Category: 3. Business

Tesla has scheduled an annual shareholders meeting for November, one day after the electric vehicle company came under pressure from major shareholders to do so.

Billionaire Elon Musk’s company said in a regulatory filing on Thursday that the meeting will be held on Nov. 6. A group of more than 20 Tesla shareholders said in a letter to the company a day earlier that it needed to provide public notice of the annual meeting.

Texas law states businesses must hold annual meetings within 13 months of their last one, if shareholders request it. But the law also allows for “written consent instead of the annual meeting” to be executed within the 13-month timeframe. Tesla is incorporated in Texas.

The annual meeting, given Tesla’s fortunes this year, has the potential to be a raucous event and it is unclear how investors will react to the delay, which is rare for any major U.S. corporation.

Tesla shares have plunged 27% this year, largely due to blowback over Musk’s affiliation with President Donald Trump, as well as rising competition.

Many shareholders have been miffed by Musk’s participation in the Trump administration this year, saying he needs to focus on his EV company which is facing extraordinary pressures.

“An annual meeting provides shareholders with the opportunity to hear directly from the board about these concerns, and to vote for or against directors, the board’s approach to executive compensation, and other matters of material importance,” the group said in the letter.

Tesla’s last shareholders meeting was on June 13 of last year, where investors voted to restore Musk’s record $44.9 billion pay package that was thrown out by a Delaware judge earlier that year.

Tesla also said in its regulatory filing on Thursday that July 31 is the new deadline for the submission of proposals to be included in the proxy statement. In a January filing, Tesla said it would file its proxy statement for this year’s annual meeting by the end of April.

However, the company filed an amended report on April 30, saying that it didn’t have a date for the meeting yet. Tesla also said in that filing that it was creating a special committee to look at Musk’s compensation as CEO.

Also on Thursday, Musk said that the Grok chatbot will be heading to Tesla vehicles.

“Grok is coming to Tesla vehicles very soon. Next week at the latest,” Musk said on social media platform X, in response to a post stating that Grok implementation on Teslas wasn’t announced on a Grok livestream Wednesday.

Grok was developed by Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI and pitched as an alternative to “woke AI” interactions from rival chatbots like Google’s Gemini, or OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Yet Grok has had a bumpy ride during its rollout.

On Wednesday xAI announced that it was taking down “inappropriate posts” made by its Grok chatbot, which appeared to include antisemitic comments that praised Adolf Hitler.

Shares of Tesla rose more than 3% in Thursday morning trading after tumbling this week as the feud between Trump and Musk heated up again.

By Steve Gelsi

America’s only fully integrated rare-earth producer will receive a ‘multibillion-dollar’ package of investments to build a magnet-manufacturing plant

MP Materials Corp.’s stock skyrocketed in early trading Thursday, after the rare-earth producer said it inked a public-private partnership with the U.S. Defense Department to boost domestic magnet production and to reduce dependence on foreign sources.

MP Materials (MP) said the U.S. government will emerge as its largest shareholder with 15% of its stock as it works to build its new 10X Facility at a yet-to-be-announced location. The company, which bills itself as “America’s only fully integrated rare earth producer,” plans to open the magnet manufacturing plant in about three years and update its existing mine in Mountain Pass, Calif.

The stock soared 46.3% to $43.90 a share in afternoon trading as it headed toward a three-year high. The gains are putting the stock on track to smash its current one-day record rally of 21.7% on April 14, 2025.

D.A. Davidson analyst Matt J. Summerville reiterated a buy rating on MP Materials’ stock and praised the deal.

“We view this partnership as clearly transformative, although not entirely surprising given the [Trump] administration’s priorities with respect to critical minerals/materials,” Summerville said in a research note.

James Litinsky, founder and chief executive of MP Materials, said, “This initiative marks a decisive action by the Trump administration to accelerate American supply chain independence.”

The Pentagon and MP Materials inked a 10-year price floor agreement of $110 per kilogram for the company’s neodymium and praseodymium rare-earth products for use in batteries and other electronic components.

The U.S. government has also committed to buy $400 million of newly issued preferred stock, which will be convertible into common stock, and a warrant to purchase additional common shares.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) have pledged $1 billion in financing for building the 10X Facility. MP Materials also received a $150 million loan from the U.S. government.

The company will use the money to expand its existing rare earths separation and processing capabilities, as well as its existing location in Mountain Pass, Calif., it said. It’s also commissioning its Texas-based magnetics facility called Independence.

Baird analyst Ben Kallo said last month that a big deal was coming.

“We see a partnership announcement with a large [original equipment manufacturer] and/or support from the U.S. government as potential catalysts to monitor,” he said at the time. “MP is in the driver’s seat at the negotiating table given their status as the only scaled U.S. producer.”

MP Materials extracts, refines, and separates rare-earth materials at what is currently the world’s second-largest rare-earth mine in Mountain Pass, Calif. The largest mine in the world is located in China.

MP went public in 2022 in a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, as one of the many blank-check deals put together by Chamath Palihapitiya, a venture capitalist known as the SPAC King and who co-hosts of the popular podcast “All-In.”

Ahead of Thursday’s moves, MP Materials’ stock had rallied 92.5% in 2025 through Wednesday, while the Nasdaq Composite Index COMP has gained 6.7% and the S&P 500 index SPX has tacked on 6.5%.

Also read: Why it’s nearly impossible for America to meet its rare-earth needs after China’s export restrictions.

-Steve Gelsi

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Virtu Financial has come out against rival Citadel Securities’ attempts to block the opening of a new US options exchange, as the high-speed trading giant wades into a dispute over market structure that has sucked in some of Wall Street’s biggest names.

The disagreement hinges on the implementation of a 350-microsecond so-called “speed bump” that US exchange operator IEX — made famous by the Michael Lewis’s bestseller Flash Boys — hopes will protect traders on its proposed exchange from buying and selling options at stale prices.

This mechanism will allow IEX to cancel and reprice a small proportion of orders, but critics of the plan, including billionaire Ken Griffin’s Citadel Securities, say it would end up harming ordinary investors while enriching IEX’s shareholders and market makers.

New York-headquartered Virtu on Wednesday wrote to the Securities and Exchange Commission in support of IEX, which says it wants to shield investors from the cost of latency arbitrage — the exploitation by high-frequency traders of the microseconds it takes prices to reflect broader market moves.

Virtu’s intervention comes three weeks after Citadel Securities criticised what it described as IEX’s “nefarious” and “unlawful” plan “to introduce an unprecedented quote cancelling scheme” into the ballooning US options market, in a letter to the SEC.

Retail broker Charles Schwab, the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq have also said that IEX’s plan to launch a new equity options exchange should not be approved. 

But in its letter, Virtu said IEX’s proposal “represents a well-intentioned effort to advance” market transparency and improve “the investor experience”. 

It added: “The introduction of new trading venues has the potential to promote competition, foster innovation and possibly deliver better trading outcomes for all market participants.” Virtu was co-founded by Doug Cifu and Vincent Viola, former chair of the New York Mercantile Exchange and the owner of ice hockey team the Florida Panthers.

Citadel Securities and IEX have clashed before. In 2015, Citadel Securities sought to block IEX’s application for registration as a national securities exchange, writing at the time that a new entrant would “create confusion for the marketplace, and for retail investors in particular”. 

Citadel’s attempt was ultimately unsuccessful, although 11 years later IEX remains a small player in US equities, with a market share of roughly 2.6 per cent, according to the firm.

Citadel’s latest attempt to shut down IEX’s planned move into the options market has drawn the ire of pressure group We The Investors, which wrote to the SEC on the subject earlier this month.

“Almost 10 years since the first comment letters were filed against the IEX Equities exchange application, and all we have are the same tired, recycled arguments,” said WTI chief technology office Dave Lauer in the letter.

“It has become clear that despite critics’ attempts to rewrite history and pretend that there is no such thing as latency arbitrage, such arbitrage does exist, and exploits both geographical and technological latencies in order to earn profits for the fastest traders to the detriment of slower traders,” he added.

John Ramsay, chief market policy officer at IEX, said: “For the people who complain that the quotes will be inaccessible, it’s worth asking inaccessible to whom and for what purpose. If the answer is they’ll be inaccessible to people who are using latency arbitrage, that is exactly the point.”

Additional reporting by Jennifer Hughes

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JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon warned European leaders they have a competitiveness problem and that they are currently “losing” the battle to rival the US and China. 

“Europe has gone from 90 per cent US GDP to 65 per cent over 10 or 15 years. That’s not good,” Dimon said at an event in Dublin organised by the Irish foreign ministry. “You’re losing.” 

The comments from Dimon, one of the most influential voices in global finance, underscores the challenges facing the EU as it battles to invigorate its economy.

Mario Draghi, the continent’s former top central banker, last year demanded a new industrial strategy for Europe with annual investment of €800bn to maintain competitiveness with the US and China.

“We’ve got this huge strong market and our companies are big and successful, have huge kinds of scale that are global. You have that, but less and less,” Dimon said.

It is an even blunter message from Dimon than he made in his most recent annual shareholder meeting in April, where he said “Europe has some serious issues to fix”, and urged European nations to “significantly reform their economies so they can grow”. 

Dimon, who has run JPMorgan since 2006, also warned that financial markets had become too relaxed about Donald Trump’s repeated threat of tariffs.

Investors on Thursday brushed off the US president’s latest threat of a 50 per cent tariff on copper, 200 per cent tariffs on the pharmaceutical sector and levies on countries including Japan and South Korea.

“Unfortunately, I think there is complacency in the market,” Dimon said. 

He said Trump had so far been correct in backing down from his biggest threats on tariffs, invoking the so-called Taco trade based on the premise that “Trump always chickens out”. 

“I hate to use the word ‘Taco trade” because I think he did the right thing to chicken out,” Dimon said.

Dimon saw trouble ahead for Trump if the economy struggled. “I think if the [US] economy weakens at all, he’s going to have a tough time.”

But he also blasted the opposition Democrats, saying: “What were they thinking in their wokeness?” He also called Zohran Mamdani — who won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York, where JPMorgan has its headquarters — a “Marxist”.

Dimon said worrying about whether Trump would seek a third term would be “premature”. US presidents are limited to two terms.

However, the JPMorgan boss said he thought the vice-president, JD Vance, would not agree to any deal in which he headlined the ticket alongside Trump: “He’ll say, ‘Hey buddy, get in the basement. You’ve had your day in the sun!’”

But Dimon said Trump may eventually prefer his son Eric as a candidate. Despite saying he harboured no political aspirations, Dimon said: “If he did [that], I might consider it too.”

A Delta jet experienced engine problems on what was supposed to be a trans-Atlantic flight and landed on an island in the middle of the ocean, where the nearly 300 travelers and crew had to spend the night, officials said Thursday.

Flight 127 left Madrid on Sunday, bound for New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, when it had “to divert to Lajes, Azores (TER) after indication of a mechanical issue with an engine,” according to an airline statement.

The Airbus A330 had 282 customers and 13 crew members on board, Delta said.

The passengers and crew “deplaned via stairs at TER” and “were accommodated overnight in area hotels and provided meals,” the airline added.

They were taken off the island in Portugal’s Azores archipelago on a new aircraft on Monday.

“The flight landed safely, and we sincerely apologize to our customers for their experience and delay in their travels,” Delta said.

More than 1 in 5 US adults with arthritis do not know their specific subtype, with a lack of awareness disproportionately affecting certain racial and ethnic groups, as well as individuals with lower income, less education, and no health insurance, according to a study published in the CDC’s Preventing Chronic Disease.¹

Arthritis is one of the most common chronic diseases in the US, affecting an estimated 53.2 million adults.² This number is projected to increase to 78.4 million by 2040.³ The term “arthritis” encompasses over 100 conditions, each with different symptoms, treatments, etiologies, and pathogeneses.⁴

Consequently, the researchers emphasized the importance of individuals with arthritis knowing their specific subtype to support effective disease management. They added that having up-to-date prevalence estimates for various arthritis subtypes can help inform public health policies, support prevention programs, and allocate resources effectively.

Despite its importance, limited research has examined the prevalence and distribution of arthritis subtypes among US adults. To fill this gap, the researchers analyzed data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey collected between 2017 and March 2020.

The study found that the overall crude prevalence of any diagnosed arthritis among US adults aged 20 or older was 27.9%, affecting about 67.1 million individuals (95% CI, 23.5%-30.6%). The overall age-standardized prevalence was 24.9% (95% CI, 23.2%-26.7%).

Osteoarthritis was the most common subtype, affecting an estimated 33.2 million US adults (crude prevalence, 49.6%; age-standardized prevalence, 44.5%). This was followed by rheumatoid arthritis, which impacted 10.6 million people (crude, 15.8%; age-standardized, 18.9%), and psoriatic arthritis, which affected 1.0 million people (crude, 1.4%; age-standardized, 1.7%).

Additionally, more than 1 in 10 individuals with arthritis reported having an unlisted type of arthritis (n = 7.7 million; crude, 11.5%; age-standardized, 15.6%), and about 1 in 5 affected adults did not know their specific arthritis type (n = 14.4 million; crude, 21.6%; age-standardized, 22.3%).

The age-standardized prevalence of not knowing one’s arthritis type was higher among certain racial and ethnic groups. Among adults who self-identified as Mexican American, 31.9% were unaware of their arthritis type, compared with 20.2% of non-Hispanic White adults (P = .03). Similarly, the prevalence was 26.7% among non-Hispanic Black adults and 29.5% among other Hispanic adults.

The data also showed a clear association between educational attainment and arthritis type awareness, with the prevalence of not knowing increasing as educational attainment decreased (P = .006). Adults with a college degree (14.8%) had a lower prevalence of not knowing their arthritis type compared with those with some college education (23.4%; P = .02), a high school education (24.1%; P = .03), or less than a high school education (31.8%; P = .005).

Income level also played a role. Adults with a family income at or below 125% of the federal poverty level (FPL) had a higher prevalence of not knowing their arthritis type (26.7%) than those with a family income above 400% of the FPL (16.6%; P = .004). Lastly, a lack of health insurance was another significant factor, with 36.1% of uninsured adults unaware of their arthritis type compared with 20.7% of insured adults (P = .03).

The researchers concluded by acknowledging their limitations, including the fact that arthritis subtypes were self-reported and not validated by a health care professional. As a result, recall bias may have led to misclassification of arthritis types, affecting the accuracy of prevalence estimates.

Nonetheless, they expressed confidence in their findings, which highlight a broader issue of health literacy in the US. The researchers stressed that understanding one’s arthritis type is essential for effective treatment, self-management, and improved health outcomes.

“Knowing arthritis type is crucial for successfully managing the disease and preventing further damage,” the authors wrote. “Using strategies to improve organizational and personal health literacy could contribute to more informed patients, thereby reducing the prevalence of not knowing arthritis type and improving health outcomes.”

References

1. Foster AL, Boring MA, Lites TD, Croft JE, Odom EL, Fallon EA. Distribution of arthritis subtypes among adults with arthritis in the United States, 2017-March 2020. Prev Chronic Dis. 2025;22:E28. doi:10.5888/pcd22.240393
2. Fallon EA, Boring MA, Foster AL, et al. Prevalence of diagnosed arthritis – United States, 2019-2021. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep. 2023;72(41):1101-1107. doi:10.15585/mmwr.mm7241a1
3. Hootman JM, Helmick CG, Barbour KE, Theis KA, Boring MA. Updated projected prevalence of self-reported doctor-diagnosed arthritis and arthritis-attributable activity limitation among US adults, 2015-2040. Arthritis Rheumatol. 2016;68(7):1582-1587. doi:10.1002/art.39692