Elon Musk, Chief Executive Officer of Tesla and owner of X, formerly known as Twitter, attends the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, June 16, 2023.
Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters
Tesla will reveal its robotaxi product on Aug. 8, CEO Elon Musk said in a social media post on X.
Musk has spoken about the robotaxi project for years, and it could represent a major new business for the carmaker as investors grow wary of the company during a period of slowing growth.
Tesla shares rose over 3% in extended trading after Musk’s tweet.
Musk shared the reveal date on Friday after Reuters reported that plans for Tesla’s highly anticipated low-cost car model had been scrapped. Musk accused Reuters of “lying.”
In 2015, Elon Musk told shareholders that Tesla’s cars would achieve “full autonomy” within three years. In 2016, he said Tesla would able to send one of its cars on a cross-country drive without requiring any human intervention by the end of the following year.
Tesla still has yet to deliver a robotaxi, autonomous vehicle or technology that can turn its cars into “level 3” automated vehicles. However, Tesla offers advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), including a standard Autopilot option or premium Full Self-Driving “FSD” option, the latter of which costs $199 per month for U.S. subscribers or $12,000 upfront.
In a push for end-of-quarter sales, Musk recently mandated that all sales and service staff install and demo FSD for customers before handing over the keys. He wrote in an email to employees, “Almost no one actually realizes how well (supervised) FSD actually works. I know this will slow down the delivery process, but it is nonetheless a hard requirement.”
Despite its name, Tesla’s premium option requires a human driver at the wheel, ready to steer or brake at any moment.
Alphabet’s autonomous vehicle unit Waymo operates commercial, driverless ride-hailing services in Phoenix, San Francisco and Los Angeles, and is ramping up in Tesla’s home base of Austin, Texas. Waymo also recently struck a multi-year partnership with Uber and will put its robotaxis to use delivering food for Uber Eats in Arizona. In China, Didi’s autonomous unit operates commercially in markets including Guangzhou. Companies including Wayve in the U.K. and Zoox in the U.S. continue testing their robotaxis.
Some companies have had a tough time in the crowded market.
On Friday, Apple shuttered its self-driving unit and laid off about 600 people on Friday who had been associated with the project. GM’s Cruise service previously offered self-driving car services in San Francisco before being wound down under regulatory scrutiny after an accident. Since the incident, Cruise’s robotaxi fleet has been grounded, local and federal governments have launched their own investigations and Cruise leadership has been gutted.
At Tesla, “unveil” dates do not predict a near-future date for a commercial release of a new product. For example, Tesla unveiled its fully electric heavy-duty truck, the Semi, in 2017 and did not begin deliveries until December 2022. It still produces and sells very few Semis to this day.
Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, holds hundred dollar bills as he speaks during the Bitcoin 2022 Conference at Miami Beach Convention Center on April 7, 2022 in Miami, Florida.
Marco Bello | Getty Images
Founders Fund, the venture capital firm run by billionaire Peter Thiel, has closed a $4.6 billion late-stage venture fund, according to a Friday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The fund, Founders Fund Growth III, includes capital from 270 investors, the filing said. Thiel, Napoleon Ta and Trae Stephens are the three people named as directors. A substantial amount of the capital was provided by the firm’s general partners, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Axios reported in December that Founders Fund was raising about $3 billion for the fund. The firm ended up raising more than that amount from outside investors as part of the total $4.6 billion pool, said the person, who asked not to be named because the details are confidential.
A Founders Fund spokesperson declined to comment.
Thiel, best known for co-founding PayPal before putting the first outside money in Facebook and for funding defense software vendor Palantir, started Founders Fund in 2005. In addition to Palantir, the firm’s top investments include Airbnb, Stripe, Affirm and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Founders Fund is also a key investor in Anduril, the defense tech company started by Palmer Luckey. CNBC reported in February that Anduril is in talks to raise funding at a $28 billion valuation.
Hefty amounts of private capital are likely to be needed for the foreseeable future as the IPO market remains virtually dormant. It was also dealt a significant blow last week after President Donald Trump’s announcement of widespread tariffs roiled tech stocks. Companies including Klarna, StubHub and Chime delayed their plans to go public as the Nasdaq sank.
President Trump walked back some of the tariffs this week, announcing a 90-day pause for most new tariffs, excluding those imposed on China, while the administration negotiates with other countries. But the uncertainty of where levies will end up is a troubling recipe for risky bets like tech IPOs.
SpaceX, Stripe and Anduril are among the most high-profile venture-backed companies that are still private. Having access to a large pool of growth capital allows Founders Fund to continue investing in follow-on rounds that are off limits to many traditional venture firms.
Thiel was a major Trump supporter during the 2016 campaign, but later had a falling out with the president and was largely on the sidelines in 2024 even as many of his tech peers rallied behind the Republican leader.
In June, Thiel said that even though he wasn’t providing money to the campaign for Trump, who was the Republican presumptive nominee at the time, he’d vote for him over Joe Biden, who had yet to drop out of the race and endorse Kamala Harris.
“If you hold a gun to my head, I’ll vote for Trump,” Thiel said in an interview on stage at the Aspen Ideas Festival. “I’m not going to give any money to his super PAC.”
From left, U.S. President Donald Trump, Senator Dave McCormick, his wife Dina Powell McCormick and Elon Musk watch the men’s NCAA wrestling competition at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on March 22, 2025.
Brendan Smialowski | Afp | Getty Images
Meta on Friday announced that it was expanding its board of directors with two new members, including Dina Powell McCormick, a part of President Donald Trump’s first administration.
Powell McCormick served as a deputy national security advisor to Trump from 2017 to 2018. She is also married to Sen. Dave McCormick, a Republican from Pennsylvania who took office in January.
“He’s a good man,” Trump said of McCormick in an endorsement last year, according to the Associated Press. Powell McCormick and her husband were photographed in March beside Trump and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, a current advisor to the president, at a wrestling championship match in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Additionally, Powell McCormick was assistant Secretary of State under Condoleezza Rice in President George W. Bush’s administration.
Besides her political background, Powell McCormick is vice chair, president and head of global client services at BDT & MSD Partners. That company was founded in 2023 when the merchant bank BDT combined with Michael Dell’s investment firm MSD. Powell McCormick arrived at the firm after 16 years at Goldman Sachs, where she had been a partner.
Her appointment represents another sign of Meta’s alignment with Republicans following Trump’s return to the White House.
In January, the company announced a shift away from fact-checking and said it was bringing Trump’s friend Dana White, CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship, onto the board. The changes follow Trump dubbing the company behind Facebook and Instagram “the enemy of the people” on CNBC last year.
Also on Friday, Meta said Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO of payments startup Stripe, was also elected to the board. Stripe was valued at $65 billion in a tender offer last year.
“Patrick and Dina bring a lot of experience supporting businesses and entrepreneurs to our board,” Meta co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement.
Zuckerberg visited the White House last week, after attending Trump’s inauguration in Washington in January. Politico last week reported that the Meto CEO paid $23 million in cash for a mansion in the nation’s capital.
Powell McCormick and Collison officially become directors on April 15, Meta said.
UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty testifies before the Senate Finance Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, May 1, 2024.
Kent Nishimura | Getty Images
Following the massive cyberattack on UnitedHealth Group’s Change Healthcare unit last year, the company launched a temporary funding assistance program to help medical practices with their short-term cash flow needs, offering no-interest loans with no added fees.
A little over a year later, UnitedHealth is aggressively going after borrowers, demanding they “immediately repay” their outstanding balances, according to documents viewed by CNBC and providers who received funding. Some groups have been asked to repay hundreds of thousands of dollars in a matter of days.
Optum, UnitedHealth’s financial, pharmacy and care services arm, is telling borrowers that it reserves the right to “begin offsetting claims payable” to the practices, meaning the company will withhold separate funds until it recoups the loan.
It’s a significant change in posture for the company, which suffered a cyberattack in February 2024 that compromised data from around 190 million Americans, the largest reported health-care breach in U.S. history. The ensuing disruption caused severe fallout across the health-care system, leaving many providers temporarily unable to get paid for their services. Some dipped into their personal savings to keep their practices afloat.
During a Senate hearing about the attack in May, UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty said providers would only be required to repay the loans when “they, not me, but they confirm that their cash flow is normalized.”
Several doctors who took advantage of the financing told CNBC that they can’t meet the company’s new demands. Dr. Christine Meyer, an internist who started a practice in Exton, Pennsylvania, received a letter from Optum earlier this month telling her to immediately submit her organization’s payment.
“We are not in any position to start repaying this loan,” Meyer, who started her practice about 20 years ago, told CNBC. She has been a vocal critic of UnitedHealth following the breach.
“I’m just looking at all my legal options at this point,” Meyer said. “But repaying them $750,000 in five days is obviously not going to happen.”
UnitedHealth didn’t comment on specific cases, but a spokesperson for Change Healthcare confirmed that the company has started recouping the loans.
“Now, more than one year post the event and with services restored, we have begun the process of recouping the interest-free funding we provided to providers,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
The company said the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services took the same approach last year “under its own cyber-attack lending program.” HHS launched a separate funding assistance program through the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services last March. CMS said it would automatically recoup payments from Medicare claims, and providers could accrue interest, according to a release.
“We continue to work with providers on repayment and other options, and continue to reach out to those providers that have not been responsive to previous calls or email requests for more information,” the Change Healthcare spokesperson said.
Providers were told that UnitedHealth reserved the right to withhold future payments when they signed up for the funding assistance program, the company added. CNBC independently reviewed a copy of a loan agreement for the program and confirmed this statement.
Change Healthcare, which offers payment and revenue cycle management tools, was acquired by Optum in 2022.
After discovering the breach last year, UnitedHealth said it isolated and disconnected the impacted systems. The company paid out more than $9 billion to providers in 2024, and more than $4.5 billion has already been repaid, according to the company’s fourth-quarter earnings report in January. UnitedHealth said providers would receive an invoice once standard payment operations resumed, and that they would be subject to a repayment period of 45 business days.
“Change Healthcare will notify the recipient that the funding amount is due after claims processing or payment processing services have resumed and payments impacted during the service disruption period are processed,” the website says.
Meyer said that when the breach took place, she watched her practice’s daily deposits shrivel from the range of $60,000 to $80,000 to about $150 “overnight.” She applied for Optum’s temporary funding assistance program, and after some difficulty and back and forth with the company, she ultimately received a total of $756,900 in financial assistance.
Former Senator Bob Casey Jr., D-Pa., shared Meyer’s story during the congressional hearing in May. He asked Witty about the company’s approach to the repayment process.
“I’d like to absolutely confirm to you and Dr. Meyer that we have no intention of asking for loan repayment until after she determines that her business is back to normal,” Witty told lawmakers. “Even then, we would not look for repayment until 45 business days – 60 calendar days – after that and there would be no interest and no fee associated with that loan.”
“So it would be a determination she makes?” Casey asked.
“That’s absolutely right,” Witty said.
Meyer said that’s not what happened.
UnitedHealth Group Inc. headquarters stands in Minnetonka, Minnesota, U.S.
Mike Bradley | Bloomberg | Getty Images
She received a notice from Optum on Jan. 24, which was viewed by CNBC, that requested repayment since “the service disruption has ended for most clients.” Meyer said she called and told the company she was “not in any position to pay.”
Meyer claims that her practice lost more than $1 million in revenue due to the Change Healthcare cyberattack. She told CNBC the figure was based on a forensic financial analysis her practice carried out by comparing its charges against payments over recent years. The $1.2 million figure accounts for losses across all its insurers, not just UnitedHealthcare, Meyer said.
On April 1, Meyer received another notice requesting immediate repayment within five business days. The letter was addressed to Meyer. But the name of the practice on the letter, Insight Counseling, as well as the total amount due, $925,200, were incorrect.
Meyer said she called Optum again and was told the company made a mistake, but that she had five days to repay her actual total of $750,000. At that point, the company would start withholding her UnitedHealthcare payments, which she described as a “shakedown.”
Meyer said her practice typically receives annual claims payments of about $150,000 to $200,000 from UnitedHealthcare.
“I guess I’ll just let them take those payments back for the next three years until they get their money back,” she told CNBC.
In a post on LinkedIn on Thursday, Meyer wrote that she and her team “made a plan to leave the least amount of money in the account set up to receive payments from UnitedHealthcare. If it isn’t there, they can’t get it.”