Tech

Kevin Turner, chief operating officer of Microsoft Corp., listens during the annual Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California, U.S., on Monday, May 2, 2016. The conference gathers attendees to explore solutions to today’s most pressing challenges in financial markets, industry sectors, health, government and education. Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesBloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesKevin Turner has stepped down as CEO of crypto mining start-up Core Scientific, the company confirmed to CNBC Wednesday. He will continue on as an adviser to the company and remains a significant shareholder.Core Scientific’s co-founder and chairman, Mike Levitt, has stepped in as CEO.According to a Geekwire article, Turner joined Core Scientific in 2018. He spent nearly three years running the blockchain infrastructure and hosting provider, which operates crypto mines across the country. The company has more than 100 employees, according to its profile page on LinkedIn.Turner has championed the company’s mission to be 100% carbon-neutral, addressing a common criticism of cryptocurrency mining. Fifty-six percent of the power used at its facilities today is from renewable sources, and the balance is purchased via National Wind Renewable Energy Certificates out of North Dakota.Turner did not immediately reply to a request for comment.Turner

In this articleMSTRTSLACOINSpaceX founder and Tesla CEO Elon Musk looks on as he visits the construction site of Tesla’s gigafactory in Gruenheide, near Berlin, Germany, May 17, 2021.Michele Tantussi | ReutersCryptocurrency related stocks led by Tesla and Coinbase dropped on Wednesday as bitcoin plunged the equivalent of a bear market in just a single day.Bitcoin, the world’s largest digital token, fell to nearly $30,000 at one point Wednesday morning, according to Coin Metrics. The price was down roughly 24%. (Any drop greater than 20% in an asset or security is considered a bear market.)The move comes after China on Tuesday barred financial institutions from conducting crypto-related transactions. Separately, a JPMorgan report showed large institutional investors were dumping bitcoin in favor of gold.The pullback this month in bitcoin intensified a week ago after Tesla CEO Elon Musk appeared to change his tune a bit on crypto by saying the company would stop accepting bitcoin for payment because of environmental concerns surrounding crypto-mining.”You had a confluence of events…where you started breaking down the positivity in the price action, and now we’ve got a liquidation event,” Galaxy Digital CEO and Chairman Mike Novogratz told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “It’s not going to bounce right

Peter Thiel, co-founder and chairman of Palantir Technologies Inc., speaks during a news conference in Tokyo, Japan, on Monday, Nov. 18, 2019.Kiyoshi Ota | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesPalantir co-founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel has invested in a company that’s putting computer chips into people’s heads in a bid to improve them in some way.The early Facebook investor, who co-founded PayPal with Elon Musk in 1998, has backed the firm called Blackrock Neurotech in a $10 million financing round, taking an undisclosed amount of equity in the process.The funding round was confirmed to CNBC by Blackrock Neurotech but Thiel declined to comment.Founded in 2008 and headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, Blackrock has been selling hardware and software to the neuroscience research community for over a decade.”It’s a niche market but one we knew we could get revenue in, and we’ve been profitable since 2015,” Blackrock Neurotech CEO Marcus Gerhardt told CNBC, adding that the firm hasn’t taken any significant venture capital funding until now.”We got to a stage in 2020, where we couldn’t take all the contracts we were being offered so we realized we needed external capital to do that,” he added.Among other things, Blackrock Neurotech, which has

In this articleM12-DE789-HKApple’s 2021 12.9-inch iPad ProTodd Haselton | CNBCI’ve been testing Apple’s new 12.9-inch iPad Pro for the past week or so.It might look similar to the last two versions, but it’s a really big upgrade that caters most to power users who use an iPad as a portable adjunct to their Mac for tasks like capturing video in the field for later editing. It has a number of features you won’t get in the iPad Air, but I still think the Air — which is several hundred dollars cheaper — is the best tablet computer for most people.Apple’s iPads, like its iPhones and Macs, have been crushing it recently. The company reported nearly 79% year-over-year revenue growth in its last quarter, generating $7.8 billion from iPad sales alone. Some of that growth was propelled by the pandemic, but I think that trend could continue as people find ongoing use for the iPad’s portability as parts of the world begin to reopen. For the first time, the 2021 iPad Pros are equipped with the same M1 chip that also powers the new iMac desktop and the refreshed MacBook Air, MacBook Pro and Mac Mini that were released last year. It

In this articleBTC.BS=-USSIn this photo illustration, a visual representation of the digital Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin is on display in front of the Bitcoin course’s graph on February 09, 2021 in Paris, France.Chesnot | Getty ImagesBitcoin fell sharply on Tuesday continuing a major sell-off that began a week ago.The digital currency fell over 13% to hit an intraday low of $38,585.86 at around 12:54 a.m. ET, according to CoinDesk data. It was the lowest level since Feb. 9, the last time it dropped below $40,000.Negative news over the past week has dampened sentiment for bitcoin.On May 12, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the electric carmaker had suspended vehicle purchases using bitcoin, citing environmental concerns over the so-called computational “mining” process. This is where high-powered computers are used to solve complex mathematical puzzles to enable transactions using bitcoin.Musk’s comments caused over $300 billion to be wiped off the entire cryptocurrency market that day.The announcement to suspend bitcoin payment came just three months after Tesla revealed that it bought $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin, and would start accepting bitcoin in exchange for its products.Early this week, the Tesla CEO clarified that the company has “not sold any Bitcoin.”Then on Tuesday, three Chinese banking and

Google CEO Sundar Pichai speaks at the company’s 20201 Google I/O conference.GoogleGoogle announced a slew of updates to its developer products Tuesday at its first Google I/O event since 2019.Though Google makes most of its money from advertising, the annual event is a way to excite its developer ecosystem with updates ranging from software and artificial intelligence moonshots to shopping features. The company cancelled the annual developer conference last year due to the Covid-19 pandemic. This year’s event was mostly virtual, with a few in-person attendees at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.Here’s a roundup of some of the more interesting announcements from the day’s event:HardwareThis year’s event was pretty light on hardware announcements — no big unveiling or refresh to its Pixel phones or home speakers. It did, however, announce some updates to existing products.Most notably, Google said it now has a whopping 3 billion active Android devices, globally, well ahead of Apple’s claim of 1 billion iPhones. However, Android devices are widely divergent in terms of the version of the platform they run, with some relying only on the core open-source code and others relying on custom apps and skins issued by hardware makers and carriers.The company

In this articleAMZNTLiberty Media’s John MaloneMichael Kovac | Getty ImagesLong-time employees of WarnerMedia have been through so many spinoffs and mergers that Monday’s announcement of its impending separation from AT&T and combination with Discovery amounted to gallows humor.”You just have to laugh,” said one veteran employee.Given that context, it may not be surprising that WarnerDiscovery — the leading candidate for a name, according to a person familiar with the matter — is structuring itself for a future sale.The key indicator that future chief executive David Zaslav is already considering a sale down the road — assuming the merger passes regulatory approval — is John Malone’s decision to give up his Discovery super-voting shares to merge with WarnerMedia.Based on the latest proxy statemen filed on Apr. 30, Malone owned 6.2 million Discovery Class B shares, giving him a total of 26.5% voting control — the most of any single owner. He held 19.5 million shares in total, amounting to a 4% economic interest. His voting control was much greater because of the super-voting stock.Malone agreed to turn in those shares for common equity because he wanted to give a combined WarnerDiscovery flexibility to sell itself in the future — most likely

In this articleMSFTSatya Nadella, chief executive officer of Microsoft Corp., speaks during the Viva Technology conference in Paris, France, on Thursday, May 24, 2018. Viva Tech, a three-year-old event for startups, gathers global technology leaders and entrepreneurs as the French establishment unites behind a push for more tech investment in Paris.Marlene Awaad | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesMicrosoft said in a blog post on Tuesday that it’s starting to roll out the latest twice-annual update to its Windows 10 operating system. It’s not jam-packed with major new capabilities. Rather, it gives PCs a few more quality enhancements.The company is continuing to take a more careful approach with its Windows business, which generates about 14% of the company’s revenue. With more than 1.3 billion devices running it, Windows 10 remains the top desktop operating system with 59% share in April, according to NetMarketShare data.After introducing Windows 10 in 2015, Microsoft has spent the last few years bulking it up with updates, such as tools for crafting three-dimensional objects, applying photo filters and specifying parts of speech on websites. Two updates came out each year, while Apple’s MacOS and iOS and Google’s Android got just one.Microsoft dialed back the pace of development in

In this articleAAPLThe 2020 MacBook Air on the left versus the 2020 13-inch MacBook Pro on the right.Todd Haselton | CNBCApple is planning to release redesigned MacBook Pro laptops with an updated version of its in-house processor sometime this summer, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.The update will be followed by new versions of the MacBook Air, the Mac Pro desktop and the entry-level MacBook Pro, likely later in the year, the report said.It shows how Apple is quickly working to capitalize on using its own chips after announcing last year it would transition away from Intel processors. The Apple M1 processor made its debut in the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro and Mac Mini last year and is also used in the new iMac, which launched this spring. The computers will reportedly use newer and more powerful versions of Apple’s processor.Apple’s MacBook customers seem to like the new chip so far. Paired with the at-home work environment of the pandemic and a crop of new M1 computers, Apple’s fiscal Q2 Mac revenue jumped 70.1% year over year from $6.86 billion to $9.1 billion. Apple CEO Tim Cook told CNBC last month that he expects the business to continue to perform well, even