Peter Thiel, once one of Donald Trump’s major financial backers in the tech industry, said Thursday that even though he’s not providing money to the Republican presumptive nominee’s campaign this time around, he’d vote for him over President Joe Biden.

“If you hold a gun to my head, I’ll vote for Trump,” Thiel said in an interview on stage at the Aspen Ideas Festival. “I’m not going to give any money to his super PAC.”

Thiel donated $1.25 million to Trump’s campaign in 2016 at a time when the vast majority of tech money was going to Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. Thiel, best known for an early bet on Facebook and for co-founding Palantir, also spoke at the Republican National Convention that year and, after the election, helped organize a meeting between Trump and top execs at Amazon, Apple, Google, Tesla and several other giant tech companies.

However, Thiel later soured on Trump and said last year that he wouldn’t be funding any politician in the 2024 presidential campaign. That’s after he spent $32 million on Republican candidates in the 2022 midterm elections with mixed results.

In Ohio, Trump’s pick, Republican J.D. Vance, defended a GOP-held seat against Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan. But in Arizona, Republican Blake Masters failed in his bid to unseat Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly.

WATCH: Tech for Trump

The entire value of the S&P 500 currently stands at $45.5 trillion, according to FactSet. Tesla CEO Elon Musk claimed on Thursday that his company’s Optimus humanoid robots could eventually make the automaker worth more than half of that.

Musk, who characterized himself as “pathologically optimistic” at the 2024 annual shareholder meeting in Austin, Texas, said Tesla is embarking on not just a “new chapter” in its life, but is about to write an entirely “new book.” Optimus appears to be one of the main characters.

Tesla first revealed its plans to work on humanoid robots in 2021 at an AI Day event, trotting out a dancer in a unitard that looked like a sleek, androgynous robot.

In January, Tesla showed off Optimus robots folding laundry in a demo video that was immediately criticized by robotics engineers for being deceptive. The robots were not autonomous, but were rather being operated with humans at the controls.

At the shareholder event on Thursday, Musk didn’t divulge exactly what Optimus can do today. He suggested the robots some day will perform like R2-D2 and C-3PO in Star Wars. They could cook or clean for you, do factory work, or even teach your children, Musk suggested.

As for shareholder value, Musk said Optimus could be the catalyst for lifting Tesla’s market cap to $25 trillion someday.

Speaking to a crowd consisting mostly of fawning fanboys in an auditorium at the Gigafactory, Musk promised Tesla would move into “limited production” of Optimus in 2025 and test out humanoid robots in its own factories next year.

The company, he predicted, will have “over 1,000, or a few thousand, Optimus robots working at Tesla” in 2025.

This is all far-out stuff even for Musk, who is notorious for making ambitious promises to investors and customers that don’t pan out — from developing software that can turn an existing Tesla into a self-driving vehicle with an upload, to EV battery swapping stations.

Getting to a $25 trillion market cap would mean that Tesla would be worth about eight times Apple’s value today. The iPhone maker is currently the world’s biggest company by market cap, just ahead of Microsoft.

At Thursday’s close, Tesla was valued at about $580 billion, making it the 10th most valuable company in the S&P 500.

Musk didn’t provide a timeframe for reaching $25 trillion. He did say that autonomous vehicles could get the company to a market cap of $5 trillion to $7 trillion.

Musk said he agreed with numbers from long-time Tesla bull Cathie Wood, the CEO of ARK Invest. This week, ARK put a $2,600 price target on Tesla’s stock by 2029, betting on a commercial robotaxi business that the company has yet to enter.

Wood’s price target equals a market cap for Tesla of over $8 trillion.

Musk’s comments at the annual meeting followed the shareholder vote to reinstate the CEO’s $56 billion pay plan, five months after a Delaware court ordered the company to rescind the package. The crowd cheered when the proposal was read aloud, and when preliminary results were announced.

Taking the stage following the readout of the shareholder votes, Musk said, “I just want to start off by saying hot d—! I love you guys.”

Tesla shares have dropped 27% this year as the company reckons with a sales decline that’s tied in part to an aging lineup of electric vehicles and increased competition in China. The company has also implemented steep layoffs. Musk has encouraged investors to look past the current state of the business and more toward a future of autonomous driving, robots and artificial intelligence.

Among his boldest claims on Thursday was Musk’s declaration that Tesla had advanced so far in developing silicon that it’s surpassed Nvidia when it comes to inference, or the process that trained machine learning models use to draw conclusions from new data.

Nvidia shares have soared almost nine-fold since the end of 2022, driven by demand for its AI chips. The company is now worth about $3.2 trillion.

One concern swirling around Musk is his focus on Tesla given all of his other commitments. He owns and runs social media company X, is CEO of SpaceX, and founded The Boring Co. and Neuralink. He launched another startup, xAI, in March last year and the company recently raised $6 billion in venture funding.

Musk was asked by a shareholder at the meeting how important he is, personally, to the future of Tesla.

“I’m a helpful accelerant to that future,” he said, emphasizing his role in innovation.

He said that, when it comes to humanoid robots, other companies, including tech startups, are going after the market. Competitors include Boston Dynamics, Agility, Neura and Apptronik.

“What really matters is, can we be much faster than everyone else and our product be done a few years before theirs and be better,” Musk said.

WATCH: Tesla shareholders approve Musk’s $56 billion pay package

Boeing‘s Starliner is a human-grade space capsule designed to take astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Boeing began work on the capsule in 2014, when it signed a $4.2 billion contract with NASA under the agency’s Commercial Crew Program.

NASA also selected SpaceX for the job, giving Elon Musk’s company $2.6 billion to develop its Crew Dragon capsule.

“The entirety of the Commercial Crew Program was very much a new venture,” said Caleb Henry, director of research at Quilty Space. “Prior to that, NASA relied on a lot of its own engineering talent to get humans to the space station.”

Henry said the program allowed NASA to offload “some of those responsibilities to the private sector.”

“There was some reticence in Congress towards this type of approach,” he said. “It was only because Boeing threw its hat in the ring that Congress and by extension, NASA, were confident enough to actually go forward with this program.”

In the decade since, Boeing has struggled to deliver on the six missions it’s contracted to fly with NASA.

Of the nearly $5 billion Boeing has received to develop Starliner to date, the company has spent $1.5 billion to cover delay overruns. Boeing recently launched its last test, a milestone crewed mission, which it needs to complete before NASA can certify Starliner to begin operational missions.

SpaceX, meanwhile, has completed over a dozen crewed missions to space, launching both NASA astronauts and private citizens since 2020.

Watch the video to learn more about the obstacles that Boeing has faced with its Starliner project and what the future may hold for its long-awaited capsule.

Former President Donald Trump’s campaign debuted an official account on TikTok on Saturday night, the social media platform facing a potential ban in the U.S.

“It’s my honor,” Trump said in his first TikTok post under the handle “@realdonaldtrump,” followed by a montage of him waving to crowds at a Saturday Ultimate Fighting Championship show. That post received 1.5 million likes within 10 hours of going online.

Trump’s TikTok rollout came as his own social media company, Trump Media, took a financial tumble in the wake of the historic verdict that convicted the former president on 34 felony counts in his Manhattan hush money trial.

Trump Media, the parent company of Truth Social trading under the DJT ticker, was down over 5% at market close on Friday, the day after Trump’s conviction, with shares priced at $49. Immediately following Trump’s conviction on Thursday, the stock was down roughly 15% in extended trading hours.

Trump launched Truth Social in early 2022 as an alternative, “non-woke” social media platform after he was banned from sites like Twitter and Facebook following the Jan. 6 Capitol riots. Since then, Trump Media has gone public and the former president now holds a 65% stake in the company.

Truth Social did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment about Trump’s move to TikTok.

Trump is several months later than his Democratic opponent, President Joe Biden, whose reelection campaign launched on TikTok in February. But the presumptive Republican presidential nominee already had over 2 million followers on Sunday, outpacing the Biden campaign’s near 340,000.

The disparity in those follower counts is typical for social media accounts directly attached to a specific candidate, which generally tend to outperform accounts associated with a campaign. For example, as of Sunday, Trump’s direct Truth Social account, “@realDonaldTrump” had over 7 million followers, while his campaign account, “@TeamTrump” had 427,000.

“We refuse to cede any ground to Biden and the Democrats,” Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to NBC News on Sunday. “We will get President Trump’s winning message to every voter possible. He has already gained significant ground with young voters and this is another way to reach them.”

Both candidates joined TikTok despite previously vocalizing national security concerns about the app.

In April, Biden signed into law a foreign aid package with a clause to force TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell the app or else the platform would face a national ban in the U.S.

During his administration, Trump also said he would try to ban TikTok, though he has since flipped that stance. Still, he told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” in a March interview that he believes TikTok could threaten U.S. national security.

Microsoft‘s Build developer conference kicks off on Tuesday, giving the company the opportunity to showcase its latest artificial intelligence projects, following high-profile events this month hosted by OpenAI and Google.

One area where Microsoft has a distinct advantage over others in the AI race is in its ownership of Windows, which gives the company a massive PC userbase.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in January that 2024 will mark the year when AI will become the “first-class part of every PC.”

The company already offers its Copilot chatbot assistant in the Bing search engine and, for a fee, in Office productivity software. Now, PC users will get to hear more about how AI will be embedded in Windows and what they can do with it on new AI PCs.

Build comes days after Google I/O, where the search giant unveiled its most powerful AI model yet and showed how its Gemini AI will work on computers and phones. Prior to Google’s event, OpenAI announced its new GPT-4o model. Microsoft is OpenAI’s lead investor, and its Copilot technology is based on OpenAI’s models..

For Microsoft, the challenge is twofold: keeping a prominent position in AI and bolstering PC sales, which have been in the doldrums for the past two years following an upgrade cycle during the pandemic.

In a recent note on Dell to investors, Morgan Stanley analyst Erik Woodring wrote that he remains “bullish on the PC market recovery” due to commentary from customers and recent “upward revisions to notebook” original design manufacturer (ODM) builds.

Technology industry researcher Gartner estimated that PC shipments increased 0.9% in the quarter after a multi-year slump. Demand for PCs was “slightly better than expected,” Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said on the company’s quarterly earnings call last month.

New AI tools from Microsoft could offer another reason for enterprise and consumer customers to upgrade their aging computers, whether they’re made by HP, Dell or Lenovo.

“While Copilot for Windows does not directly drive monetization it should, we believe, drive up usage of Windows, stickiness of Windows, customers to higher priced more powerful PCs (and therefore more revenue to Microsoft per device), and likely search revenue,” Bernstein analysts wrote in a note to investors on April 26, the day after Microsoft reported earnings.

While Microsoft will provide the software to handle some of the AI tasks sent to the internet, its computers will be powered by chips from AMD, Intel and Qualcomm for offline AI jobs. That could include, for example, using your voice to ask Copilot to summarize a transcription without a connection.

The key hardware addition to an AI PC is what’s called a neural processing unit. NPUs go beyond the capabilities of traditional central processing units (CPUs) and are designed to specifically handle artificial intelligence tasks. Traditionally, they’ve been used by companies like Apple to improve photos and videos or for speech recognition.

Microsoft hasn’t said what AI PCs will be capable of yet without an internet connection. But Google’s PIxel 8 Pro phone, which doesn’t have a full computer processor, can summarize and transcribe recordings, recommend text message responses and more using its Gemini Nano AI.

Computers with Intel’s latest Lunar Lake chips with a dedicated NPU are expected to arrive in late 2024. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chip with an NPU will be available in the middle of this year, while AMD’s latest Ryzen Pro is expected sometime during the quarter.

Intel says the chips allow for things like “real-time language translation, automation inferencing, and enhanced gaming environments.”

Apple has been using NPUs for years and recently highlighted them in its new M4 chip for the iPad Pro. The M4 chip is expected to launch in the next round of Macs sometime this year.

Qualcomm, unlike Intel and AMD, offers chips powered by Arm-based architecture. One of Microsoft’s sessions will talk about “the Next Generation of Windows on Arm,” which will likely cover how Windows runs on Qualcomm chips and how that’s different from Intel and AMD versions of Windows.

Intel still controls 78% of the PC chip market, followed by AMD at 13%, according to recent data from Canalys.

In the past, Qualcomm has promoted Snapdragon Arm-based computers by touting their longer battery life, thinner designs and other benefits like cellular connections. But earlier versions of Qualcomm’s chips were limited in what they offered consumers. In 2018, for example, the company’s Snapdragon 835 chip couldn’t run most Windows applications. 

Microsoft has since improved Windows to handle traditional apps on Arm, but questions remain. The company even has an FAQ page dedicated to computers running on ARM hardware. 

Microsoft will also be hosting sessions like “AI Everywhere” covering how to “accelerate generative AI models” on devices that run in the cloud. 

An “Azure AI Studio” session will look at how developers can create their own Copilot chatbots, which may be similar to what Google and OpenAI are doing with Gemini and ChatGPT. Imagine, for example, a company creating a chatbot that can help employees select health benefits.

WATCH: Investing in the future of AI

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has to testify in a probe by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission concerning his 2022 acquisition of Twitter, a federal judge ordered Saturday.

As CNBC previously reported, the SEC is investigating whether Musk or anyone else committed securities fraud in 2022 as the billionaire began buying stock in Twitter and building a stake ahead of his leveraged buyout of the social media company.

Musk closed his acquisition of Twitter in October 2022 in a deal worth roughly $44 billion and has since rebranded it X.

In the order dated Feb. 10, 2024, federal magistrate judge Laurel Beeler wrote that although Musk and his legal team argued the SEC’s subpoena in this matter amounted to harassment of the billionaire, the federal financial regulator was “within its authority” and its subpoena was “definite, and seeks relevant information” to its investigation.

The federal financial regulator and Musk now have one week to set a date and location for his testimony.

Musk and his attorney Alex Spiro didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for the SEC declined to comment “beyond the public filings for this matter.”

Musk has repeatedly sought to challenge if not strip authority from federal regulatory agencies.

For example, he has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to undo a settlement agreement that he and Tesla struck with the SEC previously. The settlement required Musk to have a “Twitter sitter” approve his tweets about his electric vehicle business before he posts them. Musk’s attorneys have argued that the agreement set an unconstitutional condition on Musk and amounts to a violation of his free speech rights.

In another example, Musk-led defense contractor SpaceX sued the National Labor Relations Board after the federal agency filed a complaint against the company alleging the rocket maker illegally fired employees who signed an open letter critical of Musk. The letter said, among other things, that Musk’s “behavior in the public sphere is a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment for us.” 

SpaceX filed its lawsuit against the NLRB in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas in Brownsville. Attorneys for SpaceX argued in their suit that the very structure of the federal labor board violates the U.S. Constitution. Their suit resembles one brought by a former employee of Starbucks against the NLRB, and seeks to prevent the NLRB’s earlier complaint against SpaceX from moving forward.

Read the full order to compel compliance here.

TikTok has cut about 60 jobs, CNBC confirmed, the latest tech company to downsize at the start of 2024.

A company spokesperson said all of those who were laid off “may apply to any open internal roles, of which there are over 120 similar roles posted currently.”

The job cuts were first reported on Monday evening by NPR. The ByteDance division characterized the layoffs to NPR as part of a routine reorganization that affected staff in sales and advertising who worked in the Los Angeles, New York, and Austin, Texas offices, as well as other global outposts.

Tech companies like Amazon, Alphabet, Unity, Discord and Trend Micro have all cut staff in January, continuing a trend from last year, when the industry slimmed down and slashed costs following an extended boom.

Earlier this week, Tencent’s Riot Games unit said it would cut 11% of its workforce, representing about 530 employees. In a letter to employees that was published as a blog post, Riot Games CEO Dylan Jadeja said the job cuts were necessary to “create focus and move us toward a more sustainable future.”

As of 2023, TikTok employed about 7,000 workers in the U.S. Meanwhile, ByteDance has a global workforce of over 150,000 employees.

In November, ByteDance slashed hundreds of jobs in the company’s gaming division, Nuverse. The layoffs indicated that ByteDance was scaling back its gaming efforts, an area where it’s been competing with Chinese rivals Tencent and NetEase.

“We regularly review our businesses and make adjustments to center on long-term strategic growth areas,” a spokesperson told CNBC at the time. “Following a recent review, we’ve made the difficult decision to restructure our gaming business.”

WATCH: The AI dark horse: Why Apple could win the next evolution of the AI arms race

Salesforce shares rose more than 8% in extended trading on Wednesday after the cloud software vendor reported fiscal third-quarter earnings that topped analysts’ estimates.

Here’s how the company did:

• Earnings: $2.11 per share, adjusted, versus the $2.06 per share expected by LSEG
• Revenue: $8.72 billion versus the $8.72 billion expected by LSEG

Revenue increased 11% from $7.84 billion a year ago. Salesforce, which has historically expanded by well over 20% a year, has seen its growth rates slip in recent quarters as businesses have looked to reduce spending due to economic uncertainties and high interest rates.

However, the stock has jumped more than 70% this year, outperforming the Nasdaq, which has climbed 36%. That’s largely because Salesforce has been able to bolster profits by lowering expenses. In January, the company announced that it was cutting 10% of jobs and reducing some office space as part of a restructuring plan.

Salesforce on Wednesday raised its fiscal 2024 forecast for operating cash flow growth to 33% from 30%. It also said revenue for the fiscal fourth quarter will increase about 10% to between $9.18 billion and $9.23 billion. Analysts were expecting revenue of $9.21 billion, according to LSEG.

“We had another strong quarter of executing on our profitable growth plan we set in motion last year, delivering $8.7 billion in revenue and again raising our operating margin guidance for this fiscal year,” Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said in the press release.

In its biggest unit, which provides customer support, Salesforce saw revenue jump 12% to $2.07 billion. Revenue in the sales software segment also rose 12% to $1.9 billion.  Platform and other revenue, which includes Slack, increased 11% to $1.69 billion.

Salesforce shares rose to $250 after the earnings report. At that level, they’re about 20% off their record high from two years ago.

WATCH: Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff: When I talk to CEOs they are all Slack-first