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Carsharing company Getaround made its public market debut Friday through a merger with blank-check company InterPrivate II Acquisition Corp. The company saw its share value drop more than 65%, reflecting the chilly environment for both SPACs and ridesharing companies.
Getaround, which made the very first CNBC Disruptor 50 list in 2013, allows users to rent cars and trucks from each other via a digital marketplace. The company launched in 2009 and is available in more than 1,000 cities in the United States and Europe.
The merger had valued the company at about $1.2 billion, and Getaround said it planned to use the funds to invest in new markets and expand its products.
SPACs, or special purpose acquisition companies, raise capital through an IPO to acquire or merge with existing companies, aiming to eventually take the companies public in a two-year time frame. Though SPACs rose in popularity in 2020 and 2021, they tend to significantly underperform in comparison to traditional IPOs.
The appetite for SPACs, which often back early-stage growth companies with little earnings, have diminished in the face of rising rates as well as elevated market volatility. For SPACs that did go public, they haven’t fared well: the CNBC SPAC Post Deal Index has fallen over 60% in the past year.
Public ridesharing companies have been struggling as well. Lyft shares plummeted in November after the company reported worse-than-expected revenue and a slowing active user count, and the business announced the same month that it would be laying off 13% of its workforce.
Uber reported a third-quarter net loss of $1.2 billion in its third quarter, but the company has seen its stock price rise over the last month after beating analyst estimates and issuing strong fourth-quarter guidance. Still, Uber’s stock is down more than 38% year-to-date even as the company has cited booming travel, easing lockdowns and shifts in consumer spending, and it shares remains well below their 2019 IPO price of $45.
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Elliot Kroo, CTO and co-founder of Getaround, told CNBC in May that recent increases in car prices led many people to use carsharing services as well as Uber and Lyft.
“What’s happening in transportation is a slow moving kind of shift from ownership to access, and that’s building momentum over time,” he said. “More and more people are looking at alternative transportation options, realizing that car ownership is very expensive.”
However, prices for both new and used cars have dropped from record highs, also putting pressure on online car dealer Carvana, which is reportedly facing bankruptcy risk or in the least a sharp rise in concerns among its creditors about the financial outlook.
Getaround had raised approximately $600 million in funding. Its financing, like many start-ups over the past decade, grew quickly, from a series C round in 2017 of $45 million to a series D in 2018 of $300 million, led by Softbank, a deal Toyota also took part in.
Amid the pandemic, when the company said its usage fell more than 75%, it raised $140 million from Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus investment arm Reinvent Capital, among other new investors.
In 2019, it spent $300 million to acquire Drivy, a carsharing platform in Europe.
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Elon Musk listens as reporters ask U.S. President Donald Trump and South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa questions during a press availability in the Oval Office at the White House on May 21, 2025 in Washington, DC.
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Tesla shares gained about 5% on Tuesday after CEO Elon Musk over the weekend reiterated his intent to home in on his businesses ahead of the latest SpaceX rocket launch.
The billionaire wrote in a post to his social media platform X that he needs to be “super focused” on X, artificial intelligence company xAI and Tesla as they launch “critical technologies” on the heels of a temporary outage.
“As evidenced by the uptime issues this week, major operational improvements need to be made,” he wrote, adding that he would return to “spending 24/7” at work. “The failover redundancy should have worked, but did not.”
An outage over the weekend briefly shuttered the social media platform formerly known as Twitter for thousands of users, according to DownDetector. Earlier in the week, the platform suffered a data center outage. X has suffered a series of outages since Musk purchased the platform in 2022.
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Musk has previously indicated plans to step away from his political work and prioritize his businesses.
During Tesla’s April earnings call he said that he would “significantly” reduce his time running President Donald Trump‘s Department of Government Efficiency.
In the last election cycle, Musk devoted time and billions of dollars to political causes and toward electing Trump in 2024. However, a story over the weekend from the Washington Post, citing sources familiar with the matter, said that Musk has grown disillusioned with politics and wants to return to managing his businesses.
Last week, Musk said in an interview at the Qatar Economic Forum that he planned to spend “a lot less” on campaign donations going forward.
The comments from Musk precede SpaceX’s Starship rocket Tuesday evening. Pressure is on for the company after two Starship rockets exploded in January and March.
Ahead of the launch, Musk announced an all hands livestream on X at 1 p.m.
Tesla is still facing fallout from Musk’s political foray, with protests at showrooms and other brand damage.
In April, Tesla sold 7,261 cars in Europe, down 49% from last year, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association.
National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said Tuesday that the Trump administration does not want to “harm Apple” with tariffs.
“Everybody is trying to make it seem like it’s a catastrophe if there’s a tiny little tariff on them right now, to try to negotiate down the tariffs,” Hassett told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Tuesday. “In the end, we’ll see what happens, we’ll see what the update is, but we don’t want to harm Apple.”
Hassett’s comments come after President Donald Trump said in a social media post that Apple will have to pay a tariff of 25% or more for iPhones made outside the U.S. Apple has historically manufactured its products in foreign countries including China, India and Vietnam.
“I have long ago informed Tim Cook of Apple that I expect their iPhone’s that will be sold in the United States of America will be manufactured and built in the United States, not India, or anyplace else,” Trump wrote in the post. “If that is not the case, a Tariff of at least 25% must be paid by Apple to the U.S. Thank your for your attention to this matter!”
By some estimates, a U.S.-made iPhone could cost as much as $3,500.
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“If you think that Apple has a factory some place that’s got a set number of iPhones that it produces and it needs to sell them no matter what, then Apple will bear those tariffs, not consumers, because it’s an elastic supply,” Hassett said.
Hasset’s comments continue the administration’s push to pressure companies to shoulder the cost burden of Trump’s tariffs, instead of raising prices for consumers.
Earlier this month, Trump told retail giant Walmart to “EAT THE TARIFFS” after the company warned it would have to pass those added costs on.
Shares of Apple were up more than 1% Tuesday.
Apple did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
Dr. Priti Patel, CMIO at John Muir Health, uses Ambience before starting a patient encounter.
Courtesy of Ambience Healthcare
Artificial intelligence startup Ambience Healthcare on Tuesday announced a new medical coding model that outperforms doctors by 27%.
Ambience uses AI to draft clinical notes in real-time as doctors consensually record their visits with patients. The company used tools from OpenAI to build the new model.
The startup is part of a fiercely competitive market that has taken off as health-care executives search for solutions to help reduce staff burnout and daunting administrative workloads.
The company’s new model can listen to patient encounters and identify ICD-10 codes, which are internationally standardized classifications for different diseases and conditions. There are about 70,000 ICD-10 codes that are regularly updated and used to facilitate billing and other reporting processes in health care.
Ambience said its new ICD-10 model can reduce billing mistakes and help clinicians and professional coders work more efficiently. The model notched a “27% relative improvement over physician benchmarks,” according to a release on Tuesday.
“We’re not replacing doctors or coders,” Brendan Fortuner, Ambience’s head of engineering, told CNBC in an interview.“What we’re doing is we’re liberating them from administration, and we’re fixing mistakes that help make health care better, safer, more cost-effective.”
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Documenting ICD-10 codes has traditionally been a labor-intensive task in health care, but it’s a crucial way to track outcomes, mortalities and morbidities in a standardized way, said Dr. Will Morris, the chief medical officer of Ambience.
“If you think about it from a data perspective, it’s how you can compare and contrast clinician A to B, or health system A to B,” Morris said in an interview. “It’s the cornerstone for quality.”
Ambience’s technology is used at more than 40 health-care organizations, like Cleveland Clinic and UCSF Health. It has raised more than $100 million, according to PitchBook, from investors including Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz and the OpenAI Startup Fund.
The company is reportedly seeking fresh capital at a valuation of over $1 billion, according to a report from The Information. Ambience declined to comment on the report.
Ambience trained its new AI model using OpenAI’s reinforcement fine-tuning technology. This technology allows companies to tune OpenAI’s best reasoning models for very specific domains, like health care.
To validate the model, Ambience tested it against a “gold panel” set of labels, the company said. The labels were established by a group of expert clinicians who evaluated complex clinical cases and came to an agreement on what the right codes were.
Ambience’s AI platform for compliant documentation, CDI, and coding.
Courtesy of Ambience Healthcare
The company then recruited 18 different board-certified doctors and compared their performance on ICD-10 coding accuracy to the model’s performance. That comparison showed the Ambience technology performed 27% better than the physician baseline.
“It shows for the first time that an AI system can actually surpass clinician experts at a very, very important administrative task, especially in coding,” Fortuner said.
Ambience already has similar capabilities available for other medical codes like Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes, and Fortuner said it’s exploring how to tackle other areas like prior authorizations, utilization management and clinical trial matching.
The company’s new ICD-10 model will roll out to customers over the summer.
“Getting it right at the point of care is a fundamental change,” Morris said.