Stocks finished February with a flourish, but they’re flattish so far today. The same goes for the dollar, Treasuries, and precious metals. Crude oil is popping, though.
Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk is suing Sam Altman, the CEO of Artificial Intelligence (AI) company OpenAI. Musk claims Altman abandoned the open source, non-profit approach of OpenAI to make money off AI technology instead, breaching a contract with him in the process.
Musk co-founded the firm in 2015, though he hasn’t been on the board of directors since vacating the position in 2018. Representatives for OpenAI, the company behind the ChatGPT tool, and partner/investor Microsoft (MSFT) reportedly didn’t yet comment.
The crisis at New York Community Bancorp (NYCB) deepened late yesterday, when the commercial real estate (CRE) lender warned of “material weaknesses” in risk tracking. The bank has $37 billion in loans on apartment properties, with roughly half of those rent-controlled buildings.
New York Community Bancorp (NYCB)
The value of those kinds of properties has dropped sharply due to changes that make it harder and less profitable for New York landlords to convert rent-regulated units to market-rent ones. NYCB shares dropped another 27% this morning, after previously being down 53% year-to-date.
Finally, it looks like there’s some “Swift Envy” afoot in Asia. Taylor Swift’s “Eras Tour” is currently crisscrossing the globe. But in East Asia, she is only performing in Japan and Singapore – with the latter reportedly subsidizing her appearance. Countries like Thailand and the city of Hong Kong are feeling left out, especially because her rabid fans have been spending money like crazy in host cities all over the world.
