Snowflake Chairman Frank Slootman attends the Snowflake Summit 2022 in Las Vegas on June 14, 2022.
Snowflake | Via Reuters
News of Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman’s retirement sparked an 18% plunge in the company’s stock price on Thursday, its steepest selloff since the data analytics software vendor debuted on the New York Stock Exchange in 2020.
Slootman’s departure was announced late Wednesday as part of Snowflake’s quarterly earnings report, which included disappointing guidance. Analysts at Mizuho Securities wrote in a note that the stock is getting hammered “as investors digest the resignation” of Slootman, who joined in 2019 and led the company through its blockbuster IPO the following year.
While the announcement caused consternation on Wall Street, Slootman told CNBC that he’s not worried about a wave of Snowflake employees following him out the door.
“This is not a personal cult, OK?” Slootman said.
Slootman, 65, is being succeeded by former Google ad chief Sridhar Ramaswamy, who joined Snowflake in June via the company’s $185 million purchase of Neeva, a startup Ramaswamy co-founded in 2019.
Snowflake was the third enterprise technology company that Slootman shepherded through the IPO process, following Data Domain in 2007 and ServiceNow in 2012. Snowflake marked his biggest financial windfall. He controlled roughly 6% of the company’s stock at the time of the IPO, and owned 10.6 million shares as of Feb. 9, a stake that’s currently worth about $2 billion.
Additionally, Slootman’s total compensation in 2023 amounted to $23.7 million, almost entirely from stock and option awards.
Before joining Snowflake, Slootman spent about six years as CEO of ServiceNow. He told CNBC that ServiceNow has continued to flourish since his departure. Annualized revenue has grown from $1.5 billion to almost $10 billion.
“Some people are still there that I hired — quite a few of them, actually,” Slootman said. “There’s also new ones, obviously.”
ServiceNow’s workforce stood at 23,668 by the end of 2023, compared with 603 in December 2011, months after Slootman had joined, according to regulatory filings.
“We put ServiceNow on the rails. We’ve done that with Snowflake as well,” said Slootman, who’s sticking around as chairman.
Taking three companies through big and successful exits is a rare feat in technology, and has gained Slootman plenty of acclaim. But he’s also attracted attention for stepping into controversy on issues like the tech industry’s focus on diversity. In 2021, as corporate America was wading through the fallout of the George Floyd murder, Slootman noted that diversity shouldn’t trump merit. He later apologized.
In his 2022 book “Amp It Up,” Slootman offered advice leaders on how to raise standards inside companies, citing Steve Jobs’ insistence on greatness at Apple. “Don’t let malaise set in,” he wrote.
Founded in 2012, Snowflake built a cloud-based data warehouse for storing and analyzing corporate information. Now the company wants to help clients build artificial intelligence models and applications on top of the data.
Ramaswamy said Snowflake has a clear vision, with the data cloud at the center and apps around it.
“Just delivering on that at scale with speed is what I’m going to do,” he said.
The challenge will be to maintain the company’s momentum.
Snowflake generates about $3 billion in annualized revenue, growing at about 32% a year, compared with under $200 million before Slootman replaced former Microsoft executive Bob Muglia as CEO in 2019. As it tries to continue its rapid expansion, Snowflake faces competition from Databricks, valued at $43 billion last year in an investment round that included Capital One, which previously backed Snowflake.
After Snowflake bought Neeva, Slootman said he made an effort to get to know Ramaswamy. The company put Ramaswamy in the most critical role at the time, leading its AI efforts. Slootman had a realization.
“Holy s—, this is the opportunity we’ve been waiting for,” he said.
Ramaswamy said he’s been spending a lot of time with Slootman. They’ve traveled together to London and Berlin, along with domestic trips to Arizona and Las Vegas. Ramaswamy said he’s held conversations with over 100 clients, including many with Slootman.
Now that he’s at the helm, Ramaswamy has to deal with the naysayers.
“It is no doubt concerning to see Mr. Slootman, who has a strong track record and is well regarded by investors, step down after five years in the role,” Deutsche Bank analysts wrote in a note on Thursday, though they maintained their buy recommendation on the stock.
But nobody has more at stake in Ramaswamy’s success than Slootman, who remains one of the company’s biggest investors.
“Snowflake is in an extremely good place, having Sridhar at the helm,” he said.
The U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., U.S., June 27, 2025.
Elizabeth Frantz | Reuters
It’s “Crypto Week” in Washington.
The cryptocurrency industry is set to notch a major win this week if the House can pass two bills that would set up a long-lobbied-for regulatory framework for digital assets.
The stablecoin bill, known as the GENUIS Act, has already passed the Senate and looks set to become the first standalone crypto measure signed into law should the House do the same.
But the real prize for the industry is a wider and more complex bill on market structure called the CLARITY Act, which faces a more difficult path to President Donald Trump‘s desk.
Seeking CLARITY
The CLARITY Act sets the rules for when an asset is considered a security and overseen by the Securities and Exchange Commission versus when it’s considered a commodity that is overseen by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, or CFTC.
The act is likely to pass the House on Wednesday, given the bipartisan support when the bill cleared two committees. But the path in the Senate is murky, as Democrats could withhold their support over concerns about how Trump and his family are benefiting from crypto.
The Trump family’s growing crypto empire includes $TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coins, a stablecoin, and a decentralized finance firm called World Liberty Financial, among other ventures.
Some lawmakers who backed the narrower stablecoin bill did so with the hopes of seeing the wider market structure package address conflicts of interest.
“President Trump’s crypto corruption distorts the digital asset marketplace,” said Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., who voted for the stablecoin bill. “Writing a bill with a corruption caveat for the president sends a clear message — that Congress is not serious about addressing corruption, which we know undermines investors’ faith in capital markets.”
Pushing it to pass
Coinbase attempted to literally sweeten the deal on the CLARITY Act for lawmakers with an advertising push that included handing out about 5,000 chocolate bars around D.C.
The candy wrappers cited a Morning Consult poll that found about “1 in 5” Americans own crypto.
Coinbase, Ripple and other crypto companies are lobbying Congress to put their concerns aside and back the market structure package, anticipating that more regulatory certainty will encourage more investment in crypto.
“When consumers buy and sell and trade these digital assets, they want to know what they’re getting and they want to know that they’re using a reputable intermediary,” Coinbase Vice President of U.S. Policy Kara Calvert told CNBC. “And what this bill does is provide that construct to do that.”
Read more CNBC tech news
The Senate is set to introduce its own market structure bill this month that is expected to differ slightly from the House version.
Senate Banking Chair Tim Scott, R-S.C., is working with Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., and others on the measure.
Other Democrats are planning to work with Republicans on a bill, including Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., who worked on previous market structure bills with Lummis.
“We have a lot of work to do, and we’re going to work on a bipartisan basis over the next month,” she told CNBC in a brief interview in the Capitol.
GENIUS and the Fed
The House is scheduled for a GENIUS Act vote on Thursday.
The package cleared the Senate last month with 18 Democrats joining most Republicans to support the measure.
The House stood down on their own version of the bill under pressure from Trump, who told lawmakers via a Truth Social post to “Get it to my desk, ASAP — NO DELAYS, NO ADD ONS.”
In addition to the two major bills the crypto industry has pushed for, the House will take up a separate measure that would prevent the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency (CBDC).
The bill is expected to pass in a vote scheduled for Wednesday.
The commitment includes an initial 100 megawatt data center built in Lancaster, a city about 70 miles west of Philadelphia. The data center will be able to expand to 300 MW.
“The demand for high-performance AI compute is relentless,” said CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator in a release, “and CoreWeave is scaling a cloud purpose-built for AI to meet it and strengthen US leadership.”
The announcement comes as part of the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit in Pittsburgh hosted by Sen. Dave McCormick, R-Penn., where President Donald Trump, members of his administration and executives are meeting to discuss AI and investment opportunities in the state.
Read more CNBC tech news
Google announced a $25 billion data center and AI infrastructure deal Tuesday in conjunction with the summit, and pledged $3 billion to upgrade two hydropower plants in Pennsylvania.
CoreWeave, which rents out access to Nvidia AI chips, has been on a tear since it went public at the end of March. Shares opened at $39 and are up more than 250% since then.
The company announced a $9 billion acquisition of data center infrastructure provider Core Scientific last week, a deal that will boost CoreWeave’s access to power and real estate.
CoreWeave was already a major customer of Core Scientific and the deal will cut $10 billion in future lease commitments, according to the company.
In this photo illustration, logo of Tesla is displayed on a mobile phone screen in front of the Indian flag in Ankara, Turkiye on November 28, 2023.
Cem Genco | Anadolu | Getty Images
Tesla has made its long-awaited debut in India, where it will sell its electric SUV, the Model Y, starting at $69,770, a significant markup from other major markets, its website showed Tuesday.
The sales launch comes the same day the American electric vehicle maker opened a showroom in Mumbai, its first in the country.
Isabel Fan, Southeast Asia Director at Tesla, also announced that the company would soon launch a showroom in the Indian capital of New Delhi, according to a report from CNBC-TV18.
The report added that Tesla would hire staff locally and set up experience centers, service centers, delivery systems, charging stations and logistics hubs throughout the country.
There has long been speculation about when Tesla would enter India, the third-largest automotive market in the world by sales. However, the high price tag may come as a surprise to many. For example, the Model Y starts from $44,990 in the U.S.
Why are prices so high?
Vaibhav Taneja, Tesla’s Chief Financial Officer, in April, confirmed the company’s interest in India but said it would take a careful approach to the market considering its 70% tariff on EV imports and about 30% luxury tax.
These high taxes explain why Tesla was forced to set its prices so high in India, despite the country’s preference for EVs at much lower price ranges.
Experts told CNBC that this will see Tesla in India compete in the premium segment of the market with the likes of BMW, rather than with local EV companies like Tata Motors.
“I won’t say that these prices are completely out of range because you will find buyers in India for all price points,” Vivek Vaidya, global client leader for mobility at research firm Frost & Sullivan, told CNBC’s “Inside India” on Tuesday.
“The question is whether they are going to threaten the mass market. The answer to that is no because the most popular selling cars probably sell at one-tenth of this price,” he added.
Testing the waters
While the Model Y will struggle to be price competitive, Tesla is likely more focused on “testing the waters” than generating sales in India, Puneet Gupta, Director for the Indian automotive market at S&P Global Mobility, told CNBC.
India first announced a new EV policy last year that promised to reduce duties for companies that commit to building up a local supply chain. While this could help Tesla push its prices down, the company has yet to commit to building any local manufacturing plants in India.
“The Mumbai showroom is a strategic ‘soft power’ move, not a full commitment,” Diwakar Murugan, automotives analyst at Canalys, told CNBC in a statement, adding that Tesla’s hesitation in India is pragmatic, as the market still lacks the demand to justify a large-scale manufacturing facility.
“Shifting a significant portion of its production to India would require a major re-evaluation of its global manufacturing strategy, something it’s not ready to do while its primary focus remains on scaling production in its established markets,” he said.
Murugan predicted that Tesla may only commit to full-scale Indian manufacturing between 2028 and 2030, with incentives like land subsidies and tax holidays, as well as the maturity of the local battery market expected to be important factors.
In the meantime, the Model Y will be a “niche, limited-volume product for wealthy, tech-savvy early adopters who seek a status symbol,” he added.
S&P’s Gupta noted that India’s tariffs on EV exports could also soon change as a result of ongoing trade negotiations between Washington and New Delhi, as well as further tweaks to its EV policy.
“The Indian government has been very proactive in terms of pushing green, cleaner, electric cars, and I think that Tesla has a clear advantage due to the India-U.S. relationship,” Gupta said.