|
|
|
Jan 23, 2026
|
|
|
|
|
|
Friday is here! Trump sues JPMorgan. TikTok completes sale of U.S. data security arm to a joint venture. Elon Musk says Tesla will start selling its Optimus humanoid robots to the general public by the end of 2027.
|
|
|
|
President Donald Trump sued JPMorgan and the bank’s CEO Jamie Dimon for closing his bank accounts in 2021 shortly after the January 6 riots in the U.S. Capital. The lawsuit, which was filed in Miami-Dade County and Thursday, claims accounts owned by Trump and his related entities were closed “as a result of political and social motivations.” Trump is seeking at least $5 billion in damages for allegedly cutting off his banking services. In a statement, JPMorgan said the suit has “no merit.” JPMorgan disclosed to investors last year that it was facing reviews and investigations related to the government’s probe of “debanking” in the financial sector. The lawsuit was filed after Dimon earlier this month criticized the Trump administration’s criminal probe into Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell. “We respect the President’s right to sue us and our right to defend ourselves - that’s what courts are for,” JPMorgan said. The Trump Organization is suing Capital One over similar debanking allegations.
|
|
|
|
TikTok announced it has completed a restructuring in which its data security arm is being sold into a joint venture, owned by a group of investors including Oracle, MGX and Silver Lake, to bring the popular app into compliance with a 2024 law. The law had required TikTok’s U.S. operations to sever its ties with its Chinese parent ByteDance or face a ban. The deal, blessed by President Trump last September, doesn’t entirely sever TikTok from ByteDance. As previously reported, and confirmed in today’s announcement, the joint venture will oversee the protection of TikTok’s U.S. user data, the security of the algorithm that governs what people see on the app and oversee content moderation. TikTok’s business—the sale of advertising and the running of TikTok Shop—remains part of ByteDance. Thursday’s
announcement named the board members for the new joint venture. They include TikTok CEO Shou Chew, as well as Mark Dooley, a representative of ByteDance investors Susquehanna International Group, as well as Silver Lake co-CEO Egon Durban, Timothy Dattels from TPG Global, Oracle executive Ken Glueck and MGX executive David Scott. As expected, TikTok executive Adam Presser will run the joint venture, confirming an earlier report by The Information. TikTok also revealed the identity of other investors, including Michael Dell, affiliates of ByteDance investors Susquehanna and General Atlantic, as well as a Yuri Milner and Xavier Niel, a French entrepreneur and a ByteDance board member. ByteDance keeps 19.9% of the venture.
|
|
|
|
Tesla plans to start selling its Optimus humanoid robots to the general public by the end of 2027, CEO Elon Musk said at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday. By then, Musk said Tesla expects the robots to be “high reliability, high safety.” While Musk has promised that the Optimus program is the future of Tesla, the company slashed production goals in 2025 due to problems perfecting the robots’ hands and other technical challenges, The Information has reported. Musk said Thursday that Tesla was using Optimus for “simple tasks” inside its factories
and was hoping to have the robots doing “more complex tasks” by the end of 2026. Musk also shared other optimistic projections for Tesla on Thursday, including that its supervised Full Self-Driving software would receive approval in Europe and China by the end of February. Tesla has blown through several previous timelines shared by Musk for progress on autonomous driving software.
|
|
|
|
Capital One struck a deal to buy payments and credit card startup Brex for $5.15 billion, the U.S. bank said on Thursday. That is a far cry from Brex’s last valuation of $12 billion during a 2022 fundraising, though the sale means investors in the nine-year-old startup will be able to cash out of their investments during a sluggish period for initial public offerings The purchase of Brex, which offers corporate credit card programs and sought to take on American Express, will be funded with an even split of cash and stock, Capital One said in a statement accompanying its latest quarterly results. Venture capital investors Greenoaks and TCV led Brex’s $300 million fundraising round in 2022. More recently, Brex took on $235 million of debt from Citi and private equity firm TPG. Brex was generating more than $700 million in annualized revenue as of September. Brex’s main rival, Ramp, raised money at a $22.5 billion valuation last summer and $32 billion valuation in November, after taking business away from Brex and competitors by offering slick software and more credit card rewards. Brex was founded by Brazilian entrepreneurs Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi, who ran the startup as co-CEOs until Dubugras stepped aside to serve as chairman in 2024. In a post on X, Brex said it was excited about “the largest bank-fintech deal in history” and the resources of Capital One would allow the startup to invest even more aggressively in automation and AI. In a post on X, Franceschi said he would continue as Brex’s CEO.
|
|
|
|
Intel’s fourth quarter revenue fell 4%, the chip firm reported Thursday, at the high end of the company’s projections. The result reflected a 7% decline in its largest unit, through which it sells CPUs for use in personal computers and other consumer products. Intel stock, which has more than doubled in recent years, fell 6.6% in after-hours trading. That decline was partly offset by a 9% increase in its artificial intelligence data center CPU business and a 4% boost in sales from its chip manufacturing arm. Intel projected first quarter revenue would be between $11.7 and $12.7 billion in revenue, which would be as much as 7.8% lower than a year earlier. Intel generated $12.7 billion in revenue in the first quarter last year. Chief financial officer David Zinsner attributed the expected downturn in the current
quarter to supply shortages, saying in the company’s earnings release that it expects available supply to be “at its lowest level in Q1 before improving in Q2 and beyond.”
|
|
|
|
BitGo, a crypto custodian, opened up 25% on the New York Stock Exchange Thursday, becoming the first crypto company to go public this year. The company and its shareholders raised $213 million in its initial public offering, at a price of $18 per share, giving it a valuation of about $2.1 billion. It opened trading at $22.43 per share. BitGo’s performance could bode well for other crypto firms that are preparing to go public. Crypto exchange Kraken and asset manager Grayscale have also filed for IPOs. The crypto markets have cooled since the market fell last October. Bitcoin now trades at $89,376, down 28% from early October.
|
|
|
|
| |
