The News

 Following auditor changes and Nasdaq-100 Index exclusion, Nvidia (NVDA, Financials) partner Super Micro Computer (SMCI, Financials) is down notably; the stock is down 11.8% in pre-market trading on last look.

• Warning! GuruFocus has detected 4 Warning Signs with NVDA.

The Nasdaq Stock Exchange will take Super Micro Computer off the Nasdaq-100 Index on Dec. 23. Periodically changing, the index highlights the biggest non-financial companies active on the market.

Apart from the index exclusion, Super Micro Computer's accounting policies under examination. October saw Auditor Ernst & Young leave under internal control and governance concerns. Following the appointment of BDO USA as an auditor, the business asked Nasdaq to postpone financial reporting. Senior management has not shown any wrongdoing according to an independent examination, so the business does not expect financial restatements.

Though these changes, Super Micro Computer has expandedespecially in artificial intelligence. Leading supplier of high-performance AI servers, the company's stock price skyrocketed early in this year.

The present problems of the corporation cause increased volatility in its shares. Investor worries about governance and future prospects have caused shares to fall.

Super Micro Computer wants to comply and keep its Nasdaq listing. The corporation is strengthening governance and appointing a new CFO to help to allay investor worries.

This article first appeared on GuruFocus.

 Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son will announce a $100 billion investment in the U.S. over the next four years during a Monday visit to President-elect Donald Trump’s residence Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, sources familiar with the matter told CNBC’s Sara Eisen.

The billionaire investor and founder of the Japanese tech-investing firm will also promise in the joint announcement with Trump to create 100,000 jobs focused on artificial intelligence and related infrastructure, the sources said. The money will be deployed before the end of Trump’s term.

The funding could come from various sources controlled by Softbank, including the Vision Fund, capital projects or chipmaker Arm Holdings

, where the firm is majority owner. Some of the money will not necessarily be newly raised, but could include some funding already announced such as Softbank’s recent $1.5 billion investment in OpenAI, the tech firm behind chatbot ChatGPT.

Softbank’s Son and Trump made a similar announcement in 2016 after Trump was elected president for the first time, with the Japanese firm agreeing to invest $50 billion in the U.S. with the aim to create 50,000 jobs.

 With January just weeks away and inflation still impacting the wallets of Americans, taxpayers across the country are preparing to file in 2025.

To ease the transition, the Internal Revenue Service announces inflation adjustments each year, noting adjustments for more than 60 tax provisions. 

The IRS released numbers for tax year 2024 last year, nudging most taxpayers to pay close attention to the standard deduction for single and married filers.

For single taxpayers and married individuals filing separately, the standard deduction rose to $14,600, up $750 from tax year 2023, the IRS reported. For married couples filing jointly for tax year 2024, the deduction increased to $29,200, up $1,500 from tax year 2023, the IRS said. The IRS noted that for the head of household, the standard deduction went up $1,100, totaling to $21,900.

IRS tax rates for tax year 2024

The IRS announced tax rates for its seven tax brackets for tax year 2024:

• 37% – Single income over $609,350 and married couples filing jointly with income over $731,200
• 35% – Single income over $243,725 and married couples filing jointly with income over $487,450
• 32% – Single income over $191,950 and married couples filing jointly with income over $383,900
• 24% – Single income over $100,525 and married couples filing jointly with income over $201,050
• 22% – Single income over $47,150 and married couples filing jointly with income over $94,300
• 12% – Single income over $11,600 and married couples filing jointly with income over $23,200
• 10% – Single income of $11,600 or less and married couples filing jointly with income less than $23,200

Tax exemptions and credits

One change noted by the IRS relates to the alternative minimum tax exemption (AMT). Some tax benefits can significantly shrink a taxpayer's regular tax amount. The AMT is applied to high-income taxpayers by limiting these benefits, ensuring that these high-income taxpayers pay at least a minimum amount of tax, the IRS said on its website.

The AMT exemption amount for tax year 2024 increased to $85,700 and starts to phase out at $609,350, up $4,400 and $31,200 compared to tax year 2023, respectively. The exemption amount for married couples filing jointly increased to $133,300 and begins to phase out at $1,218,700, up $6,800 and $62,400 compared to tax year 2023, the IRS said.

The tax year 2024 maximum Earned Income Tax Credit amount for taxpayers with three or more qualifying children is $7,830, an increase of $400 from tax year 2023.

A spokesperson from the IRS said that based on public statistics, out of 153.8 million tax returns, fewer than 180,000 taxpayers paid the alternative minimum tax in 2023. Numbers may be higher, though since the numbers were only crunched through November.

What about my health savings account contributions?

For tax year 2024, the limit for employee health savings account contributions is set to increase to $3,200, the IRS announced in November last year.

For tax year 2024, those with self-only coverage in a medical savings account have a maximum out-of-pocket expense amount of $5,550, up $250 from 2023. 

Family coverage for tax year 2024 includes an out-of-pocket expense limit of $10,200 (an increase of $550 from tax year 2023).

Are tax brackets changing for tax year 2025?

In October, the IRS also released information on changes impacting taxpayers for tax year 2025, or when they file their taxes beginning in January 2026. 

Changes taxpayers can be on the lookout for include another increase for single taxpayers and married individuals filing separately. The standard deduction will rise to $15,000, up $400 from this year, the IRS said.

For married couples filing jointly, the standard deduction will be $30,000, up $800, and for heads of households, the standard deduction will rise to $22,500, an increase of $600.

Brackets for singles and married couples filing jointly, according to the IRS, include:

 Billionaire Elon Musk earned his reputation as an innovator at the forefront of science and technology, revolutionizing electric vehicles and space travel. But in the past several months, he has emerged as a major political figure in the United States, pouring more than US$250 million into Republican Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and using his social-media platform X (formerly Twitter) to question vaccine safety and climate science.

What Trump’s election win could mean for AI, climate and health

Now the entrepreneur is joining forces with president-elect Trump on a mission to downsize the US government — including potentially slashing the budgets and workforces of science agencies, which Musk’s companies Tesla and SpaceX relied on for government contracts to grow and thrive. It has left many in the research community raising questions about his political influence and what it means for science in the United States and beyond.

Although details about the US advisory body that Musk will help to lead, named the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), are scant, the billionaire, along with his co-chair, biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, laid out some of their intentions in a guest editorial in the Wall Street Journal last month. “Unelected bureaucrats” — a category that includes tens of thousands of scientists and other specialists — represent an “existential threat to our republic” owing to the unnecessary regulations on industry that they have helped to implement, the duo wrote. The pair then promised “mass headcount reductions across the federal bureaucracy”.

Musk has not responded to repeated requests for comment from Nature.

DOGE will undoubtedly face headwinds in achieving its cuts, policy observers who spoke to Nature say. Few, however, doubt that Musk will have far-reaching influence on science in the United States and beyond.

Shrinking the government

Conflicts of interest abound for Musk as a government adviser. The world’s richest man, Musk heads companies rooted in science, including private aerospace firm SpaceX, electric-vehicle company Tesla and brain-implant firm Neuralink. He has complained that US innovation is being held back by a “mountain of choking regulations” — government rules on everything from labour practices to data privacy that have repeatedly ensnared his own companies. In February 2022, for instance, Tesla agreed to pay a $275,000 fine after inspectors at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found that one of its manufacturing plants in Fremont, California, violated air-pollution regulations.

Musk’s deregulatory vision aligns with that of president-elect Trump. For instance, many expect Trump to roll back or weaken rules designed to curb pollution, protect public health and limit climate change when he takes office, much as he did during his first term in 2017–21. Whether government regulation actually hinders economic and technological innovation is a complex question, however.

Some research supports the idea that it can discourage growth or make it harder for big firms to acquire too much power by snapping up technology from start-up firms1,2. Many venture capitalists in places such as Silicon Valley, California, have focused on the latter restriction, and hope that the incoming Trump administration will relax rules governing mergers and acquisitions.

There are areas in which streamlining regulations makes sense, says Robert Atkinson, an economist and president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation in Washington DC. Environmental regulations, for instance, might protect public health by requiring firms to study the environmental impacts of their activities and limiting pollution, but they can also slow deployment of crucial clean-energy projects and infrastructure.

The real question lies in how regulations are crafted, says Scott Stern, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. “Clear and stable regulation arguably provides the right incentives for innovation,” he says. For instance, clear rules governing drug development protect both public health and intellectual property, fostering private investment.

The danger is that efforts to scale back government regulations, as well as spending, will go too far, Atkinson says. “If we … just slash the federal enterprise, at the end of the day, we’re going to get less innovation, not more.”

A new political dynamic

In various posts and forums, Musk and Ramaswamy have said they want to cut 75% of federal workers and an eye-watering $2 trillion of government spending, but policy watchers say that goal is practically impossible. The entire federal budget is around $6.8 trillion, and most of that goes to mandatory — and politically popular — social programmes that provide health care and retirement benefits to millions of people. The discretionary portion, which funds the entire federal government, including science agencies, is $1.7 trillion. And roughly half of that is dedicated to defence spending, a pot of money that is unlikely to be cut by Republicans.

What is science? Tech heavyweights brawl over definition

The US Congress has resisted efforts to cut back or even eliminate federal agencies in the past. During Trump’s first term, for instance, Republican lawmakers joined Democrats in rejecting his call to slash the budgets of the EPA and other science agencies. In some cases, budgets even increased.

The political dynamic is different today, however, with Trump’s election victory and Republicans set to control both chambers of Congress next year. Republicans in the lower chamber, the House of Representatives, are already planning to create a panel to identify spending and programme cuts in parallel with DOGE, which as an advisory body lacks the authority to implement its own recommendations. Science agencies could be vulnerable, especially those associated with environmental and social sciences that don’t align with the Trump administration’s agenda, policy specialists say.

Political influencer

Given how much political influence Musk now has in one of the most powerful governments in the world, he could affect the direction of several scientific fields.

Last year, for instance, he was among a group of technology leaders and researchers urging to pause big artificial intelligence (AI) experiments. In an open letter, the group warned of the “profound risks to society and humanity” and advocated for the “development of robust AI governance systems”.

First private spacewalk a success! What the SpaceX mission means for science

Advocacy from Musk, who founded the firm xAI, which has released a generative-AI chatbot called Grok, could translate into support for the federal AI Safety Institute, which is developing potential rules for governing the industry, says Chris MacKenzie, a spokesperson for Americans for Responsible Innovation, an AI-policy advocacy organization in Washington DC. Supporting the institute, rather than recommending it be cut, could put the United States in a position “to lead internationally on writing the rules of the road for AI”, Mackenzie says.

Musk, who has long sought to send humans to Mars, is unlikely to recommend slashing funding for space exploration. And Trump’s nominee to lead NASA, Jared Isaacman, another Silicon Valley billionaire, probably won’t either if he is confirmed by the Senate. Isaacman has close ties to Musk and is an ardent space enthusiast who has twice flown aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft.

Instead, Musk might try to influence NASA to speed up its plans to send astronauts to the Moon, then quickly move on to Mars using SpaceX’s Starship system, says John Logsdon, a retired space-policy analyst who formerly worked at George Washington University in Washington DC. The idea would be “do the Moon first, don’t linger, and then turn to Mars”.

Currently in development, Starship is already NASA’s vehicle of choice to carry US astronauts to the Moon’s surface in the coming years. Efforts to streamline programmes at NASA could hinder Starship’s competitors, namely the NASA-built Space Launch System rocket.

Nobody is questioning Musk’s right to advocate for his companies or his ideas, and Stern, for one, says Musk’s background in science and engineering could ultimately prove beneficial. Stern is reserving judgment but says that Musk is “at least acquainted with science, and he does think from first principles.”.

Still, questions remain about political influence and the dangers of giving a few wealthy individuals too much power. “That isn’t how the government is supposed to function,” says Dave Cook, a physicist who studies clean-energy transportation at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a Cambridge-based advocacy group. “And it’s certainly not something that is automatically going to be in the best interests of the American people.” he says.

 Donald Trump hosted Apple CEO Tim Cook for a Friday evening dinner at the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago resort, according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to comment publicly.

Cook is the latest in a string of big tech leaders — including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos — who have sought to improve their standing with the incoming president after choppy relations with Trump during his first term.

Trump has said he has spoken with Cook about the company’s long-running tax battles with the European Union.

The meeting comes less than two months after Trump said he spoke to Cook by phone, and soon after Apple lost its last appeal in a dispute with the EU over 13 billion euros ($14.34 billion) in back taxes to Ireland.

“He said the European Union has just fined us $15 billion,” Trump recalled of his conversation with Cook, in an October interview with podcaster Patrick Bet-David. “Then on top of that they got fined by the European Union another $2 billion.”

The decision by the EU top court was the finale to a dispute that centered on sweetheart deals that Dublin was offering to attract multinational businesses with minimal taxes across the 27-nation bloc. The European Commission in 2016 ruled that Ireland granted Apple unlawful aid that Ireland was required to recover.

Trump’s transition team and Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment about his dinner with Cook.

OpenAI CEO Altman is planning to make a $1 million personal donation to Trump’s inauguration fund, the company confirmed Friday. Amazon and Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, confirmed this week they had each donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.

During his first term, Trump criticized Amazon and railed against the political coverage at The Washington Post, which Bezos owns. Meanwhile, Bezos had criticized some of Trump’s past rhetoric. In 2019, Amazon also argued in a court case that Trump’s bias against the company harmed its chances of winning a $10 billion Pentagon contract.

More recently, Bezos has struck a more conciliatory tone. Last week, he said at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit in New York that he was “optimistic” about Trump’s second term while also endorsing president-elect’s plans to cut regulations.

The donation from Meta came just weeks after Meta CEO Zuckerberg met with Trump privately at Mar-a-Lago.

  former OpenAI employee and whistleblower, Suchir Balaji, was recently found dead in his apartment in San Francisco, California.

The San Francisco Office of the Chief Medical Examiner has identified Balaji, 26, as the deceased person, according to the San Jose Mercury News. The manner of death has been ruled suicide.

Balaji was found dead in his Buchanan Street apartment on November 26, a spokesperson for the San Francisco Police Department told the outlet. First responders were called to his home to perform a wellness check, and no evidence of foul play was found during the initial probe.

"We are devastated to learn of this incredibly sad news today and our hearts go out to Suchir’s loved ones during this difficult time," a spokesperson for OpenAI told Fox News Digital.

This comes after Balaji, an AI researcher, raised concerns about OpenAI breaking copyright law in an interview with The New York Times in October.

A man is seen using the OpenAI ChatGPT artificial intelligence chat website in this illustration photo on July 18, 2023.  (Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Balaji resigned from OpenAI after working there for nearly four years when he learned the technology would bring more harm than good to society, he told the newspaper, noting that his main concern was the way the company allegedly used copyright data, stating that he believed its practices were damaging to the internet.

"I was at OpenAI for nearly 4 years and worked on ChatGPT for the last 1.5 of them," Balaji wrote in October on the social media platform X. "I initially didn't know much about copyright, fair use, etc. but became curious after seeing all the lawsuits filed against GenAI companies."

The OpenAI logo is arranged on a laptop in Beijing, China, on Friday, Feb. 24, 2023. (Bloomberg via Getty Images)

"When I tried to understand the issue better, I eventually came to the conclusion that fair use seems like a pretty implausible defense for a lot of generative AI products, for the basic reason that they can create substitutes that compete with the data they’re trained on," his post continued.

OpenAI and Microsoft are currently facing several lawsuits from media outlets who accuse OpenAI of breaking copyright law.

 China’s recent economic measures failed to spark investor confidence, causing the yuan to weaken against the US dollar, which climbed to a two-and-a-half-week high.

What does this mean?

China's efforts to boost its economy with increased spending and debt issuance seem to have backfired, as the yuan has lost value instead of gaining it. Policymakers are expanding budget deficits and loosening monetary policies, yet these actions haven’t reassured investors about China’s growth outlook. At the same time, the People's Bank of China is propping up the yuan by setting a stronger midpoint rate than expected. Despite these efforts, bond yields have dropped to record lows, indicating a tough economic climate. This uncertainty is bolstering the US dollar’s appeal, as markets expect a Federal Reserve rate cut, drawing investors seeking stability.

Why should I care?

For markets: Investors look for safe harbors.

China's underwhelming strategies have led the US dollar to become a beacon of safety for investors. With China's bond yields at historic lows, the profitability of Chinese investments is under scrutiny. The yuan's dip against the dollar might redirect global capital flows to the US, impacting emerging market currencies and international investment dynamics.

China is cautiously stimulating its economy, wary of unleashing consumer stimulus unless an economic crisis arises, while considering a weaker yuan to counterbalance possible US tariffs by 2025. This calculated approach emphasizes China's delicate act of fostering growth while maintaining currency stability, reflecting the challenges of steering a massive economy like China’s amid global pressures and shifting geopolitical landscapes.