Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi (R) meets with Elon Musk (L) in New York, United States on June 20, 2023. (Photo by Indian Press Information Bureau (PIB) / Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Indian Press Information Bureau | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images
Tesla CEO Elon Musk says he is “incredibly excited about the future of India,” adding it has “more promise than any large country in the world.”
“I am a fan of Modi,” Musk admitted Tuesday in a video interview published on Prime Minister Narendra Modi‘s official YouTube page.
“He really wants to do the right thing for India. He wants to be open, he wants to be supportive of new companies, but at the same time make sure it accrues to India’s advantage,” said the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX after their meeting in New York.
Modi and Musk last met in 2015 when the Indian prime minister visited Tesla’s Fremont Factory in California.
The Indian prime minister is on his first state visit to the U.S., where he’s expected to hold high-level talks with leaders and business executives on defense, technology and India’s role in the Indo-Pacific.
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President Joe Biden will be hosting him at a White House dinner in Washington on Thursday, where Modi is expected to meet a slew of business leaders including Apple‘s Tim Cook, Google‘s Sundar Pichai, Microsoft‘s Satya Nadella, according to CNBC’s Seema Mody.
Modi “really cares about India because he’s pushing us to make significant investments in India, which is something we intend to do and we’re just trying to figure out the right timing,” Musk said.
Investing in India
India holds great potential for Tesla, one analyst told CNBC.
“Every single U.S. company which has a listed subsidiary in India has seen higher growth and value creation in India,” Nilesh Shah, managing director at Kotak Mahindra Asset Management, said.
“U.S. investors will be reassured that building a U.S.-India partnership will be a true win-win situation for both countries,” he added.
Investments from Tesla would aim to support India’s sustainable energy generation primarily through solar and wind, said the CEO of the EV maker.
“India is great for solar. The amount of land area you actually need to generate enough electricity to power India is very small. I believe it’d be probably 1% or 2% of the land area in India, so it’s very doable.”
Other areas of investment include stationary battery packs and electric vehicles.
“India will be a promising market for Tesla as their fate in China will be similar to other American car manufacturers who ended up being beaten by Chinese competitors,” Shah highlighted.
Musk also said that he’s keen on improving India’s internet connectivity and hopes to bring SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service to the South Asian nation.
This can be “incredibly helpful for remote or rural villages where they perhaps may have no access to [the] internet or the internet is very expensive and slow,” Musk said.
Musk said Modi invited him to visit India, and it could happen as soon as next year.
Modi’s visit to New York saw him crossing paths with U.S. astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, investor Ray Dalio and Grammy Award-winner Falguni Shah.
In this photo illustration, the Spotify music app is seen on a phone on June 04, 2024 in New York City.
Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images
Spotify is minting music millionaires.
Nearly 1,500 artists generated over $1 million in royalties from Spotify in 2024, the company said Wednesday in its annual Loud and Clear Report.
Spotify said more than 80% of the artists in that pool didn’t have a song reach the app’s Global Daily Top 50 chart.
“Spotify has helped level the playing field for artists at every stage of their careers,” read a portion of the report. “Success in the streaming era doesn’t require a decade-spanning catalog nor a chart-topping hit.”
The news comes about a month after the company reported a fourth-quarter earnings beat that saw the Swedish music streamer record its first full year of profitability. The company said it paid an all-time high of $10 billion in royalties to the music industry for the year.
Marc Benioff, Chairman & CEO of Salesforce, speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box outside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 22nd, 2025.
Gerry Miller | CNBC
Salesforce on Wednesday announced plans to invest $1 billion in Singapore over the next five years.
The cloud software giant said the investment is designed to accelerate the country’s digital transformation and the adoption of Salesforce’s flagship AI offering Agentforce.
Salesforce is among the many technology companies hoping to boost revenue with generative AI features.
The company launched the newest version of Agentforce last month. It has previously described the system — which it says can tackle sophisticated questions in Salesforce’s Slack communications app, based on all available data — as the first digital AI platform for enterprises.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is scheduled to speak at CNBC’s CONVERGE LIVE at around 9:25 a.m. Singapore time (9:25 p.m. ET) on Wednesday.
“We are in an incredible new era of digital labor where every business will be transformed by autonomous agents that augment the work of humans, revolutionizing productivity and enabling every company to scale without limits,” Benioff said in a statement.
“Singapore is at the forefront of this shift, and as the world’s largest provider of digital labor through our Agentforce platform,” he added.
Salesforce said Agentforce can help Singapore to “rapidly expand” its labor force in several key service and public sector roles at a time when the country is grappling with an aging population and declining birth rates.
Jermaine Loy, managing director of the Singapore Economic Development Board, welcomed Salesforce’s investment, saying it will help to boost the country’s efforts “to build a vibrant hub for AI innovation.”
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman stands on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) after ringing a bell on the floor setting the share price at $47 in its initial public offering (IPO) on March 21, 2024 in New York City.
Spencer Platt | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Reddit shares rose more than 10% on Tuesday, reversing a three-day slump that coincided with a broader decline among technology companies.
Despite Tuesday’s gains, Reddit shares are still roughly 30% below the close on Wednesday.
Reddit’s stock market upswing was likely bolstered by a Loop Capital analyst note published Tuesday that reiterated a buy rating and characterized the company’s shares as “extremely attractive.” The analyst note said that Reddit’s 50% drop on Wall Street in the past month “is excessive,” and that the social media company “has the biggest upside potential relative to Street estimates in our coverage universe.”
The company’s shares dropped more than 15% in February after the company reported weaker-than-expected fourth-quarter user numbers as a result of a Googlesearch change that temporarily hurt its search-derived traffic. Although Reddit said at the time that it had recovered from the algorithmic shift, the user number miss spooked investors.
Loop Capital managing director Alan Gould acknowledged in the note that investors are operating in a “risk-off market environment,” but he contended that Reddit “has been one of the top performing stocks over the past year,” aside from its most recent dip.
“RDDT wildly exceeded ours and Street estimates for 2024, which explains why the stock increased almost 7-fold from a $34 IPO price to a peak of $230 in less than a year,” Gould wrote, noting Reddit’s growing revenue and improved advertising tools, among other positive developments.
Reddit’s fourth-quarter sales grew 71% year over year to $428 million, which represents the fastest growth rate for any quarter since 2022.
“In our view, RDDT deserves the revaluation it had experiencing based on the growth it has shown in the recent earnings reports and future projected growth driven by the ability to narrow the ARPU gap, and data licensing possibilities,” Gould wrote.