Three days into his tenure as Silicon Valley Bank‘s government-appointed CEO, Tim Mayopoulos has a message for his high-powered venture capital and startup clients: Bring your money back.
That was consistent throughout Mayopoulos’ responses as he fielded over 400 questions from concerned clients on a 30-minute Zoom call Wednesday.
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“There is no safer place in the U.S. banking system to put your deposits,” Mayopoulos said on the call, which CNBC attended and was first to report. He urged clients to return their funds to the bank and to promptly alert their relationship teams of any issues with inbound or outbound wire transfers, a point of concern for many corporate executives who were unable to pull their deposits from the bank last week.
Mayopoulos was joined by SVB operating chief Phil Cox, the only remaining executive from the core C-suite team. SVB’s former CEO and CFO are no longer employed by the bank, Mayopoulos said on the call.
While Mayopoulos is making his pleas to current and former clients, it’s not clear how long he will stay in his current job as the bank is currently controlled by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Mayopoulos said he doesn’t know what SVB’s “exact end state” would look like, and he listed three possibilities: recapitalization, sale, or liquidation.
A recapitalization would allow SVB to continue to exist as a standalone entity. But that possibility depends on another financial institution or group of investors stepping up.
“I recognize I’m new on the scene,” Mayopoulos said in direct response to concerns from venture capital firms. “You’ve been patient with us as we’ve gone through some of those operational difficulties. All I would ask is give us a chance to win back your trust and confidence.”
Mayopoulos’ pitch was tailored towards the venture investors that have taken to social media in droves to express shock and dismay at the collapse of a storied Silicon Valley institution. On the call, Mayopoulos repeatedly referred to the “innovation economy,” and to a startup ecosystem in which “Silicon Valley has played an important part.”
Customer feedback will be critical in determining the future of the bank, Mayopoulos said on the call. Input “from clients and from the venture capital and entrepreneurial community” would shape the timetable for SVB’s ultimate emergence from government control.
“One of the things I want to convey to you is that you have some agency in this that you actually get to vote, at least to send clear signals about what you want the outcome of this process to be,” the CEO said in his prepared remarks. “If our clients choose to take their deposits and keep them in other institutions, that clearly limits the range of options that we have in terms of the ultimate outcome.”
SVB’s longstanding relationship with Silicon Valley’s most elite venture firms is mutually beneficial and symbiotic.
From its founding at a poker table until the nearly fatal bank run last week, SVB was focused on taking risks in a market that most traditional banks shunned. SVB found a niche in venture debt, funding companies that needed cash infusions, especially between funding rounds.
In exchange for future consideration, often equity or warrants in a company, SVB became a mammoth player in the venture debt space, extending from software and internet into life sciences and robotics.
In its over 40 of business, SVB grew along with its depositors, building out a lucrative mortgage business and a suite of private-banking products that allowed it to retain and charm the founders whose fortunes the bank helped create.
From legacy enterprises like Cisco to more modern tech companies such as DocuSign and Roku, SVB has focused on providing financing and banking services at every stage of growth.
“There are other places that do venture debt, but Silicon Valley Bank was the 1,000-pound gorilla in the room,” said Ami Kassar, CEO of the business lending consultant Multifunding.
Exclusivity contracts, meaning an ironclad promise that a company would keep all its money at SVB, were a key facet of those funding deals. When SVB failed, it roiled startups that had traded banking flexibility for liquidity. Some fled the bank, violating their covenants to keep their lights on and their payroll checks rolling.
When asked about potential exclusivity violations, Mayopoulos indicated that he understood emergency actions taken by startups.
“Given the change in circumstances and what the FDIC has done around insurance coverage, we’d very much like to work with our clients to have those deposits come back to us,” the CEO said on the call.
Clients who return wouldn’t have to worry about any fallout from breach of their covenants, Mayopoulos suggested. He didn’t say what would happen to ex-customers who did the same.
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.”