Steven Spielberg attends the 55th Annual Cinema Audio Society Awards at InterContinental Los Angeles Downtown on February 16, 2019 in Los Angeles, California.
Matt Winkelmeyer | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images
Warner Bros. Discovery is calling in a filmmaker brain trust to help steer the curation and programming of its cable-TV channel Turner Classic Movies, after a shake-up among management left fans concerned about the network’s future.
“Jaws” director Steven Spielberg, “Goodfellas” helmer Martin Scorsese and “Boogie Nights” filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson officially signed on to provide their input at TCM, the company and filmmakers said on Wednesday. The filmmakers will work closely with Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group chiefs Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy, who are overseeing curation and programming after a series of layoffs and management shake-up at TCM, according to the company.
“We have already begun working on ideas with Mike and Pam, both true film enthusiasts who share a passion and reverence for classic cinema that is the hallmark of the TCM community,” the three filmmakers said in a joint statement on Wednesday. “This unique arrangement, initiated by David Zaslav, reflects his commitment to honoring the TCM legacy while also involving us on curation and programming.”
The inclusion of the filmmakers came after Warner Bros. Discovery employees last week faced another round of layoffs, particularly across its portfolio of cable-TV networks.
Part of that was a major shake-up at TCM, recognized as a place for preservation of classic films and a carefully curated lineup augmented by guest star introductions. The changes had caused concern among movie buffs and those dedicated to film preservation, who voiced their distress on social media.
The filmmakers also applauded that longtime programming chief Charles Tabesh, who was initially set to leave as part of the shake-up, will stay with the network.
David Zaslav, CEO, Warner Bros. Discovery.
Anjali Sundaram | CNBC
Last week, the filmmakers had said in a statement Zaslav contacted and reassured them, and they were committed to working with the company for TCM’s future.
Since the 2022 merger between Warner Bros. and Discovery, the company has been undergoing a number of cost-cutting initiatives, including layoffs and cutting back on content spending.
In the months leading up to the job cuts and changes at the networks, including TCM, Zaslav and Spielberg held conversations about TCM’s future, according to a person familiar with the matter. Zaslav also initiated the conversation with Spielberg, Scorsese and Anderson last week.
Spielberg and Anderson and joined Zaslav on a panel during the TCM Classic Film Festival in April about film preservation efforts, according to media reports.
Warner Bros. Discovery and its film chiefs touted the company’s increased investment in TCM recently.
“TCM is a cultural treasure which WBD is fully committed to safeguarding, supporting, and investing in for the future. This year, TCM’s content investment has grown by 30% and we plan to build on that in future years,” a company spokesperson said in a statement. “That said, TCM is not immune to the very real pressure on the entire linear ecosystem, but we have taken steps to ensure that we stay true to the mission of the network – bringing more titles to the air, driving content investment, and preserving and protecting the culture of cinema.”
The increased investment will go toward licensing new films and bringing a wider roster to the network, according to the person familiar with the matter.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, May 13, 2025.
Hamad I Mohammed | Reuters
Tesla’s shares have finally turned positive for the year.
After a dismal first quarter, which was the worst for the stock in any period since 2022, and a brutal start to April, following President Donald Trump’s announcement of sweeping new tariffs, Wall Street has again rallied around the electric vehicle maker.
The stock rose 3.6% on Monday to $410.26, topping its closing price of 2024 by over $6. It’s up 85% since bottoming for the year at $221.86 on April 4. A new filing revealed that CEO Elon Musk purchased about $1 billion worth of shares in the company through his family foundation.
It’s the second straight year Tesla has bounced back after a down first quarter. Last year, the shares fell 29% in the first three months before ending up 63% for 2024.
In recent weeks, analysts have praised the EV maker’s proposed pay plan for Musk, which could amount to a $1 trillion windfall for the world’s richest person over the next decade. The company has also gotten a boost from its new MegaBlocks battery energy storage systems that Tesla ships preassembled to businesses looking to lower their power costs or make greater use of electricity from renewable resources.
Even with the rebound, Tesla is the second-worst performer this year among tech’s megacaps, ahead of only Apple, which is down about 5% in 2025. Tesla is still in the midst of a multi-quarter sales slump due to an aging lineup of EVs and increased competition from lower-cost competitors in China, namely BYD.
Tesla has seen a consumer backlash, in part because of Musk’s political activities, including spending nearly $300 million to propel President Trump back to the White House and his work with the Trump administration to slash the federal workforce.
Tesla leadership has been working to shift investors’ attention to other topics such as robotaxis and humanoid robots.
However, the company has yet to deliver vehicles that are safe to use without a human onboard and ready to take control if needed. And while Musk is touting Tesla’s Optimus robots, which he says will be able to do everything from factory work to babysitting, a product is still a long way from hitting the market.
Shares of the search giant jumped more than 4% on Monday, pushing the company into territory occupied only by Nvidia, Microsoft and Apple.
The stock got a big lift in early September from an antitrust ruling by a judge, whose penalties came in lighter than shareholders feared. The U.S. Department of Justice wanted Google to be forced to divest its Chrome browser, and last year a district court ruled that the company held an illegal monopoly in search and related advertising.
But Judge Amit Mehta decided against the most severe consequences proposed by the DOJ, which sent shares soaring to a record. After the big rally, President Donald Trump congratulated the company and called it “a very good day.”
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Alphabet shares are now up more than 30% this year, compared to the 15% gain for the Nasdaq.
The $3 trillion milestone comes roughly 20 years after Google’s IPO and a little more than 10 years after the creation of Alphabet as a holding company, with Google its prime subsidiary.
CEO Sundar Pichai was named CEO of Alphabet in 2019, replacing co-founder Larry Page. Pichai’s latest challenge has been the surge of new competition due to the rise of artificial intelligence, which the company has had to manage through while also fending off an aggressive set of regulators in the U.S. and Europe.
The rise of Perplexity and OpenAI ended up helping Google land the recent favorable antitrust ruling. The company’s hopes of becoming a major AI player largely ride with Gemini, Google’s flagship suite of AI models.
The U.S. and China have reached a ‘framework’ deal for social media platform TikTok, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Monday.
“It’s between two private parties, but the commercial terms have been agreed upon,” he said from U.S.-China talks in Madrid.
Both President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will meet Friday to discuss the terms. Trump also said in a Truth Social post Monday that a deal was reached “on a ‘certain’ company that young people in our Country very much wanted to save.”
Bessent indicated that the framework could pivot the platform to U.S.-controlled ownership.
TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The comments came during the latest round of trade discussions between the U.S. and China. Relations have soured between the two countries in recent months from Trump’s tariffs and other trade restrictions.
At the same time, TikTok parent company ByteDance faces a Sept. 17 deadline to divest the platform’s U.S. business or face being shut down in the country.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said Monday that the deadline may need to be pushed back to get the deal signed, but there won’t be ongoing extensions.
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Congress passed a law last year prohibiting app store operators like Apple and Google from distributing TikTok in the U.S. due to its “foreign adversary-controlled application” status.
But Trump postponed the shutdown in January, signing an executive order in January that gave ByteDance 75 more days to make a deal. Further extensions came by way of executive orders in April and in June.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnicksaid in July that TikTok would shutter for Americans if China doesn’t give the U.S. more autonomy over the popular short-form video app.
As for who controls the platform, Trump told Fox News in June that he had a group of “very wealthy people” ready to buy the app and could reveal their identities in two weeks. The reveal never came.
He has previously said he’d be open to Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison or Tesla CEO Elon Musk buying TikTok in the U.S. Artificial intelligence startup Perplexity has submitted a bid for an acquisition, as has businessman Frank McCourt’s Project Liberty internet advocacy group, CNBC reported in January.
Trump told CNBC in an interview last year that he believed the platform was a national security threat, although the White House started a TikTok account in August.