To The Moon

The so-called Magnificent Seven group of tech stocks have spent the past two years looking invincible, so it's ironic that the companies worth $18 trillion in total market value were undercut this past week by a Chinese start-up no one on Wall Street had heard of just days earlier.Such is the power -- and vulnerability -- of being on the cutting edge.The new R1 artificial-intelligence model from China's DeepSeek has comparable performance to some of the world's best models, and seemingly comes at a lower price to train and run in the cloud.There are many reasons to be skeptical of R1, beginning with the fact that the Chinese government may be subsidizing R1's creation and deployment. But DeepSeek has made the model open source and produced two white papers detailing its methods, and AI labs in the U.S. and allied countries are busy trying to replicate what DeepSeek did.It's the cloud, in fact, that looks most vulnerable from the DeepSeek development. The ability to run models on local

-- Europe’s largest pension fund sold its entire 571 million stake in Tesla Inc. in the third quarter partly due to disagreement with Elon Musk’s remuneration package.“We had a problem” with Musk’s pay package, a spokesperson for Stichting Pensioenfonds ABP said Sunday. The fund also considered costs, return and responsible investment requirements in its decision to sell its investment.The news was first reported by Dutch newspaper Het Financieele Dagblad, which also cited poor working conditions at the company among ABP’s reasons to ditch Tesla.Last month, Musk’s record-setting Tesla pay package was struck down once again by a Delaware judge even after shareholders backed the amounts and Musk asked her to reconsider. The stock options package was initially worth $2.6 billion and spiked to $56 billion by the time the judge canceled it.In June, ABP voted against the pay package, calling it “controversial and exceptionally high.”