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Emad Mostaque, founder and CEO of Stability AI, speaks during the Bloomberg Technology Summit in San Francisco, California, US, on Thursday, June 22, 2023.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Beleaguered artificial intelligence startup Stability is laying off employees after the exit of its controversial former CEO Emad Mostaque.

Stability, which is behind the popular Stable Diffusion large language model, made more than 20 of its employees redundant to “right-size” the business after a period of unsustainable growth, according to an internal memo obtained by CNBC.

The company’s newly appointed co-CEOs Shan Shan Wong and Christian Laforte told employees in an email Wednesday night that the firm needed to “restructure parts of the business, which will sadly mean saying goodbye to some colleagues.”

“Those who are affected by this have been notified individually and we will be supporting them throughout this period,” Wong and Laforte, who were previously chief operating officer and chief technology officer at the company, respectively, said in the internal memo.

Stability AI’s layoffs amount to about 10% of its global headcount, according to publicly available data online which shows the firm employs around 200 people in total.

The employees affected by the measures are mostly on the operational side of the business and have been notified of their redundancies, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke with CNBC under condition of anonymity as they were not able to speak publicly on the matter.

Last month, Stability announced its former CEO, Mostaque, was leaving the company to “pursue decentralized AI,” and would be replaced by Wong and Laforte.

Mostaque’s departure follows media reports throwing doubt on his credentials.

A June 2023 Forbes report said that Mostaque misled people including his own investors about receiving a master’s degree from Oxford University, as well as the nature of a partnership with Amazon which Stability characterized as a strategic deal but was nothing more than a standard cloud computing leasing contract.

Mostaque’s response at the time was that several of Forbes’ allegations were “false accusations and misrepresentations.” He said he didn’t receive his Oxford University degree because he didn’t attend his graduation ceremony but had arranged to receive his degrees by post.

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He also doubled down on the deal with Amazon and it’s cloud computing unit Amazon Web Services by describing it as a “strategic business alliance” that saw AWS build an “incredibly rare dedicated compute cluster” completed to the requirements of Stability.

Stability AI is still searching for a permanent CEO to fill the top leadership role. The company said it continues to operate as normal and is still releasing new products, having only recently announced developer APIs, or application programming interfaces, for its Stable Diffusion 3 AI model.

You can read the full memo from co-CEOs Wong and Christian Laforte below:

Dear team,

As you know, over the past couple of weeks the Leadership team have been working hard on a strategic plan to reduce our cost-base, strengthen support with our investors and partners, and enable our teams to continue developing and releasing innovative products. 

Following a review of the global team, we have determined the need to restructure parts of the business, which will sadly mean saying goodbye to some colleagues. Those who are affected by this have been notified individually and we will be supporting them throughout this period.  

These decisions have not been taken lightly and they are intended to right-size parts of the business and focus our operations, which is critical to setting us on a more sustainable path – and to put us in the best possible position to continue developing cutting-edge models and products. Products like the Stable Diffusion 3 API strengthen our deep-tech leadership and demonstrate our unique, systemic importance to the AI ecosystem.

We will meet as planned on Thursday for our regular town hall and we encourage you to ask any questions you might have of our Leadership team in the form that will be sent out shortly. In the meantime, please feel free to discuss any concerns with your manager.

We would like to thank everyone for their dedication and contributions. We recognize the challenges we face, but we have a plan in place. Through the hard work and commitment of this team, we are making progress every day, moving us steadily in the right direction.

Best wishes,

Shan Shan & Christian 

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Tesla’s stock erases loss for the year, soaring 85% from April low

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Tesla's stock erases loss for the year, soaring 85% from April low

Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, May 13, 2025.

Hamad I Mohammed | Reuters

Tesla’s shares have finally turned positive for the year.

After a dismal first quarter, which was the worst for the stock in any period since 2022, and a brutal start to April, following President Donald Trump’s announcement of sweeping new tariffs, Wall Street has again rallied around the electric vehicle maker.

The stock rose 3.6% on Monday to $410.26, topping its closing price of 2024 by over $6. It’s up 85% since bottoming for the year at $221.86 on April 4. A new filing revealed that CEO Elon Musk purchased about $1 billion worth of shares in the company through his family foundation.

It’s the second straight year Tesla has bounced back after a down first quarter. Last year, the shares fell 29% in the first three months before ending up 63% for 2024.

In recent weeks, analysts have praised the EV maker’s proposed pay plan for Musk, which could amount to a $1 trillion windfall for the world’s richest person over the next decade. The company has also gotten a boost from its new MegaBlocks battery energy storage systems that Tesla ships preassembled to businesses looking to lower their power costs or make greater use of electricity from renewable resources.

Even with the rebound, Tesla is the second-worst performer this year among tech’s megacaps, ahead of only Apple, which is down about 5% in 2025. Tesla is still in the midst of a multi-quarter sales slump due to an aging lineup of EVs and increased competition from lower-cost competitors in China, namely BYD.

Tesla has seen a consumer backlash, in part because of Musk’s political activities, including spending nearly $300 million to propel President Trump back to the White House and his work with the Trump administration to slash the federal workforce.

Tesla leadership has been working to shift investors’ attention to other topics such as robotaxis and humanoid robots.

However, the company has yet to deliver vehicles that are safe to use without a human onboard and ready to take control if needed. And while Musk is touting Tesla’s Optimus robots, which he says will be able to do everything from factory work to babysitting, a product is still a long way from hitting the market.

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Alphabet becomes fourth company to reach $3 trillion market cap

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Alphabet becomes fourth company to reach  trillion market cap

Google CEO Sundar Pichai gestures to the crowd during Google’s annual I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California on May 20, 2025.

Camille Cohen | Afp | Getty Images

Alphabet has joined the $3 trillion club.

Shares of the search giant jumped more than 4% on Monday, pushing the company into territory occupied only by Nvidia, Microsoft and Apple.

The stock got a big lift in early September from an antitrust ruling by a judge, whose penalties came in lighter than shareholders feared. The U.S. Department of Justice wanted Google to be forced to divest its Chrome browser, and last year a district court ruled that the company held an illegal monopoly in search and related advertising.

But Judge Amit Mehta decided against the most severe consequences proposed by the DOJ, which sent shares soaring to a record. After the big rally, President Donald Trump congratulated the company and called it “a very good day.”

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Alphabet shares are now up more than 30% this year, compared to the 15% gain for the Nasdaq.

The $3 trillion milestone comes roughly 20 years after Google’s IPO and a little more than 10 years after the creation of Alphabet as a holding company, with Google its prime subsidiary.

CEO Sundar Pichai was named CEO of Alphabet in 2019, replacing co-founder Larry Page. Pichai’s latest challenge has been the surge of new competition due to the rise of artificial intelligence, which the company has had to manage through while also fending off an aggressive set of regulators in the U.S. and Europe.

The rise of Perplexity and OpenAI ended up helping Google land the recent favorable antitrust ruling. The company’s hopes of becoming a major AI player largely ride with Gemini, Google’s flagship suite of AI models.

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Bessent: TikTok deal ‘framework’ reached with China, Trump and Xi will finalize it Friday

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Bessent: TikTok deal 'framework' reached with China, Trump and Xi will finalize it Friday

Samuel Boivin | Nurphoto | Getty Images

The U.S. and China have reached a ‘framework’ deal for social media platform TikTok, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Monday.

“It’s between two private parties, but the commercial terms have been agreed upon,” he said from U.S.-China talks in Madrid.

Both President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will meet Friday to discuss the terms. Trump also said in a Truth Social post Monday that a deal was reached “on a ‘certain’ company that young people in our Country very much wanted to save.”

Bessent indicated that the framework could pivot the platform to U.S.-controlled ownership.

TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The comments came during the latest round of trade discussions between the U.S. and China. Relations have soured between the two countries in recent months from Trump’s tariffs and other trade restrictions.

At the same time, TikTok parent company ByteDance faces a Sept. 17 deadline to divest the platform’s U.S. business or face being shut down in the country.

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said Monday that the deadline may need to be pushed back to get the deal signed, but there won’t be ongoing extensions.

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Congress passed a law last year prohibiting app store operators like Apple and Google from distributing TikTok in the U.S. due to its “foreign adversary-controlled application” status.

But Trump postponed the shutdown in January, signing an executive order in January that gave ByteDance 75 more days to make a deal. Further extensions came by way of executive orders in April and in June.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in July that TikTok would shutter for Americans if China doesn’t give the U.S. more autonomy over the popular short-form video app.

As for who controls the platform, Trump told Fox News in June that he had a group of “very wealthy people” ready to buy the app and could reveal their identities in two weeks. The reveal never came.

He has previously said he’d be open to Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison or Tesla CEO Elon Musk buying TikTok in the U.S. Artificial intelligence startup Perplexity has submitted a bid for an acquisition, as has businessman Frank McCourt’s Project Liberty internet advocacy group, CNBC reported in January.

Trump told CNBC in an interview last year that he believed the platform was a national security threat, although the White House started a TikTok account in August.

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