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A labor rights group sued Starbucks on Thursday, alleging that it sourced coffee from a major cooperative in Brazil whose member farms were cited for keeping workers in slave-like conditions.

International Rights Advocates filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Washington on behalf of eight Brazilian coffee farm workers.

The lawsuit alleges that Starbucks violated U.S. trafficking laws by continuing to buy coffee from Cooxupe even after Brazilian authorities repeatedly cited the cooperative for trafficking and forced labor violations.

The plaintiffs — who were not named in the lawsuit because International Rights Advocates said they fear retribution — allege they were lured to farms with the promise of good pay and working conditions. But instead, they were put in filthy housing and the cost of their transportation, food and equipment was deducted from their pay.

“Consumers are paying obscene amounts for a cup of Starbucks coffee that was harvested by trafficked slaves,” said International Rights Advocates founder Terry Collingsworth, who is representing the plaintiffs. “It is time to hold Starbucks accountable for profiting from human trafficking.”

Starbucks said Thursday that the lawsuit’s claims are without merit.

The company said it only purchases coffee from a small fraction of Cooxupe’s 19,000 coffee farm members. All of Starbucks’ coffee comes from farms whose labor and environmental practices meet the company’s standards, it said. Starbucks said its verification program was developed by outside experts and includes regular third-party audits.

“Starbucks is committed to ethical sourcing of coffee including helping to protect the rights of people who work on the farms where we purchase coffee from,” the company said in a statement.

Cooxupe said Thursday that it was not part of the lawsuit and doesn’t have access to it.

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Associated Press Writer Mauricio Savarese in Sao Paulo contributed.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Why not tax the millionaires?

As Congress begins drafting a massive package for President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” with trillions of dollars in tax breaks and federal program cuts, it’s a question that won’t seem to go away.

Trump himself has mused he’d “love” to tax wealthier Americans a little bit more, but the Republican president has also repeatedly walked it back. This week, the president dismissed a tax hike as “disruptive” when asked about it at the White House.

But still it swirls.

And it’s setting up a potential showdown between the old guard of the Republican Party, which sees almost any tax hike as contrary to the GOP goal of slashing government, and its rising populist-nationalists, who view a millionaire’s tax as championing working-class voters who helped deliver the White House.

“Bring it, baby,” said former Trump strategist Stephen Bannon on his podcast.

Think of it as Bannon on the one side, versus Newt Gingrich, anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist and others on the other — a debate that once seemed unfathomable for Republicans who have spent generations working to lower taxes and reduce the scope of the federal government.

“I don’t think we’re raising taxes on anybody,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said this week on Fox News Channel.

Johnson said there have been lots of ideas thrown out but the Republicans are working against the idea of a tax on millionaires. “I’m not in favor of raising the tax rates because our party is the group that stands against that, traditionally,” he said.

This spring and summer, the Republican-led Congress is determined to make progress on the package, which is central to the party’s domestic policy agenda. It revolves around extending many of the GOP tax cuts that Congress approved in 2017, during Trump’s first term, but are expiring later this year.

As it stands, the top individual tax rate is now 37%, on annual incomes above $611,000 for single filers and $767,000 for married couples. If Congress fails to act, that rate is set to revert to what it was before the 2017 tax law, 39.6%, on top filers.

It seems impossible that Republicans in Congress will purposefully wade into the debate. They are striving to keep all the existing tax brackets in place, while adding new tax breaks the president campaigned on during the 2024 election — including no taxes on tips, Social Security income, overtime pay and others. It’s a potentially $5 trillion-plus package.

But the Bannon wing is working to force the issue, saying it’s time to raise that top rate on the wealthier households, at least $1 million and above.

Sounding at times more like progressive Democrats, Bannon’s flank sees a tax hike as a way not only to ensure wealthy Americans pay their fair share but to generate federal revenue. With federal debt at $36 trillion, they say it can help counter annual deficits that cannot be offset by budget cuts alone.

“The current system we have is not sustainable,” Bannon said at Semafor’s World Economy Summit on Wednesday in Washington. “You have to go to an alternative. I think the alternative is budget cuts. And … it has to be tax increases on the wealthy.”

That’s drawing fierce blowback from the traditional tax-cutters, who have gone into overdrive, warning of nothing short of a political shattering of GOP orthodoxy, and the party itself, if Republicans entertain the idea.

“Madness,” Gingrich, the former Republican House speaker, told Fox News’ Larry Kudlow.

Gingrich warns of a George Bush-style political implosion similar to his “Read my lips: No new taxes” pledge, which contributed to his failed 1992 presidential reelection bid.

“It would be a disaster,” Gingrich said.

Trump appears to be weighing the arguments, sending mixed messages about what he prefers.

“Newt is quite possibly right on this,” the president said in a note Gingrich said he received from the president and reposted Tuesday on social media.

“While I love the idea of a small increase,” Trump said in the note, “the Democrats would probably use it against us, and we would be, like Bush, helpless to do anything about it.”

Trump went on to counsel that if they can do without it, they’re probably better off. “We don’t need to be the ‘READ MY LIPS’ gang who lost an election,” he posted.

Asked about a tax hike on millionaires Wednesday in the Oval Office, Trump was more definitive.

“I think it would be very disruptive,” he said, suggesting wealthy Americans would simply leave the country, rather than pay the higher tax, and end up costing in lost revenues.

Yet in a Time magazine interview posted Friday, Trump said of a millionaires’ tax: “I actually love the concept, but I don’t want it to be used against me politically.”

As Republicans in Congress work behind the scenes crafting the tax bill — and at least $1.5 trillion in government spending cuts to help cover the lost revenues — it seems highly unlikely enough of them would agree to a tax hike.

Most of the congressional Republicans have signed a no-taxes pledge from Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform group, even as others signal some interest.

With Democrats prepared to oppose the package altogether because of its expected steep cuts to federal programs, the Republicans will need to keep all their lawmakers in line if they hope to pass the bill through the House and the Senate with their narrow majorities.

Yet, as Republicans are scrounging for ways to pay for their tax bill, they face potential resistance within their own ranks to reductions in Medicaid, food stamps or other federal programs.

Even an accounting measure preferred by the Senate Republicans, which would count the 2017 tax breaks as current policy rather than a new one requiring an offset, still comes up short for covering the full price tag of the new package, which could swell beyond $5 trillion over 10 years.

Setting the new top rate at about 40% for those earning $1 million or above would bring in some $300 billion in revenue over the decade, analysts have said.

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — X Corp., the social media platform owned by Trump adviser Elon Musk, is challenging the constitutionality of a Minnesota ban on using deepfakes to influence elections and harm candidates, saying it violates First Amendment speech protections.

The company’s federal lawsuit filed this week also contends that the 2023 state law is preempted by a 1996 federal statute that shields social media from being held responsible for material posted on their platforms.

“While the law’s reference to banning ‘deep fakes’ might sound benign, in reality it would criminalize innocuous, election-related speech, including humor, and make social-media platforms criminally liable for censoring such speech,” the company said in a statement. “Instead of defending democracy, this law would erode it.”

Minnesota’s law imposes criminal penalties — including jail time — for disseminating a deepfake video, image or audio if a person knows it’s fake, or acts with reckless disregard to its authenticity, either within 90 days before a party nominating convention, or after the start of early voting in a primary or general election.

It says the intent must be to injure a candidate or influence an election result. And it defines deepfakes as material so realistic that a reasonable person would believe it’s real, and generated by artificial intelligence or other technical means.

“Elon Musk funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into the 2024 presidential election and tried to buy a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat," said the law’s author, Democratic state Sen. Erin Maye Quade.

“Of course he is upset that Minnesota law prevents him from spreading deepfakes that meant to harm candidates and influence elections. Minnesota’s law is clear and precise, while this lawsuit is petty, misguided and a waste of the Attorney General Office’s time and resources,” her statement said.

Democratic Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison’s office, which is legally obligated to defend the constitutionality of state laws in court, said in a statement that it’s “reviewing the lawsuit and will respond in the appropriate time and manner.”

The Minnesota law was already the subject of a constitutional challenge by Christopher Kohls, a content creator, and GOP state Rep. Mary Franson, who likes to post AI-generated parodies of politicians. That case is on hold while they appeal to overturn a judge’s denial of their request to suspend the law.

The attorney general’s office argues in that case that deepfakes are a real and growing threat to free elections and democratic institutions, that the law is a legitimate and constitutional response to the problem, and that it contains important limitations on its scope that protect satire and parody.

X, formerly known as Twitter, said it’s the only social media platform challenging the Minnesota law, and that it has also challenged other laws it considers infringements of free speech, such as a 2024 California political deepfakes law that a judge has blocked.

X said in its statement that its “Community Notes” feature allows users to flag content they consider problematic, and that it’s been adopted by Facebook, YouTube and TikTok. The company’s lawsuit said its “Authenticity Policy” and “Grok AI” tool provide additional safeguards.

Alan Rozenshtein, a University of Minnesota law professor and expert on technology law, said in an interview Friday that it’s important to separate the free-speech issues from whatever one thinks about the controversial Musk.

“I’m almost positive that this will be struck down,” Rozenshtein said.

There’s no exception under the First Amendment for false or misleading political speech, even lies, he said. And the potential for criminal penalties gives social media companies like X and Facebook “an incentive to take down anything that might be a deepfake. ... You’re going to censor a massive amount to comply with this law.”

Deepfakes aren’t good, but it would be nice to get evidence that they’re causing actual problems before imposing such limits on free speech, the professor said. And while it’s easy to focus on the supply of misinformation, the large demand for it is the problem.

“People want to be fooled, and it’s very bad for our democracy, but it’s not something I think can be solved with a deepfakes ban,” he said.

It ain’t over yet. Slagging off Fed chair Jerome Powell, and threatening to fire him didn’t do Donald Trump any favors. “If I want him out, he’ll be out of there real fast, believe me,” Trump told reporters at the White House a week ago. The stock and bond markets balked, with the S&P 500 dropping 3.36% on Monday when markets reopened after the Good Friday holiday. So Trump backed down for now, which at least got the S&P back up about 4.2%. (Though it’s still down over 11% since Trump took office.)

But that doesn’t mean everything’s copacetic between the White House and the Fed. As Trump sees it, the Fed chair’s job is to help the sitting president look good. Never mind that Trump himself named Powell Fed chair in 2018, Trump thinks Powell cut rates under Joe Biden’s presidency in a failed effort to help the Democrat win the 2024 election. Now, he wants Powell to cut interest rates to help Trump look good now that Trump’s unprovoked tariff war has the U.S. and possibly the rest of the world headed for a recession. “I would like to see him be a little more active in terms of his idea to lower interest rates…but, no, I have no intention to fire him,” he told reporters in the Oval Office.

The crux of the matter is that the Fed’s independence from politics is what gives it—and by extension the entire U.S. economy—its credibility. Powell is bent on preserving the independence of the Fed to make up its own mind on how to achieve its dual mandate: Keep inflation low and employment high. “We will only make our decisions based on…our best analysis of the data,” Powell said last week. “That’s the only thing we’re ever going to do.”

Even if Trump can’t control Powell or can’t bend the Fed to his will, Fed watchers say Trump is trying to set up Powell as the person to blame for the economic destruction that’s already been wrought and the damage yet to come as the tariff turmoil drags on. “It’s tempting to want somebody else to ride to the rescue, or at least have someone else to blame,” Phil Gramm, the former GOP senator from Texas, told the Wall Street Journal.

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• Zuck on the hook? As Meta’s $META monopoly trial continues in Washington, Instagram founder Kevin Systrom accused Meta chief and Facebook founder Mark “Hoodie Man” Zuckerberg of stifling Instagram shortly after he bought it, to protect Facebook from a “network collapse.” Systrom is a witness for the Federal Trade Commission, which brought the charges against Meta. Systrom said that fear was a “major driving force” behind Zuck’s 2018 decision to throttle back investment in Instagram. Zuck’s lawyers, however, point to Instagram’s rapid growth and rising profits since Facebook (now Meta) bought the platform. The feds are hoping to split up Meta, forcing it to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp.
• Boeing’s China Woes: The Trump Tariff Turmoil (TTT) is hitting Boeing $BA right where it hurts, just as the troubled planemaker tries to return to profitability after years of losses and declining sales. On Wednesday, Boeing reported a first-quarter loss of $31 million, beating analysts’ expectations and showing a whopping improvement from the $350 million lost a year ago after a poorly-installed door panel fell off a 737 last January. Boeing delivered 130 planes, up from 83 a year earlier, and won a contract to make the Air Force’s next fighter, the suggestively named F-47. Boeing also raised some cash by agreeing to sell some of its digital businesses—which mainly have to do with navigation—to a private equity firm for $10.5 billion. But Boeing’s taking a big blow from the tariffs. China has put a hold on deliveries of Boeing planes, and Boeing now says it may have to sell those planes elsewhere to maintain its cash flow. CEO Kelly Ortberg called 2025 Boeing’s “turnaround year,” but hasn’t said how tariffs will affect the company’s finances.
• Coke v. Pepsi: Forget about the monkeys. Pepsi’s $PEP decades-old decision to make some of its concentrate in Ireland because of the Emerald Isle’s lower tax rates is backfiring now that Trump has imposed 10% tariffs on all imports. Coke $COKE makes its secret concentrate in Atlanta and Puerto Rico. Pepsi also makes concentrate in Texas, and it hasn’t said how the tariff will affect costs. But both soda makers are expected to face pressure from Trump’s 25% tariff on aluminum imports, most of which come from Canada.
• Oil troubles: Oil prices keep falling, which may be good for consumers but not so great for OPEC members and the big energy giants. It certainly doesn’t help Donald Trump’s plans to “drill baby, drill.” Benchmark Brent crude fell more than 2% after OPEC+ said it will increase production in May by 411,000 barrels a day, up from a planned increase of 122,000. The extra production will mean more income for cash-strapped members, including Russia, but it threatens plans to expand drilling in the U.S. by flooding the market with cheap fuel. It comes as Trump’s tariffs limit demand for oil, with the International Energy Agency cutting its forecast for oil demand growth by about a third, from 1 million barrels a day to 730,000. “Concerns that the measures could stoke inflation, slow economic growth, and intensify trade disputes weighed on oil prices,” the IEA wrote in its April Oil Market Report, referring to Trump’s tariffs.
• Pope’s Death Ratings: Amazon $AMZN and Netflix $NFLX saw viewership soar after Pope Francis died on Monday. “Conclave,” a 2024 Oscar Winner which Amazon streams, saw a 32-fold jump in viewership (measured, bizarrely in millions of minutes watched) on Tuesday; Netflix’s 2019 “The Two Popes,” a biopic about Francis and his conservative predecessor and Hitler Youth member Pope Benedict XVI, saw viewership jump 417%.

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• CryptoTrumping: Wanna have dinner with Donald Trump? Just be one of the 220 biggest spenders on his $TRUMP memecoin, and you’re in. “At this Intimate Private Dinner, Hear First-Hand President Trump Talk about the Future of Crypto,” according to an online ad. The campaign is effectively an opportunity to buy access to the President by enriching him and his family. After the announcement went public Wednesday, $TRUMP memecoin spiked 54%, shooting up to $14.32 from $9.29 in less than an hour, as some $842 million of the memecoin changed hands. “This is really incredible,” Corey Frayer, who ran crypto policy for the SEC during the Biden administration, told the New York Times. “They are making the pay-to-play deal explicit.” The $TRUMP memecoin hit a peak of $75.35 on January 19, the day before Trump’s inauguration. A Trump Organization affiliate, CIC Digital, and a firm called Fight Fight Fight together own 80% of the $TRUMP memecoins.
• The Truth about ETFs: Trump Media & Technology Group $DJT, the parent company of Truth Social, said it’s reached a deal with a Florida investment firm and the Crypto.com trading platform to launch a series of ETFs, as it seeks more revenue to prop up the unprofitable Truth Social platform. When Trump took office, the SEC closed an investigation into Crypto.com. Shares in Trump Media are up 15% since the news, but down 26% since Trump’s inauguration.
• TTT Update: So what’s going on with the Trump Tariff Turmoil? A lot of talk about negotiations being started, a lot of talk about unilateral lifting of tariffs by Trump himself, and a lot of U.S. trading partners now looking elsewhere to do their business. China stopped buying U.S. soybeans and Boeing jets. Truckers are losing business and are expected to lose vast amounts more as China and other nations stop shopping goods to the U.S. Then there’s the effect on the global economy: The International Monetary Fund warns Trump’s tariffs, which it notes are higher than U.S. tariffs were at the beginning of the Great Depression, will shrink global growth to 2.8% from a previous forecast of 3.3%. The U.S. economy will grow at only 1.8%, down from a 2.7% forecast in January. Mexico, which was looking at 1.4% growth, will see its economy shrink by 0.3% this year.
• Debt alert: The IMF warned global government debt could reach 117% of global GDP up from today’s 92.3%, a level not seen since the end of World War II. Why does that matter? Because instead of an efficient economy producing goods and generating taxes to pay for government services, governments will have to borrow even more money just to keep the lights on.
• Tariff tiff at home: In a foray to block Trump from implementing his planned mega-tariffs and rolling back the ones he’s already implemented, states are taking to the courts themselves. A dozen states have joined a lawsuit in U.S. International Trade Court, arguing the Trump tariffs are illegal. “The president does not have the power to raise taxes on a whim, but that’s exactly what President Trump has been doing with these tariffs,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement on the lawsuit.

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• One big ouch! Tesla’s $TSLA profit dropped 71% in the first quarter to $409 million, and not from selling cars. The electric car maker made $400 million in interest on cash and investments and $595 million from selling emissions credits to other carmakers (Trump has pledged to end those credits). Tesla reported it delivered 336,681 vehicles in the first quarter of 2025, a 13% decline from a year ago. Tesla shares have lost half their value since December. “This is the worst performance I’ve seen in Tesla’s history. I get Elon will tell everyone about trillions of TAM and robots taking over the world… anything to get you not to look at the facts,” said prominent Tesla investor Ross Gerber. After the earnings report, Musk said he plans to cut back the amount of time he spends DOGEing the U.S. Government in Washington and will spend more time with Tesla.
• Excuses, excuses: Musk says China’s trade war hold on key magnets made from heavy rare earth metals will delay his plans to produce his Optimus humanoid robots. The magnets are 15 times smaller than regular magnets and are used to build the electric motors that make robots flex and move.

• Discord at Discord: Just as Discord, every gamer’s favorite co-playing app, is preparing for a multi-billion-dollar IPO, co-founder and CEO Jason Citron is stepping down. He’ll remain a board member and adviser to incoming CEO Humam Sakhnini, a veteran of game maker Activision, whom Citron called a better fit for taking the firm public.
• The rich keep getting richer: Now, 19 U.S. families control a record 1.8% of America’s wealth—$2.6 trillion—and they accumulated $1 trillion of that just last year. In 2023, according to an analysis by UC Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman, those 19 households held only 1.2% of the country’s wealth, the Wall Street Journal reported. Last year’s surging stock market helped create much of that wealth, and the numbers aren’t in on what happened since Trump took office. One indication could be the Dow, down 10% through Wednesday since Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration.
• Times 2, Palin 0: Former half-term Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin lost her second libel trial against the New York Times this week, when a jury took just two hours to determine that the Times had not acted recklessly or with malice when it suggested that a Palin ad targeting Democratic Congressional districts with a rifle’s crosshairs had possibly prompted the shooting of Arizona Democrat Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. There was no indication that Giffords’ assailant had ever seen the map, and the Times immediately published a correction and apology. Conservatives are expected to continue their push to overturn a 1964 Supreme Court decision, New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, that ruled media could only be sued for defamation if there was “actual malice” involved in deciding to publish.
• Cultured: New York-based yogurt-maker Chobani said it plans to open a $1.2 billion, 1-million square-foot factory in Rome, New York, to turn out 1 billion pounds of dairy products a year. With one-fifth of the U.S. yogurt market, Chobani said it had sales of $2.96 billion last year and profits of $509 million, or nearly 16%. While Chobani gets its milk from American cows, the machines it uses to make yogurt and other food products come from Europe, and the company is concerned about the impact of tariffs.
• Card tricks: Federal banking regulators have approved a $35 billion deal for bank and credit card issuer Capital One to buy Discover in a move regulators say will add a serious competitor to the credit card duopoly of Visa and Mastercard. The enlarged Capital One will be the largest U.S. credit card issuer by balances and the eighth-largest U.S. consumer bank. Consumer advocates called the deal anti-competitive and are asking state regulators to block it.

NEW YORK (AP) — Elon Musk has been called a Moonshot Master, the Edison of Our Age and the Architect of the Future, but he’s got a big problem at his car company and it’s not clear he can fix it: damage to its brand.

Sales have plunged for Tesla amid protests and boycotts over Musk’s embrace of far right-wing views. Profits have been sliced by two-thirds so far this year, and rivals from China, Europe and the U.S. are pouncing.

On Tuesday came some relief as Musk announced in an earnings call with investors that he would be scaling back his government cost-cutting job in Washington to a “day or two per week” to focus more on his old job as Tesla’s boss.

Investors pushed up Tesla’s stock 5% Wednesday, though there are plenty of challenges ahead.

Musk seemed to downplay the role that brand damage played in the drop in first-quarter sales on the investor call. Instead, he emphasized something more fleeting — an upgrade to Tesla’s best-selling Model Y that forced a shutdown of factories and pinched both supply and demand.

While financial analysts following the company have noted that potential buyers probably held back while waiting for the upgrade, hurting results, even the most bullish among them say the brand damage is real, and more worrisome.

“This is a full blown crisis,” said Wedbush Securities’ normally upbeat Dan Ives earlier this month. In a note to its clients, JP Morgan warned of “unprecedented brand damage.”

Musk dismissed the protests against Tesla on the call as the work of people angry at his leadership of the Department of Government Efficiency because “those who are receiving the waste and fraud wish it to continue.”

But the protests in Europe, thousands of miles from Washington, came after Musk supported far-right politicians there. Angry Europeans hung Musk in effigy in Milan, projected an image of him doing a straight-arm salute on a Tesla factory in Berlin and put up posters in London urging people not to buy “Swasticars” from him.

Sales in Europe have gone into a free fall in the first three months of this year — down 39%. In Germany, sales plunged 62%.

Another worrying sign: On Tuesday, Tesla backed off its earlier promise that sales would recover this year after dropping in 2024 for the first time a dozen years. Tesla said the global trade situation was too uncertain and declined to repeat the forecast.

Meanwhile, Tesla’s competition is stealing its customers.

Among its fiercest rivals now is Chinese giant BYD. Earlier this year, the EV maker announced it had developed an electric battery that can charge within minutes. And Tesla’s European rivals have begun offering new models with advanced technology that is making them real Tesla alternatives just as popular opinion has turned against Musk.

Tesla’s share of the EV market in the U.S. has dropped from two-thirds to less than half, according to Cox Automotive.

Another rival, Google parent Alphabet, is already ahead of Tesla in an area that Musk has promised will help remake his company: Cybercabs.

One of the highlights of Tesla’s call Tuesday was Musk sticking with his previous prediction that it will l aunch driverless cabs without steering wheels and pedals in Austin, Texas, in June, and in other cities soon after.

But Google’s service, called Waymo, already has logged millions of driverless cybercab trips in San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Austin as part of a partnership with ride-hailing leader Uber.

Musk also told analysts that this driverless capability will be available on the Tesla vehicles already on the road through software updates over the air, and put a timeline on it: “There will be millions of Teslas operating autonomously in the second half of the year.”

But he has made similar promises before, only to miss his deadlines, such as in April 2019 when he vowed full automation by the end of the next year. He repeated the prediction, moving up the date, several more times, in following years.

A big problem is federal investigators have not given the all-clear that Tesla vehicles can drive completely on their own safely. Among other probes, safety regulators are looking into Tesla’s so-called Full Self-Driving, which is only partial self-driving, for its tie to accidents in low-visibility conditions like when there is sun glare.

In competition with rivals in the U.S., Tesla currently has one clear advantage: It will get hurt by less by tariffs because most of its vehicles are built in the countries where they are sold, including those in its biggest market, the U.S.

“Tariffs are still tough on a company where margins are still low, but we do have localized supply chains,” Musk said Tuesday. “That puts us in a strong position.”

The company also reconfirmed that a cheaper version of its best-selling vehicle, the Model Y sport utility vehicle, will be ready for customers in the first half of this year. That could help boost sales.

Another plus: The company had a blow out first quarter in its energy storage business. And Musk has promised to be producing 5,000 Optimus robots, another Tesla business, by the end of the year.

Even after falling nearly 50% from its December highs, Tesla’s stock is still very richly valued based on the one yardstick that really matters in the long run: its earnings.

At 110 times its expected per share earnings this year, the stock is valued more than 25 times higher than General Motors. The average stock on in the S&P 500 index trades at less than 20 times earnings.

That leaves Tesla little margin for error if something goes wrong.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The State Bar of California has disclosed that some multiple-choice questions in a problem-plagued bar exam were developed with the aid of artificial intelligence.

The legal licensing body said in a news release Monday that it will ask the California Supreme Court to adjust test scores for those who took its February bar exam.

“The debacle that was the February 2025 bar exam is worse than we imagined,” Mary Basick, assistant dean of academic skills at the University of California, Irvine, Law School, told the Los Angeles Times. “I’m almost speechless. Having the questions drafted by non-lawyers using artificial intelligence is just unbelievable.”

In February, the new exam led to complaints after many test-takers were unable to complete their bar exams. The online testing platforms repeatedly crashed before some applicants even started. Others struggled to finish and save essays, experienced screen lags and error messages and could not copy and paste text, the Times reported earlier.

According to a recent presentation by the State Bar, 100 of the 171 scored multiple-choice questions were made by Kaplan and 48 were drawn from a first-year law students exam. A smaller subset of 23 scored questions were made by ACS Ventures, the State Bar’s psychometrician, and developed with artificial intelligence.

“We have confidence in the validity of the (multiple-choice questions) to accurately and fairly assess the legal competence of test-takers,” Leah Wilson, the State Bar’s executive director, told the newspaper in a statement.

Katie Moran, an associate professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law who specializes in bar exam preparation, told the newspaper, “It’s a staggering admission.”

“The State Bar has admitted they employed a company to have a non-lawyer use AI to draft questions that were given on the actual bar exam,” she said. “They then paid that same company to assess and ultimately approve of the questions on the exam, including the questions the company authored.”

Andrew Perlman, dean of Suffolk University Law School and an advisory council member of the American Bar Association Task Force on the Law and Artificial Intelligence, said he had not heard of AI being used to develop bar exam questions or standards being put in place governing such uses.

But he said he was not surprised, given the rapid growth of AI technology. Perlman said AI can be useful for developing questions for assessment, but a critical guard rail is making sure that everything that comes from an AI tool is vetted carefully by experts in the subject matter.

He expects its use to continue to grow.

Although there might be public skepticism of the emerging technology in the legal profession at this time, “we will be worried in the future about the competence of lawyers who don’t use these tools,” Perlman predicted.