Author: News Room

Elon Musk said on Friday that he had sold X, his social media company, to xAI, the artificial intelligence start-up he founded in 2023, in an unusual arrangement that may raise conflict-of-interest questions.The all-stock deal valued xAI at $80 billion and X at $30 billion, Mr. Musk said on X. The price for X is a $14 billion discount from the $44 billion that Mr. Musk paid for the social media company in 2022. Both companies are privately held.“XAI and X’s futures are intertwined. Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent,” Mr.…

President Trump on Friday commuted the sentence of Carlos Watson, a co-founder of the now-defunct digital media company Ozy Media, on the day he was set to surrender to prison, three people familiar with the matter said.Mr. Watson was sentenced in December to almost 10 years in prison for trying to defraud investors and lenders by lying about the company’s finances. His sentence came after a federal jury last summer convicted Mr. Watson and Ozy Media of conspiracy to commit securities and wire fraud. The jury also convicted Mr. Watson of identity theft, following a two-month trial during which witnesses…

The nation’s legal profession is being split between those that want to fight back against President Trump’s attacks on the industry and those that prefer to engage in the art of the deal.Two big firms sued the Trump administration on Friday, seeking to stop executive orders that could impair their ability to represent clients. The lawsuits filed by Jenner & Block and WilmerHale highlight how some elite firms are willing to fight Mr. Trump’s campaign targeting those he doesn’t like, while others, like Paul Weiss and Skadden, have cut deals to appease the president.In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has issued…

Big as the U.S. stock market is, it isn’t the only place to trade stocks. Markets in Europe, Asia and Latin America have been outpacing the U.S. market in 2025. The DAX index, which tracks 40 of Germany’s most important stocks, was up nearly 15 percent for the year, led by Rheinmetall, Europe’s biggest ammunition maker, with a gain, in 2025 alone, of 113 percent. Germany is rearming, a consequence of President Trump’s America First foreign policy, and a vast anticipated increase in military spending is spurring European stock markets.In the United States, President Trump’s tariff policy, along with his…

Charlie Javice, who made big headlines in 2023 when JPMorgan Chase accused her of faking her start-up’s customer list, was found guilty in federal court Friday of fraud.She now faces the possibility of decades in prison.The bank has its own civil lawsuit on standby, as it attempts to claw back her share of the $175 million it paid for her company, Frank. It sued her three years ago, and Ms. Javice was arrested at Newark Liberty International Airport not long after that.Frank, which was founded in 2016, aimed to help customers fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid…

Trevor Milton, a major Republican donor who was convicted by a federal jury in 2022 of defrauding investors in the electric truck maker Nikola, has received a pardon from President Trump, the White House said on Friday.Mr. Milton, Nikola’s founder and former chief executive, was sentenced to four years in prison and fined $1 million after being convicted by a New York jury of one count of securities fraud and two counts of wire fraud. He has been free on bail while he appealed the conviction.In addition to sparing Mr. Milton time in prison, the pardon means he will not…

Concerns about inflation and weak consumer sentiment dragged down the stock market on Friday, as Wall Street keeps struggling to assess the path forward for the U.S. economy with the full impact of President Trump’s tariffs looming.The S&P 500 inched down at the start of trading, after the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation measure came in hotter than economists had expected, intensifying worries about inflationary pressures. The index later extended its decline, falling roughly 1.8 percent by midday and putting the benchmark on track for a weekly loss. Investors also digested new data from the University of Michigan that showed consumer…

Years before President Trump returned to the White House, his budget chief, Russell T. Vought, began mapping out a plan to shrink the federal government.In Mr. Vought’s design, spending would be slashed by about $9 trillion over the next decade. Entire federal programs — from housing vouchers to student loans — would be eliminated. The government would fire thousands of civil workers, including those who investigated tax fraud. And Washington would restrict aid to the poor, requiring Americans to work in exchange for benefits.The ideas formed the bedrock of Mr. Vought’s plan to end the “woke and weaponized” bureaucracy, a…

More than a month after Washington and Kyiv first haggled over a deal to grant the United States a major stake in Ukraine’s mineral, oil and gas development projects, the two sides are back to square one in the negotiations.Washington has sent Kyiv a new proposal that restates the sweeping financial demands from an initial draft agreement rejected by Ukraine, and adds new ones that could burden the country’s finances for years. Several Ukrainian lawmakers suggested that Ukraine could not possibly accept such a deal and that new negotiations would be needed.President Volodymyr Zelensky told reporters in Paris on Thursday…

Americans hoping for some relief on inflation suffered a setback in February, as new data showed underlying price pressures intensifying even before the latest escalation in President Trump’s trade war.The Personal Consumption Expenditures price index, after stripping out volatile food and energy items, climbed 2.8 percent in February from a year earlier, outpacing January’s annual pace. On a monthly basis, these “core” prices ticked up another 0.4 percent, higher than the monthly increase in January. Both were slightly higher than economists had expected.Overall inflation came in at 2.5 percent, a level that sits well above the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent…