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Pallets of depleted lithium-ion batteries at JB Straubel’s Redwood Materials are ready for recycling.

Source: CNBC

Redwood Materials, the battery-recycling startup founded by Tesla board member JB Straubel, recently nabbed Tesla’s vice president of powertrain engineering, Colin Campbell, to serve as chief technology officer.

Based in Carson City, Nevada, Redwood was founded by Straubel in 2017 while he was still serving as Tesla’s CTO. Straubel resigned from Tesla in 2019 to focus on Redwood.

Campbell announced the move on LinkedIn on Monday, capping a 17-year tenure working for Elon Musk’s electric vehicle company in a variety of engineering and leadership roles. He thanked his former colleagues at Tesla for a “once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

“At Redwood, I will continue to work on electrification — but this time, ensuring broad EV and clean energy adoption by solving problems further upstream!” Campbell wrote. “Redwood’s mission is to create a circular battery supply chain, localizing the current fragmented system by creating critical battery components at scale in the US for the first time — and from an ever-increasing amount of recycled content.”

Redwood turns end-of-life electric vehicle batteries and scrap from car factories into raw materials and components to make new battery cells. Straubel told CNBC in February that the company also blends “sustainably mined material” in its manufacturing processes.

Campbell’s departure from Tesla follows an announcement earlier this month that the company’s finance chief, Zach Kirkhorn, was stepping down, to be replaced by Tesla accounting chief Vaibhav Taneja, who now holds both the chief financial officer and accounting role, according to Tesla’s shareholder disclosure.

Redwood has lured top talent away from Tesla for years. Another executive at Redwood, operating chief Kevin Kassekert, previously served as vice president of people and places at Tesla. More than 120 people currently work at Straubel’s company after previously working for Tesla, according to LinkedIn data.

Straubel, who is credited as a co-founder of Tesla, was elected by the automaker’s shareholders earlier this year to serve as an independent director on the board.

Tesla did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

WATCH: EV batteries being primarily U.S. sources is still far away

U.S.-sourced EV batteries still far away, says Redwood's JB Straubel

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Super Micro ‘confident’ it will meet SEC deadline and reach $40 billion next fiscal year

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Super Micro 'confident' it will meet SEC deadline and reach  billion next fiscal year

Super Micro Computer CEO Charles Liang at the Computex conference in Taipei, Taiwan, on June 5, 2024.

Annabelle Chih | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Super Micro Computer gave optimistic commentary for its fiscal 2026 and delayed annual report that overshadowed its slashed fiscal 2025 revenue guidance in Tuesday’s preliminary second-quarter results.

CEO Charles Liang said he is “confident” that the company will file its delayed annual report by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s Feb. 25 deadline. The company also said it expects to hit $40 billion in revenue in fiscal 2026. Analysts polled by LSEG expected $30 billion in revenue for the period.

Shares of Super Micro were up as much as 10% in extended trading. 

For the near term, however, the company slashed its guidance for fiscal 2025 revenue. The company said it expects revenues to range between $23.5 billion to $25 billion for fiscal 2025. That was down from a previous forecast of $26 billion and $30 billion. Analysts polled by LSEG expected revenues of $24.9 billion for the year.

The company also said it expects to report net sales between $5.6 billion and $5.7 billion for the quarter that ended Dec. 31. Wall Street expected $5.89 billion, according to analysts polled by LSEG. The company also offered weaker-than-expected guidance for the current period.

Super Micro also said that it “continues to work diligently” to meet the deadline to file its delayed fiscal 2024 annual and fiscal 2025 first and second quarter reports as it faces the possibility of a Nasdaq delisting.

Shares of the company, known for its servers powered with Nvidia graphics processing chips, have been on a rollercoaster ride since Hindenburg Research revealed a short position in the stock and the company delayed releasing its annual report in August. The company’s auditor quit in October, citing governance issues, and Super Micro’s drop in share price spurred the possibility of a delisting from the Nasdaq exchange.

The rollercoaster continued into Tuesday’s release. The stock is up about 27% in 2025 but down from its March 2024 high.

Super Micro’s prime position in the artificial intelligence world catapulted the stock to new heights as ChatGPT’s 2022 debut set off a craze for AI infrastructure. Recent earnings reports and commentary suggest that megacaps Meta, Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft plan to invest as much as $320 billion into AI projects this year.

WATCH: Super Micro Computer cuts full year revenue guidance

Super Micro Computer cuts full year revenue guidance

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Tesla drops 6% after BYD partners with DeepSeek, Musk adds to DOGE distractions with OpenAI bid

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Tesla drops 6% after BYD partners with DeepSeek, Musk adds to DOGE distractions with OpenAI bid

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk joins U.S. President Donald Trump during an executive order signing in the Oval Office at the White House on Feb. 11, 2025 in Washington, DC.

Andrew Harnik | Getty Images

Tesla shares dropped 6% on Tuesday after Chinese rival BYD announced plans to develop autonomous vehicle technology with DeepSeek, and said it would offer its Autopilot-like system in nearly all of its new cars, adding to fears that Elon Musk’s company is falling behind the competition.

There’s also growing concerns surrounding Musk’s distractions outside of Tesla, after news surfaced that the world’s richest person is offering to lead an investor group in purchasing OpenAI, while he steps up his work with President Donald Trump’s White House.

Tesla’s stock price has slid for five straight days, falling close to 17% over that stretch to $328.50, and wiping out over $200 billion in market cap.

BYD, which has emerged as Tesla’s fiercest rival on the world stage, said on Monday that at least 21 of its new model vehicles will come equipped with its partially automated driving systems that include features for automatic parking and navigating on highways.

Tesla doesn’t yet offer a robotaxi and its EVs currently require a human driver to remain at the wheel, ready to steer or brake at any time. On Tesla’s earnings call last month, Musk said the company is aiming to launch “Unsupervised Full Self-Driving,” and a driverless rideshare service in Austin, Texas, in June. Alphabet’s Waymo already operates a robotaxi service in Austin as well as in parts of Phoenix, San Francisco.

“In our view, competition between Waymo, Tesla and a host of Chinese players is a key driver on the path to commercialization” of robotaxis,” Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in a note to clients after the BYD announcement. The firm recommends buying the stock and has a price target of $430.

Waymo said on Tuesday that it added 10 square miles of coverage to its robotaxi service in Los Angeles.

The rise of Phoenix as a major tech hub with chips, autonomous cars and drones

In a report on Tuesday, Oppenheimer analysts wrote that the “autonomy competition may limit [Tesla] profitability.” Even if Tesla meets its June 2025 timeline for driverless cars in Texas, the company is “one of several autonomous technology providers, suggesting competition on price and performance,” they wrote.

In addition to running Tesla, Musk is CEO of SpaceX, owns social media company X and is head of artificial intelligence startup xAI. He’s also spending significant time these days in Washington, D.C., running the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) as a special government employee, aiming to slash federal spending, personnel, regulations and even entire agencies.

Many projects, many distractions

Investors already concerned about Musk’s hefty commitments beyond his trillion-dollar EV company have more reason for trepidation after events that unfolded on Monday. Musk’s attorney, Marc Toberoff, confirmed to CNBC that Musk was leading a consortium of investors in a $97.4 billion bid for OpenAI.

Musk was among the founders of OpenAI in 2015, when the AI startup was created as a nonprofit research lab. Musk sought to have Tesla acquire OpenAI, and he later departed the organization’s board.

OpenAI has since commercialized numerous products, most notably ChatGPT. Co-founder and CEO Sam Altman is seeking to restructure OpenAI as a for-profit entity. Musk has sued OpenAI to prevent that transition, and started xAI as a direct competitor.

The Oppenheimer analysts wrote that, “While [Tesla] has shifted focus to being a Physical AI play, we view Elon Musk’s bid for Open AI as a distraction from [Tesla’s] challenges.”

Altman told employees in a memo on Tuesday that OpenAI’s board hasn’t received an official offer from Musk and reminded staffers that “Elon has a history of making claims that don’t hold up.” 

Later on Tuesday, Toberoff said in a statement that he emailed the bid for OpenAI on behalf of the Musk-led consortium a day earlier to OpenAI’s outside counsel William Savitt and Sarah Eddy “for transmission to their client.” Toberoff said the bid was “in the form of a detailed four-page letter” and was addressed to OpenAI’s board.

“Whether Sam Altman chose to provide or withhold this from OpenAI’s other Board members is outside of our control,” he wrote.

Oppenheimer’s analysts also highlighted the added risks associated with Musk’s extensive work with the Trump administration.

While Musk’s behavior “has fans in certain circles,” his public life “risks alienating consumers and employees as the Trump administration tests the limits of its power,” they wrote. For example, they referenced recent vehicle registration data that showed steep year-over-year declines in California and across several European markets.

Tesla and Musk didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

WATCH: Tesla still on track

Tesla is still on track and we will add exposure when it's near $300 per share: KKM's Jeff Kilburg

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Amazon opens beauty and personal care store in Italy as part of brick-and-mortar expansion

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Amazon opens beauty and personal care store in Italy as part of brick-and-mortar expansion

Amazon is opening a beauty and health products store in Milan, Italy, marking the company’s latest brick-and-mortar experiment.

The store is located in the city center of Milan, and features a range of beauty and personal care items, as well as nonprescription drugs, Amazon said in a blog post. The first store, which is called Amazon Parafarmacia & Beauty, will open its doors to the public on Wednesday.

The store will be stocked with products from beauty and skin-care brands including La Roche-Posay, Eucerin and Vichy. There are also “Derma-bars,” where shoppers can get a “complimentary digital skin analysis” of their skin type and condition, and receive product recommendations.

Amazon says the store includes a section staffed by on-site pharmacists where shoppers can purchase “non-prescription, over-the-counter medications.”

By launching its first “parapharmacy,” the e-commerce giant is hoping to parlay its online success in the beauty and personal care category into sales in the physical world. Beauty and personal care items, which include everything from hairspray and cosmetics to deodorants and Q-tips, make up one of the fastest-growing verticals on Amazon.

The company began offering health and beauty products in 2000, but its selection was initially limited to most mass-market brands. It has since added more luxury brands such as Estée Lauder and La Mer.

The new store format also marks Amazon’s latest experiment in physical retail. The company opened and then shuttered all of its bookstores, pop-up shops, four-star stores and apparel stores. It has also shrunk its footprint of Amazon Go convenience stores, shutting down a storefront in Woodland Hills, California, last month. In grocery, Amazon’s portfolio includes Whole Foods supermarkets and its own chain of Fresh stores.

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