McDonald’s is now facing its first legal action related to the E. coli outbreak linked to its Quarter Pounder burgers.
On the stock market front, Nasdaq experienced a notable rise of 1.5%, adding 277 points on Monday afternoon. This gain came in the wake of President Joe Biden’s announcement that he would not seek re-election, subsequently endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris to lead the Democratic candidacy. Meanwhile, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 saw increases of 0.3% and 1.1%, respectively.
The betting platform Polymarket has placed its support behind Harris as the Democratic nominee, while PredictIt from New Zealand anticipates that she will ascend to the presidency as the 47th leader of the United States.
In corporate news, Nvidia’s stock climbed by 4% in the afternoon after Reuters reported that the tech giant is working on a version of its new Blackwell AI chips tailored for the Chinese market. Collaborating with local partner Inspur, Nvidia aims to launch the new chip, tentatively named the “B20,” in China, with shipments expected to commence in the second quarter of 2025. Nvidia has not provided further comment on the matter.
In anticipation of its earnings report, Tesla’s stock surged nearly 5% just one day before the announcement. CEO Elon Musk hinted on X that updates regarding the company’s delayed robotaxi plans will be shared during the report. He stated, “Tesla will have genuinely useful humanoid robots in low production for Tesla internal use next year and, hopefully, high production for other companies in 2026.”
Meanwhile, CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm linked to a significant global tech outage last Friday, has been recovering from the incident. The company reported that a substantial number of the roughly 8.5 million Windows devices affected are now back online. However, CrowdStrike’s stock fell over 13% in afternoon trading, hovering around $263.
Verizon faced a considerable decline of nearly 6% after announcing its quarterly earnings report, as it fell short of revenue expectations. The telecom giant attributed this shortfall to customers retaining their old devices for more extended periods, which has adversely affected upgrade rates on promotional mobile plans. Verizon reported a second-quarter revenue of $32.8 billion, which slightly missed analysts’ average estimate of $33.06 billion, although its earnings per share (EPS) of $1.15 met expectations.