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Alex Spiro, attorney to Elon Musk, center, departs court in San Francisco, California, US, on Tuesday, Jan. 17, 2023.

Benjamin Fanjoy | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Tesla CEO Elon Musk appeared in a San Francisco federal court on Friday to defend tweets he posted to his tens of millions of followers in August 2018.

The tweets said he had “funding secured” to take his electric vehicle company private for $420 per share, and that “investor support” for such a deal was “confirmed.”

Tesla’s stock trading initially halted after the tweets, then shares were highly volatile for weeks. Musk later said that he had been in discussions with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund and felt sure that funding would come through at his proposed price. A deal never materialized.

The SEC charged Musk and Tesla with civil securities fraud after the tweets. Musk and Tesla each paid $20 million fines to the agency, and struck a revised settlement agreement that required Musk to temporarily relinquish his role as chairman of the board at Tesla.

His 2018 tweets also triggered a shareholder class action lawsuit from Tesla investors. They alleged that Musk’s tweets misled them and said relying on his statements to make trades cost them significant amounts of money.

The shareholders’ trades in question took place during a 10-day period before Musk seemed to admit a take-private deal was not going to happen in 2018.

Musk said under oath on Friday that it’s difficult to link Tesla’s stock price to his tweets.

“There have been many cases where I thought that if I were to tweet something, the stock price would go down,” Musk said. “For example, at one point I tweeted that I thought that, in my opinion, the stock price was too high…and it went went higher, which was, which is, you know, counterintuitive.”

A big increase in trading volume after he tweeted

It’s rare for top executives at publicly traded companies to discuss their stock price because any commentary can influence price movements.

Daniel Taylor, director of the Wharton Forensics Analytics Lab and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, analyzed every trade in Tesla stock occurring on Aug. 7, 2018, the day that Musk tweeted. He calculated the total trading volume every minute from the time the market opened through the time of Musk’s tweets about a buyout. 

Taylor found that the trading volume the minute Musk tweeted, at 12:48 p.m. ET that day, was over $350 million, and the trading volume for Tesla shares the next minute was over $250 million. By comparison, the average volume five minutes before Musk tweeted was $32 million per minute. The minute before Musk tweeted, trading volume was $24 million.  

“It is generally true that correlation is not causation,” Taylor told CNBC on Friday, after Musk’s first day on the witness stand. “However, I am unaware of any alternative explanation for a 10-fold increase in trading volume the same minute that Elon Musk tweeted.”

Musk also testified about his low opinion of short sellers on Friday.

“I believe short selling should be made illegal,” Musk said, referring to short sellers as “bad people on Wall Street” who “steal” from other investors. He said they also plant stories in the media to “get the stock to go down” and will “do anything in their power to make a company die.”

Tesla was among the most heavily shorted stocks in August 2018, when Musk made the statements about taking Tesla private. Tesla’s share price surged about 10% during trading that day. Short sellers face enormous losses when shares in a given company climb higher.

Some of the plaintiffs in the trial that’s underway claim that Musk’s “funding secured” tweets were intended to put upward price pressure on Tesla’s stock driving a so-called “short squeeze.”

Musk’s testimony is not yet complete and the court plans to hear from him again on Monday.

WATCH: Musk testifies over tweets

Tesla CEO Elon Musk to testify over 2018 'funding secured' tweets

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AMD’s Lisa Su sees 35% annual sales growth driven by ‘insatiable’ AI demand

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AMD's Lisa Su sees 35% annual sales growth driven by 'insatiable' AI demand

Lisa Su, chair and chief executive officer of Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD), during a Bloomberg Television interview in San Francisco, California, US, on Monday, Oct. 6, 2025.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

AMD CEO Lisa Su said on Tuesday that the company’s overall revenue growth would expand to about 35% per year over the next three to five years, driven by “insatiable” demand for artificial intelligence chips.

Su said that much of that would be captured by the company’s AI data center business, which it expects to grow at about 80% per year over the same time period, on track to hit tens of billions of dollars of sales by 2027.

“This is what we see as our potential given the customer traction, both with the announced customers, as well as customers that are currently working very closely with us,” Su told analysts.

Ultimately, Su said that AMD could be able to achieve “double-digit” share in the data center AI chip market over the next three to five years.

AMD shares fell 3% in extended trading.

The AI chip market is currently dominated by Nvidia, which has over 90% of the market share, according to some estimates, and which has given the company a market cap of over $4.6 trillion, versus AMD’s roughly $387 billion valuation.

AMD is holding its first financial analyst day since 2022, as the company has found itself at the center of a boom in data center spending for AI.

While companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars in total on graphics processing unit (GPU) chips to build and power artificial intelligence applications like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, they are also looking for alternatives to increase capacity and control costs. AMD is the only other major developer of GPUs aside from Nvidia.

In October, AMD announced a partnership with OpenAI in which it would sell the AI startup billions of dollars in its Instinct AI chips over multiple years, starting with enough chips in 2026 to use 1 gigawatt of power.

As part of the deal, OpenAI could end up taking a 10% stake in the chipmaker. Su also highlighted long-term deals with Oracle and Meta on Tuesday.

AMD shares have nearly doubled so far in 2025.

Read more CNBC tech news

OpenAI is also helping AMD set up its next-generation systems based around its Instinct MI400X AI chips, which ship next year.

AMD has said that its chips will be able to be assembled into a “rack-scale” system where 72 of its chips work together as one, which is essential for running the largest AI models.

If AMD succeeds at its rack, it will catch up with Nvidia’s AI chips, which have been offered in rack-scale systems for three product generations.

Su said that the company now sees the total market for AI data center parts and systems hitting $1 trillion per year in 2030, representing 40% annual growth per year. AMD reported $5 billion in AI chip sales in its fiscal 2024.

That’s up from the company’s previous forecast of a $500 billion market in 2028 for AI chips. But the updated AMD figure also includes central processors (CPU), an important kind of chip that sits at the heart of a computer, but isn’t a pure AI accelerator like the GPUs made by Nvidia and AMD.

AMD’s Epyc CPUs are still the company’s most important product by sales. It primarily competes with Intel and some smaller Arm-based processors in the CPU market. AMD also makes chips for game consoles, networking parts, and other devices.

On Tuesday, although AMD focused much of its focus on its growing AI business, it told shareholders that its older businesses were growing too.

“The other message that we want to leave you with today is every other part of our business is firing on all cylinders, and that’s actually a very nice place to be,” Su said.

AMD delivers third quarter beat and forecast raise

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CoreWeave CEO responds to data center delays as stock plunges. Core Scientific shares fall

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CoreWeave CEO responds to data center delays as stock plunges. Core Scientific shares fall

CoreWeave CEO responds to data center delay as stock falls

CoreWeave shares sank 13% on Tuesday after CEO Mike Intrator addressed delays at a third-party data center developer that hit full-year guidance in its latest earnings report.

“Quite frankly, every single part of this quarter went exactly as we planned, except for one delay at a singular data center,” Intrator told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Tuesday.

He then clarified that a “singular data center provider” is more accurate.

“Some people might think it’s one complex, but when I go over the numbers, we’re talking about multiple places,” CNBC’s Jim Cramer said. “And it just so happens that the places are all connected to an outfit called Core Scientific that you tried to buy.”

Cramer noted delays at complexes in Texas, Oklahoma and North Carolina.

Intrator said the companies have been working together on infrastructure for a long time a would continue work to bring it online. He did not directly confirm that Core Scientific is the third-party provider.

CoreWeave tried to acquire Core Scientific for $9 billion earlier this year. Core Scientific shareholders voted against the proposed deal. Core Scientific shares sank 7% Tuesday.

During CoreWeave’s quarterly earnings call on Monday, JPMorgan Securities analyst Mark Murphy asked if the delay was related to Core Scientific, but Intrator declined to name the company. At another point in the call, the CEO suggested that just one data center, not multiple sites, were affected.

“There was a problem at one data center that’s impacting us, but there are 41 data centers in our portfolio,” Intrator said.

Read more CNBC tech news

At a different point in the call, CoreWeave’s CFO Nitin Agrawal said the delays stem from “a single provider, data center provider partner.”

When reached for comment about how many sites were affected, CoreWeave did not provide a number and pointed to Intrator’s statements on the earnings call and during his “Squawk on the Street” interview.

CoreWeave, which provides infrastructure for artificial intelligence companies, reported third-quarter results on Monday that showed $1.36 billion in revenue for the period, up 134% from $583.9 million a year ago. But CoreWeave now sees 2025 revenue coming in between $5.05 billion and $5.15 billion, below the average analyst estimate of $5.29 billion.

Intrator told CNBC on Tuesday that CoreWeave has teams of employees working with contractors and Core Scientific at those sites “every single day” to get things back on track.

“It became apparent to us in Q3 that there were delays at the facility,” Intrator said. “CoreWeave responded by deploying our own boots on the ground to ensure that everything was being done in order to move those facilities along as quickly as possible.”

Intrator told analysts on Monday that the delays would not affect its backlog or get the full value from contracts.

Core Scientific did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

CoreWeave has been on a deal-making blitz as big tech companies and AI startups race to build out their computing infrastructure.

The company announced in September that it agreed to provide Meta with $14.2 billion of AI cloud infrastructure, just days after expanding its contract with OpenAI to $22.4 billion.

CoreWeave slides after earnings: Here's what to know

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Analysts call this lagging portfolio stock a buy — plus, what’s behind Nvidia’s decline

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Analysts call this lagging portfolio stock a buy — plus, what's behind Nvidia's decline

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