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Opendoor chairman Keith Rabois: We're going to get back to merit and excellence

Opendoor co-founder and newly minted board chair Keith Rabois said remote work and a “bloated” workforce have been a drag on the company’s culture, as he vowed to slash headcount.

“There’s 1,400 employees at Opendoor. I don’t know what most of them do. We don’t need more than 200 of them,” Rabois told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Friday.

The online real-estate platform on Wednesday appointed former Shopify executive Kaz Nejatian as its new CEO after investor pressure caused his predecessor, Carrie Wheeler, to resign last month. Opendoor also named Rabois as chairman and said Eric Wu, who served as the company’s first CEO before stepping down in 2023, would return to the board.

The announcement sent Opendoor shares soaring 78% on Thursday, before the stock slid more than 12% on Friday. It is still up almost 500% this year, after an army of retail investors pushed up the stock price when hedge fund manager Eric Jackson began touting the company.

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Opendoor year-to-date stock chart.

Opendoor’s business involves using technology to buy and sell homes, pocketing the gains.

Nothing has fundamentally improved for the company since Jackson bought shares of Opendoor in July. Opendoor remains a cash-burning, low-margin business with meager near-term growth prospects.

Rabois said he has a “high level view of the strategy” that’s needed to transform Opendoor, and that the headcount reductions are necessary to resolve the company’s cash burn.

“The culture was broken,” Rabois said. “These people were working remotely. That doesn’t work. This company was founded on the principle of innovation and working together in person. We’re going to return to our roots.”

He added that Opendoor “went down this DEI path,” referring to diversity, equity and inclusion.

“We’re gonna fix all that,” Rabois said.

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Trump renominates Musk ally Jared Isaacman to run NASA months after withdrawal

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Trump renominates Musk ally Jared Isaacman to run NASA months after withdrawal

Jared Isaacman, U.S. President Donald Trump’s nominee to be administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) testifies during a Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 9, 2025.

Ken Cedeno | Reuters

President Donald Trump has renominated Jared Isaacman to run NASA after pulling his prior nomination months ago due to what the president called a “thorough review of prior associations.”

“Jared’s passion for Space, astronaut experience, and dedication to pushing the boundaries of exploration, unlocking the mysteries of the universe, and advancing the new Space economy, make him ideally suited to lead NASA into a bold new Era,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social on Tuesday.

Isaacman, who is friends with Tesla CEO Elon Musk, was originally picked to lead NASA in December, before Trump had even taken office. Isaacman is a billionaire who founded payments company Shift4 and has led two private spaceflights.

But Trump pulled the nomination in late May after a spat between the president and Musk, who had been leading a White House effort to slash the size of the federal government. Trump said at the time that he was withdrawing the pick because of Isaacman’s past associations, though he didn’t specify what those were. Some reports have suggested that it was a reference to Isaacman’s prior donations to Democrats.

Days after the withdrawal, Isaacman told Shift4 investors in a letter that his “brief stint in politics was a thrilling experience.” He also said that he was resigning as CEO of Shift4, which he founded in 1999 at age 16, and would assume the role of executive chairman. He had been planning to leave the company if his nomination was confirmed by the Senate. But it never got that far.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has been running NASA as interim head since July.

Isaacman still must go through the Senate confirmation process. The federal government has been shut down since the beginning of October, but the Senate is still able to confirm presidential nominees.

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Super Micro stock drops on slumping sales, weak earnings

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Super Micro stock drops on slumping sales, weak earnings

Charles Liang, CEO of Super Micro Computer Inc., during the Computex conference in Taipei, Taiwan, on June 5, 2024.

Annabelle Chih | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Super Micro Computer shares plunged as much as 10% in extended trading on Tuesday after the server maker issued weaker-than-expected results for the fiscal first quarter.

Here’s how the company did in comparison with analyst estimates compiled by LSEG:

  • Earnings per share: 35 cents adjusted vs. 40 cents expected
  • Revenue: $5.02 billion vs. $6 billion expected

Revenue fell 15% from $5.94 billion a year ago, Super Micro said in a statement. The report comes about two weeks after Super Micro issued preliminary earnings and said it expected revenue of $5 billion for the quarter, down from prior guidance of $6 billion to $7 billion.

Net income fell by more than half to $168.3 million, or 26 cents a share, from $424.3 million, or 67 cents a share, a year earlier.

In its partial report last month, Super Micro said “design win upgrades” pushed some expected first-quarter revenue to the second quarter. The company said it now expects sales of $10 billion to $11 billion in the current quarter, above the $7.83 billion average estimate, according to LSEG.

Super Micro has been a big beneficiary of the artificial intelligence boom, as its servers come packed with graphics processing units from Nvidia. But after growth soared from late 2023 through last year, the business has flatlined, with some analysts saying that Dell has taken market share.

Prior to Tuesday’s report, the stock was up 55% for the year.

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AMD reports better-than-expected results but margin guidance only meets estimates

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AMD reports better-than-expected results but margin guidance only meets estimates

AMD CEO Lisa Su speaks at a Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee hearing in Washington on May 8, 2025. The leaders of some of the biggest technology and artificial intelligence companies will go to Congress on Thursday with a wish list of sorts that at its top has doing away with regulation they say inhibits their firms’ growth and by default, sends business to China.

Nathan Howard | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Advanced Micro Devices reported fiscal third-quarter results that exceeded Wall Street expectations, but gave margin guidance was inline with estimates. The stock slipped in extended trading.

Here’s how the company did in comparison with LSEG consensus:

  • Earnings per share: $1.20 adjusted vs. $1.16 expected
  • Revenue: $9.25 billion vs. $8.74 billion expected

Revenue increased 36% from a year earlier in the fiscal third quarter, which ended on Sept. 27, according to a statement.

Net income climbed to $1.24 billion, or 75 cents per share, from $771 million, or 47 cents per share, a year earlier.

For the fourth quarter, AMD expects about $9.6 billion in revenue, implying 25% growth. That’s above LSEG’s $9.15 billion consensus. AMD sees an adjusted gross margin of 54.5% for the quarter, meeting StreetAccount’s consensus of 54.5%.

AMD, which is trying to keep pace with Nvidia in the market for artificial intelligence processors, said the guidance does not include revenue from shipments of its Instinct MI308 chips to China. Executives said the same thing last quarter.

As of Tuesday’s close, AMD shares were up 107% so far this year, while the Nasdaq is up 21%.

AMD reached a deal with OpenAI last month that could see the AI startup company take a 10% stake in the chipmaker. OpenAI will deploy 6 gigawatts of AMD’s Instinct graphics processing units over multiple years and across multiple generations of hardware, the companies said, beginning with an initial 1-gigawatt rollout of chips in the second half of next year.

For years OpenAI and other companies relied on graphics chips from Nvidia for running large-scale AI models.

Also in October, Oracle announced plans to deploy 50,000 AMD Instinct MI450 AI chips in its cloud starting next year.

AMD’s data center business, which includes standard central processing units and GPUs for AI, generated $4.34 billion in fiscal third-quarter revenue, up 22%. Analysts polled by StreetAccount were looking for $4.13 billion.

Client revenue reached $2.75 billion, which was up 46% and more than StreetAccount’s $2.61 billion consensus. Revenue from gaming totaled $1.30 billion, up 181%. StreetAccount’s consensus was $1.05 billion.

Amazon, a key cloud customer for AMD, disclosed in a Tuesday filing that it had sold all 822,234 of its AMD shares as of Sept. 30. Amazon built the position sometime in the first quarter.

Executives will discuss the results with analysts on a conference call starting at 5 p.m. ET.

This is developing news. Please check back for updates.

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