Craigslist founder Craig Newmark is pouring millions of dollars into combating AI’s dark side
Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist
Source: Bleacher + Everard
Craig Newmark made his fortune off a website, founded in 1995, that served as an early online bulletin board and looks like it hasn’t been updated in two decades.
That website, Craigslist, is still cranking along, featuring apartment listings, an active jobs board and items for sale. But the privately held company has long been surpassed in value by the likes of Airbnb, LinkedIn and Facebook Marketplace, which all face Wall Street’s demands for growth and profit.
Though Newmark’s internet company may be outdated, his concerns about where the industry is headed are most certainly not. Since the 2015 debut of Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the entrepreneur has donated many millions of dollars to various causes involving media and technology.
Most recently, his organization contributed $3 million to help fund a new artificial intelligence and education initiative from Common Sense Media, the nonprofit told CNBC this week.
“While I tried to pay some attention to what was going on, just everything caught me by surprise,” Newmark said, referring to the current boom of generative AI and all the new and intelligent chatbots.
Newmark, 70, spoke to CNBC as he was recovering from a minor heart procedure he went through in late August. The heart ablation required Newmark to lay on his back “the whole time in the wrong position” and he “woke up with a lot of back pain,” he said.
More than the surgery, Newmark wanted to talk about the hospital food.
“Hospital pudding is really good,” he said. “And since they served my lunch cold, I asked them and got more containers of pudding.”
Newmark, who ran his business out of San Francisco but now lives with his wife in New York, said the hospital stay didn’t cause him to reflect much on mortality, as he’d already addressed such existential issues when he decided to simplify his life by giving away much of his Craigslist riches.
Newmark’s foundation has principally focused on donating to organizations and causes pertaining to journalism, combating misinformation, countering online harassment, cybersecurity issues, and supporting veterans and military families.
The rapid evolution of AI and its potential hazards have recently caught Newmark’s attention, and his money.
The goal of Common Sense’s AI project is to provide an AI ratings system for parents, educators, policymakers and regulators so they can evaluate what makes certain tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT safe or unsafe for children. Additionally, the nonprofit is offering online AI literacy courses intended to help parents and educators teach basic AI fundamentals to children.
The full scope of AI’s capabilities and potential for societal harm became more clear to Newmark by the time companies began “modifying search engines to use generative AI.”
“I realized that if a search engine was using sources that weren’t reliable, if the sources were about lying to people, that would create a big, ethical problem, and you really don’t want a news source of any sort to knowingly lie,” Newmark said.
Newmark is concerned that bad actors will use generative AI to more easily amplify and spread disinformation. At the same time, he’s worried that tech companies, particularly in social media, “aren’t even trying anymore to get rid of stuff they know is dishonest,” he said.
Tech companies like Meta, Amazon and X (formerly known as Twitter) recently laid off numerous trust and safety workers as part of major cost-cutting initiatives, but have said that the downsizing won’t affect the safety of their platforms.
‘Bad uses’ of the internet
Meanwhile, AI has the potential to profoundly affect society, like the internet and the printing press before it, Newmark said. That’s an area where he has notable expertise. Craigslist was both hugely disruptive to newspapers and their classified ads sections, and has been a site that’s attracted criminals and scammers.
Few people predicted the “bad uses” of the internet, which has allowed nefarious actors to “mostly lie to people in large numbers,” Newmark said.
“I guess the profits to be made in being a really good professional liar, those profits have greatly increased because the internet is a big amplifier,” Newmark said. “It’s everyone’s printing press, and you get to use it as a printing press, whether your intentions are good or bad.”
Newmark said he became interested in language-generating software like ChatGPT in the early 1970s, “when people were beginning to talk about language understanding and neural networks.” However, he says, “I didn’t really understand it.”
Now the technology is here and spreading rapidly.
Newmark said he doesn’t want to name names when it comes to the organizations he fears are creating the most societal discontent through AI, because he’s previously been scarred for getting that specific.
“In the past when I’ve pointed out major problems, I’ve learned the hard way that I’m no match for someone who lies for a living,” Newmark said. “So, I’m allowing myself to be chickens—.”
Rather, he said he relies on “people who are both braver and smarter” to call public attention to those matters.
“Protecting kids when it comes to AI is a big issue,” Newmark said, regarding his donation to Common Sense Media. “I have no idea how I would go about getting started, but I know where to put my money where my mouth is.”
Why Common Sense?
“A lot of groups and politicians talk about protecting kids,” Newmark said. “But these guys are the real deal, and so I’m helping them.”
Misinformation and journalism
Newmark acknowledged that the topics of misinformation, journalism and content moderation have become more polarized and politicized of late. House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, alleged that tech companies unfairly censor conservative speech, and he’s undertaken a “censorship investigation” to probe suspected ties between the executive branch and certain technologists and researchers.
Several academics previously told CNBC that the politicized landscape has led to some organizations cutting back on funding research into combating misinformation for fear of being publicly criticized.
“Some people are backing off, some people are getting braver. Again, I’m not very brave,” Newmark said. He highlighted the Knight Foundation and Ford Foundation as organizations that are “doing brave things.”
Within journalism, Newmark’s most high-profile endeavor is the City University of New York’s Craig Newmark Graduate School in Journalism. The program was renamed in 2018 after Newmark endowed the school with a $20 million gift, though he made prior contributions in 2016 and 2017.
He also donated $20 million in 2018 to help fund The Markup, which describes itself as a “nonprofit newsroom that investigates how powerful institutions are using technology to change our society.” That project quickly became controversial after founding Editor-in-Chief Julia Angwin said she’d been fired over email by co-founder and Executive Director Sue Gardner.
Still, Newmark says both the CUNY journalism school and The Markup have been successful, while other efforts “have not been successful, and I’m being discreet about them because I’m still trying to help before I have much sterner talks.”
He pegs his philanthropy success rate at “70% or 80%, which is good, but it’s not 100.”
In terms of where he spends his time online, Newmark said he still posts on X, primarily to promote and highlight the work of teachers. However, he said the site is losing its effectiveness as it leans toward showing people algorithmically recommended posts.
Thilina Kaluthotage | Nurphoto | Getty Images
“As a social network, Twitter does seem to be gone,” Newmark said, adding that he’s trying out rivals like Bluesky, Mastodon and Meta’s Threads.
In particular, Newmark said he likes “like the spirit of Mastodon and Bluesky,” which he likened to the early days of the internet when it took a long time for websites to build devoted audiences.
“The audience development is very slow,” Newmark said. “Twitter and everything else grew slowly and the other sites are growing slowly, and yet we are impatient and we want to see network effects now.”
Cybersecurity is another area of focus for Newmark. He pointed to a recent $100 million commitment announced in March to a collection of organizations working on cyber-related issues, like combating the spread of ransomware and creating methods for tech and security companies to share threat information.
He said the total number will probably exceed $100 million, because he’s already “broken through $80 million.”
In June, Newmark’s philanthropy arm also pledged to donate $100 million to multiple organizations supporting veterans and military members, who “sometimes have to choose between decent housing or feeding their families,” Newmark said. He called the treatment of that community “a national security matter.”
“There’s nothing virtuous in that,” Newmark said about his donations, noting that he doesn’t spend his money on “yachts or fast cars.”
“It’s more satisfying to give it away,” Newmark said. “Again, that’s not pious or altruistic. It’s just what I was taught in Sunday school.”
WATCH: How Amazon is racing to catch up in generative AI with custom AWS chips
Larry Ellison and Monica Seles and Bill Gates (back row) watch Carlos Alcaraz of Spain play against Alexander Zverev of Germany in their Quarterfinal match during the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, California, on March 14, 2024.
Clive Brunskill | Getty Images
It’s been a good year for Larry Ellison.
Oracle’s co-founder has gained roughly $75 billion in paper wealth as the software company he started in 1979 enjoyed its biggest stock rally since 1999 and the dot-com boom.
While the S&P 500 index has gained 27% in 2024, Oracle shares have shot up 63%, lifting Ellison’s net worth to more than $217 billion, according to Forbes, behind only Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos among the world’s richest people.
At 80, Ellison is a senior citizen in the tech industry, where his fellow billionaire founders are generally decades younger. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose net worth has also ballooned past $200 billion, is half his age.
But Ellison has found the fountain of youth both personally and professionally. After being divorced several times, Ellison was reported this month to be involved with a 33-year-old woman. And at a meeting with analysts in Las Vegas in September, Ellison was as engaged as ever, mentioning offhand that the night before, he and his son were having dinner with his good friend Musk, who’s advising President-elect Donald Trump (then the Republican nominee) while running Tesla and his other ventures.
His big financial boon has come from Oracle, which has maneuvered its way into the artificial intelligence craze with its cloud infrastructure technology and has made its databases more accessible.
ChatGPT creator OpenAI said in June that it will use Oracle’s cloud infrastructure. Earlier this month, Oracle said it had also picked up business from Meta.
Startups, which often opt for market leader Amazon Web Services when picking a cloud, have been engaging Oracle as well. Last year, video generation startup Genmo set up a system to train an AI model with Nvidia graphics processing units, or GPUs, in Oracle’s cloud, CEO Paras Jain said. Genmo now relies on the Oracle cloud to produce videos based on the prompts that users type in on its website.
“Oracle produced a different product than what you can get elsewhere with GPU computing,” Jain said. The company offers “bare metal” computers that can sometimes yield better performance than architectures that employ server virtualization, he said.
In its latest earnings report earlier this month, Oracle came up short of analysts’ estimates and issued a forecast that was also weaker than Wall Street was expecting. The stock had its worst day of 2024, falling almost 7% and eating into the year’s gains.
Still, Ellison was bullish for the future.
“Oracle Cloud Infrastructure trains several of the world’s most important generative AI models because we are faster and less expensive than other clouds,” Ellison said in the earnings release.
For the current fiscal year, which ends in May, Oracle is expected to record revenue growth of about 10%, which would mark its second-strongest year of expansion since 2011.
Jain said that when Genmo has challenges, he communicates with Oracle sales executives and engineers through a Slack channel. The collaboration has resulted in better reliability and performance, he said. Jain said Oracle worked with Genmo to ensure that developers could launch the startup’s Mochi open-source video generator on Oracle’s cloud hardware with a single click.
“Oracle was also more price-competitive than these large hyperscalers,” Jain said.
‘That’s going to be so easy’
Three months before its December earnings report, at the analyst event in Las Vegas, Oracle had given a rosy outlook for the next three years. Executive Vice President Doug Kehring declared that the company would produce more than $66 billion in revenue in the 2026 fiscal year, and over $104 billion in fiscal 2029. The numbers suggested acceleration, with a compound annual growth rate of over 16%, compared with 9% in the latest quarter.
After Kehring and CEO Safra Catz spoke, it was Ellison’s turn. The company’s chairman, technology chief and top shareholder strutted onto the stage in a black sweater and jeans, waved to the analysts, licked his lips and sat down. For the next 74 minutes, he answered questions from seven analysts.
“Did — did he say $104 billion?” Ellison said, referring to Kehring’s projection. Some in the crowd giggled. “That’s going to be so easy. It is kind of crazy.”
Oracle’s revenue in fiscal 2023 was just shy of $50 billion.
The new target impressed Eric Lynch, managing director of Scharf Investments, which held $167 million in Oracle shares at the end of September.
“For a company doing single digits for a decade or so, that’s unbelievable,” Lynch told CNBC in an interview.
Oracle co-founder and Chairman Larry Ellison delivers a keynote address during the Oracle OpenWorld on October 22, 2018 in San Francisco, California.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Oracle is still far behind in cloud infrastructure. In 2023, Amazon controlled 39% share of market, followed by Microsoft at 23% and Google at 8.2%, according to industry researcher Gartner. That left Oracle with 1.4%.
But in database software, Oracle remains a stalwart. Gartner estimated that the company had 17% market share in database management systems in 2023.
Ellison’s challenge is to find opportunities for expansion.
Last year, he visited Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, for the first time to announce a partnership that would enable organizations to use Oracle’s database through Microsoft’s Azure cloud. Microsoft even installed Oracle hardware in its data centers.
In June, Oracle rolled out a similar announcement with Google. Then, in September, Oracle finally partnered with Amazon, introducing its database on AWS.
Oracle and Amazon had exchanged barbs for years. AWS introduced a database called Aurora in 2014, and Amazon worked hard to move itself off Oracle. Following a CNBC report on the effort, Ellison expressed doubt about Amazon’s ability to reach its goal. But the project succeeded.
In 2019, Amazon published a blog post titled, “Migration Complete – Amazon’s Consumer Business Just Turned off its Final Oracle Database.”
Friendlier vibe
Ellison looked back on the history between the two companies at the analyst meeting in September.
“I got kind of got cute commenting about Amazon uses Oracle, doesn’t use AWS, blah, blah,” he said. “And that hurt some people’s feelings. I probably shouldn’t have said it.”
He said a friend at a major New York bank had asked him to make sure the Oracle database works on AWS.
“I said, ‘Great. It makes sense to me,'” Ellison said.
The multi-cloud strategy should deliver gains in database market share, said analyst Siti Panigrahi of Mizuho, which has the equivalent of a buy rating on Oracle shares. Cloud deals related to AI will also help Oracle deliver on its promise for faster revenue growth, he said.
“Oracle right now has an end-to-end stack for enterprises to build their AI strategy,” said Panigrahi, who worked on applications at Oracle in the 2000s.
So far, Oracle has been mainly cutting high-value AI deals with the likes of OpenAI and Musk’s X.ai. Of Oracle’s $97 billion in remaining performance obligations, or revenue that hasn’t yet been recognized, 40% or 50% of it is tied to renting out GPUs, Panigrahi said.
Oracle didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Panigrahi predicts that a wider swath of enterprises will begin adopting AI, which will be a boon to Oracle given its hundreds of thousands of big customers.
There’s also promise in Oracle Health, the segment that came out of the company’s $28.2 billion acquisition of electronic health record software vendor Cerner in 2022.
Yoshiki Hayashi, Marc Benioff and Larry Ellison attend the Transformative Medicine of USC: Rebels with a Cause Gala in Santa Monica, California, on Oct. 24, 2019.
Joshua Blanchard | Getty Images
Unlike rival Epic, Oracle Health lost U.S. market share in 2023, according to estimates from KLAS Research. But Ellison’s connection to Musk, who is set to co-lead Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, might benefit Oracle Health “if there is a bigger push towards modernizing existing healthcare systems,” analysts at Evercore said in a note last week. They recommend buying the stock.
For now, Oracle is busy using AI to rewrite Cerner’s entire code base, Ellison said at the analyst event.
“This is another pillar for growth,” he said. “I think you haven’t quite seen it yet.”
Hours earlier, Ellison had put in a call to Marc Benioff, co-founder and CEO of Salesforce. Benioff knows Ellison as well as anyone, having worked for him for 13 years before starting the cloud software company that’s now a big competitor.
“It was awesome,” Benioff said in a wide-ranging interview the next day, regarding his chat with Ellison.
Benioff spoke about his former boss’s latest run of fortune.
“Larry really deeply wants this,” Benioff said. “This is very important to him, that he is building a great company, what he believes is one of the most important companies in the world, and also, wealth is very important to him.”
A Waymo rider-only robotaxi is seen during a test ride in San Francisco, California, U.S., December 9, 2022.
Paresh Dave | Reuters
Despite General Motor’s decision to shutter its Cruise robotaxi business earlier this month, the U.S. has never been closer to a driverless future.
For the autonomous vehicle industry, 2024 will be remembered as the year that at least one major U.S. player — Alphabet-owned Waymo — saw glimmers of mainstream adoption and made strides toward commercial viability.
That came after a rocky start for the self-driving car industry domestically.
Following a decade of sizable venture investments in AV companies, Uber sold off its self-driving business in 2020 after a fatal collision, and two years later Ford abandoned its stake in its robotaxi developers Argo.AI. In 2023, Cruise paused all of its driverless operations after collisions led to investigations and a suspension of its licenses in California. When GM decided to retreat from the robotaxi business earlier this month, it had already poured $10 billion into Cruise.
Waymo may have outlasted Cruise to lead the U.S. market but domestic competitors are working to catch up, too — most notably Elon Musk’s automaker Tesla and Amazon-owned Zoox.
At stake is a share of a massive market for ride-hailing services in and beyond the U.S. According to research by Fortune Business Insights, the global ride-sharing market is projected to grow from an estimated $123.08 billion in 2024 to $480.09 billion by 2032.
As 2025 approaches, here’s where these major players stand.
Hyundai Motor and Waymo have agreed to a multiyear, strategic partnership that includes the self-driving company adding the South Korean automaker’s Ioniq 5 electric vehicle to its robotaxi fleet.
Courtesy image
Waymo pulls way ahead
What began as “project chauffeur” at Google in 2009 became a publicly available, commercial robotaxi service across multiple U.S. cities this year.
The project, rebranded as Waymo in 2016, has now completed more than 4 million paid autonomous trips in total, the company said Wednesday. That’s more than triple the number a year ago, when Waymo said it had completed around 700,000 driverless ride-hail trips.
Waymo’s service now operates in Phoenix, San Francisco and Los Angeles, covering more than 500 square miles of public roads.
The company dropped its digital velvet rope in June and opened its robotaxi service to all San Franciscans, allowing them to hail rides via the Waymo One app. Opening to the general public proved to riders, and internally, that the company’s fleet of AVs can work well in the traffic conditions of a complex urban environment.
In July, Alphabet’s then-CFO, Ruth Porat, announced a multiyear investment by Google’s parent into Waymo on an earnings call, which amounted to $5.6 billion in total, with $5 billion of that coming from Alphabet.
Waymo co-CEOs, Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov, told employees at an all-hands meeting in November that they should scale up as aggressively as possible but do so with safety at the forefront of all their efforts, company insiders told CNBC.
A big focus for Waymo in 2025 will be expanding its robotaxi service to more cities, winning over riders and continuing research and development on newer technology that will allow the company’s AVs to operate in more weather and traffic conditions.
Waymo plans to launch a commercial service in Austin, Texas, and Atlanta, with rides available through the Uber app next year. It’s also begun testing in Miami with plans to offer rides to the public there in 2026.
Earlier this month, Waymo announced its first international testing destination in Tokyo. Waymo said it’s partnered with the taxi app GO and one of Japan’s largest taxi operators, Nihon Kotsu, and will commence test rides in early 2025.
Waymo showed off its next generation of self-driving vehicles, which it will be making with Chinese auto giant Geely, in August. Waymo’s custom hardware and software will be integrated into the Geely Zeekr electric SUVs. For this new robotaxi, Waymo was able to reduce the number of cameras on board from 29 to 13 and lower the number of costly lidar sensors on board from five to four.
The company also announced a partnership with Hyundai in October to integrate the automaker’s Ioniq 5 SUV into Waymo’s fleet of vehicles. The companies said they will begin testing the Waymo Ioniq 5s by late 2025.
Waymo is already conducting testing and validation drives in Detroit, Buffalo, New York, and at a test track in Columbus, Ohio, with its Jaguar I-Pace and newer Geely Zeekr vehicles to understand how these systems will perform in different types of traffic and weather.
Given its progress and increasing presence on U.S. streets, Waymo received plenty of social media and publicity in 2024, stirring delight and controversy.
In a Reddit channel, R/Waymo, users document every incident involving the company, including one in February where a crowd attacked a Waymo vehicle and set it on fire. The forum also dissected instances when Waymo vehicles were involved in collisions or backed up traffic.
A separate incident went viral when a woman posted on X in September that she was stuck in her Waymo robotaxi when two men stopped it by standing outside of the vehicle, asking for her phone number.
To maintain public trust in the safety of its service, Waymo has built a large public affairs operation, published more detailed safety reports in 2024, and is working closely with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, first responders and authorities in the cities where it operates.
Tesla’s Cybercab robotaxi is displayed during the AutoMobility LA 2024 auto show at the Los Angeles Convention Center in Los Angeles, November 21, 2024.
Robyn Beck | AFP | Getty Images
Tesla unwraps its robotaxi concept
Musk, Tesla’s CEO, has been promising “robotaxi-ready” cars for about a decade. Each year since 2016, he has declared the company is about a year away from making his vision a reality, but Tesla still doesn’t manufacture robotaxis or run a driverless ride-hailing service.
While Tesla didn’t deliver on its robotaxi promises in 2024, Musk revealed the look and feel of Tesla’s “dedicated robotaxi” at an event in October held at a movie studio lot in Burbank, California. He called the vehicle the Cybercab and said Tesla wants to produce it by 2027 and sell it for under $30,000.
The fan-pleasing robotaxi concept was a two-seater with butterfly doors and no steering wheel or pedals. The Petersen Automotive Museum already added a preproduction Cybercab to its collection earlier this month.
At the October event, Tesla also showed off the Robovan, a low-clearance autonomous bus with an art deco design aesthetic.
Musk has promised that Tesla’s Model Y and other vehicles will be able to function as robotaxis as early as 2025 once their systems are upgraded. Model Y vehicles, without safety drivers on board, also circulated in the closed environment of the studio lot at the Burbank event, showing how Tesla envisions they will function as robotaxis.
At the time of that “We, Robot” event, Tesla had not applied for licenses and permits that would allow it to operate a commercial robotaxi service in major U.S. markets where they are required by city or state authorities.
Despite the lack of permits and licenses, Musk told analysts in an October earnings call that Tesla had already built a “development app” allowing employees to request a ride that would take them anywhere in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Bullish investors say Tesla will make good on its driverless technology promises as early as next year, but critics remain skeptical in part because of Musk’s many missed deadlines on robotaxis.
Tesla currently sells driver assistance systems, including its standard Autopilot option and a premium paid option called Full Self-Driving supervised. In correspondence with government agencies, Tesla calls these “partially automated” systems that are not robotaxi-ready. In fine print in its EV manuals, Tesla says FSD and Autopilot require a human driver at the wheel, ready to steer or brake at all times.
This year, Tesla corresponded with authorities in Austin regarding safety expectations for its autonomous vehicle technology.
Musk has repeatedly painted regulation as a hurdle that prevented Tesla from putting self-driving cars on U.S. roads. On a Tesla earnings call on Oct. 23, Musk said he would use his sway with now President-elect Donald Trump to establish a “federal approval process for autonomous vehicles.”
However, AV policy expert Bryant Walker Smith rejected the notion that regulation has curtailed any robotaxi business in a post for Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. Pointing to Waymo as an example, Walker Smith wrote, “AVs can be — and in fact are — lawfully deployed and regulated under existing federal statutory law.”
A Zoox autonomous robotaxi in San Francisco, California, US, on Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Zoox ‘toasters’ heat up
Well before Tesla showed off its Robovan and Cybercab designs, Zoox in February secured important permits allowing it to carry members of the public in its autonomous vehicles in Foster City, California, this year.
Founded in 2014 and acquired by Amazon in 2020 in a deal worth around $1.3 billion, Zoox has developed a unique self-driving shuttle that features big side windows, inward-facing seats and no steering wheel, driver’s seat or traditional windshield.
Zoox in March expanded the environmental conditions its AVs can handle on public roads to include “nighttime driving, driving under light rain and damp road conditions, and at speeds up to 45 mph,” a spokesperson told CNBC.
The company’s vehicles can carry four adults and luggage comfortably, and the small shuttles feature calming lighting, ambient music and interior cameras to monitor what’s happening inside the cabin. Some early riders have described the look of the Zoox vehicles as “futuristic hot dog toasters” or “toasters on wheels.“
Led by CEO Aicha Evans, Zoox is aiming to offer free rides to more members of the public early next year, before opening up to paying customers and the general public.
The service will start in Las Vegas and expand to San Francisco, the company told CNBC. It will begin with an early rider program called Zoox Explorers, allowing select users to ride in a Zoox for free and provide feedback.
With its robotaxis currently on public roads in Las Vegas, San Francisco and Foster City, this summer, Zoox also began testing in Austin and Miami, where its test fleet is still driving.
The company has also been attracting senior talent. One notable recent hire was Zheng Gao, previously the leader of Tesla’s autopilot hardware design team, now director of hardware engineering for Zoox.
A in San Francisco, California, US, on Thursday Aug. 10, 2023.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Cruise’s closure
Despite clear demand for robotaxi rides in the U.S. market, GM surprised some longtime industry observers when it announced earlier this month that it was exiting the business.
“Cruise was well on its way to a robotaxi business, but when you look at the fact you’re deploying a fleet, there’s a whole operations piece of doing that,” GM CEO Mary Barra said on a call announcing the strategic change.
The Detroit automaker will now focus on the development of what it calls “personal autonomous vehicles” instead of robotaxis. GM has yet to determine how many of Cruise’s 2,300 employees will move into its broader tech team.
“In case it was unclear before, it is clear now: GM are a bunch of dummies,” Cruise founder Kyle Vogt, who sold Cruise to GM in 2016 and left the company in November 2023, posted on X after the automaker’s exit announcement.
An early entrant in the U.S. robotaxi market, Cruise grounded its driverless operations in October 2023, shortly before Vogt’s departure. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration fined Cruise $1.5 million after the company failed to disclose details of a serious crash that month involving a pedestrian.
A third-party probe into the incident ordered by GM and Cruise found that culture issues, ineptitude and poor leadership led to the accident.
Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia Corp., holds up the company’s AI accelerator chips for data centers as he speaks during the Nvidia AI Summit Japan in Tokyo on Nov. 13, 2024.
Akio Kon | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Artificial intelligence is still an abstract concept for many everyday consumers unsure about how it will change their lives. But there’s no question about whether businesses are finding value in it.
Some of the biggest winners in this year’s stock market rally that’s seen the Nasdaq jump 33% and other U.S. indexes notch double-digit gains have direct ties to the rapid advancements in AI. Chipmaker Nvidia is among them, but it’s not alone.
The other standout theme that’s driven this year’s outperformers is crypto. Starting with the launch of spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds in January, cryptocurrencies had a big 2024, punctuated by Donald Trump’s election victory, which was funded heavily by the crypto industry. A number of stocks tied to crypto got a big boost.
With four trading days left in the year, here are the five best-performing U.S. tech stocks of 2024 among companies valued at $5 billion or more.
AppLovin
Adam Foroughi, CEO of AppLovin.
CNBC
AppLovin entered the year with a market cap of about $13 billion and was best known for investing in a collection of mobile gaming studios that had produced titles like “Woody Block Puzzle,” “Clockmaker” and “Bingo Story.”
As it exits the year, AppLovin’s valuation has soared past $110 billion, making it worth more than Starbucks, Intel and Airbnb. At Tuesday’s close, AppLovin shares are up 758% this year, far surpassing all other tech companies.
While AppLovin went public in 2021, riding a Covid-era wave of excitement in online games, the business is now centered around online ads and booming profits from advancements in AI.
Last year, AppLovin released the updated 2.0 version of its ad search engine called AXON, which helps put more targeted ads on the gaming apps the company owns and is also used by studios that license the technology. Software platform revenue in the third quarter increased 66% to $835 million, outpacing total growth of 39%.
Net income in the quarter soared 300%, lifting the company’s profit margin to 36.3% from 12.6% in the course of a year.
AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi, whose net worth has swelled past $10 billion, is even more excited about what’s coming. On the company’s earnings call in November, Foroughi raved about a test e-commerce project that allows businesses to offer targeted ads in games.
“In all my years, It’s the best product I’ve ever seen released by us, fastest growing, but it’s still in pilot,” he said.
MicroStrategy
CostFoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images
After climbing 346% in 2023, it was hard to imagine MicroStrategy’s stock finding another gear. But it did.
The company’s share price has jumped 467% this year on the back of a bitcoin-buying strategy that’s made founder Michael Saylor a crypto cult hero.
In mid-2020, the company announced a plan to start buying bitcoin. Up to that point, MicroStrategy had been a middling business intelligence software vendor, but since then, its purchased over 444,000 bitcoins, using its ever-increasing share price as a way to sell stock, raise debt and buy more coin.
It’s now the world’s fourth-largest holder of bitcoin, behind only creator Satoshi Nakamoto, BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust and crypto exchange Binance, with a stockpile valued at close to $44 billion. MicroStrategy’s market cap has swelled from about $1.1 billion when it was just a software company to $80 billion today.
While the rally was long underway prior to November, Trump’s election victory last month added fuel. The stock is up 57% since then while bitcoin has gained about 44%. Trump once called bitcoin a “scam,” but he was the industry’s preferred choice in this election and was backed heavily by some of the leading players, including Coinbase.
“With the red sweep, Bitcoin is surging up with tailwinds, and the rest of the digital assets will also begin to surge,” Saylor told CNBC soon after the election. He said bitcoin remains the “safe trade” in the crypto space, but as a “digital assets framework” is put into place for the broader crypto market, “there’ll be a surge in the entire digital assets industry.”
Palantir
Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir Technologies, walks to the morning session at the Allen & Co. Media and Technology Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, on July 10, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Palantir had a lot of big runs in 2024 on its way to a 380% gain in its stock price. One of its best stretches came last month, when the software company boosted its revenue outlook a day ahead of the presidential election.
The company, which sells data analytics tools to defense agencies, bumped up its target for 2024, with fourth-quarter guidance that blew away analysts’ estimates. Palantir also topped results for the third quarter, leading CEO Alex Karp to declare in the earnings release, “We absolutely eviscerated this quarter, driven by unrelenting AI demand that won’t slow down.”
The stock jumped 23% on the earnings report and then another 8.6% the next day after Trump’s win. Palantir co-founder and board member Peter Thiel was a big Trump booster in the 2016 campaign and helped organize a meeting with tech execs at Trump Tower soon after that election. Karp was one of the attendees.
Karp, however, openly backed Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, in the 2024 campaign. He told The New York Times in a story published in August that Thiel’s earlier support of Trump and the backlash that followed made it “actually harder to get things done.”
Still, Wall Street has rallied behind Palantir following the election on optimism that more military spending will flow to the company.
Karp’s comments in the earnings report ahead of the election suggest the company would be fine either way.
“The growth of our business is accelerating, and our financial performance is exceeding expectations as we meet an unwavering demand for the most advanced artificial intelligence technologies from our U.S. government and commercial customers,” Karp said in a letter to shareholders.
Analysts expect revenue growth in 2025 of about 24% to $3.5 billion, according to LSEG.
Robinhood
Dado Ruvic | Reuters
Robinhood shares more than tripled in value this year, despite a 17% drop on Oct. 31, following disappointing earnings.
Investors looked past those numbers a few days later, driving the stock up 20% after Trump’s election win, as all things tied to crypto rallied. One of Robinhood’s biggest growth engines is crypto, which retail investors can easily purchase on the app, alongside their stocks.
Revenue from crypto transactions jumped 165% in the third quarter from a year earlier to $61 million, accounting for 10% of total net revenue.
In addition to bitcoin, Robinhood users can easily buy about 20 other cryptocurrencies, ranging from popular digital assets like etherium to alt-coins such as dogecoin, Shiba Inu and Bonk. At the company’s investor day in November, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said that crypto is more than just an investment but also a “disruptive technology that will change the underlying infrastructure beneath payments, loans and a wide variety of tradable assets.”
For the fourth quarter, analysts are expecting Robinhood to report revenue growth of over 70% to $805.7 million, according to LSEG, which would be the fastest rate of growth for any quarter since 2021, the year the company went public.
Robinhood’s rally this year has exceeded that of Coinbase, which has jumped 61%. But with a market cap of $70 billion, Coinbase is still twice as valuable.
Nvidia
Nvidia’s astounding run has continued.
Following last year’s 239% gain, powered by excitement around generative AI, Nvidia soared another 183% this year, adding a whopping $2.2 trillion in market cap.
Twice this year Nvidia grabbed the title of world’s most valuable publicly traded company. Apple has jumped back ahead and is approaching $4 trillion, with Nvidia at $3.4 trillion and Microsoft at $3.3 trillion.
Nvidia remains the biggest beneficiary of the AI boom, as the largest cloud vendors and internet companies snap up all the graphics processing units they can find. Annual revenue has increased by at least 94% in each of the past six quarters, with growth exceeding 200% three times in that stretch.
CEO Jensen Huang said in the company’s latest earnings report that the next-generation AI chip called Blackwell is in “full production.” Finance chief Colette Kress said the company is on track for “several billion dollars” of Blackwell revenue in its fourth quarter.
“Every customer is racing to be the first to market,” Kress said. “Blackwell is now in the hands of all of our major partners, and they are working to bring up their data centers.”
While growth is expected to remain robust for a company of Nvidia’s size, the inevitable slowdown is coming. Analysts are projecting year-over-year deceleration over the next several quarters with growth dipping into the mid-40s by the second half of next year.
Nvidia counts on an outsized amount of revenue from a handful of tech giants, so any economic swings present significant risk to investors.
That helps explain why Nvidia likes to tell Wall Street about the extensive roster of companies that are building new AI services and “are racing to accelerate development of these applications with the potential for billions of agents to be deployed in the coming years,” Kress said on the earnings call.
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