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Tesla CEO Elon Musk walks to board Air Force One with U.S. President Donald Trump (not pictured) as they depart for Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from Morristown Municipal Airport in Morristown, New Jersey, U.S., March 22, 2025.

Nathan Howard | Reuters

Shares of Tesla were flat in premarket trading Thursday after the EV maker denied a Wall Street Journal report that its board was searching for a replacement for chief executive Elon Musk.

The report, citing comments from sources familiar with the discussions, said that Tesla’s board members reached out to several executive search firms to work on a formal process for finding the company’s next CEO. Shares of Tesla fell as much as 3% in overnight trading on trading platform Robinhood following the news, before paring losses.

Tesla chair Robyn Denholm wrote on the social media platform X that the report was “absolutely false.”

“Earlier today, there was a media report erroneously claiming that the Tesla Board had contacted recruitment firms to initiate a CEO search at the company,” she wrote.

“This is absolutely false (and this was communicated to the media before the report was published). The CEO of Tesla is Elon Musk and the Board is highly confident in his ability to continue executing on the exciting growth plan ahead.”

It comes after a sharp drop in the electric vehicle giant’s sales and profits, with its top and bottom lines missing estimates in the first quarter. Musk has admitted that his involvement with the Trump administration could be hurting the automaker’s stock price.

The mega-billionaire said on a Tesla earnings call last week that he plans to spend just a “day or two per week” running the so-called Department of Government Efficiency beginning in May.

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Shares of Tesla

Tesla’s total revenue slipped 9% year-on-year to hit $19.34 billion in the January-March quarter. This falls short of the $21.11 billion forecast by analysts, LSEG data shows.

Revenue from its automotive segment declined 20% year-on-year to $14 billion, as the company needed to update lines at its four vehicle factories to start making a refreshed version of its popular Model Y SUV. Tesla also attributed the decline to lower average selling prices and sales incentives as a drag on revenue and profit.

Its net income plunged 71% to $409 million, or 12 cents a share, from $1.39 billion or 41 cents a year ago.

Since the start of the year, its shares have plunged over 30%.

— CNBC’s Dan Mangan and Laura Kolodny contributed to this report.

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Microsoft engineer resigns over cloud business from Israeli military

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Microsoft engineer resigns over cloud business from Israeli military

Demonstrators hold a banner reading “Liberated Zone” during a protest at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington, on Aug. 19, 2025. Microsoft Corp. employees rallied at the company’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters in an effort to ratchet up pressure on the software maker to stop doing business with Israel over its war in Gaza.

David Ryder | Bloomberg | Getty Images

A Microsoft engineer is resigning after 13 years at the software giant, claiming the company continues to sell cloud services to the Israeli military and that executives won’t discuss the war in Gaza.

Scott Sutfin-Glowski, a principal software engineer, informed colleagues at Microsoft on Thursday that this will be his last week at the company.

“I can no longer accept enabling what may be the worst atrocities of our time,” he wrote.

In the letter, he referred to a February Associated Press article that said the Israeli military had at least 635 Microsoft subscriptions, and he claimed the vast majority of them remain active.

Microsoft declined to comment.

Sutfin-Glowski’s announced departure comes a day after President Donald Trump said Israel and Hamas committed to the first phase of a peace plan two years into the latest conflict. The AP reported on Thursday, citing government officials, that the U.S. is sending roughly 200 troops to Israel to help support the ceasefire deal.

The conflict has been a matter of ongoing tension at Microsoft.

For months, employees have protested the company’s cloud business from the Israeli military. Five employees were fired.

In September, Microsoft said it had stopped providing certain services to a division of the Israeli Ministry of Defense, though it didn’t provide specifics. That decision came after Microsoft investigated an August report from The Guardian saying the Israeli Defense Forces’ Unit 8200 had built a system for tracking Palestinians’ phone calls.

Sutfin-Glowski said the company cut off communication systems that allowed employees to bring up their concerns regarding the Israeli military’s use of Microsoft products.

Outside a building at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, on Thursday, employees and community members opened up banners calling on the company to drop ties with Israel, according to a statement from No Azure for Apartheid. The group has been asking Microsoft to listen to the more than 1,500 employees who petitioned the company to endorse a ceasefire.

“Today, the ceasefire in Gaza finally takes effect after two years of genocide, but the atrocities, human rights abuses, war crimes, apartheid, and occupation continue,” Sutfin-Glowski wrote.

WATCH: Microsoft is trending toward a $5T market cap, says Wedbush’s Dan Ives

Microsoft is trending toward a $5T market cap, says Wedbush's Dan Ives

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Tesla faces U.S. auto safety probe after reports FSD ran red lights, caused collisions

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Tesla faces U.S. auto safety probe after reports FSD ran red lights, caused collisions

The tablet of the new Tesla Model 3.

Matteo Della Torre | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Tesla is facing a federal investigation into possible safety defects with FSD, its partially automated driving system that is also known as Full Self-Driving (Supervised).

Media, vehicle owner and other incident reports to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration showed that in 44 separate incidents, Tesla drivers using FSD said the system caused them to run a red light, steer into oncoming traffic or commit other traffic safety violations leading to collisions, including some that injured people.

In a notice posted to the agency’s website on Thursday, NHTSA said the investigation concerns “all Tesla vehicles that have been equipped with FSD (Supervised) or FSD (Beta),” which is an estimated 2,882,566 of the company’s electric cars.

Tesla cars, even with FSD engaged, require a human driver ready to brake or steer at any time.

The NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation opened a Preliminary Evaluation to “assess whether there was prior warning or adequate time for the driver to respond to the unexpected behavior” by Tesla’s FSD, or “to safely supervise the automated driving task,” among other things.

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The ODI’s review will also assess “warnings to the driver about the system’s impending behavior; the time given to drivers to respond; the capability of FSD to detect, display to the driver, and respond appropriately to traffic signals; and the capability of FSD to detect and respond to lane markings and wrong-way signage.”

Tesla did not respond to a request for comment on the new federal probe. The company released an updated version of FSD this week, version 14.1, to customers.

For years, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has promised investors that Tesla would someday be able to turn their existing electric vehicles into robotaxis, capable of generating income for owners while they sleep or go on vacation, with a simple software update.

That hasn’t happened yet, and Tesla has since informed owners that future upgrades will require new hardware as well as software releases.

Tesla is testing a Robotaxi-brand ride-hailing service in Texas and elsewhere, but it includes human safety drivers or valets on board who either conduct the drives or manually intervene as needed.

In February this year, Musk and President Donald Trump slashed NHTSA staff as part of a broader effort to reduce the federal workforce, impacting the agency’s ability to investigate vehicle safety and regulate autonomous vehicles, The Washington Post first reported.

Read NHTSA’s Tesla FSD traffic safety violations investigation filings here.

William Blair's Dorsheimer: Tesla's stock is more aligned with robotaxis & FSD than new models

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Trump meets with Jared Isaacman about top NASA job after pulling nomination

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Trump meets with Jared Isaacman about top NASA job after pulling nomination

Commander Jared Isaacman of Polaris Dawn, a private human spaceflight mission, speaks at a press conference at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S. August 19, 2024. 

Joe Skipper | Reuters

President Donald Trump has met with Jared Isaacman to discuss another nomination to lead NASA, a source familiar with the talks confirmed to CNBC’s Morgan Brennan.

Isaacman, who has close ties with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, was at the White House in September for Trump’s dinner for tech power players. Musk did not attend.

Trump and Isaacman have had multiple in-person meetings in recent weeks to talk about the Shift4 founder’s vision for the space program, according to Bloomberg, citing a person familiar with the meetings.

After a fiery back-and-forth between Musk and Trump over government spending, the president pulled Isaacman’s nomination for the post, saying he was a “blue blooded Democrat, who had never contributed to a Republican before.”

“I also thought it inappropriate that a very close friend of Elon, who was in the Space Business, run NASA, when NASA is such a big part of Elon’s corporate life,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on June 6.

Trump named Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy interim head of NASA in July.

Isaacman, who declined to comment, was initially nominated in December to lead the space agency.

Isaacman is a seasoned space traveller, having led two private spaceflights with SpaceX in 2021 and 2024. Shift4 has invested $27.5 million in SpaceX, according to a 2021 filing.

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Isaacman stepped down as CEO from Shift4, the payments company he founded in 1999 at the age of 16, after his nomination was pulled, and now serves as executive chairman.

“Even knowing the outcome, I would do it all over again,” Isaacman wrote about the NASA nomination process in a letter to investors announcing the Shift4 change.

Now, it looks like he gets to do it all over again.

Tensions between Musk and Trump have cooled in the months since, but big challenges face the U.S. space program..

Trump has proposed cutting more than $6 billion from NASA’s budget.

As a result of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative, which Musk led in the first half of 2025, around 4,000 NASA employees took deferred resignation program offers, cutting the space agency’s staff of 18,000 by about one-fifth.

During the October government shutdown, NASA has made exceptions that allow employees to keep working on missions involving Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin.

The First-Ever Private Spacewalk with Polaris Dawn Mission Commander Jared Isaacman

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