A Tesla Model X burns after crashing on U.S. Highway 101 in Mountain View, California, U.S. on March 23, 2018.
S. Engleman | Via Reuters
Tesla has settled a wrongful death lawsuit brought by the family of Walter Huang, an Apple engineer and father of two who died after his Model X SUV, with Autopilot features switched on, crashed into a highway barrier near Mountain View, California, in 2018.
The settlement comes as jury selection and a trial were just beginning on Monday in a California Superior court. The settlement allows Tesla to avoid airing evidence and testimonies in a widely-followed case.
The National Transportation Safety Board investigated the fatal crash and revealed, in 2020, that it found Tesla’s tech was at least partly to blame for the collision, along with possible driver distraction and problematic road construction. NTSB believed that Huang had been looking at a game on his phone at some point before the collision.
The federal agency found that Tesla’s forward collision warning system did not provide an alert, and its automatic emergency braking system did not activate as Huang’s Model X, with Autopilot engaged, accelerated into a barrier alongside the highway 101. Faded lane markings and the barrier — or crash attenuator — positioning also may have contributed to the collision, the NTSB said in 2020.
Huang’s bereaved family sued Tesla for wrongful death and their claims focused in part on alleged safety and design defects in the company’s driver assistance systems. The case was Sz Huang et al v. Tesla Inc. et al in a California Superior Court in Santa Clara County.
Huang attorneys, in court filings, also pointed to social media and marketing messages from Tesla, its CEO Elon Musk and others, suggesting that Autopilot made Tesla vehicles safe to drive without needing to stay attentive to the road at all times or without needing to keep hands on the vehicle’s steering wheel.
In internal Tesla e-mails referenced in court filings, Tesla execs and engineers discussed how they had become complacent while driving their Tesla vehicles with Autopilot or related premium features switched on. They described reading emails and checking their phones while driving with these systems engaged.
A Tesla Model X which crashed on U.S. Highway 101 (US-101) is seen in Mountain View, California, U.S. on March 23, 2018 in this handout image.
S. Engleman | Via Reuters
A civil jury trial was slated to begin this week in a San Jose, California courthouse just before Tesla settled.
Tesla attorneys had argued that Huang was an inattentive driver, who ostensibly knew better but was playing mobile games on his phone at the time of the crash.
The company has filed to seal from public view the amount listed in the settlement agreement.
The fatal crash and filings in this suit had already thrown Tesla’s culture, its attitudes about safety and the quality of its driver assistance systems into question for many prospective shareholders and customers.
If a jury had found Tesla liable (in part or whole) for Huang’s death, this trial would have also set a precedent in product liability suits that the EV maker is now facing pervasively, making it easier for other plaintiffs to sue or win over related issues.
In May 2022, Musk declared in a post on social media: “We will never seek victory in a just case against us, even if we will probably win,” adding that, “We will never surrender/settle an unjust case against us, even if we will probably lose.”
Tesla lead attorneys with Bowman and Brooke LLP were not immediately available to comment on Monday.
In a filing asking the court to seal the settlement terms, Tesla’s attorneys wrote that the company had, “entered into a settlement agreement with Plaintiffs to end years of litigation.” They said they wanted the exact dollar amount of the settlement sealed because, “other potential claimants (or the plaintiffs’ bar) may perceive the settlement amount as evidence of Tesla’s potential liability for losses, which may have a chilling effect on settlement opportunity in subsequent cases.”
Attorneys for the Huang family, at the law firms Minami Tamaki and Walkup Melodia, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
TikTok’s grip on the short-form video market is tightening, and the world’s biggest tech platforms are racing to catch up.
Since launching globally in 2016, ByteDance-owned TikTok has amassed over 1.12 billion monthly active users worldwide, according to Backlinko. American users spend an average of 108 minutes per day on the app, according to Apptoptia.
TikTok’s success has reshaped the social media landscape, forcing competitors like Meta and Google to pivot their strategies around short-form video. But so far, experts say that none have matched TikTok’s algorithmic precision.
“It is the center of the internet for young people,” said Jasmine Enberg, vice president and principal analyst at Emarketer. “It’s where they go for entertainment, news, trends, even shopping. TikTok sets the tone for everyone else.”
Platforms like Meta‘s Instagram Reels and Google’s YouTube Shorts have expanded aggressively, launching new features, creator tools and even considering separate apps just to compete. Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, traditionally a professional networking site, is the latest to experiment with TikTok-style feeds. But with TikTok continuing to evolve, adding features like e-commerce integrations and longer videos, the question remains whether rivals can keep up.
“I’m scrolling every single day. I doom scroll all the time,” said TikTok content creator Alyssa McKay.
But there may a dark side to this growth.
As short-form content consumption soars, experts warn about shrinking attention spans and rising mental-health concerns, particularly among younger users. Researchers like Dr. Yann Poncin, associate professor at the Child Study Center at Yale University, point to disrupted sleep patterns and increased anxiety levels tied to endless scrolling habits.
“Infinite scrolling and short-form video are designed to capture your attention in short bursts,” Dr. Poncin said. “In the past, entertainment was about taking you on a journey through a show or story. Now, it’s about locking you in for just a few seconds, just enough to feed you the next thing the algorithm knows you’ll like.”
Despite sky-high engagement, monetizing short videos remains an uphill battle. Unlike long-form YouTube content, where ads can be inserted throughout, short clips offer limited space for advertisers. Creators, too, are feeling the squeeze.
“It’s never been easier to go viral,” said Enberg. “But it’s never been harder to turn that virality into a sustainable business.”
Last year, TikTok generated an estimated $23.6 billion in ad revenues, according to Oberlo, but even with this growth, many creators still make just a few dollars per million views. YouTube Shorts pays roughly four cents per 1,000 views, which is less than its long-form counterpart. Meanwhile, Instagram has leaned into brand partnerships and emerging tools like “Trial Reels,” which allow creators to experiment with content by initially sharing videos only with non-followers, giving them a low-risk way to test new formats or ideas before deciding whether to share with their full audience. But Meta told CNBC that monetizing Reels remains a work in progress.
While lawmakers scrutinize TikTok’s Chinese ownership and explore potential bans, competitors see a window of opportunity. Meta and YouTube are poised to capture up to 50% of reallocated ad dollars if TikTok faces restrictions in the U.S., according to eMarketer.
Watch the video to understand how TikTok’s rise sparked a short form video race.
The X logo appears on a phone, and the xAI logo is displayed on a laptop in Krakow, Poland, on April 1, 2025. (Photo by Klaudia Radecka/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Elon Musk‘s xAI Holdings is in discussions with investors to raise about $20 billion, Bloomberg News reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The funding would value the company at over $120 billion, according to the report.
Musk was looking to assign “proper value” to xAI, sources told CNBC’s David Faber earlier this month. The remarks were made during a call with xAI investors, sources familiar with the matter told Faber. The Tesla CEO at that time didn’t explicitly mention any upcoming funding round, but the sources suggested xAI was preparing for a substantial capital raise in the near future.
The funding amount could be more than $20 billion as the exact figure had not been decided, the Bloomberg report added.
Artificial intelligence startup xAI didn’t immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment outside of U.S. business hours.
The AI firm last month acquired X in an all-stock deal that valued xAI at $80 billion and the social media platform at $33 billion.
“xAI and X’s futures are intertwined. Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent,” Musk said on X, announcing the deal. “This combination will unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach.”
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai during the Google I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California, on May 10, 2023.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Alphabet‘s stock gained 3% Friday after signaling strong growth in its search and advertising businesses amid a competitive artificial intelligence environment and uncertain macro backdrop.
“GOOGL‘s pace of GenAI product roll-out is accelerating with multiple encouraging signals,” wrote Morgan Stanley‘s Brian Nowak. “Macro uncertainty still exists but we remain [overweight] given GOOGL’s still strong relative position and improving pace of GenAI enabled product roll-out.”
The search giant posted earnings of $2.81 per share on $90.23 billion in revenues. That topped the $89.12 billion in sales and $2.01 in EPS expected by LSEG analysts. Revenues grew 12% year-over-year and ahead of the 10% anticipated by Wall Street.
Net income rose 46% to $34.54 billion, or $2.81 per share. That’s up from $23.66 billion, or $1.89 per share, in the year-ago period. Alphabet said the figure included $8 billion in unrealized gains on its nonmarketable equity securities connected to its investment in a private company.
Adjusted earnings, excluding that gain, were $2.27 per share, according to LSEG, and topped analyst expectations.
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Alphabet shares have pulled back about 16% this year as it battles volatility spurred by mounting trade war fears and worries that President Donald Trump‘s tariffs could crush the global economy. That would make it more difficult for Alphabet to potentially acquire infrastructure for data centers powering AI models as it faces off against competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic to develop largely language models.
During Thursday’s call with investors, Alphabet suggested that it’s too soon to tally the total impact of tariffs. However, Google’s business chief Philipp Schindler said that ending the de minimis trade exemption in May, which created a loophole benefitting many Chinese e-commerce retailers, could create a “slight headwind” for the company’s ads business, specifically in the Asia-Pacific region. The loophole allows shipments under $800 to come into the U.S. duty-free.
Despite this backdrop, Alphabet showed steady growth in its advertising and search business, reporting $66.89 billion in revenues for its advertising unit. That reflected 8.5% growth from the year-ago period. The company reported $8.93 billion in advertising revenue for its YouTube business, shy of an $8.97 billion estimate from StreetAccount.
Alphabet’s “Search and other” unit rose 9.8% to $50.7 billion, up from $46.16 billion last year. The company said that its AI Overviews tool used in its Google search results page has accumulated 1.5 billion monthly users from a billion in October.
Bank of America analyst Justin Post said that Wall Street is underestimating the upside potential and “monetization ramp” from this tool and cloud demand fueled by AI.
“The strong 1Q search performance, along with constructive comments on Gemini [large language model] performance and [AI Overviews] adoption could help alleviate some investor concerns on AI competition,” Post wrote in a note.