Trump’s Waco Rally, Bitcoin’s Bullish Phase, Musk’s Bounty for Twitter Employees and More: 5 Weekend Stories You May Have Missed – Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL)

The banking crisis continued to dominate the conversation over the weekend, especially as the German bank DB scared on Friday. Here is a summary of some of the big headlines that hit the thread over the weekend.

1. Great turnout at Trump’s first major campaign rally: Former president Donald Trump’s The decision to hold the first major rally of the 2024 presidential campaign in Waco, Texas, was questioned since it coincided with the 30th anniversary of a federal siege of the facility belonging to a religious cult group in the city. The former president received a rousing reception at the rally held late Saturday, using the platform to rally people around him at a time when he faces potential indictment and arrest.

Predictably, he took potshots at federal prosecutors and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who will likely throw their hat into the GOP presidential race.

2. Cathie Wood beats Hindenburg over block short report: After Hindenburg took down shares of Block, Inc. SQ with a short report, fund manager Cathie Wood and analyst in her firm Ark Invest rose to the defense of the company. The short seller said she assumes investors and analysts with fintech expertise won’t read it, while expecting traders and speculators to support their short position without reading or understanding the report, she said, calling the report “wildly misleading.”

3.Tesla’s Giga Berlin hits the mark: Tesla, Inc. TSLA announced over the weekend that the Giga Berlin facility has increased its weekly production capacity from 4,000 units at the end of February to 5,000 units. The performance garnered praise from Elon Musk, which said: “Big congratulations to the Tesla Germany team.” The development assumes significance because Tesla is said to have submitted an application to the German government to expand the facility in an attempt to increase annual production capacity to 1 million units.

4. Analyst Bullish on Bitcoin: Pseudonymous analyst “Dave The Wave” said Bitcoin BTC/USD enters a new bullish phase, pointing to the weekly moving average convergence divergence, a technical indicator. He also suggested that Bitcoin’s price performance should be mapped against gold instead of the US dollar. Over 20 years, Bitcoin could reach the same market value as gold, which would involve a price increase of a factor of 22, he said.

5. Musk’s offer to Twitter employees: A Wall Street Journal report said Musk has offered new stock awards to employees of the social media platform that will vest after six months. The share grants have a value of around USD 20 billion. Musk said in an email that Twitter could potentially achieve a value of more than $250 billion, which would mean the stock grants could increase in value by a factor of more than 10.

What else: In what could be a decisive pointer towards the launch of Apple, Inc.’s AAPL much-delayed MRI headset by June, the company’s highest-ranking executives, also known as the “Top 100,” arrived at the Steve Jobs Theater over the weekend, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman said in its weekly “Power On” newsletter.

Technical redundancies continue as Amazon, Inc. AMZN reportedly began eliminations of 9,000 employees that it announced last week. The bulk of the job cuts were in some of the company’s profitable businesses, including its cloud computing business. Salesforce, Inc. CRM also hinted at the possibility of more cuts and noted that a review is underway.

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