Uber on Thursday was ordered to pay $8.5 million to the plaintiff in an Arizona trial that is the first lawsuit to be tried of thousands involving alleged sexual assault and misconduct by drivers on the ridesharing platform.

In the lawsuit, Jaylynn Dean alleged that she was raped by her Uber driver in November 2023 while returning to her hotel.

The verdict, which was delivered in a U.S. District Court in Phoenix, found Uber liable for apparent agency and lays the groundwork for about 3,000 similar lawsuits nationwide that have been consolidated in federal court.

The jury did not find Uber liable for negligence or design defects, and the company was not ordered to pay punitive damages.

“This verdict affirms that Uber acted responsibly and has invested meaningfully in rider safety. We will continue to put safety at the heart of everything we do,” a spokesperson for Uber wrote in a statement to CNBC.

Sarah London, a lawyer at Girard Sharp who is representing Dean, called the verdict a “victory” for the plaintiff in a statement to CNBC and said it “validates the thousands of survivors who have come forward at great personal risk to demand accountability against Uber for its focus on profit over passenger safety.”

The company is planning to appeal the decision.

The ride-hailing company has said it should not be held liable for the misconduct of drivers, who are classified as contractors on its platform.

Last year, the New York Times reported that Uber received over 400,000 sexual assault and misconduct reports between 2017 and 2022, which was far more than the company had disclosed. In a report last August, Uber said serious sexual assault on the platform had fallen by 44%.

Uber has taken steps to address safety on the platform and implemented new features, including an in-app emergency button and pin verification. In July, Uber began piloting a program in the U.S. that allows women drivers and riders to opt out of being paired with a man.

Ridesharing rival Lyft has also faced lawsuits tied to sexual assault and harassment.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ordered Apple and Goldman Sachs on Wednesday to pay more than $89 million for mishandling consumer disputes related to Apple Card transactions.

The bureau said Apple failed to send tens of thousands of consumer disputes to Goldman Sachs. Even when Goldman Sachs did receive disputes, the CFPB said the bank did not follow federal requirements when investigating the cases.

Goldman Sachs was ordered to pay a $45 million civil penalty and $19.8 million in redress, while Apple was fined $25 million. The bureau also banned Goldman Sachs from launching new credit cards unless it can provide an adequate plan to comply with the law.

“Apple and Goldman Sachs illegally sidestepped their legal obligations for Apple Card borrowers. Big Tech companies and big Wall Street firms should not behave as if they are exempt from federal law,” said CFPB Director Rohit Chopra.

Apple Card was first launched in 2019 as a credit card alternative, hinged on Apple Pay, the company’s mobile payment and digital wallet service. The company partnered with Goldman Sachs as its issuing bank, and advertised the card as more simple and transparent than other credit cards.

That December, the companies launched a new feature that allowed users to finance certain Apple devices with the card through interest-free monthly installments.

But the CFPB found that Apple and Goldman Sachs misled consumers about the interest-free payment plans for Apple devices. While many customers thought they would get automatic interest-free monthly payments when they bought Apple devices with an Apple Card, they were still charged interest. Goldman Sachs did not adequately communicate to consumers about how the refunds would work, which meant some people ended up paying additional interest charges, according to the CFPB.

It also meant some consumers had incorrect credit reports, the agency said.

“Apple Card is one of the most consumer-friendly credit cards that has ever been offered. We worked diligently to address certain technological and operational challenges that we experienced after launch and have already handled them with impacted customers,” Nick Carcaterra, vice president of Goldman Sachs corporate communications, told CNBC. “We are pleased to have reached a resolution with the CFPB and are proud to have developed such an innovative and award-winning product alongside Apple.”

Apple said it worked closely with Goldman Sachs to address the issues when it learned about them.

“While we strongly disagree with the CFPB’s characterization of Apple’s conduct, we have aligned with them on an agreement,” an Apple spokesperson said. “We look forward to continuing to deliver a great experience for our Apple Card customers.”

— CNBC’s Hugh Son and Steve Kovach contributed to this report.

Caroline Ellison, the star witness in the prosecution of her former boyfriend, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, was sentenced Tuesday in New York federal court to two years in prison and ordered to forfeit $11 billion for her role in the massive fraud and conspiracy that doomed the cryptocurrency exchange once valued at $32 billion.

The prison term was significantly stiffer than the recommendation by the federal Probation Department that Judge Lewis Kaplan sentence Ellison, who had run the hedge fund Alameda Research, to three years of supervised release, with no time at all behind bars. Defense lawyers also had requested a no-prison sentence for Ellison.

Alameda received much of the $8 billion in customer funds looted by Bankman-Fried from FTX. The stolen money was used for Alameda’s trading operation and other purposes.

While Kaplan praised Ellison for her extensive cooperation with prosecutors — which led to the conviction of Bankman-Fried — the judge said her criminal sentence needed to deter other potential bad actors from committing fraud.

The judge said the FTX case is probably the greatest financial fraud perpetrated in the history of the U.S., and because of that a “literal get-out-of-jail-free card I can’t agree to,” Kaplan said in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, where Ellison’s parents and two sisters looked on from the courtroom’s gallery.

“I’ve seen a lot of cooperators over the years and I’ve never seen one quite like Miss Ellison,” said Kaplan, who also said he believed that Ellison was genuinely remorseful for her crimes and that her cooperation carried a steep price for her emotionally.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon urged Kaplan for leniency, citing Ellison’s consistent truthfulness while refusing to minimize her role in the fraud. Sassoon also said she could not overstate Ellison’s assistance in convicting Bankman-Fried.

Ellison’s attorney, Anjan Sahni, urged Kaplan to give Ellison a second chance saying she has “recovered her moral compass” and “profoundly regrets” not leaving FTX and Bankman-Fried’s orbit.

Ellison read from a statement in a shaky voice while crying at times as she apologized to the people she had hurt and said she was deeply ashamed. She also said she was sorry for not being brave enough to walk away from FTX and Bankman-Fried.

Kaplan allowed Ellison to remain free on bail until she surrenders to prison either on or after Nov. 7.

Ellison reached a plea deal with prosecutors in December 2022, a month after FTX spiraled into bankruptcy. She pleaded guilty to conspiracy and financial fraud charges.

Bankman-Fried, in contrast, chose to stand trial and was convicted of all seven criminal fraud charges against him. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison in March and also was ordered to pay $11 billion in forfeiture by Kaplan.

Bankman-Fried since then has appealed his conviction, and requested a new trial and a different judge, arguing that Kaplan was biased against him.

Two other former FTX executives, Gary Wang and Nishad Singh, are scheduled to be sentenced later this year. Like Ellison, they pleaded guilty instead of standing trial.

On Tuesday, before sentencing Ellison, Kaplan noted that while the FTX founder had denied criminal conduct, she cooperated with authorities.

“It didn’t work out so well” for Bankman-Fried, in part because of Ellison’s cooperation, the judge said.

Kaplan credited Ellison for providing prosecutors with seven fake spreadsheets, which he called “one of the huge pieces of evidence in the case” against Bankman-Fried.

Late Monday, Ellison’s attorneys in a court filing said they had finalized financial settlements with prosecutors and the FTX debtor’s estate.

The filing did not say how much she would pay in those settlements, which are separate from the forfeiture order, but it was already known that Ellison’s $10 million in shares in the AI startup Anthropic, which have grown substantially since she first bought them, provide the bulk value of her settlements.

Both Bankman-Fried and Ellison had faced the same statutory maximum sentence of about 110 years in prison for their crimes.

Defendants in criminal cases who cooperate with prosecutors instead of fighting the charges, particularly in white-collar cases such as FTX, often receive leniency when they are sentenced.

WATCH: FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried appeals fraud conviction

Elon Musk says he can grow Tesla into “a leader in AI & robotics,” an ambition that he’s said will require a lot of pricey processors from Nvidia to build up its infrastructure.

On Tesla’s first-quarter earnings call in April, Musk said the electric vehicle company will increase the number of active H100s — Nvidia’s flagship artificial intelligence chip — from 35,000 to 85,000 by the end of this year. He also wrote in a post on X a few days later that Tesla would spend $10 billion this year “in combined training and inference AI.”

But emails written by Nvidia senior staff and widely shared inside the company suggest that Musk presented an exaggerated picture of Tesla’s procurement to shareholders. Correspondence from Nvidia staffers also indicates that Musk diverted a sizable shipment of AI processors that had been reserved for Tesla to his social media company X, formerly known as Twitter.

Tesla shares slipped as much as 1% on the news Tuesday morning.

By ordering Nvidia to let privately held X jump the line ahead of Tesla, Musk pushed back the automaker’s receipt of more than $500 million in graphics processing units, or GPUs, by months, likely adding to delays in setting up the supercomputers Tesla says it needs to develop autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots.

“Elon prioritizing X H100 GPU cluster deployment at X versus Tesla by redirecting 12k of shipped H100 GPUs originally slated for Tesla to X instead,” an Nvidia memo from December said. “In exchange, original X orders of 12k H100 slated for Jan and June to be redirected to Tesla.”

A more recent Nvidia email, from late April, said Musk’s comment on the first-quarter Tesla call “conflicts with bookings” and that his April post on X about $10 billion in AI spending also “conflicts with bookings and FY 2025 forecasts.” The email referenced news about Tesla’s ongoing, drastic layoffs and warned that head-count reductions could cause further delays with an “H100 project” at Tesla’s Texas Gigafactory.

The new information from the emails, read by CNBC, highlights an escalating conflict between Musk and some agitated Tesla shareholders who question whether the billionaire CEO is fulfilling his obligations to Tesla while also running a collection of other companies that require his attention, resources and hefty amounts of capital.

A spokesperson for Nvidia declined to comment for this story. Musk and representatives for X and Tesla did not respond to requests for comment.

Critics have said Musk is only a part-time CEO of Tesla, the company responsible for the vast majority of his wealth. Musk is also the CEO of aerospace company SpaceX, the founder of brain-computer interface startup Neuralink and tunneling venture The Boring Co. He also owns X, which he acquired for $44 billion in late 2022, when it was still called Twitter. He launched his AI startup, xAI, in 2023.

X and xAI are tightly intertwined. In a post on X in November, Musk wrote, “X Corp investors will own 25% of xAI.” Additionally, xAI uses some capacity in X data centers to run some of its training and inference for the large language models behind its chatbot Grok, CNBC has learned.

Musk has pitched Grok, originally named Truth GPT, as a politically incorrect chatbot with “a rebellious streak” and a would-be competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other generative AI services.

While Musk juggles his many ventures, Tesla shareholders have reason for concern. The company is in the midst of a troubling sales decline due in part to its aging lineup of electric vehicles and increased competition. Its reputation has also suffered in the U.S., according to the Axios Harris Poll 100 survey, which attributed some of the slippage to Musk’s “antics” and “political rants.”

Tesla’s stock price is down 29% this year.

Rather than discuss EV sales or the massive restructuring underway at Tesla, Musk has been encouraging investors to focus on future products that he’s been promising for years but has yet to deliver. That includes AI software to turn existing cars into self-driving vehicles, dedicated robotaxis that can make money for their owners, and a driverless transportation network.

“If somebody doesn’t believe Tesla’s going to solve autonomy, I think they should not be an investor in the company,” Musk said on the April earnings call. “We will, and we are.”

To get there, he’s said, Tesla requires plenty of Nvidia’s GPUs which are specialized for AI training and workloads. Those chips are in limited supply due to soaring demand from Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and others.

At Tesla, Musk has promised to build a $500 million “Dojo” supercomputer in Buffalo, New York, and a “super dense, water-cooled supercomputer cluster” at the company’s factory in Austin, Texas. The technology would potentially help Tesla develop the computer vision and LLMs needed for robots and autonomous vehicles.

At xAI, which is racing to compete with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others in developing generative AI products, Musk is also seeking to build “the world’s largest GPU cluster” in North Dakota, with some capacity online in June, according to an internal Nvidia email from February.

The memo described a “Musk mandate” to make all 100,000 chips available to xAI by the end of 2024. It noted that the LLM behind xAI’s Grok was relying on Amazon and Oracle cloud infrastructure, with X providing additional data center capacity.

The Information previously reported some details of xAI’s data center ambitions.

On May 26, xAI said it closed a $6 billion financing round led by many of the same investors who funded Musk’s Twitter takeover. The company was incorporated in March 2023, but Tesla didn’t disclose its formation at the time, and it was four months later before Musk publicly introduced the startup.

While Musk has said for years that Tesla is a leader in AI, he wrote in a post on X in January that he’d want more control over the company before pushing further in that direction.

“I am uncomfortable growing Tesla to be a leader in AI & robotics without having ~25% voting control. Enough to be influential, but not so much that I can’t be overturned,” he said in the post.

Tesla’s latest proxy filing indicates Musk has 20.5% of the company’s outstanding shares, a figure that includes options awarded to Musk as part of his unprecedented 2018 CEO pay package. A Delaware court has ordered that compensation to be rescinded. Post-trial proceedings are ongoing and subject to appeal.

If he is unable to reach his desired ownership mark, Musk said in the January post, he “would prefer to build products outside of Tesla.” He’s already doing that at xAI.

Musk’s comments in the January post rankled some longstanding bulls, including the company’s largest retail shareholder, Leo Koguan, and Gerber Kawasaki’s Ross Gerber, who characterized his demand as “blackmail.”

Joel Fleming, a securities litigator at Equity Litigation Group, said that by letting his private companies skip ahead of Tesla in procuring critical hardware, Musk is making his conflicts of interest readily apparent.

“When you have someone like Mr. Musk who is a fiduciary to multiple companies, the law recognizes this creates conflict,” Fleming said. “If you owe fiduciary duties to two or more companies that are competing over the same things, you may end up channeling corporate opportunity away from one company to another.”

Fleming, who frequently represents public company investors in shareholder disputes, said that in such situations, other executives would be in the best position to make decisions, while those who are conflicted should abstain.

“That has not historically been the path that Mr. Musk has chosen for himself,” Fleming said.

Musk hasn’t been shy about intermingling corporate resources among his companies.

For example, following his buyout of Twitter, Musk enlisted dozens of Autopilot software engineers and other technical and administrative employees from Tesla to help him make sweeping changes at the company. Some employees even work for two Musk companies at once.

At xAI, Musk has also attracted employees away from Tesla, including machine-learning scientist Ethan Knight, and at least four other former Tesla employees who had been involved in Autopilot and big data projects there before joining the startup.

A former Tesla supply chain analyst, who asked not to be named in order to discuss sensitive matters, told CNBC that Musk has always considered his companies as an extension of his persona and believed he can do whatever he wants with them. That includes Tesla’s 2016 acquisition of SolarCity, where he was chairman and a top shareholder.

However, the person said, redirecting a large shipment of chips from Tesla to X is extreme, given the scarcity of Nvidia’s technology. The decision means the automaker willingly gave up precious time that could have been used to build out its supercomputer cluster in Texas or New York and advance the models behind its self-driving software and robotics.

In a post on X following publication of this story, Musk wrote, “Tesla had no place to send the Nvidia chips to turn them on, so they would have just sat in the warehouse.” He said the “south extension” of the Texas Gigafactory will soon “house 50k H100s” for training of self-driving technology.

Musk later added that, of Tesla’s $10 billion in “AI-related expenditures” this year, $3 billion to $4 billion will go to purchasing Nvidia hardware.

WATCH: Musk ordered Nvidia to ship thousands of AI chips to X