CNBC

Elon Musk’s tunneling venture, The Boring Company, announced plans earlier this week to build a 10-mile underground loop in Nashville, in coordination with Tennessee Republican Governor Bill Lee, who put out a press release praising the project. Democratic lawmakers in Nashville are demanding answers on the plans, while the state’s Republican leaders have jumped at the chance to partner with Musk. Read more: cnb.cx/45tqkKS

Let Tim Cook? After a 2025 where Apple seemed to be in the doldrums, Cook and company roar back, with the biggest revenue growth for Apple since 2021. Meanwhile, Cook said that Apple is "very open" to AI acquisitions. https://lnkd.in/gW45FjRi

Amazon posted its latest quarterly earnings report this afternoon and while the company beat on the top and bottom lines, as well as gave better-than-expected guidance, it wasn't enough to please Wall Street. Cloud growth came in at 18%, trailing Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, which expanded 39% and 32%, respectively. Analysts on the company's conference call pointed to the perception that Amazon is losing market share to cloud rivals and falling behind on AI innovation. Investors were hoping for signs that Amazon's steep investments in artificial intelligence have begun to pay off. The company has committed $100 billion in capital expenditures this year, with the lion's share going to data center expansion to support AI demand. Amazon guided for operating income in the third quarter that was lighter than analysts expected. The forecast indicates those returns on AI investments are still a ways off. Company executives also acknowledged that President Donald Trump's tariff policies remain hard to predict, and it's unclear where things will land throughout the remainder of the year. More here: https://lnkd.in/eRNxXSpi

You can almost smell the bubbly wafting across Silicon Valley. Following Figma's blockbuster market debut on Thursday, four of the most iconic names in venture capital — Index Ventures, Greylock, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia — are collectively sitting on roughly $24 billion worth of the design software vendor's stock. Until recently, there's been little reason to celebrate. From late 2021, when soaring inflation and rising rates pushed investors out of risky assets, until the middle of 2025, tech IPOs were few and far between, and many of the companies that managed to make it out failed to impress Wall Street. That's left venture firms with scarce returns for the pension funds, endowments and foundations they rely on for funding.

Wall Street cheered Reddit's second-quarter earnings results, in which it reported a 78% year-over-year sales jump in the period, representing the biggest beat in its short history as a public company. One point Reddit was keen to highlight this quarter was its AI-powered Reddit Answers feature, akin to LLM-based apps like ChatGPT except tailored specifically to surface Reddit comments and discussions. That tool now has 6 million weekly users, which was up from 1 million during the first quarter. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman discussed Reddit Answers during an earnings call, positioning the AI tool as a crucial feature for the company amid the rise of AI chat apps and Google's own AI search experiments, like its AI Overview product, which online publishers have attributed to declining web traffic. "What users want is the Reddit perspective," Huffman said. "And so as long as this is true, I think that's a great thing, and so regardless of how they get to Reddit, our job is to help internet consumers find the kind of answers to their questions and turn that into helping those users become regular core Reddit users as both the seekers and the scrollers." Huffman also briefly talked about English pop star Rick Astley, who he recently met and talked with at the Cannes Ad festival. "I also got to chat with Rick Astley, the author of the 'never going to give you up' song from back in the 80s, popularized by Reddit as the Rickroll, one of the first memes on Reddit. And it was just really interesting hearing how grateful he was for the second act of his career, being a part of that." Read more from CNBC:

Richard Masters, CEO of the English Premier League, discusses the rise of U.S. owners in the league. Sign up for the CNBC Sport newsletter to watch the full interview: cnb.cx/458LZGU

Richard Masters, CEO of the English Premier League, talks about the spike in interest in the sport around the World Cup and how the league can capitalize on it. Sign up for the CNBC Sport newsletter to watch the full interview: cnb.cx/458LZGU

Arm Holdings CEO Rene Haas says the company is growing "much faster than the market." Watch more of the interview: cnb.cx/4ogl1pq

Wael Sawan, Shell CEO, discusses the future of natural gas. Watch more of the interview: cnb.cx/4fdcrni

Salman Chowdhury, a recent graduate of PCTI STEM Academy in Wayne, New Jersey, got accepted to top Ivy Leagues — including Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Much of his success, he says, has to do with how his parents raised him.