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    Is Trump Unveiling a Crypto Wallet? His Associates Say Yes. His Sons Say No.

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    The back-and-forth over a potential Trump cryptocurrency wallet on Tuesday exposed rifts among the family’s web of digital currency ventures.A flashy new website drew a surge of attention on Tuesday afternoon, purporting to announce the latest cryptocurrency venture backed by President Trump.The developers of Mr. Trump’s memecoin, the website said, were working with a company called Magic Eden to launch “the Official $TRUMP Wallet” — a trading app for customers to buy and sell digital currencies.But the announcement soon triggered a backlash from an unexpected source: Mr. Trump’s sons.Donald Trump Jr. wrote on X that the Trump family business had no connection to the new crypto product. His brother Eric Trump said he knew “nothing about” it. And in a rare social media post, Barron Trump, the youngest Trump son, said that “our family has zero involvement.”The sons’ reaction to the announcement appeared to expose a rift in Mr. Trump’s ever-expanding network of crypto ventures, a complex web of businesses run by various family members and associates who now appear to be competing against each other.On one side is Bill Zanker, a longtime Trump business partner and the architect of the president’s memecoin, a type of cryptocurrency usually based on an online joke, which Mr. Trump began promoting shortly before his inauguration in January. On the other are Mr. Trump’s sons, who helped found World Liberty Financial, a separate crypto business that markets its own digital currency, which has generated $550 million in sales.In a series of text messages to The New York Times, Eric Trump escalated the dispute on Tuesday, saying the Trump family would legally challenge the creation of the “Official $TRUMP Wallet” — even though it was being promoted on social media by an account linked to Mr. Zanker.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      HBO’s Streaming Service Becomes ‘HBO Max’ Again

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      Warner Bros. Discovery executives are reinstating the name HBO Max for the popular streaming service. It’s the fourth name change for the app in the last decade.It’s not Max. It’s HBO Max — again.In a surprise pivot, Warner Bros. Discovery executives announced Wednesday morning that the streaming service Max would be renamed HBO Max, reinstating the app’s old name and abandoning a contentious change that the company introduced two years ago.The reason for the change, executives explained, was straightforward.People who subscribe and pay $17 a month for the streaming service wind up watching HBO content like “The White Lotus” and “The Last of Us,” as well as new movies, documentaries and not a whole lot more.“It really is a reaction to being in the marketplace for two years, evaluating what’s working and really leaning into that,” Casey Bloys, the chairman of HBO content, said in an interview.HBO, a trailblazer of the cable era, has been on a very bumpy ride to finding an identity in the streaming era. There was HBO Go (2008), HBO Now (2015), HBO Max (2020), Max (2023) and now, once again, HBO Max (2025).Two years ago, Warner Bros. Discovery executives said that they meant well by changing the name to Max. Their overwhelming concern, the executives said, was that Discovery’s suite of reality shows — “Sister Wives,” “My Feet Are Killing Me” — risked watering down the HBO brand, which continued to produce award-winning series like “Succession.”Further, they said, HBO spent decades branding itself as a premium adult service. That was not exactly an ideal anchor for a streaming service that they envisioned would compete head-to-head with a general entertainment app like Netflix.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      TikTok, Facing a U.S. Ban, Tells Advertisers: We’re Here and Confident

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      The company’s executives tried to reassure potential advertisers about the app’s future in the United States without directly addressing a looming ban under a federal law.“TikTok is here — we are here,” Khartoon Weiss, the company’s vice president of global business solutions, told a packed warehouse of advertisers on Tuesday in Manhattan.“We are absolutely confident in our platform and confident in the future of this platform,” she declared.That statement was the closest TikTok advertising executives got to addressing the app’s uncertain fate in the United States in the company’s annual spring pitch to marketers. Under a federal law and executive order, the app is set to be banned in the country next month if the Chinese owner of the company, ByteDance, does not sell it.Hundreds of representatives from companies like L’Oreal and Unilever and various ad agencies scrambled to find seats for an event hosted by the comedian Hasan Minhaj that heavily emphasized TikTok’s role as a cultural juggernaut.TikTok was more than a video platform, Mr. Minhaj told the crowd. TikTok was “the cultural moments you talk about at work, the jokes you talk about in your group chat, the language you use in your everyday life,” he said.The tone of the event marked a departure from TikTok’s presentation a year ago, when the company was smarting from the federal law that promised to ban the app in the United States because of national security concerns related to the company’s Chinese ownership. Last year’s pitch started with one of TikTok’s top executives telling roughly 300 attendees that the company would fight the law in court and prevail and was “not backing down.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Judge Rebukes Apple and Orders It to Loosen Grip on App Store

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      The ruling was a stinging defeat for Apple in a long-running antitrust case brought by Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, on behalf of app developers.A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that Apple must loosen its grip on its App Store and stop collecting a commission on some app sales, capping a five-year antitrust case brought by Epic Games that aimed to change the power that Apple wields over a large slice of the digital economy.The judge, Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, rebuked Apple for thwarting a previous ruling in the lawsuit and said the company needed to be stopped from further disobeying the court. She criticized Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, and accused other executives at the company of lying.In her earlier ruling, Judge Gonzales Rogers ordered Apple to allow apps to provide users with external links to pay developers directly for services. The apps could then avoid the 30 percent commission that Apple charges in its App Store and potentially charge less for services.Instead, Judge Gonzalez Rogers said on Wednesday, Apple created a new system that forced apps with external sales to pay a 27 percent commission to the company. Apple also created pop-up screens that discouraged customers from paying elsewhere, telling them that payments outside the App Store may not be secure.“Apple sought to maintain a revenue stream worth billions in direct defiance of this court’s injunction,” Judge Gonzalez Rogers wrote.In response, she said Apple could no longer take commissions from sales outside the App Store. She also restricted the company from writing rules that would prevent developers from creating buttons or links to pay outside the store and said it could not create messages to discourage users from making purchases. In addition, Judge Gonzalez Rogers asked the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California to investigate the company for criminal contempt.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Boeing Will Sell Its Digital Businesses for $10 Billion

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      The deal, with the private equity firm Thoma Bravo, will help the struggling aerospace manufacturer pay down debt and streamline its operations.Boeing on Tuesday announced that it would sell a handful of navigation, flight planning and other businesses for more than $10.5 billion as the company works to refocus on manufacturing planes and other aircraft.The company, which also wants to reduce its large debt, said it would sell four businesses from a digital unit to Thoma Bravo, a private equity firm specializing in software. Those include Jeppesen, which provides navigational charts and information to pilots, and ForeFlight, an app that helps plan flights and monitor weather.“This transaction is an important component of our strategy to focus on core businesses, supplement the balance sheet and prioritize the investment grade credit rating,” Kelly Ortberg, Boeing’s chief executive, said in a statement.The company said that it expected to close the all-cash deal by the end of the year. The digital unit that houses those businesses employs about 3,900 people, though some of the unit will remain at Boeing. The company employed about 172,000 people as of the start of the year.Mr. Ortberg, who joined the company last summer, made streamlining Boeing’s operations a strategic goal as he tries to address concerns about the quality of the company’s planes that were raised after a panel blew off a 737 Max plane during a January 2024 flight near Portland, Ore.No one was seriously injured in that incident, but it renewed worries about Boeing’s planes several years after two fatal crashes of the 737 Max in 2018 and 2019. Safety and quality issues have stymied Boeing’s commercial plane production in recent years. Then last fall, production of the 737 Max, Boeing’s most popular commercial plane, came to a near standstill during a two-month worker strike.In January, Mr. Ortberg said that the company had resumed production of the Max, and was making more than 20 of those planes per month as well as five of the larger 787 Dreamliners.That is well below the goal the company had set before last year’s panel incident of delivering 50 of its 737s and 10 of its 787s per month. Boeing has about 5,500 outstanding commercial plane orders, valued at hundreds of billions of dollars. More

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      Meta’s Antitrust Trial Begins as FTC Argues Company Built Social Media Monopoly

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      The tech giant went to court on Monday in an antitrust trial focused on its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. The case could reshape its business.The Federal Trade Commission on Monday accused Meta of creating a monopoly that squelched competition by buying start-ups that stood in its way, kicking off a landmark antitrust trial that could dismantle a social media empire that has transformed how the world connects online.In a packed courtroom in the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia, the F.T.C. opened its first antitrust trial under the Trump administration by arguing that Meta illegally cemented a monopoly in social networking by acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp when they were tiny start-ups. Those actions were part of a “buy-or-bury strategy,” the F.T.C. said.Ultimately, the purchases coalesced Meta’s power, depriving consumers of other social networking options and edging out competition, the government said.“For more than 100 years, American public policy has insisted firms must compete if they want to succeed,” said Daniel Matheson, the F.T.C.’s lead litigator in the case, in his opening remarks. “The reason we are here is that Meta broke the deal.”“They decided that competition was too hard and it would be easier to buy out their rivals than to compete with them,” he added.The trial — Federal Trade Commission v. Meta Platforms — poses the most consequential threat to the business empire of Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s co-founder. If the government succeeds, the F.T.C. would most likely ask Meta to divest Instagram and WhatsApp, potentially shifting the way that Silicon Valley does business and altering a long pattern of big tech companies snapping up younger rivals.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What If Mark Zuckerberg Had Not Bought Instagram and WhatsApp?

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      Meta’s antitrust trial, in which the government contends the company killed competition by buying young rivals, hinges on unknowable alternate versions of Silicon Valley history.In 2012, when Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg cut a $1 billion check to buy the photo-sharing app Instagram, most people thought he had lost his marbles.“A billion dollars of money?” joked Jon Stewart, then the host of The Daily Show. “For a thing that kind of ruins your pictures?”Mr. Stewart called the decision “really lame.” His audience — and much of the rest of the world — agreed that Mr. Zuckerberg had overpaid for an app that highlighted a bunch of photo filters.Two years later, Mr. Zuckerberg opened his wallet again when Facebook agreed to buy WhatsApp for $19 billion. Many Americans had never heard of the messaging app, which was popular internationally but was not well known in the United States.No one knew how these deals would turn out. But hindsight, it seems, is 20/20.On Monday, the government argued in a landmark antitrust trial that both acquisitions — now considered among the greatest in Silicon Valley history — were the actions of a monopolist guarding his turf. Mr. Zuckerberg, in turn, was set to contend that were it not for these deals, his company — which has been renamed Meta — would just be an afterthought in the social media landscape.Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, is set to contend in the company’s antitrust trial that were it not for buying Instagram and WhatsApp, his firm might just be an afterthought in the social media landscape.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Trump Could Make Larry Ellison the Next Media Mogul

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      For decades, Larry Ellison reveled in being the Silicon Valley executive who really knew how to have a good time. He spent as much as $200 million building a Japanese-inspired imperial villa near Palo Alto, Calif., bought the sixth-largest Hawaiian island and dated and married and divorced with never-ending zeal.Few paid much attention to exactly what his database company, Oracle, did. Sometimes, neither did Mr. Ellison. He did not show up for his keynote talk at Oracle’s annual convention in San Francisco in 2013 because he was on his yacht trying to win the America’s Cup, which he did. A biography about him was titled, “The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison: God Doesn’t Think He’s Larry Ellison.”With a fortune of $175 billion, there is not much left for Mr. Ellison to buy that would seriously dent his wallet. He broke a Florida record in 2022 when he purchased a 22-acre estate near Palm Beach — but at $173 million, the price was one-tenth of 1 percent of his wealth. He invested $1 billion in Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter that same year because, he said at the time, “it would be lots of fun.”Now 80 years old and married for the fifth or possibly the sixth time, Mr. Ellison is expanding his ambitions beyond having fun and surrounding himself with beautiful things. Following a path laid down by his friend Mr. Musk, who has at least six companies that feed off one another, Mr. Ellison also appears to be planning to grow his corporate empire.Oracle keeps emerging as a possible bidder for TikTok, the wildly popular video app that Congress has decreed needs to divest itself of its ownership by the Chinese internet company ByteDance or be banned in the United States. On Wednesday, President Trump plans to meet with top White House officials to discuss a new ownership structure for the app. The deadline for a deal is Saturday, though TikTok deadlines have come and gone before.Oracle almost became a minority owner of TikTok’s U.S. operations in 2020, along with Walmart, when concerns about the app’s data security ran rampant. A deal was negotiated where Oracle started storing the data of U.S. users on its cloud. Oracle would also own 12.5 percent of a new company, TikTok Global. The latter part, like many TikTok deals, never happened.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Set to Meet With Top Aides to Decide TikTok’s Fate

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      President Trump plans to meet with top White House officials on Wednesday to discuss a proposal that could secure TikTok’s future in the United States, two people familiar with the plans said.Mr. Trump will consider a proposal for a new ownership structure for the popular video app, which is owned by the Chinese internet giant ByteDance. Lawmakers and other U.S. officials have argued that the app’s ties to China raise national security concerns, and a federal law that was passed last year requires TikTok to change its ownership or face a ban in the United States. The latest deadline for that ban is Saturday.The meeting is set to include Vice President JD Vance, whom Mr. Trump tapped to find an arrangement to save the popular app early in February, and other top officials, the two people said on the condition of anonymity. The new ownership structure, they said, could include Blackstone, the private equity giant, and Oracle, the technology company.The meeting is another twist in the long national saga of TikTok, which surged in popularity in the United States despite sustained and deep scrutiny in Washington and state capitals. Mr. Trump, who made repeated assurances that he wants to save the app, extended the deadline for a deal in January and suggested that he might do so again if a suitable plan was not reached by early this month.TikTok did not immediately return a request for comment.It is not clear that the kind of deal under discussion would comply with the law, which calls for no more than 20 percent of TikTok or its parent company to be owned by people or companies in so-called foreign adversary countries, a list that includes China.The law also bars a new entity from working with ByteDance to operate its video-recommendation technology or creating a data-sharing agreement.Mr. Trump suggested last week that he might relax upcoming tariffs on China in exchange for the country’s support of a deal.TikTok has maintained that it is not for sale, in part, it says, because the Chinese government would block a deal. More