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Dec 18, 2025
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Happy Thursday! Warner Bros. Discovery rejects Paramount's offer, sticking with Netflix. Tesla could face a 30-day sales suspension unless it changes marketing description. China has built a prototype of EUV machine used in advanced chip manufacturing.
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The board of Warner Bros. Discovery rejected Paramount Skydance’s $108 billion takeover offer, sticking with a deal it has already reached with Netflix, citing “significant risks” of the Paramount offer. In a securities filing, WBD outlined in detail the risks of the Paramount offer, which is backed by Oracle founder Larry Ellison, whose son David is the Paramount CEO and whose family controls Paramount. While the Ellison family has said it will “backstop” the roughly $41 billion in equity required to complete the WBD offer, WBD complained that Paramount’s arrangements “contain several loopholes” which created uncertainty about its acquisition closing. It noted that the backstop was based on Larry Ellison’s personal trust but said there was no details about the assets or liabilities of the trust.
While Paramount said the trust held Ellison’s $209 billion stake in Oracle, WBD said Paraount had “not provided any evidence of this.”
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Tesla will face a possible 30-day ban on selling its vehicles in California unless it changes marketing practices that a state regulator says mislead consumers about the capabilities of its driver assistance software, according to the California Department of Motor Vehicles. A California administrative law judge said Tuesday that the way Tesla markets its driver assistance software products—called ”Autopilot” and “Full Self-Driving”—misleads consumers about their capabilities. Both features require at least some supervision by drivers. The California DMV said in a statement that Tesla has 60 days to make changes to its marketing practices before the DMV will suspend its license. California is especially important to Tesla because it’s home to the company’s first factory and is the biggest market for electric vehicles in the U.S. Tesla shares were up about 1% early Wednesday. In a post on X, Tesla said: “This was a ‘consumer protection’ order about the use of the term ‘Autopilot’ in a case where not one single customer came forward to say there’s a problem. Sales in California will continue uninterrupted.”
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China has built a prototype of an extreme ultraviolet lithography machine that’s critical for manufacturing advanced semiconductors, as the country steps up its effort to produce advanced chips without relying on Western technology suppliers, Reuters reported. The prototype of the EUV machine that etches circuits onto silicon wafers to make chips, was built in early 2025 by a team of former engineers of Dutch chip equipment maker ASML, according to Reuters. The team reverse-engineered ASML’s EUV machine to build the prototype. The Chinese government has set a goal of producing working chips using the prototype by 2028, the report said. As the U.S. tries to prevent China from building its own advanced chips, Washington has imposed export controls to restrict Chinese companies’ access to ASML’s EUV machines.
But the existence of the prototype suggests that China may be overcoming technological hurdles to develop its own chip manufacturing equipment. Tech giant Huawei Technologies is playing a key role in China’s EUV project by working with thousands of engineers and coordinating many companies and government research institutes across the country, according to Reuters.
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Anthropic will get up to 2.3 gigawatts of computing power from data centers being developed by Hut 8, a bitcoin mining company with close ties to the Trump family. Hut 8 and cloud startup Fluidstack will develop a data center campus in Louisiana with an initial 245 megawatts of power and the potential for an additional 1 gigawatt over time, it said Wednesday. Anthropic, the customer for the campus, has the option to develop data centers consuming an additional 1.1 gigawatts of power with Hut8 as part of the agreement. Hut 8 is one of several publicly-traded bitcoin miners trying to pivot to building AI data centers. Google will backstop Fluidstack’s lease payments at the data center, similar to previously announced agreements with bitcoin miners Cipher Mining and TeraWulf. Hut 8 separately in March formed a bitcoin mining venture with Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, who is listed as chief strategy officer of the company, American Bitcoin. Shares in Hut 8 rose about 10% in Wednesday trading following the announcements.
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Online education platform Coursera said on Wednesday it would buy rival Udemy for about $950 million in stock, giving the two companies more scale to compete as AI threatens their businesses. The companies are two of the largest US-based online learning providers but their growth has slowed sharply in recent years. Udemy’s growth flatlined in the third quarter and its revenue is up just 1.5% in the first nine months of the year. Coursera has done a bit better and reported 10% higher revenues in the third quarter. Both companies went public in 2021 and their shares are well below their IPO prices. Udemy has lately traded between $5 and $6, compared with its IPO price of $29, while Coursera has been trading around $8 compared with its IPO price of $33. Coursera is offering 0.8 of one of its shares for each Udemy
share, valuing it around $6.40 a share. Udemy stock jumped 24% on the news while Coursera was trading up 5%. Qatalyst Partners advised Coursera while Morgan Stanley advised Udemy.
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YouTube has struck a five-year exclusive deal to broadcast the Oscars, starting in 2029, YouTube and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced on Wednesday. The deal, which will end ABC’s exclusive run broadcasting the Oscars, which began in 1976, highlights the growing strength of the streaming platform, which has also been muscling into live sports programming via its Sunday Ticket deal with the NFL. YouTube is the most popular streaming platform on televisions, according to Nielsen. According to the press announcement, the partnership also includes access to other Academy events like the Oscars Nominees Luncheon exclusively on the Oscars YouTube channel, and Google will help digitize some of the Academy’s collection of 52 million film-related items.
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