US stocks edged higher on Monday as hopes of easing tensions between the US and China rose after the first day of renewed trade talks between the two countries wrapped up on an upbeat note.
Market Snapshot
The S&P 500 rose 0.1%, with the benchmark a little more than 2% off its all-time closing high. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was flat, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite gained about 0.3%.
Market Movers
Tesla rose 4.6% to $308.58 after closing up 3.8% on Friday. Shares of the electric-vehicle company ended the week with a loss of nearly 15%—the stock’s worst weekly decline since the week ended Oct. 20, 2023—including a 14% tumble on Thursday in response to thefeud between CEO Elon Musk and President Donald Trump.
Investors are looking ahead to the launch of Tesla’s robo-taxi service launch in Austin, Texas. Reports have said the date is Thursday, but Tesla hasn’t offered precise details. Analysts at Baird downgrades the stock to Neutral from Outperform.
Apple, meanwhile, kicked off its Worldwide Developers Conference. Shares slipped 1.2% after the event began. The delayed rollout of a highly anticipated artificial-intelligence update to Siri has been a drag on the stock, which remains down 19% this year.
Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, said the update “needed more time to reach our high quality bar, and we look forward to sharing more about it in the coming year.” The company didn’t provide an exact timeline.
Robinhood Markets fell 2% and AppLovin declined 8.2% after neither stock was added to the S&P 500 index on Friday, as many had expected they would be. Barron’s reported last week that Cheniere Energy and Interactive Brokers were possible additions to the S&P 500 but S&P Dow Jones Indices on Friday opted not to make any quarterly changes to the benchmark index. Cheniere was down 5.9%, while Interactive Brokers fell 3.4%.
Nvidia rose 0.6%. CEO Jensen Huang delivered the opening keynote speech at London Tech Week early Monday alongside U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Nvidia also announced several AI initiatives during the conference, such as establishing a U.K. sovereign AI industry forum together with several British companies.
Qualcomm rose 4.1% after the chip maker reached a deal to buy London-listed Alphawave IP Group for $2.4 billion. Qualcomm said in April that it was considering making an offer to buy Alphawave, a leader in high-speed connectivity and custom chip products that enable fast data transfer with lower power consumption.
Warner Bros. Discovery fell 2.9% after the entertainment company it would split into two companies. The move separates Warner’s streaming and studios business, which includes its HBO Max platform, from its global networks division, which includes cable channels including CNN and TNT.
EchoStar tumbled 8.5% after The Wall Street Journal reported the satellite-and-wireless company was considering a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing as it looks to shield its wireless spectrum licenses from the threat of revocation by federal regulators. The Journal cited people familiar with the matter.
IonQ rose 2.7% after agreeing to acquire British quantum computing start-up Oxford Ionics in a deal valued at $1.075 billion. Like IonQ, Oxford Ionics specializes in an architecture called trapped-ion quantum computing, in which charged atomic particles are manipulated by an electric field. The transaction is expected to close this year.
The company also shared the results of a collaborative research project with Nvidia, AstraZeneca, and Amazon that was meant to accelerate the time needed to simulate a chemical reaction. The demonstration reduced the overall expected runtime from months to days, IonQ said.
Intuitive Surgical declined 5.6% to $526.15. The maker of surgical robots was downgraded to Sell from Hold at Deutsche Bank, which cut its stock-price target to $400 from $515. The company has enjoyed a virtual monopoly in soft-tissue surgical instruments since the Food and Drug Administration first approved its da Vinci robot system in 2000. It is likely to face increasing competition from lower-cost remanufactured tools in future years, Deutsche Bank argued.
Market News
OpenAI's annualized revenue hits $10 billion, up from $5.5 billion in December 2024
OpenAI said on Monday that its annualized revenue run rate surged to $10 billion as of June, positioning the company to hit its full-year target amid booming AI adoption.
Its projected annual revenue figure based on current revenue data, which was about $5.5 billion in December 2024, has demonstrated strong growth as the adoption and use of its popular ChatGPT artificial-intelligence models continue to rise.
Warner Bros Discovery splits streaming from cable TV in latest media shakeup
Warner Bros Discovery said it would split into two publicly traded companies, separating its studios and streaming business from its fading cable television networks as the parent of HBO and CNN looks to compete better in the streaming era.
The breakup is the latest unraveling of decades of media consolidation that created global conglomerates spanning content creation, distribution and in some cases, telecommunications.
