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Instacart shares slumped more than 5% in their second day of trading Wednesday, continuing a slide that began immediately after the stock hit the Nasdaq on Tuesday, and leaving it narrowly above its IPO price.

On Monday, Instacart sold shares in its long-awaited IPO at $30 a piece. Trading under ticker symbol “CART,” the stock popped 40% to open at $42, but then sold off throughout the day to close at $33.70. By Wednesday afternoon, Instacart’s rally had fizzled further, and shares are now trading below $32.

Instacart’s offering helped reignite a sleepy IPO market, which has been mostly closed since late 2021 as companies were plagued by inflationary pressures and rising interest rates. But Instacart’s falling share price suggests investors are still hesitant to buy into tech companies that are aiming to disrupt traditional markets despite challenging economics.

The grocery delivery company joins a group of gig economy companies on the public market, following the debut in 2020 of Airbnb and DoorDash and ridehailing companies Uber and Lyft in 2019. Of those companies, only Airbnb has been a good bet for investors.

Gene Munster, managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management, expressed some skepticism about Instacart in an interview with CNBC’s “Closing Bell” Tuesday. Munster said the initial pop was “misleading” and typical of an IPO. He said investors should note that Instacart’s unit growth has been flat year to date.

“The question investors should ask today: Do you believe order growth will reaccelerate? My view on that is I think that it will improve from flat, but it’s not going to be as exciting as Uber,” Munster said, adding that his firm owns Uber shares but not Instacart.

Analysts at Needham issued a “hold” rating on Instacart’s stock in a Tuesday note. They said they anticipate the company’s growth will be “more difficult” over the next three years.

“Our expectations for post-pandemic online grocery sales in the US are likely going to be below consensus, and we see structural headwinds against adoption,” the analysts wrote.

Following Instacart’s debut, marketing automation company Klaviyo hit the market on Wednesday. The stock initially rose 23% to $36.75 but has lost some of those gains.

WATCH: Deepwater’s Gene Munster is betting on Uber over Instacart

Deepwater's Gene Munster is betting on Uber over Instacart

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Microsoft engineer resigns over cloud business from Israeli military

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Microsoft engineer resigns over cloud business from Israeli military

Demonstrators hold a banner reading “Liberated Zone” during a protest at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington, on Aug. 19, 2025. Microsoft Corp. employees rallied at the company’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters in an effort to ratchet up pressure on the software maker to stop doing business with Israel over its war in Gaza.

David Ryder | Bloomberg | Getty Images

A Microsoft engineer is resigning after 13 years at the software giant, claiming the company continues to sell cloud services to the Israeli military and that executives won’t discuss the war in Gaza.

Scott Sutfin-Glowski, a principal software engineer, informed colleagues at Microsoft on Thursday that this will be his last week at the company.

“I can no longer accept enabling what may be the worst atrocities of our time,” he wrote.

In the letter, he referred to a February Associated Press article that said the Israeli military had at least 635 Microsoft subscriptions, and he claimed the vast majority of them remain active.

Microsoft declined to comment.

Sutfin-Glowski’s announced departure comes a day after President Donald Trump said Israel and Hamas committed to the first phase of a peace plan two years into the latest conflict. The AP reported on Thursday, citing government officials, that the U.S. is sending roughly 200 troops to Israel to help support the ceasefire deal.

The conflict has been a matter of ongoing tension at Microsoft.

For months, employees have protested the company’s cloud business from the Israeli military. Five employees were fired.

In September, Microsoft said it had stopped providing certain services to a division of the Israeli Ministry of Defense, though it didn’t provide specifics. That decision came after Microsoft investigated an August report from The Guardian saying the Israeli Defense Forces’ Unit 8200 had built a system for tracking Palestinians’ phone calls.

Sutfin-Glowski said the company cut off communication systems that allowed employees to bring up their concerns regarding the Israeli military’s use of Microsoft products.

Outside a building at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, on Thursday, employees and community members opened up banners calling on the company to drop ties with Israel, according to a statement from No Azure for Apartheid. The group has been asking Microsoft to listen to the more than 1,500 employees who petitioned the company to endorse a ceasefire.

“Today, the ceasefire in Gaza finally takes effect after two years of genocide, but the atrocities, human rights abuses, war crimes, apartheid, and occupation continue,” Sutfin-Glowski wrote.

WATCH: Microsoft is trending toward a $5T market cap, says Wedbush’s Dan Ives

Microsoft is trending toward a $5T market cap, says Wedbush's Dan Ives

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Tesla faces U.S. auto safety probe after reports FSD ran red lights, caused collisions

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Tesla faces U.S. auto safety probe after reports FSD ran red lights, caused collisions

The tablet of the new Tesla Model 3.

Matteo Della Torre | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Tesla is facing a federal investigation into possible safety defects with FSD, its partially automated driving system that is also known as Full Self-Driving (Supervised).

Media, vehicle owner and other incident reports to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration showed that in 44 separate incidents, Tesla drivers using FSD said the system caused them to run a red light, steer into oncoming traffic or commit other traffic safety violations leading to collisions, including some that injured people.

In a notice posted to the agency’s website on Thursday, NHTSA said the investigation concerns “all Tesla vehicles that have been equipped with FSD (Supervised) or FSD (Beta),” which is an estimated 2,882,566 of the company’s electric cars.

Tesla cars, even with FSD engaged, require a human driver ready to brake or steer at any time.

The NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation opened a Preliminary Evaluation to “assess whether there was prior warning or adequate time for the driver to respond to the unexpected behavior” by Tesla’s FSD, or “to safely supervise the automated driving task,” among other things.

Read more CNBC tech news

The ODI’s review will also assess “warnings to the driver about the system’s impending behavior; the time given to drivers to respond; the capability of FSD to detect, display to the driver, and respond appropriately to traffic signals; and the capability of FSD to detect and respond to lane markings and wrong-way signage.”

Tesla did not respond to a request for comment on the new federal probe. The company released an updated version of FSD this week, version 14.1, to customers.

For years, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has promised investors that Tesla would someday be able to turn their existing electric vehicles into robotaxis, capable of generating income for owners while they sleep or go on vacation, with a simple software update.

That hasn’t happened yet, and Tesla has since informed owners that future upgrades will require new hardware as well as software releases.

Tesla is testing a Robotaxi-brand ride-hailing service in Texas and elsewhere, but it includes human safety drivers or valets on board who either conduct the drives or manually intervene as needed.

In February this year, Musk and President Donald Trump slashed NHTSA staff as part of a broader effort to reduce the federal workforce, impacting the agency’s ability to investigate vehicle safety and regulate autonomous vehicles, The Washington Post first reported.

Read NHTSA’s Tesla FSD traffic safety violations investigation filings here.

William Blair's Dorsheimer: Tesla's stock is more aligned with robotaxis & FSD than new models

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Trump meets with Jared Isaacman about top NASA job after pulling nomination

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Trump meets with Jared Isaacman about top NASA job after pulling nomination

Commander Jared Isaacman of Polaris Dawn, a private human spaceflight mission, speaks at a press conference at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S. August 19, 2024. 

Joe Skipper | Reuters

President Donald Trump has met with Jared Isaacman to discuss another nomination to lead NASA, a source familiar with the talks confirmed to CNBC’s Morgan Brennan.

Isaacman, who has close ties with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, was at the White House in September for Trump’s dinner for tech power players. Musk did not attend.

Trump and Isaacman have had multiple in-person meetings in recent weeks to talk about the Shift4 founder’s vision for the space program, according to Bloomberg, citing a person familiar with the meetings.

After a fiery back-and-forth between Musk and Trump over government spending, the president pulled Isaacman’s nomination for the post, saying he was a “blue blooded Democrat, who had never contributed to a Republican before.”

“I also thought it inappropriate that a very close friend of Elon, who was in the Space Business, run NASA, when NASA is such a big part of Elon’s corporate life,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on June 6.

Trump named Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy interim head of NASA in July.

Isaacman, who declined to comment, was initially nominated in December to lead the space agency.

Isaacman is a seasoned space traveller, having led two private spaceflights with SpaceX in 2021 and 2024. Shift4 has invested $27.5 million in SpaceX, according to a 2021 filing.

Read more CNBC tech news

Isaacman stepped down as CEO from Shift4, the payments company he founded in 1999 at the age of 16, after his nomination was pulled, and now serves as executive chairman.

“Even knowing the outcome, I would do it all over again,” Isaacman wrote about the NASA nomination process in a letter to investors announcing the Shift4 change.

Now, it looks like he gets to do it all over again.

Tensions between Musk and Trump have cooled in the months since, but big challenges face the U.S. space program..

Trump has proposed cutting more than $6 billion from NASA’s budget.

As a result of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative, which Musk led in the first half of 2025, around 4,000 NASA employees took deferred resignation program offers, cutting the space agency’s staff of 18,000 by about one-fifth.

During the October government shutdown, NASA has made exceptions that allow employees to keep working on missions involving Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin.

The First-Ever Private Spacewalk with Polaris Dawn Mission Commander Jared Isaacman

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