Elon Musk arrives on the red carpet for the automobile awards “Das Goldene Lenkrad” (The golden steering wheel) given by a German newspaper in Berlin, Germany, November 12, 2019.
Hannibal Hanschke | Reuters
Days after closing his $44 billion purchase of Twitter, Elon Musk faced pressure from heads of civil rights groups to disallow many users who had been banned from the platform from returning, and to give company staffers access to the tools necessary to combat election-related misinformation.
Leaders of the Anti-Defamation League, the NAACP, Color of Change, Asian American Foundation and Free Press, a media reform advocacy group, spoke with Musk in an almost hour-long Zoom call on Tuesday, one week before the Nov. 8 midterm elections.
Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, helped organize the call after speaking with Musk previously, and took part in the meeting, according to three of the attendees.
Some of the organizations represented have co-signed an open letter to Twitter’s advertisers to encourage them to “cease all advertising on Twitter globally if he [Musk] follows through on his plans to undermine brand safety and community standards including gutting content moderation.”
Bloomberg reported that some employees had been frozen out of their access to tools used for content moderation and policy enforcement, which could impact the company’s ability to eliminate misinformation on Election Day. Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of safety and integrity, defended the move as “exactly what we (or any company) should be doing in the midst of a corporate transition to reduce opportunities for insider risk.” He said Twitter is still enforcing its rules.
After the call with civil rights groups, Musk tweeted that users who’ve been banned from Twitter for violating its rules — a group that includes former President Donald Trump — will not have the chance to return to the platform for at least another few weeks. Prior reports suggested Musk was planning to allow people who’d been kicked off Twitter for disciplinary reasons to come back.
Musk told the group that he plans to retain and enforce Twitter’s election integrity measures, and staff will have access to the necessary tools by the end of this week, Free Press CEO Jessica Gonzalez, who was on the call, said in an interview.
Michael Kives, a longtime Musk ally, was also on the call, according to the participants. Kives’ firm, K5 Global, has backed SpaceX and The Boring Company, two of Musk’s other companies.
Musk was the only Twitter representative on the call. Neither Musk nor Kives, who reportedly worked as a spokesman for former President Bill Clinton, immediately responded to requests for comment.
Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change, told CNBC on Wednesday that he urged Musk to implement a consistent process for letting people back onto Twitter.
Robinson said he “spoke to him [Musk] about the folks that had incited violence and the message that it sends both to just replatform them without a very clear and transparent process.” He also said that, when it allows people to return, Twitter should “take accountability, not just for what these folks do, but to the message it sends their followers.”
Trump, who was banned after the Jan. 6 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol, wasn’t mentioned by name on the call, attendees said. But Derrick Johnson, CEO of the NAACP, said the group told Musk, “there are some people whose offenses are so egregious that they should never be allowed back on the platform.” Johnson added, referring to Trump, that “I would hope that he’s never placed back on the platform because we’d all be in danger.”
Musk said before he finalized his purchase of Twitter that it was a “mistake” to permanently ban Trump from the platform. But after the deal was completed, Musk quickly moved to reassure advertisers that Twitter would not become a “free-for-all hellscape” just because he favors more lenient content moderation policies.
Musk told advertisers he acquired Twitter because he believes it’s “important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence.”
The Tesla CEO said he plans to create a council at Twitter that will help review its content moderation approach. He said the group “will include representatives with widely divergent views, which will certainly include the civil rights community and groups who face hate-fueled violence.”
The logo of Japanese company SoftBank Group is seen outside the company’s headquarters in Tokyo on January 22, 2025.
Kazuhiro Nogi | Afp | Getty Images
A sector-wide pullback hit Asian chip stocks Friday, led by a steep decline in SoftBank, after Nvidia‘s sharp drop overnight defied its stronger-than-expected earnings and bullish outlook.
SoftBank plunged more than 10% in Tokyo. The Japanese tech conglomerate recently offloaded its Nvidia shares but still controls British semiconductor company Arm, which supplies Nvidia with chip architecture and designs.
SoftBank is also involved in a number of AI ventures that use Nvidia’s technology, including the $500 billion Stargate project for data centers in the U.S.
South Korea’s SK Hynix fell nearly 10%. The memory chip maker is Nvidia’s top supplier of high-bandwidth memory used in AI applications. Samsung Electronics, a rival that also supplies Nvidia with memory, fell over 5%.
Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision Industry, also known as Foxconn, which manufactures server racks designed for AI workloads, dipped 4%.
The retreat in major Asian semiconductor giants comes after Nvidia fell over 3% in the U.S. on Thursday, despite beating Wall Street expectations in its third-quarter earnings the night before.
The company also provided stronger-than-expected fourth-quarter sales guidance, which analysts said could lift earnings expectations across the sector.
However, smaller chip players in Asia were not spared either.
In Tokyo, Renesas Electronics, a key Nvidia supplier, fell 2.3%. Tokyo Electron, which provides essential chipmaking equipment to foundries that manufacture Nvidia’s chips, was down 5.32%.
Another Japanese chip equipment maker, Lasertec, was down over 3.5%.
An electric air taxi by Joby Aviation flies near the Downtown Manhattan Heliport in Manhattan, New York City, U.S., November 12, 2023.
Roselle Chen | Reuters
Air taxi maker Joby Aviation in a new lawsuit accused competitor Archer Aviation of using stolen information by a former employee to “one-up” a partnership deal with a real estate developer.
“This is corporate espionage, planned and premeditated,” Joby said in the lawsuit filed Wednesday in a California Superior Court in Santa Cruz, where the company is based.
Archer and Joby did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
The lawsuit alleges that former U.S. state and local policy lead, George Kivork, downloaded dozens of files and sent some content to his personal email two days before he resigned in July to take a job at Archer, which had recruited him.
By August, Joby said a partner that worked with Kivork said it had been approached by Archer with a “more lucrative deal.” Joby alleges that the eVTOL rival’s understanding of “highly confidential” details helped it leverage negotiations.
Joby also said the developer attempted to terminate the agreement, citing a breach of confidentiality.
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Kivork refused to return the files when Joby approached him after conducting an investigation, according to the suit. The company also said Archer denied wrongdoing, and would not disclose how it learned about the terms of the agreement or provide results from an internal investigation it allegedly undertook.
The lawsuit comes during a busy period for electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) technology as companies race to gain Federal Aviation Administration certification to start flying commercially. ‘
Joby argued in the complaint that it’s “imperative” to protect Joby’s work “from this type of espionage” to promote the sector’s success and ensure fair competition.
Last week, Joby said it completed its first test flight for a hybrid aircraft it’s working on with defense contractor L3Harris. This month, Amazon-backed Beta Technologies, another electric flight company, also went public on the New York Stock Exchange.
Joby shares have more than doubled over the last year, while Archer is up about 68%.
In August 2023, Archer settled a previous legal dispute with Boeing-owned Wisk Aero over the alleged theft of trade secrets. As part of the deal, Archer agreed to use Wisk as its autonomous tech partner.
Every weekday, the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer releases the Homestretch — an actionable afternoon update, just in time for the last hour of trading on Wall Street. Markets : There was an ugly reversal in the market Thursday. Stocks soared for most of the morning in reaction to Nvidia ‘s strong quarter, bullish outlook on AI spending, and pushback that customers weren’t generating a sufficient return on their investment. Nvidia shares climbed as high as $196 on Thursday — a roughly 5% gain — and its gravitational pull helped lift other technology and AI-adjacent industrial stocks. The market’s gains pushed the S & P 500 into positive territory for the week. However, around 11 a.m. ET, the market began to fall rapidly, with technology and industrial names leading the decline. Nvidia gave up all of its gains and dropped 2%. Bitcoin hit its lowest level since late April. Notable defensive stocks like consumer staples held onto their gains, though. That resilience reinforces our decision to diversify further, which we did earlier this week , by adding Procter & Gamble to the portfolio. The S & P 500’s decline has pushed the index back toward the lows of its recent downturn, marking a roughly 5% pullback from its high. It remains to be seen whether Thursday’s reversal is a sign of investors continuing to retreat from risk assets or simply a retest of the recent downdraft. But Nvidia’s earnings report gave zero indication of a slowdown in demand for AI compute. Interest rate cut: Expectations for a 25-basis-point rate cut at the Federal Open Market Committee’s next meeting in December continue to fluctuate. One month ago, a rate cut seemed like a sure thing with a 98.8% probability, according to the CME FedWatch Tool . But the odds dropped to about 50% a week ago after a slew of hawkish commentary from Federal Reserve members. On Wednesday, the odds of a cut plummeted to 30% after the release of the October Fed minutes, which showed that the central bank was hesitant to lower rates again this year. But after the long-delayed September jobs data finally came out Thursday, the probability of a 25-basis-point reduction jumped to 40%. Although the economy added 119,000 jobs in September, more than double the forecasted figure, the unemployment rate ticked higher. The Fed is in a bind, trying to balance a softening labor market against the risk that a rate cut could reignite inflation. Up next: Gap, Ross Stores , Intuit , and Veeva Systems report after the closing bell. BJ’s Wholesale Club will post results Friday morning. On the economic data side, tomorrow we’ll get November’s S & P Global Flash PMI for Manufacturing and Services, along with the University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment survey. (See here for a full list of the stocks in Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED.