Tesla is facing a crucial verdict in a personal injury trial over a fatal Autopilot crash in 2019, the first time Elon Musk’s automaker has been in front of a jury on such a matter in federal court.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs on Thursday asked the jury to award damages of around $345 million. That includes $109 million in compensatory damages and $236 million in punitive damages. The trial in the Southern District of Florida started on July 14.

The suit centers around who shoulders the blame for a deadly crash that occurred in 2019 in Key Largo, Florida. A Tesla owner named George McGee was driving his Model S electric sedan while using the company’s Enhanced Autopilot, a partially automated driving system.

While driving, McGee dropped his mobile phone that he was using and scrambled to pick it up. He said during the trial that he believed Enhanced Autopilot would brake if an obstacle was in the way. He accelerated through an intersection at just over 60 miles per hour, hitting a nearby empty parked car and its owners, who were standing on the other side of their vehicle.

Naibel Benavides, who was 22, died on the scene from injuries sustained in the crash. Her body was discovered about 75 feet away from the point of impact. Her boyfriend, Dillon Angulo, survived but suffered multiple broken bones, a traumatic brain injury and psychological effects.

The plaintiffs have included Benavides’ surviving family members, and Angulo, who testified in the trial. Angulo is seeking compensation for his medical expenses and pain and suffering, while Benavides’ estate is suing for wrongful death, pain and suffering, and other punitive damages.

Lawyers representing the plaintiffs argued that Tesla’s partially automated driving systems, marketed as Autopilot at the time, had dangerous defects, which should have been known and fixed by the company, and that use of Autopilot should have been limited to roads where it could perform safely.

They also argued that Musk and Tesla made false statements to customers, shareholders and the public, overstating the safety benefits and capabilities of Autopilot, which encouraged drivers to overly rely on it.

In opening arguments and throughout the trial, the plaintiffs’ attorneys and expert witnesses cited a litany of Musk’s past promises about Autopilot and Tesla’s autonomous vehicle technology. The lawyers said

Tesla attorneys countered in court that the company had communicated directly with customers about how to use Autopilot and other features, and that McGee’s driving was to blame for the collision. They said in closing arguments that Tesla works to develop technology to save drivers’ lives, and that a ruling against the EV maker would send the wrong message.

The Benavides family had previously sued McGee and settled with him. McGee was charged in October 2019 with careless driving and didn’t contest the charges.

While Tesla has typically been able to settle cases or move Autopilot-related suits into arbitration and out of the public eye, Judge Beth Bloom in the Miami court wrote, in an order in early July, that the case could move ahead to trial.

“A reasonable jury could find that Tesla acted in reckless disregard of human life for the sake of developing their product and maximizing profit,” she wrote in that order.

For closing arguments on Thursday, the Benavides family and Angulo were in the courtroom. They looked away from screens anytime a video or picture of the scene of the crash was displayed.

— NBC News’ Maria Piñero reported from Miami.

WATCH: Calling Tesla a car company is overrated

Apple’s AI strategy and investment was on the mind of analysts on an earnings call after the company reported third-quarter earnings that showed overall revenue grew by 10% year over year.

While Apple was never going to announce major acquisitions or initiatives on an earnings call, CEO Tim Cook’s remarks on Thursday confirm that the company is going to invest more heavily in the technology.

Cook said Apple is going to “significantly” grow the company’s investments in AI. He added that Apple was always looking to buy companies of any size that could help it develop its AI offerings.

“We’re very open to M&A that accelerates our roadmap,” Cook said. “We are are not stuck on a certain size company, although the ones that we have acquired thus far this year are small in nature.”

Cook said that Apple had acquired “around” seven companies so far this year, although not all of them were focused on AI. While Cook has said in the past that Apple is always evaluating potential acquisitions of all sizes, its largest purchase of all time was Beats Electronics in 2014 for $3 billion.

He made the remarks Thursday as Apple has faced growing pressure from Wall Street to catch up to its Silicon Valley peers, all of whom have dedicated tens of billions of dollars toward the infrastructure necessary to power AI.

Apple has never been the biggest spender on capital expenditures among big tech companies. It only reported $3.46 billion in capital expenditures in the June quarter, up from $2.15 billion in the year ago period. Its expenses this past quarter are the highest they have been since the quarter ending December 2022. If Apple spent as much as it did this quarter for a full year, that would be about $14 billion annually.

That hardly compares to Google projecting $85 billion in capital expenditures for its fiscal 2025 last week, Meta’s estimate of as much as $72 billion in annual capital expenditure spending, and Microsoft’s $30 billion capital expenditures guide for the current quarter.

Cook also downplayed any potential that AI-powered devices that haven’t been invented yet might threaten Apple’s iPhone franchise. Apple’s former design guru Jony Ive teamed up with OpenAI in a $6.5 billion May deal, although they have yet to reveal what their product is, does or will cost.

“It’s difficult to see a world where iPhone’s not living in it,” Cook said, “That doesn’t mean that we are not thinking about other things as well, but I think that that the devices are likely to be complementary devices, not substitution.”

Cook also made it clear to investors and analysts on the call that Apple does have an AI strategy that it’s executing on.

“Our focus, from an AI point of view, is on putting AI features across the platform that are deeply personal, private and seamlessly integrated,” Cook said.

When asked if he thought that if large language models — the core AI technology made by companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI — might be commoditized, Cook declined to answer and said he was keeping some parts of the company’s strategy secret for now.

“The way that we look at AI is that it’s one of the most profound technologies of our lifetime” Cook said. “It will affect all devices in a significant way.”

WATCH: Apple CEO Tim Cook: Incurred $800 million in tariff-related costs in June quarter

You can almost smell the bubbly wafting across Silicon Valley.

Following Figma’s blockbuster market debut on Thursday, four of the most iconic names in venture capital — Index Ventures, Greylock, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia — are collectively sitting on roughly $24 billion worth of the design software vendor’s stock.

Until recently, there’s been little reason to celebrate. From late 2021, when soaring inflation and rising rates pushed investors out of risky assets, until the middle of 2025, tech IPOs were few and far between, and many of the companies that managed to make it out failed to impress Wall Street. That’s left venture firms with scarce returns for the pension funds, endowments and foundations they rely on for funding.

The mood is noticeably brighter these days as the Nasdaq trades near a record.

Figma is the latest, and perhaps most high-profile, tech company to hit the market, and Wall Street appears to want more. After raising its price range this week and then pricing $1 above the top of that range, Figma shares soared 250% in their first day on the New York Stock Exchange.

Investors will admit they got lucky. Figma was supposed to get acquired for $20 billion by Adobe, an agreement the two companies forged in 2022. But the following year, the transaction collapsed after U.K. regulators said the tie-up would harm competition.

Figma is now worth more than three times what Adobe was going to pay, closing on Thursday with a market cap of almost $68 billion.

CEO Dylan Field, who co-founded the company in 2012, owns a stake worth over $6 billion. Danny Rimer, a partner at Index Ventures and Figma board member, wrote in a blog post on Thursday that the failed acquisition came with “intense pressure and a spotlight few founders ever face.”

“Dylan remained his usual grounded, transparent self,” wrote Rimer, whose firm first bet on Figma in 2013 and is the biggest shareholder, with $7.2 billion worth of stock in the company. “When the deal fell through a year later, he didn’t flinch. He turned the page and got right back to building.”

Figma’s offering raised $1.2 billion, with two-thirds of the proceeds going to existing investors. Other than the small slug of stock each of the venture firms sold at $33, the rest of their holdings are subject to a lock-up period, meaning all of the current value is currently just on paper. The vast majority of outstanding shares are locked up for 180 days, so big stock sales can’t happen until January.

Stablecoin issuer Circle went public in June, and is the other tech IPO that’s generated hefty returns for VCs recently. The shares were initially sold at $31 each and are now trading at over $183, leaving investment firms IDG Capital, General Catalyst, Accel and Breyer Capital with a combined stake of close to $12 billion. Circle doubled on its first day of trading.

While IPO pops generate a lot of buzz and dramatically lift the value of investors’ holdings, they’re not universally celebrated. Bill Gurley of Benchmark has for years been a critic of such first-day gains, arguing that bankers leave money on the table for the company while handing deeply discounted stock to new investors.

In a series of posts on X on Thursday, Gurley described the Figma outcome as “expected & fully intentional.”

“Who benefits?” Gurley wrote, shortly after the stock began trading. “The large clients of the investment banks (who return the favor paying for other services). They bought it at $33 last night and can sell it today for over $90.”

After a record year in 2021, which saw 155 U.S. venture-backed IPOs raise $60.4 billion, every year since has been relatively dismal, according to data from University of Florida finance professor Jay Ritter. There were 13 such offerings in 2022, followed by 18 in 2023 and 30 last year, collectively raising $13.3 billion, Ritter’s data shows.

The slowdown followed the Federal Reserve’s aggressive rate-hiking campaign in 2022, meant to slow crippling inflation. As the lower-growth environment extended into years two and three, venture firms faced increasing pressure to return cash to investors.

Earlier this year, the exit environment was still looking ominous. After President Donald Trump’s announcement of sweeping tariffs in April, companies including online lender Klarna and ticket marketplace StubHub delayed their IPO plans. The Nasdaq plummeted 10% in a week, as investors fretted over the potential of rising import costs and supply chain disruptions.

But Trump later walked back his threats and the trade deals he’s landed have resulted in lower tariffs than previously feared.

CoreWeave, a provider of artificial intelligence infrastructure, went public just before Trump’s initial plans were announced. The stock is now almost triple its IPO price, closing on Thursday at $114.13, though that’s down about 38% from its high in June.

CoreWeave and Circle have both been big wins for investors, with their market caps now at about $56 billion and $41 billion, respectively. Figma is worth even more.

Lynn Martin, president of the NYSE, told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Thursday that she thinks the Figma offering “will open the floodgates.”

Figma’s early investors and big financial winners all published glowing blog posts about Field and the journey he’s been on with the company that he started after dropping out of college in 2012.

“Figma’s relentless focus on product, community, and craft has reshaped how the world designs,” wrote Greylock’s John Lilly in a post on Thursday. His firm led the $14 Series AI investment in 2015 and now owns a stake worth about $6.7 billion.

Kleiner Perkins led the $25 Series B, which was announced in 2018. Its holdings are now valued at $6 billion.

“The product was still early, but the love from its small community of users was unmistakable,” wrote Kleiner partner Mamoon Hamid, in his post after the IPO. “We were convinced that Figma had the potential to fundamentally reshape how digital products would be designed, and knew we had to be part of it.”

Two years later, venture powerhouse Sequoia stepped in to lead Figma’s $40 million Series C round. Sequoia’s Andrew Reed wrote at the time that the company had “the talent and culture to build an enduring, fundamental company.”

On Thursday, with his firm’s stake in Figma approaching $3.8 billion, Reed took to X for his congratulatory remarks.

“Congrats to the incredible @Figma team,” Reed wrote. “The most creative, determined, imaginative, and positive group of people. I’m just so happy for all of your success.”

— CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report.

WATCH: CNBC’s interview with Figma CEO Dylan Field