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Jim Cramer makes the case for why Apple and investors should stick with CEO Tim Cook

Jim Cramer makes the case for why Apple and investors should stick with CEO Tim Cook

CNBC20 hours ago
Jim Cramer says he's still backing Apple 's Tim Cook despite calls for the CEO to resign. "I really believe in Tim," Jim said at Friday's annual meeting of the CNBC Investing Club from the New York Stock Exchange. "He's made us a lot of money. He gets the benefit of the doubt." Responding to a question from a member who asked whether the Club would consider trimming the stock if Apple cannot turn things around, Jim also addressed the Street's list of concerns about the tech giant, including last Tuesday's announcement that COO Jeff Williams, 62, will retire later this year. Williams was the No. 2 executive at Apple. A day later, LightShed Partners analyst Walter Piecyk called for Apple to replace Cook. Piecyk did credit the 64-year-old CEO for an amazing job navigating the iPhone era, but said Apple now needs a product-focused CEO. Piecyk told CNBC's "Fast Money" last Wednesday evening that the idea of Apple needing new leadership is not new among institutional investors. "It cannot miss out on AI," LightShed wrote in its note to clients. Jim recently advocated for Apple to buy AI start-up Perplexity as a solution to getting back in the game. "They screwed up the AI. Jeff Williams is retiring. Luca Maestri, the great CFO, is gone. The new CFO [Sabih Khan] is young. They're right now lacking innovation. A lot of people feel that Vision Pro [headset] is a bust," Jim said. "There isn't anything that they are doing right, right now, according to people," he acknowledged. But in a show of faith, Jim kept Apple stock as one of the Club portfolio's 12 core holdings , alongside artificial intelligence winners Amazon , Meta Platforms , and newly crowned $4 trillion market cap stock Nvidia . Apple's shares have been feeling the weight of shaky investor confidence, with the stock down nearly 16.5% year to date. Unlike other tech companies following the tariff-driven April lows, Apple has been slower to recover. Currently trading around $209, the stock would have to see an upside move of roughly 19% to get back to its record-high close of $259 on Dec. 26, 2024. AAPL YTD mountain Apple YTD It's undeniable that Apple is up to its eyeballs in problems, with AI being one of those at the forefront of investors' minds. Earlier this year, the company delayed its rollout of an AI-powered conversational Siri, helping fuel naysayers who are upset with its failure to catch up in the AI revolution. To add more flames to the fire, Apple lost a top AI executive , Ruoming Pang, to Meta last week. Furthermore, the company has been a direct target of the Trump administration, which has publicly criticized Cook for a lack of urgency in moving iPhone production back to the U.S. Despite having shifted some production to India, most of Apple's phones are still made in China. But either way, President Donald Trump wants iPhones made in America, which could more than double the price tag of the device. "It is painful to hear people going for [Cook's] head or that it's time for him to change," Jim said, as he questioned whether investors have forgotten the "thousands and thousands of percentages" in profits that the company and Cook have made them. "As long as this [iPhone] is remarkable. As long as this [iPhone] is indispensable, we're going to own the stock," Jim said. (Jim Cramer's Charitable Trust is long AAPL. See here for a full list of the stocks.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust's portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED.
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Amylyx Pharmaceuticals Shares Promising Avexitide Data for Post-Bariatric Hypoglycemia at ENDO 2025, Phase 3 Enrollment Nears Completion
Amylyx Pharmaceuticals Shares Promising Avexitide Data for Post-Bariatric Hypoglycemia at ENDO 2025, Phase 3 Enrollment Nears Completion

Yahoo

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  • Yahoo

Amylyx Pharmaceuticals Shares Promising Avexitide Data for Post-Bariatric Hypoglycemia at ENDO 2025, Phase 3 Enrollment Nears Completion

Amylyx Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDAQ:AMLX) is one of the best low priced pharma stocks to buy now. On July 13, Amylyx Pharmaceuticals announced new exploratory analyses from its Phase 2 PREVENT and Phase 2b clinical trials of avexitide for post-bariatric hypoglycemia/PBH at the Endocrine Society's annual meeting (ENDO 2025). Avexitide is an investigational, first-in-class glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor antagonist and has received FDA Breakthrough Therapy designation for PBH. PBH is a complication that can arise after bariatric surgery, such as Roux-en-Y gastric bypass. A medical scientist in a lab coat gazing at a microscopic view of a drug in development. There are currently no FDA-approved treatments for PBH. Avexitide works by binding to the GLP-1 receptor on pancreatic islet beta cells, blocking the effect of excessive GLP-1 and thus mitigating hypoglycemia by decreasing insulin secretion and stabilizing glucose levels. Avexitide has generally been well-tolerated with a favorable safety profile across all trials. Amylyx expects to complete recruitment for the LUCIDITY trial this year, with topline data anticipated in H1 2026. Amylyx Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDAQ:AMLX) is a clinical-stage pharmaceutical company that discovers and develops treatment options for neurodegenerative diseases and endocrine conditions in the US. While we acknowledge the potential of AMLX as an investment, we believe certain AI stocks offer greater upside potential and carry less downside risk. If you're looking for an extremely undervalued AI stock that also stands to benefit significantly from Trump-era tariffs and the onshoring trend, see our free report on the . READ NEXT: and . Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data

Apple just spent $500 million to source a material that's critical for iPhones from the US
Apple just spent $500 million to source a material that's critical for iPhones from the US

CNN

time9 minutes ago

  • CNN

Apple just spent $500 million to source a material that's critical for iPhones from the US

Apple is investing $500 million in a deal with US rare earths company MP Materials as the iPhone maker faces pressure from President Donald Trump to produce its popular smartphones domestically. As part of the partnership announced on Tuesday, Apple committed to buying rare earth magnets directly from MP Materials to help bolster its US supply chain. Apple will also collaborate with the company on a new recycling line in California, which will repurpose recycled rare earth materials to use in Apple products. The move is part of a $500 billion investment Apple announced earlier this year to expand its US operations as the Trump administration pushes to onshore technology manufacturing and reduce reliance on China. Rare earths, which are critical for everything from smartphones to TVs and military jets, have been a key bargaining chip in trade talks between Washington and Beijing. That's because China controls nearly all rare earths processing. 'American innovation drives everything we do at Apple, and we're proud to deepen our investment in the US economy,' Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a press release. 'Rare earth materials are essential for making advanced technology, and this partnership will help strengthen the supply of these vital materials here in the United States.' MP Materials' facility in Fort Worth, Texas, will create new magnet manufacturing lines specifically for Apple products. Shipments are expected to begin in 2027 and will eventually support 'hundreds of millions of Apple devices,' according to MP Materials. The materials will be delivered throughout the United States and around the world. Apple says the expansion will create dozens of new jobs. Both companies will also provide training to develop a US workforce for magnet manufacturing. China has a virtual monopoly on rare earth elements, which are critical components for everyday products from smartphones to wind turbines to LED lights and flat-screen TVs. They're also crucial for batteries in electric vehicles as well as MRI scanners and cancer treatments. The name rare earths is also a bit of a misnomer. The materials are found throughout the Earth's crust but are difficult and costly to extract and process. China has the only equipment needed to process some of the various elements and currently controls 92% of the global output in the processing stage. While the MP Materials deal could help Apple curry favor with Trump amid tariff threats, it also aligns with Apple's efforts to incorporate more recycled materials into its products – a plan already in place long before Trump took office. The iPhone 16e, which launched earlier this year, includes 30 percent recycled content, for example. Apple says it uses recycled rare earths in its major products, including in magnets found in the latest iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, MacBook and Mac models. 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AI Hiring Favors Women Over Equally Qualified Men, Study Finds
AI Hiring Favors Women Over Equally Qualified Men, Study Finds

Newsweek

time13 minutes ago

  • Newsweek

AI Hiring Favors Women Over Equally Qualified Men, Study Finds

Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. As artificial intelligence takes on a bigger role in corporate hiring — with many companies touting its impartiality — one researcher's findings suggest the technology may be more biased than humans, and is alread favoring women over equally qualified men. David Rozado, an associate professor at the New Zealand Institute of Skills and Technology and a well-known AI researcher, tested 22 large language models (LLMs)—including popular, consumer-facing apps like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok—using pairs of identical résumés that differed only by gendered names. His findings revealed that every single LLM was more likely to select the female-named candidate over the equally qualified male candidate. "This pattern may reflect complex interactions between model pre-training corpora, annotation processes during preference tuning, or even system-level guardrails for production deployments," Rozado told Newsweek. "But the exact source of the behavior is currently unclear." A Problem With Men? Rozado's findings reveal not just that AI models tend to favor women for jobs over men, but also how nuanced and pervasive those biases can be. Across more than 30,000 simulated hiring decisions, female-named candidates were chosen 56.9 percent of the time — a statistically significant deviation from gender neutrality, which would have resulted in a 50–50 split. When an explicit gender field was added to a CV — a practice common in countries like Germany and Japan — the preference for women became even stronger. Rozado warned that although the disparities were relatively modest, they could accumulate over time and unfairly disadvantage male candidates. "These tendencies persisted regardless of model size or the amount of compute leveraged," Rozado noted. "This strongly suggests that model bias in the context of hiring decisions is not determined by the size of the model or the amount of 'reasoning' employed. The problem is systemic." The models also exhibited other quirks. Many showed a slight preference for candidates who included preferred pronouns. Adding terms such as "she/her" or "he/him" to a CV slightly increased a candidate's chances of being selected. "My experimental design ensured that candidate qualifications were distributed equally across genders, so ideally, there would be no systematic difference in selection rates. However, the results indicate that LLMs may sometimes make hiring decisions based on factors unrelated to candidate qualifications, such as gender or the position of the candidates in the prompt," he said. Rozado, who is also a regular collaborator with the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, emphasized that the biggest takeaway is that LLMs, like human decision-makers, can sometimes rely on irrelevant features when the task is overdetermined and/or underdetermined. "Over many decisions, even small disparities can accumulate and impact the overall fairness of a process," he said. However, Rozado also acknowledged a key limitation of his study: it used synthetic CVs and job descriptions rather than real-world applications, which may not fully capture the complexity and nuance of authentic résumés. Additionally, because all CVs were closely matched in qualifications to isolate gender effects, the findings may not reflect how AI behaves when candidates' skills vary more widely. "It is important to interpret these results carefully. The intention is not to overstate the magnitude of harm, but rather to highlight the need for careful evaluation and mitigation of any bias in automated decision tools," Rozado added. AI Is Already Reshaping the Hiring Process Even as researchers debate the biases in AI systems, many employers have already embraced the technology to streamline hiring. A New York Times report this month described how AI-powered interviewer bots now speak directly with candidates, asking questions and even simulating human pauses and filler words. Jennifer Dunn, a marketing professional in San Antonio, said her AI interview with a chatbot named Alex "felt hollow" and she ended it early. "It isn't something that feels real to me," she told the Times. Another applicant, Emily Robertson-Yeingst, wondered if her AI interview was just being used to train the underlying LLM: "It starts to make you wonder, was I just some sort of experiment?" Job seekers attends the South Florida Job Fair held at the Amerant Bank Arena on June 26, 2024 in Sunrise, Florida. More than 50 companies set up booths to recruit people from entry-level to... Job seekers attends the South Florida Job Fair held at the Amerant Bank Arena on June 26, 2024 in Sunrise, Florida. More than 50 companies set up booths to recruit people from entry-level to management. Open jobs include police officers, food service, security, sales reps, technicians, customer service, IT, teacher assistants, insurance agents, and account executives. More Photo byStill, some organizations defend the use of AI recruiters as both efficient and scalable, especially in a world where the ease of online job-searching means open positions often field hundreds if not thousands of applicants. Propel Impact told the Times their AI interviews enabled them to screen 500 applicants this year — more than triple what they managed previously. Rozado, however, warned that the very features companies find appealing — speed and efficiency — can mask underlying vulnerabilities. "Over many decisions, even small disparities can accumulate and impact the overall fairness of a process," he said. "Similarly, the finding that being listed first in the prompt increases the likelihood of selection underscores the importance of not trusting AI blindly." More Research Needed Not all research points to the same gender dynamic Rozado identified. A Brookings Institution study this year found that, in some tests, men were actually favored over women in 51.9 percent of cases, while racial bias strongly favored white-associated names over Black-associated names. Brookings' analysis stressed that intersectional identities, such as being both Black and male, often led to the greatest disadvantages. Rozado and the Brookings team agree, however, that AI hiring systems are not ready to operate autonomously in high-stakes situations. Both recommend robust audits, transparency, and clear regulatory standards to minimize unintended discrimination. "Given current evidence of bias and unpredictability, I believe LLMs should not be used in high-stakes contexts like hiring, unless their outputs have been rigorously evaluated for fairness and reliability," Rozado said. "It is essential that organizations validate and audit AI tools carefully, particularly for applications with significant real-world impact."

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