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Sep 11, 2025
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Happy Thursday! Oracle's shares soar on revenue growth projection, making chairman Larry Ellison briefly the world's richest man. Elon Musk says Tesla is struggling to perfect Optimus robot hands. Klarna rose 15% on NYSE debut after raising $1.37 billion in the IPO.
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Oracle stock closed 36% higher to $328 on Wednesday, in the wake of the company’s long-range revenue projections that showed its small cloud business growing rapidly through 2030. That growth is thanks to several cloud deals Oracle has struck with companies like OpenAI. Oracle stock has nearly doubled this year, giving the 48-year-old tech company a market capitalization of $922 billion. Oracle chairman and founder Larry Ellison’s 41% stake is worth $383 billion. Bloomberg reported that Ellison
at one point was worth more than Elon Musk, making the Oracle chairman the world’s richest man.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk says Tesla is “struggling” to finalize the design of its Optimus humanoid robots, primarily due to difficulties perfecting the model’s hands. “Right now, we’re struggling with the final design of the hardware,” Musk said in an interview at the All-In Summit on Tuesday. Musk added: “The hands, inclusive of the forearm, are a majority of the engineering difficulty of the entire robot.” Musk’s comments follow a July report by The Information, which said that Tesla was lagging far behind its goal of producing 5,000 Optimus robots in 2025 due to difficulties with the robot’s hands. Musk wants the hands to be capable of doing everything from working in factories to playing musical instruments. Musk also said in Tuesday’s interview that he expects the cost of manufacturing Optimus to eventually come down to $20,000 to $25,000 per robot once Tesla scales up production.
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Shares in Klarna rose 15% on the buy now, pay later lender’s first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange. The stock closed at $45.82, above the $40 initial public offering price, representing a successful but more muted debut than some recent venture-backed IPOs. Shares of design software firm Figma shares tripled on their first day of trade in July, while those of crypto firm Circle rose 170%. Shares in the latter two companies have since pared some of these gains. Klarna raised $1.37 billion in the IPO, which included a mix of shares sold by the 20-year-old company and its biggest investors, including Sequoia Capital. At the close of trade on Wednesday, Klarna’s market cap stood at roughly $17.5 billion. At its peak in 2021, Klarna was valued at $45.6 billion.
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Amazon’s autonomous ride-hailing company Zoox said Wednesday started to accept rides from members of the public for stops along the casino-lined Las Vegas Strip. Riders can call for a Zoox pick-up on the new Zoox smartphone app. The self-driving cars, which resemble large toaster ovens and don’t have steering wheels, had previously only taken Zoox employees and their families and friends in Las Vegas as passengers. Zoox riders currently do not have to pay as the company awaits regulatory approval. In January it applied for a permit to charge passengers for rides
within Nevada. The company said riders can also join the Zoox waitlist for San Francisco. The Las Vegas launch moves Zoox one step closer to competing with Alphabet’s Waymo, which has already launched commercial operations in several cities. While Waymo has a clear lead, other companies are racing to catch up. Also Thursday, Lyft started offering autonomous rides in Atlanta through a partnership with May Mobility.
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OpenAI has committed to purchasing $300 billion in computing power to train and run its artificial intelligence models from Oracle, one of the partners to OpenAI’s Stargate data center project, according to The Wall Street Journal. The contract, which spans roughly five years starting in 2027, is the largest cloud deal ever signed. OpenAI and Oracle had previously said that they planned to develop an additional 4.5 gigawatts of data center capacity in the U.S., increasing their earlier agreement by nine times. This means that the Oracle data centers used by OpenAI
would consume as much power as Microsoft. Oracle’s CEO Safra Catz said on Wednesday the company added $317 billion in contracts during its last quarter ending on August 31 but didn’t name the customers. Oracle shares jumped by 35% on Wednesday as a result of the increased contracted revenue.
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Perplexity, which runs an artificial intelligence-powered search engine, has secured commitments from investors for $200 million in new funding at a $20 billion valuation, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The new capital comes less than two months after the three-year-old startup r | | | |
