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Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks alongside U.S. President Donald Trump to reporters in the Oval Office of the White House on May 30, 2025 in Washington, DC.

Kevin Dietsch | Getty Images

In the three trading days since Elon Musk’s war of words with President Donald Trump last week sank Tesla’s market cap by 14% in a single session, the stock has rallied almost all the way back.

Tesla shares rose 5.7% on Tuesday to close at $326.09 on Tuesday, leaving the stock about $6 short of where it was trading last Wednesday, before the Musk-Trump brouhaha exploded across social media.

The latest jump came after Musk shared a video on X showing that Tesla was testing driverless vehicles on the roads of Austin, Texas, without a human safety supervisor behind the wheel. The eight-second clip showed the latest version of the Model Y SUV, painted black with a white “Robotaxi” graffiti-style logo painted on it, navigating an intersection and pausing to allow pedestrians to traverse a crosswalk.

After years of delays and unfulfilled promises left Tesla well behind rivals like Alphabet’s Waymo in the robotaxi market, Musk’s company finally appears poised to put its autonomous driving technology on public streets, even if in a very limited capacity to start. Bloomberg previously reported that Tesla is expected to officially launch its “pilot” for a driverless ride-hailing service in Austin on June 12, though the company hasn’t confirmed the timing beyond saying that it’s coming in June.

Musk recently told CNBC’s David Faber that Tesla will start with a very small rollout, including about 10 to 20 of its robotaxis, with a new, “unsupervised” version of the company’s FSD or “Full Self-Driving” technology installed. The tests will involve the Model Y, not the futuristic looking CyberCab that Tesla plans to produce next year.

Musk said Tesla will “geofence” the service, limiting where the robotaxis can initially operate, and that employees will remotely monitor the fleet.

A Tesla automobile owned by President Trump (he does not drive it but some staffers do) is parked in a lot next to the White House fence in Washington, D.C. on June 05, 2025.

Michael S. Williamson | The Washington Post | Getty Images

Tesla is now listed as “testing” on an official website for the city of Austin, EV fan blog Teslarati first reported. The site shares information about autonomous vehicle companies operating in Austin.

Waymo, which operates a commercial fleet in the Texas capital, is the only autonomous vehicle maker listed with a “deployment” designation, rather than “mapping” or “testing” on the Austin site. The company also has commercial robotaxi services running in parts of the San Francisco Bay Area, Phoenix, and Los Angeles.

In Austin, Amazon’s Zoox is listed as testing, as is AVRide, a self-driving vehicle developer that spun out of Russian tech firm Yandex.

Sawyer Merritt, a Tesla promoter and fan, originally posted the clip of the Model Y operating on FSD-Unsupervised in Austin.

“BREAKING: First ever Tesla Model Y robotaxi with no-one in the drivers seat spotted testing on public roads in Austin, Texas!” Merritt wrote on X.

Last week’s spat

Musk shared the post, adding, “Beautifully simple design.” He later wrote, “These are unmodified Tesla cars coming straight from the factory, meaning that every Tesla coming out of our factories is capable of unsupervised self-driving!”

Musk, the world’s richest person, is coming off a bruising week. After his term running the Trump Administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) officially came to an end, Musk and the president began feuding, partly due to the contents of the spending bill that’s being debated in congress. The spat turned personal on Thursday, with both men hurling insults at each other from their respective social media platforms.

The stock was already getting hit but took a sharp turn lower after Trump said Musk had gone “CRAZY” and threatened to end government contracts and cut off subsidies for his companies. In addition to Tesla, Musk also runs defense contractor SpaceX, artificial intelligence startup xAI (which owns X), health tech company Neuralink and drilling venture The Boring Company.

While Trump said he “would assume” his relationship with Musk is over, the president is known to for his transactional approach. The stock bump early this week may be in part a reaction to a more contrite Musk, who has deleted some of the most pointed insults that he previously lobbed at Trump, and has appeared to endorse the president on other policy matters like immigration.

Trump-Musk spat a "clash of the titans," says market strategist

Tesla investors have been urging Musk to refocus his attention on the electric car maker after a brutal first quarter that saw automotive revenue plunge 20% due to increased competition from lower-cost EV makers in China and a consumer backlash to Musk’s political activities and rhetoric. In key markets throughout Europe and China, Tesla’s year-over-year sales declined in the first two months of the second quarter.

In a report to clients on Tuesday, analysts at Piper Sandler wrote, regarding driverless cars being spotted in Austin, that “a key component of our TSLA thesis has officially begun playing out.” The firm has a buy rating on the stock.

Philip Koopman, an auto safety researcher and associate professor of computer engineering, told CNBC that investors shouldn’t get too carried away at the sight of Tesla running driverless vehicles on public roads.

“We don’t know enough from the company, or from this clip, to know if these vehicles are going to be safe, how they operate and what it costs,” Koopman said, referring to the video shared by Musk. He said he expects Tesla to rely heavily on so-called “remote assistants,” or people who watch the company’s robotaxis from a computer in a service center, with the ability to take over control if needed.

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Ambarella shares soar 19% on report chip designer is exploring sale

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Ambarella shares soar 19% on report chip designer is exploring sale

Thomas Fuller | SOPA Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Ambarella shares popped 19% after a report that the chip designer is currently working with bankers on a potential sale.

Bloomberg reported the news, citing sources familiar with the matter.

While no deal is imminent, the sources told Bloomberg that the firm may draw interest from semiconductor companies looking to improve their automotive business. Private equity firms have already expressed interest, according to the report.

Read more CNBC tech news

The Santa Clara, California-based company is known for its system-on-chip semiconductors and software used for edge artificial intelligence. Ambarella chips are used in the automotive sector for electronic mirrors and self-driving assistance systems.

Shares have slumped about 18% year to date. The company’s market capitalization last stood at nearly $2.6 billion.

Read the Bloomberg story here.

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Nvidia CEO Huang sells $15 million worth of stock, first sale of $873 million plan

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Nvidia CEO Huang sells  million worth of stock, first sale of 3 million plan

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attends a roundtable discussion at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 11, 2025.

Sarah Meyssonnier | Reuters

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sold 100,000 shares of the chipmaker’s stock on Friday and Monday, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The sales are worth nearly $15 million at Tuesday’s opening price.

The transactions are the first sale in Huang’s plan to sell as many as 600,000 shares of Nvidia through the end of 2025. It’s a plan that was announced in March, and it’d be worth $873 million at Tuesday’s opening price.

The Nvidia founder still owns more than 800 million Nvidia shares, according to Monday’s SEC filing. Huang has a net worth of about $126 billion, ranking him 12th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

The 62-year-old chief executive sold about $700 million in Nvidia shares last year under a prearranged plan, too.

Nvidia stock is up more than 800% since December 2022 after OpenAI’s ChatGPT was first released to the public. That launch drew attention to Nvidia’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, which were needed to develop and power the artificial intelligence service.

The company’s chips remain in high demand with the majority of the AI chip market, and Nvidia has introduced two subsequent generations of its AI GPU technology.

Nvidia continues to grow. Its stock is up 9% this year, even as the company faces export control issues that could limit foreign markets for its AI chips.

In May, the company reported first-quarter earnings that showed the chipmaker’s revenue growing 69% on an annual basis to $44 billion during the quarter.

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Judge rules Anthropic did not violate authors’ copyrights with AI book training

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Judge rules Anthropic did not violate authors' copyrights with AI book training

Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO, speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box outside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 21st, 2025.

Gerry Miller | CNBC

Anthropic‘s use of books to train its artificial intelligence model Claude was “fair use” and “transformative,” a federal judge ruled late on Monday.

Amazon-backed Anthropic’s AI training did not violate the authors’ copyrights since the large language models “have not reproduced to the public a given work’s creative elements, nor even one author’s identifiable expressive style,” wrote U.S. District Judge William Alsup.

“The purpose and character of using copyrighted works to train LLMs to generate new text was quintessentially transformative,” Alsup wrote. “Like any reader aspiring to be a writer.”

The decision was a significant win for AI companies as legal battles play out over the use and application of copyrighted works in developing and training LLMs. Alsup’s ruling begins to establish the legal limits and opportunities for the industry going forward.

Read more CNBC reporting on AI

A spokesperson for Anthropic said in a statement that the company was “pleased” with the ruling and that the decision was, “Consistent with copyright’s purpose in enabling creativity and fostering scientific progress.”

CNBC has reached out to the plaintiffs for comment.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, was brought by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson in August. The suit alleged that Anthropic built a “multibillion-dollar business by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books.”

Alsup did, however, order a trial on the pirated material that Anthropic put into its central library of content, even though the company did not use it for AI training.

“That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft, but it may affect the extent of statutory damages,” the judge wrote.

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Anthropic unveils next AI models

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