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Tesla CEO Elon Musk addressed shareholders at the company’s annual meeting on Tuesday, predicting the economy would pick up after 12 months and promising the company would deliver production Cybertrucks later this year.

Addressing the long delays to the angular-looking electric pickup truck, Musk lamented some of the manufacturing challenges and said, “Sorry for the delay. We’re finally going to start delivering production Cybertrucks later this year.” He said it would be the vehicle he drives on a daily basis.

Musk also said that he expects a challenging economic environment to persist for the next twelve months, and that many companies will go bankrupt. But after that, he believes, the economy will recover and Tesla will be well-positioned.

He also predicted that the Tesla Model Y would be “the number one best-selling car on Earth this year.”

Earlier, shareholders voted to add former Tesla CTO JB Straubel, who is now the CEO of Redwood Materials, to the automaker’s board of directors. Redwood Materials recycles electronic waste and batteries, and last year struck a multi-billion dollar deal with Tesla supplier Panasonic.

After the shareholder vote, CEO Elon Musk kicked off his portion of the meeting with a commitment to conduct a third-party audit of Tesla’s cobalt supply chain, namely to ensure there is no child labor within any of Tesla’s cobalt suppliers.

Cobalt is a critical ingredient for production of batteries that go into Tesla’s electric cars and backup battery packs used at homes and for utility-scale energy projects. “Even for the small amount of cobalt that we do us, we will make sure six weeks til Sunday that no child labor is being exploited,” Musk said to the cheers of investors in attendance in person.

Musk also announced that Tesla plans to produce a new kind of drive unit, which he said will require less silicon carbide than prior drive trains, and no rare earth elements. He added that Tesla will also switch to a new, low voltage architecture in its cars which should require less copper.

Later in his presentation, Musk boasted about the company’s energy storage business and said growth in the sales of “big batteries” was faster than growth in the company’s core automotive segment.

Since the electric vehicle maker’s last annual meeting in August 2022, Tesla’s largest retail shareholder, Leo Koguan, has criticized Musk for selling billions of dollars worth of his Tesla holdings to finance a $44 billion buyout of Twitter, the social media company.

Koguan, who is a billionaire and founder of the IT services firm SHI International, called for the company’s board to “perform shock therapy to resuscitate stock price,” namely by way of a share buyback late last year.

Musk is now serving as CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter concurrently, but recently announced that he has hired a new CEO for Twitter, Linda Yaccarino, the former head of advertising at NBC Universal. Musk plans to stay on at Twitter in the role of CTO.

Some institutional Tesla investors have admonished Musk for being too distracted with his new role as Twitter CEO to perform optimally at the helm of Tesla. They have also criticized the Tesla board, led by chairwoman Robyn Denholm, for failing to rein him in and protect shareholders’ interests.

Shares in Tesla closed at $228.52 on October 28, 2022, after Musk officially took over Twitter. They closed at $166.52 on May 16, 2023, as the meeting kicked off.

At the 2022 annual shareholders meeting for Tesla, Musk predicted an 18-month recession, teased the possibility of share buybacks, and told investors that electric vehicle business was aiming to produce 20 million vehicles annually by 2030, which he thought would require a dozen factories total with each one producing 1.5 million to 2 million units per year.

At that time, Musk also told investors the long-delayed Cybertruck would not have the same specifications and pricing that were originally promised when the company unveiled the angular pickup in 2019.

This is a developing story, please check back for updates.

Disclosure: NBCUniversal is the parent company of CNBC.

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Nvidia to report third-quarter earnings after the bell

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Nvidia to report third-quarter earnings after the bell

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang arrives at the launch of the supercomputer Gefion, at the Vilhelm Lauritzen Terminal in Kastrup, Denmark, Oct. 23, 2024.

Ritzau Scanpix | Mads Claus Rasmussen | Via Reuters

Nvidia reports fiscal third-quarter earnings Wednesday after the market closes.

Here’s what Wall Street is looking for, per LSEG consensus estimates:

  • Revenue: $33.16 billion
  • Earnings per share: 75 cents, adjusted

How Nvidia sees the current quarter shaping up is even more important than the results. Investors want to see if the chipmaker can continue to grow at a fierce rate, even as the artificial intelligence boom enters its third year. Wall Street expects Nvidia to forecast 82 cents per share on $37.08 billion in sales.

Much of that future growth will have to come from Blackwell, its next-generation AI chip for data centers currently shipping to customers Microsoft, Google and Oracle.

Analysts will listen carefully to comments from CEO Jensen Huang to hear what he says about the demand for Blackwell. The company could also address reports that some of the systems based on Blackwell chips are experiencing overheating issues.

In August, Nvidia said it expected about “several billion” in Blackwell sales during the January quarter.

Nvidia stock has nearly tripled since the start of 2024.

The company reported a 122% growth in sales in the most recent quarter, but that was a slowdown from the 262% year-over-year growth it reported in the April quarter and the 265% growth in the January quarter.

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Bitcoin rises to a fresh record above $94,000 as investors watch Trump transition, ETF options

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Bitcoin rises to a fresh record above ,000 as investors watch Trump transition, ETF options

Jonathan Raa | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Bitcoin advanced past $94,000 on Wednesday for the first time as traders continued to monitor President-elect Donald Trump’s transition back to the White House and weighed early options trading on bitcoin ETFs.

The price of the cryptocurrency was last higher by more than 1% at $94,461.75, according to Coin Metrics. Earlier, it traded as high as $94,834.33.

Coinbase shares rose 2%. Meanwhile, MicroStrategy jumped 8%, bringing its week-to-date gains to 36%.

Bitcoin has been regularly hitting fresh records since the election, though in smaller increments since the postelection rally faded last week, on hopes that Trump will usher in a crypto-friendly era for the industry that includes a more supportive regulation and a potential national strategic bitcoin reserve or stockpile.

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Bitcoin continues its climb toward $95,000

Traders this week are keeping a close eye on Trump’s appointments for Treasury Secretary and the Securities and Exchange Commission chair.

“We’re still very much in a phase of kind of pricing in the Trump trade,” said Joel Kruger, market strategist at LMAX Group.

He also pointed to the “mainstream, institutional adoption that we’re getting by way of the approval of the bitcoin and ETH spot ETFs this year” and options trading on those ETFs going live beginning Tuesday, which he called “another reflection of the maturation of the crypto market.”

Options on BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT) began trading on the Nasdaq Tuesday. The Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC), the Grayscale Bitcoin Mini Trust (BTC) and the Bitwise Bitcoin ETF (BITB) are expected to have options available Wednesday.

Elsewhere, traders are looking forward to Nvidia earnings after the bell, which could impact bitcoin’s price. The cryptocurrency often benefits from moves in risk assets broadly, more so this year as institutional investors have become more comfortable with it thanks to bitcoin ETFs.

Don’t miss these cryptocurrency insights from CNBC PRO:

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Alphabet’s VC arm backs little-known SAP rival Odoo, boosting valuation to $5.3 billion

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Alphabet's VC arm backs little-known SAP rival Odoo, boosting valuation to .3 billion

Fabien Pinckaers, CEO of Belgian-based enterprise software startup Odoo.

Odoo

Odoo, a startup taking on SAP in the realm of enterprise software, boosted its valuation to 5 billion euros ($5.3 billion) in a secondary share round led by Alphabet‘s venture fund and Sequoia Capital.

The Belgium-based company develops open-source enterprise resource planning software, with over 80 applications available on its platform offering businesses tools for accounting, customer relationship management, human resources and e-commerce and website building.

Fabien Pinckaers, CEO and co-founder of Odoo, told CNBC in an interview this week that his company didn’t have a need to raise any primary capital as it is “cash profitable” and growing revenue at a rate of 50% year-over-year. Enterprise resource planning, he said, is “still a very fragmented market.”

“The reason everybody [has] failed [in this market] is that it’s quite complex,” Pinckaers told CNBC. “Small companies have complex needs from accounting to inventory, to website, e-commerce, point-of-sale. It’s a lot and they don’t have budget, and they need something that is simple and affordable.”

“Nobody succeeded to get both,” he added. “You have complex products like SAP that run well for large companies. But it’s complex and expensive.”

Andrew Reed, partner at Sequoia Capital, added that the market Odoo is addressing “just requires more gestation time than most startups both because the core system is very complex, and making it simple to use for small businesses and various countries is no small feat.”

Humble beginnings

Odoo “is not your traditional Silicon Valley tech story,” according to Reed.

Pinckaers opened the company’s first-ever office 22 years ago on a farm in Belgium. That was all he could afford at the time. Later, as the company started bringing in revenue, Odoo opened two additional offices in Belgium, home to the firm’s research and development, support and technical teams.

Today, Pinckaers resides in India with his family. He’s lived there for a year now, working to expand the company’s presence there, hiring more people, increasing marketing and broadening Odoo’s overall partner network.

Odoo had billings of 370 million euros last year and is on track to top 650 million of billings in 2025 — after that, the company is hoping to top the 1 billion-euro billings milestone by 2027. Billings — or the total sum of all invoices for a given year — is Odoo’s preferred metric for tracking annual revenue performance.

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Around 80% of Odoo’s business today accounts for open-source software, with the remaining 20% coming from software licensed for a fee, Pinckaers said. Open source refers to a type of software that allows users to access the underlying code — most often free of charge — which they can then modify and adjust.

In no rush to IPO

Despite Odoo now being at the scale of an IPO-ready business, Pinckaers said he’s in no rush to take the company public. If anything, remaining private has given Odoo flexibility to stay focused on investing for the long term, he said.

Odoo’s private backers aren’t in a rush for the firm to go public, either. Alex Nichols, partner at Alphabet’s CapitalG, told CNBC that he’s not worried about “IPO timing,” adding that factors like public market conditions are ultimately “out of our control.”

Pinckaers built the business to the size it is today primarily by bootstrapping — that is, growing without raising external funding. Odoo hasn’t had to raise primary capital from investors in a decade, opting instead to let early investors and employees sell shares in secondary sales.

The last time Odoo secured primary funding was in 2014, when it raised $10 million in a Series B round. Prior to the latest secondary round, Odoo was most recently valued by investors at 3.2 billion euros.

Odoo’s other backers include the likes of private equity firms Summit Partners, Noshaq, and Wallonie Entreprendre, which all sold a portion of their shares to CapitalG and Sequoia as part of the 500-million-euro investment announced on Wednesday.

Even after selling a portion of its shares, Summit remains Odoo’s largest institutional shareholder. Pinckaers himself has never sold his own personal shares.

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