SpaceX founder Elon Musk gestures to the audience after being recognized by U.S. President Donald Trump at NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building following the successful launch of a Falcon 9 rocket with the Crew Dragon spacecraft from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center
Paul Hennessy | SOPA Images | Getty Images
As part of a criminal investigation into Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 U.S. presidential election, a federal judge asked if the company formerly known as Twitter was trying to “cozy up” to the ex-president by refusing to hand over data related to his account.
According to a court transcript that was made public on Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell grilled Twitter’s legal team during a hearing on Feb. 7, for delaying the delivery of materials to special counsel Jack Smith, who had a search warrant for Trump’s Twitter account.
At the time, Twitter wasn’t complying with the warrant, citing various legal arguments and its desire to notify Trump about the probe. Tesla CEO Elon Musk purchased Twitter late last year and soon reinstated Trump’s account after the ex-president was kicked off the site in January 2021 following the Capitol riot.
“Twitter has had quite some time to comply with the warrant and have everything prepared to turn over, so I am a little bit concerned about where we are,” Howell said, according to the transcript.
Twitter, now known as X, eventually sent Smith’s team the necessary data related to Trump’s Twitter account on Feb 9, and was then fined $350,000 as part of a so-called contempt sanction.
Trump was indicted earlier this month on charges related to attempting to overturn his loss to President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. The former president now faces 91 felony charges across four criminal cases.
Special counsel Jack Smith speaks to members of the media at the US Department of Justice building in Washington, DC, on August 1, 2023.
Saul Loeb | AFP | Getty Images
At various points during the February hearing, Judge Howell peppered Twitter’s lawyers about whether they understood the “scope” of the warrant and the information that the government sought.
“Is it because the CEO wants to cozy up with the former president, and that’s why you are here?” Howell asked.
The judge and the defense’s legal team engaged in a seemingly tense back-and-forth exchange about the proper ways to search for the material and what kind of data was appropriate for the government to gather as part of its probe.
At several times during the conversation, Howell disputed Twitter’s interpretation of various rights related to the First Amendment and executive privilege, which the company claimed would impede its ability to provide materials to the government as part of an investigation.
“It couldn’t be that Twitter is trying to make up for the fact that it kicked Donald Trump off Twitter for some period of time that it now is standing up to protect First Amendment rights here, is it?” said Howell.
“No, your honor,” replied George Varghese, Twitter’s lawyer, adding that the nature of the search request provided a legal reason for not complying with the order.
Howell continued, asking if the company was trying “to make Donald Trump feel like he is a particularly welcomed new renewed user of Twitter, here.”
Varghese responded by saying “Twitter has no interest other than litigating its constitutional rights, your honor.”
Chris Martin of Coldplay performs live at San Siro Stadium, Milan, Italy, in July 2017.
Mairo Cinquetti | NurPhoto | Getty Images
Days after Astronomer CEO Andy Byron resigned from the tech startup, the HR exec who was with him at the infamous Coldplay concert has left as well.
“Kristin Cabot is no longer with Astronomer, she has resigned,” a company spokesperson wrote in an email to CNBC Thursday. Cabot was the company’s chief people officer.
Cabot and Byron, who is married with children, were shown in an intimate moment on the ‘kiss cam’ at a recent Coldplay show in Boston, and immediately hid when they saw their faces on the big screen. Lead singer Chris Martin said, “Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy.” An attendee’s video of the incident went viral.
Byron resigned from the company on Saturday. Both Cabot and Byron have been removed the company’s leadership team webpage.
Pete DeJoy, Astronomer’s interim CEO, wrote in a post earlier this week that recent and unexpected national attention has turned the company into “a household name.”
In May, the New York-based company, which commercializes open source software, announced a $93 million investment round led by Bain Ventures and other investors, including Salesforce Ventures.
Elon Musk‘s satellite internet service Starlink said it had a “network outage” on Thursday. The company said it was working on a solution.
There were more than 60,000 reports of an outage on Downdetector, a site that logs issues.
Starlink is owned and operated by SpaceX, which is also run by Musk.
Musk apologized for the outage on his social media platform X and said, “Service will be restored shortly.”
Musk posted earlier Thursday that the company’s direct-to-cell-phone service was “growing fast” following the announcement that T-Mobile‘s Starlink-powered satellite service was available to the public.
T-Mobile said the T-Satellite service was built to keep phones connected “in places no carrier towers can reach.”
Starlink didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Starlink internet speeds and reliability decrease with popularity, a recent study found.
It wasn’t immediately clear if the T-Satellite service was affected by or involved in the outage.
The Intel logo is displayed on a sign in front of Intel headquarters on July 16, 2025 in Santa Clara, California.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Intel reported second-quarter results on Thursday that beat Wall Street expectations on revenue, as the company’s new CEO Lip-Bu Tan announced significant cuts in chip factory construction. The stock ticked higher in extended trading.
Here’s how the chipmaker did versus LSEG consensus estimates:
Earnings per share: Loss of 10 cents per share, adjusted.
Revenue: $12.86 billion versus $11.92 billion estimated
Intel said it expects revenue for the third-quarter of $13.1 billion at the midpoint of its range, versus the average analyst estimate of $12.65 billion. The chipmaker said that it expects to break even on earnings while analysts were looking for earnings of 4 cents per share.
For the second quarter, Intel reported a net loss of $2.9 billion, or 67 cents per share, compared with a $1.61 billion net loss, or 38 cents per share, in the year-earlier period. Earnings per share were not comparable to analyst estimates due to an $800 million impairment charge, “related to excess tools with no identified re-use,” the company said. That resulted in an EPS adjustment of about 20 cents.
The report was Intel’s second since Lip-Bu Tan took over as CEO in March, promising to make the chipmaker’s products competitive again, and to reduce bureaucracy and layers of management, including slashing staff in Oregon and California.
In a memo to employees published on Thursday, Tan said that the first few months of his tenure had “not been easy.” He said that the company had “completed the majority” of its planned layoffs, amounting to 15% of the workforce, and that it plans to end the year with 75,000 employees. Intel previously said it was trying to reduce operating expenses by $17 billion in 2025.
Intel shares are up about 13% this year as of Thursday’s close after plummeting 60% in 2024, their worst year on record.
Tan also announced several other spending cuts in the memo, particularly in the company’s costly foundry division, which makes chips for other companies and is still looking for a big customer to anchor the business.
Intel said its foundry business had an operating loss of $3.17 billion on $4.4 billion in revenue.
Tan said that Intel had cancelled planned fab projects in Germany and Poland, and will consolidate its testing and assembly operations in Vietnam and Malaysia. He added that the company would slow down the pace of its construction of a cutting-edge chip factory in Ohio, depending on market demand and if it can secure big customers for the facility.
“Over the past several years, the company invested too much, too soon – without adequate demand,” Tan wrote. “In the process, our factory footprint became needlessly fragmented and underutilized.”
Tan wrote that the company’s forthcoming chip manufacturing process, called 14A, will be built out based on confirmed customer commitments.
“There are no more blank checks. Every investment must make economic sense,” Tan wrote.
The company’s client computing group, which is primarily comprised of sales of central processors for PCs, had $7.9 billion in sales, down 3% on an annual basis.
Revenue in the data center group, which includes some AI chips but is mostly central processors for servers, rose 4% to $3.9 billion. Tan wrote in his memo that Intel wants to regain market share in data center chips, and is looking for a permanent leader for the business. Longtime rival Advanced Micro Devices has increasingly been winning server business from cloud customers.
Tan added he would personally review and approve all chip designs before they are taped out, which is the final step of the design process before a new chip is manufactured.