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Apple has taken down an app that uses crowdsourcing to flag sightings of U.S. immigration agents after coming under pressure from the Trump administration.

ICEBlock, a free iPhone-only app that lets users anonymously report and monitor activity by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, was no longer available on Apple’s App Store as of Friday. The developer had confirmed its removal on Thursday evening.

“We just received a message from Apple’s App Review that #ICEBlock has been removed from the App Store due to “objectionable content’,” ICEBlock said in a social media post. “The only thing we can imagine is this is due to pressure from the Trump Admin. We have responded and we’ll fight this!”

The developer said last month that it had more than 1 million users. Even though it has been removed from the app marketplace, those who have already downloaded the app should still be able to use it.

The Associated Press reached out to ICEBlock for further comments on Friday.

Apple said it removed apps like ICEBlock due to the potential for risks that were raised by law enforcement.

“We created the App Store to be a safe and trusted place to discover apps,” the company said in a statement. “Based on information we’ve received from law enforcement about the safety risks associated with ICEBlock, we have removed it and similar apps from the App Store.”

U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi confirmed that her office had reached out to Apple on Thursday “demanding that they remove ICEBlock from their App Store.” In a statement sent to The Associated Press, she claimed that ICEBlock was “designed to put ICE agents at risk just for doing their jobs.”

Officials said last month that a gunman who opened fire on an ICE facility in Dallas had searched for apps that tracked the presence of ICE agents.

Bondi has previously said that crowdsourced apps that allow people to communicate about the location of law enforcement officers is not allowed — specifically referring to ICEBlock developer Joshua Aaron in a July interview on Fox News.

“We are looking at him and he better watch out because that’s not a protected speech,” Bondi said at the time.

But advocates say that tracking ICE activity is a form of free speech protected by the First amendment. They maintain that such platforms are primarily used among individuals looking to protect themselves from surprise raids or potential harassment from immigration officials.

Downloads of apps like ICEblock have surged as the Trump administration steps up immigration enforcement.

ICEBlock and other crowdsourcing apps like it are being targeted, but crowdsourced technology has become common in the app store, and is still available through other apps.

Navigation apps like Waze or Google Maps for Android phones have been in use for years. Part of their draw is that users are alerted to police speed traps by other drivers. Users of those apps have suggested they can be used to post updates about “icy conditions.”

Waze and Google Maps have not been targeted by U.S. officials.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Former Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers learned all about technology’s volatile highs and lows as a veteran of the internet’s early boom days during the late 1990s and the ensuing meltdown that followed the mania.

And now he is seeing potential signs of the cycle repeating with another transformative technology as a whirlwind of investments and excitement about artificial intelligence has propelled the stock market to new highs.

Chambers took a similarly meteoric ride in his early days running Cisco, which had a market value of about $15 billion in 1995, when networking equipment suddenly became must-have components for the buildup of the internet. The feverish demand briefly turned the firm into the world’s most valuable company — worth $550 billion in March 2000 — before the investment bubble burst. The crash caused Cisco’s stock price to plunge more than 80% during a period that Chambers still recalls as the worst of his career.

Cisco bounced back to deliver consistent financial growth to help establish Chambers as one of Silicon Valley’s most respected leaders before he stepped down as CEO in 2015, but company’s stock price has never approached the peak it reached a quarter century ago.

While remaining Cisco’s chairman emeritus, Chambers is now as fascinated by the AI’s transformative powers as he once was by the internet revolution. Only this time he is advising CEOs as a venture capitalist investing in AI startups rather than running a company himself. Chambers, 76, recently discussed the promise and perils of the AI boom with The Associated Press. The interview has been edited for clarity.

Q: Does the current AI mania remind you of the internet boom of the 1990s?

A: Absolutely. There are a lot of parallels but there are also some spectacular differences. AI is moving at five times the speed and will produce three times the outcomes of the internet age. In the internet age, a startup would develop products for two years and then in year three, they would take that out into the market. Today, AI startups develop the product in a month and sometimes in a week, and then they bring it to market in one or two quarters.

In the internet age, there was an irrational exuberance on a really large scale. In this AI one, there is a lot of tremendous optimism that does indicate a future bubble for certain companies. Is there going to be train wreck? Yes, for those that aren’t able to translate the technology into a sustainable competitive advantage, how are you going to generate revenue after all the money you poured into it?

Q: Do you think AI is going to eliminate a lot of jobs?

A: It happened with the internet. The problem this time is that if I am right about AI moving at five times the speed of the internet, we are going to destroy jobs faster than we can replace them. Will we be able to replace them over time? Yes, but there is going to be a drought while we have to re-educate lots of people.

Q: Does that worry you?

A: Big time!

Q: What do we need to be doing to be prepared for this upheaval?

A: We need to change education. Entry-level jobs, both white and blue collar, are going to disappear fast. We are creating more productivity, but we have to create more jobs as well. If companies start making more money, they are either going to increase the dividend or invest in new areas. Hopefully, the majority will invest in new areas to create new jobs.

You will see successful companies expand and grow dramatically, but you are probably going to see 50% of the Fortune 500 companies disappear and 50% of the executives of the Fortune 500 disappear. They won’t have the skills to adjust to this new innovation economy driven by AI because they were trained in silos they were trained to move at the speed of a five-year cycle as opposed to a 12-month cycle.

Q: Do you think this is one of the most uncertain times you have ever seen?

A: It’s the most uncertain time on a global basis, ever. I would argue that this is the new normal. With the speed the market is moving at now, you have to be able to reinvent yourself, which most CEOs and business leaders don’t know how to do, especially with AI.

Q: What’s your view of how Big Tech has been working with President Donald Trump during his second term in office?

A: Let’s be realistic. Silicon Valley moved right, there shouldn’t be any doubt. They did it for economic reasons. And practicality, they did it for their shareholders but also regulation was getting out of control. They weren’t able to grow and China was plainly beating us.

Q: How worried are you about China?

A: I think China has full intention to win at the U.S.’s expense. In China, there are no rules, there is no intellectual property, there are no issues about misusing the power. They intend to blow past militarily, economically, and in every other way. I do not view them as a partner, I view them as a serious competitor on all fronts and someone I don’t trust. I think over time people are going to recognize it’s in the U.S.’s best interest and it’s in China’s best interest for us to get along. So go out 10 years, and that’s the most likely outcome. But I think the next five years are going to be really bumpy and dangerous. We should have no illusions that they intend to crush us.

WASHINGTON (AP) — From Wall Street trading floors to the Federal Reserve to economists sipping coffee in their home offices, the first Friday morning of the month typically brings a quiet hush around 8:30 a.m. eastern as everyone awaits the Labor Department’s crucial monthly jobs report.

But with the government shut down, no information was released Friday about hiring in September.

The interruption in the data has occurred at a particularly uncertain time, when policymakers at the Federal Reserve and Wall Street investors would need more data on the economy, rather than less. Hiring has ground nearly to a halt, threatening to drag down the broader economy. Yet at the same time, consumers — particularly higher-income earners — are still spending and some businesses are ramping up investments in data centers developing artificial intelligence models. Whether that is enough to revive hiring remains to be seen.

It’s the first time since a government shutdown in 2013 that the jobs report has been delayed. During the 2018-2019 partial government closure, the Labor Department was one of several agencies that remained open because Congress had agreed to fund them. September’s jobs figures will be released eventually, once the shutdown ends.

The Trump administration has blamed Senate Democrats for the shutdown, while Democrats levy similar charges against the White House.

“Businesses, families, policymakers, markets, and even the Federal Reserve are flying blind at a key juncture in America’s economic resurgence because the Democrats’ government shutdown has halted the release of key economic data,” said White House spokesman Kush Desai.

Yet President Donald Trump himself has often trashed government jobs data when it has painted an unflattering picture of the economy. In August, he fired the then-head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after the agency reported that job gains in May and June had been sharply lower than previously reported.

For now, economists are turning to alternative measures of the job market provided by nonprofits and private-sector companies. Those measures mostly show a job market with little hiring, but not many layoffs, either. Those who have jobs appear to be mostly secure, while those looking for work are having a tougher time.

Payroll processor ADP, for example, said Wednesday that its estimate showed the economy had lost a surprising 32,000 private-sector jobs last month. Companies in the construction, manufacturing, and financial services industries all cut jobs, ADP found. Restaurants and hotels, and professional services such as accounting and engineering, also shed workers.

Businesses in health care, private education, and information technology were the only sectors to add workers, ADP said.

“We’ve seen a significant decline in hiring momentum throughout the year,” said Nela Richardson, ADP’s chief economist. “This is consistent with a low hire -- even a no-hire — and low fire economy.”

The shutdown has also meant the government isn’t releasing the weekly count of how many Americans have filed for unemployment benefits, a proxy for layoffs, which is published each Thursday.

But Goldman Sachs used data provided by most states to produce their own estimates of unemployment claims. In a report late Thursday, they calculated that weekly claims ticked up to 224,000, up from 218,000 the previous week. Those are historically low figures, which suggest companies are still holding onto most of their workers.

On Friday, the Institute for Supply Management, a trade group of purchasing managers, released its monthly report on economic activity in the services sector, which includes everything from banking to restaurants to retail stores to warehousing and covers about 90% of the economy. Its index dropped to 50, from 52, with 50 the dividing line between shrinking and expanding. That means services sector activity was unchanged last month.

But services companies did cut back on hiring for the fourth straight month, the ISM’s survey found, suggesting that job gains remained weak last month.

And the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago on Thursday released its monthly forecast of unemployment, a new alternative measure it unveiled last month. The Chicago Fed estiamtes that the unemployment rate remained a still-low 4.3% in September.

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. stocks are adding to their records on Friday as Wall Street cruises toward the finish of another winning week.

The S&P 500 rose 0.3% and is heading toward the close of its seventh winning week in the last nine. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 439 points, or 0.9%, as of 1:30 p.m. Eastern time. The Nasdaq composite gave up and early gain and slipped 0.1%. All three indexes are coming off all-time highs set the day before.

Treasury yields were holding relatively steady in the bond market following mixed reports on activity for U.S. businesses in the health care, real estate and other services industries. One report from the Institute for Supply Management said growth in activity is stalling, while another from S&P Global said it’s still growing slowly.

Usually, the first Friday of each month has Wall Street transfixed on the monthly jobs update that the U.S. government publishes. It shows how many jobs employers created and destroyed, while also updating the unemployment rate.

Such data is particularly important now, given how much on Wall Street is riding on the expectation that the job market is continuing to slow by enough to get the Federal Reserve to keep cutting interest rates. But the shutdown of the U.S. government, now in its third day, is delaying the release.

So far, the U.S. stock market has looked past such delays, which also includes Thursday’s report on unemployment claims. Past shutdowns of the U.S. government have tended not to hurt the economy or stock market much, and the thinking is that this one could be similar, even if President Donald Trump has threatened large-scale firings of federal workers this time around.

That leaves excitement around artificial intelligence and the massive spending underway because of it as one of the drivers of the U.S. stock market, which has been setting record after record.

The industry got another boost after Japan’s Hitachi signed a memorandum of understanding with OpenAI related to powering AI. It followed a set of announcements by OpenAI with South Korean companies the day before. Hitachi’s stock jumped 10.3% in Tokyo.

But AI stocks have become so dominant, and so much money has poured into the industry that worries are rising about a potential bubble that could eventually lead to disappointment for investors.

On the losing end of Wall Street was Applied Materials, which sank 2.2%. The company, whose equipment helps make semiconductor chips, said it will take a roughly $110 million hit to its revenue in the fourth quarter because of a new U.S. Commerce Department rule expanding export restrictions to certain customers based in China.

Oil producers rose as the price of crude clawed back some of its sharp losses from earlier in the week, taken because of worries that the amount of oil in inventories will be too high relative to demand. Exxon Mobil climbed 2% and was one of the stronger forces lifting the S&P 500.

In stock markets abroad, indexes were mixed across Europe and Asia.

Japan’s Nikkei 225 was a big winner, and rose 1.9% thanks in part to Hitachi’s jump.

In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury held steady at 4.10%, where it was late Thursday.

___

AP Writers Teresa Cerojano and Matt Ott contributed.

Just because the stock market keeps going up, you might feel it’s a good idea to protect your 401(k) and other market investments on the very slim chance that it might not continue to do so forever. Editor Peter Green sat down with Tony Roth, Chief Investment Officer at Wilmington Trust Investment Advisors. He has $90 billion under management, so how does he sleep soundly at night?

In the face of uncertainty, you have to remember that the market generally will take into account all available information in most cases better than any one individual investor can. And what you’re seeing is a market that’s saying that, notwithstanding all the uncertainty, which is real, there is still enough tailwind that the markets continue to rise and that those companies that are doing well continue to rise. It’s important to stay invested because, as we’ve seen, for an investor who decided that they were going to run for the hills, the market’s up 15% this year in the U.S., 25% outside of the U.S., and even higher in the emerging world.

Unless you can see the whites of the eyes of the recession coming or some other calamitous outcome, I think it’s important to stay invested. And right now we’re not seeing the whites of the eyes. We’re seeing conjecture around a lot of things that are different, that are concerning, but we’re not seeing a train wreck in front of our eyes.

In the very short term, the catalysts are probably to the upside. The next catalyst for markets is probably going to be the earnings season coming up. The narrative that we’re hearing from companies is that consumers are continuing to spend, and companies are continuing to spend on infrastructure and AI. So I would be looking for another strong earnings season. It kicks off with financials, and financials are benefiting from the expectations of rates coming down and increased M&A activity. Higher volatility in markets is good for financials, too.

Longer term, it’s a little harder to say because the economic experimentation of the current moment is largely unprecedented, and nobody knows how it’s going to turn out. There’s probably two or three key things: One is the tariffs. Two is the shrinking of the labor force: We’re shrinking the labor force by cutting off immigration, both legal and illegal. Three is we’re systematically running the government with a much higher budget deficit than we ever have before, and that can’t go on forever. So those are all what I would call economic experiments.

All of them stand to potentially harm the economy at some point. It’s just hard to know how resilient the economy can be until those crows come home to roost, as it were.

Tariffs are a tax on the consumer, and taxes on consumers are generally not good for the economy. It slows the economy down. The second concern is the lack of labor supply. Certainly, it will be inflationary, but one of the biggest outstanding questions is can AI create enough incremental productivity to make up for the shrinking of the labor force? Historically, immigration has been a real driver of economic growth, both in terms of labor supply and consumption.

The third part is simply the ability to run the government at such a large budget deficit, 6% of GDP. When you end up having to stimulate the economy, then you find yourself in a problem because you get to a point where the bond market starts to sell off and it pushes rates up and it’s the exact opposite thing that you want. You need to actually increase fiscal spending.

Those are policy experiments that I don’t see coming home to roost in 2025. Right now, the market is responding to the rate outlook and the short end of the curve, the Fed cutting rates, the strength of the AI trade, with CapEx continuing to be quite strong. And the consumer seems to continue to be pretty good, notwithstanding the fact that the jobs market has this cloud over it. So the market’s definitely looking at the glass half full versus the glass half empty, but that’s not unusual. The markets generally will do so, if given the opportunity to put a constructive gloss on the future. Until one of those three policy risks that we talked about manifests itself in some nasty way.

I don’t think the AI trade is over. I think you’re going to see NVIDIA $NVDA, Amazon $AMZN, Google $GOOG, Microsoft $MSFT, Facebook $META, those five stocks are going to continue to perform well, and they’re going to be trailed by Apple $AAPL, and I think that Tesla $TSLA will probably do the worst. And then if things look better next year for the broader economy, you’ll get a rotation into other kinds of stocks. You’ll see financials do well.

This interview has been edited and condensed for brevity and clarity.

—Peter S. Green

• CarTalk: EVs are up! As car buyers rush to get their federal $7,500 EV credit before the Trump Administration axes it at the end of the month, both GM $GM and Ford $F saw sales jump about 8% compared with the third quarter of 2024, with EV sales doubling for GM, and climbing 30% for Ford. Ford CEO Jim Farley said he wouldn’t be surprised if EV sales plummeted from a 10-12% share of all new car sales this year to under 5% when the incentives end. On Thursday, even sales-troubled Tesla $TSLA saw its EV sales reach a new high of 497,099, though its shares were down by 5% in midday trading on Thursday.
• Chase’s Banker Bots: JPMorganChase $JPM , the world’s largest bank by market cap, is trying to go full-on AI. Already, the bank’s AI bots can build a venture capital pitch deck in 30 seconds. The goal is to have AI pilots for everything the bank does. That would eliminate a lot of jobs and boost profits. Yet most corporates have seen “zero” return from a collective $30 - $40 billion investment in AI, according to a July report from MIT. If JPMorgan can be the first bank to fully use AI, it will make some serious margins before the rest of the finance world catches up, but as Derek Waldron, JPMorgan chief analytics officer told CNBC, even with an IT budget of $18 billion a year, “There is a value gap between what the technology is capable of and the ability to fully capture that within an enterprise.”
• Spirited reply: Spirit Airlines $FLYYQ has a friend in its creditors, who are offering it $475 million in financing to stay in the sky for now. And it’s got a $150 credit line from aircraft leasing firm AerCap $AER. Spirit last month filed for its second Chapter 11 bankruptcy in less than a year and is racing to cut costs, furloughing a third of its flight attendants, trying to squeeze $100 million from its pilot union, and cutting routes to try to return to profitability.
• The rental fix is in: Real estate rental-listing sites Redfin and Zillow $Z got hit with lawsuits from the Feds and five state attorneys general, alleging they colluded to stop competition in the online housing rental ad market. In February 2025, Zillow paid Redfin and its parent Rocket Companies $RKT $100 million to shut down its advertising business for rentals in buildings with 25 or more apartments and transfer its clients to Zillow. The AGs argue that the deal is driving up the cost of rental listings, and noted that Zillow, Redfin, and CoStar’s $CSGP Apartments.com control 85% of the rental ad market.
• Boeing’s new baby: More than 60 years after launching the 737, Boeing $BA is now in early-stage development of a successor to the world’s most widely used passenger jet. More than 12,000 of the two-aisle 737s have been delivered since the first was assembled in 1967, but Boeing’s been losing business to Airbus $EADSY without a narrower single-aisle plane that can be profitably flown on less frequented routes. Rolls-Royce is designing the engines, the Wall Street Journal reported.
• Coffee calamity: Starbucks $SBUX is laying off another 900 corporate employees and closing close to 200 coffee shops it says can’t be made more inviting or aren’t making money. This comes after six consecutive quarters of declining same-store sales and is part of a larger trend of large corporations slashing jobs. Job openings fell to 7.2 million in July from a post-pandemic peak of 12.1 million in March 2022.

• Fly-bye: Play time is over. Low-cost airline Play, based in Iceland, has stopped flying after weeks of poor ticket sales and a failed shift from trans-Atlantic flights to Southern European sun spots. Some 400 jobs have been lost, and passengers who hadn’t made it home got some tough love: “We kindly advise you to check flights with other airlines. Some carriers may offer special ‘rescue fares’ considering the circumstances,” Play said in a statement.
• Charlie’s Ankle: Charlie Javice, the woman who defrauded JPMorganChase $JPM of $175 million when she sold the bank her student financial aid startup in 2021, is trading in her ankle bracelet for 85 months in the federal pen. Javice’s company, Frank, was meant to help students fill out financial aid forms, and Chase saw it as a way to wrangle potentially wealthy future customers. But Javice feared her customer base was too thin and invented millions of fake customers to pad her rolls.
• Buffett’s Chemical Brother: Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway $BRK.B is poised to make its biggest deal in nearly three years, a $10 billion bid for the petrochemical business of Occidental Petroleum $OXY. Berkshire is already the biggest shareholder in Occidental. Why now? Berkshire’s been sitting out the latest stock market surge with a pile of cash that hit $344 billion in June. Berkshire’s share price is up 10.4% this year.
• AI Jumpers: More than 20 top AI researchers have left jobs at big tech firms, including Google $GOOG, Meta $META A, and OpenAI, to join a startup called Periodic Labs that aims to speed discoveries in physics, chemistry, and other fields, accelerating discoveries in science, not “automating white-collar work,” the New YorkTimes reports.

• Dirty Jobs: Job numbers are not improving. As the government shutdown was expected to block the release of this week’s job numbers, payroll processor ADP said the economy lost 32,000 private sector jobs in September. Updated numbers showed the U.S. losing 3,000 jobs in August, when economists surveyed by the Wall Street Journal had expected an increase of 45,000. The biggest losses came in leisure and hospitality, with 19,000 cuts, while education and healthcare saw 33,000 jobs gained. Meanwhile, President Trump withdrew the nomination of Heritage Foundation economist E.J. Antoni, who he said would restore integrity to “rigged” job numbers released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
• Shutdown at the OK Corral: There’s a good chance that Republicans won’t back off their plan to cut health care, the Democrats’ red line, and the government shutdown could drag on. What would that cost? So far, the stock market has shrugged off a closure rising slightly, and gold hit a record of more than $3,900 an ounce. Furloughed workers eventually get paid, but they do stop spending temporarily. A budget office audit found that the 34-day government shutdown in the president’s first term cost the economy only $3 billion. The bigger hit could come if Trump follows through on his threat to fire hundreds of thousands of government workers.
• The Drug Deal: President Trump announced Tuesday that he’s cut a deal with U.S. pharma giant Pfizer $PFE to offer its drugs at prices charged in Europe, about 50% what is charged in the U.S. The cut-price drugs will be available from your corner dealer from a website called TrumpRx.com. But Medicaid patients already pay as little as $3 to $5 (or less) for their drugs, so the deal is unlikely to save money for the 90% of Americans with health insurance. “It is an environment where you can pretend to make significant changes that actually don’t meaningfully improve the prices that Americans will pay for their drugs,” Harvard med school professor Ameet Sarpatwari told NPR.
• Government holdings: The Trump Administration is converting a $2.6 billion loan to Canada-based Lithium Americas $LAC, into a 5% stake in the firm’s lithium mining project in Nevada.
• Trump Family Affairs: First son-in-law Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners is closing in on a deal with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund to take private U.S. video game maker Electronic Arts $EA , in a $55 billion transaction that would be the largest ever buyout of a publicly traded company. The move is part of a Saudi push into sports and gambling, but online games and gambling hold massive amounts of data about U.S. citizens, and the takeover will likely need U.S. national security approval.
• YouTube pays Trump: Alphabet $GOOG subsidiary YouTube agreed to pay Pres. Trump $22 million after he claimed the platform’s decision to block him from posting after the January 6 attack on the Capitol was censorship. Meta $META paid Trump $25 million, and X paid him $10 million for having taken down his accounts. “If he hadn’t been re-elected, we’d be in court forever,” Trump attorney John Coale told the New York Times. “Then the president gets re-elected and things look a lot better.” In August, several senators wrote to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, warning that a settlement could violate federal anti-bribery laws.
• Apprentice Fed Chair Edition: The Supreme Court weighed has said Fed Governor Lisa Cooke can keep her job — for now. Trump said he fired Cooke after she was falsely accused of mortgage fraud, but there appears to be little letup in Trump’s campaign to create a compliant Fed that will slash interest rates and goose the economy ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. “It’s a time to exhale but not breathe easy,” Peter Conti-Brown, an expert on Fed governance at the University of Pennsylvania, told the New York Times.

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NEW YORK (AP) — Months after Elon Musk left the Trump administration to the relief of Tesla investors worried about boycotts, the world’s richest man has announced some good news: Sales of Tesla cars are back.

Well, maybe.

The electric vehicle maker run by Musk reported Thursday that car sales jumped 7% in the three months through September after plunging for most of the year as people turned off by his embrace of President Donald Trump and far-right politicians in Europe balked at buying his cars.

But the jump comes with a caveat: Tesla benefited from consumers taking advantage of a $7,500 tax credit before it expired on Sept. 30, a surge in buying that helped all EV makers.

In fact, many Tesla rivals saw sales rise more. Rivian Automotive reported a 32% increase.

Tesla stock rose sharply on the sales news, but closed the day down 4.5% to $439 amid skepticism the new number really signals a turnaround given all the anti-Musk backlash.

“I don’t think most people are any more enamored with Elon now than they were a few months ago,” said Telemetry Insight’s Sam Abuelsamid. ”I expect this is more a blip for Tesla than the restart of growth.”

Even Tesla bull Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities was cautious, noting there are “still demand issues.”

Still, it was a blowout number with sales hitting 497,099 vehicles versus 462,890 in the same period last year. Analysts expected a small drop to 456,000.

Investors cheered Musk’s decision in April to leave Washington for Austin, Texas, where Tesla is headquartered. But he is still heavily involved in political and social wars, alienating potential car buyers.

On Wednesday, he posted on X that he was canceling his Netflix subscription because of critical comments made by the creator of a show on the streaming service, which appeared to spark a wave of cancellations in turn.

The sharp fall in Tesla stock Thursday was remarkable as investors have been surprisingly optimistic about the company in recent weeks despite terrible financial figures.

Investors drove the stock up 34% in September alone in a bet that Musk’s planned new cheaper version of his bestselling Model Y will recharge sales. Musk has also been successful in shifting investor attention away from cars to other aspects of the business — the rollout of its driverless robotaxi service planned for several cities and its Optimus robots for factory work and household chores.

Driving the stock higher has also been Musk’s apparent renewed focus on the company.

To hold his attention, Tesla’s board proposed last month a pay package that would allow Musk to earn $1 trillion if he meets certain financial goals over the next several years. The pay offer, unprecedented for U.S. companies known for outsized CEO compensation, drew criticism from Pope Leo in an interview lamenting widening income gaps.

If Musk meets the goals, he could set a record on top of his own record. He recently became the first person ever to hit $500 billion in net worth, at least according to rich list compiler Forbes magazine.

The 7% sales rise in the last quarter compares with a 13% dropped in the first three months of the year when Musk led Trump’s government cost-cutting efforts at the Department of Government Efficiency. In the following three months through June, sales plunged 13% again.

The anti-Musk backlash in Europe had been also been fierce. Sales plunged 40% in more than two dozen countries after he publicly supported far-right politicians there.

Musk said a British prime minister was an “evil tyrant” who belongs in prison and told Germans “things will get very, very much worse” in their country if they didn’t vote for the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party. Protests broke out in several cities, including a hanging of the billionaire in effigy in Milan and posters in London likening him to a Nazi.

For her part, the Tesla head of the board of directors who approved Musk’s latest pay package recently told Bloomberg that she is not sure if Musk’s politics have had any impact on the company’s finances. Robyn Denholm has earned nearly $700 million in compensation for serving on the board since 2014, a package that itself has drawn criticism.

Tesla reports third-quarter earnings later this month. Profits for the previous quarter fell 16% as the company continued to lose market share to European EV makers and fast-growing Chinese rivals, such as BYD.

Musk’s new robotaxi service, which began with a test-run in Austin in June, has had some hitches with reports of the cabs stopping suddenly for no reason and even driving in the opposing lane in one instance. But Musk says the service will quickly roll out anyway with launches in several other cities by the end of next year.

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. stocks edged up to more records on Thursday as technology stocks kept rising and as Wall Street kept ignoring the shutdown of the U.S. government.

The S&P 500 added 0.1% to its all-time high set the day before. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 79 points, or 0.2%, and the Nasdaq composite climbed 0.4%. Both also hit records.

Thursdays on Wall Street typically have investors reacting to the latest weekly tally of U.S. workers applying for unemployment benefits. But D.C.’s shutdown meant this week’s report on jobless claims has been delayed. An even more consequential report, Friday’s monthly tally of jobs created and destroyed across the economy, will likely also not arrive on schedule.

That increases uncertainty when much on Wall Street is riding on investors’ expectation that the job market is slowing by enough to convince the Federal Reserve to keep cutting interest rates, but not by so much that it leads to a recession.

“The Fed has been on record that they are very data dependent, and the lack of data from public sources is likely to be problematic,” said Brian Rehling, head of global fixed-income strategy at Wells Fargo Investment Institute.

So far, the U.S. stock market has looked past the delays of such data. Shutdowns of the U.S. government have tended not to hurt the economy or stock market much, and the thinking is that this one could be similar, even if President Donald Trump has threatened large-scale firings of federal workers this time around.

That left corporate announcements as the main drivers of trading Thursday.

Stocks in the chip and artificial-intelligence industries climbed after OpenAI announced partnerships with South Korean companies for Stargate, a $500 billion project aimed at building AI infrastructure.

Samsung Electronics rose 3.5% in Seoul, and SK Hynix jumped 9.9%.

The announcement also sent ripples around the world. On Wall Street, Advanced Micro Devices climbed 3.5%, and Broadcom gained 1.4%. Nvidia’s 0.9% rise was the strongest single force pushing the S&P 500 upward.

Excitement around AI and the massive spending underway because of it has been a major reason the U.S. stock market has hit record after record, along with hopes for easier interest rates. But AI stocks have become so dominant, and so much money has poured into the industry that worries are rising about a potential bubble that could eventually lead to disappointment for investors.

Occidental Petroleum fell 7.3% after it agreed to sell its chemical business, OxyChem, to Berkshire Hathaway for $9.7 billion in cash. It could be the final big purchase for Berkshire Hathaway with famed investor Warren Buffett as its CEO.

Fair Isaac jumped 18% to its best day in nearly three years after announcing a program that will streamline access to its FICO credit scores, potentially cutting out such big credit bureaus as TransUnion, Equifax and Experian.

TransUnion’s stock tumbled 10.6%, while Equifax slid 8.5%.

All told, the S&P 500 rose 4.15 points to 6,715.35. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 78.62 to 46,519.72, and the Nasdaq composite gained 88.89 to 22,844.05.

The stock of a third credit bureau, the United Kingdom’s Experian, fell 4.2% in London. It helped drag London’s FTSE 100 down by 0.2%, but indexes were much stronger across Europe and Asia.

South Korea’s Kospi leaped 2.7% for one of the world’s largest gains following the big jumps for Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix.

In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury eased to 4.08% from 4.12% late Wednesday.

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AP Writers Teresa Cerojano and Matt Ott contributed.