Over 1,400 employees who were about to be laid off from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) will be able to keep working for at least another week after a federal judge intervened in the dismantling of the independent regulator on Friday. Judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington, DC, said the Trump administration could not […]
Google Is Once Again Deemed a Monopoly, This Time in Ad Tech
A federal judge ruled today that Google is a monopolist in some parts of the online advertising market, marking the second case in a year where the company was found to have violated US antitrust law. Last August, a federal judge ruled that Google was maintaining an illegal monopoly in search. Judge Leonie Brinkema of […]
Will Meta Really Have to Sell Instagram and WhatsApp?
Paresh Dave: Absolutely. The timing when some of those moves were first announced was viewed as kind of suspicious because it was right around when these investigations into Meta and these cases started getting filed against Big Tech companies. Zoë Schiffer: We’re going to take one more short break. And when we come back, we’ll […]
A New Mexico Man Faces Federal Charges for Allegedly Setting Fire to a Tesla Showroom
A New Mexico man is facing federal charges for two separate incidents of alleged arson—one at an Albuquerque Tesla showroom and one at the New Mexico Republican Party’s office—according to a Monday press release from the Department of Justice. Jamison Wagner, 40, was charged with allegedly setting fire to a building or vehicle used in […]
OpenAI’s New GPT 4.1 Models Excel at Coding
OpenAI announced today that it is releasing a new family of artificial intelligence models optimized to excel at coding, as it ramps up efforts to fend off increasingly stiff competition from companies like Google and Anthropic. The models are available to developers through OpenAI’s application programming interface (API). OpenAI is releasing three sizes of models: […]
Where Were Big Tech’s CEOs on Tariffs?
If you logged on to X or Bluesky this past week, you were likely swept up in the onslaught of posts about Trump’s reciprocal tariffs and the plunging stock market. And, if you follow the tech industry as closely as I do, you probably also noticed who wasn’t posting about the tariffs: many of the […]
What Trump’s Tariffs Mean for Tech—and You
Katie Drummond: Very exciting promise by Howard Lutnick. I can’t wait to talk about whether any of that is actually possible. Michael Calore: Certainly not in the short term. Lauren Goode: Was this the same moment where he talked about the army of millions using tiny screws? Katie Drummond: Oh, yes. The teeny tiny screws? […]
The US Is Turning a Blind Eye to Crypto Crimes
Meanwhile, the Trump family’s crypto empire continues to expand. In late March, Eric Trump and Donald Trump, Jr., the president’s sons, announced a new bitcoin mining venture. Shortly before that, the parent company of Truth Social, Trump’s social media platform, entered an agreement to launch a series of crypto exchange-traded funds. President Trump himself has […]
Labor Leaders Fear Elon Musk and DOGE Could Gain Access to Whistleblower Files
In the memo, the AFL-CIO highlights some two dozen accidents and alleged safety issues reported at Tesla, SpaceX, and The Boring Company since 2016 as the basis for its concern, some of which were the subject of recent OSHA investigations. In one incident reported to OSHA last year, a licensed electrician named Victor Joe Gomez […]
BYD Launches Denza in Europe—Another Mighty Impressive EV Brand the US Won’t Get
Denza was originally founded in 2010 as a joint venture between BYD and Mercedes-Benz, launching its first car into the Chinese market in 2014. Now wholly owned by BYD, it went through a significant rebrand in 2021, with Wolfgang Egger—who previously led design teams at Audi and Lamborghini—joining at the helm as chief designer. The […]