Partners at Andreessen Horowitz, the blue-chip venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, defended to investors their decision to hire Daniel Penny, a Marine veteran acquitted on a charge of criminally negligent homicide last year, according to an internal memo viewed by The New York Times. Andreessen Horowitz, the memo said, is most likely the largest … Read more
In Washington, Elon Musk has been at the forefront of Trump administration efforts to gut programs designed to promote diversity. At the same time, Tesla, the electric car company that Mr. Musk leads, has in recent days, with little notice, tried to appease critics who have accused the company of racial discrimination. In a little-noticed … Read more
In 2020, Uber was at a crossroads: The company had made an expensive bet on robot taxis, but the project was laden with legal problems and burning through cash. So Uber gave it away to another start-up. But five years later, Uber’s future seems as tied to autonomous vehicles as ever. The company is now … Read more
Google tried for years to diversify its work force, saying it would hire and promote more women and people from racial minorities. On Wednesday, the company abandoned employee diversity targets, saying that as a federal contractor, it needed to comply with President Trump’s executive orders opposing diversity, equity and inclusion policies. In 2020, Google announced … Read more
President Trump’s first weeks back in the White House have included government groups scrambling to figure out their funding and Wall Street investors getting whipsawed by trade wars that seemed to begin and then end in an instant. But through it all, the mood among those in right-wing media has been nothing short of ebullient. … Read more
NASA’s second thoughts about VIPER opened an opportunity for someone else to book that ride to the moon. Just because its cargo was canceled did not mean Astrobotic’s journey was off — it remains scheduled for later this year. And on Wednesday, a small startup named Venturi Astrolab Inc. announced it had claimed that opportunity … Read more
By a campfire on the shore of Lake Geneva in 1816, five friends take up the challenge of telling the scariest story. Mary Shelley is clearly the winner, with her cautionary tale (soon to be a novel) of an obsessed doctor whose electrified monster achieves sentience, then runs wild. So freaked out is her pal … Read more
Alphabet, Google’s parent company, reported sales that narrowly fell short of Wall Street’s expectations, weighed down by disappointing growth in its cloud-computing division, which sells the company’s artificial intelligence tools to other businesses. The Silicon Valley giant reported revenue of $96.5 billion in its most recent quarter, an increase of 12 percent from a year … Read more
As Elon Musk digs into the federal bureaucracy in his crusade to slash government spending, he has a tool that no aspiring cost-cutter has had before: his own giant social media platform to debate, shame and bludgeon anyone who stands in his way. Since the inauguration, Mr. Musk has attacked journalists and X users for … Read more
China retaliated against tariffs from the United States on Tuesday with a series of measures that took aim at American companies. Along with imposing tariffs and import restrictions, the country said, it had launched an antitrust investigation into Google. The announcement of the investigation was vague — just one line on a Chinese agency’s website. … Read more