New York
Fed probe suggests Tesla’s self-driving feature wasn’t to blame in crash
NEW YORK (AP) — Federal safety investigators looking into a runaway Tesla that killed a grandmother in her home say the driver had pressed the accelerator to full speed, suggesting the vehicle’s self-driving software was not to blame.
The driver had told police that he had the self-driving software turned on, but a report from the National Transportation Safety Board on Wednesday concluded that he had actually overridden that feature when he pushed hard on the pedal. Moments later the Tesla Model 3 raced down a residential street in Katy, Texas, at highway speeds, slammed into a brick home and killed a 76-year-old woman standing in the front room.
The crash last month drew national attention because Tesla CEO Elon Musk is seeking to reassure the public its self-driving feature is safe as he prepares to turn hundreds of thousands of Teslas already on the road into fully automatic vehicles and begin selling two-seated Cybercabs missing steering wheels and pedals.
The crash came two months after officials at a separate federal agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, announced it was elevating a 2024 investigation of the self-driving feature to new “engineering analysis” level, raising the possibility of a recall of 3.2 million Tesla vehicles.
That NHTSA probe was triggered by crashes where the self-driving feature failed to alert drivers to take control in fog and other poor visibility conditions.
The agency opened an investigation last year into 58 incidents in which Teslas reportedly violated traffic safety laws while using self-driving technology, leading to more than a dozen crashes and fires and nearly two dozen injuries.
Separate from the National Transportation Safety Board, NHTSA is also looking into the Tesla house crash in Texas, one of 46 “special crash” investigations of Tesla’s self-driving or driver-assistance technology in the past decade, according to the agency’s records. In more than a dozen of those crashes, at least one person — a driver, passenger or pedestrian — was killed.
Tesla had originally called its driver assistance software Full Self-Driving, or FSD, but auto experts and regulators complained it was misleading because drivers must always keep their eyes on the road and be ready to take over at any time. The company has since changed the name to Full Self-Driving (Supervised).
Video of the Katy, Texas, accident shows the Tesla traveling at more than 70 mph (112.65 kilometers per hour), jumping a curb then tearing across a lawn before crushing through a brick wall of a home. A woman standing feet away, Martha Avila, was found amid piles of crumbling plaster, split beams and bits of furniture and rushed to a hospital but died.
Sales of Tesla cars still haven’t recovered fully from boycotts last year over Musk’s far-right political stands, but the stock is rising anyway as he has successfully shifted attention away from the sales figures. He says they matter less now that the company is on the cusp of major technological advances, such as turning Teslas into hands-free vehicles and having its Optimus robots take over for humans for tasks at home and work.
Tesla stock has risen 22% in the past year and is currently trading at 170 times expected annual earnings compared to 20 for the S&P 500.
For its second-quarter financial results out next week, financial analysts surveyed by FactSet expect earnings per share will barely budge — 32 cents versus 33 cents a year earlier — continuing a sixth quarter streak of flat or falling profits.
Georgia
Trump’s teleprompter operator on unpaid leave for alleged prediction market bets
ATLANTA (AP) — President Donald Trump’s teleprompter operator is on unpaid leave after reports that he used his inside knowledge to make bets about the president’s speeches on the online prediction market Kalshi, the White House said Thursday.
The firm’s enforcement chief said Kalshi contacted federal regulators about bets allegedly made about what the president would say in public addresses.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the president is aware of the situation, which she described as “unfortunate” and “a disgrace.”
“The White House has extremely strict ethical guidelines with respect to issues like this,” Leavitt told reporters, saying the aide is on unpaid leave.
ABC News reported Thursday that Gabriel Perez, who has been operating Trump’s teleprompter since 2016, used his inside knowledge to win more than $100,000 betting on what the president would say in big speeches, including the State of the Union address earlier this year.
Robert Denault, Kalshi’s lawyer and head of enforcement, said on X that the “Kalshi surveillance team promptly flagged, investigated and referred these trades” to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission that has regulatory authority over such matters.
His statement did not name Perez.
“We have been assisting regulators on this matter and provided all evidence that we collected, as we do with any referral,” Denault added.
ABC based its report on multiple sources who have knowledge of the matter but spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the details.
The ABC report described suspicious activity on Kalshi’s “Mentions” market, in which users can place bets on what phrases and specific words might be used in public speeches. Kalshi recently began requiring users to disclose their place of employment, and the platform’s policy prohibits betting based on information that users gain because of their job.
Attention on members of the administration profiting from the presidency has reached all the way to Trump himself.
In his most recent disclosures, Trump reported making $1.2 billion from his crypto businesses in 2025, raking in profits while his investors suffered losses in marketplaces that Trump has sought to shield from tighter federal regulation.
Trump got more than $500 million from his World Liberty Financial business selling new crypto products, including “governance tokens,” according to the required annual disclosure report with the Office of Government Ethics. It also showed another crypto business, CIC Digital LLC, took in more than $600 million from sales of souvenir-type “meme” coins stamped with his face. Both the tokens and the coins have plunged in value since the sales.
The president has also profited from merchandising deals and high-dollar political and official events at his properties, significantly increasing his net worth since returning to power.
Trump’s aides have stood by his personal and family business practices.
“The president is abiding by all conflict-of-interest laws that are applicable to the president,” Leavitt said earlier this year. It’s “absurd for anyone to insinuate that this president is profiting off of the presidency.”
Fed probe suggests Tesla’s self-driving feature wasn’t to blame in crash
NEW YORK (AP) — Federal safety investigators looking into a runaway Tesla that killed a grandmother in her home say the driver had pressed the accelerator to full speed, suggesting the vehicle’s self-driving software was not to blame.
The driver had told police that he had the self-driving software turned on, but a report from the National Transportation Safety Board on Wednesday concluded that he had actually overridden that feature when he pushed hard on the pedal. Moments later the Tesla Model 3 raced down a residential street in Katy, Texas, at highway speeds, slammed into a brick home and killed a 76-year-old woman standing in the front room.
The crash last month drew national attention because Tesla CEO Elon Musk is seeking to reassure the public its self-driving feature is safe as he prepares to turn hundreds of thousands of Teslas already on the road into fully automatic vehicles and begin selling two-seated Cybercabs missing steering wheels and pedals.
The crash came two months after officials at a separate federal agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, announced it was elevating a 2024 investigation of the self-driving feature to new “engineering analysis” level, raising the possibility of a recall of 3.2 million Tesla vehicles.
That NHTSA probe was triggered by crashes where the self-driving feature failed to alert drivers to take control in fog and other poor visibility conditions.
The agency opened an investigation last year into 58 incidents in which Teslas reportedly violated traffic safety laws while using self-driving technology, leading to more than a dozen crashes and fires and nearly two dozen injuries.
Separate from the National Transportation Safety Board, NHTSA is also looking into the Tesla house crash in Texas, one of 46 “special crash” investigations of Tesla’s self-driving or driver-assistance technology in the past decade, according to the agency’s records. In more than a dozen of those crashes, at least one person — a driver, passenger or pedestrian — was killed.
Tesla had originally called its driver assistance software Full Self-Driving, or FSD, but auto experts and regulators complained it was misleading because drivers must always keep their eyes on the road and be ready to take over at any time. The company has since changed the name to Full Self-Driving (Supervised).
Video of the Katy, Texas, accident shows the Tesla traveling at more than 70 mph (112.65 kilometers per hour), jumping a curb then tearing across a lawn before crushing through a brick wall of a home. A woman standing feet away, Martha Avila, was found amid piles of crumbling plaster, split beams and bits of furniture and rushed to a hospital but died.
Sales of Tesla cars still haven’t recovered fully from boycotts last year over Musk’s far-right political stands, but the stock is rising anyway as he has successfully shifted attention away from the sales figures. He says they matter less now that the company is on the cusp of major technological advances, such as turning Teslas into hands-free vehicles and having its Optimus robots take over for humans for tasks at home and work.
Tesla stock has risen 22% in the past year and is currently trading at 170 times expected annual earnings compared to 20 for the S&P 500.
For its second-quarter financial results out next week, financial analysts surveyed by FactSet expect earnings per share will barely budge — 32 cents versus 33 cents a year earlier — continuing a sixth quarter streak of flat or falling profits.
Georgia
Trump’s teleprompter operator on unpaid leave for alleged prediction market bets
ATLANTA (AP) — President Donald Trump’s teleprompter operator is on unpaid leave after reports that he used his inside knowledge to make bets about the president’s speeches on the online prediction market Kalshi, the White House said Thursday.
The firm’s enforcement chief said Kalshi contacted federal regulators about bets allegedly made about what the president would say in public addresses.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the president is aware of the situation, which she described as “unfortunate” and “a disgrace.”
“The White House has extremely strict ethical guidelines with respect to issues like this,” Leavitt told reporters, saying the aide is on unpaid leave.
ABC News reported Thursday that Gabriel Perez, who has been operating Trump’s teleprompter since 2016, used his inside knowledge to win more than $100,000 betting on what the president would say in big speeches, including the State of the Union address earlier this year.
Robert Denault, Kalshi’s lawyer and head of enforcement, said on X that the “Kalshi surveillance team promptly flagged, investigated and referred these trades” to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission that has regulatory authority over such matters.
His statement did not name Perez.
“We have been assisting regulators on this matter and provided all evidence that we collected, as we do with any referral,” Denault added.
ABC based its report on multiple sources who have knowledge of the matter but spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the details.
The ABC report described suspicious activity on Kalshi’s “Mentions” market, in which users can place bets on what phrases and specific words might be used in public speeches. Kalshi recently began requiring users to disclose their place of employment, and the platform’s policy prohibits betting based on information that users gain because of their job.
Attention on members of the administration profiting from the presidency has reached all the way to Trump himself.
In his most recent disclosures, Trump reported making $1.2 billion from his crypto businesses in 2025, raking in profits while his investors suffered losses in marketplaces that Trump has sought to shield from tighter federal regulation.
Trump got more than $500 million from his World Liberty Financial business selling new crypto products, including “governance tokens,” according to the required annual disclosure report with the Office of Government Ethics. It also showed another crypto business, CIC Digital LLC, took in more than $600 million from sales of souvenir-type “meme” coins stamped with his face. Both the tokens and the coins have plunged in value since the sales.
The president has also profited from merchandising deals and high-dollar political and official events at his properties, significantly increasing his net worth since returning to power.
Trump’s aides have stood by his personal and family business practices.
“The president is abiding by all conflict-of-interest laws that are applicable to the president,” Leavitt said earlier this year. It’s “absurd for anyone to insinuate that this president is profiting off of the presidency.”
