Jeff Bezos, an iPhone myth, car part layoffs, and Nvidia wins (again): The week's most popular stories

Forvia, a French autoparts supplier, said it will cut 10,000 jobs as it looks to lower costs and keep up with EU regulations pushing the industry toward more electric alternatives. The job cuts, which will take place over the next five years and save a projected 500 million euros ($540 million) each year starting in 2028, will be felt globally. Half of all cars around the world have Forvia parts, including those made by major U.S. companies like Tesla and Ford. Forvia supplies mainly for vehicle interiors and emission systems.

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Microsoft is tapping semiconductor pioneer Intel in its ambitions to make more chips as it races to develop further AI models. The company plans to use Intel’s 18A manufacturing technology to make a future chip that has been designed in-house, Microsoft and Intel said, but didn’t specify what the chip would be used for.

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Recent U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings have revealed the stocks the richest people in the world have been buying and selling in the past few months. Amazon executive chairman Jeff Bezos sold billions of dollars worth of the online retailer’s stock in February. Warren Buffet trimmed his stake in Apple by about 1% in the last quarter of 2023. And activist investor Carl Icahn revealed he has a nearly 10% stake in the budget airline JetBlue.

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Nvidia reported revenues of $22 billion in the fourth quarter, up nearly 270% from the prior year and even above Wall Street’s soaring expectations. Nvidia’s H100 GPUs, the $30,000 chips that power generative AI products, have unleashed a buying frenzy from the biggest of big tech companies. Its largest purchasers are Microsoft and Meta — which spent $4.5 billion each on the chips last year — followed by Google parent Alphabet, Amazon, and Oracle. 

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Apple users seem unanimously convinced that closing background apps is a good habit, but it’s more likely a waste of time. Perhaps this mythical ritual of iPhone maintenance will save battery, make your phone run faster, or stop social media companies from tracking you. While it’s not crazy to think so, it’s simply a lie we’ve all been living. Closing background apps does nothing because those apps aren’t actually “running.”

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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wants to raise trillions of dollars to reshape the global semiconductor industry, an effort to boost chip-making capacity and power more artificial intelligence. It’s an eye-boggling amount, one that was put to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang — the man behind the AI company of the moment — for his thoughts. Asked during the World Government Summit in Dubai how many GPUs can be bought for $7 trillion, Huang jokingly responded: “Apparently all the GPUs.”

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Capital One announced that it is acquiring the credit card company Discover in an all-stock deal valued at $35.3 billion. Combined, the two companies would form the largest credit card company in the U.S. by loan volume.

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Amazon executive chairman Jeff Bezos sold a new batch of 14 million shares of Amazon stock, worth about $2.4 billion. Over nine trading days, Bezos sold a total of 50 million shares, worth about $8.4 billion. The last time Bezos sold Amazon stock was in 2021.

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