Protests and campaigns against Tesla, Musk and his work in the Trump White House have erupted around the world. Criminal acts of vandalism and arson have also targeted some Tesla electric vehicles, showrooms and charging stations in a string of incidents in the U.S. and across Europe.
At an all-hands meeting with Tesla employees on Thursday evening, Musk addressed some of those issues, while trying to reassure employees that they were still in good hands, and to “hang onto your stock.” The shares rose 4% on Friday.
“It’s very difficult like for people in the stock market, especially those that look in the rearview mirror — which is most people — to imagine a future where suddenly a 10 million vehicle fleet has five to ten times the usefulness,” Musk said, touting his vision for autonomous vehicles that he’s long promised. “It’s so profound and there’s no comparison with anything in the past that it does not compute. But it will compute in the future.”
In recent months, Tesla’s new vehicle sales have fallen in Europe and in parts of the U.S. and China. The company is facing trade uncertainty after multiple executive orders from President Trump imposed new tariffs on goods and materials from Canada, Mexico and China, home to crucial Tesla suppliers. National car shopping site Edmunds said this week that Tesla owners are trading in their electric vehicles at record levels.
“If you read the news it feels like, you know, Armageddon,” Musk said on the livestream on Thursday. “It’s like, I can’t walk past the TV without seeing a Tesla on fire. Like what’s going on? Some people, it’s like listen, I understand if you don’t wanna buy our product, but you don’t have to burn it down. That’s a bit unreasonable.”
He followed up saying, “This is psycho, stop being psycho!”
Employees laughed with him.
Musk spent much of the meeting hyping Tesla’s technology, or the prospects of it.
“What’s the most exciting future that you could possibly imagine?” he asked rhetorically. He answered that it’s “a future of abundance for all,” where robotaxis, artificial intelligence and robots now in development at Tesla will bring about a future “where you could literally just have anything you want.”
Musk celebrated the best-seller status of the Tesla Model Y, and said the electric SUV would be the “best-selling car on Earth again this year” and “available worldwide.” He boasted that the Cybertruck, Tesla’s angular steel pickup truck, had become the top-selling fully electric pickup. Despite a massive Cybertruck recall announced earlier on Thursday, Musk also lauded the vehicle because it had attained a 5-star rating for crash safety.
He thanked Tesla employees for the refreshed version of the Model Y, saying the company’s supply chains on three continents proved a challenge in getting the car to market.
Musk boasted about the forthcoming Cybercab, a two-seater with no steering wheel or brakes, and EVs that will be upgraded to have robotaxi capabilities with a software update. It’s a promise he’s been making for years. In 2016, Musk told Tesla owners that their cars would be able to make a driverless cross-country trip by the end of 2018.
On Tesla’s last earnings call, Musk said a driverless ride-hail service is coming to Austin, Texas in June, using existing Tesla vehicles and a version of the company’s FSD or “Full Self-Driving” software, which currently requires a driver at the wheel ready to steer or brake at any time.
Musk said on Thursday that the Cybercab will be produced in Austin, as will the company’s humanoid robot, dubbed the Optimus. The Optimus is now being assembled at the company’s Fremont, California factory, he said, and Tesla aims to produce about 5,000 units this year.
In both the robotaxi and humanoid robotics markets, Tesla faces stiff competition.
Alphabet’s Waymo is scaling its driverless ride-hailing offering in more U.S. markets, recently launching in Austin. And Chinese EV makers, including Zeekr, plan to make their equivalents to Tesla’s Autopilot and FSD available as standard options.
Meanwhile, a number of humanoid robotics developers, including Apptronik, Boston Dynamics and Unitree, are working to bring their models to market. Boston Dynamics, in partnership with RAI Institute, released a new video this week showing their electric Atlas humanoid robot walking, running, crawling, and doing gymnastics.
Still, Musk says Tesla’s Optimus is “the most sophisticated humanoid robot on Earth,” even though it’s now “learning to walk and catch balls” and in most of its major demonstrations has been operated by people.
Tesla employees will be first to get access to the robots, he said, adding that one day they’ll function like Star Wars characters R2-D2 and C-3PO.
“We will offer Optimus robots first to Tesla employees,” Musk said. “There are some pluses and minuses to that — probably have a few bugs. But it’s gonna be very cool.”
Michael Intrator, co-founder and chief executive officer of CoreWeave Inc., during an interview on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, US, on Monday, Sept. 22, 2025.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
CoreWeave on Thursday announced a $6.5 billion deal with OpenAI, expanding its current agreement with the artificial intelligence startup behind ChatGPT.
The new agreement brings the AI cloud infrastructure provider’s total contracts with OpenAI to $22.5 billion.
“This milestone affirms the trust that world-leading innovators have in CoreWeave’s ability to power the most demanding inference and training workloads at an unmatched pace,” CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator said in a statement.
In March, CoreWeave announced an $11.9-billion agreement with OpenAI to provide AI datacenters and technology over five years. Intrator told CNBC in May that the companies expanded the agreement by $4 billion.
CoreWeave, which went public in March, makes money by renting out data centers packed with numerous Nvidia graphics processing units. The company is backed by Nvidia and makes a significant chunk of its revenue from Microsoft, which is a key investor in OpenAI.
At the time of its prospectus, CoreWeave said it operated 32 datacenters powered over 250,000 Nvidia GPUs.
Earlier this month, CoreWeave’s share price popped after the company disclosed a $6.3 billion order from Nvidia.
OpenAI and Databricks are two of the most highly valued tech startups on the planet. Now they’re working together.
Databricks, a data analytics software vendor, said Thursday that it has committed to spending $100 million over multiple years with OpenAI. Databricks is making it easier for customers to connect their data stored in its cloud service with GPT-5, announced in August, and other OpenAI models.
OpenAI, which was recently valued by private investors at $500 billion, has become a household name in the years since the launch of its ChatGPT in late 2022. In partnering with Databricks, valued at more than $100 billion in its latest funding round, OpenAI has landed its first formal integration with a business-focused product vendor, said Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s operating chief, in a news conference Wednesday.
Lightcap said the company’s “aspiration is a multiple” of the $100 million spending commitment in terms of revenue the agreement will generate.
Databricks has formed similar partnerships with Google and with Anthropic. But OpenAI is leading the way with more than 700 million people using its ChatGPT assistant, powered by GPT-5, every week.
The company was making enterprise more of a focus even before the Databricks deal. Microsoft has been bringing OpenAI models into businesses, governments and schools. And OpenAI has been building up its own sales function.
Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi said the partnership will simplify the process for its customers when it comes to accessing OpenAI’s models, which they’ve already been using in large numbers.
Until now, if a Databricks customer wanted to tap a proprietary OpenAI model to help analyze internal data, it would have required extensive configuration, as well as legal and security sign-off.
“The key difference here is that any database customer automatically now, just by clicking in the UI, can start using this product,” Ghodsi said, referring to the user interface. Ghodsi said the price is similar to what it would cost if the user went directly to OpenAI.
Greg Ulrich, Mastercard‘s chief AI and data officer, said he’s optimistic about the integration.
“It enables opportunity for research and targeted experimentation, using AI to solve new problems, bringing value to customers, enhancing employee productivity, in an environment that we trust, that we know,” Ulrich said.
It’s an increasingly competitive space.
Databricks rival Snowflake, which has a market cap of $75 billion, announced an expansion of its Microsoft partnership in February, enabling the use of OpenAI models. Oracle, which has a $300 billion cloud contract from OpenAI, said two weeks ago that in October it will launch a service for running Google, OpenAI and xAI models on data stored in its database software.
Databricks said earlier this month that it now generates more than $4 billion in annualized revenue, growing over 50% year over year, with $1 billion coming from AI products. The company’s $100 billion valuation was announced alongside a $1 billion funding round.
OpenAI and Databricks ranked No. 2 and No. 3, respectively, on CNBC’s 2025 Disruptor 50 list.
The European Commission launched an antitrust probe into German software behemoth SAP on Thursday, citing concerns about the company’s practices in software support services.
According to the Commission, the investigation will assess “whether SAP may have distorted competition in the aftermarket for maintenance and support services related to an on-premises type of software, licensed by SAP, used for the management of companies’ business operations.”
SAP, in a statement on Thursday, said it believed its policies and actions were fully compliant with EU competition rules.
“However, we take the issues raised seriously and we are working closely with the EU Commission to resolve them,” a spokesperson said. “We do not anticipate the engagement with the European Commission to result in material impacts on our financial performance.”
SAP is one of Europe’s most valuable companies, with a market cap of almost 282 billion euros ($331 billion). Shares of the firm moved lower on Thursday, losing 2% by 12:45 p.m. in London (7:45 a.m. ET).
The EU probe relates to a piece of SAP software called Enterprise Resource Planning, or ERP.
ERP is widely used by large corporations to manage their everyday finance and accounting needs. SAP is a major player in the space — but it isn’t alone. The company competes with the likes of Microsoft and Oracle, which offer their own ERP products.
Specifically, the European Commission said it was addressing the so-called “on-prem” version of SAP ERP. On-prem refers to software that is hosted on a company’s own servers, as opposed the cloud where it can be remotely accessed via SAP data centers.
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Much of SAP’s business still comes from its on-prem IT services. However, the company has for years been attempting to shift more of its focus to the cloud — particularly as it faces competition from technology giants like Microsoft and Amazon, which dominate the market for public cloud services.
The latest EU antitrust probe is noteworthy as it doesn’t involve Big Tech.
Much of the bloc’s work on competition policy has focused on the market power of U.S. technology giants. This has led to criticisms from both the tech sector and politicians in the U.S., who say American tech firms are being unfairly targeted. On Wednesday, Apple urged a repeal of the Digital Markets Act, the EU’s landmark digital competition law, saying it was “leading to a worse experience for Apple users in the EU.”