Vice Media declares Fortress Investment Group the winning bidder in bankruptcy sale
A general view of atmosphere at the VICE Kills TX Music Showcase during the 2013 SXSW Music, Film + Interactive Festival at Viceland on March 16, 2013 in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Hutton Supancic/Getty Images for SXSW)
Hutton Supancic | Getty Images
Vice Media has declared Fortress Investment Group’s stalking horse bid of $225 million the winning offer for the company as it emerges from bankruptcy.
Vice received multiple bids for the company, but none of them “rose to the level of being deemed a superior bid,” according to an internal memo obtained by CNBC.
Closely held GoDigital submitted one of the bids at a $300 million valuation, according to a person familiar with the matter. Fortress wanted more cash in the offer and had concerns about GoDigital’s funding, according to two people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be speak publicly because the bidding details are private.
Fortress led a group of creditors, including Soros Fund Management and Monroe Capital, that took over Vice out of bankruptcy leading up to a potential auction for the company this week. That auction won’t take place without outstanding credible bids.
Vice will present the sale to bankruptcy court on Friday and expects the acquisition to close then, the company said in the memo.
The sale closes a chapter for the digital media company that was valued at $5.7 billion in 2017. Vice owns a series of assets including Vice News, Vice Studios, Refinery29 and an ad agency called Virtue.
Spokespeople for Vice, GoDigital and Fortress declined to comment.
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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attends a roundtable discussion at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 11, 2025.
Sarah Meyssonnier | Reuters
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sold 100,000 shares of the chipmaker’s stock on Friday and Monday, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
The sales are worth nearly $15 million at Tuesday’s opening price.
The transactions are the first sale in Huang’s plan to sell as many as 600,000 shares of Nvidia through the end of 2025. It’s a plan that was announced in March, and it’d be worth $873 million at Tuesday’s opening price.
The Nvidia founder still owns more than 800 million Nvidia shares, according to Monday’s SEC filing. Huang has a net worth of about $126 billion, ranking him 12th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The 62-year-old chief executive sold about $700 million in Nvidia shares last year under a prearranged plan, too.
Nvidia stock is up more than 800% since December 2022 after OpenAI’s ChatGPT was first released to the public. That launch drew attention to Nvidia’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, which were needed to develop and power the artificial intelligence service.
The company’s chips remain in high demand with the majority of the AI chip market, and Nvidia has introduced two subsequent generations of its AI GPU technology.
Nvidia continues to grow. Its stock is up 9% this year, even as the company faces export control issues that could limit foreign markets for its AI chips.
In May, the company reported first-quarter earnings that showed the chipmaker’s revenue growing 69% on an annual basis to $44 billion during the quarter.
Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO, speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box outside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 21st, 2025.
Gerry Miller | CNBC
Anthropic‘s use of books to train its artificial intelligence model Claude was “fair use” and “transformative,” a federal judge ruled late on Monday.
Amazon-backed Anthropic’s AI training did not violate the authors’ copyrights since the large language models “have not reproduced to the public a given work’s creative elements, nor even one author’s identifiable expressive style,” wrote U.S. District Judge William Alsup.
“The purpose and character of using copyrighted works to train LLMs to generate new text was quintessentially transformative,” Alsup wrote. “Like any reader aspiring to be a writer.”
The decision was a significant win for AI companies as legal battles play out over the use and application of copyrighted works in developing and training LLMs. Alsup’s ruling begins to establish the legal limits and opportunities for the industry going forward.
A spokesperson for Anthropic said in a statement that the company was “pleased” with the ruling and that the decision was, “Consistent with copyright’s purpose in enabling creativity and fostering scientific progress.”
CNBC has reached out to the plaintiffs for comment.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, was brought by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson in August. The suit alleged that Anthropic built a “multibillion-dollar business by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books.”
Alsup did, however, order a trial on the pirated material that Anthropic put into its central library of content, even though the company did not use it for AI training.
“That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft, but it may affect the extent of statutory damages,” the judge wrote.
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