Elizabeth Holmes, founder of Theranos Inc., exits federal court in San Jose, California, on Tuesday, Aug. 31, 2021.
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SAN JOSE, CALIF. — A hedge fund manager who put $96 million into Theranos said he thoroughly investigated the company but was still misled by CEO Elizabeth Holmes about its blood-testing technology.
Brian Grossman, chief investment officer at PFM Health Sciences, told jurors in Holmes’ criminal trial on Tuesday that in 2014, as part of his due diligence, he got his own blood drawn from a Theranos machine at a Walgreens pharmacy.
“I had my blood drawn with a venous draw, not a finger stick,” said Grossman, adding that the experience undermined what he’d been told about Theranos.
Grossman said he met with Holmes and her top executive, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, at their office in Palo Alto, California, in December 2013. He said Holmes did most of the talking, and that he and his colleagues were told Theranos could run 1,000 blood tests on its proprietary technology.
“Ms. Holmes was actually very clear that they could match any test on a Labcorp and Quest menu of tests,” Grossman said. He told jurors that “was a really big statement about how much they had accomplished, where the technology was at that time.”
Earlier witnesses, including lab associate Erika Cheung, have testified that Theranos devices couldn’t run more than 12 different tests, contradicting the company’s public pronouncements.
Grossman said that in the meeting he was told Theranos was working with the military and that its technology was being used on medivacs in the battlefield.
“What better application for a technology like this than in a military setting under harsh conditions like one would expect in a place like Afghanistan or Iraq?” Grossman said. Theranos indicated that it had “something over $200 million in revenue from the Department of Defense,” he said.
Daniel Edlin, a former Theranos employee, told jurors last month that, to his knowledge, the blood-testing devices were never used in the Middle East.
‘No ambiguity and no confusion’
Grossman said that following his initial meeting with Holmes and Balwani, he sent them an e-mail in January 2014, with the subject: “Due Diligence Questions.”
His questions from PFM fell into seven categories. He wanted more details on issues like the accuracy and speed of the tests compared to those from traditional vendors, the limitations of the technology and whether the Walgreens relationship was exclusive.
“We as a group came up with questions that we wanted to better understand the business,” Grossman said. “We wanted to ask the same questions in as many ways as we could so there was no ambiguity and no confusion as to what the technology was doing.“
PFM then met with Holmes and Balwani a second time. Grossman testified that Holmes left about halfway through the meeting. Theranos executives told him at the time that it could get test results back in under four hours in retail stores and within one hour in hospitals.
Grossman told the jury that Holmes never told him the company was using third-party machines to run the blood tests. About his own experience at Walgreens, Grossman said he was surprised to find out that the blood was drawn from his arm and said his test results took longer than four hours.
“I asked [Balwani] why I didn’t receive a finger stick and why it was a venous draw,” Grossman said. “I also asked him why it took longer than four hours to get my test results back.”
Balwani assured him it was because his doctor ordered an unusual test, Grossman said.
Still, PFM invested $96.1 million in Theranos in February 2014. That investment included $2.2 million from a friends and family fund, which Grossman said had money in it from low-income people.
PFM eventually settled its lawsuit against Theranos after accusing the company of securities fraud.
Holmes has pleaded not guilty to 12 counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. As a witness to the prosecution, Grossman’s testimony underpins one of the wire fraud counts.
For 11 weeks, Holmes has sat at the defense table as government witnesses have testified. A key question remaining is whether the defense will present a case after the prosecution rests.
“We don’t even know if there is a defense case and if there is what it might be,” Lance Wade, an attorney for Holmes, said before the jury entered the courtroom. “We’re still in the government’s case.”
Last week Holmes’ defense team provided the government a list of potential witnesses. However, Wade said, “we’re not saying we’re presenting a defense case by giving them a sense of the witnesses.”
Shares of advertising technology company AppLovin and stock trading app Robinhood Markets each jumped about 7% in extended trading on Friday after S&P Global said the two will join the S&P 500 index.
The changes will go into effect before the beginning of trading on Sept. 22, S&P Global announced in a statement. AppLovin will replace MarketAxess Holdings, while Robinhood will take the place of Caesars Entertainment.
In March, short-seller Fuzzy Panda Research advised the committee for the large-cap U.S. index to keep AppLovin from becoming a constituent. AppLovin shares dropped 15% in December, when the committee picked Workday to join the S&P 500. Robinhood, for its part, saw shares slip 2% in June when it was excluded from a quarterly rebalancing of the index.
It’s normal for stocks to go up on news of their inclusion in a major index such as the S&P 500. Fund managers need to buy shares to reflect the updates.
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AppLovin and Robinhood both went public on Nasdaq in 2021.
Robinhood has been a favorite among retail investors who have bid up shares of meme stocks such as AMC Entertainment and GameStop.
AppLovin itself became a stock to watch, with shares gaining 278% in 2023 and over 700% in 2024. As of Friday’s close, the stock had gained only 51% so far in 2025. AppLovin’s software brings targeted ads to mobile apps and games.
Earlier this year, AppLovin offered to buy the U.S. TikTok business from China’s ByteDance. U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly extended the deadline for a sale, most recently in June.
At Robinhood’s annual general meeting in June, a shareholder asked Vlad Tenev, the company’s co-founder and CEO, if there were plans for getting into the S&P 500.
“It’s a difficult thing to plan for,” Tenev said. “I think it’s one of those things that hopefully happens.”
He said he believed the company was eligible.
Shares of MarketAxess, which specializes in fixed-income trading, have fallen 17% year to date, while shares of Caesars, which runs hotels and casinos, are down 21%.
U.S. Federal Trade Commission Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter raised questions on Friday about the status of an artificial intelligence chatbot complaint against Snap that the agency referred to the Department of Justice earlier this year.
In January, the FTC announced that it would refer a non-public complaint regarding allegations that Snap’s My AI chatbot posed potential “risks and harms” to young users and said it would refer the suit to the DOJ “in the public interest.”
“We don’t know what has happened to that complaint,” Slaughter said on CNBC’s ‘The Exchange.” “The public does not know what has happened to that complaint, and that’s the kind of thing that I think people deserve answers on.”
Snap’s My AI chatbot, which debuted in 2023, is powered by large language models from OpenAI and Google and has drawn scrutiny for problematic responses.
The DOJ did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Snap declined to comment.
Slaugther’s comments came a day after President Donald Trump held a White House dinner with several tech executives, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Apple CEO Tim Cook.
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“The president is hosting Big Tech CEOs in the White House even as we’re reading about truly horrifying reports of chatbots engaging with small children,” she said.
Trump has been attempting to remove Slaughter from her FTC position, but earlier this week, U.S. appeals court allowed her to maintain her role.
On Thursday, the president asked the Supreme Court to allow him to fire her from the post.
FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson, who was selected by Trump to lead the commission, publicly opposed the complaint against Snap in January, prior to succeeding Lina Khan at the helm.
At the time, he said he would “release a more detailed statement about this affront to the Constitution and the rule of law” if the DOJ were to eventually file a complaint.
Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai meets with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk at Google for Startups in Warsaw, Poland, on February 13, 2025.
Klaudia Radecka | Nurphoto | Getty Images
From the courtroom to the boardroom, it was a big week for tech investors.
The resolution of Google’s antitrust case led to sharp rallies for Alphabet and Apple. Broadcom shareholders cheered a new $10 billion customer. And Tesla’s stock was buoyed by a freshly proposed pay package for CEO Elon Musk.
Add it up, and the U.S. tech industry’s eight trillion-dollar companies gained a combined $420 billion in market cap this week, lifting their total value to $21 trillion, despite a slide in Nvidia shares.
Those companies now account for roughly 36% of the S&P 500, a proportion so great by historical standards that Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at S&P Dow Jones Indices, told CNBC by email, “there are no comparisons.”
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There was a certain irony to this week’s gains.
Alphabet’s 9% jump on Wednesday was directly tied to the U.S. government effort to diminish the search giant’s market control, which was part of a years-long campaign to break up Big Tech. Since 2020, Google, Apple, Amazon and Meta have all been hit with antitrust allegations by the Department of Justice or Federal Trade Commission.
A year ago, Google lost to the DOJ, a result viewed by many as the most-significant antitrust decision for the tech industry since the case against Microsoft more than two decades earlier. But in the remedies ruling this week, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta said Google won’t be forced to sell its Chrome browser despite its loss in court and instead handed down a more limited punishment, including a requirement to share search data with competitors.
The decision lifted Apple along with Alphabet, because the companies can stick with an arrangement that involves Google paying Applebillions of dollars per year to be the default search engine on iPhones. Alphabet rose more than 10% for the week and Apple added 3.2%, helping boost the Nasdaq 1.1%.
Analysts at Wedbush Securities wrote in a note after the decision that the ruling “removed a huge overhang” on Google’s stock and a “black cloud worry” that hung over Apple. Further, they said it clears the path for the companies to pursue a bigger artificial intelligence deal involving Gemini, Google’s AI models.
“This now lays the groundwork for Apple to continue its deal and ultimately likely double down on more AI related partnerships with Google Gemini down the road,” the analysts wrote.
Mehta explained that a major factor in his decision was the emergence of generative AI, which has become a much more competitive market than traditional search and has dramatically changed the market dynamics.
New players like OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity have altered Google’s dominance, Mehta said, noting that generative AI technologies “may yet prove to be game changers.”
On Friday, Alphabet investors shrugged off a separate antitrust matter out of Europe. The company was hit with a 2.95-billion-euro ($3.45 billion) fine from European Union regulators for anti-competitive practices in its advertising technology business.
Broadcom pops
While OpenAI was an indirect catalyst for Google and Apple this week, it was more directly tied to the huge rally in Broadcom’s stock.
Following Broadcom’s better-than-expected earnings report on Thursday, CEO Hock Tan told analysts that his chipmaker had secured a $10 billion contract with a new customer, which would be the company’s fourth large AI client.
Several analysts said the new customer is OpenAI, and the Financial Times reported on a partnership between the two companies.
Broadcom is the newest entrant into the trillion-dollar club, thanks to the company’s custom chips for AI, already used by Google, Meta and TikTok parent ByteDance. With Its 13% jump this week, the stock is now up 120% in the past year, lifting Broadcom’s market cap to around $1.6 trillion.
“The company is firing on all cylinders with clear line of sight for growth supported by significant backlog,” analysts at Barclays wrote in a note, maintaining their buy recommendation and lifting their price target on the stock.
For the other giant AI chipmaker, the past week wasn’t so good.
Nvidia shares fell more than 4% in the holiday-shortened week, the worst performance among the megacaps. There was no apparent negative news for Nvidia, but the stock has now dropped for four consecutive weeks.
Still, Nvidia remains the largest company by market cap, valued at over $4 trillion, with its stock up 56% in the past 12 months.
Microsoft also fell this week and is on an extended slide, dropping for five straight weeks. Shares are still up 21% over the last 12 months.
On the flipside, Tesla has been the laggard in the group. Shares of the electric vehicle maker are down 13% this year due to a multi-quarter sales slump that reflects rising competition from lower-cost Chinese manufacturers and an aging lineup of EVs.
But Tesla shares climbed 5% this week, sparked mostly by gains on Friday after the company said it wants investors to approve a pay plan for Musk that could be worth up to almost $1 trillion.
The payouts, split into 12 tranches, would require Tesla to see significant value appreciation, starting with the first award that won’t kick in until the company almost doubles its market cap to $2 trillion.
Tesla Chairwoman Robyn Denholm told CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin the plan was designed to keep Musk, the world’s richest person, “motivated and focused on delivering for the company.”