Frontier Airlines (NASDAQ: ULCC) said Wednesday bankrupt rival budget airline Spirit Airlines (OTC: SAVEQ) turned down a new merger offer, writing to Spirit executive that their acquisition deal would benefit Spirit more than its current bankruptcy plans. The new plan offered Spirit's debtors $400 million and a 19% stake in Frontier and proposed provision Spirit's creditors $350 million in new funding. "We continue to believe that under the current standalone plan, Spirit will emerge highly levered, losing monet at the operating level, and this would not be a transaction we would pursue," Frontier Chair Bill Franke and CEO Barry Biffle wrote in an email to Spirit Chair Mac Gardner and CEO Ted Christie, shared in a securities filing. In turn, Gardner and Christie told respond to Frontier with a new rejection, calling the terms of the deal "risky and costly, with no certainty as to either timing or outcome" according to the filing.
Alphabet's (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) Waymo announce Tuesday it will begin testing its robotaxis on the Los Angeles freeway system, including the major highways 10, 110, 405, and 90. Waymo said this new test will follow its same testing-to-commercial service plan it conducted in previous service expansions, first allowing employees to use driverless vehicles and then opening it to the public. The company has mapped many neighborhoods in Los Angeles since 2019, including downtown, Koreatown, Santa Monica, Westwood, Miracle Mile and West Hollywood. Waymo received approval from the California Public Utilities Commission in March 2024 to operate a commercial robotaxi service in LA as well as expand its Bay Area operations to include the San Francisco Peninsula and freeways.
President Donald Trump's $100 billion artificial intelligence venture Stargate will be reportedly powered in-part by solar energy and batteries built by SB Energy, Bloomberg News reports. The project, in partnership with OpenAI, Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) and SoftBank (OTC: SFTBY) is designed to develop large-scale data centers across the United States, and that amount of computing power necessitates a lot of energy. The U.S. Department of Energy estimated last month data centers could use as much as 12% of all power produced by the U.S. by 2028, a jump from about 4% in 2023. "The United States has seen an incredible investment in artificial intelligence and other breakthrough technologies over the last decade and a half, and this industrial renaissance has created greater demand on our domestic energy supply," said U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm in a statement. "We can meet this growth with clean energy."
Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META) is offering eligible TikTok creators "up to" $5,000 in bonuses over three months for posting Reels on Facebook and Instagram, the social media giant announced Tuesday, in a bid to attract more short-form video content creators to its platforms. Eligible creators will also get access to the Facebook Content Monetization program, which allows creators to generate revenue from their posts on Facebook, Meta said. The company will also offer some TikTok creators content deals and a one-year trial of Meta Verified, which increased a verified badge, alongside additional account support and impersonation protection. TikTok was banned in the United States for about 12 hours over the weekend, with President Donald Trump signing an executive order on Monday to delay the app's ban deadline by 75 days. The app is still no longer available on Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) and Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) app stores.
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) grounded SpaceX's Starship rocket on Friday until the company and regulator complete a "mishap investigation" into the mid-flight failure of its test flight on Thursday. SpaceX's Starship rocket exploded and led to debris falling "outside of the identified closed aircraft hazard areas," the FAA said, causing the regulator to divert and delay multiple commercial airline flights from operators including American Airlines (NASDAQ: AAL), JetBlue Airways (NASDAQ: JBLU) and Delta Air Lines (NYSE: DAL). Separately, the FAA said Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin must also complete a similar investigation into what caused its New Glenn rocket to explode during its attempted landing after successfully making it into orbit on Thursday.
