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Pedestrians pass the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, US, on Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2024.

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Silicon Valley is known for producing tech businesses that start in garages and turn into massive publicly traded companies ubiquitously known across the globe. From Oracle and Microsoft to Google and Facebook, the public markets are responsible for turning ambitious tech founders into billionaires.

But the appeal of the IPO is waning, according to a survey published this week from startup accelerator Techstars. Of the 1,550 entrepreneurs surveyed by Techstars, only 15% said their long-term goal is an IPO. That’s down from 16% a year earlier.

Following an extended bull market in high-growth software and internet stocks, the tech IPO market collapsed in 2022 due to soaring inflation and rising interest rates, which pushed investors out of risk, slashed valuations and led many later-stage companies to delay their plans to go public. 

The prior year was a record period for new offerings, with companies including Roblox, Robinhood, Rivian and UiPath hitting the market. There have been scant few notable tech IPOs in the past two and a half years.

“In combination with the lack of confidence that IPOs will bounce back in short order, this year’s data further underlines the trend that startups are staying private for longer, and IPOs are out of favor with the vast majority of early-stage entrepreneurs,” Techstars said in its report.

For 34% of entrepreneurs surveyed, the preference is to get acquired by a publicly traded company, down from 36% last year, while 30% indicated their goal is to remain private or independent, up from 28% in the prior report.

The trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) prepares for the social media platform Reddit’s initial public offering (IPO) on March 21, 2024 in New York City. 

Spencer Platt | Getty Images

Investment banks have been gearing up for a rebound.

Colin Stewart, the Global Head of Technology Equity Capital Markets at Morgan Stanley, told CNBC in April that “the IPO market’s back,” predicting that 10 to 15 tech companies might go public by the end of the year. Stewart cited high priced and well traded IPOs as “bod[ing] well for the future.” 

Stewart’s comments came after Reddit went public in March, becoming the first major social media company to hold an IPO since Pinterest in 2019. Astera Labs, which sells data center connectivity chips to cloud and artificial intelligence infrastructure companies, went public the same week, followed by data-management company Rubrik in April.

Prior to that, there was a brief jump in activity in September, when chip designer Arm, grocery delivery company Instacart and cloud software vendor Klaviyo debuted.

However, in comparison to the pre-2022 stretch, it’s been mostly quiet for new tech companies on Wall Street. Uncertainty surrounding the presidential election in November is pointing to a dearth of deals for the remainder of the year.

“We have the upcoming election, which is not helping the market in H2,” Athena Theodorou, head of software banking in the Europe region at UBS, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Wednesday. “We do expect the market to remain muted in H2,” Theodorou said, though she said that in Europe the IPO market has started to show signs of life.

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OpenAI says it will use Google’s cloud for ChatGPT

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OpenAI says it will use Google's cloud for ChatGPT

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks to members of the media as he arrives at a lodge for the Allen & Co. Sun Valley Conference on July 8, 2025 in Sun Valley, Idaho.

Kevin Dietsch | Getty Images News | Getty Images

OpenAI said Wednesday that it expects to use Google’s cloud infrastructure for its popular ChatGPT artificial intelligence assistant.

The reach for additional capacity aligns with OpenAI’s desire for more computing power to meet heavy demand after initially relying exclusively on Microsoft for cloud capacity. The two companies’ relations have evolved since then, with Microsoft naming OpenAI as a competitor last year.

Both companies sell AI tools for developers and offer subscriptions to companies.

OpenAI has added Google to a list of suppliers, specifying that ChatGPT and its application programming interface will use the Google Cloud Platform, as well as Microsoft, CoreWeave and Oracle.

The announcement amounts to a win for Google, whose cloud unit is younger and smaller than Amazon‘s and Microsoft‘s. Google also has cloud business with Anthropic, which was established by former OpenAI executives.

The Google infrastructure will run in the U.S., Japan, the Netherlands, Norway and the United Kingdom.

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Last year, Oracle announced that it was partnering with Microsoft and OpenAl “to extend the Microsoft Azure Al platform to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure” to give OpenAI additional computing power. In March, OpenAI committed to a cloud agreement with CoreWeave in a five-year deal worth nearly $12 billion.

Microsoft said in January that it had agreed to move to a model of providing the right of first refusal anytime OpenAI needs more computing resources, rather than being its exclusive vendor across the board. Microsoft continues to hold the exclusive on OpenAI’s programming interfaces.

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s co-founder and CEO, said in April that the startup, which draws on Nvidia graphics processing units to power its large language models, was facing capacity constraints.

“if anyone has GPU capacity in 100k chunks we can get asap please call!” he wrote in an X post at the time.

Reuters reported in June that OpenAI was planning to bring on cloud capacity from Google.

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Tesla’s change in bylaws to limit shareholder lawsuits slammed by New York state officials

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Tesla's change in bylaws to limit shareholder lawsuits slammed by New York state officials

Elon Musk interviews on CNBC from the Tesla Headquarters in Texas.

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In May, Tesla changed its corporate bylaws in a way that would require investors to own 3% of the stock, today worth about $30 billion, in order to file a derivative lawsuit against the company for breach of fiduciary duties. Authorities in New York State are now asking Tesla to delete the bylaw entirely.

Overseers of the New York State Common Retirement Fund, which owns about 0.1% of Tesla’s shares, submitted a formal proxy proposal and letter to the company on July 11, and shared it with CNBC on Wednesday. They say that Elon Musk’s automaker engaged in a “bait-and-switch” to convince shareholders to approve an incorporation move from Delaware to Texas in June 2024.

Musk made the move after a judge in Delaware voided the $56 billion pay package that the CEO, also the world’s richest person, was granted by Tesla in 2018, the largest compensation plan in public company history. In getting shareholders to approve the change in its state of incorporation, Tesla said that stakeholders’ rights “are substantially equivalent” under the laws of Delaware and Texas.

On May 14, almost a year after Tesla’s move, Texas changed its law to allow corporations in the state to require 3% ownership before being able to carry forth a shareholder derivative suit.

“The very next day, Tesla’s board amended the Company’s bylaws to the maximum allowable 3% ownership threshold, effectively insulating the Company’s directors and officers from accountability to shareholders,” the New York letter says. The letter was signed by Gianna McCarthy, a director of corporate governance with the retirement fund, on behalf of the fund and New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli.

Only three institutions currently own at least 3% of Tesla’s outstanding shares.

Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The New York fund overseers wrote that derivative actions are “the last resort for shareholders to enforce their rights” when company directors or officers violate their fiduciary obligations, and called Tesla’s decision on the matter “egregious.”

In an email to CNBC, DiNapoli said Tesla “deceived shareholders” in assuring them that their rights would remain the same in Texas.

“These actions violate basic tenets of good corporate governance and must be reversed,” he wrote.

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Peter Thiel just bought a big stake in Tom Lee’s ether company and the shares are surging

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Peter Thiel just bought a big stake in Tom Lee's ether company and the shares are surging

Peter Thiel, president and founder of Clarium Capital Management LLC, holds hundred dollars bills as he speaks during the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami, Florida, U.S., on Thursday, April 7, 2022. 

Eva Marie Uzcategui | Bloomberg | Getty Images

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The current wave of interest in Ethereum and related assets follows an announcement by Robinhood that it will enable trading of tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs across Europe, and a groundswell of interest in stablecoins throughout June following Circle’s wildly successful IPO and ongoing progress in Congress on the Senate’s proposed stablecoin bill, the GENIUS Act.

The price of ether itself also continued its rally, up more than 4% Wednesday. The coin has doubled in price in the past three months.

Thiel is a venture capitalist and hedge fund manager best known as a cofounder of both PayPal and Palantir and an early investor in Facebook. Founders Fund was an investor in Tagomi, the crypto brokerage acquired by Coinbase in 2020, and Polymarket, the prediction market built on Ethereum.

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