Google owner Alphabet will buy cybersecurity firm Wiz for $32 billion — in a deal set to boost the tech giant’s in-house cloud computing amid burgeoning artificial intelligence growth.
If closed, the cash transaction, announced Tuesday, would become Google’s most expensive acquisition in the company’s 25-year history. Wiz rejected a reported $23 billion buyout proposal from Alphabet last July.
The purchase gives Google new momentum in its efforts to compete in the cloud-computing business by offering more security for its services.
“Wiz and Google Cloud are both fueled by the belief that cloud security needs to be easier, more accessible, more intelligent, and democratized, so more organizations can adopt and use cloud and AI securely,” Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport said in a blog post.
The company says Wiz will join Google Cloud — and that this deal represents a company investment “to accelerate two large and growing trends in the AI era: improved cloud security and the ability to use multiple clouds.”
Google Calendar drops cultural celebrations like Black History Month and Women’s History Month
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Together, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a statement, Google Cloud and Wiz “will turbocharge improved cloud security and the ability to use multiple clouds.”
Assaf Rappaport, Co-Founder & CEO, added that the deal will “bolster our mission to improve security and prevent breaches by providing additional resources and deep AI expertise.”
Wiz, based in New York, was founded in 2020, makes security tools designed to shield the information stored in remote data centers from intruders.
The proposed buyout will get a close look from antitrust regulators. While many expect the Trump administration to be more friendly to business deals, it has also shown skepticism of big tech.
Also, the new Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson has vowed to maintain a tough review process for mergers and acquisitions.
Zach Perret, CEO and co-founder of Plaid, speaks during the Silicon Slopes Tech Summit in Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S., on Jan. 31, 2020.
George Frey | Bloomberg via Getty Images
Plaid on Thursday announced a new funding round that values the fintech startup at $6 billion, down from $13.4 billion in 2021. The new funding will give some employees a way to cash out.
The $575 million round was led by a batch of new investors including Franklin Templeton, Fidelity and BlackRock. Existing backers NEA and Ribbit Capital also participated, Plaid said.
Plaid CEO Zach Perret said the startup saw a “substantial” growth year with record revenue and positive operating margins, though he did not provide specifics. The downsized valuation is a reflection of market conditions, he said.
“The reality is our business is much stronger and revenue has grown quite substantially,” Perret told CNBC. “The profitability of business has gotten quite a lot better, and yet we are impacted by market multiples, as many companies are.”
Plaid is “not ready” for an IPO quite yet, but this round will be the last private fundraise until the company lists on public markets, he said.
“An IPO is absolutely on our path for the coming years. We haven’t assigned a specific timeline to it,” Perret said. “We still have a lot of internal work to do. We’re not ready, which is why we didn’t consider it right now.”
Rise of secondary rounds
Plaid’s new funding allows employees to cash out of restricted stock units that expire at the end of the year. The startup will also use a portion of the proceeds to enable an employee tender offer.
“That’s the motivation for the round,” Perret said. “We think it’s important to give our employees options to sell and the ability to have liquidity, especially given that Plaid has been private for so long.”
Plaid is the latest in a string of late-stage, private deals designed to enable employees to cash out in private markets. Ramp, DataBricks, OpenAI and Stripe have all announced secondary financings that were designed to let some employees get liquidity. Few of those companies seem eager to wade into public markets. Recent volatility around stocks and lackluster performance of recent IPOs, including CoreWeave’s last week, has kept some companies on the sidelines.
“Volatility is definitely going to be one of the key factors,” Perret said, adding that it was too early to assess IPO market conditions for Plaid.
The startup has been on a roller coaster in private markets since it was founded a decade ago. Plaid was set to be bought by Visa for $5 billion in 2020 in a deal that was eventually called off amid regulatory scrutiny. The following year, it raised money at a $13.4 billion valuation. That also marked the peak for growth and technology valuations before the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates.
Plaid provides the plumbing to connect consumer bank accounts to popular finance apps. Its APIs let consumers link their bank accounts to services like Venmo, Robinhood and Coinbase. Since then, it’s expanded into direct bill pay, cyber security and data analytics. It also partners with major banks.
Cybersecurity is one of Plaid’s largest growth areas, Perret said. He pointed to financial fraud growing at 20% to 25% per year as a result of the boom in artificial intelligence.
“We’ve been leaning in to try to build tools to combat deep fakes and a lot of AI-driven financial fraud,” he said. “Unfortunately, this is a large market opportunity. It’s something that we’d actually like to be smaller. But it’s been an area of growth.”
When President Trump first pushed tariffs on China in 2018, Apple began moving more production of iPads and AirPods to Vietnam and iPhones to India.
But with Mr. Trump’s return to the White House, that strategy may have backfired for the world’s most valuable publicly traded company.
On Wednesday, Mr. Trump said that the United States would put tariffs of 46 percent on Vietnam and 26 percent on India. The White House has said the tariffs are effective immediately, but some trade experts consider them to be preliminary and designed to be a starting point for negotiations to reduce overseas tariffs.
The proposed tariffs threaten to compound the pressure on Apple’s business. The company is already dealing with 20 percent tariffs on products imported from China, where Apple makes about 90 percent of the iPhones it sells around the world. Mr. Trump said that the rate would go to 34 percent under his new tariff plan.
An Apple spokesman declined to comment.
While Apple is the most prominent tech company to feel the sting of tariffs, most other tech companies will see an impact — directly or indirectly. Google and Microsoft, for example, are not as heavily dependent on international suppliers, but they do have notable consumer electronics businesses. And the tariffs could increase the cost of building the massive, new data centers the companies are planning on to build new artificial intelligence technology.
The new levies are part of Mr. Trump’s efforts to remake world trade with tariffs on every country that imposes fees on American exports. U.S. trade officials estimate that India has a tariff rate of 13.5 percent on U.S. goods, with a 39 percent tariff on agricultural products. Vietnam has a tariff rate of 8.1 percent on U.S. goods, with a 17.1 percent tariff on agricultural products.
But during a news conference at the White House, Mr. Trump said the combination of tariffs, currency manipulation and trade barriers had a much more significant impact.
The costs of “reciprocal tariffs,” as Mr. Trump calls them, could put Apple’s business in a jam. The iPhones, iPads and Apple Watches that the company sells deliver three-quarters of its nearly $400 billion in annual revenue. With Mr. Trump saying he won’t allow products to be exempted from tariffs, Apple will have to either pay those fees, which will reduce its profit, or indirectly pass those added costs on to customers by raising prices.
The tariffs on iPhones and other devices imported from China will increase Apple’s annual costs by $8.5 billion, without any relief from the Trump administration, according to Morgan Stanley. That would reduce the company’s profit next year by $0.52 per share, or about $7.85 billion. That would be a roughly 7 percent hit on next year’s profits.
Apple’s stock fell 5.7 percent in aftermarket trading following Mr. Trump’s remarks.
“Apple will take these new tariff numbers and put them in models they have built and know within hours how big of a problem they have,” said Anna-Katrina Shedletsky, the founder of Instrumental, a Bay Area company that uses artificial intelligence to improve manufacturing performance. She previously worked at Apple.
After Mr. Trump took office, Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, went to the White House and promised that Apple would invest hundreds of billions of dollars in the United States. In February, Apple followed through on that promise by pledging to invest $500 billion in the country, with much of the money already part of its spending plans.
During the previous Trump administration, Mr. Cook’s work to build a relationship with Mr. Trump helped Apple avoid tariffs on most of its products. U.S. trade officials in the previous Trump administration didn’t put tariffs on iPhones, and they removed tariffs from the Apple Watch.
In 2019, Mr. Trump toured an Apple plant in Texas that made desktop computers. Mr. Cook stood beside Mr. Trump as the president took credit for the plant, which had been making computers since 2013.
In the years since then, Apple hasn’t moved production of a single major product to the United States. Instead, it embarked on an effort to diversify beyond China.
In 2017, as Mr. Trump started in office, Apple began setting up assembly lines for iPhones in India. It took five years for it to train workers and build the infrastructure to make its newest iPhones in the country. It is in the process of increasing production there, with hopes the country’s factories manufacture about 25 percent of the 200 million iPhones that it sells annually.
The company also began shifting production of AirPods, iPads and MacBooks to Vietnam. The country became a destination for Apple and others after Covid-19 shut down factories in China in 2020, and Vietnam’s factories accounted for more than 10 percent of the top 200 suppliers that the company had in 2023.
Vietnam was an appealing location because of its proximity to China. India was alluring because Apple wanted to boost sales of iPhones in the country, which is the world’s second largest smartphone market.
But Apple has struggled in the past with U.S. production. The Texas plant that made Macs had problems as some workers walked off the job after their shift but before their replacements had arrived, forcing the company to shut down the assembly line. It also struggled to find suppliers that could make components it needed like a custom screw.
Mr. Cook has said that the United States doesn’t have enough skilled manufacturing workers to compete with China. At a conference in late 2017, he said that China was one of the few places where Apple could reliably find people capable of running the state-of-the-art machines that make its products.
“In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers, and I’m not sure we could fill the room,” Mr. Cook said. “In China, you could fill multiple football fields.”
Amazon has told the White House it is interested in buying TikTok ahead of a key deadline by which its parent company, China-based ByteDance, must either sell the popular social media app or face a ban in the U.S., CBS News has learned, according to two people familiar with discussions.
Amazon has submitted a bid for the app, the New York Times reported earlier, citing people familiar with the matter.
Both Amazon and TikTok declined to comment on the matter.
Amazon’s bid comes after lawmakers last year passed a bill setting a Jan. 19 deadline for the sale, which Mr. Trump extended for 75 days. He set a deadline of Saturday, April 5, for ByteDance to either sell its stake in the app or be forced to shut down in the U.S.
The retail giant made the offer in a letter addressed to Vice President JD Vance and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, according to people familiar with the matter, the New York Times reported.
Retail industry analysts say Amazon’s interest in TikTok underscores the social app’s importance to online retailers, given its ability to drive e-commerce purchases.
“While Amazon is the No. 1 destination for searching for products, it remains a channel that is most suited to planned and specific purchases,” GlobalData managing director Neil Saunders said in an email to CBS MoneyWatch. “It has certainly made some inroads into becoming a place for consumer entertainment and discovery, which led to impulse purchases, but this is very much the preserve of TikTok and TikTok Shop. This more impulse driven part of the market is faster growing that more established e-commerce channels.”
Deadline to sell TikTok approaching
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AppLovin, a California-based mobile technology company, has also expressed interest in acquiring TikTok, a person familiar with the matter told CBS News.
In remarks to reporters on Air Force One over the weekend, Mr. Trump addressed the matter of TikTok’s sale, saying, “We have a lot of potential buyers. There’s a lot of interest in TikTok. The decision is going to be my decision.”
He added that he’d “like to see TikTok remain alive.”
The U.S. government has said TikTok poses a threat to national security because its vast trove of customer data, including browsing patterns, locations and biometric information, could end up in the hands of the Chinese authorities.
Ahead of the initial divestiture deadline, ByteDance earlier this year briefly shut down TikTok in the U.S. Mr. Trump quickly paused the ban and the service was restored.
The ban does not target TikTok’s U.S. users. But the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, signed into law in 2024 under former President Biden, would make it illegal for app stores and web-hosting services to distribute or service TikTok.
Jennifer Jacobs
contributed to this report.
Megan Cerullo
Megan Cerullo is a New York-based reporter for CBS MoneyWatch covering small business, workplace, health care, consumer spending and personal finance topics. She regularly appears on CBS News 24/7 to discuss her reporting.
Apple CEO Tim Cook, center, watches during the inauguration ceremonies for President Donald Trump, right, and Vice President JD Vance, left, in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Jan. 20, 2025.
Shawn Thew | Afp | Getty Images
Apple slid more than 6% in late trading Wednesday and led a broader decline in tech stocks after President Donald Trump announced new tariffs of between 10% and 49% on imported goods.
The majority of Apple’s revenue comes from devices manufactured primarily in China and a handful of other Asian countries. Nvidia, which manufactures new chips in Taiwan and assembles its artificial intelligence systems in Mexico and elsewhere, fell about 4%, while electric vehicle company Tesla dropped 4.5%.
Across the rest of the megacap universe, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta all dropped between 2.5% and 5%, and Microsoft was down by almost 2%.
If Apple’s postmarket loss is matched in regular trading Thursday, it would be the steepest decline for the stock since September 2020.
Trump on Wednesday afternoon said the new taxes on imported goods would be a “declaration of economic independence” for the country. He announced a 10% blanket tariff on all imports, and higher duties for specific countries, including 34% for China, 20% for European nations, and 24% for Japanese imports, based on what tariffs they charge on U.S. exports, Trump said.
“We will supercharge our domestic industrial base, we will pry open foreign markets and break down foreign trade barriers,” Trump said during his speech. “Ultimately, more production at home will mean stronger competition and lower prices for consumers.”
Stocks broadly got hit by Trump’s announcements. An exchange-traded fund tracking the S&P 500 slid 2.8%, while an ETF following the Nasdaq 100 lost more than 3%.
During his speech, Trump praised Apple, Meta, and Nvidia for spending money and investing in the United States.
“Apple is going to spend $500 billion, they never spent money like that here,” Trump said. “They’re going to build their plants here.”
The Nasdaq just wrapped up its worst quarter since 2022, dropping 10% in the first three months of the year, though the tech-heavy index rose in each of the first two days of the second quarter.
WATCH: President Trump signs executive orders for reciprocal tariffs
For decades, Larry Ellison reveled in being the Silicon Valley executive who really knew how to have a good time. He spent as much as $200 million building a Japanese-inspired imperial villa near Palo Alto, Calif., bought the sixth-largest Hawaiian island and dated and married and divorced with never-ending zeal.
Few paid much attention to exactly what his database company, Oracle, did. Sometimes, neither did Mr. Ellison. He did not show up for his keynote talk at Oracle’s annual convention in San Francisco in 2013 because he was on his yacht trying to win the America’s Cup, which he did. A biography about him was titled, “The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison: God Doesn’t Think He’s Larry Ellison.”
With a fortune of $175 billion, there is not much left for Mr. Ellison to buy that would seriously dent his wallet. He broke a Florida record in 2022 when he purchased a 22-acre estate near Palm Beach — but at $173 million, the price was one-tenth of 1 percent of his wealth. He invested $1 billion in Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter that same year because, he said at the time, “it would be lots of fun.”
Now 80 years old and married for the fifth or possibly the sixth time, Mr. Ellison is expanding his ambitions beyond having fun and surrounding himself with beautiful things. Following a path laid down by his friend Mr. Musk, who has at least six companies that feed off one another, Mr. Ellison also appears to be planning to grow his corporate empire.
Oracle keeps emerging as a possible bidder for TikTok, the wildly popular video app that Congress has decreed needs to divest itself of its ownership by the Chinese internet company ByteDance or be banned in the United States. On Wednesday, President Trump plans to meet with top White House officials to discuss a new ownership structure for the app. The deadline for a deal is Saturday, though TikTok deadlines have come and gone before.
Oracle almost became a minority owner of TikTok’s U.S. operations in 2020, along with Walmart, when concerns about the app’s data security ran rampant. A deal was negotiated where Oracle started storing the data of U.S. users on its cloud. Oracle would also own 12.5 percent of a new company, TikTok Global. The latter part, like many TikTok deals, never happened.
Five years later, a lot has changed, starting with this: The tech moguls have been unleashed.
Mr. Musk, backed by President Trump, has obliterated the lines between public and private. He is blowing up government agencies and using his vast wealth to try to sway elections. Mr. Ellison, who may be closer to Mr. Trump than any mogul this side of Mr. Musk, appears to want nothing less than to bring the country under the benevolent sway of artificial intelligence, which he has said will bring about an era of bounty and harmony.
One company, even if it is as successful as Oracle, might not help him get close to this goal. Several, though, might.
Mr. Ellison is putting up most of the $8 billion bid by his son, David, to buy Paramount, owner of the fabled Hollywood studio as well as CBS, MTV and other properties that generate news and content. (The deal still needs regulatory approval.) TikTok, meanwhile, is all about producing content. It has a monthly active user base of 1.5 billion, about a tenth of them in the United States.
And then there’s the wild card factor: Mr. Ellison’s proximity to President Trump. In January, Mr. Ellison was prominently featured at the White House for the announcement of a project called Stargate, which will build data centers for artificial intelligence. President Trump was asked if Mr. Musk might buy TikTok, and he volunteered that “I’d like Larry to buy it, too.”
“All these pieces are coming together to form something that isn’t quite clear yet except for this: The Ellison family will be at the center,” said Richard Greenfield, a media analyst with LightShed Partners.
The White House, TikTok, Mr. Ellison and Oracle declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment. Mr. Ellison in any case is looking down the road. “The only way I know to make myself feel better is to make the world better,” he told Vanity Fair in 1997, adding: “Don’t mistake that for altruism. It’s egotism. Call it enlightened egotism.”
Mr. Ellison has recently been trying to make the world better by pushing for a surveillance society. There would be cameras everywhere, with every movement analyzed by A.I.
“Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on,” he told Oracle investors last fall. “It’s unimpeachable.”
Also on Mr. Ellison’s to-do list is combining thousands of databases into one enormous electronic repository, which can be mined by A.I. That will cure diseases and fix everything else, he told Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, at a symposium on reinventing government held in Dubai in February.
“I think this will make for a happier citizenry,” Mr. Ellison, who appeared via video, told Mr. Blair.
Mr. Ellison’s quest for data has hit setbacks. In November, a federal court in California gave final approval to a settlement over a class-action suit that accused Oracle of improperly capturing and selling individuals’ online and offline data without their permission. Oracle agreed to pay $115 million without admitting wrongdoing.
During Mr. Ellison’s flamboyant heyday in the 1990s, he provided a striking contrast to what was then a relatively sober Silicon Valley. He described his office style as “management by ridicule.” After Oracle had a self-inflicted near-death experience, he explained: “Oracle is run by adolescents. And that includes me.” He told reporters he was going to launch a proxy fight and gain control of Apple. He indulged in a long-running, if one-sided, feud with Microsoft.
And then there were his wives and girlfriends. “As a veteran of three marriages, do you feel you can do it better this time?” Playboy asked him in 2002.
“There’s no question I can do it better,” Mr. Ellison replied. “Can I do it worse? I don’t think so.”
In 2003, he married Melanie Craft, a romance novelist, who became wife No. 4. Steve Jobs was the wedding photographer. Ms. Craft wrote “Man Trouble,” about a reporter who persuades a romance novelist to help him snag an interview with a shy billionaire.
Mr. Ellison’s ideal politician in that era was a Democrat. He once joked that the Constitution should be amended so Bill Clinton could have a third term. Mr. Ellison turned more conservative in the 21st century, developing a friendship with Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and recoiling against what he saw as Barack Obama’s anti-Israel approach.
“Bill Clinton was a centrist. Tony Blair was a centrist. Marco Rubio is a centrist. Mitt Romney is a centrist. Those are my politics,” Mr. Ellison said in 2018.
Now his politics are President Trump’s, but it took a while to get there. In the 2016 presidential race, Mr. Ellison backed Mr. Rubio, a Republican senator from Florida and then a Trump critic. In 2020, Mr. Trump persuaded Mr. Ellison to host a fund-raiser at his golf course in Southern California. Even though his name appeared on the invitation as the sole host, Mr. Ellison snubbed the event, telling people he was sick.
Four years later, Mr. Trump was, once again, not Mr. Ellison’s first choice for president. Mr. Ellison traveled to South Carolina for the presidential announcement speech of Senator Tim Scott, a South Carolina Republican, where Mr. Scott called the billionaire “one of my mentors.”
After Mr. Scott flamed out and Mr. Trump needed cash, Mr. Ellison drew closer to the new Republican nominee, dining with him at Mar-a-Lago. It helped that he sometimes lives nearby in his recently purchased Florida home.
While Mr. Ellison is not in Mr. Trump’s inner circle, and did not make public donations to support the campaign, he appeared at Mar-a-Lago to sit in on a transition meeting.
It was during President Trump’s first term that Mr. Ellison developed an interest in TikTok, leading to the almost-deal among TikTok, Oracle and Walmart that was approved by Mr. Trump.
This time, Walmart is not expected to be involved. A friend of Mr. Ellison, speaking not for attribution in order to talk candidly, said the tech mogul was probably influenced by Mr. Musk’s ownership of Twitter, now called X. It’s one thing to be rich, the friend said; Mr. Musk is relevant to consumers, with power in culture, politics and media.
Safra Catz, the chief executive of Oracle, rather than Mr. Ellison, has been the negotiator in the TikTok talks, according to a person involved in the process. Even assuming Oracle strikes some sort of deal with TikTok, it probably won’t eliminate other owners for the video app, people close to the process said. And it probably will not involve the algorithm that has made the social media company so successful.
Mr. Ellison’s faith in technology is undimmed. Terry Garnett, an Oracle marketing chief, suffered the fate of many Oracle executives when he was dismissed by Mr. Ellison in 1994. For a time, Mr. Garnett held a grudge but has since come to appreciate his former boss.
“At the end of the day he loves technology,” Mr. Garnett said. “It’s that simple.”
So what if Oracle is not a consumer company, and if its most prominent attempt to try to become one — a line of cheap desktops in the late 1990s challenging Microsoft’s software domination — stumbled?
“Think of TikTok as video data — unstructured data that fits into another slice of that Oracle matrix,” said Mr. Garnett, now a private investor. “Whoever has the data has the power.”
The National Security Agency sent out an operational security special bulletin to its employees in February 2025 warning them of vulnerabilities in using the encrypted messaging application Signal, according to internal NSA documents obtained by CBS News.
News of the NSA bulletin comes amid the continued fallout from an explosive article published Monday in The Atlantic. The publication’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, detailed how Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth inadvertently disclosed war plans to him in an encrypted Signalchat group two hours before the U.S. military launched attacks against Houthi militia in Yemen. Goldberg wrote that Hegseth’s messages included “precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.”
The NSA is an arm of the Defense Department and specializes in signals intelligence — which is derived from electronic transmissions — and cybersecurity. The agency is responsible for monitoring, collecting and processing information and data for U.S. national security interests.
The unclassified but for-official-use-only documents provided to CBS News by a senior U.S. intelligence official are entitled “Signal Vulnerability” and were sent out the month before Goldberg was accidentally added to the group chat allegedly by national security adviser Mike Waltz.
“A vulnerability has been identified in the Signal Messenger Application. The use of Signal by common targets of surveillance and espionage activity has made the application a high value target to intercept sensitive information,” the internal bulletin begins.
The bulletin warned of Russian professional hacking groups employing phishing scams to gain access to encrypted conversations, bypassing the end-to-end encryption the application uses.
The bulletin also underscored to NSA employees that third-party messaging applications such as Signal and Whatsapp are permitted for certain “unclassified accountability/recall exercises” but not for communicating more sensitive information.
NSA employees were also warned to not send “anything compromising over any social media or Internet-based tool or application,” and to not “establish connections with people you do not know.”
CBS News contacted the NSA for comment but did not receive a reply prior to publication.
Signal responded to the bulletin in a social media post Tuesday, saying the NSA’s “memo used the term ‘vulnerability’ in relation to Signal-but it had nothing to do with Signal’s core tech. It was warning against phishing scams targeting Signal users.”
“Phishing isn’t new, and it’s not a flaw in our encryption or any of Signal’s underlying technology,” the company said. “Phishing attacks are a constant threat for popular apps and websites.”
On Tuesday, National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, both of whom were reportedly in the Signal group chat, testified before a Senate panel.
“There was no classified material that was shared in that Signal chat,” Gabbard told lawmakers. But the NSA bulletin advises that even information that is not categorized as classified should not be shared on Signal, advising users not to share “unclassified, nonpublic” information on the messaging platform.
Ratcliffe said Signal “is a permissible use” application that has been approved by the White House for use by senior officials. The group chat, Ratcliffe said, was a “mechanism for communicating between senior level officials but not a substitute for using high side or classified communications.”
Both Ratcliffe and Gabbard were asked by Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico whether the Signal conversation included information on “weapons packages, targets or timing.” Ratcliffe replied, “Not that I’m aware of,” and Gabbard said, “Same answer and defer to the Department of Defense on that question.” Both said they had no knowledge of the chat including operational details of the strike in Yemen.
Arden Farhi
contributed to this report.
James LaPorta
James LaPorta is a national security coordinating producer in CBS News’ Washington bureau. He is a former U.S. Marine infantryman and veteran of the Afghanistan war.
Circle, the company behind the USDC stablecoin, has filed for an initial public offering and plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange.
The prospectus, filed with the SEC on Tuesday, lays the groundwork for Circle’s long-anticipated entry into the public markets.
JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup are serving as lead underwriters, and the company is reportedly aiming for a valuation of up to $5 billion. It will trade under ticker symbol CRCL.
It marks Circle’s second attempt at going public. A prior merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) collapsed in late 2022 amid regulatory challenges. Since then, Circle has made strategic moves to position itself closer to the heart of global finance, including the announcement last year that it would relocate its headquarters from Boston to One World Trade Center in New York.
Circle reported $1.68 billion in revenue and reserve income in 2024, up from $1.45 billion in 2023 and $772 million in 2022. The company reported net income last year of about $156 million., down from $268 million a year earlier.
Read more about tech and crypto from CNBC Pro
A successful IPO would make Circle one of the most prominent pure-play crypto companies to list on a U.S. exchange. Coinbase went public through a direct listing in 2021 and has a market cap of about $44 billion.
Circle will be trying to hit the public markets at a volatile moment for tech stocks, with the Nasdaq having just wrapped up its steepest quarterly drop since 2022. The tech IPO market has been mostly dry for over three years, though there are signs of life. Online lender Klarna, digital health company Hinge Health and ticketing marketplace StubHub have all filed their prospectuses recently. Late last week, artificial intelligence infrastructure provider CoreWeave held the biggest IPO for a U.S. venture-backed tech company since 2021. But the company scaled back the offering and the stock had a disappointing first two days of trading before rebounding on Tuesday.
Circle is best known as the issuer of USD Coin (USDC), the world’s second-largest stablecoin by market capitalization.
Pegged one-to-one to the U.S. dollar and backed by cash and short-term Treasury securities, USDC has roughly $60 billion in circulation and makes up about 26% of the total market cap for stablecoins, behind Tether’s 67% dominance. Its market cap has grown 36% this year, however, compared with Tether’s 5% growth.
The company’s push into public markets reflects a broader moment for the crypto industry, which is enjoying political favor under a more crypto-friendly U.S. administration. The stablecoin sector specifically has been ramping up as the industry gains confidence that the crypto market will get its first piece of U.S. legislation passed and implemented this year, focusing on stablecoins. President Donald Trump has said he hopes lawmakers will send stablecoin legislation to his desk before Congress’s August recess.
Stablecoins’ growth could have investment implications for crypto exchanges like Robinhood and Coinbase as they become a bigger part of crypto trading and cross-border transfers. Coinbase also has an agreement with Circle to share 50% of the revenue of its USDC stablecoin, and Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said on the company’s most recent earnings call that it has a “stretch goal to make USDC the number 1 stablecoin.”
The stablecoin market has grown about 11% so far this year and about 47% in the past year, and has become a “systemically important” part of the crypto market, according to Bernstein. Historically, digital assets in this sector have been used for trading and as collateral in decentralized finance (DeFi), and crypto investors watch them closely for evidence of demand, liquidity and activity in the market.
WATCH: Circle CEO on launching first stablecoin in Japan
President Trump plans to meet with top White House officials on Wednesday to discuss a proposal that could secure TikTok’s future in the United States, two people familiar with the plans said.
Mr. Trump will consider a proposal for a new ownership structure for the popular video app, which is owned by the Chinese internet giant ByteDance. Lawmakers and other U.S. officials have argued that the app’s ties to China raise national security concerns, and a federal law that was passed last year requires TikTok to change its ownership or face a ban in the United States. The latest deadline for that ban is Saturday.
The meeting is set to include Vice President JD Vance, whom Mr. Trump tapped to find an arrangement to save the popular app early in February, and other top officials, the two people said on the condition of anonymity. The new ownership structure, they said, could include Blackstone, the private equity giant, and Oracle, the technology company.
The meeting is another twist in the long national saga of TikTok, which surged in popularity in the United States despite sustained and deep scrutiny in Washington and state capitals. Mr. Trump, who made repeated assurances that he wants to save the app, extended the deadline for a deal in January and suggested that he might do so again if a suitable plan was not reached by early this month.
TikTok did not immediately return a request for comment.
It is not clear that the kind of deal under discussion would comply with the law, which calls for no more than 20 percent of TikTok or its parent company to be owned by people or companies in so-called foreign adversary countries, a list that includes China.
The law also bars a new entity from working with ByteDance to operate its video-recommendation technology or creating a data-sharing agreement.
Mr. Trump suggested last week that he might relax upcoming tariffs on China in exchange for the country’s support of a deal.
TikTok has maintained that it is not for sale, in part, it says, because the Chinese government would block a deal.
An encrypted messaging app called Signal is drawing attention and questions after top Trump officials — including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Vice President JD Vance — allegedly used the service to discuss a highly sensitive military operation while inadvertently including The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, in the chat.
On Monday, Goldberg published a piece in The Atlantic about how he was added to an 18-person chat on Signal earlier this month to discuss military strikes in Yemen, writing that at first he “didn’t think it could be real.”
The National Security Council said the messages seem to be “authentic,” in a statement to CBS News after the story was published.
The use of Signal to discuss sensitive military operations is raising questions about the app, including its level of security against hackers and other bad actors. It’s an app that many Americans may not be familiar with, given that Signal had about 70 million users in 2024, a fraction of the 1 billion active monthly users of Apple’s iMessage, according to the national security publication Lawfare.
President Trump told reporters on Tuesday that he had asked national security adviser Mike Waltz, who Goldberg said added him to the group chat, to “immediately study” the use of Signal by government officials.
Here’s what to know about the service.
What is Signal?
Signal is an encrypted service for text messaging, but it can also handle phone and video calls, making it a versatile app for talking on a secure channel with others. Up to 1,000 people can join a group chat, and messages can be set to disappear after a period of time.
Signal has been gaining users because of its end-to-end encryption, which is boosting its “adoption during uncertain times or specific events which reinforce its position as the go-to communication service,” PP Foresight analyst Paolo Pescatore told CBS MoneyWatch.
Its encryption prevents any third-party from viewing conversation content or listening in on calls. In other words, messages and calls sent on Signal are scrambled and only the sender and recipient at each end will have the key to decipher them.
Unlike another popular messaging app, Telegram, encryption on Signal is turned on by default. Signal also says it doesn’t collect or store any sensitive information.
“Signal messages and calls cannot be accessed by us or other third parties because they are always end-to-end encrypted, private and secure,” according to the service.
Signal didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment about the Trump administration’s use of the app.
Who owns Signal?
Signal is owned by the nonprofit Signal Foundation, which was set up by co-founders Moxie Marlinspike and Brian Acton to support the app’s operations as well as “investigate the future of private communication,” according to the foundation’s website. The foundation says it is a nonprofit “with no advertisers or investors, sustained only by the people who use and value it.”
The foundation’s board has five members, including Marlinspike and Acton, who co-founded WhatsApp and donated $50 million to set up the foundation.
The Signal app was created more than a decade ago by Marlinspike, an entrepreneur, who was briefly head of product security at Twitter after he sold his mobile security startup, called Whisper Systems, to the social media company in 2011. Marlinspike merged two existing open source apps, one for texting and one for voice calls, to create Signal.
Can Signal be hacked?
Signal touts the privacy of its service, and experts agree it is more secure than conventional texting.
But they also caution that it could be hacked. And in February 2025, the National Security Agency sent out an operational security special bulletin to its employees cautioning them of vulnerabilities in the Signal app, according to internal NSA documents obtained by CBS News.
“A vulnerability has been identified in the Signal Messenger Application. The use of Signal by common targets of surveillance and espionage activity has made the application a high value target to intercept sensitive information,” the internal bulletin says.
Signal responded to the bulletin in a social media post Tuesday, saying the NSA’s “memo used the term ‘vulnerability’ in relation to Signal-but it had nothing to do with Signal’s core tech. It was warning against phishing scams targeting Signal users.”
“Phishing isn’t new, and it’s not a flaw in our encryption or any of Signal’s underlying technology,” the company said. “Phishing attacks are a constant threat for popular apps and websites.”
Government officials have used Signal for organizational correspondence, such as scheduling sensitive meetings. But in the Biden administration, people who had permission to download it on their White House-issued phones were instructed to use the app sparingly, according to a former national security official who served in the administration.
“Unlike other end-to-end encryption messaging services, Signal does boast a rich range of features,” Pescatore said. “However, hackers are always on the prowl to find weaknesses and use apps maliciously.”
What is Signal typically used for?
Because of its end-to-end encryption, Signal is often used by national security and intelligence professionals, as well as activists, among others, according to Lawfare.
A recent Associated Press review found that encrypted messaging apps are increasingly popular with government officials, with some using government mobile phone numbers, while others registered their accounts to personal numbers.
Are there legal issues for government officials using Signal?
Possibly, yes. Sharing sensitive national security details over Signal could violate the Espionage Act, CBS News national security contributor Sam Vinograd, who served in former President Barack Obama’s Homeland Security Department, said Tuesday.
“By communicating classified information on a nonsecure platform like Signal, senior U.S. government officials … increased the chance that foreign governments could get access to sensitive operational security plans — and that could put our own troops in harm’s way,” Vinograd said.
While Mr. Trump told reporters from the Oval Office on Tuesday that “I don’t know anything about Signal, I wasn’t involved in this,” he indicated that other branches of government use the app.
“I hear it’s used by a lot of groups, I hear it’s used by the media a lot,” he said. “A lot of the military, I think successfully. Sometimes people can get onto those things, that’s one of the prices you pay when you’re not sitting in the Situation Room with no phones, which is always the best, frankly. The best is to be there.”
How Trump, inner circle reacted to the Signal group texts story from The Atlantic
05:46
Mr. Trump said Signal is the “No. 1 device or app that is used” that he had asked Waltz to explore its use by government officials.
Meanwhile, Democratic lawmakers are demanding an investigation into why highly sensitive information was being discussed on a commercially available messaging app, rather than secure government channels.
The Atlantic’s Goldberg also alleged that some of the messages in the group chat were designed to disappear after one week, and others after four weeks, which could be a violation of federal law requiring the preservation of official records.
The Associated Press
contributed to this report.
Aimee Picchi
Aimee Picchi is the associate managing editor for CBS MoneyWatch, where she covers business and personal finance. She previously worked at Bloomberg News and has written for national news outlets including USA Today and Consumer Reports.
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