President Donald Trump said the government will investigate Google following an accusation by tech billionaire Peter Thiel that the company is working with China and committing treason.
"A great and brilliant guy who knows this subject better than anyone! The Trump Administration will take a look!" Trump said on Twitter Tuesday morning after a segment on Fox News aired on the issue.
In a speech on Sunday, Thiel reportedly suggested that Google's ($GOOGL) AI operations had been infiltrated by foreign intelligence agencies — especially China's — and said that senior management has made a "seemingly treasonous decision" to work with China.
These questions "need to be asked by the FBI, by the CIA," Thiel said at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington D.C., according to Axios, adding that a probe should be conducted "in a not excessively gentle manner."
Google strongly pushed back against the charge, saying in a statement to Cheddar that "we do not work with the Chinese military. We are working with the U.S. government, including the Department of Defense, in many areas including cybersecurity, recruiting and healthcare."
Thiel, who is on the board of Facebook ($FB) and has been a longtime supporter of Trump, is the co-founder of PayPal ($PYPL) and Palantir Technologies, a data mining firm that works with several U.S. government agencies.
"Treason is a very, very serious word here," Jason Moser, senior analyst at the investor firm The Motley Fool, told Cheddar. "You need to be very careful when you use that language and at least have something to back it up."
Larry Kudlow, the director of the White House's National Economic Council, also pushed back against the accusation, telling Fox Business on Monday that he is "not sure where [Thiel] is going, what [Thiel] is pointing to."
A Michigan judge is putting sponges in the hands of shoplifters and ordering them to wash cars in a Walmart parking lot when spring weather arrives. Genesee County Judge Jeffrey Clothier hopes the unusual form of community service discourages people from stealing from Walmart. The judge also wants to reward shoppers with free car washes. Clothier says he began ordering “Walmart wash” sentences this week for shoplifting at the store in Grand Blanc Township. He believes 75 to 100 people eventually will be ordered to wash cars this spring. Clothier says he will be washing cars alongside them when the time comes.
The State Department had been in talks with Elon Musk’s Tesla company to buy armored electric vehicles, but the plans have been put on hold by the Trump administration after reports emerged about a potential $400 million purchase. A State Department spokesperson said the electric car company owned by Musk was the only one that expressed interest back in May 2024. The deal with Tesla was only in its planning phases but it was forecast to be the largest contract of the year. It shows how some of his wealth has come and was still expected to come from taxpayers.
At 100 years old, the Goodyear Blimp is an ageless star in the sky. The 246-foot-long airship will be in the background of the Daytona 500 — flying roughly 1,500 feet above Daytona International Speedway, actually — to celebrate its greatest anniversary tour. Even though remote camera technologies are improving regularly and changing the landscape of aerial footage, the blimp continues to carve out a niche. At Daytona, with the usual 40-car field racing around a 2½-mile superspeedway, views from the blimp aptly provide the scope of the event.
You'll just have to wait for interest rates (and prices) to go down. Plus, this deal's a steel, the big carmaker wedding is off, and bribery is back, baby!
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem: Restaurants are struggling with record-high U.S. egg prices, but their omelets, scrambles and huevos rancheros may be part of the problem. Breakfast is booming at U.S. eateries. First Watch, a restaurant chain that serves breakfast, brunch and lunch, nearly quadrupled its locations over the past decade to 570. Fast-food chains like Starbucks and Wendy's added more egg-filled breakfast items. In normal times, egg producers could meet the demand. But a bird flu outbreak that has forced them to slaughter their flocks is making supplies scarcer and pushing up prices. Some restaurants like Waffle House have added a surcharge to offset their costs.
William Falcon, CEO and Founder of Lightning AI, discusses the ongoing feud between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, and how everyday people can use AI in their lives.
U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum “will not go unanswered,” European Union chief Ursula von der Leyen vowed on Tuesday, adding that they will trigger toug
