Tesla has reported its first-ever decline in annual revenue on a busy day for corporate earnings that also saw the release of results from Microsoft, Meta and Samsung Electronics. Elon Musk's electric car company said on Wednesday that revenue fell 3 percent year-on-year to $24.9bn in the final quarter of 2025. Revenue for all of 2025 was $94.8bn, down from $97.7bn the previous year. The Austin, Texas-based company also revealed that it had agreed to invest $2bn in Musk's artificial intelligence start-up xAI - the developer of Musk's controversial Grok chatbot - as part of a push to lessen its reliance on the auto market. "Together, the investment and the related framework agreement are intended to enhance Tesla's ability to develop and deploy AI products and services into the physical world at scale," the company said in its earnings report.

Disney has agreed to invest $1bn (£740m) in OpenAI as part of a deal which will let people use many of its iconic characters in the chatbot ChatGPT and video-generation tool Sora. It is the first major studio to license parts of its catalogue to the tech giant, in a move which could have major implications for the studio's future plans. It means fans will be able to generate and share pictures and videos of more than 200 characters from Disney's franchises, including Pixar, Marvel and Star Wars. The move comes as OpenAI faces mounting questions about how its rapidly advancing tech is used - and as anxiety in Hollywood increases over the impact of AI on the creative industries. According to a blog post announcing the news, the list of eligible characters include those from Disney films Zootopia, Moana and Encanto - as well as characters like Star Wars' Luke Skywalker and Marvel's Deadpool.

'We excel at every phase of AI': Nvidia CEO quells Wall Street fears of AI bubble amid market selloff Global share markets rose after Nvidia posted third-quarter earnings that beat Wall Street estimates, assuaging for now concerns about whether the high-flying valuations of AI firms had peaked. On Wednesday, all eyes were on Nvidia, the bellwether for the AI industry and the most valuable publicly traded company in the world, with analysts and investors hoping the chipmaker's third-quarter earnings would dampen fears that a bubble was forming in the sector. Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, opened the earnings call with an attempt to dispel those concerns, saying that there was a major transformation happening in AI, and Nvidia was foundational to that transformation. "There's been a lot of talk about an AI bubble," said Huang. "From our vantage point, we see something very different. As a reminder, Nvidia is unlike any other accelerator. We excel at every phase of AI from pre-training to post-training to inference."

An aerial view of an Amazon Web Services Data Center known as US East 1 in Ashburn, Virginia on 20 October 2025. An aerial view of an Amazon Web Services Data Center known as US East 1 in Ashburn, Virginia on 20 October 2025. Thu 30 Oct 2025 16.50 EDTLast modified on Fri 31 Oct 2025 05.25 EDT Amazon has made its first financial disclosures since the disastrous outage suffered by its cloud computing division that brought everything from smart beds to banks offline. In spite of the global outage, Amazon Web Services has continued to grow, and this quarter reported a 20% increase in revenue year over year. Wall Street estimated that AWS would bring in $32.42bn in net sales in the third quarter, with the company reporting actual revenue of $33bn.

Microsoft's CEO, Satya Nadella, speaks at the company's annual developer conference in Seattle, Washington. Microsoft's CEO, Satya Nadella, speaks at the company's annual developer conference in Seattle, Washington. Tech giant reports earnings of $3.72 per share day after deal with OpenAI pushed value of company to more than $4tn Microsoft blew off concerns of overspending on AI on Wednesday, reporting elevated earnings even as it faced an outage of its cloud computing service, Azure, and its office software suite, 365. The strong earnings report comes a day after a deal with OpenAI pushed the value of the tech giant to more than $4tn. After its Xbox and investor relations pages went down, the company issued a statement that said: "We are working to address an issue affecting Azure Front Door that is impacting the availability of some services."

As some financial leaders fret publicly about the stock market falling to earth, Andrew Ross Sorkin's new book recounts the greatest crash of them all. As stocks plummeted on the morning of October 24th, 1929, a large crowd gathered on Wall Street outside of the New York Stock Exchange. Pat Bologna, a local shoeshiner whose life savings were invested in the market, dodged into a packed brokerage nearby. "Everybody is shouting," he later recalled. "They're all trying to reach the glass booth where the clerks are. Everybody wants to sell out. The boy at the quotation board is running scared. He can't keep up with the speed of the way stocks are dropping. The guy who runs it is Irish. I can't hear what he's saying. But a guy near me shouts, 'the sonofabitch has sold me out!' " The stock-market crash of 1929 occupies a dark but indelible place in the national imagination, and for good reason.

Large Language Models have spread rapidly since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, accompanied by claims of major productivity gains but also concerns about job displacement. This paper examines the short-run labor market effects of LLM adoption by comparing earnings and unemployment across occupations with differing levels of exposure to these technologies. Using a Synthetic Difference in Differences approach, we estimate the impact of LLM exposure on earnings and unemployment. Our findings show that workers in highly exposed occupations experienced earnings increases following ChatGPT's introduction, while unemployment rates remained unchanged. These results suggest that initial labor market adjustments to LLMs operate primarily through earnings rather than worker reallocation.

Has Elon Musk really been awarded a $1 trillion pay deal? Tesla shares jumped 6 percent on Monday after CEO Elon Musk disclosed that he had bought $1bn worth of the company's stock. The move reinforces Musk's push for greater control over Tesla and comes a week after the company's board offered him a $1 trillion pay package over the next decade. Musk's stock purchase - his first open-market buy-up of shares since 2020 - comes at a critical time for Tesla, as it races to transform into an artificial intelligence and robotics firm whilst also grappling with falling sales of electric vehicles (EVs). Last weekend, Pope Leo decried the widening pay gap between corporate bosses such as Elon Musk - whose estimated wealth now stands at $367bn - and ordinary working people, which he said was a major factor in growing global unrest.

Punishment as a mechanism for promoting cooperation has been studied extensively for more than two decades, but its effectiveness remains a matter of dispute. Here, we examine how punishment's impact varies across cooperative settings through a large-scale integrative experiment. We vary 14 parameters that characterize public goods games, sampling 360 experimental conditions and collecting 147,618 decisions from 7,100 participants. Our results reveal striking heterogeneity in punishment effectiveness: while punishment consistently increases contributions, its impact on payoffs (i.e., efficiency) ranges from dramatically enhancing welfare (up to 43% improvement) to severely undermining it (up to 44% reduction) depending on the cooperative context. To characterize these patterns, we developed models that outperformed human forecasters (laypeople and domain experts) in predicting punishment outcomes in new experiments. Communication emerged as the most predictive feature, followed by contribution framing (opt-out vs. opt-in), contribution type (variable vs. all-or-nothing), game length (number of rounds), peer outcome visibility (whether participants can see others' earnings), and the availability of a reward mechanism. Interestingly, however, most of these features interact to influence punishment effectiveness rather than operating independently. For example, the extent to which longer games increase the effectiveness of punishment depends on whether groups can communicate. Together, our results refocus the debate over punishment from whether or not it "works" to the specific conditions under which it does and does not work. More broadly, our study demonstrates how integrative experiments can be combined with machine learning to uncover generalizable patterns, potentially involving interactions between multiple features, and help generate novel explanations in complex social phenomena.

Microsoft, the world's second-most valuable company, is dumping enormous sums of money into its artificial intelligence efforts. At the same time, the company is earning money hand over fist. The enterprise software giant reported fiscal fourth-quarter results that exceeded expectations on Wednesday as the company races to acquire datacenters and talent, which continues to be investigated by investors. The company predicted its capital expenditure for the next fiscal year would top 100bn, a 14% increase from the year prior. It's the fifth quarter in a row that Microsoft has beaten Wall Street's expectations.