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Trump teases a buyer for TikTok: A group of 'very wealthy people'

29 June 2025 at 16:34
Trump holds his phone as he arrives at Joint Base Andrews
Trump holds his phone as he arrives at Joint Base Andrews

Julia Demaree Nikhinson/File/AP

  • President Donald Trump said in an interview aired Sunday that the US had found a buyer for TikTok.
  • Trump told Fox News the buyer was a group of "very wealthy people."
  • The president has repeatedly delayed the enforcement of a TikTok divest-or-ban law.

President Donald Trump says the United States has found a buyer for TikTok.

In an interview with Fox News that aired on Sunday, the president said the buyer was a group of "very wealthy people" that he would reveal in "about two weeks" โ€” his favorite timeline.

Trump added that he would "probably" need China's approval for a sale to go ahead, but appeared confident that Chinese leader Xi Jinping would back it.

Trump has stepped in three times so far to extend a deadline for TikTok's Chinese owner, ByteDance, to find a new buyer or effectively cease operating in the United States.

An executive order on June 19 extended the deadline to September 17.

In a statement at the time, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the administration wanted to ensure US users would continue to be able to access the app.

"As he has said many times, President Trump does not want TikTok to go dark," she said. "This extension will last 90 days, which the Administration will spend working to ensure this deal is closed so that the American people can continue to use TikTok with the assurance that their data is safe and secure."

TikTok missed its original January 19 deadline and briefly shut down for millions of Americans before Trump intervened.

"Sorry, TikTok isn't available right now," a message on the app read for affected users. "A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the US. Unfortunately, that means you can't use TikTok for now."

A number of high-profile figures have previously expressed interest in purchasing the platform, including "Shark Tank" star Kevin O'Leary and former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

Trump also previously said he would support his once-staunch ally, Elon Musk, if he wanted to buy the app.

Musk said in January that he has been "against a TikTok ban for a long time," adding that he believed it "goes against freedom of speech." However, the Tesla CEO told the WELT Economic Summit later that month that he had not made a bid for the app.

"I don't have any plans for what would I do if I had TikTok," he added.

Read the original article on Business Insider

Delta warns of continued disruption at Atlanta airport after severe storms cause canceled flights and the evacuation of an air traffic control tower

29 June 2025 at 15:12
Planes at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
Planes at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

Jeff Greenberg/Getty Images

  • Severe weather battered Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport this weekend.
  • Storms led to hundreds of flight cancellations and the evacuation of an air traffic control tower.
  • Delta said Saturday it expected continued disruption over the rest of the weekend.

Severe storms this weekend led to hundreds of flight cancellations and the evacuation of an air traffic control tower at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.

Heavy rainfall and high winds battered the world's busiest airport on Friday night, prompting flash flood warnings and the temporary evacuation of a traffic control tower.

Delta, which has a major hub in Atlanta, said Saturday that its teams were working hard to restore operations but that it expected delays and cancellations to continue over the remainder of the weekend, which comes at peak travel time amid the July 4 rush.

"The storm caused hundreds of cancellations, diversions and delays across our entire system as well as an evacuation and temporary power loss at the ATL air traffic control tower," the airline said in a statement.

"More than 100 Delta aircraft required inspection due to hail, and we anticipate several hundred more cancellations this weekend as we work to safely recover."

The carrier, which operates around 900 flights per day from Atlanta, apologized for the disruption and encouraged passengers to check the Fly Delta app for the latest flight information.

In a statement shared with Business Insider, the Federal Aviation Administration said air traffic controllers had "returned to the Atlanta control tower after the FAA evacuated most personnel due to strong winds."

"A few controllers remained in the facility to handle inbound aircraft," it added.

Read the original article on Business Insider

Klarna CEO warns AI may cause a recession as the technology comes for white-collar jobs

8 June 2025 at 17:55
Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski smiles whilst wearing a gray sweatshirt and blue jeans and posing near Klarna's pop up store in London.
Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski.

Dave Benett/Dave Benett/Getty Images for Klarna

  • The CEO of payments company Klarna has warned that AI could lead to job cuts and a recession.
  • Sebastian Siemiatkowski said he believed AI would increasingly replace white-collar jobs.
  • Klarna previously said its AI assistant was doing the work of 700 full-time customer service agents.

The CEO of the Swedish payments company Klarna says that the rise of artificial intelligence could lead to a recession as the technology replaces white-collar jobs.

Speaking on The Times Tech podcast, Sebastian Siemiatkowski said there would be "an implication for white-collar jobs," which he said "usually leads to at least a recession in the short term."

"Unfortunately, I don't see how we could avoid that, with what's happening from a technology perspective," he continued.

Siemiatkowski, who has long been candid about his belief that AI will come for human jobs, added that AI had played a key role in "efficiency gains" at Klarna and that the firm's workforce had shrunk from about 5,500 to 3,000 people in the last two years as a result.

It's not the first time the exec and Klarna have made headlines along these lines.

In February 2024, Klarna boasted that its OpenAI-powered AI assistant was doing the work of 700 full-time customer service agents. The company, most famous for its "buy now, pay later" service, was one of the first firms to partner with Sam Altman's company.

Later that year, Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg TV that he believed AI was already capable of doing "all of the jobs" that humans do and that Klarna had enacted a hiring freeze since 2023 as it looked to slim down and focus on adopting the technology.

However, Siemiatkowski has since dialed back his all-in stance on AI, telling an audience at the firm's Stockholm headquarters in May that his AI-driven customer service cost-cutting efforts had gone too far and that Klarna was planning to now recruit, according to Bloomberg.

"From a brand perspective, a company perspective, I just think it's so critical that you are clear to your customer that there will be always a human if you want," he said.

In the interview with The Times, Siemiatkowski said he felt that many people in the tech industry, particularly CEOs, tended to "downplay the consequences of AI on jobs, white-collar jobs in particular."

"I don't want to be one of them," he said. "I want to be honest, I want to be fair, and I want to tell what I see so that society can start taking preparations."

Some of the top leaders in AI, however, have been ringing the alarm lately, too.

Anthropic's leadership has been particularly outspoken about the threat AI poses to the human labor market.

The company's CEO, Dario Amodei, recently said that AI may eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within the next five years. "We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming," Amodei said. "I don't think this is on people's radar."

Similarly, his colleague, Mike Krieger, Anthropic's chief product officer, said he is hesitant to hire entry-level software engineers over more experienced ones who can also leverage AI tools.

The silver lining is that AI also brings the promise of better and more fulfilling work, Krieger said.

Humans, he said, should focus on "coming up with the right ideas, doing the right user interaction design, figuring out how to delegate work correctly, and then figuring out how to review things at scale โ€” and that's probably some combination of maybe a comeback of some static analysis or maybe AI-driven analysis tools of what was actually produced."

Read the original article on Business Insider

Cathie Wood says the Musk-Trump feud reveals how much Musk's companies rely on the government

8 June 2025 at 15:40
Cathie Wood speaking at a conference in Miami Beach, Florida.
Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood says the feud between Donald Trump and Elon Musk shows just how much the latter's companies rely on the government.

Joe Raedle via Getty Images

  • Ark Invest's Cathie Wood has weighed in on the public feud between Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
  • Wood said the feud reveals how much Musk's companies rely on the US government.
  • Trump said Saturday he had no desire to fix his relationship with the Tesla CEO.

The public feud between Elon Musk and President Donald Trump has shown investors just how much control the US government has over Musk's companies, Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood says.

"I think the way this is evolving is Elon, Tesla, and investors are beginning to understand more and more just how much the government has control here," Wood said in a video posted to the company's YouTube channel on Friday.

Many of Musk's companies have key links to the government and have received billions of dollars in federal loans, contracts, tax credits, and subsidies over the years.

"Elon is involved in companies that are depending on the government," Wood said, pointing to Tesla, SpaceX, and Neuralink as examples.

SpaceX's COO, Gwynne Shotwell, said last year that the company has $22 billion worth of federal contracts. Neuralink, Musk's brain chip company, is subject to FDA regulation, and a less friendly regulatory environment could impact Tesla's robotaxi rollout plans. Tesla stock fell more than 14% on Thursday after Musk and Trump became locked in a series of increasingly bitter clashes.

The feud appeared to begin, at least publicly, on Tuesday, after Musk criticized Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill." He called it a "disgusting abomination" and said it would increase the national budget deficit.

Tensions rose fast between the once-close allies on Thursday. Trump threatened to cut Musk's government contracts and Musk said SpaceX would immediately begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft โ€” which returned stranded NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore from the International Space Station in March.

Musk later retracted that threat, which Wood said was a sign he was "beginning to walk this back."

Wood said the rift with Trump could, in part, be Musk's attempt to further decouple himself from the Trump administration. Musk announced in April that he would be stepping back from his government work.

"One of the hypotheses out there is that what has happened was partly โ€” not entirely โ€” orchestrated," Wood said. "Clearly, there has been some brand damage to Tesla, which he readily admits, and I think he's trying to disengage from the government and being associated with one party or the other."

Moving forward, Wood said neither Trump nor Musk needed to get "bogged down" with a fight and that she believed both would eventually heed that reasoning.

She also appeared to be confident that Musk could make the situation work for him. She said Musk "works really well under pressure" and that "he creates a lot of that chaos and pressure himself."

Trump, however, signaled Saturday that he had no desire to fix his relationship with the SpaceX CEO anytime soon.

"I have no intention of speaking to him," Trump told NBC News.

"I think it's a very bad thing, because he's very disrespectful. You could not disrespect the office of the President," he added.

Vice President JD Vance struck a somewhat friendlier tone when asked about the possibility of reconciliation during a Thursday interview with podcaster Theo Von.

Vance said that while he thought it was a "huge mistake" for Musk to "go after the president," he hoped Musk "figures it out" and "comes back into the fold."

Read the original article on Business Insider

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