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The lawsuit, filed on Friday, alleges the lithium-ion battery pack in the Model S caused the electronic door systems to fail.

Electric Vehicle company Tesla has been sued over a fiery crash in the United States that killed all five occupants of a Model S, who were allegedly trapped inside because of a design flaw that prevented them from opening the sedan’s doors.

Jeffrey Bauer, 54, and Michelle Bauer, 55, of Crandon, Wisconsin, were passengers in a Model S when the car went off the road and struck a tree in Verona, Wisconsin, a suburb of Madison, on November 1, 2024. They died the next day.

According to a complaint filed on Friday by four of the Bauers’ children, the couple’s fate was sealed because the Model S’s lithium-ion battery pack caused the electronic door systems to fail.

The children said that Tesla knew this could happen based on earlier fires, yet made a “conscious departure from known, feasible safety practices”.

Tesla, based in Austin, Texas, and led by Elon Musk, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday by the Reuters news agency.

The automaker has also been sued by families of two college students killed in a Cybertruck crash last November in a San Francisco suburb, after allegedly being locked in the burning vehicle because of its door handle design.

In September, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration disclosed a probe into the possible defects on some Tesla doors, following reports that handles could fail.

The Bauer children said that Model S rear seat passengers, like Michelle Bauer, were particularly vulnerable in the event of a crash, because they would have to lift carpeting to find a metal tab allowing their escape, which is not intuitive.

A nearby homeowner told 911 that she heard screaming from within the Bauers’ vehicle, the complaint said.

“Tesla’s design choices created a highly foreseeable risk: that occupants who survived a crash would remain trapped inside a burning vehicle,” according to the complaint.

Other defendants include the estate of the car’s driver, whom the Bauer children accused of negligent driving.

On Wall Street, Tesla’s stock finished the day up 2.5 percent.

How much power is enough for AI? Nobody knows, not even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman or Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

That has put software-first businesses like OpenAI and Microsoft in a bind. Much of the tech world has been focused on compute as a major barrier to AI deployment. And while tech companies have been racing to secure power, those efforts have lagged GPU purchases to the point where Microsoft has apparently ordered too many chips for the amount of power it has contracted.

“The cycles of demand and supply in this particular case you can’t really predict,” Nadella said on the BG2 podcast. “The biggest issue we are now having is not a compute glut, but it’s a power and it’s sort of the ability to get the [data center] builds done fast enough close to power.”

“If you can’t do that, you may actually have a bunch of chips sitting in inventory that I can’t plug in. In fact, that is my problem today. It’s not a supply issue of chips, it’s the fact that I don’t have warm shells to plug into,” Nadella added, referring to the commercial real estate term for buildings ready for tenants.

In some ways, we’re seeing what happens when companies accustomed to dealing with silicon and code, two technologies that scale and deploy quickly compared with massive power plants, need to ramp up their efforts in the energy world.

For more than a decade, electricity demand in the U.S. was flat. But over the last five years, demand from data centers has begun to ramp up, outpacing utilities’ plans for new generating capacity. That has led data center developers to add power in so-called behind-the-meter arrangements, where electricity is fed directly to the data center, skipping the grid.

Altman, who was also on the podcast, thinks that trouble could be brewing: “If a very cheap form of energy comes online soon at mass scale, then a lot of people are going to be extremely burned with existing contracts they’ve signed.”

“If we can continue this unbelievable reduction in cost per unit of intelligence — let’s say it’s been averaging like 40x for a given level per year — you know, that’s like a very scary exponent from an infrastructure buildout standpoint,” he said.

Altman has invested in nuclear energy, including fission startup Oklo and fusion startup Helion, along with Exowatt, a solar startup that concentrates the Sun’s heat and stores it for later use.

None of those are ready for widespread deployment today, though, and fossil-based technologies like natural gas power plants take years to build. Plus, orders placed today for new gas turbine likely won’t get fulfilled until later this decade.

That’s partially why tech companies have been adding solar at a rapid clip, drawn to the technology’s inexpensive cost, emissions-free power, and ability to deploy rapidly.

There might be subconscious factors at play, too. Photovoltaic solar is in many ways a parallel technology to semiconductors, and one that has been derisked and commoditized. Both PV solar and semiconductors are built on silicon substrates, and both roll off production lines as modular components that can be packaged together and tied into parallel arrays that make the completed part more powerful than any individual module.

Because of solar’s modularity and speed of deployment, the pace of construction is much closer to that of a data center.

But both still take time to build, and demand can change much more quickly than either a data center or solar project can be completed. Altman admitted that if AI gets more efficient or if demand doesn’t grow as he expects, some companies might be saddled with idled power plants.

But from his other comments, he doesn’t seem to think that’s likely. Instead, he appears to be a firm believer in Jevons Paradox, which says that more efficient use of a resource will lead to greater use, increasing overall demand.

“If the price of compute per like unit of intelligence or whatever — however you want to think about it — fell by a factor of a 100 tomorrow, you would see usage go up by much more than 100 and there’d be a lot of things that people would love to do with that compute that just make no economic sense at the current cost,” Altman said.

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Operations: The company focuses on providing information infrastructure and application services in Japan. It operates with a market capitalization of ¥87.77 billion, engaging in diverse revenue streams within the tech industry.

TechMatrix, amidst a dynamic tech landscape in Asia, showcases robust growth with its earnings forecast to surge by 16.1% annually, outpacing the Japanese market’s average of 7.7%. This performance is underpinned by significant R&D investments that have catalyzed innovations across its operations. With a projected revenue increase of 11.6% per year—double the national rate—the firm leverages these advancements to enhance its competitive edge significantly. Notably, TechMatrix’s strategic focus on high-quality earnings and a strong return on equity anticipated at 20.9%, positions it well for sustained financial health and industry leadership, despite recent executive changes impacting its board structure.

Simply Wall St Growth Rating: ★★★★★☆

Overview: COVER Corporation operates a VTubers distribution platform in Japan, focusing on video and music content, with a market cap of ¥120.14 billion.

Operations: The company generates revenue primarily through its VTubers distribution platform, which focuses on video and music content in Japan. With a market capitalization of ¥120.14 billion, the business leverages digital media to engage audiences and monetize content effectively.

COVER, thriving in the high-growth tech sector in Asia, demonstrates a robust trajectory with its earnings and revenue significantly outpacing regional averages. With an annualized revenue growth rate at 14%, and earnings expanding by 20.9% per year, the company’s aggressive investment in R&D has proven fruitful, amounting to substantial yearly expenditures that fuel innovation and market competitiveness. Particularly noteworthy is COVER’s strategic pivot towards software as a service (SaaS) models, which not only enhances customer retention through subscriptions but also promises sustained revenue streams. This forward-thinking approach, coupled with a strong return on equity forecasted at 29.5%, positions COVER favorably within its industry landscape despite fierce competition and varying market dynamics.

This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. We provide commentary based on historical data and analyst forecasts only using an unbiased methodology and our articles are not intended to be financial advice. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned.

Companies discussed in this article include KOSE:A005930 TSE:3762 and TSE:5253.

Have feedback on this article? Concerned about the content? Get in touch with us directly. Alternatively, email editorial-team@simplywallst.com

By Joseph Adinolfi

The largest companies have seen their weighting in the S&P 500 rise more quickly than their share of total earnings

One stock-market bull says recent developments are making her more concerned that an AI-driven bubble might be forming in the U.S. stock market.

Lori Calvasina, head of U.S. equity strategy at RBC Capital Markets, has repeatedly rebutted claims that the U.S. equity market has entered an AI-driven bubble. But in a report recently shared with MarketWatch, she included one chart that is making her a bit more nervous.

The chart in question, shown below, compares the weighting of the 10 most valuable stocks in the S&P 500 index SPX with the companies’ share of total net income. As Calvasina points out, the weighting of these stocks in the index recently touched a new peak north of 44% – the highest level going back to at least 1990, according to the data used by RBC. Yet the share of total profit of all index members that is being produced by these firms hasn’t quite kept up.

“While we’ve generally not agreed with the view that the stock market is in the midst of an AI bubble, similar to the TIMT bubble, due to a better earnings foundation, we do think this risk has grown,” Calvasina said in the report. TIMT in this context refers to Technology, Internet, Media and Telecommunications. The acronym is frequently used in reference to the stock-market bubble that crested in early 2000.

Among the 10 largest companies in the S&P 500, the AI theme is heavily represented. Names like Nvidia Corp. (NVDA), Meta Platforms Inc. (META), Broadcom Inc. (AVGO), Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN), Alphabet Inc. – which is counted twice by RBC due to its dual share classes, Class A (GOOGL) and Class C (GOOG) – Apple Inc. (AAPL) and Tesla Inc. (TSLA). The only company in the group that doesn’t have direct and significant exposure to the AI theme is Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B).

See: The ‘Magnificent Seven’ have never been this important to the stock market – and a big test lies ahead

To be sure, this isn’t exactly a new trend. The biggest companies in the S&P 500 have been seeing their overall weighting in the index climb more quickly than their share of earnings since at least 2021, Calvasina said.

This is largely because investors have been willing to pay a premium on the expectation of stronger long-term earnings growth, especially since the launch of ChatGPT kicked off the AI investment frenzy in late 2022.

However, over the past few months, the pace at which this gap has been widening has intensified. As of the end of October, the 10 largest companies in the S&P 500 accounted for 34.3% of total net income for all of the companies included in the index, according to the latest available data. That pushed the gap between the weighting of these companies in the S&P 500 and their share of profits to 9.9 percentage points. That isn’t far off from the 10.3 percentage-point gap seen in March 2000.

Worries about an AI bubble have resurfaced as many of the biggest players in the space – the so-called “hyperscalers” – have reported earnings over the past couple of weeks. Although some on Wall Street have been warning about frothy valuations practically since the trend first found its legs during the first half of 2023.

Meta shares dived last week, erasing more than $200 billion in value. Two Wall Street analysts downgraded the stock after panning the company’s plans for more aggressive AI-related spending, MarketWatch reported at the time. The stock was down again Monday, further trimming its yearly gain to about 8.9%.

Gains for other members of the big AI-plays, most notably Amazon, helped to compensate as U.S. stocks finished higher for a third straight week on Friday.

News on Monday that Amazon had inked a deal with OpenAI to provide cloud-computing power to the privately held AI company has helped to keep the stock-market rally going as November trading got under way, one portfolio manager told MarketWatch.

U.S. stocks mostly climbed on Monday, with the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite COMP finishing higher. Meanwhile, the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA and the small-cap Russell 2000 RUT ended modestly lower.

-Joseph Adinolfi

This content was created by MarketWatch, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. MarketWatch is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

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