The man who fired more than 180 shots with a long gun at the headquarters of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention broke into a locked safe to get his father’s weapons and wanted to send a message against COVID-19 vaccines, authorities said Tuesday.
Documents found in a search of the home where Patrick Joseph White lived with his parents expressed the shooters discontent with the COVID-19 vaccinations, Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey said.
White, 30, had written about wanting to make the public aware of his discontent with the vaccine, Hosey said.
White also had recently verbalized thoughts of suicide, which led to law enforcement being contacted several weeks before the shooting, Hosey said. He died at the scene Friday of a self-inflicted gunshot wound after killing a police officer.
Asked about threats based on misinformation regarding the CDC and its vaccine work, FBI Special Agent Paul Brown said Tuesday: Weve not seen an uptick, although any rhetoric that suggests or leads to violence is something we take very seriously.
Although we are tracking it, we are sensitive to it. We have not seen that uptick, said Brown, who leads the FBIs Atlanta division.
The suspects family was fully cooperating with the investigation, authorities said at the Tuesday news briefing. White had no known criminal history, Hosey said.
Executing a search warrant at the family’s home in the Atlanta suburb of Kennesaw, authorities recovered written documents that are being analyzed, and seized electronic devices that are undergoing a forensic examination, the agency said.
Investigators also recovered a total of five firearms, including a gun belonging to his father that he used in the attack, Hosey said.
Hosey said the suspect did not have a key to the gun safe: He broke into it, he said.
White had been stopped by CDC security guards before driving to a pharmacy across the street, where he opened fire from a sidewalk, authorities said. The bullets pierced blast-resistant windows across the campus, pinning employees down during the barrage. More than 500 shell casings have been recovered from the crime scene, the GBI said.
In the aftermath, officials at the CDC are assessing the security of the campus and making sure they notify officials of any new threats.
U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. toured the CDC campus on Monday, accompanied by Deputy Secretary Jim ONeill and CDC Director Susan Monarez, according to a health agency statement.
No one should face violence while working to protect the health of others, Kennedy said in a statement Saturday. It said top federal health officials are actively supporting CDC staff.
Kennedy also visited the DeKalb County Police Department, and later met privately with the slain officers wife.
A photo of the suspect will be released later Tuesday, Hosey said, but he encouraged the public to remember the face of the officer instead.
Kennedy was a leader in a national anti-vaccine movement before President Donald Trump selected him to oversee federal health agencies, and he has made false and misleading statements about the safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 shots and other vaccines.
Some unionized CDC employees called for more protections. Some employees who recently left the agency as the Trump administration pursues widespread layoffs, meanwhile, squarely blamed Kennedy.
Years of false rhetoric about vaccines and public health was bound to take a toll on peoples mental health, and leads to violence, said Tim Young, a CDC employee who retired in April.
By Charlotte Kramon and Jeff Martin, Associated Press
The Oklahoma City Thunder felt slighted last season when they were left off the NBAs Christmas schedule.
That wont be an issue this year.
MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and the NBA champion Thunder will be working at home for Christmas this season, playing host to Victor Wembanyama and the San Antonio Spurs as part of the leagues annual Dec. 25 quintuple-header. BetMGM Sportsbook has the Thunder favored by 9.5 points.
The other Christmas games, released by the NBA on Tuesday: Cleveland at New York (favored at -2.5), Houston at LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers (-1.5), No. 1 pick Cooper Flagg and Dallas visiting Golden State (-4.5), and Minnesota playing at Denver (-4.5).
Some NBA Cup games are scheduled to be released Wednesday, and the full schedule80 of the 82 games for all teamsis to be released on Thursday. The remaining two games for each club will be filled in December based on how teams fare in the NBA Cup.
They make the schedule. We play it, Thunder coach Mark Daigneault said last season, when asked about his club not being picked for the Dec. 25 lineup. Our players, I know, would have liked to play on Christmas because thats such a staple day in the NBA season. But we cant control that.
Well, they sort of did control their Christmas scheduling fate this season.
The NBA champions typically get invited to play on Christmas the following season; Oklahoma City beat Indiana in a seven-game NBA Finals last season. The Eastern Conference champion Pacers are among the Christmas snubs this year, after losing Tyrese Haliburton to an Achilles tear that will sideline him for the entirety of this season and seeing Myles Turner opt to sign with Milwaukee in free agency.
The Knicks will be playing their 58th Christmas game, extending their NBA record. The first Christmas game in league history was at Madison Square Garden in 1947.
Boston, Philadelphia, and Phoenix played on Christmas last season and didnt make the Dec. 25 cut this season, replaced by Cleveland (which was the Easts No. 1 seed), Houston (which landed Kevin Durant in an offseason blockbuster from the Suns), and the Thunder.
Cleveland and the Thunder are playing on Christmas for the first time since 2018. The Rockets have a Christmas game for the first time since 2019.
James, if he plays on the holiday, will be making his 20th Christmas appearance in his record 23rd NBA season. Only 12 NBA franchises have 20 Christmas games, and James could soon have that many as a player.
And it’ll be a big NBA holiday in Texas: All three of the state’s teams are playing on Christmas for the first time.
Opening night
NBCs return to the NBA broadcast world officially starts with opening night on Oct. 21, when the Thunder (favored by 6.5 points) will receive their championship rings before playing host to Durant and the Rockets in the first game of the season.
That will be followed by Stephen Curry, Jimmy Butler, and Golden State taking on James, Luka Doncic, and the Lakers (-3.5) in the second game of the NBC doubleheader. Those are the only two games on opening night.
MLK Day
Peacock and NBC will have four games on Jan. 19, which is Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
The matchups: Milwaukee at Atlanta on Peacock at 1 p.m. ET, followed by three games on NBC: Oklahoma City at Cleveland at 2:30 p.m. ET, Dallas at New York at 5 p.m. ET, and Boston at Detroit at 8 p.m. ET.
Memphis, which typically plays on the holiday, is not this season. The Grizzlies will be returning from Europe, after facing Orlando on Jan. 15 in Berlin and Jan. 18 in London.
Shares of major U.S. carriers jumped on Tuesday after upbeat airfare data for July signaled improving pricing power for the industry, as airlines bring capacity in check to align with a soft demand environment.
Shares of legacy carriers United Airlines, American Airlines and Delta Air Lines jumped nearly 10% each, while budget rival Southwest Airlines gained 4% in afternoon trading.
Smaller peers Alaska Air and JetBlue Airways rose about 10% each and low-cost carrier Frontier Group surged 22%.
Data from the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics on Tuesday showed airfares rose 4% in July after slipping 0.1% in June, marking their first increase in six months.
Uncertainty stemming from President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs and budget cuts has prompted travelers to curb discretionary spending and reassess plans.
A soft demand environment, particularly from budget-conscious domestic travelers, had forced carriers to discount fares, squeezing margins despite summer typically being their peak money-making season.
Airlines have since been trimming seats on offer and readjusting routes to keep their pricing power in control and shield margins.
During their second-quarter earnings calls in July, major executives expressed confidence in the industry’s ability to cut capacity and boost airfares in the latter part of the year.
Shivansh Tiwary, Reuters
Shares of major U.S. carriers jumped on Tuesday after upbeat airfare data for July signaled improving pricing power for the industry, as airlines bring capacity in check to align with a soft demand environment.
Shares of legacy carriers United Airlines, American Airlines and Delta Air Lines jumped nearly 10% each, while budget rival Southwest Airlines gained 4% in afternoon trading.
Smaller peers Alaska Air and JetBlue Airways rose about 10% each and low-cost carrier Frontier Group surged 22%.
Data from the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics on Tuesday showed airfares rose 4% in July after slipping 0.1% in June, marking their first increase in six months.
Uncertainty stemming from President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs and budget cuts has prompted travelers to curb discretionary spending and reassess plans.
A soft demand environment, particularly from budget-conscious domestic travelers, had forced carriers to discount fares, squeezing margins despite summer typically being their peak money-making season.
Airlines have since been trimming seats on offer and readjusting routes to keep their pricing power in control and shield margins.
During their second-quarter earnings calls in July, major executives expressed confidence in the industry’s ability to cut capacity and boost airfares in the latter part of the year.
Shivansh Tiwary, Reuters
As the battle to train artificial intelligence models becomes more intense and Reddits rich content library becomes more valuable, the social media giant has taken steps to block the Internet Archive from indexing its pages.
While the Wayback Machine has historically recorded all Reddit pages, comments and user profiles, the company has put limits on what the system can scrape. Moving forward, it will only be permitted to archive the sites home page, which shows popular posts and news headlines of the day, but no user comments or post history.
The action comes as Reddit has become increasingly protective of the content on its site. Reddit, in May, announced it had struck a deal with OpenAI to use its content to help train ChatGPT. It previously announced a similar deal with Google and blocked other search engines from crawling the site after that deal unless they struck financial agreements with Reddit as well.
AI companies that are less well-financed, however, have reportedly been using the Internet Archive to scrub the sites previous posts and train their large language models from that content.
Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt, in a statement, told Fast Company “Internet Archive provides a service to the open web, but weve been made aware of instances where AI companies violate platform policies, including ours, and scrape data from the Wayback Machine. Until theyre able to defend their site and comply with platform policies (e.g., respecting user privacy, re: deleting removed content) were limiting some of their access to Reddit data to protect redditors.”
Reddit shares were higher Tuesday, gaining more than 3% in midday trading, hitting $228. Year to date, the company’s stock is up 38%.
Reddits legal battles meet its AI ambitions
In June, Reddit sued Anthropic, claiming the AI company behind the Claude chatbot was scraping the Reddit site.
“In July 2024, Anthropic claimed, in response to Reddits public protests regarding Anthropics misuse of Reddit content, that it had blocked its bots from accessing Reddit. Not so,” the suit reads. “Anthropics bots continued to hit Reddits servers over one hundred thousand times. Unlike its competitors, Anthropic has refused to agree to respect Reddit users basic privacy rights, including removing deleted posts from its systems.”
(Anthropic has denied the accusations.)
Reddit’s latest defensive act against AI scraping comes as the company is focusing more on its own AI initiatives. Last December, the company rolled out Reddit Answers, an AI-powered tool that will summarize conversations and posts on the site, letting users bypass traditional search engines. That AI product is now used by six million people, the company said in its second quarter earnings announcement, up from one million in the first quarter.
Reddit is planning to use that momentum, as well as the significant use of its own internal search engine (which the company says services 70 million users per week) to challenge Google and other popular search tools.
“The world and the internet are rapidly changing, and I believe Reddit has a once-in-a-generation opportunity,” said CEO Steve Huffman on an earnings call following the earnings. “Were unifying [search and Reddit Answers] into a single search experience. Were going to bring that front and center in the app. So, whether youre a new user opening the app for the first time or returning user opening the app, that search box will be present immediately for users who open the app looking for something specific.”
While Reddits efforts in the search space will include AI components, the company said it hopes to differentiate itself from the growing number of AI search engines by highlighting the human component.
“Conversation and connection are becoming more valuable and rare,” said Huffman. “In a world increasingly dominated by algorithms and automation, the need for human voices has never been greater.”
Eastman Kodak, the iconic American company known for its photography and film business, said it is at risk of going out of business, prompting a massive stock slide on Tuesday.
Here’s what to know.
Kodak Q2 2025 earnings
Let’s start with Kodak’s earnings report on Monday. For the second quarter ending June 30, Kodak reported its revenue was $263 million, a decrease of $4 million, or 1%, compared with the same period in 2024. Adjusting for the favorable impact of foreign exchange of $5 million, revenues decreased by $9 million, or 3%, compared with the year prior.
Kodak ended the quarter with a cash balance of $155 million, a decrease of $46 million from December 31, 2024. The decrease was primarily driven by capital expenditures to fund growth initiatives, changes in working capital, the impact of higher costs, and lower profitability from operations.
Most importantly, Kodak included a disclosure regarding its concern assessment in its second quarter 2025 Form 10-Q filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In its earnings press release, the 133-year-old company said current financial conditions “raise substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern,” which publicly traded companies are required to mention. The reason: It doesn’t have the ability to pay its debt obligation, which runs some $500 million, according to CNN.
Kodak stock price slides
As a result, shares of Eastman Kodak (NYSE: KODK) fell more than 7% in premarket trading on Tuesday, and at the time of this writing, were down a whopping 25% in early afternoon trading.
Kodak is a leading global manufacturer focused on commercial print and advanced materials and chemicals. Founded in 1882 by George Eastman, it has earned 79,000 worldwide patents over 130 years of R&D (research and development) and is known as a pioneer in the photography business, specializing in both cameras and film.
In 2012, Kodak filed for bankruptcy as its business became increasingly irrelevant with the advent of digital photography and smartphone cameras.
The U.S. stock market is rallying toward records on Tuesday after data suggested inflation across the country was a touch better last month than economists expected.
The S&P 500 rose 0.9% and was on track to top its all-time high set two weeks ago. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 467 points, or 1.1%, as of 12:30 p.m. ET, while the Nasdaq composite was 1.1% higher and also heading toward a record.
Stocks got a lift from hopes that the better-than-expected inflation report will give the Federal Reserve leeway to cut interest rates at its next meeting in September.
Lower rates would give a boost to investment prices and to the economy by making it cheaper for U.S. households and businesses to borrow to buy houses, cars, or equipment. President Donald Trump has angrily been calling for cuts to help the economy, often insulting the Feds chair personally while doing so.
But the Fed has been hesitant because of the possibility that Trumps tariffs could make inflation much worse. Lowering rates would give inflation more fuel, potentially adding oxygen to a growing fire. Thats why Fed officials have said they wanted to see more data come in about inflation before moving.
Tuesdays report said U.S. consumers paid prices for groceries, gasoline, and other costs of living that were 2.7% higher in July than a year earlier. Thats the same inflation rate as Junes, and it was below the 2.8% that economists expected.
The report pushed traders on Wall Street to increase bets that the Fed will cut interest rates for the first time this year in September. They’re betting on a 94% chance of that, up from nearly 86% a day earlier, according to data from CME Group.
The Fed will receive one more report on inflation, as well as one more on the U.S. job market, before its next meeting, which ends Sept. 17. The most recent jobs report was a stunner, coming in much weaker than economists expected.
Some economists warn that more twists and turns in upcoming data could make the Feds upcoming decisions not so easy. Its twin goals are to get inflation to 2% while keeping the job market healthy, and helping one with interest rates often means hurting the other.
Even Tuesdays better-than-expected inflation report had some discouraging undertones. An underlying measure of inflation, which economists say does a better job of predicting where inflation may be heading, hit its highest point since early this year, noted Gary Schlossberg, market strategist at Wells Fargo Investment Institute. That helped cause some up-and-down swings for Treasury yields in the bond market.
Eventually, tariffs can show up in varying degrees in consumer prices, but these one-off price increases dont happen all at once, said Brian Jacobsen, chief economist at Annex Wealth Management. That will confound the Fed and economic commentators for months to come.
Other central banks around the world have been lowering interest rates, and Australias on Tuesday cut for the third time this year.
On Wall Street, Intel’s stock rose 3.2% after Trump said its CEO has an amazing story, less than a week after he had demanded Lip-Bu Tans resignation.
Circle Internet Group, the company behind the popular USDC cryptocurrency that tracks the U.S. dollar, climbed 2.4% despite reporting a larger loss for the latest quarter than analysts expected. It said its total revenue and reserve income grew 53% in its first quarter as a publicly traded company, and it topped forecasts.
On the losing side of Wall Street was Celanese, which sank 10.3% even though the chemical company delivered a better profit than expected. It said that customers in most of its markets continue to be challenged, and CEO Scott Richardson said that the demand environment does not seem to be improving.
Cardinal Health dropped 7.3% despite likewise reporting a stronger profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected. Its revenue fell short of forecasts, and analysts said the markets expectations were particularly high for the company after its stock had already soared 33.3% for the year coming into the day.
Critics say the broad U.S. stock market is looking expensive after its surge from a bottom in April. Thats putting pressure on companies to deliver continued growth in profit.
In stock markets abroad, indexes edged up in China after Trump signed an executive order late Monday that delayed hefty tariffs on the worlds second-largest economy by 90 days. The move was widely expected, and the hope is that it will clear the way for a possible deal to avert a dangerous trade war between the United States and China.
Japans Nikkei 225 jumped 2.1%, and South Koreas Kospi fell 0.5%, for two of the worlds bigger moves.
In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury rose to 4.30% from 4.27% late Monday.
The yield on the two-year Treasury, which more closely tracks expectations for the Fed, fell to 3.73% from 3.76%.
By Stan Choe, AP business writer
AP Business Writers Yuri Kageyama and Matt Ott contributed.
Spirit Airlines cant seem to reach its cruising altitude. The budget airline issued a warning late Monday that if it doesnt find an infusion of cash, its business is poised to fail.
Spirit expressed the dire state of its financials in its quarterly earnings report that was filed late Monday. The report comes less than six months after the beleaguered airline emerged from bankruptcy with a plan to right its business and pursue profitability.
Management has concluded there is substantial doubt as to the Companys ability to continue as a going concern within 12 months from the date these financial statements are issued, Spirit wrote in the filing, citing a scenario in which the company fails to hold the liquid assets needed to meet its debt obligations and keep its credit card processor.
To steer itself out of the crisis, Spirit is pursuing liquidity enhancing measures that could include selling some of its aircraft or real estate and offloading some of its extra airport gate capacity. While it is the Companys goal to execute on these initiatives, there can be no assurance that such initiatives will be successful, the company wrote.
Spirit cut 200 jobs back in January as part of its plan to slash $80 million in costs. Last year, the company sold 23 Airbus planesmore than 10% of its fleetto drum up emergency cash.
As you all know, were facing significant challenges with our business, which is why weve been focused on taking actions to optimize our organization and create more efficiencies, then-Spirit CEO Ted Christie told staff in an internal memo earlier this year. The bottom line is, we need to run a smaller airline and get back on better financial footing.
Recent problems, Frontier bailout
Spirit filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy late last year in light of mounting losses, a pile of debt, and failed merger negotiations.
The airline continued to operate during that time frame, which coincided with the busy holiday travel season. The most important thing to know is that you can continue to book and fly now and in the future, the company wrote in an open letter to customers at the time.
Spirit was in talks with JetBlue to combine the two airlines back in 2023, but the ill-fated merger faced stiff opposition. The Justice Department sued to block the $3.8 billion deal over antitrust concerns and, ultimately, a federal judge sided with the government, sounding the mergers death knell.
Earlier this year, Spirit rejected a different merger offer from fellow budget carrier Frontier Airlines. Frontier revised the offer, but Spirit declined to move forward with the deal, which would have been worth around $2.16 billion. At the time, the company insisted that going it alone and pursuing its post-bankruptcy restructuring plan would benefit shareholders more than doubling up with another airline.
The airline industry is in a strange transitional phase in 2025. Normal U.S. carriers are looking to rebrand themselves as lifestyle airlines while credit card companies double down on luxe travel perks designed to make air travel more bearable. The industrys already wafer-thin margins are threatened by Trumps endless parade of tariffs and the economic chaos they sow. Meanwhile, a spate of U.S. aviation disasters has led to tanking trust in air travel and calls for a national overhaul of the air traffic control system that undergirds the whole industry.
Howand ifbudget airlines fit into the future of travel is an open question, but its one Spirit needs to answer if it plans to survive. Unfortunately for the troubled airline, time is running out.
Financial companies from Bank of America to Fiserv are preparing to launch their own dollar-backed crypto tokens now that a new U.S. law has established the first-ever rules for stablecoins, but experts warn the path forward could be anything but simple.
U.S. President Donald Trump on July 18 signed the GENIUS Act into law, setting federal rules and guidelines for cryptocurrency tokens pegged to the U.S. dollar known as stablecoins. This U.S. law, the first designed to facilitate crypto usage, could pave the way for the digital assets to become an everyday way to make payments and move money, experts said.
The use of stablecoins, designed to maintain a constant value, usually a 1:1 U.S. dollar peg, has exploded in recent years, notably among crypto traders moving funds to and from other tokens, such as bitcoin and ether.
Now, a slate of companies are entertaining their own stablecoin strategies to capitalize on the promise of instant payments and settlement that stablecoins offer. Payments on traditional banking rails can take several days to arrive, or take even longer across international borders.
Among the companies considering stablecoins are Walmart and Amazon, the Wall Street Journal reported in June. Walmart and Amazon did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
However, the new law will not immediately open the floodgates, experts said. The newfound opportunity to dabble in stablecoins can lead to numerous tricky considerations for firms, both strategic and technical.
Companies have to embark on a lengthy process to deploy their own stablecoins, or decide whether it makes more sense to integrate existing stablecoins, like issuer Circle’s USDC, into their business.
Companies first have to decide the purpose of their stablecoins. For example, a retail platform could make a stablecoin available to customers to buy goods, which could appeal to crypto-savvy users. Some companies could use them internally for cross-border payments, given that stablecoins can enable near-instant payments, often with lower fees.
How a company plans to use a stablecoin could affect whether it creates a stablecoin or works with a partner.
“The intended use is going to matter a lot,” said Stephen Aschettino, a partner at Steptoe. “Is this something really designed to drive customers to engage with the issuer, or is the issuer’s primary motivation to have a stablecoin that is more ubiquitous?”
For nonbanks, stablecoins will bring new compliance costs and oversight requirements, given that the GENIUS Act requires issuers to comply with anti-money laundering and “know your customer” (KYC) requirements.
“Those that already have robust KYC risk management and regulatory change management programs or working towards implementing these program elements may have a competitive advantage,” said Jill DeWitt, senior director of compliance and third-party risk management solutions at Moody’s.
One group likely to enjoy that advantage is banks, which are no strangers to screening for sanctions-related risks and verifying the identities of their customers.
Bank of America and Citigroup are actively considering issuing their own stablecoins, the CEOs of both banks said in earnings calls last month. Others like Morgan Stanley are closely monitoring stablecoin developments. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said the bank will be involved in stablecoins, without giving details.
Banks need to weigh several factors before going live with stablecoins, including how holding the tokens might affect liquidity requirements, said Julia Demidova, head of digital currencies product and strategy at FIS.
Banks holding assets like stablecoins on their balance sheets might be required to hold more capital under current U.S. bank rules.
“The GENIUS Act is great, but if the bank is treating their stablecoin on the balance sheet under prudential banking regulation, you still need to look at the risk weight of the asset,” she said.
Another crucial question is how to issue stablecoins. Like other cryptocurrencies, stablecoins are created on a blockchain, a digital ledger that records transactions.
Hundreds of blockchain networks exist today, two of the most popular being ethereum and solana. Both are considered public or “permissionless” blockchains because all transactions on those networks are available for anyone to see.
Still, it is unclear which attribute companies issuing stablecoins would prioritize. Banks, in particular, could opt for their own private, or “permissioned,” blockchains instead, Demidova said.
“The banks would desire and demand that very clear governance and structure,” she said. “In that permissionless environment, you don’t have the governance and controls in place.”
Others like said Nassim Eddequiouaq, CEO of Bastion, a provider of infrastructure for companies to issue their own stablecoins, see merits to permissionless blockchains.
“We’ve seen a tremendous amount of interest for existing blockchains that have seen user adoption, that have been battle tested at scale, including during activity spikes,” he said.
Although the GENIUS Act has been signed into law, its effective date is potentially several years off, with federal banking regulators expected to issue rules in the meantime to fill in certain gaps.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, for instance, is expected to issue rules to outline several risk management and compliance requirements. Under the new U.S. framework, the Treasury Department will have to issue a rule on foreign stablecoin regulatory regimes and their compatibility with the new U.S. framework.
“These things are going to have to phase in,” said Aschettino.
Hannah Lang, Reuters
Stablecoin issuer Circle Internet Group is seeing its stock (NYSE: CRCL) rise yet again. Shares in the company are up more than 7% in early morning as of the time of this writing. At one point, shares were up as much as 10% after markets opened.
The reason? Circle just posted its first quarterly earnings as a public company, and investors seem to like what they are seeing. Heres what you need to know.
Circle posts its first quarterly results as a public company
Today, Circle announced its Q2 2025 financial resultsthe first quarterly results the company has posted as a publicly traded business.
The big number most investors seem to care about from Circles Q2 earnings is its revenue. The company said that for the quarter, its total revenue grew to $658 million. Thats a 53% increase year over year.
It also said that the circulation of its stablecoin, USDC, grew 90% year over year to reach a total of $61.3 billion at the quarters end.
The more the circulation of Circles USDC stablecoin grows, the more Circle stands to make. Thats because Circle makes the majority of its revenues not from cryptocurrencies themselves, but from U.S. Treasuries.
Circle, much like a bank, knows that only a fraction of all the USDC in circulation will be redeemed at any one time, so it only needs to keep a portion of reserves in cash to be instantaneously redeemable by USDC holders, Mitrade points out. It invests the rest in short-term U.S. Treasuries.
This means that as the circulation of USDC grows, Circle stands to make more income from its investments in short-term U.S. Treasuries, thereby increasing its revenue.
Yet despite the 53% revenue growth Circle announced, the company still posted a net loss of $482 million. That net loss was mainly attributed to IPO-related noncash charges, including stock-based compensation payouts.
CRCL stock surged after its June IPO
Despite charges related to its IPO significantly contributing to the companys Q2 net loss, Circles public offering has been very good to investors.
Since Circle went public in June, its stock surged. By the end of June, CRCL stock had risen 750%.
Circle, like many crypto companies, has been greatly helped by a more friendly crypto regulatory environment under the Trump Administration. Those policies are why more cryptocurrency companies seem more interested in pursuing IPOs, including trading platform eToro, which did so in May, and cryptocurrency exchange Bullish, which is having its IPO tomorrow.
Over the past month, however, CRCL stock has lost about 7.65% of its value. As of the time of this writing, with todays post-earnings boost, CRCL shares are hovering around $168.16.
When the company went public in June, its IPO share price was $31 per share.
Billionaire SpaceX, Tesla and X owner Elon Musk says he plans to sue Apple for not featuring X and its Grok artificial intelligence chatbot app in its top recommended apps in its App Store.
Musk posted the comments on X late Monday, saying, Hey @Apple App Store, why do you refuse to put either X or Grok in your Must Have section when X is the #1 news app in the world and Grok is #5 among all apps? Are you playing politics? What gives? Inquiring minds want to know.
Grok is owned by Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI.
Musk went on to say that Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store, which is an unequivocal antitrust violation. xAI will take immediate legal action.
He gave no further details.
There was no immediate comment from Apple, which has faced various allegations of antitrust violations in recent years.
A federal judge recently found that Apple violated a court injunction in an antitrust case filed by Fortnite maker Epic Games.
Regulators of the 27-nation European Union fined Apple 500 million euros in April for breaking competition rules by preventing app makers from pointing users to cheaper options outside its App Store.
Last year, the EU fined the U.S. tech giant nearly $2 billion for unfairly favoring its own music streaming service by forbidding rivals like Spotify from telling users how they could pay for cheaper subscriptions outside of iPhone apps.
As of early Tuesday, the top app in Apple’s App Store was TikTok, followed by Tinder, Duolingo, YouTube and Bumble. Open AI’s ChatGPT was ranked 7th.
