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Workers at Salesforce, all the way up to co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff, could breathe more easily this week after the business-software company posted considerably more robust earnings and guidance than analysts had estimated, prompting plaudits from Wall Street.

But challenges remain.

Like other cloud software developers that have seen their shares beaten down because of rising interest rates, Salesforce is focusing more than ever on profit. That might make it harder for the company to build technology to address emerging threats, such as the evolution of a longtime partner into a competitor.

That’s the dynamic playing out at Veeva Systems, which sells software to life sciences organizations. Veeva is also on an upswing, with shares rising 4% on Thursday after the company’s stronger-than-expected quarterly earnings.

Veeva built its core software on top of Salesforce’s app-development platform, but that will be coming to an end in 2025. The risk is that other companies built on Salesforce might be inspired to follow Veeva.

“If I was Salesforce, I would actually be worrying about the long-term implication of that,” said Rishi Jaluria, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets with the equivalent of buy ratings on both Salesforce and Veeva. Salesforce did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Jaluria pointed to banking software maker Ncino, whose CEO, Pierre Naudé, said in 2021 that it was the largest company building on Salesforce after Veeva.

Salesforce and Veeva are closely intertwined. Peter Gassner, Veeva’s founder and CEO, ran the Salesforce platform before starting Veeva in 2007. “Peter has been an outstanding CEO,” Benioff was quoted as saying in 2017, as the two companies deepened their partnership. Veeva’s chairman, Gordon Ritter of Emergence Capital, invested in Salesforce before backing Veeva.

The agreement between the companies holds that Veeva is on the hook to pay Salesforce as Veeva customers use Salesforce’s platform — and costs have risen as more people have come to rely on Veeva. In exchange, Salesforce won’t enter Veeva’s specialized, regulated market.

That sort of arrangement might have been fine when Veeva was a startup. But it has grown into a profitable publicly traded software company with $2 billion in annual revenue and a $28 billion market capitalization. Veeva accrued about $7 million in fees payable to Salesforce in the October quarter, according to a regulatory filing.

After Veeva announced the news alongside financial results in December, Gassner and other executives spent time fielding a variety of questions from analysts about the change during a conference call. “I think overall for customers, this is a positive,” Gassner said. “It simplifies their landscape.”

Veeva, which pays Amazon Web Services for hosting capabilities, will transition its customer-relationship management software to its own Vault platform. The plan is to provide tools to help clients move over, although they have until September 2030 thanks to a five-year wind-down period specified in the agreement.

Veeva will demonstrate its software using Vault at its Commercial Summit conference in Boston in May, Paul Shawah, Veeva’s executive vice president of strategy, said on a Wednesday call with analysts.

Jaluria said he doesn’t think Salesforce will be able to compete effectively against Veeva after the agreement ends in 2025. Salesforce’s push toward increasing profits, which came about as activist investors asked questions about Salesforce’s balance of growth and margins, might not help, he said. “But even before that, Salesforce hasn’t shown us their ability to develop industry cloud organically.”

Under Benioff, Salesforce has fueled a lot of its growth through acquisitions, and there was once a time when Gassner could have ended up back at Salesforce. A Salesforce presentation that leaked in 2016 included Veeva on a list of “potential acquisition targets.”

Today that looks unlikely. Gassner is directing Veeva to move off Salesforce, and on Wednesday Benioff said that the Salesforce board has disbanded its committee on mergers and acquisitions.

WATCH: Nobody was expecting a 27% margin guide from Salesforce, says Mizuho’s Greg Moskowitz

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Tesla faces U.S. auto safety probe over faulty crash reporting

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Tesla faces U.S. auto safety probe over faulty crash reporting

Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, attends the Viva Technology conference at the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 16, 2023.

Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters

Elon Musk‘s Tesla is facing a federal probe by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration after the U.S. auto safety agency found that the company was not reporting crashes as required.

According to documents posted to NHTSA’s website on Thursday, the agency’s Office of Defects Investigation had “identified numerous incident reports” from Tesla concerning crashes that had “occurred several months or more before the dates of the reports” to the agency.

The delayed reports were likely “due to an issue with Tesla’s data collection, which, according to Tesla, has now been fixed,” according to NHTSA’s explanation for the probe.

Automakers must report on collisions that occurred on publicly accessible roads in the U.S. that involved the use of either partially or fully automated driving systems in their cars within five days of the companies becoming aware of any crash.

The agency will now conduct an “audit query” to figure out if Tesla is in compliance with its reporting requirements, and to “evaluate the cause of the potential delays in reporting, the scope of any such delays, and the mitigations that Tesla has developed to address them.”

NHTSA will also investigate whether Tesla neglected to report any prior relevant collisions, and whether its reports submitted to the safety regulator “include all of the required and available data.”

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Tesla stock was little changed Thursday.

The company sells electric vehicles equipped with a standard Autopilot system, or premium Full Self-Driving Supervised option, which is also known as FSD, in the U.S. Both require a driver at the wheel ready to steer or brake at any time.

A site that tracks Tesla-involved collisions drawing on news reports, police records and federal data, TeslaDeaths.com, has found at least 59 fatalities resulting from crashes where Tesla Autopilot or FSD were a factor.

The new NHTSA probe comes as Musk, Tesla’s CEO, is trying to persuade investors that the company can become a global leader in autonomous vehicles, and that its self-driving systems are safe enough to operate fleets of robotaxis on public roads in the U.S.

A manned Tesla Robotaxi service launched in Austin, Texas in June, and the company is running another manned car service in the San Francisco Bay Area in California. Riders can book trips via the company’s Tesla Robotaxi app.

Tesla has not begun driverless ride-hailing operations that would make it directly comparable to Alphabet-owned Waymo, or Baidu’s Apollo Go and other autonomous vehicle competitors yet.

The company is facing a sales and profit decline, due, in part, to a consumer backlash against Musk’s incendiary political rhetoric, his work to re-elect President Donald Trump, and his work leading the Department of Government Efficiency to slash federal spending and its workforce.

Still, many Wall Street analysts and shareholders remain optimistic about Musk’s vision.

“We think it is a positive that Tesla has begun robotaxi operations which puts it on the path to addressing a large market (we estimate that the US robotaxi market will be $7 bn in 2030 as discussed in our recent AV deep dive report),” Goldman Sachs autos industry analysts wrote in a note Wednesday.

Musk and Tesla have not given investors a sense of what they expect in terms of Robotaxi-related revenue or the technical performance of vehicles in its rideshare fleet, so a “debate on the pace of robotaxi growth will continue,” the research note said.

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Apple TV+ hikes subscription for third time in three years

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Apple TV+ hikes subscription for third time in three years

Thomas Fuller | SOPA Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Apple is taking a cue from some of its competitors.

The technology giant’s Apple TV+ monthly subscription is now $12.99, starting Thursday in the U.S. and other countries.

Apple said the new price will hit current subscribers 30 days after their next renewal date. The annual subscription price will not change.

For new subscribers, the $12.99 monthly price begins after a seven-day trial period.

The change marks Apple’s first price hike for its streaming service since 2023. At the time, Apple lifted its monthly price to about $9.99 from $6.99. The company raised the price in 2022 from $4.99.

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Apple TV+ is one of the company’s most popular services, but Apple does not release viewership numbers. A report from The Information earlier this year said the streaming service is losing more than $1 billion annually as subscriptions rocketed toward 45 million, citing people familiar with the matter.

Apple isn’t the only streaming company hiking prices this year to either fund new content or reap returns on their investments. Earlier this year, both Netflix and NBCUniversal’s Peacock boosted prices. Music streaming platform Spotify also raised prices in multiple markets.

Earlier this year, Apple introduced its streaming service to Android phones in a move that could open the company to more people worldwide.

The company is fresh off the release of its highest-grossing theatrical film, “F1: The Movie.”

Disclosure: Comcast owns NBCUniversal, the parent company of CNBC.

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Trump’s Nvidia and Intel meddling is a ‘scattershot method of crony capitalism’: Walter Isaacson

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Trump's Nvidia and Intel meddling is a 'scattershot method of crony capitalism': Walter Isaacson

U.S. government's push for Intel stake is a scattershot method of crony capitalism: Walter Isaacson

President Donald Trump‘s dealings with Intel and Nvidia amount to a “scattershot method of crony capitalism,” Walter Isaacson said Thursday.

“That state capitalism often evolves into crony capitalism, where you have favored companies and industries that pay tribute to the leader, and that is a recipe for not only disaster, but just sort of a corrupt sense of messiness,” he told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

The Tulane University professor, widely known for his recent Elon Musk biography, argued that this method won’t succeed in reviving American manufacturing.

Isaacson’s comments come as the Trump administration wades further into influencing the way companies operate in the U.S.

The White House is pushing for a stake in embattled chipmaker Intel after Trump called CEO Lip-Bu Tan “highly CONFLICTED” and said he should resign.

Earlier this month, both Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices agreed to pay 15% of their China revenues to the U.S. government for export licenses to sell certain chips there.

Isaacson said he’s always been “dubious” of public-private partnerships. He highlighted Trump’s push for Coca-Cola to use cane sugar in its namesake soda as another example of “crony capitalism.”

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