash. In what was once a barbershop, for instance, Abu Daher runs 15 ASICs.
“At first glance, the town does not look like much of what you would think a ‘mining’ town would look like, but then you look inside the storefronts that are replacing traditional businesses, and you get a better feeling. For example, one of Ahmad’s farms used to be a barbershop – there’s still a mirror inside and ads for beauty products – but make no mistake that it is a fully fledged mining farm,” said El Chamaa of some of the mines in the Chouf range.
He added that, “The mining farms themselves were not as impressive as the ones I’ve seen on TikTok, but my keen observation was that they get the job done either way.”
Now, Abu Daher is trying to educate the locals about mining, mainly because he needs the extra manpower to keep the business going.
“We are trying to let someone in each village learn about mining in the purpose to help us. We can’t cover all the machines we have by my team, because we have a huge amount of machines, and we are selling a huge amount of machines,” he said.
AntMiner L3++ miners running at one of Ahmad Abu Daher’s crypto farms in Mghayriyeh in the Chouf Mountains.
Ahmad Abu Daher
Lifeline to ‘fresh dollars’
In Oct. 2019, money stopped making sense in Lebanon. After a season of unrest triggered by an ill-fated taxation scheme and years of economic mismanagement, banks first limited withdrawals and then shut their doors entirely as much of the world descended into Covid lockdowns.
Hyperinflation took root. The local currency, which had a peg of 1,500 Lebanese pounds to $1 for 25 years, began to rapidly depreciate. The street rate is now around 40,000 pounds to $1. After re-opening, the banks refused to keep up with this extreme depreciation, and offered much lower exchange rates for U.S. dollars than they were worth on the open market.
Anti-government protesters take part in a demonstration against the political elites and the government, in Beirut, Lebanon, on August 8, 2020 after the massive explosion at the Port of Beirut.
STR | NurPhoto via Getty Images
Today, withdrawals of U.S. dollars deposited into the Lebanese banking system before 2019 are capped, and each so-called “lollar” is paid out at a rate worth about 15% of its actual value, according to estimates from multiple locals and experts living across Lebanon.
Meanwhile, banks still offer the full market-rate exchange rate for U.S. dollars deposited after 2019. These are now known colloquially as “fresh dollars.”
Cryptocurrencies are volatile — the price of bitcoin has dropped about 70% from its peak a year ago — but the power of earning fresh dollars is a massive incentive for Lebanese to enter mining.
Rawad El Hajj, a 27-year-old with a marketing degree, tells CNBC that his 11 machines mine for litecoin and dogecoin.
Rawad El Hajj
Rawad El Hajj, a 27-year-old with a marketing degree, found out about Abu Daher’s mining operation three years ago through his brother.
“We started because there is not enough work in Lebanon,” El Hajj said.
El Hajj, who lives south of the capital in a city called Barja, started small, purchasing two miners to start.
“Then every month, we started to go bigger and bigger,” he said.
Because of the distance to Abu Daher’s farms, El Hajj pays to outsource the work of hosting and maintaining the rigs. He tells CNBC that his 11 machines mine for litecoin and dogecoin, which collectively bring in the equivalent of about .02 bitcoin a month, or $360.
It’s a similar story for Salah Al Zaatare, an architect living 20 minutes south of El Hajj in the coastal city of Sidon. Al Zaatare tells CNBC that he began mining dogecoin and litecoin in March of this year to augment his income. He now has 10 machines that he keeps with Abu Daher. Al Zaatare’s machines are newer models so he pulls in more than El Hajj — about $7,200 a month.
“I got into it because I think it will become a good investment for the future,” Al Zaatare told CNBC.
Al Zaatare pulled all of his money out of the bank before the crisis hit in 2019, and he held onto that cash until deciding to invest his life savings into mining equipment last year.
“I don’t have any problem now living in Lebanon since I am getting fresh dollars from mining,” said Myriam Harfoush, a 32-year-old French teacher living in Baakleen — about a 45-minute drive south of Beirut.
Harfoush, who trades in crypto on the side, told CNBC in a WhatsApp message that she took all of her money out of the bank at the start of the crisis and now has mining machines in Zaarouriyeh. (Harfoush only spoke to CNBC in written messages on WhatsApp, citing concerns over speaking by phone.)
“If you can get the machine, and you get the power, you get the money,” said Shafer. “Crypto is something that with the right type of expertise, you can produce in your local context.”
Overhead power lines transmit hydroelectricity to the surrounding towns.
Mohamad El Chamaa
The energy dilemma
Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, dogecoin, and litecoin are created through a process known as proof-of-work, in which miners around the world run high-powered computers that collectively validate transactions and simultaneously create new tokens. The process requires a lot of electricity, and because this is the only variable cost in a low-margin industry, miners tend to seek out the cheapest sources of power.
More often than not, renewables offer the most competitive pricing on electricity.
“It’s a way to convert a locally stranded resource (electricity) into a global commodity,” explained Nic Carter, a partner at Castle Island Ventures, which focuses on blockchain investments. “Hydro, especially run on the river, is one of those classic resources which tends to have a supply-demand mismatch.”
Dammed hydro can better accommodate fluctuations in demand and grid needs, whereas run-of-the-river hydro produces constantly, Carter tells CNBC.
Helium machine mounted on top of a house in Lebanon.
Mohamad El Chamaa
“So you often see these stranded or underutilized hydro resources being monetized part of the time with bitcoin mining, as we saw infamously in Sichuan and Yunnan in China,” continued Carter.
Abu Daher taps into a hydropower project which harnesses electricity from the 90-mile Litani River that cuts across southern Lebanon. He says he is getting 20 hours a day of electricity at old pre-inflationary rates.
“So basically, we are paying very cheap electricity, and we are getting fresh dollars through mining,” continued Abu Daher.
But the government, facing electrical shortages, is starting to crack down.
In January, police raided a small crypto mining farm in the hydro-powered town of Jezzine, seizing and dismantling mining rigs in the process. Soon after, the Litani River Authority, which oversees the country’s hydroelectric sites, reportedly said that “energy intensive cryptomining” was “straining its resources and draining electricity.”
But Abu Daher tells CNBC he is neither worried about being raided — nor the government’s proposal to hike up the price of electricity.
“We had some meetings with the police, and we don’t have any problems with them, because we are taking legal electricity, and we are not affecting the infrastructure,” he said.
Whereas Abu Daher says that he has set up a meter that officially tracks how much energy his machines have consumed, other miners have allegedly hitched their rigs to the grid illegally and are not paying for power.
Electricity harnessed from the Litani River transmits electricity to the Charles Helou power station, which provides enough electricity to power the mining farms in the area.
Mohamad El Chamaa
“Basically, a lot of other persons are having some issues, because they are not paying for electricity, and they are affecting the infrastructure,” he said.
Abu Daher, who has a knack for building creative designs to solve real-world problems, says that his next goal is creating a closed energy loop for his mining farms. He envisions a system in which the heat produced by the machines is harnessed and that geothermal energy is repurposed to power the miners, as well as to heat homes and hospitals in the villages where these mines are located.
“Instead of buying fuel to heat up our homes, we would buy mining machines. We produce heat to heat up our building, and at the same time, we produce money,” Abu Daher explained of his grand vision for the future of crypto mining in Lebanon.
Ahmad Abu Daher repairing mining equipment in the basement of a home in Zaarouriyeh.
Ahmad Abu Daher
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Technology
For bitcoin bulls who self-custody crypto, the global risks are growing
Published
3 hours agoon
April 6, 2025By
admin
Whether to buy cryptocurrency as a long-term holding may be the biggest decision an investor interested in digital assets has to make, but where to store crypto like bitcoin can become the most consequential.
Following the wildfires earlier this year in California, social media posts began to appear with claims of bitcoin losses, with some users showing metal plates intended to protect seed phrases burnt up and illegible or describing the complexity of recovering crypto keys stored in a safety deposit box in a bank impacted by the fires. While impossible to verify individual claims about fires consuming hard drives, laptops and other storage devices containing so-called hard and cold storage crypto wallets and seed phrases, what is certain is that bitcoin self-custody presents a unique set of security issues. And those risks are growing.
Holders of crypto typically use some form of what can be called a “wallet,” and there are a few main features – whether that wallet is connected to the internet, and how much control is directly embedded in the wallet for trades and transfers. There is also the underlying issue of whether a crypto investor uses a third party for custody at all, or maintains total custody and trading control over their holdings.
The standard third-party platform “hot wallet” – think of an offering from a Coinbase or Blockchain.com – is constantly connected to the internet. Cold storage and “cold wallets,” on the other hand, include hardware devices (like a USB stick) that holds private keys offline, or even just a seed phrase (a master recovery code, a collection of 12 to 24 words used to recover access to a crypto wallet) on paper/metal. Hardware wallets or offline backups of seed phrases can be used to access crypto when connected to the internet through another device.
With third-party custodial options, there are steps to help owners remain vigilant against the threat posed by cybercriminals who can gain access to an internet-connected platform, including the use of two-factor authentication, and strong passwords. The U.S. Marshals Service within the Department of Justice, which is responsible for asset forfeiture from U.S. law enforcement, uses Coinbase Prime to provide custody for its seized digital assets.
Many crypto bulls prefer to self-custody digital assets like bitcoin for some of the same reasons they are interested in cryptocurrencies to begin with: lack of faith in some forms of institutional control. Custodial wallets from crypto brokers trade convenience for the risk of exchange hacks, shutdowns, or fraud, as in the case of the high-profile implosion of FTX. And the wildfires are just one example in a recent string of global events that raise more questions about shifts in the crypto custody debate. There is the ongoing conflict in the Middle East and Russia-Ukraine war, which has led crypto bulls from overseas to re-think their approach to self-custody.
Nick Neuman, co-founder and CEO of self-custody company Casa, said physical risks in the world like a natural disaster are an opportunity to revisit how bitcoin security works, and the common security lapses folded into most peoples’ practices. “Most people secure their bitcoin with one private key. If that key is on a single device or written down on paper as a seed phrase, it’s a single point of failure. If you lose that key, your bitcoin is gone,” he said.
It should be obvious that keeping seed phrases on paper offers the lowest level of protection against fire, yet it is common practice, Neuman said. Slipping these pieces of paper into fireproof bags or safes offer some protection, but not much, and even going the extra steps to have the seed phrases on “indestructible” metal storage plates presents a few failure points. For one, they might prove to be not so indestructible, and second, they may be impossible to locate amid the rubble.
“Logically, given the location of the fires in California and the stories being shared on X, it’s highly likely bitcoin was lost,” said Neuman. “Some of them are pretty convincing,” he said.
Casa performs annual stress tests on seed phrase backups.
Some self-custody services, like Casa, offer multi-signature setups that reduce the risks of single-point failure. A multi-key crypto “vault” can include mobile phone keys, multiple hardware keys, and a recovery key that a company likes Casa holds on an owner’s behalf.
The multi-sig custody approach allows an owner to hold a majority of keys while a trusted partner holds a minority of keys. John Haar, managing director at Swan Bitcoin, says that in such a setup, the owner would need to lose all the physical devices and all copies of the seed phrases at the same time. As long as the owner can access at least one device or one seed phrase, they would be able to recover their bitcoin. This approach should significantly limit the potential for all of the devices to be lost in an event like a natural disaster, Haar said.
“You can spread these keys across multiple regions or even countries, and you need any three of the five keys to approve a bitcoin transaction,” Neuman said of Casa’s five-key approach.
Jordan Baltazor, chief administrative officer at Fortress Trust, a regulated crypto custodian, says best practices that we use in other areas of personal life should apply to cryptocurrency. For one, diversification of storage approach and weighing of risks. Digital assets are no different, he says, when it comes to backing up personal and sensitive data on the cloud to ensure data against loss or corruption.
Companies including Coinbase and Jack Dorsey’s Block offer products that try to merge some of these ideas, creating a more secure version of a crypto wallet that remains convenient to use. There is Coinbase Vault, which includes enhanced security steps before a user can access crypto holdings for trading. And there is Coinbase Wallet and Block’s Bitkey, which have mobile apps that work like a traditional wallet making moving bitcoin around easy, but with the ability to pair with hardware wallets and added security more commonly associated with cold storage.
Bitkey hardware requires multiple authorizations for transactions for added security, similar to “multi-sig wallets.” Bitkey also offers recovery tools so one of the biggest risks of self-custody — losing codes or phrases needed to recover a cold wallet — is less of an issue.
Solutions like Dorsey’s may help to solve the tension between convenience and security; at minimum, they underline that this tension exists and will likely be something of a roadblock to more widespread crypto adoption. Beyond the risks out there in the form of wildfires, all kinds of natural disasters, and wars, bitcoin self-custody can be vulnerable to the biggest personal risk of all: unexpected death of the bitcoin owner. There is arguably nothing more complicated than inheritance when it comes to unlocking the crypto chain of custody.
Coinbase requires probate court documents and specific will designations before releasing funds from custody, while physical wallets offer little to no support, potentially leaving all that digital value stuck on a private key. Bitkey rolled out its inheritance solution in February for what a Bitkey executive called, “kind of a multibillion-dollar problem waiting to happen.”
“People who have a material investment in bitcoin absolutely need to be thinking differently about how to protect it,” Neuman said. He says that after disasters like the California wildfires, or when exchanges go bust like FTX, the industry does see more crypto holders taking action to move to more secure storage setups. “I suppose it’s human nature to wait until ‘bad things happen’ to spur action to improve your own personal situation,” he said. “But I think people would be better off if they were more proactive. Otherwise, they risk having that ‘bad thing’ happen to them, and then it’s too late,” he said.
Technology
Silicon Valley’s early return on Trump investment: Plunging valuations, delayed IPOs
Published
1 day agoon
April 5, 2025By
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The Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, June 9, 2023.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Silicon Valley executives and financiers publicly opened their wallets in support of President Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential run. The early returns in 2025 aren’t great, to say the least.
Following Trump’s sweeping tariff plan announced Wednesday, the Nasdaq suffered steep consecutive daily drops to finish 10% lower for the week, the index’s worst performance since the beginning of the Covid pandemic in 2020.
The tech industry’s leading CEO’s rushed to contribute to Trump’s inauguration in January and paraded to Washington, D.C., for the event. Since then, it’s been a slog.
The market can always turn around, but economists and investors aren’t optimistic, and concerns are building of a potential recession. The seven most valuable U.S. tech companies lost a combined $1.8 trillion in market cap in two days.
Apple slid 14% for the week, its biggest drop in more than five years. Tesla, led by top Trump adviser Elon Musk, plunged 9.2% and is now down more than 40% for the year. Musk contributed close to $300 million to help propel Trump back to the White House.
Nvidia, Meta and Amazon all suffered double-digit drops for the week. For Amazon, a ninth straight weekly decline marks its longest such losing streak since 2008.
With Wall Street selling out of risky assets on concern that widespread tariff hikes will punish the U.S. and global economy, the fallout has drifted down to the IPO market. Online lender Klarna and ticketing marketplace StubHub delayed their IPOs due to market turbulence, just weeks after filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and fintech company Chime is also reportedly delaying its listing.
CoreWeave, a provider of artificial intelligence infrastructure, last week became the first venture-backed company to raise more than $1 billion in a U.S. IPO since 2021. But the company slashed its offering, and trading has been very volatile in its opening days on the market. The stock plunged 12% on Friday, leaving it 17% above its offer price but below the bottom of its initial range.
“You couldn’t create a worse market and macro environment to go public,” said Phil Haslett, co-founder of EquityZen, a platform for investing in private companies. “Way too much turbulence. All flights are grounded until further notice.”
CoreWeave investor Mark Klein of SuRo Capital previously told CNBC that the company could be the first in an “IPO parade.” Now he’s backtracking.
“It appears that the IPO parade has been temporarily halted,” Klein told CNBC by email on Friday. “The current tariff situation has prompted these companies to pause and assess its impact.”

‘Cave rapidly’
During last year’s presidential campaign, prominent venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen backed Trump, expecting that his administration would usher in a boom and eliminate some of the hurdles to startup growth set up by the Biden administration. Andreessen and his partner, Ben Horowitz, said in July that their financial support of the Trump campaign was due to what they called a better “little tech agenda.”
A spokesperson for Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment.
Some techies who supported Trump in the campaign have taken to social media to defend their positions.
Venture capitalist Keith Rabois, a managing director at Khosla Ventures, posted on X on Thursday that “Trump Derangement Syndrome has morphed into Tariff Derangement Syndrome.” He said tariffs aren’t inflationary, are effective at reducing fentanyl imports, and he expects that “most other countries will cave and cave rapidly.”
That was before China’s Finance Ministry said on Friday that it will impose a 34% tariff on all goods imported from the U.S. starting on April 10.
At Sequoia Capital, which is the biggest investor in Klarna, outspoken Trump supporter Shaun Maguire, wrote on X, “The first long-term thinking President of my lifetime,” and said in a separate post that, “The price of stocks says almost nothing about the long term health of an economy.”
However, Allianz Chief Economic Advisor Mohamed El-Erian warned on Friday that Trump’s extensive raft of import tariffs are putting the U.S. economy at risk of recession.
“You’ve had a major repricing of growth prospects, with a recession in the U.S. going up to 50% probability, you’ve seen an increase in inflation expectations, up to 3.5%,” he told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro on the sidelines of the Ambrosetti Forum in Cernobbio, Italy.
Former Microsoft CEOs Bill Gates, left, and Steve Ballmer, center, pose for photos with CEO Satya Nadella during an event celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Microsoft on April 4, 2025 in Redmond, Washington.
Stephen Brashear | Getty Images
Meanwhile, executives at tech’s megacap companies were largely silent this week, and their public relations representatives declined to provide comments about their thinking.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was in the awkward position on Friday of celebrating his company’s 50th anniversary at corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Alongside Microsoft’s prior two CEOs, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Nadella sat down with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin for a televised interview that was planned well before Trump’s tariff announcement.
When asked about the tariffs at the top of the interview, Nadella effectively dodged the question and avoided expressing his views about whether the new policies will hamper Microsoft’s business.
Ballmer, who was succeeded by Nadella in 2014, acknowledged to Sorkin that “disruption is very hard on people” and that, “as a Microsoft shareholder, this kind of thing is not good.” Ballmer and Gates are two of the 12 wealthiest people in the world thanks to their Microsoft fortunes.
C-suites may not be able to stay quiet for long, especially if the recent turmoil spills into next week.
Lise Buyer, who previously helped guide Google through its IPO and now works as an adviser to companies going public, said there’s no appetite for risk in the market under these conditions. But there is risk that staffers get jittery, and they’ll surely look to their leaders for some reassurance.
“Until markets settle out and we have the opportunity to access valuation levels, public company CEOs should work to calm potentially distressed employees,” Buyer said in an email. “And private company managements should refine plans to get by on dollars already in the treasury.”
— CNBC’s Hayden Field, Jordan Novet, Leslie Picker, Annie Palmer and Samantha Subin contributed to this report.

Technology
Tesla’s June robotaxi deadline looms as political backlash builds over Elon Musk
Published
1 day agoon
April 5, 2025By
admin
Elon Musk has been promising investors for about a decade that Tesla’s cars are on the verge of turning into robotaxis, capable of driving themselves cross-country, after one big software update.
That hasn’t happened yet.
What Tesla offers is a sophisticated, but only partially automated, driving system that’s marketed in the U.S. as its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) option, though many Tesla fans refer to it as FSD. In China, Tesla recently changed the system’s name to “intelligent assisted driving.”
Full Self-Driving, as it was previously called, relies on cameras and software to enable features like automatic navigation on highways and city streets, or automatic braking and slowing in response to traffic lights and stop signs.
Tesla owner’s manuals warn users that FSD “is a hands-on feature” that requires them to pay attention to the road at all times. “Keep your hands on the steering wheel at all times, be mindful of road conditions and surrounding traffic,” the manuals say.
But many of Tesla’s customers ignore the fine print and use the system hands-free anyway.
Tesla’s partially automated driving systems have been a source of inspiration for its stalwart fans. But they’ve also caused controversy and concern for public safety after reports of injurious and fatal collisions where Tesla’s standard Autopilot or premium FSD systems were known to be in use.
FSD does a lot of things “amazingly well,” said Guy Mangiamele, a professional test driver for automotive consulting firm AMCI Testing, during a recent long drive in Los Angeles. But he added that “the times that it trips up, you could kill somebody or you could hurt yourself.”
The pressure has never been higher on Tesla to elevate the technology and deliver on Musk’s long-delayed promises.
The Tesla CEO is the wealthiest person in the world and was the biggest financial backer of President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign. Since Trump’s January inauguration, Musk has been leading the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency effort to drastically slash the federal workforce and government spending.
The DOGE team has been connected to more than 280,000 layoff plans for federal workers and contractors impacting 27 agencies over the last two months, according to data tracked by Challenger Gray, the executive outplacement firm.
Musk’s work with DOGE – along with his frequently incendiary political rhetoric and endorsement of Germany’s far-right, anti-immigrant party AfD – has led to a tremendous backlash against Tesla.
Protests, boycotts and even criminal acts of vandalism have targeted the electric vehicle maker in recent months and led many prospective Tesla customers to turn to other brands. Meanwhile, existing Tesla owners have been trading in their EVs at record levels, according to data from Edmunds.
Tesla’s stock dropped 36% through the first three months of 2025, representing its steepest decline since 2022 and third-biggest slide for any quarter since the EV maker went public in June 2010. Tesla also reported 336,681 vehicle deliveries in the first quarter of 2025, a 13% decline from the same period a year ago.
Product unveilings and a “robotaxi launch” expected from Tesla in Austin, Texas, this year could revitalize investors’ sentiment about the company and hopefully lift its share price, Piper Sandler analysts wrote in a note following the worse-than-expected deliveries report.
On Tesla’s last earnings call, Musk promised investors that Tesla will finally start its driverless ride-hailing service in Austin in June.
To see whether the company’s FSD technology is anywhere close to a robotaxi-ready release, CNBC spent months riding along with Tesla owners who use Full Self-Driving (Supervised) and speaking with automotive safety experts about their impressions.
Auto-tech enthusiast and Tesla owner Chris Lee, host of the YouTube channel EverydayChris, told CNBC that Tesla’s system “definitely has a ways to go, but the fact that it’s able to go from where it was three years ago to today, is insane.”
Many experts, including Telemetry Vice President of Market Research Sam Abuelsamid, remain skeptical. There’s been “no evidence” that FSD is “anywhere close to being ready to be used in an unsupervised form” by June, said Abuelsamid, whose firms specializes in automotive intelligence.
Tesla FSD will “often work really well, particularly in daytime conditions” but then “randomly, in a scenario where it did fine previously, it will fail,” said Abuelsamid, adding that those scenarios can be unpredictable and dangerous.
Watch the video to learn more about the evolution of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) and whether it will be robotaxi-ready this June.
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