Business
Robinhood’s note on 10% layoffs shows blaming AI isn’t cutting it

It appears using AI as a cover story for cutting jobs is fast falling out of fashion.
Unlike many of his tech industry peers who have cut thousands of jobs this year citing the need to restructure their teams to make the most of AI, Robinhood’s CEO Vlad Tenev conspicuously made no mention of AI in his note to employees announcing that the company is letting go 10% of its full-time employees, or about 290 people.
Nor did the company’s regulatory filing announcing the move, which instead framed the cuts as a restructuring exercise.
Still, Tenev did say the company would use “frontier technologies to push our execution even further,” which sounds like a conscious effort to avoid even naming AI. Which isn’t surprising: Sentiment against AI and related infrastructure projects has been trending lower even as a small minority of tech executives make ridiculous bank.
But Tenev did add to the ongoing narrative that it’s now necessary for companies to operate with smaller teams and “flatter organizational structures,” writing: “We cannot default to operating as a heavily-layered organization. We must be a lean, hyper-focused team where every single individual is empowered to make a massive impact.”
We’ve seen companies of various stripes, from Amazon, Block, Coinbase, GitLab, and Intuit employing similar language in their layoff announcements, indicating that large teams, bureaucracy, and siloed departments are now seen as undesirable line items at a time when AI tools promise to significantly improve productivity.
Some even think it’s a tacit allusion to the fact that tech companies over-hired following the COVID-19 pandemic, and are now scaling back as expenses begin to pile up — especially those associated with massive AI usage.
Regardless, these companies are doing quite well. Tech stocks have surged broadly, spurred by record revenues, improving profit margins (GitLab reported 88% gross margin last month), skyrocketing demand for cloud services, and the belief that the billions being poured into data center projects will produce returns that are orders of magnitudes higher.
Robinhood itself reported a 15% improvement in first-quarter revenue in April, and the company said its second quarter is looking better thanks to rising prediction market fees, subscription revenue, and strong equity and option-trading volumes as markets stabilize.
The company said on Tuesday it is also closing “a small number” of open roles, and that it would incur about $28 million in costs related to the cuts.
Business
Fed Chair Warsh expected to withhold ‘dot’ from central bank’s interest rate outlook
Tom Williams | Cq-roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images
When the Federal Reserve wraps up its policy meeting Wednesday, one important thing could be missing — a dot.
The central bank’s Federal Open Market Committee is set to release its quarterly update of where individual officials expect interest rates to head this year and through 2028 and beyond. Markets closely parse the grid, known more commonly as the “dot plot,” for information on how Fed officials view the economy and its impact on monetary policy.
However, most Fed watchers on Wall Street expect new Chair Kevin Warsh won’t participate, either because he feels he’s not ready after having only been in office since May 22 — or simply because he doesn’t like the dot plot and its implications for “forward guidance.”
Declining to submit a dot would counter some 14 years of post-financial crisis practice for the Fed, and risk alienating other FOMC officials who favor the way it helps them communicate with the public. However, it also could be an effective first step for a central bank leader who has vowed fundamental changes for how the institution operates.
“It seems to me fairly likely that he doesn’t want to submit a rate forecast,” said Bill English, former head of monetary affairs at the Fed and now a professor at Yale. “There may be others on the committee who don’t particularly like the dot plot, who might be willing to do that, too.”
‘The Fed’s human’
Warsh objects to the dot plot and other methods of forward guidance because he believes they limit the Fed’s decision-making capabilities.
The dot plot belongs to a larger set of data called the Summary of Economic Projections, which also includes the outlook for unemployment, inflation and gross domestic product. The SEP is updated quarterly and includes the median outlook for each category and as such is not an official forecast but merely the midpoint of the range among FOMC meeting participants.
Bank of America economist Aditya Bhave expects Warsh won’t submit a dot, while Goldman Sachs economist David Mericle said in a note that, “We assume that Warsh will not submit dots in light of his past criticism of forward guidance, but we are not sure.”
During his confirmation hearing in April, Warsh cited the SEP as part of a broader problem at the Fed with overcommunication. Specifically, he cited the Fed’s mistaken “transitory” call on inflation in 2021-22 that led to a series of aggressive rate hikes to combat the biggest price surge in 40 years.
“The Fed tells the whole world what their dots are going to be, what their forecasts are going to be,” he said then. “Well, the Fed’s human. Then they hold onto those forecasts longer than they should. I think if the Fed were to wait until it gets into a meeting before making a decision, that incremental deliberation can keep the central bank from compounding its errors. I think these are big changes that are needed.”
Markets are watching
Still, markets hinge on the dot plot and the rest of the SEP, and may have to learn to live without it if Warsh has his way.
“To me it never made a lot of sense that [the SEP] at times was market moving, because its accuracy has been at best middling,” said Liz Ann Sonders, chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab. “But it is an avenue through which the Fed expresses a view, and the market tends to move on those views.”
Economist Claudia Sahm cautioned that should Warsh and others not participate, it could send the wrong message to markets. Specifically, she said investors could take the news to mean that Warsh is trying to “hide the hawkish shift” in the committee to fight inflation with elevated rates.
“Neutralizing the SEP this week might address some of Warsh’s concerns, but it would almost certainly create new ones,” wrote Sahm, chief economist at New Century Advisors. “A Fed that appears to be concealing its own debate could look complacent about inflation, which is exactly the credibility it can’t afford to lose.”
This meeting is expected to be an interesting test of Warsh’s new communications strategy.
In addition to his views on the dot plot and SEP, markets also will be watching for changes to the post-meeting statement and his views on whether he will continue to hold news conferences after each meeting.
Business
Rivian laying off hundreds of workers amid R2 launch
Rivian said Tuesday it was laying off hundreds of workers, or less than 2% of its workforce, as the electric vehicle maker aims to narrow losses.
The layoffs affect some teams in the service and customer segments, according to a spokesperson. The company had 15,232 employees across North America and Europe at the end of last year.
“We recently restructured a handful of teams within Rivian as we work to profitably scale our business,” the company said in a statement.
The layoffs come a week after the automaker officially launched deliveries of its key new vehicle, the R2 SUV. The R2 is meant to transform Rivian from a niche EV manufacturer that sells luxury vehicles into a more mainstream brand like U.S. EV leader Tesla . The layoffs were first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
Rivian has said it hopes to achieve profitability with the R2. It has never turned an annual profit.
The EV maker lost $3.6 billion last year, while only delivering 42,247 vehicles, according to company filings. Its automotive segment lost about $6,000 per vehicle it delivered during the first quarter of this year.
Rivian and other EV manufacturers are increasingly facing a more challenging market than they did in recent years amid changing regulations under the Trump administration, including the elimination of a $7,500 federal incentive for purchasing an EV.
Business
General Motors announces new defense partnership with Lockheed Martin
Automaker General Motors on Tuesday announced a new partnership with defense company Lockheed Martin to scale manufacturing and expand production capabilities.
The deal was facilitated by the U.S. Department of Defense, according to Bruce Brown, GM’s vice president of strategy at GM Defense, and will focus on munitions.
“What makes this moment especially important is that the country needs more than great technology. It also needs the capacity to build, scale and deliver reliably,” Brown said on a call with reporters. “This is where GM can help. Across our company, we bring deep experience in advanced engineering, digital development, supply chain discipline and manufacturing at scale.”
Lockheed Chief Operating Officer Frank St. John said it was too early to say what projects it would invest in with GM Defense.
Executives from both companies said on the call that the collaboration will allow for more growth at a time when the country is ramping up its production of defense parts.
“Together, we will explore opportunities across three important areas: improving production readiness and scalable manufacturing environments; strengthening supply chains and identifying ways to increase resilience; and applying advanced manufacturing and design approaches [that] can help improve efficiency and accelerate delivery,” St. John said.
Lockheed Martin is investing $9 billion through 2030 to modernize 20 of its facilities and supply bases, St. John added. GM said it will spend $7 billion on research and development in the U.S., according to Brown.
The executives said the partnership will be focused on “high-rate manufacturing” at scale and expanding production capacity. They added that the collaboration is still in early stages and that they need to further define what the potential for future contracts may be. They are working under a memorandum of understanding.
The automaker built tanks for the country during World War II. Its GM Defense unit is one of the company’s newer but fast-growing business segments, reestablished in 2017 with customers including the U.S. Army, Secret Service and NASA.
“America is stronger when two companies with deep manufacturing roots come together to help expand speed, scale and resilience in the defense industrial base. That is why Lockheed Martin and GM are announcing this collaboration,” Brown said on the call.
The partnership comes as President Donald Trump has been pushing for more American manufacturing to bring more production and reshoring into the country. The U.S. has also seen its defense stockpiles fall because of the wars in Ukraine and Iran.
The White House has held discussions with Ford and GM about better supporting the country’s defense industry.
— CNBC’s Michael Wayland contributed to this report.
Business
Leaked financial docs show OpenAI is losing billions of dollars a year
As OpenAI files SEC paperwork ahead of an expected initial public stock offering, newly leaked financial documents show a company with quickly growing revenues that are currently being overwhelmed by even larger expenses.
The audited financial statements, obtained by independent journalist Ed Zitron, show OpenAI’s reported revenue growing from $3.7 billion in 2024 to $13.07 billion in 2025. The Financial Times, which reviewed the same documents, writes that the company’s monthly revenues had grown to nearly $2 billion by the end of 2025, suggesting that its ongoing revenue rates continued to grow throughout the year.
But the company’s fast-growing revenues are still dwarfed by its even more significant expenses. OpenAI’s total revenues in both of the last two years were outpaced by research and development alone, which grew from a $7.81 billion line item in 2024 to a massive $19.18 billion cost in 2025. Those numbers seem to reflect the significant costs OpenAI incurred in training new models and include $10.59 billion in R&D costs paid to Microsoft alone in 2025.
On top of that, OpenAI’s “cost of revenue” (i.e., the money spent producing and distributing the product) increased from $2.65 billion in 2024 to $7.5 billion in 2025. This cost line likely reflects the significant compute costs incurred at “inference time” as the company’s models respond to a growing number of user prompts. Costs associated with sales and marketing also grew from $1.11 billion in 2024 to $5.73 billion in 2025.
All told, OpenAI’s day-to-day “loss from operations” increased from $8.78 billion in 2024 to $20.92 billion in 2025, a concerning direction for a company that is telling investors it hopes to be profitable by 2030. But measured as a percentage of revenues, the company’s operating losses slightly improved year to year, from 237 percent in 2024 to 160 percent in 2025.
Gotta spend money to make money
Operating numbers aside, OpenAI’s headline “net loss” number of just over $5 billion in 2024 ballooned to nearly $39 billion in 2025. But the 2025 number includes a significant accounting charge related to investor valuations that shifted amid the company’s 2025 conversion to a for-profit structure. The Financial Times cites “a person familiar with the matter” in reporting that this non-recurring charge was approximately $30 billion and that OpenAI’s 2025 net loss amounted to a more reasonable-looking $8 billion without it.
As OpenAI tries to shift all these losses to eventual profits, it will have to start reining in its costs, especially the massive (and growing) R&D costs associated with model training. It will also have to deal with enterprise customers that are beginning to balk at token-based pricing and starting to demand a measurable return on investment for their AI spending. And on the subscription side, pressure from rival Anthropic may force the company to lower prices, which could further increase operating losses in the near term.
OpenAI shut down its Sora video generation model in March. Around the same time, OpenAI CEO of Applications Fidji Simo told employees that the company would be cutting back on “side quests” and focusing on its core coding and business users.
In March, OpenAI raised $122 billion of financing in a funding round that valued the company at $852 billion. The company reports over 900 million weekly active users of ChatGPT, though only about 50 million of those are paid subscribers.
Business
The Iran War Permanently Altered the Global Economy
The framework deal between the United States and Iran sets the stage for an end to the bursts of violence and debilitating disruption of energy deliveries and trade in the Persian Gulf. But don’t expect economies around the globe to simply pick up where they left off before the United States and Israel began bombing Iran on Feb. 28.
The war has set in motion changes that will be hard to reverse.
The global energy order is being reshaped.
The near shutdown in oil and gas deliveries from the Middle East and the leap in prices are causing a shift in power. Energy producers from the Gulf to the Americas are jockeying to maintain or increase their dominance, and customers are struggling to reduce their dependency and shore up their supply.
As a result, the energy market is changing, the energy mix is changing and the energy players are changing.
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