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

Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Google were the four leading global brands at the end of 2023, according to consulting firm Interbrand. They’re are also four of the world’s five most valuable companies.

The other is Nvidia, which for a time this week, surpassed Microsoft to become the largest company in the world by market cap.

But despite its $3.1 trillion valuation (it reached $3.3 trillion before a two-day slide), Nvidia doesn’t even crack the top 100 most iconic names on Interbrand’s most recent list, which is populated by such companies as McDonald’s, Starbucks, Disney and Netflix.

Nvidia’s historic rise in valuation — the stock has climbed almost ninefold since the end of 2022 — has been driven almost entirely by demand for its graphics processing units (GPUs) that are at the heart of the boom in generative artificial intelligence and, more broadly, by the hype over AI. Nvidia has over 80% of the market for chips used to train and deploy AI software like ChatGPT. A handful of huge tech companies are the primary buyers of its chips.

The speed of Nvidia’s ascent and its relative lack of contact with consumers along the way combines to put the 31-year-old company’s brand recognition on Main Street far behind its allure on Wall Street. No. 100 on Interbrand’s list for 2023 is Japanese camera maker Canon, with Dutch brewer Heineken at No. 99.

“As a product company recently moving onto a global stage, Nvidia has not had time, nor has it dedicated resources, to change its role of brand and strengthen its brand to protect future revenue,” Greg Silverman, Interbrand’s global director of brand economics, said in an email. The risk for Nvidia, Silverman added, is that its “weak brand strength will limit how valuable it will be, despite its market cap heights.”

A spokesperson for Nvidia declined to comment.

Nvidia’s annual revenue growth has exceeded 200% in each of the past three quarters. For fiscal 2025, revenue is expected to almost double from a year earlier to over $120 billion, according to LSEG.

The company’s data center GPUs, which made up 85% of sales in the most recent quarter, are installed in massive facilities, and typically require a team of expensive data science and supercomputing experts to configure them to efficiently create AI software.

By contrast, Apple, ranked No. 1 by Interbrand, makes the vast majority of its money by selling iPhones and other devices to consumers across the globe. Microsoft, ranked second, is an enterprise sales giant, but is ubiquitously known for its Windows and Office software. Third-ranked Amazon strives to be consumers’ everything store, and No. 4 Google is, for many people, the front door to the internet.

Rounding out Interbrand’s top 10 are South Korean electronics giant Samsung, along with three car companies (Toyota, Mercedes-Benz and BMW), Coca-Cola and Nike.

Further down the list, at No. 24, is Nvidia rival Intel, which is best known for making the processor at the heart of laptops and PCs and for its long-running “Intel Inside” advertising campaign. Even Hewlett Packard Enterprise, a company that builds servers, made the list at No. 91.

However, a competing survey shows that Nvidia’s brand value is catching up to that of its peers.

In a ranking of the 100 most valuable global brands published this month by Kantar BrandZ, Nvidia landed at No. 6, leaping 18 places from its prior survey. The brand’s overall valued jumped 178% in a year to an estimate of about $202 billion. Kantar surveys enterprise buyers to evaluate brands that primarily sell to other businesses to come up with a total estimate of brand value.

“Nvidia is pound for pound as relevant and meaningful to that B2B buyer that’s looking to make big, large purchases in-house for their company as Apple is to the consumer who’s buying an iPad or a Mac,” Marc Glovsky, senior brand strategist at Kantar, told CNBC.

And while Nvidia may not be a name known to your parents — or your kids — it does have resonance in a particular corner of the consumer world. Just ask your hard-core gaming buddy.

When Nvidia was founded in 1991, AI was a nascent field. The company’s primary focus was on designing chips that could draw digital triangles quickly, a basic capability that led to a huge expansion in 3D games.

For years, Nvidia, and its GeForce brand and green logo were well known to the type of people who tweaked their computers to run the most advanced games. Nvidia provides the chips for the Nintendo Switch console, which has shipped over 140 million units around the world.

Unlike Intel, Nvidia never put its name in front of consumers with flashy ad campaigns. And gaming is now just a nice side business for chipmaker. In the latest quarter, it accounted for $2.6 billion of revenue, or 10% of total sales, rising 18% year over year.

When it comes to Nvidia’s most important products, companies and institutions vying for its AI chips have to go through an extensive quoting and sales process, often through a computer-equipment company, like Dell or HPE. Those vendors sell complete systems, including memory, a central processor and other parts. Even experts who want to train AI models are more likely to rent Nvidia access through a cloud provider than build their own server clusters.

Still, Nvidia’s name recognition is rapidly increasing. Among retail investors, Nvidia has emerged as the most widely held stock, according to data collected and published last month by Vanda Research.

And while the name didn’t make Interbrand’s top 100 list for 2023, the firm’s data shows its brand awareness quadrupled in the past 12 months, which will help when it’s time for the next ranking, Silverman said.

Maybe by then people will know how to say its name, a topic that’d been the source of debate on obscure gaming forums. The company pronounces it en-VID-ia.

WATCH: The ‘Magnificent Seven’ should have another good earnings season

The Food and Drug Administration on Monday approved Merck‘s new vaccine designed to protect adults from a bacteria known as pneumococcus that can cause serious illnesses and a lung infection called pneumonia, the drugmaker said.

Merck’s shot, called Capvaxive, specifically protects against 21 strains of that bacteria to prevent a severe form of pneumococcal disease that can spread to other parts of the body and lead to pneumonia. It’s the first pneumococcal conjugate vaccine designed specifically for adults and aims to provide broader protection than the available shots on the market, according to the drugmaker.

Healthy adults can suffer from pneumococcal disease. But older patients and those with chronic or immunocompromising health conditions are at increased risk for the illness, especially the more serious or so-called “invasive” form. 

Invasive pneumococcal disease can lead to meningitis, an infection that causes inflammation in the area surrounding the brain and spinal cord, and an infection in the bloodstream called bacteremia. 

“If you have chronic lung disease, even asthma, you have a higher risk of getting sick with pneumococcal disease, and then being in the hospital, losing out on work,” Heather Platt, Merck’s product development team lead for the newly cleared vaccine, told CNBC in an interview. “Those are things that have a real impact on adults and children, their quality of life.”

Around 150,000 U.S. adults are hospitalized with pneumococcal pneumonia each year, Platt said. Death from the more serious form of the disease is highest among adults 50 and above, Merck said in a release in December.

Even after the FDA approval, the company’s single-dose vaccine won’t reach patients just yet. An advisory panel to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will meet on June 27 to discuss who should be eligible for the shot.

Platt said Merck will support the committee’s decision and is ready to supply the vaccine by late summer. 

Some analysts view Capvaxive as a key growth driver for Merck as it prepares to offset losses from its blockbuster cancer drug Keytruda, which will lose exclusivity in the U.S. in 2028. 

The market for pneumococcal conjugate vaccines is currently around $7 billion and could grow to be worth more than $10 billion over the next several years, according to a November note from Cantor Fitzgerald analysts. 

Merck’s newly approved shot could boost its competitive edge in that space, which includes drugmaker Pfizer. Merck currently markets two pneumococcal shots, but neither is specifically designed for adults. For example, the company’s existing shot Vaxneuvance is approved in the U.S. for patients 6 weeks of age and older.

Pfizer’s single-dose pneumococcal vaccine, Prevnar 20, is the current leader in the market for adults. But Merck expects its new shot to capture the majority of market share among adults, Platt said. 

“We do expect there to be rapid uptake of” Capvaxive, she said, adding that the company is confident that data on the shot will “really resonate” with clinicians and policymakers. 

Merck’s pneumococcal vaccine protects against eight strains of the bacteria that are not included in any other approved shot for the disease. Those eight strains account for roughly 30% of invasive pneumococcal disease cases in patients 65 and above, according to a release from Merck, citing CDC data from 2018 to 2021. 

The 21 strains included in Merck’s shot account for roughly 85% of invasive pneumococcal disease cases in adults 65 and above, Merck, citing the CDC data. Meanwhile, Pfizer’s Prevnar targets strains that only account for roughly 51% of cases in that age group, based on the same CDC data. 

The FDA’s approval is partly based on Merck’s late-stage trial called STRIDE-3 that pitted the vaccine against Pfizer’s Prevnar 20 in adults 18 and up who had not previously received a pneumococcal vaccine.

Correction: This story has been updated to reflect 150,000 U.S. adults are hospitalized with pneumococcal pneumonia each year.

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

Databricks, the data analytics software vendor that’s among the most richly valued private U.S. tech companies, told investors on Wednesday that annualized revenue will reach $2.4 billion by the midpoint of this year.

Annualized sales through July, or the first six months of fiscal 2025, will increase 60% from a year earlier, Databricks CFO Dave Conte said at an investor briefing concurrent with the company’s Data and AI Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday.

Databricks’ growth contrasts with parts of the software industry that have continued to struggle since soaring inflation and rising interest rates in 2022 put an end to the extended bull market. In recent weeks Okta, Salesforce, UiPath and other software companies have blamed disappointing results or guidance on the economy or other macro issues.

“Obviously there’s some volatility going on in enterprise software, but I’ve been really eager to get up and share how we’re performing financially,” Conte said. “It’s pretty exciting.”

Databricks is one of a handful of prominent venture-backed software makers that have long been on the path to an IPO. Others include Canva, Figma and Stripe. However, the IPO market has been quiet for over two years, even with some activity in 2024. In April, security software company Rubrik debuted on the New York Stock Exchange.

While Conte didn’t provide an update on Databricks’ plans to go public, he did say that business is strengthening. In March, the company told media outlets outlets that it generated $1.6 billion in revenue for the year ending Jan. 31, up more than 50% year over year. The 11-year-old startup had an annualized run rate of $1.5 billion and 50% growth for the quarter that ended July 31, 2023.

When it issued those figures in September, Databricks said it had raised $500 million in funding, valuing the company at $43 billion. Top competitor Snowflake, which debuted on the NYSE in 2020, was valued at $43.6 billion at the end of Wednesday’s trading session.

In the January quarter, Databricks saw 221 transactions that exceeded $1 million, Conte said. Existing clients are spending more, and the company is adding Fortune 500 clients, he said. Net revenue retention in the 2024 fiscal year, which ended in January, was higher than 140%. That figure indicates growth from existing customers.

Meanwhile, Databricks is investing in growth. Research and development spending as a percentage of revenue was 33% in each of the past three fiscal years, compared with 19% for its peer group and 23% for a group of 89 companies that have gone public since 2018, Conte said. Databricks’ subscription gross margin for the 2024 fiscal year was above 80%.

Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi told reporters in a briefing on Wednesday that some growth is coming from the data warehouse product the company launched in 2020. That business topped $400 million in annualized revenue.

“I think by any B2B standard, it’s one of the fastest-growing probably out there,” Ghodsi said.

Databricks and Snowflake have been trying to reduce costs of cleaning up and running queries for clients by using a standard format called Apache Iceberg. Last week Databricks said it was paying over $1 billion to buy Tabular, a startup whose founders created Iceberg. Snowflake was also bidding for Tabular, CNBC reported.

WATCH: Everybody is interested in building their own AI models today, says Databricks CEO

For years, Apple avoided using the acronym AI when talking about its products. Not anymore.

The boom in generative artificial intelligence, spawned in late 2022 by OpenAI, has been the biggest story in the tech industry of late, lifting chipmaker Nvidia to a $3 trillion market cap and causing a major shifting of priorities at Microsoft, Google and Amazon, which are all racing to add the technology into their core services.

Investors and customers now want to see what the iPhone maker has in store.

New AI features are coming at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), which takes place on Monday at Apple’s campus in Cupertino, California. Apple CEO Tim Cook has teased “big plans,” a change of approach for a company that doesn’t like to talk about products before they’re released.

WWDC isn’t typically a major investor attraction. On the first day, the company announces annual updates to its iOS, iPadOS, WatchOS and MacOS software in what’s usually a two-hour videotaped keynote launch event emceed by Cook. This year, the presentation will be screened at Apple’s headquarters. App developers then get a week of parties and virtual workshops where they learn about the new Apple software.

Apple fans get a preview of the software coming to iPhones. Developers can get to work updating their apps. New hardware products, if they appear at all, are not the showcase.

But this year, everyone will be listening for the most hyped acronym in tech.

With more than 1 billion iPhones in use, Wall Street wants to hear what AI features are going to make the iPhone more competitive against Android rivals and how the company can justify its investment in developing its own chips.

Investors have rewarded companies that show a clear AI strategy and vision. Nvidia, the primary maker of AI processors, has seen its stock price triple in the past year. Microsoft, which is aggressively incorporating OpenAI into its products, is up 28% over the past year. Apple is only up 9% over that same period, and has seen the other two companies surpass it in market cap.

“This is the most important event for Cook and Cupertino in over a decade,” Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush, told CNBC. “The AI strategy is the missing piece in the growth puzzle for Apple and this event needs to be a showstopper and not a shrug-the-shoulders event.”

Taking the stage will be executives including software chief Craig Federighi, who will likely address the real-life uses of Apple’s AI, whether it should be run locally or in massive cloud clusters and what should be built into the operating system versus distributed in an app.

Privacy is also a key issue, and attendees will likely want to know how Apple can deploy the data-hungry technology without compromising user privacy, a centerpiece of the company’s marketing for over half a decade.

“At WWDC, we expect Apple to unveil its long-term vision around its implementation of generative AI throughout its diverse ecosystem of personal devices,” wrote Gil Luria, an analyst at D.A. Davidson, in a note this week. “We believe that the impact of generative AI to Apple’s business is one of the most profound in all of technology, and unlike much of the innovation in AI that’s impacting the developer or enterprise, Apple has a clear opportunity to reach billions of consumer devices with generative AI functionality.”

Last month, OpenAI revealed a voice mode for its AI software called ChatGPT-4o.

In a short demo, OpenAI researchers held an iPhone and spoke directly to the bot inside the ChatGPT app, which was able to do impressions, speak fluidly and even sing. The conversation was snappy, the bot gave advice and the voice sounded like a human. Further demos at the live event showed the bot singing, teaching trigonometry, translating and telling jokes.

Apple users and pundits immediately understood that OpenAI had demoed a preview of what Apple’s Siri could be in the future. Apple’s voice assistant debuted in 2011 and since has gained a reputation for not being useful. It’s rigid, only able to answer a small proportion of well-defined queries, partially because it’s based on older machine learning techniques.

Apple could team up with OpenAI to upgrade Siri next week. It’s been discussing licensing chatbot technology from other companies, too, including Google and Cohere, according to a report from The New York Times.

Apple declined to comment on an OpenAI partnership.

One possibility is that Apple’s new Siri won’t compete directly with fully featured chatbots, but will improve its current features, and toss off queries that can only be answered by a chatbot to a partner. It’s close to how Apple’s Spotlight search and Siri work now. Apple’s system tries to answer the question, but if it can’t, it turns to Google. That agreement is part of a deal worth $18 billion per year to Apple.

Apple might also shy away from a full-throated embrace of an OpenAI partnership or chatbot. One reason is that a malfunctioning chatbot could generate embarrassing headlines, and could undermine the company’s emphasis on user privacy and personal control of user data.

“Data security will be a key advantage for the company and we expect them to spend time talking about their privacy efforts during the WWDC as well,” Citi analyst Atif Malik said in a recent note.

OpenAI’s technology is based on web scraping, and ChatGPT user interactions are used to improve the model itself, a technique that could violate some of Apple’s privacy principles.

Large language models like OpenAI’s still have problems with inaccuracies or “hallucinations,” like when Google’s search AI said last month that President Barack Obama was the first Muslim president. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently found himself in the middle of a thorny societal debate about deepfakes and deception when he denied accusations from actress Scarlett Johansson that OpenAI’s voice mode had ripped off her voice. It’s the kind of conflict that Apple executives prefer to avoid.

Outside of Apple, AI has become reliant on big server farms using powerful Nvidia processors paired with terabytes of memory to crunch numbers.

Apple, by contrast, wants its AI features to run on iPhones, and iPads, and Macs, which operate on battery power. Cook has highlighted Apple’s own chips as superior for running AI models.

“We believe in the transformative power and promise of AI, and we believe we have advantages that will differentiate us in this new era, including Apple’s unique combination of seamless hardware, software, and services integration, groundbreaking Apple Silicon with our industry-leading neural engines, and our unwavering focus on privacy,” Cook told investors in May on an earnings call.

Samik Chatterjee, an analyst at JPMorgan, wrote in a note this month that, “We expect Apple’s presentation at WWDC keynote to be focused on the features and the on-device capabilities as well as the GenAI models being run on-device to enable those features.”

In April, Apple published research about AI models it calls “efficient language models” that would be able to run on a phone. Microsoft is also publishing research on the same concept. One of Apple’s “OpenELM” models has 1.1 billion parameters, or weights — far smaller than OpenAI’s 2020 GPT-3 model which has 175 billion parameters, and smaller even than the 70 billion parameters in one version of Meta’s Llama, which is one of the most widely used language models.

In the paper, Apple’s researchers benchmarked the model on a MacBook Pro laptop running Apple’s M2 Max chip, showing that these efficient models don’t necessarily need to connect to the cloud. That can improve response speed, and provide a layer of privacy, because sensitive questions could be answered on the device itself, rather than being sent back to Apple servers.

Some of the features built into Apple’s software could include providing users a summary of their missed text messages, image generation for new emojis, code completing in the company’s development software Xcode, or drafting email responses, according to Bloomberg.

Apple could also decide to load up its M2 Ultra chips in its data centers to process AI queries that need more horsepower, Bloomberg reported.

WWDC won’t strictly be about AI.

The company has more than 2.2 billion devices in use, and customers want improved software and new apps.

One potential upgrade could be Apple’s adoption of RCS, an improvement to the older system of text messaging known as SMS. Apple’s messages app diverts texts between iPhones to its own iMessage system, which displays conversations as blue bubbles. When an iPhone texts an Android phone, the bubble is green. Many features such as typing notifications aren’t available.

Google led development of RCS, adding encryption and other features to text messaging. Late last year Apple confirmed that it would add support for RCS alongside iMessage. The debut of iOS 18 would be the logical time to show its work.

The conference will also be the first anniversary of Apple’s reveal of the Vision Pro, its virtual and augmented reality headset, which was released in the U.S. in February. Apple could announce its expansion to more countries, including China and the U.K.

Apple said in its WWDC announcement that the Vision Pro would be in the spotlight. Vision Pro is currently on the first version of its operating system, and core features, such as its Persona videoconferencing simulation, are still in beta.

For users with a Vision Pro, Apple will offer some of its virtual sessions at the event in a 3D environment.

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.

Salesforce shares plummeted as much as 17% in extended trading on Wednesday after the cloud software vendor reported weaker-than-expected revenue and issued guidance that trailed Wall Street’s expectations.

Here’s how the company did, compared to the LSEG consensus:

• Earnings per share: $2.44 adjusted vs. $2.38 expected
• Revenue: $9.13 billion vs. $9.17 billion expected

Salesforce called for adjusted earnings per share in the current quarter of $2.34 to $2.36 on $9.2 billion to $9.25 billion in revenue. Analysts surveyed by LSEG had expected $2.40 in adjusted earnings per share on $9.37 billion in revenue.

Revenue in the fiscal first quarter, which ended April 30, increased 11% from $8.25 billion a year earlier, Salesforce said in a statement. It is the first time since 2006 that Salesforce fell short on revenue, according to LSEG data.

Salesforce saw budget scrutiny and longer deal cycles than usual during the quarter, president and operating chief Brian Millham told analysts on a conference call. Management implemented go-to-market changes that cut into bookings, Millham said.

All five of Salesforce’s product areas contributed to the growth. But revenue from the Professional Services and Other category, at $548 million, was down 9% and under the StreetAccount consensus of $572.9 million.

Net income jumped to $1.53 billion, or $1.56 per share, from $199 million, or 20 cents per share a year ago.

Salesforce lifted its earnings forecast for the 2025 fiscal year. The company now expects adjusted earnings of $9.86 to $9.94 per share, compared to $9.68 to $9.76 three months ago. Its revenue guidance remains at $37.7 billion to $38 billion. Analysts polled by LSEG were looking for $9.76 in adjusted earnings per share and $38.08 billion in revenue.

Amy Weaver, Salesforce’s finance chief, said she expects deal compression and slowing projects in the professional services business through the current fiscal year.

During the quarter, Salesforce started selling its Einstein Copilot assistant sales and customer service representatives. The company also said all paid Slack customers were gaining access to artificial intelligence features such as conversation summaries and daily recaps. The Wall Street Journal reported that Salesforce was in talks to buy data-integration company Informatica, but weeks later, the newspaper said talks had collapsed.

Weaver said Salesforce acquisitions would need “a clear timeline to value accretion.”

Before the after-hours move, Salesforce shares were up 3.5% so far this year, trailing the S&P 500 index, which is up around 11% during the same period. A drop of this magnitude on Thursday would mark Salesforce’s worst day on the market since the 2008 financial crisis.

— CNBC’s Robert Hum contributed to this report.

WATCH: Salesforce bets even bigger on artificial intelligence

The 1986 Air Carrier Access Act requires airlines to provide a wheelchair for passengers with disabilities at the airport. The problem, though, is that many travelers are faking it, Frontier Airlines CEO Barry Biffle said.

“There is massive, rampant abuse of special services. There are people using wheelchair assistance who don’t need it at all,” Biffle said at a Wings Club luncheon on Thursday in New York.

He said he has seen some Frontier flights where 20 people were brought in wheelchairs at departure, with only three using them upon arrival.

“We are healing so many people,” he joked.

Biffle wasn’t talking about travelers’ personal wheelchairs, but rather the service airlines provide when travelers arrive at the airport.

It costs the airline between $30 and $35 each time a customer requests a wheelchair, Biffle said, and abuse of the service leads to delays for travelers with a genuine need for assistance.

“Everyone should be entitled to it who needs it, but you park in a handicapped space they will tow your car and fine you,” he told CNBC. “There should be the same penalty for abusing these services.”

Biffle isn’t the only executive to complain about travelers falsely claiming they need access to a wheelchair at the airport.

In July 2022, John Holland-Kaye, the then-CEO of London’s Heathrow Airport, told LBC Radio amid staffing shortages that some travelers were “using wheelchair support to try to get fast-tracked through the airport.”

“If you go on TikTok, that is one of the travel hacks people are recommending,” he said. “Please don’t do that. We need to protect the service for people who need it most.”

John Morris, a triple amputee and founder of WheelchairTravel.org, noted there are reasons why some travelers might need wheelchairs on their outbound leg but not upon arrival. For example, they could need the help to get through a large airport like in Atlanta or New York City, but not so at smaller facilities.

“Disability impacts people in a lot of different ways,” he said.

“I think there’s a good case to be made that abusers should face some consequence but I’m not sure how we do that in a society when our disabilities aren’t [always] visible,” Morris said.

Earlier this year, the Department of Transportation proposed stricter rules aimed at preventing wheelchair damage by airport ground handlers and ensuring “prompt assistance” to travelers with disabilities when getting on and off the plane.