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Apple CEO Tim Cook holds a new iPhone 15 Pro during the Wonderlust event at the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, California, Sept. 12, 2023.

Loren Elliott | Reuters

Lead time and pre-orders for Apple’s latest iPhone are “better than feared,” Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in a note on Monday.

Lead times for the iPhone 15 Pro Max are averaging five to six weeks, the analysts wrote, “the longest of any model launched in the last 7 years.” And reports from Chinese news agencies “suggest solid early pre-order demand for the iPhone 15,” they added, despite investor concerns that have focused on China.

“While it’s far too early to call the cycle, these data points are encouraging, especially given such extreme negative investor sentiment, which has caused Apple to underperform the market by 7 points since headlines of Chinese government bans emerged on September 6th,” the analysts wrote, referring to reports that the Chinese government had barred officials from bringing iPhones to government offices or using them for work.

A Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson last week denied that the government has instituted a policy banning the purchase or use of foreign phone brands like Apple.

Morgan Stanley said the lead time for the latest iPhone line in the U.S. is a reflection of “both supply constraints and strong early demand.” In China, the lead time and pre-order data are a positive surprise given the earlier reports of a possible ban and the strength of Chinese phone maker Huawei, the analysts said.

The firm has an overweight rating on Apple’s stock with a $215 price target.

“If iPhone 15 lead time and pre-order data continue to surprise to the upside, and/or if iPhone builds remain stable, we’d expect to see a short-term recovery in Apple shares,” the analysts wrote.

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Brazil supreme court unfreezes assets of Elon Musk’s Starlink, X after taking fines

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Brazil supreme court unfreezes assets of Elon Musk's Starlink, X after taking fines

Elon Musk, chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, July 24, 2024. 

Samuel Corum | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Brazil’s supreme court announced Friday that it ordered banks to transfer funds from Starlink and X accounts to pay fines the court levied against Elon Musk’s social network.

The court’s top justice, Alexandre de Moraes, and a panel of five other justices, found that X had repeatedly violated Brazilian law when it refused to appoint a legal representative in the country, and when it refused to remove content or profiles from its platform that the court determined to be harmful towards democratic institutions in Brazil.

The court had nearly 18.4 million Brazilian reals, or approximately $3.3 million, transferred out of the accounts. Musk acquired X, then known as Twitter, in 2022. Starlink is the satellite internet service run by SpaceX.

Following the transfers, the court ordered that the frozen bank accounts and assets of X and Starlink be released, saying there was no longer any need to keep them.

The court suspended X at the end of August, and the suspension remains in place. 

Musk and his businesses have said they view the actions of de Moraes as “illegal,” and his court’s orders as having been issued without due process. X and SpaceX did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Friday.

Brazilian news agency UOL reported earlier this month that some of the accounts de Moraes ordered Musk to suspend at X belong to users who allegedly threatened federal police officers involved in a probe of former right-wing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.

Bolsonaro has been accused of instigating Brazil’s Jan. 8 riots and of attempting to stage a coup there.

Musk is a proponent of Bolsonaro, in part because the former Brazilian president authorized his business Starlink to operate in the country.

Musk has been ramping up insults and calls to impeach de Moraes since April. On Sept. 5, his long-time collaborator at the helm of SpaceX, COO Gwynne Shotwell, also took shots at the Brazil supreme court online.

She wrote, “@Alexandre, please stop harassing Starlink and let us keep serving the people of Brazil.”

Backers of de Moraes and the STF have seen the orders against X Corp. as an assertion of Brazilian sovereignty.

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Tesla Semi fire in California took 50,000 gallons of water to extinguish

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Tesla Semi fire in California took 50,000 gallons of water to extinguish

Tesla Semi

Courtesy: Tesla

A single-vehicle collision last month involving a Tesla Semi electric truck took 50,000 gallons of water to extinguish and required aircraft to dump fire retardant overhead, according to a preliminary report on Friday from the National Transportation Safety Board.

The crash, which occurred on California’s Interstate 80 west of Lake Tahoe, is being investigated by the NTSB. CAL-Fire’s efforts put out the flames cooled the vehicle’s massive battery to keep it from reigniting and prevented the fire from spreading beyond the crash site, the NTSB said.

The Tesla truck, driven by an employee, was headed to the company’s battery factory in Sparks, Nevada, from a warehouse in Livermore, California, the report said. The incident closed down part of the I-80 for 15 hours.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk first showed off the Semi truck design at an event in November 2017, promising it would come to market in 2020. The company still hasn’t started producing the trucks in high volume, but it’s building out production lines at its Nevada facility.

“Preparation of Semi factory continues and is on track to begin production by end of 2025,” Tesla said in its second-quarter earnings report in July.

The NTSB report confirmed that Tesla’s driver assistance systems, which are marketed as Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (Supervised) in the U.S., were not “operational” at the time of the Semi collision and fire.

Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment.

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Oracle’s Larry Ellison briefly tops Jeff Bezos to become world’s second-richest person

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Oracle's Larry Ellison briefly tops Jeff Bezos to become world's second-richest person

Larry Ellison, chief technology officer of Oracle (L), and Jeff Bezos, founder and executive chairman of Amazon.

Reuters

Oracle‘s best week on the stock market since 2021 has bolstered Chairman Larry Ellison’s net worth, briefly edging him past Amazon founder Jeff Bezos on Friday to become the world’s second-richest person.

Ellison’s net worth reached $208.4 billion shortly after the market open, then fell to $199 billion, according to Forbes’ real-time billionaires list. Bezos, who has claimed the title of world’s second-richest person on and off over the years, is worth $205 billion. Only Tesla CEO Elon Musk, at $252 billion, is currently above him.

Oracle shares gained 1.2% to $163.38 on Friday after the database vendor bumped up its fiscal 2026 revenue guidance and issued a rosy forecast as far out as fiscal 2029. The company issued the forward-looking revenue figures at its annual CloudWorld conference in Las Vegas.

The stock rallied 11% on Tuesday after the company reported quarterly results that topped expectations. Oracle shares continue to reach new highs and are now up about 56% this year, behind only artificial intelligence chipmaker Nvidia — up 139% — among large-cap tech stocks.

Ellison, who co-founded Oracle in 1977, has been the biggest beneficiary of the boom. He owns about 40% of the outstanding stock, making him the company’s biggest stakeholder. His company’s revival in recent years has been sparked by its improving position in cloud infrastructure and growing adoption of its cloud databases.

Bezos, 60, and Ellison, 80, are jockeying for the title of world’s second-richest person three days after their companies forged a new partnership. On Monday, Oracle said its database software will become available for AWS customers to use atop Oracle hardware sitting inside of Amazon data centers.

Over the past year, Oracle has also forged similar partnerships with Microsoft and Google, the other two leading cloud infrastructure companies. Ellison told analysts on this week’s earnings call that Oracle is now in prime position in the cloud and in traditional data centers.

“With Oracle Database to be able to run AWS, Microsoft and Google, is incredibly important,” Ellison said on the call. “It will absolutely accelerate database growth in the public cloud. But we expect that private clouds will greatly outnumber public clouds as companies decide they don’t want — they want the Oracle Cloud behind their firewall, in their datacenter, with no neighbors.”

— CNBC’s Jordan Novet and Ari Levy contributed reporting.

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