The photo illustration shows the Bitcoin cryptocurrency on November 12, 2024 in Shanghai, China.
Vcg | Visual China Group | Getty Images
The price of bitcoin leapt back above $100,000 to start the first full trading week of the new year.
The flagship cryptocurrency was last higher by about 4% at $102,234, according to Coin Metrics. The broader crypto market, as measured by the CoinDesk 20 index, gained more than 3%. Bitcoin and ether are coming off their best weeks since Dec. 6, while Solana had its best week since Nov. 22.
“Overall, we are in a bullish environment and traders appear to be risk-on as we head into the new year,” Mario Jurina, CEO at crypto swaps platform Jumper.Exchange. “With Trump’s election set to be certified today, and January often being a bullish month — six of the past 10 years saw positive price action — it’s no wonder markets are moving upward.”
Crypto stocks Coinbase and MicroStrategy advanced nearly 6% and 5%, respectively. MicroStrategy Monday morning reported it has purchased another 1,070 bitcoins for about $101 million, bringing its total bitcoin holdings to 447,470.
Activity is coming back into the crypto market after a post-election rally that was driven by promises of a more supportive regulatory environment. The optimism sent prices rocketing for weeks before cooling at the end of the year. The price of bitcoin is expected to roughly double under the new administration this year, with some price predictions, like Fundstrat’s Tom Lee’s, being as high as $250,000.
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Elon Musk‘s satellite internet service Starlink said it had a “network outage” on Thursday. The company said it was working on a solution.
There were more than 60,000 reports of an outage on Downdetector, a site that logs issues.
Starlink is owned and operated by SpaceX, which is also run by Musk.
Musk apologized for the outage on his social media platform X and said, “Service will be restored shortly.”
Musk posted earlier Thursday that the company’s direct-to-cell-phone service was “growing fast” following the announcement that T-Mobile‘s Starlink-powered satellite service was available to the public.
T-Mobile said the T-Satellite service was built to keep phones connected “in places no carrier towers can reach.”
Starlink didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Starlink internet speeds and reliability decrease with popularity, a recent study found.
It wasn’t immediately clear if the T-Satellite service was affected by or involved in the outage.
The Intel logo is displayed on a sign in front of Intel headquarters on July 16, 2025 in Santa Clara, California.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Intel reported second-quarter results on Thursday that beat Wall Street expectations on revenue, as the company’s new CEO Lip-Bu Tan announced significant cuts in chip factory construction. The stock ticked higher in extended trading.
Here’s how the chipmaker did versus LSEG consensus estimates:
Earnings per share: Loss of 10 cents per share, adjusted.
Revenue: $12.86 billion versus $11.92 billion estimated
Intel said it expects revenue for the third-quarter of $13.1 billion at the midpoint of its range, versus the average analyst estimate of $12.65 billion. The chipmaker said that it expects to break even on earnings while analysts were looking for earnings of 4 cents per share.
For the second quarter, Intel reported a net loss of $2.9 billion, or 67 cents per share, compared with a $1.61 billion net loss, or 38 cents per share, in the year-earlier period. Earnings per share were not comparable to analyst estimates due to an $800 million impairment charge, “related to excess tools with no identified re-use,” the company said. That resulted in an EPS adjustment of about 20 cents.
The report was Intel’s second since Lip-Bu Tan took over as CEO in March, promising to make the chipmaker’s products competitive again, and to reduce bureaucracy and layers of management, including slashing staff in Oregon and California.
In a memo to employees published on Thursday, Tan said that the first few months of his tenure had “not been easy.” He said that the company had “completed the majority” of its planned layoffs, amounting to 15% of the workforce, and that it plans to end the year with 75,000 employees. Intel previously said it was trying to reduce operating expenses by $17 billion in 2025.
Intel shares are up about 13% this year as of Thursday’s close after plummeting 60% in 2024, their worst year on record.
Tan also announced several other spending cuts in the memo, particularly in the company’s costly foundry division, which makes chips for other companies and is still looking for a big customer to anchor the business.
Intel said its foundry business had an operating loss of $3.17 billion on $4.4 billion in revenue.
Tan said that Intel had cancelled planned fab projects in Germany and Poland, and will consolidate its testing and assembly operations in Vietnam and Malaysia. He added that the company would slow down the pace of its construction of a cutting-edge chip factory in Ohio, depending on market demand and if it can secure big customers for the facility.
“Over the past several years, the company invested too much, too soon – without adequate demand,” Tan wrote. “In the process, our factory footprint became needlessly fragmented and underutilized.”
Tan wrote that the company’s forthcoming chip manufacturing process, called 14A, will be built out based on confirmed customer commitments.
“There are no more blank checks. Every investment must make economic sense,” Tan wrote.
The company’s client computing group, which is primarily comprised of sales of central processors for PCs, had $7.9 billion in sales, down 3% on an annual basis.
Revenue in the data center group, which includes some AI chips but is mostly central processors for servers, rose 4% to $3.9 billion. Tan wrote in his memo that Intel wants to regain market share in data center chips, and is looking for a permanent leader for the business. Longtime rival Advanced Micro Devices has increasingly been winning server business from cloud customers.
Tan added he would personally review and approve all chip designs before they are taped out, which is the final step of the design process before a new chip is manufactured.
The company’s digital assets are currently valued at $1.24 billion.
That’s up substantially from $722 million a year ago. But anyone who’s been following the crypto market knows that the figure represents a lost opportunity amounting to billions of dollars in missed gains for the electric vehicle maker.
Bitcoin is trading near a record and is up 80% over the past year. Tesla sold 75% of its holdings in mid-2022, when the digital currency was trading at a fraction of its current price.
While CEO Elon Musk has made clear that the future of his electric vehicle company is about robotaxis and humanoid robots — not about crypto investments — the business in its current form is struggling and could use the cash boost.
Read more CNBC Tesla coverage
Tesla reported a second straight drop in auto revenue in its earnings report late Wednesday, and came up short of Wall Street estimates. The stock plunged 8% on Thursday and is now down about 25% for the year, by far the biggest drop among tech’s megacaps.
Robotaxis and Optimus robots are huge and costly bets for Musk in markets with stiff competition and ever-changing dynamics. Tesla has also acknowledged that President Donald Trump’s tariffs and the expiration of federal EV tax credits could hurt the company’s core business in the coming quarters.
Tesla’s digital assets, meanwhile, are bolstering profitability. Gains from bitcoin in the second quarter amounted to $284 million in a period when total net income was $1.17 billion.
The gains could have been much greater.
In early 2021, Tesla invested $1.5 billion in bitcoin, banking on what the EV company called the digital currency’s “long-term potential” and to add “more flexibility to further diversify and maximize returns on our cash.”
Musk had become a loud proponent of bitcoin online, and in January of that year, the currency skyrocketed 20% in a day after the Tesla CEO added #bitcoin to his bio on Twitter, now X.
By mid-2022, the world was in a much different place. The Covid-era boom was gone, replaced by soaring inflation and rising interest rates, an equation that pushed investors out of risky assets.
Tesla said in the second quarter of that year that it sold three-quarters of its bitcoin holdings, adding cash to its balance sheet at a time when equity and crypto markets were simultaneously plunging. Tesla lost about two-thirds of its market cap in 2022, and bitcoin fell by 60%.
However, bitcoin has rebounded sharply since then, getting an added boost this year from the Trump administration’s efforts to loosen regulations and its promise to create a strategic bitcoin reserve.
Bitcoin is currently trading at over $119,000, up about sixfold from the end of the second quarter of 2022, the period when Tesla made its big move out.
Had Tesla held on to all of its bitcoin, that stash would be worth roughly $5 billion, based on estimates of how much Tesla bought in 2021, instead of $1.24 billion. The $936 million worth of bitcoin the company converted to cash would currently be valued at over $3.5 billion.
Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment.
As for Musk, he’s hardly said anything about bitcoin on his social network X in the past three years. In March 2022, shortly before Tesla began dumping bitcoin, he wrote regarding cryptocurrencies, “I still own & won’t sell my Bitcoin, Ethereum or Doge fwiw.”
— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.
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