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The logo of Crypto.com is seen at a stand during the Bitcoin Conference 2022 in Miami Beach, Florida, April 6, 2022.

Marco Bello | Reuters

As the crypto universe reckons with the fallout of FTX’s rapid collapse last week and tries to figure out where the contagion may head next, questions have been swirling around Crypto.com, a rival exchange that’s taken a similarly flashy approach to marketing and celebrity endorsements.

Like FTX, which filed for bankruptcy protection on Friday, Crypto.com is privately held, based outside the U.S. and offers a range of products for buying, selling, trading and storing crypto. The company is headquartered in Singapore, and CEO Kris Marszalek is based in Hong Kong.

Crypto.com is smaller than FTX but still ranks among the top 15 global exchanges, according to CoinGecko. FTX spooked the market not just by its speedy downfall but also because the company was unable to honor withdrawal requests, to the tune of billions of dollars, from users who wanted to retrieve their funds during the run on the firm. When it became clear that FTX didn’t have the liquidity necessary to give users their money, concern mounted that rivals may be next.

Twitter lit up over the weekend with speculation that Crypto.com was facing problems, and crypto experts held Twitter Spaces sessions to discuss the matter. Meanwhile, revelations landed on Sunday that, in October, Crypto.com mistakenly sent more than 80% of its ether holdings, or about $400 million worth of the cryptocurrency, to Gate.io, another crypto exchange. It was only after the transaction was exposed through public blockchain data that Marszalek acknowledged the mishap.

Kris Marszalek, CEO of Crypto.com, speaking at a 2018 Bloomberg event in Hong Kong, China.

Paul Yeung | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Changpeng Zhao, CEO of rival exchange Binance, fanned the flames of speculation, tweeting on Sunday that if an exchange has to move large amounts of crypto before or after it demonstrates the wallet addresses, “it is a clear sign of problems.” He added, “Stay away.”

Confidence is clearly shaken. Crypto.com’s native Cronos (CRO) token has dropped nearly 40% in the last week. The crumbling of FTX’s FTT token was one sign of the crisis that company faced.

“I would just get your money out of Crypto .com now,” said Adam Cochran, an investor in blockchain projects and founder of Cinneamhain Ventures, in a tweet over the weekend. “If they are full reserves they shouldn’t care if you sit on the sidelines for a week, but their handling of this hasn’t met the bar.”

Marszalek has spent the early part of the week trying to reassure users and regulators that the business is fine. On Monday, he said on YouTube that the company had a “tremendously strong balance sheet” and that it’s “business as usual” with deposits, withdrawals and trading activity. He followed up with a tweet Monday evening, indicating that “the withdrawal queue is down 98% within the last 24 hours.”

He spoke to CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Tuesday morning, answering questions about the state of his company, the market and how he’s differently positioned than FTX. He said in the interview that the company has engaged with over 10 regulators about the “shocking events” surrounding FTX and how to keep them from happening again.

“I understand that right now in the market, you’ve got a situation where everyone is done taking people’s word for anything,” Marszalek said. “We focused on demonstrating our strength and stability through our actions.”

Marszalek acknowledged that Crypto.com, like other exchanges, has faced increased withdrawals since the FTX news broke, but he said his platform has since stabilized.

A familiar refrain

The exterior of Crypto.com Arena on January 26, 2022 in Los Angeles, California.

Rich Fury | Getty Images

There are other similarities, too.

Just as FTX signed a massive deal last year with the NBA’s Miami Heat for naming rights to the team’s arena, Crypto.com agreed to pay $700 million last November to put its name and logo on the arena that hosts the Los Angeles Lakers, among other teams in L.A. FTX had Tom Brady and Steph Curry promoting its products. Crypto.com reeled in Matt Damon as a pitchman. Both companies bought Super Bowl ads and partnered with Formula One.

Marszalek has personal issues from his past that may also be concerning. The Daily Beast reported in November 2021 that Marszalek departed his last job “amid accusations from customers and business partners that they had been ripped off.” The Australian company was called Ensogo, and it offered online coupons. It abruptly shut down in 2016.

According to documents filed with the Australian Securities Exchange, Ensogo requested its stock be suspended from trading in June 2016. The board accepted Marszalek’s resignation at that time and the company said in a filing that it “is yet to announce the appointment of a new CEO.”

A spokesperson for Crypto.com told the Daily Beast that the board decided to shutter Ensogo, and “there was never a finding of wrongdoing under Kris’s leadership.”

How many coins?

Then there are Crypto.com’s books.

Last week, Crypto.com released unaudited information about its assets to blockhain analytics firm Nansen, who used the information to create a chart showing where those assets were held. One startling revelation: Crypto.com had 20% of its assets in wallets in shiba inu, a so-called “meme token” that exists purely for speculation, building off the shiba-inu dog image of the similarly popular joke token, dogecoin.

Marszalek said on Monday that this was just a reflection of the assets Crypto.com customers were buying. He said in a tweet that it was a popular purchase in 2021, along with dogecoin.

When asked by CNBC on Tuesday if Crypto.com holds tokens on its balance sheet, Marszalek said it’s a “very conservatively run business” that holds “mostly fiat and stablecoins as our source of capital.”

“Yeah but how much?” asked CNBC’s Becky Quick, reminding Marszalek that FTX had “billions of dollars” in its self-created FTT token before it declared bankruptcy.

Marszalek declined to say.

“We’re a privately held company,” he said, adding that he’s not going to provide specifics “about our balance sheet.”

He was quick to say that the company is “very well capitalized,” and reiterated comments from his YouTube session on Monday, telling CNBC that the company has “a very strong balance sheet” with “zero debt and zero leverage in the business, and we are cash flow positive.”

The company has already been hammered during the crypto winter, which has pushed bitcoin and ether down by two-thirds this year. In recent months, Crypto.com reportedly slashed over one-quarter of its workforce. Daily trading volume in CRO is down to about $365 million, according to data from Nomics. Last year, that figure was above $4 billion.

Marszalek’s main goal now is evident: avoid an FTX-type run that could see the company lose a boatload of customers. But he also wants to make it abundantly clear that all the reserves are available to honor any withdrawal requests, and that there’s no hedge fund activity taking place with user deposits.

“We run a very simple business,” he said. “We give 70 million users globally access to digital currencies and take a fee for that.”

Coinbase and Binance have similarly been on media tours trying to assuage customer concerns.

FTX saga means people will increasingly hold their own crypto, says Blockchain.com CEO

Blockchain.com CEO Peter Smith expects the whole way that crypto enthusiasts hold their investments to change dramatically. Smith, whose company operates an exchange and offers a crypto wallet, told CNBC last week that consumers don’t need to trust third parties to hold their crypto funds, and are increasingly doing it themselves.

“You’re going to see people shift toward crypto on their own private keys,” Smith said, adding that the company has about 85 million users who already do it that way. “The ultimate reality and coolest part of crypto is you can store your funds on your own private key where you have no counterparty exposure.”

From a governance standpoint, FTX was uniquely troubled. The company had no board, no finance chief and no head of compliance, despite raising billions of dollars, some from top firms like Sequoia and Tiger Global, and racing to a $32 billion valuation.

Marszalek has a more traditional corporate structure. Crypto.com has a four-person advisory board as well as a CFO, a head of legal and a senior vice president of risk and operations. That doesn’t mean there can’t be fraud (see: Theranos) or bad behavior (read: WeWork), but it’s at least a sign that some controls are in place as Crypto.com and other players try to weather a crypto winter that keeps getting colder.

“We feel quite good about where we are as a company and our operations,” said Marszalek, pointing out that the company generated over $1 billion in revenue last year and has topped that number this year. “What worries me is the impact of this collapse on the whole industry. It sets us back a good couple of years in terms of the industry’s reputation.”

WATCH: CNBC’s full interview with Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek

Watch CNBC's full interview with Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek

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Apple scores big victory with ‘F1,’ but AI is still a major problem in Cupertino

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Apple scores big victory with 'F1,' but AI is still a major problem in Cupertino

Formula One F1 – United States Grand Prix – Circuit of the Americas, Austin, Texas, U.S. – October 23, 2022 Tim Cook waves the chequered flag to the race winner Red Bull’s Max Verstappen 

Mike Segar | Reuters

Apple had two major launches last month. They couldn’t have been more different.

First, Apple revealed some of the artificial intelligence advancements it had been working on in the past year when it released developer versions of its operating systems to muted applause at its annual developer’s conference, WWDC. Then, at the end of the month, Apple hit the red carpet as its first true blockbuster movie, “F1,” debuted to over $155 million — and glowing reviews — in its first weekend.

While “F1” was a victory lap for Apple, highlighting the strength of its long-term outlook, the growth of its services business and its ability to tap into culture, Wall Street’s reaction to the company’s AI announcements at WWDC suggest there’s some trouble underneath the hood.

“F1” showed Apple at its best — in particular, its ability to invest in new, long-term projects. When Apple TV+ launched in 2019, it had only a handful of original shows and one movie, a film festival darling called “Hala” that didn’t even share its box office revenue.

Despite Apple TV+ being written off as a costly side-project, Apple stuck with its plan over the years, expanding its staff and operation in Culver City, California. That allowed the company to build up Hollywood connections, especially for TV shows, and build an entertainment track record. Now, an Apple Original can lead the box office on a summer weekend, the prime season for blockbuster films.

The success of “F1” also highlights Apple’s significant marketing machine and ability to get big-name talent to appear with its leadership. Apple pulled out all the stops to market the movie, including using its Wallet app to send a push notification with a discount for tickets to the film. To promote “F1,” Cook appeared with movie star Brad Pitt at an Apple store in New York and posted a video with actual F1 racer Lewis Hamilton, who was one of the film’s producers.

(L-R) Brad Pitt, Lewis Hamilton, Tim Cook, and Damson Idris attend the World Premiere of “F1: The Movie” in Times Square on June 16, 2025 in New York City.

Jamie Mccarthy | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images

Although Apple services chief Eddy Cue said in a recent interview that Apple needs the its film business to be profitable to “continue to do great things,” “F1” isn’t just about the bottom line for the company.

Apple’s Hollywood productions are perhaps the most prominent face of the company’s services business, a profit engine that has been an investor favorite since the iPhone maker started highlighting the division in 2016.

Films will only ever be a small fraction of the services unit, which also includes payments, iCloud subscriptions, magazine bundles, Apple Music, game bundles, warranties, fees related to digital payments and ad sales. Plus, even the biggest box office smashes would be small on Apple’s scale — the company does over $1 billion in sales on average every day.

But movies are the only services component that can get celebrities like Pitt or George Clooney to appear next to an Apple logo — and the success of “F1” means that Apple could do more big popcorn films in the future.

“Nothing breeds success or inspires future investment like a current success,” said Comscore senior media analyst Paul Dergarabedian.

But if “F1” is a sign that Apple’s services business is in full throttle, the company’s AI struggles are a “check engine” light that won’t turn off.

Replacing Siri’s engine

At WWDC last month, Wall Street was eager to hear about the company’s plans for Apple Intelligence, its suite of AI features that it first revealed in 2024. Apple Intelligence, which is a key tenet of the company’s hardware products, had a rollout marred by delays and underwhelming features.

Apple spent most of WWDC going over smaller machine learning features, but did not reveal what investors and consumers increasingly want: A sophisticated Siri that can converse fluidly and get stuff done, like making a restaurant reservation. In the age of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini, the expectation of AI assistants among consumers is growing beyond “Siri, how’s the weather?”

The company had previewed a significantly improved Siri in the summer of 2024, but earlier this year, those features were delayed to sometime in 2026. At WWDC, Apple didn’t offer any updates about the improved Siri beyond that the company was “continuing its work to deliver” the features in the “coming year.” Some observers reduced their expectations for Apple’s AI after the conference.

“Current expectations for Apple Intelligence to kickstart a super upgrade cycle are too high, in our view,” wrote Jefferies analysts this week.

Siri should be an example of how Apple’s ability to improve products and projects over the long-term makes it tough to compete with.

It beat nearly every other voice assistant to market when it first debuted on iPhones in 2011. Fourteen years later, Siri remains essentially the same one-off, rigid, question-and-answer system that struggles with open-ended questions and dates, even after the invention in recent years of sophisticated voice bots based on generative AI technology that can hold a conversation.

Apple’s strongest rivals, including Android parent Google, have done way more to integrate sophisticated AI assistants into their devices than Apple has. And Google doesn’t have the same reflex against collecting data and cloud processing as privacy-obsessed Apple.

Some analysts have said they believe Apple has a few years before the company’s lack of competitive AI features will start to show up in device sales, given the company’s large installed base and high customer loyalty. But Apple can’t get lapped before it re-enters the race, and its former design guru Jony Ive is now working on new hardware with OpenAI, ramping up the pressure in Cupertino.

“The three-year problem, which is within an investment time frame, is that Android is racing ahead,” Needham senior internet analyst Laura Martin said on CNBC this week.

Apple’s services success with projects like “F1” is an example of what the company can do when it sets clear goals in public and then executes them over extended time-frames.

Its AI strategy could use a similar long-term plan, as customers and investors wonder when Apple will fully embrace the technology that has captivated Silicon Valley.

Wall Street’s anxiety over Apple’s AI struggles was evident this week after Bloomberg reported that Apple was considering replacing Siri’s engine with Anthropic or OpenAI’s technology, as opposed to its own foundation models.

The move, if it were to happen, would contradict one of Apple’s most important strategies in the Cook era: Apple wants to own its core technologies, like the touchscreen, processor, modem and maps software, not buy them from suppliers.

Using external technology would be an admission that Apple Foundation Models aren’t good enough yet for what the company wants to do with Siri.

“They’ve fallen farther and farther behind, and they need to supercharge their generative AI efforts” Martin said. “They can’t do that internally.”

Apple might even pay billions for the use of Anthropic’s AI software, according to the Bloomberg report. If Apple were to pay for AI, it would be a reversal from current services deals, like the search deal with Alphabet where the Cupertino company gets paid $20 billion per year to push iPhone traffic to Google Search.

The company didn’t confirm the report and declined comment, but Wall Street welcomed the report and Apple shares rose.

In the world of AI in Silicon Valley, signing bonuses for the kinds of engineers that can develop new models can range up to $100 million, according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

“I can’t see Apple doing that,” Martin said.

Earlier this week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent a memo bragging about hiring 11 AI experts from companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google’s DeepMind. That came after Zuckerberg hired Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang to lead a new AI division as part of a $14.3 billion deal.

Meta’s not the only company to spend hundreds of millions on AI celebrities to get them in the building. Google spent big to hire away the founders of Character.AI, Microsoft got its AI leader by striking a deal with Inflection and Amazon hired the executive team of Adept to bulk up its AI roster.

Apple, on the other hand, hasn’t announced any big AI hires in recent years. While Cook rubs shoulders with Pitt, the actual race may be passing Apple by.

WATCH: Jefferies upgrades Apple to ‘Hold’

Jefferies upgrades Apple to 'Hold'

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Musk backs Sen. Paul’s criticism of Trump’s megabill in first comment since it passed

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Musk backs Sen. Paul's criticism of Trump's megabill in first comment since it passed

Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks alongside U.S. President Donald Trump to reporters in the Oval Office of the White House on May 30, 2025 in Washington, DC.

Kevin Dietsch | Getty Images

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who bombarded President Donald Trump‘s signature spending bill for weeks, on Friday made his first comments since the legislation passed.

Musk backed a post on X by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who said the bill’s budget “explodes the deficit” and continues a pattern of “short-term politicking over long-term sustainability.”

The House of Representatives narrowly passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on Thursday, sending it to Trump to sign into law.

Paul and Musk have been vocal opponents of Trump’s tax and spending bill, and repeatedly called out the potential for the spending package to increase the national debt.

On Monday, Musk called it the “DEBT SLAVERY bill.”

The independent Congressional Budget Office has said the bill could add $3.4 trillion to the $36.2 trillion of U.S. debt over the next decade. The White House has labeled the agency as “partisan” and continuously refuted the CBO’s estimates.

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The bill includes trillions of dollars in tax cuts, increased spending for immigration enforcement and large cuts to funding for Medicaid and other programs.

It also cuts tax credits and support for solar and wind energy and electric vehicles, a particularly sore spot for Musk, who has several companies that benefit from the programs.

“I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!” Trump wrote in a social media post in early June as the pair traded insults and threats.

Shares of Tesla plummeted as the feud intensified, with the company losing $152 billion in market cap on June 5 and putting the company below $1 trillion in value. The stock has largely rebounded since, but is still below where it was trading before the ruckus with Trump.

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Tesla one-month stock chart.

— CNBC’s Kevin Breuninger and Erin Doherty contributed to this article.

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Microsoft layoffs hit 830 workers in home state of Washington

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Microsoft layoffs hit 830 workers in home state of Washington

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks at the Axel Springer building in Berlin on Oct. 17, 2023. He received the annual Axel Springer Award.

Ben Kriemann | Getty Images

Among the thousands of Microsoft employees who lost their jobs in the cutbacks announced this week were 830 staffers in the company’s home state of Washington.

Nearly a dozen game design workers in the state were part of the layoffs, along with three audio designers, two mechanical engineers, one optical engineer and one lab technician, according to a document Microsoft submitted to Washington employment officials.

There were also five individual contributors and one manager at the Microsoft Research division in the cuts, as well as 10 lawyers and six hardware engineers, the document shows.

Microsoft announced plans on Wednesday to eliminate 9,000 jobs, as part of an effort to eliminate redundancy and to encourage employees to focus on more meaningful work by adopting new technologies, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC. The person asked not to be named while discussing private matters.

Scores of Microsoft salespeople and video game developers have since come forward on social media to announce their departure. In April, Microsoft said revenue from Xbox content and services grew 8%, trailing overall growth of 13%.

In sales, the company parted ways with 16 customer success account management staff members based in Washington, 28 in sales strategy enablement and another five in sales compensation. One Washington-based government affairs worker was also laid off.

Microsoft eliminated 17 jobs in cloud solution architecture in the state, according to the document. The company’s fastest revenue growth comes from Azure and other cloud services that customers buy based on usage.

CEO Satya Nadella has not publicly commented on the layoffs, and Microsoft didn’t immediately provide a comment about the cuts in Washington. On a conference call with analysts in April, Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said the company had a “focus on cost efficiencies” during the March quarter.

WATCH: Microsoft layoffs not performance-based, largely targeting middle managers

Microsoft layoffs not performance-based, largely targeting middle managers

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