Top Stories — Saturday, September 6, 2025
What is trending in the USA today? Here is Breaking News:
- Norway's Navy Gets a Big Boost With U.K. Ship Deal — nyt News
- 18-year-old CEO learned to code at age 7—now he has a $1.4 million-a-month AI app — CNBC
- Musk's $1T pay package is full of watered-down versions of his own broken promises — TechCrunch
Norway's Navy Gets a Big Boost With U.K. Ship Deal
Source: nyt News • Published: 9/6/2025, 7:36:44 PM
Norway's Navy is getting an upgrade.
This past week, the Norwegian government signed a $13.5 billion deal with Britain to purchase a new fleet of high-tech warships, a move that will have long-reaching consequences for NATO, the North Atlantic and the Arctic.
It is the single biggest military purchase that Norway has ever made. Defense analysts see it as an important step by Europe to increase its military capabilities after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine and as President Trump's isolationist foreign policy has scrambled traditional Western alliances.
"Europe has realized it must rearm," said Njord Wegge, a professor at the Norwegian Defense University College in Oslo.
Under the agreement, Norway will buy from British shipbuilders at least five new frigates that are nearly 500 feet long and equipped with modern weapon systems, possibly including attack helicopters. The Norwegians and the British, both founding members of NATO, are not shy about saying who their enemy is.
"This deal will see our navies work as one, creating a combined fleet to defend NATO's northern flank and strengthen our deterrence against Russian aggression," Britain's defense secretary, John Healey, said in a statement on Thursday.
Norway, which is Europe's biggest oil and gas producer and has nearly $2 trillion in its sovereign wealth fund, is increasingly watching its northern borders, especially on the Arctic Ocean.
As climate change accelerates, defense strategists predict more competition and potential conflict in the region. Russia keeps some of its most lethal nuclear-armed submarines not far from the Norwegian border in the Arctic.
"The major threat for us, the one threat we deal with every day, is Russia," said Tor Ivar Strommen, a Norwegian naval commander and lecturer at the Royal Norwegian Naval Academy. "We are dependent on having cutting-edge technology so that we are not doomed to lose."
The Russian Embassy in Oslo expressed displeasure with the move, saying on its Facebook page on Friday that NATO's military preparation "naturally poses a threat to our country's national security, has a destabilizing effect and increases the risk of escalation in the Arctic."
The Norwegian navy has only four frigates, and the first new ones are not expected to be ready until 2029. They will be equipped with special sonar to detect submarines and torpedoes and will be identical to frigates in the British navy to benefit from joint training, maintenance and repairs, Norwegian officials said.
The expanded frigate fleet will form the "backbone" of Norway's naval capability, said Marte Gerhardsen, an official in Norway's defense ministry.
The British government celebrated winning the contract, boasting that it would support 4,000 jobs and hundreds of businesses. Britain faced stiff competition, beating out the United States, France and Germany.
"Norway is up alone in the North, and the U.K. is the most intuitive partner," Mr. Wegge said. "In this situation, the U.K. appears a very natural partner for us, even if they are, of course, less capable than the U.S."
Jeffrey Gettleman is an international correspondent based in London covering global events. He has worked for The Times for more than 20 years.
Read the full story at nyt News.
18-year-old CEO learned to code at age 7—now he has a $1.4 million-a-month AI app
Source: CNBC • Published: 9/6/2025, 7:35:02 PM
Like millions of fellow 18-year-olds across the U.S., Zach Yadegari spent his summer preparing for college.
Unlike most other freshmen, Yadegari doubts he'll linger in academia for very long. He's the co-founder and CEO of Cal AI, a calorie-tracking mobile app he launched from his parents' home in Roslyn, New York, in May 2024 — and the app's success to date makes him think he'll take it full-time well before his class' graduation date, he says.
Cal AI's users upload a photo of their food, and the app's artificial intelligence-based software gives them an estimate of the total calories. The app, which Yadegari says has a 90% accuracy rate, launched in May 2024. It's free to download in the Apple and Google Play app stores, and a subscription costs $2.49 per month or $29.99 per year.
Cal AI has 30 employees, and brings in roughly $1.4 million in gross profit per month — after the Apple and Google Play app stores take their respective cuts — according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. That includes nearly $274,000 in monthly net operating income, a measurement of profit before accounting for taxes and interest.
Yadegari started undergraduate classes at the University of Miami's business school in August, but doesn't plan to stay for more than a year, he says. On social media, he touts living a lavish startup CEO lifestyle: He parties "almost every night" in an off-campus mansion he shares "with all my friends," he said in an Instagram video posted on August 23.
After college, Yadegari dreams of a career in serial entrepreneurship, he says. Technically, he's already achieved the moniker: As a high school freshman, he built a gaming website called Totally Science that helped students play online games on their schools' WiFi networks, bypassing internet blocking protocols. He sold the website for roughly $100,000 to gaming company Freeze Nova in February 2024, documents show.
"I think that entrepreneurship is really cool because at the end of the day, age doesn't really matter much," says Yadegari. "You're either good or not good at what you do, and then the market will decide [the] results."
Inspired by his love of online games like Minecraft, Yadegari's mother sent him to a summer camp to learn software coding at age 7. From there, Yadegari "started binge-watching YouTube" for tutorials on coding different types of programs, direct messaging other coders and content creators he saw online to ask for tips, he says.
After launching Totally Science, Yadegari tried to create a viral mobile app "because everyone has a phone in their pocket," he says. His ideas kept flopping, until he focused on a personal problem: He'd started working out "to impress the girls at my school," and every calorie-tracking app he downloaded made him manually input all his food, which he found tedious, he says.
He talked about it with his friend Henry Langmack, who he'd known since coding camp, and two friends he met on social media platform X — Blake Anderson, 24, and Jake Castillo, 30. The group decided to try building an AI model that could analyze photos of food and "do all of the work for you," says Yadegari.
Yadegari and Langmack coded the app, and the group spent $2,000 on a social media marketing test run, says Yadegari. The response was positive enough for Yadegari and Anderson, a serial entrepreneur in his own right, to fund Cal AI's operating and marketing costs for six months until the app stores' delayed payment schedules caught up.
Cal AI brought in more than $28,000 in revenue for its first month, and then $115,000 for the next month. The co-founders started hiring employees, with Yadegari and Langmack conducting interviews while staying in a San Francisco "hacker house" for the month of July 2024.
Once the summer ended, Yadegari worked 40 hours per week on the app — writing code and brainstorming potential new features with Cal AI's designers and developers — while managing his schoolwork at Roslyn High School, he says. His parents were supportive of his efforts, and he maintained a 4.0 GPA, he says.
"My parents are really happy with everything with Cal AI, especially my mom. She actually uses the app," Yadegari says. "Overall, they're really proud."
A mobile app may seem like a relatively low-upkeep business idea, but Cal AI's expenses nearly match its revenue.
The company spends almost $770,000 per month on advertising and marketing alone, for example. Other costs include payroll, software costs, and legal and accounting services. The co-founders do pay themselves some dividends from the app's proceeds, including one recent $100,000 payment to Yadegari.
The company must also maintain a good reputation in the Apple and Google Play app stores. Cal AI may save users some time compared to its more traditional counterparts, but it's not magic. Customer reviews show numerous complaints about the app's accuracy: Users still need to manually input any information the app can't detect, and correct anything it gets wrong.
Some customers have "misconceptions about Cal AI and what AI can do," says Yadegari, adding: "Some of our users expect it to have X-ray vision, where if you take a picture of a bowl of food and you hit things at the bottom of the bowl, it's going to pick it up. It won't."
Yadegari hopes to make Cal AI "the biggest calorie-tracking app," which would likely mean topping industry leader MyFitnessPal's self-reported 270-plus million users. The startup's app has 8.3 million downloads as of July, according to a spokesperson, and Cal AI plans to close the gap with more hiring, marketing spend and rollout of new features, Yadegari says.
For the first time, he's the CEO of a company with adult employees whose families rely on their paychecks — a responsibility he tries to not take for granted, he notes. "I can't just go away for a few months and neglect things, like I could have with previous projects," he says.
Yet for all of his long-term goals, Yadegari only plans to run Cal AI for two more years: After that, he'd like to sell it or hand the reins to another CEO so he can start a new company, he says. He's "not entirely sure" what his next venture will entail, beyond involving AI — but he hopes to "dedicate most of the rest of my life" to it, he adds.
"Ideally, it really shapes the future and is part of my legacy," says Yadegari.
Want to stand out, grow your network, and get more job opportunities? Sign up for Smarter by CNBC Make It's new online course, How to Build a Standout Personal Brand: Online, In Person, and At Work. Learn from three expert instructors how to showcase your skills, build a stellar reputation, and create a digital presence that AI can't replicate.
Plus, sign up for CNBC Make It's newsletter to get tips and tricks for success at work, with money and in life, and request to join our exclusive community on LinkedIn to connect with experts and peers.
Musk's $1T pay package is full of watered-down versions of his own broken promises
Source: TechCrunch • Published: 9/6/2025, 7:32:36 PM
Musk's $1T pay package is full of watered-down versions of his own broken promises
Tesla has proposed a massive new $1 trillion compensation package for its CEO Elon Musk, and many of the benchmarks he needs to hit are simply watered-down versions of promises he's spent years making about the company.
That's not the picture Tesla's board of directors paints in the company's annual proxy statement, where they revealed the proposed pay package. Instead, the board focuses on how it plans to create "the most valuable company in history."
To be sure, if Tesla accomplishes all that it aims for with this deal, it will look like a much different company at the end of the 10-year period it covers. That doesn't change the fact that the milestones the company is asking Musk to aim for are less ambitious than his own previously-stated goals.
While the unprecedented pay package still needs to be approved by shareholders at a meeting in November, it's easy to see the company's fervent fan base voting "yes." Previous votes on Musk's compensation have been overwhelmingly approved by Tesla's shareholders.
With that in mind, let's take a look at what Musk needs to accomplish in order to receive the full payout.
Musk spent years claiming Tesla would be able to make 20 million electric vehicles per year by 2030. This was back when he and his company were still promising to grow at a rate of 50% each year.
But Tesla walked away from those promises as sales growth stalled, and then reversed in 2024. The company then pulled the 20-million-per-year goal from its impact report last year, and stopped building a planned factory in Mexico that would have increased production.
With the new pay package being laid out over a 10-year period, that means the target has gone from 20 million EVs per year by 2030 to just 20 million total by 2035.
One of Musk's most infamous and outrageous promises about Tesla came in 2019, when he claimed that the company would have one million robotaxis on the road in 2020. It's now 2025, and Tesla has only just begun to trial a robotaxi service in Austin, Texas that has, at most, around 20 or 30 cars with safety drivers on board.
To access his full proposed pay package, Tesla is asking Musk to help the company realize an altered version of that promise, as another product goal listed is to have "1 million Robotaxis in Commercial Operation."
It's a goal with caveats. The fine print shows that Tesla is only requiring there to be a "daily average aggregate" of one million robotaxis "commercially operated by or on behalf of [Tesla] over a consecutive three-month period, as part of a transportation service."
Tesla goes on to define "Robotaxi" as any Tesla vehicle, including but not limited to the purpose-built "Cybercab" it's developing, that is using the company's Full Self-Driving software to offer rides to people.
This includes customer-owned vehicles, which is another thing Musk has long promised but never delivered. He's spent years claiming that Tesla could flip a digital switch and turn existing vehicles into fully-autonomous ones, and that owners could add and subtract those vehicles to a larger robotaxi fleet at will.
But Musk has since said many of the Teslas currently on the road don't have the necessary hardware for the former to happen, and the company has yet to demonstrate the latter. Regardless, Musk now has an even looser timeline to try and make both things happen.
Musk sees Tesla's future being all about the humanoid robot that it's developing, called Optimus. Just this week he claimed it could make up as much as 80% of the company's future revenue.
As he became increasingly focused on Optimus, Musk made some pretty wild promises about what that future would look like. One of his core claims was that Tesla will be making one million Optimus bots per year by as early as 2029.
And yet, Tesla's board is only asking Musk to deliver one million "bots" total as part of this proposed compensation plan. Tesla also defines "bots" as "any robot or other physical product with mobility using artificial intelligence manufactured by or on behalf of the Company" — though the company's vehicles do not count.
The directors seem to agree that Optimus has "the potential to be Tesla's bestselling product," and they say it reperesents "the clearest example of how Tesla has the ability to make autonomy benefit all of humanity."
But the board also notes that "commercialization plans" for Optimus are "still in development," and Musk now has until 2035 to reach the one million mark.
The fourth and final product goal Musk has to achieve is to notch 10 million active subscriptions to Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) software. It's arguably the most ambitious product goal. The company does not say how many current owners have paid for FSD, though executives have recently said the adoption rate is in the "teens." At best, that means anywhere from a few hundred thousand to the low millions of Tesla vehicles have the software installed.
Everything else Tesla's board is asking of Musk is tied to money. Ultimately, Musk needs to help Tesla reach an $8.5 trillion valuation in order to unlock the full value of the compensation package and become a trillionaire himself.
Musk already had grand designs to accomplish something similar. He has often claimed that Tesla could one day become more valuable than Apple and Saudi Aramco combined. At their current valuations, those two companies are collectively worth around $5.5 trillion. But earlier this year, the CEO claimed Tesla could be worth more than the next five most-valuable companies combined — which at the time meant he was aiming closer to the $15 trillion mark.
Along with the goal of blowing up Tesla's valuation, Musk is being asked to increase the company's earnings to, essentially, $400 billion per year — an enormous figure compared to last year's earnings of around $17 billion.
Lastly, Tesla's board has asked for two notable assurances from Musk in order to unlock the full value of the compensation package. One is that he must work with the company to develop a plan for how he will be succeeded as CEO of Tesla (and the plan essentially locks him to the company for at least 7.5 years).
The other, buried in a footnote, is that Tesla received "assurances that Musk's involvement with the political sphere would wind down in a timely manner."
Taken as a whole, it's a complex agreement with lots of truly pie-in-the-sky ideas about where Tesla could go under Musk's leadership over the next decade. The same was said about the previous compensation deal that Tesla struck with Musk back in 2018, and yet the company hit all of those seemingly-outrageous goals. (Musk's award was ultimately dusted by Delaware's Chancery Court.)
Still, it's hard not to notice just how much these new goals appear to come from the company trying to drag its CEO's promises back down to Earth.
Sean O'Kane is a reporter who has spent a decade covering the rapidly-evolving business and technology of the transportation industry, including Tesla and the many startups chasing Elon Musk. Most recently, he was a reporter at Bloomberg News where he helped break stories about some of the most notorious EV SPAC flops. He previously worked at The Verge, where he also covered consumer technology, hosted many short- and long-form videos, performed product and editorial photography, and once nearly passed out in a Red Bull Air Race plane.
You can contact or verify outreach from Sean by emailing sean.okane@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at okane.01 on Signal.
Put your brand in front of 10,000+ tech and VC leaders across all three days of Disrupt 2025. Amplify your reach, spark real connections, and lead the innovation charge. Secure your exhibit space before your competitor does.
Last day to book is September 5
Read the full story at TechCrunch.
For complete details, visit the original sources linked above.
Comments
Post a Comment