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It’s been a bumpy ride for Uber $UBER, which lost billions of dollars under founder Travis Kalanick, subsidizing rides to win users away from traditional taxi and car rental services. But it looks like under the leadership of CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, who arrived in 2017, the ride-hailing app is finally back in the good graces of investors—and riders.

Since cratering in mid-2022, Uber’s share price has boomed about 275%, as it sits on a firm three-quarters of the U.S. rideshare market and is finally making a profit on every ride. Q1 revenue of $11.5 billion was up more than 13% from a year earlier, and the bookings grew 18% year-over-year to $44.2 billion. Just three years ago, investors and Uber watchers were writing off the company — its market was saturated, lower-cost competitors were eating its lunch, and the company faced a slew of lawsuits over its employment practices. Here’s what’s made Uber rise again:

• Khosrowshahi put a focus on profitability ahead of expansion, with Uber making its first profit in five years in 2023, exiting unprofitable markets, and trimming promotional costs.
• Uber began working with Waymo and China’s WeRide to start using robotaxis. That hasn’t yet brought in a profit, but analysts see it as a preparatory step for future growth and a hedge against Tesla’s robotaxis.
• Maybe the biggest single boost Uber got was being added at the end of 2023 to the S&P 500. That nearly always boosts a stock’s price, as it means institutional investors and popular index-tracking funds need to buy the stock.
• Then there’s Bill Ackman, whose Pershing Square Capital Management took a $2.3 billion stake in Uber this month, with Ackman calling the stock undervalued. JPMorganChase analysts this week raised their price target from $92 to $105, citing Uber’s progress toward its three-year goals, including mid-to-high teens percentage growth in gross bookings and a 35%–40% increase in EBITDA. Uber is one of the cheapest big stocks compared to its bottom line, trading at 24.17 times its free cash flow, a fraction of other notable technology stocks like Tesla (397 price-to-free-cash-flow), Palantir (168) and Nvidia (62). Uber generated $6.9 billion in cash in 2024, more than double its $3.4 billion in 2023.

• OpenAI buys Jony Appleseed: It’s a race to get your AI model into the hands of consumers, and Sam Altman’s industry-leading OpenAI took a look at the landscape and decided they’d prefer to own the next ubiquitous AI device rather than pay someone else billions a year to carry his Chatbot on their device. (Much like Alphabet’s been paying Apple $AAPL to make Google the main search engine on the iPhone.) Altman didn’t look far. He’s just paid $6.5 billion for io, a year-old company created by Jony Ive, the man credited with designing the iPhone for Steve Jobs. Io is developing (behind a curtain) the next generation of tools designed around AI. “It became clear that our ambitions to develop, engineer, and manufacture a new family of products demanded an entirely new company,” Altman and Ive said in a blog post that looks a lot like a Paperless Post wedding invitation. Three cheers for the happy couple!
• Google’s dilemma: Alphabet’s $GOOG Google this week unveiled a raft of new AI tools in a bid to recover users and searches it is losing to AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Grok. There’s now an AI-mode on its search page, but gone are many of the blue links, which provided most of Google’s revenue (57% last year), and its future looks murky. After an Apple executive said last week that his company would begin offering AI options, Google’s shares slid 7.3%. “It’s a total reimagining of search with more advanced reasoning,” said Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. “​​We are now entering a new phase of the AI platform shift.”
• Meta-bollicking: Mark Zuckerberg is not happy, so Meta $META is telling managers to fire more people. How? By ensuring they put more people in the “below expectations” bucket at their mid-year performance reviews. Business Insider says it saw an internal Meta memo saying the boss wants teams of 150 people or more to put 15% to 20% of their members in that slop bucket.
• Nvidia’s no longer feeling Nvincible: Jensen Huang, the leather-jacket-wearing founder of chipmaker Nvidia $NVDA, says rules meant to maintain America’s lead in the AI race by curbing China’s access to his company’s advanced AI chips have had the opposite effect. Now Chinese tech firms like Huawei have filled the gap with their own chips. The export controls gave Chinese companies “the spirit, the energy and the government support to accelerate their development,” Huang said at a Taipei conference this week. “All in all, the export control was a failure.”
• Missed Target: Target $TGT missed expectations for sales in the most recent quarter as sales fell 3.8%, and the retailer said it expects sales to fall by single digits this year. Tariffs are only part of the problem: Consumers are losing confidence in the economy, and some shoppers are boycotting Target over its decision to end DEI programs. Target has been losing ground against Walmart and Amazon for years, trailing Walmart’s growth for the last 13 quarters. The company says it will create an “acceleration office” this year to speed up changes and win back customers. Interestingly, Amazon $AMZN CEO Andy Jassy said Wednesday that the company hasn’t seen any signs of consumers tightening their wallets in the face of President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs.
• Penalties with interest: Capital One $COF agreed to pay $425 million to settle a class action lawsuit arguing that it cheated depositors out of higher interest rates by failing to let them know about high-interest savings accounts the bank offered. Standard accounts offered a 0.3% interest rate, while high-yield accounts offered as much as 4%. Cap One did not admit responsibility. A similar suit brought by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was dropped by the Trump Administration, but two days earlier, N.Y. state attorney general Letitia James brought a similar suit.

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• Vanishing value: Tesla $TSLA has backed off its no-trade-in policy for the Cybertruck, and some owners tell Business Insider they’ve lost 37% to 38% of the value of their stainless steel mojo-mobiles in less than a year, Business Insider reports. Kelley Blue Book notes that on average, new cars lose 16% of their value after their first year.
• China syndrome: Right-wing troublemaker Steve Bannon tells the Atlantic it all went south for Elon in Washington when Trump said there’d be no China briefing for the DOGE man. “You could feel it. Everything changed. The fever had been broken,” Bannon told The Atlantic.
• Castles in the sand: That trip to the Gulf states was a great deal for Elon Musk. Musk’s X ventures secured several contracts, including approval to operate its Starlink satellite internet service in Saudi Arabia, a clinical study to test his Neuralink brain chips in Abu Dhabi, and a possible contract to provide Starlink to Emirates Airlines. Musk’s family is also doing business in the Gulf. Dad Errol Musk is in talks to build a Musk Tower in Dubai to house the Musk Institute, which the elder Musk told the New York Times would be devoted to studying “gravity and space-time travel.”
• What, me worry? Musk told a conference in Qatar that Tesla’s sales and share price are fine, despite ample evidence to the contrary. “Sales numbers are strong, we see no problem with demand,” Musk said, adding that the market is the ultimate scorecard for Tesla’s business. “You can just look at the stock price if you want the best inside information,” he said. “A stock wouldn’t be trading near all-time highs if it was not, if things weren’t in good shape. They’re fine, don’t worry about it.” Tesla shares are down 30% from an all-time high last December, and down 10% this year, despite a recent rebound, and first-quarter car sales dropped 13% over 2024.
• Caddy-attack: EV buyers are trading in their Teslas for new Cadillac EVs, says General Motors $GM. Nearly 8 out of every 10 customers purchasing a Cadillac EV are new to the brand, and about 10% of those customers are trading in a Tesla.

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• Pulling the plug: The U.S. Treasury is now singing the Moody’s blues. On Friday, Moody’s, the credit rating company, cut the U.S. government’s debt rating a notch, from AAA to Aa1, saying it “reflects the increase over more than a decade in government debt and interest payment ratios to levels that are significantly higher than similarly rated sovereigns.” The key word there is “ratios.” That means that as spending is inevitably increasing, revenue is not. In effect, if the government wants to keep spending, it needs a pay raise. The one thing it doesn’t want to do is take a pay cut. But that’s the net effect of the Trump tax cuts from term one, the tariff turmoil that’s cut economic activity (and therefore tax collections), and the “Big, beautiful bill” that increases tax breaks for the rich and that just passed the House of Representatives. The Moody downgrade hit hard on Monday, when bond markets saw a rapid sell-off in 30-year Treasury bonds, whose yields jumped to their highest level since 2023. “I think that Moody’s is a lagging indicator,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday. “I think that’s what everyone thinks of credit agencies.” There are multiple ways to interpret that statement, but none of them suggest the economy will boom anytime soon. One thing the downgrade does mean is that even more taxpayer money will have to be spent on interest on the debt. And that’s got one of America’s most prominent business voices worried. JPMorganChase CEO Jamie Dimon said the risks of higher inflation and even stagflation posed by record U.S. deficits, tariffs, and international tensions aren’t priced into the stock market. “We have huge deficits; we have what I consider almost complacent central banks,” Dimon said. “You all think they can manage all this. I don’t think they can,” he said. “People feel pretty good because you haven’t seen effective tariffs,” Dimon said. “The market came down 10%, [it’s] back up 10%. That’s an extraordinary amount of complacency.”
• Suck it up! When Walmart said it was going to pass the cost of tariffs on to its customers, Donald Trump got himself in a huff: “Walmart should STOP trying to blame Tariffs as the reason for raising prices throughout the chain,” Trump fumed on his social media platform, that occasionally sounds more like Truth Socialism. “ Walmart made BILLIONS OF DOLLARS last year, far more than expected. Between Walmart and China they should, as is said, ‘EAT THE TARIFFS,’ and not charge valued customers ANYTHING. I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!!!” Walmart’s gross profits rose 7.12% in the past year. About a third of Walmart products are imported, the vast majority from China and Mexico.
• Star Wars, the Sequel: Trump said Tuesday the U.S. will spend $175 billion on a space-based defense system aimed at blocking missiles from China and Russia, which he dubbed the “Golden Dome,” a reference to Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile defense system. Trump said it will be finished within four years, but experts say it will take twice as long and cost as much as $831 billion. Whether or not it succeeds, defense contractors are poised to win big contracts, and names mentioned include SpaceX, Palantir $PLTR, L3Harris Technologies $LHX, Lockheed Martin $LMT, and RTX Corp $RTX. Ronald Reagan attempted a similar project in the 1980s called Star Wars, but it was cancelled after the U.S. and Russia agreed to avoid an expensive arms race in space.
• Audit this: Trump’s pick to lead the IRS sold his friends a tax break that the IRS said does not exist, and Democratic senators at his confirmation hearing this week went to town. Former Missouri congressman Billy Long offered his customers a “tribal tax credit” linked to oil and gas. “I did not indicate that they were anything but real,” Long told Senators on Tuesday. And it’s there’s more trouble ahead: Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, said he’s got recordings of Long promising favorable tax deals for friends of Trump.

• Media notes: Paramount’s $PARA CBS division sacked CBS News chief Wendy McMahon after she disagreed with the company’s move to settle a $60 billion lawsuit brought by Trump, who accused “60 Minutes” of selectively editing an interview with Kamala Harris. Legal experts call the suit baseless, and Trump beat Harris at the polls anyway, so what’s his beef? But Paramount needs the FCC’s blessing to sell itself to Hollywood studio Skydance, run by Oracle $ORCL founder Larry Ellison’s son David.
• Sesame stream: As the Trump administration moves to cut all funding from public broadcasting, Sesame Street has reached a deal with Netflix to syndicate the show and launch new episodes simultaneously with PBS. Since 2015, HBO has paid Sesame Workshop $30 million to $35 million a year for new episodes of “Sesame Street,” The New York Times reported. But HBO parent Warner Bros. Discovery $WBD let that deal expire as it turns away from children’s content and faces its own financial issues. Warner shares are down 16.5% so far this year.
• $256MillionandMe: Failed DNA fortune-telling firm 23andMe said it has agreed to be bought by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals $RGN, a biotech company that uses DNA research to develop new drugs. 23andMe became a household name as Americans got their saliva tested to learn who their parents were and where they’d come from. But it ran rapidly through its potential customer base and offered nothing for a returning customer. It tried to use the genetic data to develop its own drugs, but that failed and the company filed for bankruptcy protection. Regenoron says it will still collect valuable new data for free by continuing to offer DNA testing.
• Airbnb, begone: Facing one of Europe’s worst housing crises, the Spanish government ordered Airbnb $ABNB to take down nearly 66,000 listings in the country, as an increasing number of Spaniards rent their homes—or sell them to companies that rent them out—to tourists. Airbnb says the Spanish government needs to look for the cause of its housing crisis at home: “The solution is to build more homes — anything else is a distraction,” the company said in a statement.
• Fortnite’s back! Apple reinstated Fortnite in the App Store after a federal judge ruled it coudn’t force developers to use Apple’s $AAPL costly payment system. Fortnite owner Epic had sued back in 2020, after Apple booted it from the ecosystem when Epic told customers to pay it directly rather than accepting Apple’s 30% sales commission.
• Sweet: Medical device maker Medtronic’s $MDT diabetes business has been lagging for several years, as new drugs, cheaper pumps, and a federal freeze on insulin prices slashed margins. Safety issues led it to delay selling a new insulin pump. Now it’s spinning off the diabetes business into a standalone company. “These are higher-margin markets than the diabetes space, and they better leverage our core strengths as a company,” said CEO Geoff Martha.

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Republicans stayed up all night to pass their multitrillion-dollar tax breaks package, with Speaker Mike Johnson defying the skeptics and unifying his ranks to muscle President Donald Trump’s priority bill to approval Thursday.

With last-minute concessions and stark warnings from Trump, the Republican holdouts largely dropped their opposition to salvage the “One Big Beautiful Bill” that’s central to the GOP agenda. The House launched debate before midnight and by dawn the vote was called, 215-214, with Democrats staunchly opposed. It next goes to the Senate, with long negotiations ahead.

“To put it simply, this bill gets Americans back to winning again,” said Johnson, R-La.

The outcome caps an intense time on Capitol Hill, with days of private negotiations and public committee hearings, many happening back-to-back, around-the-clock. Republicans insisted their sprawling 1,000-page-plus package was what voters sent them to Congress — and Trump to the White House — to accomplish. They believe it will be “rocket fuel,” as one put it during debate, for the uneasy U.S. economy.

Trump himself demanded action, visiting House Republicans at Tuesday’s conference meeting and hosting GOP leaders and the holdouts for a lengthy session Wednesday at the White House. Before the vote, the administration warned in a pointed statement that failure “would be the ultimate betrayal.”

After the legislation’s passage, Trump posted on social media: “Thank you to every Republican who voted YES on this Historic Bill! Now, it’s time for our friends in the United States Senate to get to work.”

The Senate hopes to wrap up its version by the Fourth of July holiday.

Central to the package is the GOP’s commitment to extending some $4.5 trillion in tax breaks they engineered during Trump’s first term in 2017, while temporarily adding new ones he campaigned on during his 2024 campaign, including no taxes on tips, overtime pay, car loan interest and others.

To make up for some of the lost tax revenue, the Republicans focused on changes to Medicaid and the food stamps program, largely by imposing work requirements on many of those receiving benefits. There’s also a massive rollback of green energy tax breaks from the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act.

Additionally, the package tacks on $350 billion in new spending, with about $150 billion going to the Pentagon, including for the president’s new “ Golden Dome” defense shield, and the rest for Trump’s mass deportation and border security agenda.

All told, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates 8.6 million fewer people would have health care coverage and 3 million less people a month would have SNAP food stamps benefits with the proposed changes.

The CBO said the tax provisions would increase federal deficits by $3.8 trillion over the decade, while the changes to Medicaid, food stamps and other services would tally $1 trillion in reduced spending. The lowest-income households in the U.S. would see their resources drop, while the highest ones would see a boost, it said.

House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York read letters from Americans describing the way the program cuts would hurt them. “This is one big ugly bill,” he said.

As the minority, without the votes to stop Trump’s package, Democrats instead offered up impassioned speeches and procedural moves to stall its advance. As soon as the House floor reopened for debate, the Democrats forced a vote to adjourn. It failed.

In “the dark of night they want to pass this GOP tax scam,” said Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-Calif.

Other Democrats called it a “big, bad bill” or a “big, broken promise.”

Pulling the package together before his Memorial Day deadline has been an enormous political lift for Johnson, with few votes to spare from his slim GOP majority whose rank-and-file Republicans have conflicting priorities of their own.

Conservatives, particularly from the House Freedom Caucus, held out for steeper spending cuts to defray costs piling onto the nation’s $36 trillion debt.

At the same time, more moderate and centrist GOP lawmakers were wary of the changes to Medicaid that could result in lost health care for their constituents. And some worried the phaseout of the renewable energy tax breaks will impede businesses using them to invest in green energy projects in many states.

One big problem had been the costly deal with GOP lawmakers from New York and other high-tax states to quadruple the $10,000 deduction for state and local taxes, called SALT, to $40,000 for incomes up to $500,000, which was included in the final product.

For every faction Johnson tried to satisfy, another would roar in opposition.

Late in the night, GOP leaders unveiled a 42-page amendment with a number of revisions.

The changes included speedier implementation of the Medicaid work requirements, which will begin in December 2026, rather than January 2029, and a faster roll back of the production tax credits for clean electricity projects, both sought by the conservatives.

Also tucked into the final version were some unexpected additions — including a $12 billion fund for the Department of Homeland Security to reimburse states that help federal officials with deportations and border security.

And in a nod to Trump’s influence, the Republicans renamed a proposed new children’s savings program after the president, changing it from MAGA accounts — money account for growth and advancement — to simply “Trump” accounts.

Rep. Erin Houchin, R-Ind., said Americans shouldn’t believe the dire predictions from Democrats about the impact of the bill. “We can unlock the ‘Golden Age’ of America,” she said, echoing the president’s own words.

By early morning hours, the chief holdouts appeared to be falling in line. Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., said they “got some improvements.”

But two Republicans voted against the package, including Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, a deficit watcher who had been publicly criticized by Trump, remained unmoved. “This bill is a debt bomb ticking,” he warned.

And Rep. Andy Harris, the chairman of the Freedom Caucus who wanted more time, voted present. Some others did not vote.

Final analysis of the overall package’s costs and economic impacts are still being assessed.

Along with extending existing tax breaks, it would increase the standard income tax deduction, to $32,000 for joint filers, and boost the child tax credit to $2,500. There would be an enhanced deduction, of $4,000, for older adults of certain income levels, to help defray taxes on Social Security income.

To cut spending, those seeking Medicaid health care, who are able-bodied adults without dependents, would need to fulfill 80 hours a month on a job or in other community activities.

Similarly, to receive food stamps through SNAP, those up to age 64, rather than 54, who are able-bodied and without dependents, would need to meet the 80 hours a month work or community engagement requirements. Additionally, some parents of children older than 7 years old would need to fulfill the work requirements.

Republicans said they want to root out waste, fraud and abuse in the federal programs.

___

Associated Press writers Matt Brown and Joey Cappelletti contributed to this report.

Nike is going to start selling its products directly on Amazon’s U.S. website for the first time since 2019 as the company looks for more ways to bring goods to customers and boost sales.

Nike, which sells footwear, clothing and other items, cut ties with Amazon at a time when the online retailer was trying to lure big brands to its website. While Nike stopped selling its sneakers and athletic gear directly to Amazon in 2019, Nike’s goods were still available on Amazon.com, sold by independent sellers that list their merchandise directly on Amazon’s marketplace.

Now Nike is resuming its direct relationship with Amazon.

“Nike is investing in our marketplace to ensure we’re offering the right products, best services, and tailored experiences to consumers wherever and however they choose to shop,” the company said in a statement. “This includes expanding to new digital accounts, including Amazon in the U.S., new physical partners like Printemps (a French luxury department store chain), elevating retail experiences across the marketplace, and launching Nike’s AI powered conversational search to improve our online services.”

Amazon is navigating its way through bringing Nike back on board.

“While independent sellers have listed some Nike inventory in our store for many years, Amazon will soon begin sourcing a much wider range of Nike products directly to expand our selection for U.S. customers,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement. “We value independent sellers, and we’re providing an extended period of time for the small number of sellers affected to sell through their inventory of overlapping items.”

When Nike announced the pilot program with Amazon.com in 2017, it hoped that it would have more control over the brand. Amazon acknowledged at the time that there were problematic sales of counterfeit goods on its site and implemented some tools to try to stop them.

Nike is reestablishing a more direct relationship with Amazon at a time when its sales are weakening.

In March the Beaverton, Oregon, company reported that its third-quarter sales fell 9% to $11.27 billion as revenue declined for the Nike brand and Converse.

Jefferies’ Randal Konik is supportive of Nike reconnecting with Amazon.

“We like this move by Nike plain and simple,” he wrote in a note to clients. “Amazon is the largest e-commerce platform and the move further cements Nike’s brand ubiquity.”

Shares of Nike rose more than 2% in Thursday afternoon trading.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — A federal judge on Wednesday rejected arguments made by an artificial intelligence company that its chatbots are protected by the First Amendment — at least for now. The developers behind Character.AI are seeking to dismiss a lawsuit alleging the company’s chatbots pushed a teenage boy to kill himself.

The judge’s order will allow the wrongful death lawsuit to proceed, in what legal experts say is among the latest constitutional tests of artificial intelligence.

The suit was filed by a mother from Florida, Megan Garcia, who alleges that her 14-year-old son Sewell Setzer III fell victim to a Character.AI chatbot that pulled him into what she described as an emotionally and sexually abusive relationship that led to his suicide.

Meetali Jain of the Tech Justice Law Project, one of the attorneys for Garcia, said the judge’s order sends a message that Silicon Valley “needs to stop and think and impose guardrails before it launches products to market.”

The suit against Character Technologies, the company behind Character.AI, also names individual developers and Google as defendants. It has drawn the attention of legal experts and AI watchers in the U.S. and beyond, as the technology rapidly reshapes workplaces, marketplaces and relationships despite what experts warn are potentially existential risks.

“The order certainly sets it up as a potential test case for some broader issues involving AI,” said Lyrissa Barnett Lidsky, a law professor at the University of Florida with a focus on the First Amendment and artificial intelligence.

The lawsuit alleges that in the final months of his life, Setzer became increasingly isolated from reality as he engaged in sexualized conversations with the bot, which was patterned after a fictional character from the television show “Game of Thrones.” In his final moments, the bot told Setzer it loved him and urged the teen to “come home to me as soon as possible,” according to screenshots of the exchanges. Moments after receiving the message, Setzer shot himself, according to legal filings.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Character.AI pointed to a number of safety features the company has implemented, including guardrails for children and suicide prevention resources that were announced the day the lawsuit was filed.

“We care deeply about the safety of our users and our goal is to provide a space that is engaging and safe,” the statement said.

Attorneys for the developers want the case dismissed because they say chatbots deserve First Amendment protections, and ruling otherwise could have a “chilling effect” on the AI industry.

In her order Wednesday, U.S. Senior District Judge Anne Conway rejected some of the defendants’ free speech claims, saying she’s “not prepared” to hold that the chatbots’ output constitutes speech “at this stage.”

Conway did find that Character Technologies can assert the First Amendment rights of its users, who she found have a right to receive the “speech” of the chatbots. She also determined Garcia can move forward with claims that Google can be held liable for its alleged role in helping develop Character.AI. Some of the founders of the platform had previously worked on building AI at Google, and the suit says the tech giant was “aware of the risks” of the technology.

“We strongly disagree with this decision,” said Google spokesperson José Castañeda. ”Google and Character AI are entirely separate, and Google did not create, design, or manage Character AI’s app or any component part of it.”

No matter how the lawsuit plays out, Lidsky says the case is a warning of “the dangers of entrusting our emotional and mental health to AI companies.”

“It’s a warning to parents that social media and generative AI devices are not always harmless,” she said.

___

EDITOR’S NOTE — If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988.

___ Kate Payne is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

The smoke that filled the cabin of a Delta flight as it took off from the Atlanta airport in February was so thick that the lead flight attendant had trouble seeing past the first row of passengers and the pilots donned oxygen masks as a precaution.

The National Transportation Safety Board said in a preliminary report Wednesday that the plane quickly returned to the airport on the morning of Feb. 24 and evacuated all 99 people aboard. Two people sustained minor injuries during the evacuation, but no one was hurt by the smoke.

Initially, the airline described the incident as just a haze inside the Boeing 717 aircraft. A Delta spokesman said he couldn’t comment during the NTSB’s ongoing investigation that the airline is cooperating with.

The flight attendants reported that the smoke began near one of the doors in the front of the plane before it also started coming out of all the vents throughout the plane, according to the report. The flight attendants tried contacting the pilots but initially couldn’t reach them because they were focused on emergency procedures and flying the plane.

The flight attendants assured passengers they were trained for the situation and asked them to remain calm.

Shortly after the smoke appeared, the NTSB said, the pilots got a low oil pressure alarm for the right engine, so they shut it down as they were returning to the airport. When maintenance personnel inspected that engine after the plane landed they found little or no oil in the engine.

The NTSB hasn’t determined if that oil leak was the cause of the smoke. That won’t be established until the agency completes its full report sometime next year.

The plane was met by firefighters when it landed, and when the pilots opened the flight deck door, they “noticed a tremendous amount of smoke in the cabin, and the captain immediately ordered an evacuation,” the report said.

Passengers evacuated the plane through a combination of the emergency slides at the front and back of the plane and climbing off the wing.

The flight’s destination had been Columbia, South Carolina.