By BERNARD CONDON, Associated Press Business Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — Elon Musk is leaving Washington after a short but turbulent stint in government and getting back to his numerous businesses, each with their own set of issues for the billionaire to address.

Start with his electric car company Tesla. While how much Musk accomplished in his role as President Donald Trump’s chief cost-cutter is up for debate, it’s clear his association with right-wing politics damaged Tesla’s brand and tanked sales.

Musk’s social media platform X, formerly Twitter, needs to rebuild its advertising base; his aerospace company SpaceX appears to be financially promising but has seen some recent setbacks; and it’s unclear if his satellite business Starlink can keep striking deals without Trump nearby.

Here’s a look at the state of some key Musk businesses.

Tesla trouble

Profits plunged 71% at Tesla in the first three months of the year right after a Chinese competitor claimed the mantle as the world’s biggest electric car seller.

The big question now: Will Musk’s leaving Washington help lure buyers back?

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The answer is crucial to reviving profits because so much else is uncertain. Tesla’s lineup of cars in aging and its foreign rivals have become much more competitive. They would be taking market share from Tesla even in the best of circumstances.

Tesla’s decision to close down factories as it retooled its best-selling Model Y, among other temporary problems, contributed to its struggles in the first quarter. But the blowback from Musk’s time in Washington created doubts for some analysts.

In a note to clients, JP Morgan warned of “unprecedented brand damage.” And Wedbush Securities said at one point, “This is a full blown crisis.”

News earlier this week from Europe doesn’t bode well: Sales in April plunged by half.

Taxis with no driver

Another big test for Musk: Will Tesla’s launch of its first ever driverless taxis prove successful?

Musk has been talking about robotaxis for more than a decade, but next month they may finally hit the road. He has promised to test 10 or20 robotaxis in Austin, Texas, then ramp that up to hundreds of thousands by the end of next year.

“Can you go to sleep in our cars and wake up at your destination?” the billionaire asked investors in a conference call last month, then answered, “I’m confident that will be available in many cities in the U.S. by the end of this year.”

Investors are convinced Musk will deliver, judging by the 50% jump in Tesla stock since he made that statement. But he faces many challenges, not least is whether technically the taxis will work without hitting things — or people.

Federal safety regulators last month requested data from Telsa on how the robotaxis will perform in low-visibility conditions. That request comes after an investigation into 2.4 million Tesla last year equipped with Full Self-Driving software after several accidents, including one in which a pedestrian was killed.

Even if the Austin test goes off without a hitch, Musk faces another challenge: Waymo.

The driverless taxi company owed by Google parent Alphabet just logged its ten-millionth trip and is now operating in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and several other cities.

Ad rebound at X?

After Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and opened it up to all manner of conspiracy theories, long-time advertisers began to flee. Then Musk made the situation worse when he threatened to “name and shame” them, and sued them.

Now advertisers are inching back, though maybe not for a good reason.

FILE – Elon Musk, departs a lunch between President Donald Trump and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the Royal Palace in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, May 13, 2025. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)

“Some big brands resumed spending on X in part to curry favor with the Trump administration, or to avoid potential retaliation by Musk,” said e-marketer analyst Jasmine Enberg,. “But fear is not a sustainable motivator, and most were spending less than they were previously.”

She expects X’s ad business will rebound this year, but still be smaller than it was before Musk bought the company.

Rockets red glare

It’s not clear how well Musk’s rocket company SpaceX is faring because the private company doesn’t disclose its finances. That said, news headlines point to both troubles and triumphs.

First the bad development, which came just this week with a spinning explosion of one of the company’s Starship mega rockets over the Indian Ocean. That followed explosions of two other Starships earlier this year that sprayed flaming debris across the Caribbean Ocean.

Undeterred, Musk is vowing several more tests soon but the stakes are high and the clock is ticking. NASA hopes to use Starship for future missions to the moon, including one next year that will attempt a lunar orbit and then send the four astronauts aboard back home.

The good news is that investors who have gotten a peek at SpaceX’s finances apparently are excited.

A private financing round for the company a few months ago followed by a private sale of shares recently have reportedly valued SpaceX at $350 billion, a big jump from a $210 billion estimated value just a year ago.

It’s business, not politics — or is it?

A SpaceX satellite internet subsidiary called Starlink also has been striking deals to set up in foreign countries. But it’s not clear how much is the result of cold business calculation and how much is due to politics, an advantage that could disappear as Musk leaves Washington.

FILE – Elon Musk flashes his t-shirt that reads “DOGE” to the media as he walks on South Lawn of the White House, in Washington, March 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File)

Accompanying Trump on his trip to Saudi Arabia earlier this month, Musk announced that the country had approved Starlink service for aviation and maritime use. That followed a decision to grant approval for the service by regulators in Bangladesh, whose garment industry would be devastated by Trump’s threatened 37% tariff, along with a string of other deals in India, Pakistan and Lesotho in recent months.

Next up: South Africa, maybe.

Earlier this month, following Trump’s Oval Office dressing down of that country’s president, regulators in the country loosened a rule in a way that could help Starlink win a foothold in the country. Musk had called the rule requiring Black partial ownership of any new foreign venture “openly racist.”

The country denies that politics influenced its decision.

AP Writer Barbara Ortutay contributed to this story from San Francisco.

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE, Associated Press Technology Writer

Google will return to federal court Friday to fend off the U.S. Justice Department’s attempt to topple its internet empire at the same time it’s navigating a pivotal shift to artificial intelligence that could undercut its power.

The legal and technological threats facing Google are among the key issues that will be dissected during the closing arguments of a legal proceeding that will determine the changes imposed upon the company in the wake of its dominant search engine being declared as an illegal monopoly by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta last year.

Brandishing evidence presented during a recent three-week stretch of hearings, Justice Department lawyers will attempt to persuade Mehta to order a radical shake-up that includes a ban on Google paying to lock its search engine in as the default on smart devices and an order requiring the company to sell its Chrome browser.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai smiles as he walks onto the stage at a Google I/O event in Mountain View, Calif., Tuesday, May 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)

Google lawyers are expected to assert only minor concessions are needed, especially as the upheaval triggered by advances in artificial intelligence already are reshaping the search landscape, as alternative, conversational search options are rolling out from AI startups that are hoping to use the Department of Justice’s four-and-half-year-old case to gain the upper hand in the next technological frontier.

“Over weeks of testimony, we heard from a series of well-funded companies eager to gain access to Google’s technology so they don’t have to innovate themselves,” Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president of regulatory affairs, wrote in a blog post earlier this month. “What we didn’t hear was how DOJ’s extreme proposals would benefit consumers.”

After the day-long closing arguments, Mehta will spend much of the summer mulling a decision that he plans to issue before Labor Day. Google has already vowed to appeal the ruling that branded its search engine as a monopoly, a step it can’t take until the judge orders a remedy.

While both sides of this showdown agree that AI is an inflection point for the industry’s future, they have disparate views on how the shift will affect Google.

The Justice Department contends that AI technology by itself won’t rein in Google’s power, arguing additional legal restraints must be slapped on a search engine that’s the main reason its parent company, Alphabet Inc., is valued at $2 trillion.

Google has already been deploying AI to transform its search engine i nto an answer engine, an effort that has so far helped maintain its perch as the internet’s main gateway despite inroads being made by alternatives from the likes of OpenAI and Perplexity.

The Justice Department contends a divestiture of the Chrome browser that Google CEO Sundar Pichai helped build nearly 20 years ago would be among the most effective countermeasures against Google continuing to amass massive volumes of browser traffic and personal data that could be leveraged to retain its dominance in the AI era. Executives from both OpenAi and Perplexity testified last month that they would be eager bidders for the Chrome browser if Mehta orders its sale.

The debate over Google’s fate also has pulled in opinions from Apple, mobile app developers, legal scholars and startups.

Apple, which collects more than $20 billion annually to make Google the default search engine on the iPhone and its other devices, filed briefs arguing against the Justice Department’s proposed 10-year ban on such lucrative lock-in agreements. Apple told the judge that prohibiting the contracts would deprive the company of money that it funnels into its own research, and that the ban might even make Google even more powerful because the company would be able to hold onto its money while consumers would end up choosing its search engine anyway. The Cupertino, California, company also told the judge a ban wouldn’t compel it to build its own search engine to compete against Google.

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In other filings, a group of legal scholars said the Justice Department’s proposed divestiture of Chrome would be an improper penalty that would inject unwarranted government interference in a company’s business. Meanwhile, former Federal Trade Commission officials James Cooper and Andrew Stivers warned that another proposal that would require Google to share its data with rival search engines “does not account for the expectations users have developed over time regarding the privacy, security, and stewardship” of their personal information.

The App Association, a group that represents mostly small software developers, also advised Mehta not to adopt the Justice Department’s proposed changes because of the ripple effects they would have across the tech industry.

Hobbling Google in the way the Justice Department envisions would make it more difficult for startups to realize their goal of being acquired, the App Association wrote. “Developers will be overcome by uncertainty” if Google is torn apart, the group argues.

Buy Y Combinator, an incubator that has helped create hundreds of startups collectively worth about $800 billion filed documents pushing for the dramatic overhaul of Google, whose immense power has discouraged venture capitalists from investing in areas that are considered to be part of the company’s “kill zone.”

Startups “also need to be able to get their products into the hands of users, free from restrictive dealing and self-preferencing that locks up important distribution channels. As things stand, Google has locked up the most critical distribution channels, freezing the general search and search text advertising markets into static competition for more than a decade,” Y Combinator told Mehta.

By ISABELLA O’MALLEY, Associated Press

Scientists say 4 billion people, about half the world’s population, experienced at least one extra month of extreme heat because of human-caused climate change from May 2024 to May 2025.

The extreme heat caused illness, death, crop losses, and strained energy and health care systems, according to the analysis from World Weather Attribution, Climate Central and the Red Cross.

“Although floods and cyclones often dominate headlines, heat is arguably the deadliest extreme event,” the report said. Many heat-related deaths are unreported or are mislabeled by other conditions like heart disease or kidney failure.

FILE – A man walks on a hot summer day in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, Thursday, July 25, 2024. (AP Photo/Mukhtar Khan,File)

The scientists used peer-reviewed methods to study how much climate change boosted temperatures in an extreme heat event and calculated how much more likely its occurrence was because of climate change. In almost all countries in the world, the number of extreme heat days has at least doubled compared with a world without climate change.

Caribbean islands were among the hardest hit by additional extreme heat days. Puerto Rico, a territory of the United States, endured 161 days of extreme heat. Without climate change, only 48 would have occurred.

“It makes it feel impossible to be outside,” said Charlotte Gossett Navarro, chief director for Puerto Rico at Hispanic Federation, a nonprofit focused on social and environmental issues in Latino communities, who lives in the San Juan area and was not involved in the report.

“Even something as simple as trying to have a day outdoors with family, we weren’t able to do it because the heat was too high,” she said, reporting feeling dizzy and sick last summer.

When the power goes out, which happens frequently in Puerto Rico in part because of decades of neglected grid maintenance and damage from Hurricane Maria in 2017, Navarro said it is difficult to sleep. “If you are someone relatively healthy, that is uncomfortable, it’s hard to sleep … but if you are someone who has a health condition, now your life is at risk,” Gossett Navarro said.

Heat waves are silent killers, said Friederike Otto, associate professor of climate science at Imperial College London, one of the report’s authors. “People don’t fall dead on the street in a heat wave … people either die in hospitals or in poorly insulated homes and therefore are just not seen,” he said.

FILE – A jogger runs along a trail in McAllister park as temperatures hit record highs, Tuesday, May 13, 2025, in San Antonio. (AP Photo/Eric Gay,File)

Low-income communities and vulnerable populations, such as older adults and people with medical conditions, suffer the most from extreme heat.

The high temperatures recorded in the extreme heat events that occurred in Central Asia in March, South Sudan in February and in the Mediterranean last July would have not been possible without climate change, according to the report. At least 21 people died in Morocco after temperatures hit 118 degrees Fahrenheit last July. People are noticing temperatures are getting hotter but don’t always know it is being driven by climate change, said Roop Singh, head of urban and attribution at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, in a World Weather Attribution statement.

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“We need to quickly scale our responses to heat through better early warning systems, heat action plans, and long-term planning for heat in urban areas to meet the rising challenge,” Singh said.

City-led initiatives to tackle extreme heat are becoming popular in parts of South Asia, North America, Europe and Australia to coordinate resources across governments and other agencies. One example is a tree-planting initiative launched in Marseille, France, to create more shaded areas.

The report says strategies to prepare for heat waves include monitoring and reporting systems for extreme temperatures, providing emergency health services, cooling shelters, updated building codes, enforcing heat safety rules at work, and designing cities to be more heat-resilient.

But without phasing out fossil fuels, heat waves will continue becoming more severe and frequent and protective measures against the heat will lose their effectiveness, the scientists said.

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

By BRIAN MELLEY, Associated Press

LONDON (AP) — Actor and comedian Russell Brand pleaded not guilty in a London court Friday to rape and sexual assault charges involving four women dating back more than 25 years.

Brand, who turns 50 next week, denied two counts of rape, two counts of sexual assault and one count of indecent assault. He said “not guilty” after each charge was read in Southwark Crown Court.

His trial was scheduled for June 3, 2026 and is expected to last four to five weeks.

English comedian and actor Russell Brand leaves Southwark Crown Court where he is charged with rape and sexual assault in London, Friday, May 30, 2025.(AP Photo/Alastair Grant)

Prosecutors said that the offenses took place between 1999 and 2005 — one in the English seaside town of Bournemouth and the other three in London.

Brand didn’t speak to reporters as he arrived at court wearing dark sunglasses, a suit jacket, a black collared shirt open below his chest and black jeans. In his right hand, he clutched a copy of the “The Valley of Vision,” a collection of Puritan prayers.

The “Get Him To The Greek” actor known for risqué stand-up routines, battles with drugs and alcohol, has dropped out of the mainstream media in recent years and built a large following online with videos mixing wellness and conspiracy theories, as well as discussing religion.

On a five-minute prayer video he posted Monday on social media, Brand wrote: “Jesus, thank you for saving my life.”

When the charges were announced last month, he said that he welcomed the opportunity to prove his innocence.

“I was a fool before I lived in the light of the Lord,” he said in a social media video. “I was a drug addict, a sex addict and an imbecile. But what I never was was a rapist. I’ve never engaged in nonconsensual activity. I pray that you can see that by looking in my eyes.”

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Brand is accused of raping a woman at a hotel room in Bournemouth when she attended a 1999 Labour Party conference and met him at an event where he was performing. The woman alleged that Brand stripped while she was in the bathroom and when she returned to the room he pushed her on the bed, removed her underwear and raped her.

A second woman said that Brand grabbed her forearm and attempted to drag her into a men’s toilet at a television station in London in 2001.

The third accuser was a television employee who met Brand at a birthday party in a bar in 2004, where he allegedly grabbed her breasts before pulling her into a toilet and forcing her to perform oral sex.

The final accuser worked at a radio station and met Brand while he was working on a spin-off of the “Big Brother” reality television program between 2004 and 2005. She said Brand grabbed her by the face with both hands, pushed her against a wall and kissed her before groping her breasts and buttocks.

The Associated Press doesn’t name victims of alleged sexual violence, and British law protects their identity from the media for life.