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KoBold, a US mining startup backed by billionaire investors including Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, raised $537 million in its latest funding round, the company said. The funding round, co-led by investors Durable Capital Partners LP and T. Rowe Price, valued KoBold at $2.96 billion, according to the company. Existing backers including venture capital firm

Approximately 20,000 Bitcoin options contracts will expire on Friday, Jan. 3, in the first such event of 2025. They have a notional value of $1.93 billion, which is a fraction of last weeks mammoth end-of-year expiry event, so the impact on spot markets is likely to be minimal. This weeks batch of Bitcoin options contracts

At least five more restaurants in Seattle are closing their doors just days after the city council’s new minimum wage law mandating an hourly pay of $20.76 an hour went into effect — with the local hospitality industry predicting that more small businesses will go under in 2025. The owner of the Bel Gatto bakery

Mark Zuckerbergs Meta announced a major overhaul of its global policy team on Thursday pushing out left-leaning department chief Nick Clegg and replacing him with the companys best-known Republican, Joel Kaplan. Kaplan, who once served as deputy chief of staff for George W. Bush, is set to take over the reins of the Facebook and

Geoffrey Hinton, the prominent data scientist known as the “Godfather of artificial intelligence,” is backing Elon Musk in his legal attempt to block OpenAI from switching to a for-profit company. Hinton, who won the 2024 Nobel Prize in physics in October, is known for his work developing artificial neural networks, the foundation for AI. OpenAI

US President Joe Biden is poised to officially block Nippon Steel’s proposed $14.9-billion purchase of US Steel, a person familiar with the matter said on Friday, dealing a probably fatal blow to the contentious merger plan. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) spent months reviewing the deal for national security risks but referred the decision to Biden in December, after

A family is demanding justice after an Ohio police officer searched their 5-year-old childs pocket when his dad was pulled over during a routine traffic stop. Brandon Wilson said he was driving his Volkswagen SUV across the street to his mothers home when Parma Police officers pulled him over at around 9:20 p.m. on Dec.

“Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski rushed to correct a guest who called Donald Trump a “rapist” — just weeks after ABC News settled a lawsuit with the incoming president after its star anchor made the nefarious claim. Scott Galloway, an entrepreneur and professor at NYU Stern School of Business, was discussing the economic reasons why voters

A brand of fresh broccoli sold at Walmart stores in 20 states is being recalled over listeria contamination, the Food and Drug Administration announced Thursday Braga Fresh, a California-based company, issued a voluntary recall of washed and ready-to-eat 12-ounce bags of Marketside Broccoli Florets. The FDA is urging consumers to throw out any bags of

We love bonds, but we hate it when they make the front page. Let’s face it, while they are intellectually fascinating, there are no good news stories about bond markets. It’s always “someone’s defaulted”, “someone’s crashing the economy”, or some other such awfulness. Readers would have found it hard to miss the excellent coverage that

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Insurers are bracing for losses of as much as $10bn from wildfires in Los Angeles after blazes ravaged some of the most exclusive neighbourhoods in California, according to early estimates from analysts. Moody’s rating agency

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Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Insurers are bracing for losses of as much as $10bn from wildfires in Los Angeles after blazes ravaged some of the most exclusive neighbourhoods in California, according to early estimates from analysts. Moody’s rating agency

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Veteran investment manager Terry Smith has dumped his underperforming £22.5bn fund’s stake in Diageo after almost 15 years owing to concerns over the drinks maker’s new management team and the threat to demand posed by

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Let’s recognise this latest political furore over grooming gang scandals for what it is. The sudden sanctimonious concern among politicians of the right for a subset of child rape victims — only those abused by

Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world Elon Musk has privately discussed with allies how Sir Keir Starmer could be removed as UK prime minister before the next general election, according to people briefed on the matter. Musk, the world’s