Fighting game tournament EVO 2023 took place Aug. 4-6 at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas.

EVO, or Evolution Championship Series, started as Battle by the Bay in 1996 with Super Street Fighter II Turbo and Street Fighter Alpha 2.

The event became EVO in 2002 and has since grown, with more than 4,000 participants in the 2022 Las Vegas event. The contest is organized by EVO Community, a collective effort within the fighting game community.

This year’s tournament came with exciting game announcements for the fighting game community. As per IGN, some notable reveals included:

• Capcom ADR’s (OTC: CCOEY) Street Fighter 6 will have a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles crossover on Aug. 8, featuring TMNT gear, emotes, titles, stamps and costumes for the Street Fighter characters.
• A.K.I., a “maniacal poison aficionado,” was teased as the next DLC character for Street Fighter 6, with a confirmed release window in Autumn 2023.
• Warner Bros. Discovery Inc’s (NASDAQ: WBD) Mortal Kombat 1 added new fighters Reptile, Ashrah, Havik and Sareena to its roster, with a release date set for Sept. 19, 2023.
• Bandai Namco Holdings Inc’s (OTC: NCBDY) Tekken 8 confirmed the return of Raven and introduced a new character, Azucena, the Peruvian coffee queen.
• SNK Corporation announced Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves, the first new Fatal Fury game since 1999, but with limited details and no release date.
• Guilty Gear Strive’s third season was detailed, with Jellyfish Pirates captain Johnny joining as a DLC fighter on Aug. 24.
• Project L, Tencent Holdings ADR’s (OTC: TCEHY) Riot Games’ fighting game based on League of Legends, revealed Yasuo as its fourth character, showcasing his mastery of sword and wind manipulation.
• Paramount Global’s (NASDAQ: PARAA) Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2 revealed Plankton from SpongeBob SquarePants as a new character, equipped with a mech suit and ketchup-based attacks.

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A Tesla, Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) bull reiterated his view that the company should be valued more like a tech company than as an automaker and said the 2024 consensus estimates for the electric vehicle pioneer are notably low.

What Happened: Tesla could soon overtake revenues of legacy automakers Ford Motor Co. (NYSE:F) and General Motors Corp. (NYSE:GM), said Future Fund’s Gary Black.

Wall Street expects Tesla’s revenue to grow by 24% per year between 2023 and 2027, the fund manager noted. Ford and General Motors will likely to see 2% and 4% revenue growth per year for the same time frame, he said.

Tesla’s top line will steamroll past Ford by 2026 and GM by 2027, the analyst said.

Black also said Tesla, with its 24% expected revenue growth and 28% expected earnings growth, should be valued more like a tech company rather than an auto company.

“Future expected growth rates drive P/Es – not the category in which one competes,” he added.

Street Numbers Fall Short: Tesla is having a number of growth drivers in the near term, Black said. The company is prepping for the launch of the next-gen “Highland” Model 3 over the next few weeks, he said.

In anticipation of the launch, the company has pushed back all Model 3 delivery timelines in Europe to the fourth quarter, with Model 3 Performance deliveries extended to Jan. 2024, he added.

Black noted that the refreshed Model-3 is rumored to resemble a small Model S. “Between refreshed M-3, Cytruck launch, FSD Alpha V12 L4 autonomy, and new $7,500 instant EV rebate, starting 1/1/2024, TSLA 2024 Street volume growth remains way low,” he said.

The fund manager expects Tesla’s 2024 volume growth to be 53%, nearly double the Street’s growth estimate of 27%. He also said he expects 2024 earnings per share of $5.40, well above the consensus of $4.70.

Tesla ended Friday’s session down 2.11% at $253.86, according to Zenger News Pro data. Since the company’s second-quarter earnings report on July 19, the stock has shed about 13%.

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Meta Platforms Inc.’s (NASDAQ:META) Threads app continues to receive new features. The latest addition is a new way to check out the posts you have liked.

What Happened: Instagram-powered Threads app’s latest update has added a new feature to the X (formerly Twitter) rival – a one-stop place to view and manage all the posts you have liked.

The feature was available on and off for beta testers over the last week, but Meta has started rolling out more widely now. Here’s how you can view and manage all your likes on Threads:

Tap on the Profile tab at the bottom.Now, tap on the hamburger menu button on the top right to open the Settings menu.Tap on Your Likes.

If this sounds familiar, that is because Instagram already has a similar feature. However, unlike Threads which has it clearly visible, the ‘Your Likes’ option is buried deep in Instagram settings.

In contrast, Twitter has a separate ‘Likes’ tab on the profile page. Moreover, it is accessible to everyone on Twitter instead of just the profile owner, unlike Threads.

Zuckerberg Says More Features Coming Soon: Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg also announced that some of the most-requested features like a desktop version and search are coming in a few weeks’ time.

Making the announcement on Threads, Zuckerberg said, “Lots of work ahead but excited about the team’s pace of shipping. Search and web coming in the next few weeks.”

He also sounded optimistic about Threads’ overall activity after the initial burst in growth in the first week of launch.

“A good week for Threads. The community here is on the trajectory I expect to build a vibrant long-term app,” he added.

Some of the other features users have been requesting include hashtags and direct messages.

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Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) CEO Elon Musk on Sunday reiterated his disagreement with hydrogen as a possible source of renewable energy and termed it “idiotic.”

What Happened: “Bizarrely, government funding is still being directed to hydrogen trucks,” Musk said. “It is idiotic.”

The CEO was responding to an X.com user who posted a picture and a video of a Tesla semi-truck passing through roads. “Bill Gates where art thou?” the user wrote, taking a dig at Bill Gates who has previously doubted the viability of electric trucks.

“Electricity works when you need to cover short distances, but we need a different solution for heavy, long-haul vehicles,” Bill Gates said in 2020.

Why It Matters: This renewed criticism from Musk comes amid discussions surrounding the Hydrogen for Trucks Act, introduced in the U.S. on March 11, 2022. The Act aims to establish a grant program showcasing the efficiency and reliability of heavy-duty fuel cell vehicles powered by hydrogen, particularly targeting trucks weighing over 26,000 pounds.

Musk has long expressed skepticism over hydrogen as an efficient fuel source. In May 2022, Musk said the world will overwhelmingly choose batteries over hydrogen for storing energy and termed the latter “the most dumb thing I could possibly imagine for energy storage.”

Only last month, Musk said that California’s push for hydrogen ‘makes no sense’ after the California Transport Commission awarded a $41.9 million grant to Nikola Corp (NASDAQ:NKLA) to build heavy-duty hydrogen refueling stations. Nikola is aiming to introduce its hydrogen fuel cell electric truck this quarter.

Meanwhile, Tesla’s all-electric heavy-duty semi-truck was first unveiled in 2017. It was pegged for a 2019 launch, but the first deliveries were eventually made to PepsiCo in December last year. PepsiCo received a total of 36 Tesla Semis, deployed in parts in Modesto and Sacramento.

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Elon Musk’s Twitter, now rebranded as “X,” says that it won’t be able to pay people who have signed up for ads revenue sharing.

In a tweet on Saturday, the X support team said that, because the company’s ads revenue sharing program is so popular, it needs “more time to review everything for the next payout” and aims to get all eligible accounts paid as quickly as possible.

The number of people signing up for ads revenue sharing has exceeded our expectations. We need a bit more time to review everything for the next payout and aim to get all eligible accounts paid as soon as possible.

Thank you for your patience!https://t.co/5n4lo5H2yf

— Support (@Support) August 5, 2023

Musk also tweeted that interest in ad revenue share has far exceeded expectations, hence X will need “a few more days” to process.

Interest in ad rev share by content creators has far exceeded our expectations, so will take a few more days to process.

Major payouts coming soon!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 5, 2023

Musk further said that users interested in ad revenue sharing on the platform must have an X premium membership. If the requirement isn’t met, X will retain the users’ portion of the ad revenue.

To be eligible for your ad revenue share, you must be an X Premium (Blue) subscriber.

The ad money will otherwise be kept by X if you are not an X Premium (Blue) subscriber.

This program is open to everyone.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 5, 2023

“We previously said that payments would occur the week of July 31. We need more time to review everything for the next payout and hope to get all eligible accounts paid as soon as possible,” X Corp. said on its website.

On Thursday, Musk announced the platform’s latest feature, saying that verified users can now download videos but only if the user who posted the content allows it.

X Corp has reportedly implemented significant ad price reductions to revive its commitment to advertising. It decided to slash ad prices to woo brands back to the platform.

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Apple Inc’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) market value has dipped below the once-historic milestone of $3 trillion, triggered by concerns over the company’s fourth-quarter outlook.

The apprehension arises from worries about sluggish demand for smartphones and other electronic devices. Apple’s third-quarter results on Thursday failed to impress Wall Street, and the stock promptly reacted with a move to the downside.

On Friday, the company’s shares experienced a decline in pre-market trading due to weaker fiscal year third-quarter hardware product sales, except for Macs, and disappointing guidance for the September quarter.

Shares of the company experienced a significant drop of 4.8%, leading to a market capitalization of approximately $2.85 trillion. This decline, the largest for Apple since September, translated to a staggering loss of over $160 billion in market value, reports Bloomberg.  

Apple’s fiscal third quarter tends to be the slowest, as it precedes the back-to-school season, and customers often delay purchasing key hardware products in anticipation of newer iterations being released.

The third-quarter gross margin remained relatively stable at 44.52%, almost unchanged from the previous quarter’s 44.26%. Compared to the same period a year ago, the metric has grown 43.26%.

Just a couple months ago, in June, Apple made history by becoming the first company to achieve a market value of $3 trillion.

However, the recent market downturn has brought its valuation below that historic milestone.

Bloomberg reported that Rosenblatt Securities downgraded the stock to neutral, saying the mixed report “highlights the slowdown phase in which Apple now sits.”

“Even though the company’s Services business is accelerating, a slowdown in the U.S. seems likely to last until a material new product category takes hold,” it said.

So far in 2023, Apple Inc. has surged 49% iin a rally by severl of Wall Street’s most valuable companies, fueled by bets that the Fed is nearing the end of its campaign of interest rate hikes, and by optimism about the potential for artificial intelligence.

Apple’s most recent quarterly report in May showed revenue and profits fell but still beat analysts’ expectations. Along with a steady track record of stock buybacks, the financial results reinforced its reputation as a safe investment at a time of global economic uncertainty.

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