Author: GT

Legacy aerospace giants scored a win Tuesday when the U.S. Senate passed President Trump’s budget reconciliation bill that earmarks billions more for NASA’s flagship Artemis program.  The $10 billion addition to the Artemis architecture, which includes funding for additional Space Launch System rockets and an orbiting station around the moon called Gateway, is a rebuke to critics who wished to see alternative technologies used instead. Among those critics are SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, who Musk proposed as the next NASA administrator.  There’s no sign the souring relations between Musk and Trump are recovering. If Trump…

Jaque Silva | Nurphoto | Getty ImagesOpenAI is distancing itself from Robinhood’s latest crypto push after the trading platform began offering tokenized shares of OpenAI and SpaceX to users in Europe.”These ‘OpenAI tokens’ are not OpenAI equity,” OpenAI wrote on X. “We did not partner with Robinhood, were not involved in this, and do not endorse it.”The company said that “any transfer of OpenAI equity requires our approval — we did not approve any transfer,” and warned users to “please be careful.”Robinhood announced the launch Monday from Cannes, France, as part of a broader product showcase focused on tokenized equities,…

Founders are often told to chase product-market fit before anything else, but what if scaling too soon, too fast, is what’s really holding them back? At TechCrunch All Stage 2025 on July 15 in Boston, Jon McNeill, CEO and co-founder of DVx Ventures (and former president of Tesla and COO of Lyft), will take the Scale Stage to flip the script on conventional startup growth advice. His session, “The Operator’s Playbook for Building and Scaling Sustainable Companies,” explores why the next generation of enduring companies will be built differently — by operators who validate both product and go-to-market strategy before…

Amazon logo on a brick building exterior in San Francisco on Aug. 20, 2024.Smith Collection | Gado | Archive Photos | Getty ImagesAmazon is discontinuing its standalone free streaming TV service next month as it looks to consolidate its content offerings under Prime Video.The service, called Freevee, launched in 2019 underneath IMDb, the film and TV site Amazon bought in 1998. It offered a stable of free, ad-supported video, including original series and some Prime Video content, primarily through an app.The Freevee app will shut down in August, at which point users will be able to watch shows and movies…

Apple’s biggest assembly partner, Foxconn, has ordered more than 300 of its Chinese employees to return home from its iPhone factories in India, Bloomberg reported, citing anonymous sources. The employees told to return account for the bulk of Foxconn’s staff in its iPhone facilities in India, and only Taiwanese support staff remain in the country, the report said. The motivation behind the order was not immediately clear, Bloomberg reported, though the outlet noted that Chinese officials have been asking regulators to curb knowledge and tech resources from being exported to India in a bid to preserve the country’s manufacturing heft.…

Rivian has hit a milestone in its agreement with German automotive giant Volkswagen that will bring $1 billion into the EV startup’s coffers in the form of a share sale. Rivian also announced Wednesday that it delivered 10,661 vehicles in the second quarter. That represents a 23% drop in sales from the second quarter of 2024, and only a slight improvement over Rivian’s rough first quarter, when it delivered 8,640 EVs. The company has already lowered its sales target for 2025 as a result of President Trump’s tariffs and trade wars, all of which make it more expensive to build…

Tesla delivered 384,122 vehicles in the second quarter of this year, wrapping up another weak quarter for the company as it struggles to bring the pace of sales back up to 2023 levels. That represents a 13.5% drop from the number of cars Tesla delivered in the second quarter of 2022, and it means Tesla runs a real chance of underperforming its total sales figure from 2024. If that happens, it would mean Tesla’s sales will have fallen two years in a row — despite the company once promoting the ability to grow deliveries at 50% annually. This quarter’s sales…

There is a whole shady industry for people who want to monitor and spy on their families. Multiple app makers promote and advertise their software — often referred to as stalkerware — to jealous partners who can use these apps to access their victims’ phones remotely.  Yet, despite how sensitive this personal data is, an increasing number of these companies are losing huge amounts of it.  According to TechCrunch’s tally, counting the latest data exposure of Catwatchful, there have been at least 26 stalkerware companies since 2017 that are known to have been hacked, or leaked customer and victims’ data…

Businesses intending to use AI do not have to rely on cloud-based tools like Chat-GPT, which tend to require uploading or sharing sensitive data. Instead, it is now possible to install and run private AI models locally, ensuring all data remains private and secure.There are several open-source tools available for those looking to experiment with locally-running AI models, all of which prioritise data privacy, cost-effectiveness, and ease of deployment, therefore ensuring they are suitable for varying levels of technical expertise.Private AIs for business experimentationLocalAILocalAI is an open-source platform developed as a drop-in alternative for OpenAI’s API, allows businesses to operate…

CANNES — Robinhood stock hit the $100 mark for the first time, capping off a week of fresh all-time highs and renewed investor confidence. Shares are now tracking their best performance since April, up more than 30% since the trading app was snubbed from the S&P 500.The milestone follows a major strategic swing in Europe, where Robinhood unveiled its most ambitious crypto expansion to date — one aimed at re-engineering the financial infrastructure itself. At an event held in a Belle Époque mansion along the French Riviera, Robinhood executives laid out a vision to bring thousands of tokenized stocks, ETFs,…