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The battle among billionaires for bragging rights as the world’s richest person got heated Wednesday with the surprising surge of an old contender: Larry Ellison.In a stunning few minutes after markets opened, stock in Ellison’s Oracle Corp. rocketed more than a third, enough for him to temporarily wrest the title from its longtime holder Elon Musk and hand it to the software giant’s co-founder.But the stock market is fickle, and Musk was back on top by the end of the day, at least according to Bloomberg, as Oracle gave up a bit of its earlier gains.For those keeping score, the difference now is a billion, which isn’t much given the size of the figures: Musk’s $384.2 billion versus $383.2 billion for Ellison.The dueling fortunes are so big each could fund the lifestyles of 5 million typical American families for a year, about the entire population of Florida, allowing them to all quit their jobs. Or they could just tell all of South Africa to take a vacation for year and produce nothing, based on its gross domestic product.The brief switch in the ranking came after a blockbuster earnings report from Oracle powered by multibillion dollar orders from customers as the artificial-intelligence race heats up.Musk became the world’s richest person for the first time four years ago. A big reason is his stake in a hot, but now cooling, electric car maker, Tesla.Stock in the company has been moving in the opposite direction of Oracle’s, dropping 14% so far this year. Musk also controls several private companies, including rocket maker SpaceX, his artificial intelligence company xAI and the former Twitter, now called X.Ellison owns about 40% of Oracle, which means its surging stock added $100 billion to his net worth in little over a half-hour after the stock market opened.The night before, after trading had closed, the company announced in an earnings report that it had struck more than $300 billion worth of new deals, including contracts with the OpenAI, Meta, Nvidia and Musk’s xAI. It said that it now expects revenue from its cloud infrastructure business to jump 77% to $18 billion this fiscal year. then rise to $144 billion in four years after that.Ellison said in an earnings call that Oracle would not just be making money from its computing centers that help build the next chatbots, but from the day-to-day running of those AI systems to run robots in factories, design drugs in laboratories, place bets in financial markets and automate legal and sales work at companies.In other words, Ellison’s surge in wealth Wednesday morning reflected investor expectations that computers will take over many jobs now done by humans and Oracle will benefit.Or as the 81-year-old said on the call, “AI Changes Everything.”Musk is hoping the same for Tesla and his own net worth, but he’s been struggling to convince investors.The company had been promising a big turnaround in electric car sales after they fell sharply earlier this year, but the bounce back hasn’t happened. Musk has been downplaying the bad numbers by trying to shift investors’ focus to Tesla’s other business of making robots and advances in the artificial intelligence behind its cars and robotaxis.While he keeps talking up the Tesla future, though, the bad news keeps coming.Tesla sales in the European Union plunged 40% earlier this summer, the seventh month in row of drops, as customers balked at buying his cars after he took to X to support extreme right-wing politicians there. The company has been losing market share in the U.S., too, as buyers angry with his embrace of Donald Trump have stayed away from Tesla showrooms.Oracle stock closed Wednesday at $328.33, a 36% jump. Tesla was up less than 1% at $347.79.-AP writers Matt O’Brien and Michael Liedtke contributed to this story. Bernard Condon, AP Business Writer
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GLP-1 patches are being pushed on TikTok Shop, despite the platforms ban on selling weight-loss products. Recent posts flagged by Olivia Little of Media Matters promise weight loss, reduced appetite, and fewer cravingswithout the cost of injections. One caption reads: Dont waste your $$ on the [shot emoji]. Another creator wrote, See yall in a month with no waist [hourglass emoji]. Many of the flagged videos include shoppable links, enabling direct in-app purchases. That runs counter to TikToks prohibited products policy, which bans items that claim to aid in weight management, fat reduction, or similar goals. (Fast Company has reached out to TikTok for comment.) Supplement makers have rushed to cash in on the GLP-1 hype, flooding the market with pills, powders, and patches branded with the name but containing no actual GLP-1 agonist drugs. Experts say they dont compare to prescription medications like semaglutide or tirzepatide. Consumer GLP-1 patches sold through social platforms are unregulated and have no credible clinical evidence showing they deliver therapeutic GLP-1 drug levels, Dr. Castel Santana, medical director at 10X Health, tells Fast Company. Established GLP-1 receptor agonists given by prescriptionfor example, weekly semaglutide or tirzepatide injectionshave been tested in large randomized clinical trials and produce substantial, measurable weight loss and metabolic benefits, he continues. By contrast, the patches on social platforms often lack ingredient transparency, dosing controls, and regulatory oversight. Unlike pharmaceuticals, supplements arent required to undergo Food and Drug Administration approval or rigorous safety and efficacy testing. Kind Patches, the most popular GLP-1 patch brand identified by Media Matters, claims its product provides weight management and appetite control with ingredients like berberine, chromium, pomegranate, and L-glutamine extract. The biological mechanism they imply, berberine boosts GLP-1, has limited supporting evidence at ingredient level, typically with oral administration and modest effectsnot proof that a consumer adhesive patch will produce clinically meaningful GLP-1 activation, Santana says. (Fast Company has reached out to Kind Patches for comment.) That hasnt slowed demand: Media Matters found more than 364,000 single packs and nearly 98,000 triple packs sold on TikTok Shop. With an army of ambassadors promising quick fixes and collecting commissions, the pitch is simple: Stick on a patch and lose weight in months. The science, however, says otherwise.
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South Korea’s president said Thursday that Korean companies will likely hesitate to make further investments in the United States unless Washington improves its visa system for their employees, as U.S. authorities released hundreds of workers who were detained from a Georgia factory site last week.In a news conference marking 100 days in office, Lee Jae Myung called for improvements in the U.S. visa system as he spoke about the Sept. 4 immigration raid that resulted in the arrest of more than 300 South Korean workers at a battery factory under construction at Hyundai’s sprawling auto plant west of Savannah.South Korea’s Foreign Ministry later confirmed that U.S. authorities have released the 330 detainees 316 of them Koreans and that they were being transported by buses to Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport where they will board a charter flight scheduled to arrive in South Korea on Friday afternoon. The group also includes 10 Chinese nationals, three Japanese nationals and one Indonesian.The massive roundup and U.S. authorities’ release of video showing some workers being chained and taken away, sparked widespread anger and a sense of betrayal in South Korea. The raid came less than two weeks after a summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Lee, and just weeks after the countries reached a July agreement that spared South Korea from the Trump administration’s highest tariffs but only after Seoul pledged $350 billion in new U.S. investments, against the backdrop of a decaying job market at home.Lawmakers from both Lee’s liberal Democratic Party and the conservative opposition decried the detentions as outrageous and heavy-handed, while South Korea’s biggest newspaper compared the raid to a “rabbit hunt” executed by U.S. immigration authorities in a zeal to meet an alleged White House goal of 3,000 arrests a day.During the news conference, Lee said South Korean and U.S. officials are discussing a possible improvement to the U.S. visa system, adding that under the current system South Korean companies “can’t help hesitating a lot” about making direct investments in the U.S. Lee: ‘It’s not like these are long-term workers’ U.S. authorities said some of the detained workers had illegally crossed the U.S. border, while others entered legally but had expired visas or entered on visa waivers that prohibited them from working.But South Korean officials expressed frustration that Washington has yet to act on Seoul’s yearslong demand to ensure a visa system to accommodate skilled Korean workers, though it has been pressing South Korea to expand U.S. industrial investments.South Korean companies have been mostly relying on short-term visitor visas or Electronic System for Travel Authorization to send workers who are needed to launch manufacturing sites and handle other setup tasks, a practice that had been largely tolerated for years.Lee said that whether Washington establishes a visa system allowing South Korean companies to send skilled workers to industrial sites will have a “major impact” on future South Korean investments in America.“It’s not like these are long-term workers. When you build a factory or install equipment at a factory, you need technicians, but the United States doesn’t have that workforce and yet they won’t issue visas to let our people stay and do the work,” he said.“If that’s not possible, then establishing a local factory in the United States will either come with severe disadvantages or become very difficult for our companies. They will wonder whether they should even do it,” Lee added.Lee said the raid showed a “cultural difference” between the two countries in how they handle immigration issues.“In South Korea, we see Americans coming on tourist visas to teach English at private cram schools they do it all the time, and we don’t think much of it, it’s just something you accept,” Lee said.“But the United States clearly doesn’t see things that way. On top of that, U.S. immigration authorities pledge to strictly forbid illegal immigration and employment and carry out deportations in various aggressive ways, and our people happened to be caught in one of those cases,” he added. South Korea, US agree on working group to settle visa issues Following a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Washington, South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Hyun said Wednesday that U.S. officials have agreed to allow the workers detained in Georgia to later return to finish their work at the site. He added that the countries agreed to set up a joint working group for discussions on creating a new visa category to make it easier for South Korean companies to send their staff to work in the United States.Before leaving for the U.S. on Monday, Cho said more South Korean workers in the U.S. could be vulnerable to future crackdowns if the visa issue isn’t resolved, but said Seoul does not yet have an estimate of how many might be at risk.The Georgia battery plant is one of more than 20 major industrial sites that South Korean companies are currently building in the United States. They include other battery factories in Georgia and several other states, a semiconductor plant in Texas, and a shipbuilding project in Philadelphia, a sector Trump has frequently highlighted in relation to South Korea.Min Jeonghun, a professor at South Korea’s National Diplomatic Academy, said it’s chiefly up to the United States to resolve the issue, either through legislation or by taking administrative steps to expand short-term work visas for training purposes.Without an update in U.S. visa policies, Min said, “Korean companies will no longer be able to send their workers to the United States, causing inevitable delays in the expansion of facilities and other production activities, and the harm will boomerang back to the U.S. economy.” Kim Tong-Hyung and Hyung-Jin Kim, Associated Press
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