Paramount Skydance and rival Warner Bros Discovery have agreed to pause their $110bn (£82.8bn) The pause follows lawsuits from 12 US states and the Writers Guild of America (WGA), who argue the deal would harm competition and lead to higher prices for consumers. The decision comes just days after European regulators approved the deal, on the condition Paramount would end a major film distribution partnership with Universal Pictures in the region. With the deal on hold in the US, emergency court hearings have now been cancelled. Despite the court freeze, Paramount and Warner Bros insist that combining their operations is essential to compete with digital streaming giants and tech conglomerates.

Image caption, Google and its paranet company Alphabet have spent huge amounts on AI. Google parent Alphabet saw its business continue to grow in recent months, yet growing spending on artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure put its leftover cash into negative territory. The company's free cash flow, the cash it maintained after paying for operations and investments, came in at negative $5.9bn (£4.3bn) for the first time in at least a decade, according to its past financial records. Alphabet's spending on AI is now expected to hit as much as $205bn this year, an increase from $190bn, as major tech companies race to build around a new wave of the technology. Meanwhile, Alphabet's combined quarterly revenue hit $119.8bn, up 23% compared with the same time last year. But the company's stock fell 4% in after hours trading.

Tesla reported its second-quarter earnings on Wednesday, disclosing far lower profits than expected. The company's already beleaguered stock, which had fallen about 14% this year to date, dipped further following the earnings report. Elon Musk's automaker, once the pinnacle of his tech empire, has taken a back seat to SpaceX. Musk's rocket and AI company held the largest stock market debut in history last month, turning the richest man on Earth into the world's first trillionaire, though his net worth has since fallen from its peak. Tesla revealed earnings of 31 cents per share, a measurement of profits divided by the number of outstanding shares, less than the 51 cents per share Wall Street predicted.

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Modular, one of the most promising chip software startups of the AI era, heads for a multibillion-dollar exit. Qualcomm will acquire the Silicon Valley chip startup Modular for nearly $4 billion. The companies announced the acquisition on Wednesday; Qualcomm said it expects to issue up to 19.2 million shares of common stock in the deal, which works out to just under $4 billion based on the company's last closing share price. The deal, which includes $300 million for Modular employees, comes nine months after the chip startup raised $250 million at a $1.6 billion valuation . It's expected to close in the second half of this year.

Superhuman announced that it has acquired GPTZero. This AI identification business offers services such as hallucination and plagiarism detection as well as a nifty little tool that displays how much of the internet is artificial intelligence. Superhuman said it plans to integrate GPTZero into its Superhuman Go AI assistant to improve the reach of its existing efforts around AI and authenticity. Teachers and students will still be the priority audience for Superhuman following the acquisition. For its part, GPTZero emphasized that Superhuman would also help put its tools in places where people were already reading and writing.

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Musk's SpaceX buys AI coding start-up for $60bn days after IPO SpaceX has agreed to buy AI coding start-up Cursor for $60bn (£45bn) just days after its bumper initial public offering (IPO). Elon Musk's rocket company will take over Anysphere, which makes the artificial intelligence coding agent. The move comes after SpaceX joined New York's tech-focused Nasdaq stock exchange on Friday in the biggest ever listing, valuing it at more than $2tn and raising $85.7bn . A surge in SpaceX's share price on Monday and Tuesday saw the company overtake Amazon to become the world's fifth most valuable company. The companies have been partners since April, when SpaceX announced it had the right to either buy it for $60bn, or pay $10bn for the work they have done together.

The commercial was submitted by the Freedom of the Press Foundation to run during Donald Trump's UFC event. It criticized the $111 billion merger as a threat to the First Amendment. Viewers who tuned into the Paramount+ livestream of UFC Freedom 250 on Sunday night, held to mark President Trump' s 80th birthday as well as the nation's semiquincentennial, were treated to the surreal spectacle of mixed martial artists beating each other bloody in a massive cage installed on the White House lawn. But there was one bruising blow they missed: an advertisement blasting the $111 billion merger agreement between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery . That's because Paramount refused to air the ad, according to Freedom of the Press Foundation, the nonprofit advocacy group that submitted it to run during the event.

Elon Musk's SpaceX valued at nearly $1.8tn ahead of record share sale SpaceX has raised $75bn (£56bn) from financial firms ahead of it becoming a publicly traded company on Friday, in what is expected to be the highest-value stock listing in history. In a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the space exploration and artificial intelligence (AI) company said it had sold $75bn in shares priced at $135 each. The share price matches the estimate SpaceX gave last week, leaving the firm's expected initial stock market value to be nearly $1.8tn. At that value, chief executive Elon Musk - already the richest man in the world - is set to become the world's first trillionaire. Once shares start trading, their value could rise or fall depending on how many shares are made available for sale, and how strong the demand is for those shares.