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Environmental and cultural-heritage nonprofits sued the Federal Aviation Administration on Monday, alleging the agency violated the National Environment Policy Act when it allowed SpaceX to launch the largest rocket ever built from its Boca Chica, Texas, facility without a comprehensive environmental review, according to court filings obtained by CNBC.

SpaceX’s Starship Super Heavy test flight on April 20 blew up the company’s launchpad, hurling chunks of concrete and metal sheets thousands of feet away into sensitive habitat, spreading particulate matter including pulverized concrete for miles, and sparking a 3.5-acre fire on state park lands near the launch site.

The lawsuit against the FAA was filed in a district court in Washington, D.C., by five plaintiffs: The Center for Biological Diversity, the American Bird Conservancy, SurfRider Foundation, Save Rio Grande Valley and a cultural-heritage organization, the Carrizo-Comecrudo Nation of Texas.

The groups argue the agency should have conducted an in-depth environmental impact statement (EIS) before ever allowing SpaceX to move ahead with its Starship Super Heavy plans in Boca Chica.

“The FAA failed to take the requisite hard look at the proposed project and has concluded that significant adverse effects will not occur due to purported mitigation measures,” they wrote in the lawsuit.

The plaintiffs argue the agency waived the need for more thorough analysis based on proposed “environmental mitigations.” But the mitigations the FAA actually required of SpaceX were woefully insufficient to offset environmental damages from launch events, construction and increased traffic in the area, as well as “anomalies” like the destruction of the launch pad and mid-air explosion in April, they said.

In their complaint, the attorneys note that the FAA’s own chief of staff for the Office of Commercial Space Transportation in June 2020 said the agency was planning an EIS. Later, “based on SpaceX’s preference,” the lawyers wrote, the federal agency settled on using “a considerably less thorough analysis,” which enabled SpaceX to launch sooner.

Despite the particulate matter, heavier debris and fire, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said this weekend on Twitter Spaces, “To the best of our knowledge there has not been any meaningful damage to the environment that we’re aware of.”

The exact impact of the launch on the people, habitat and wildlife is still being evaluated by federal and state agencies, and other environmental researchers, alongside and independently from SpaceX.

National Wildlife Refuge lands and beaches of Boca Chica, which are near the SpaceX Starbase facility, provide essential habitat for endangered species including the piping plover, the red knot, jaguarundi, northern aplomado falcon, and sea turtles including the Kemp’s Ridley. Kemp’s Ridley is the most endangered sea turtle in the world, and the National Wildlife Refuge contains designated critical habitat for the piping plover.

Boca Chica land and the wildlife there, namely ocelots, are also sacred to the Carrizo-Comecrudo tribe of Texas.

As of last Wednesday, researchers from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had not found any carcasses of animals protected by the Endangered Species Act on the land that they own or manage in the area. However, the researchers were not able to access the site for two days after the launch, leaving open the possibility that carcasses could have been eaten by predators, washed away or even removed from the site.

Access to the state parks, beaches and the National Wildlife Refuge area near Starbase, by tribes, researchers and the public, are of particular concern to the groups challenging the FAA.

The plaintiff’s attorneys noted that in 2021, Boca Chica Beach was closed or inaccessible for approximately 500 hours or more, based on the notices of closure provided by Cameron County, with a “beach or access point closure occurring on over 100 separate days.” That high rate of closure, which the FAA allowed, “infringes upon the ability of the Carrizo/Comecrudo Nation of Texas to access lands and waters that are part of their ancestral heritage,” the groups argued.

The FAA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Digital physical therapy provider Hinge Health files for IPO

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Digital physical therapy provider Hinge Health files for IPO

Hinge Health’s Enso product.

Courtesy: Hinge Health

Hinge Health, a provider of digital physical therapy services, filed to go public on Monday, the latest sign that the IPO market is starting to crack open.

Hinge Health uses software to help patients treat musculoskeletal injuries, chronic pain and carry out post-surgery rehabilitation remotely. The company’s revenue last year increased 33% to $390 million, according to its prospectus, and its net loss for the year narrowed to $11.9 million from $108.1 million a year earlier.

The IPO market has been quiet across the tech sector for the past three years, but within digital health it’s been almost completely silent, as companies have struggled to adapt to an environment of muted growth following the Covid-19 pandemic. No digital health companies held IPOs in 2023, according to a report from Rock Health, and last year the only notable offerings were Waystar, a health-care payment software vendor, and Tempus AI, a precision medicine company.

“We have many decades of work ahead,” Hinge Health CEO Daniel Perez said in the filing Monday. “We hope you join us on this journey.”

The company plans to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “HNGE.”

Perez and Gabriel Mecklenburg, Hinge Health’s chairman, co-founded the company in 2014 after experiencing personal struggles with physical rehabilitation, according to the company’s website.

Members of Hinge Health can access virtual exercise therapy and an electrical nerve stimulation device called Enso. The company claims its technology can help users improve their pain, reduce the need for surgery and cut down health-care costs.

The San Francisco-based company has raised more than $1 billion from investors including Tiger Global and Coatue Management, and it boasted a $6.2 billion valuation as of October 2021. The biggest outside shareholders are venture firms Insight Partners and Atomico, which own 19% and 15% of the stock, respectively, according to the filing.

Hinge Health’s dual class stock structure gives each share of Class B common stock 15 votes. Almost all of the Class B shares are owned by the founders and top investors.

Employees across more than 2,250 organizations, including Morgan Stanley, Target and General Motors, can access Hinge Health’s offerings. The company had more than 532,000 members as of Dec. 31, and more than 20 million people are eligible to enroll, the filing said.

Hinge Health declined to comment.

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Fintech stocks plummet as Wall Street worries about consumer spending, credit

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Fintech stocks plummet as Wall Street worries about consumer spending, credit

People wait in line for t-shirts at a pop-up kiosk for the online brokerage Robinhood along Wall Street after the company went public with an IPO earlier in the day on July 29, 2021 in New York City.

Spencer Platt | Getty Images

It was a bad day for tech stocks, and a brutal one for fintech.

As the Nasdaq suffered its steepest decline since 2022, some of the biggest losers were companies that sit at the intersection of Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

Stock trading app Robinhood tumbled 20%, bitcoin holder Strategy fell 17% and crypto exchange Coinbase lost 18%. Much of the slide in those three stocks was tied to the drop in bitcoin, which fell almost 5%, continuing its downward trajectory. The price of the leading cryptocurrency is now down 19% in the past month, falling after a big-post election pop in late 2024.

Beyond the crypto trade, online lenders and payments companies also fell more than the broader market. Affirm, which popularized buy now, pay later loans, dropped 11%, as did SoFi, which offers personal loans and mortgages. Shopify, which provides payment technology to online retailers, fell more than 7%.

JPMorgan Chase fintech analysts on Monday highlighted declining consumer confidence as a potential challenge for companies that rely on consumer spending for growth. In late February, the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index slipped to 98.3 for the month, down nearly 7%, the largest monthly drop since August 2021. Walmart recently reported a shift away from discretionary purchases, underscoring the potential trouble.

“Our universe has modestly outperformed the S&P 500 since the election, but sentiment has soured of late on declining consumer confidence and signs of slowing discretionary spend,” the JPMorgan analysts wrote.

The fintech selloff follows a strong rally in the fourth quarter, driven by Fed rate cut expectations and hopes for a more favorable regulatory environment under the Trump administration.

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Oracle misses on earnings but touts data center growth from AI

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Oracle misses on earnings but touts data center growth from AI

Larry Ellison, chairman and co-founder of Oracle Corp., speaks during the Oracle OpenWorld 2017 conference in San Francisco on Oct. 1, 2017.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Oracle issued quarterly results on Monday that trailed analysts’ estimates, but the company offered bullish comments on its cloud infrastructure segment.

Here is how Oracle did compared to LSEG consensus:

  • Earnings per share: $1.47 adjusted vs. $1.49 expected
  • Revenue: $14.13 billion vs. $14.39 billion expected

Revenue increased 6% from $13.3 billion in the same period last year. Net income rose 22% to $2.94 billion, or $1.02 a share, from $2.4 billion, or 85 cents a share, a year earlier. Revenue in Oracle’s cloud services business jumped 10% from a year earlier to $11.01 billion, accounting for 78% of total sales.

The company’s cloud infrastructure segment, which helps businesses move workloads out of their own data centers, has been booming due to demand for computing power that can support artificial intelligence projects. Oracle said revenue in its cloud infrastructure unit increased 49% from a year earlier to $2.7 billion.

“We are on schedule to double our data center capacity this calendar year,” Oracle Chair Larry Ellison said in a release. “Customer demand is at record levels.”

In January, President Donald Trump announced plans to invest billions of dollars in AI infrastructure in the U.S. in collaboration with Oracle, OpenAI and SoftBank. The first initiative of the joint venture, called Stargate, will be to construct data centers in Texas — an effort that is already underway, Ellison said during the announcement at the White House.

Oracle’s cloud and on-premises licenses business contributed $1.1 billion in revenue during the quarter, down 10% year over year.

Oracle also said it is increasing its quarterly dividend to 50 cents a share from 40 cents.

As of Monday’s close, the stock is down almost 11% year to date.

Oracle will hold its quarterly call with investors and will share its outlook at 5 p.m. ET.

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