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|  |  | Thursday, December 18, 2025 | |  | | Brandon Bell/Getty Images | Good morning, Quartz readers! It’s Shannon Carroll with the Daily Brief. Today, regulators are questioning Tesla’s Autopilot labels, shoppers are questioning General Mills’ price tags, experts are questioning Trump’s Gold Card rollout, and a UK couple is questioning the lottery’s so-called odds. | | HERE'S WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW | Amazon eyes a $10 billion stake in
OpenAI. Talks are fluid, but they could value OpenAI at $500 billion and include access to Amazon’s AI chips, deepening the compute-and-capital arms race across Big Tech. | Waller signals more cuts — and urges patience. The Fed governor, a betting favorite to replace Jerome Powell, said that he expects further cuts next year but that inflation remains high enough to move slowly. | Trump’s Gold Card gets a reality check. A longtime adviser on residency programs says that the plan’s details keep changing and that major
visa overhauls usually require Congress — so: “don’t be a guinea pig.” | Magnum blasted for “destroying” Ben & Jerry’s. Brand co-founder Ben Cohen called recent board changes
“Orwellian” and a “power grab,” while Magnum claimed the moves are to “enhance” the company’s social mission. | | | SPONSORED |  | If you
missed Nvidia, Tesla, and Shopify… you might want to see this | Some investors still don’t realize how early
The Motley Fool spotted some of today’s biggest winners. Their Nvidia recommendation from 2005 is up 75,710% to-date, and their Tesla recommendation from 2012 is up 18,231% to-date.
These weren’t lucky guesses. They’re part of the same research process powering Stock Advisor, the service over half a million paying members rely on for smarter, long-term investing guidance.
Right now, you can get 50% off a full year of Stock Advisor and see exactly which stocks their analysts are recommending today. If you’ve ever wondered how top-performing investors do their research, this could be one of the simplest ways to start.
You don’t need to predict the next Nvidia. You just need a proven strategy that helps you spot great companies before everyone else does. | | |
| | SAE ANYTHING | Tesla’s brand is getting pulled over for speeding ahead of reality. California’s DMV says the company crossed the line from
futuristic branding to old-fashioned false advertising by slapping “Autopilot” and “Full Self-Driving Capability” on driver-assistance software that still needs an actual human ready to grab the wheel. So the agency told Tesla to pick a lane. The company has 60 days to either strip the Autopilot label from anything that isn’t truly self-driving — SAE Level 3 or higher — or face a 30-day suspension of its California dealer license.
The case hinges on one promise that aged like milk:
Tesla’s pitch that its system could handle “short and long-distance trips with no action required by the person in the driver’s seat.” Regulators note those cars couldn’t then — and still can’t now — operate as autonomous vehicles, even as the branding implies they can. The DMV first accused Tesla of false advertising in 2022, while federal investigators probed Autopilot’s role in crashes and class-action lawyers argued that years of self-driving swagger pumped up resale values and the stock. Tesla keeps saying it has “clearly and consistently”
warned customers that Autopilot and FSD need supervision and that drivers are responsible. California’s read: The disclaimers are buried in the fine print while the promise is still on the dashboard.
All of this lands just as Elon Musk is trying to sell Tesla as an AI company that happens to ship cars and (dreams about) robotaxis. The company is testing a robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, with safety monitors, moves factory cars around with “unsupervised” software, and tells
investors that future fleets of driverless Teslas will justify a tech-style valuation. The stock has been hovering near record highs on that robotaxi and AI buzz, even as EV demand softens and tax credits fade. Now Tesla has a countdown clock in its biggest market to either rename the technology that still expects someone to grab the wheel or prove that Autopilot really is what the badge has been promising all along. Quartz’s Shannon Carroll has more on Autopilot’s most important upgrade yet: semantics. | | | RECOMMENDED READING | The
future of tech, decoded.
Semafor Technology unpacks the ideas, innovations, and power shifts redefining the global tech landscape. From AI and machine learning to the startups and policies shaping
the industry, each briefing delivers clarity and depth on the tech transforming our world
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| | | CEREAL KILLER | General Mills just filed a quiet little dispatch from the grocery aisle, and it reads a lot like a receipt that nobody wants to add up. Organic net sales fell 1% this quarter, adjusted operating profit sank 20%, and
margins tightened in the company’s core North America business, a trio that usually translates to one thing: Shoppers are hunting for discounts — looking at the shelf and choosing the cheaper store-brand label, not the Cheerios or Lucky Charms. And that’s a lot of damage for a company that sells routine and comfort by the box.
The company can talk all it wants about “innovation” (yes, “pancake puffs” exist, because yes, someone signed off on that), but the plot is familiar. Volumes
are down, promotions are up, and consumers on the wrong side of the K-shaped divide are trading down into store brands or simply buying less. The stock’s modest 2% pre-market bump on Wednesday looked less like a vote of confidence and more like a small sigh of relief that conditions aren’t deteriorating any faster.
And the squeeze is tightest in North America, where operating profit fell more than 20% year over year — lining up with what grocery giant Kroger has been saying on
earnings calls about lower- and middle-income shoppers pulling back and leaning harder on promotions and private labels. Kroger interim CEO Ronald Sargent said he’s “seeing this economy where high-income premium shoppers, they continue to spend, while lower-income customers are pulling back more aggressively.” Add a tariff-heavy macro backdrop, inflation pressures that still won’t fully behave, and a Fed signaling caution after three interest rate cuts this year, and General Mills’ quarter starts looking less like a cereal story and more like a
stress test. Quartz’s Catherine Baab has more on how “trading down” moved from trend to default. | | | SPONSORED | | If you
missed Nvidia, Tesla, and Shopify… you might want to see this | Some investors still don’t realize how early
The Motley Fool spotted some of today’s biggest winners. Their Nvidia recommendation from 2005 is up 75,710% to-date, and their Tesla recommendation from 2012 is up 18,231% to-date.
These weren’t lucky guesses. They’re part of the same research process powering Stock Advisor, the service over half a million paying members rely on for smarter, long-term investing guidance.
Right now, you can get 50% off a full year of Stock Advisor and see exactly which stocks their analysts are recommending today. If you’ve ever wondered how top-performing investors do their research, this could be one of the simplest ways to start.
You don’t need to predict the next Nvidia. You just need a proven strategy that helps you spot great companies before everyone else does. | | |
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