McDonald’s is now facing its first lawsuit related to the E. coli outbreak linked to its Quarter Pounder burgers.
In financial news, the Nasdaq index increased by 1.5%, gaining 277 points on Monday afternoon. This rise followed President Joe Biden’s announcement on Sunday that he would withdraw from the presidential race and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris. Meanwhile, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 saw modest gains of 0.3% and 1.1%, respectively.
The betting platform Polymarket has shown support for Harris as the likely Democratic nominee, while PredictIt, based in New Zealand, forecasts that she may become the 47th president of the United States.
In technology news, Nvidia’s shares rose by 4% after reports emerged that the company is preparing to launch its new Blackwell AI chips in China. Collaborating with the local distributor Inspur, Nvidia is working on the B20 chip, which is expected to begin shipping in the second quarter of 2025. The company has chosen not to comment on these developments.
Tesla’s stock surged nearly 5% ahead of its earnings report, where Elon Musk is likely to discuss the postponed introduction of the company’s robotaxi service. Musk stated on social media that Tesla aims to have humanoid robots in limited production for internal use by next year, with an expectation for broader production for external use by 2026.
On the other hand, CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm responsible for last Friday’s significant global tech outage, continued to deal with the repercussions days later, although recovery is underway. The company announced that a substantial number of the 8.5 million impacted Windows devices are now operational. Nonetheless, its stock fell over 13% and was trading around $263 on Monday afternoon.
In telecommunications, Verizon experienced a nearly 6% drop in stock value following the release of its quarterly earnings report. The company reported a second-quarter revenue of $32.8 billion, slightly below analysts’ projections of $33.06 billion. Its earnings per share (EPS) aligned with expectations at $1.15, but the firm noted a trend of customers retaining older phones longer, which negatively affects upgrade rates for telecom companies that typically promote new lines of mobile phones.