“Something like 10% of the world uses our systems, now a lot,” said Sam Altman, whose comments at a Friday (April 11) TED 2025 event were reported by Seeking Alpha. 

Host Chris Anderson pointed out that Altman had said his company’s user base was growing rapidly, doubling in a “just a few weeks.”

The report noted that OpenAI’s growth has been helped along by viral features like the ability to generate images and videos in a range of styles, such as that of legendary Japanese animation studio, Studio Ghibli.

Last month, Altman said the company, maker of ChatGPT, had added a million users in one hour. Asked during the TED event if the company had considered compensating artists for creating works in their style, Altman said there could be prompts that could trigger payments for specific artists.

“I think it would be cool to figure out a new model where if you say, ‘I want to do it in the name of this artist,’ and they opt in, there’s a revenue model there,” Altman said.

Altman added the company had guidelines to prevent the AI model from generating images in the styles of specific artists or creators. He also discussed the company’s work on AI agents, models that can operate autonomously on behalf of users.

In other AI news, PYMNTS wrote last week about ways the technology can help companies hoping to alleviate the cost of new tariffs. While those levies will eat into the bottom line of many businesses, AI can help reduce costs while ensuring productivity stays up.

Research by PYMNTS Intelligence has shown that 82% of workers who use generative AI at least weekly say it increases productivity, even though half of these workers also worry that AI would replace them at their jobs.

“AI can also facilitate material selection by assessing availability, compliance and cost implications, which helps brands find substitute materials when needed without compromising on quality or compliance with regulatory standards,” said Tarun Chandrasekhar, president and CPO at Syndigo.

Still, Pierre Laprée, chief product officer of SpendHQ, told PYMNTS that while AI has a part to play, it’s “misguided” to believe that AI will automatically offset rising costs from shifts in trade policy.

“Tariffs are complex, and so is procurement,” he said. “You need more than an algorithm — you need clean, structured, specific data. Without that, AI won’t reduce risk. It will amplify it.”

The post Sam Altman: OpenAI Has Reached Roughly 800 Million Users appeared first on PYMNTS.com.

And with those fees, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Sunday (April 13), comes a message: Please don’t blame us.

In some cases, the report said, these businesses are adding flat fees, while others are charging customers a percentage of the subtotal. The idea is to pass on some of the cost of the tariffs onto consumers, especially on Chinese-made products — while placing some responsibility on President Donald Trump.

“We think transparency is the way to go here, and I am giving Trump full credit for his decision to add this tariff to all American consumers,” said Ryan Babenzien, CEO of Jolie, which sells high-end filtered shower heads that are made in China.

He told WSJ to he would add a “Trump Liberation Tariff” to online orders in the weeks ahead, though the amount of that levy will depend on how the larger tariff situation plays out the company’s tariff-cost calculations.

Other businesses are being more direct about the tariffs. For example, BigBadToyStore, which sells action figures and collectibles, recently wrote to its customers telling them it would apply a tariff-related fee to preordered items.

“I absolutely hate increasing prices to you, but the tariff situation is beyond our control,” wrote Joel Boblit, the company’s president and founder, promising to reduce or remove the charge if the tariffs decreased. 

PYMNTS examined the impact the tariffs are having on the financial services world last week in a conversation with Amias Gerety, partner at QED Investors.

The uncertainty surrounding the tariffs, he told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster, is the key element undermining financial services, which depend on stability to provide loans, extend credit and make long-term investments. 

Conditions being what they are, it’s hard for businesses to make long-term commitments, whether constructing factories, expanding supply chains, or undertaking major projects. 

“Financial services need certainty,” said Gerety, who served as a Treasury department official under the Obama administration. “If you’re planning for 10 or 14 years, uncertainty is devastating.”

As companies approach earnings season, investors and executives brace for troubling guidance. Gerety expected sharp downward revisions in forecasts and increased volatility. While first quarter results may seem stable due to positive conditions, they now offer little predictive power given the drastically transformed economic landscape. 

Major financial institutions, including JPMorgan, have already adjusted their forecasts toward predicting recessionary conditions.

“Q1 was still a benign environment,” Gerety said, adding, “but the environment has changed dramatically, and even guidance will reflect that heightened uncertainty.”

The post Businesses Begin Tacking On Fees in Response to Tariffs appeared first on PYMNTS.com.

The meeting between the company and representatives of the Treasury Department happened last month, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported late Friday (April 11), citing sources familiar with the matter.

The meeting came while Binance was also exploring a business arrangement with a Trump family crypto venture, the sources added.

Some of those sources said Binance wants the Treasury to remove a government-appointed monitor who oversees the company’s compliance with anti-money laundering (AML) laws. Such a move would be the first step in returning Binance to the U.S. market following its 2023 guilty plea to AML violations.

Other sources said Biannce is also in talks to list a new stablecoin from World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture backed by President Donald Trump’s sons. That listing could open the coin to a vast new market — Binance has 250 million users — a potential multibillion-dollar payday for the Trump family.

Binance paid a record $4.3 billion fine for allowing bad actors to move billions through its exchange. It also removed all U.S. customers and agreed to report all suspicious transactions.

If the government agreed to relax its oversight of Binance, it would mark the latest in a series of moves designed to roll back earlier crypto enforcement efforts.

Last week saw a report that the Department of Justice (DOJ) was planning to limit its crypto-related investigations to focus on the use of digital assets in things like terrorism, drug trafficking and fraud.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a memo cited by Bloomberg News that this change is meant to leave crypto-related activities to regulators, a change from the Biden administration’s use of the Justice Department to pursue “regulation by prosecution.”

Meanwhile, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Acting Chairman Mark T. Uyeda said last month that the regulator has changed how it regulates digital assets.

“This approach of using notice-and-comment rulemaking or explaining the Commission’s thought process through releases — rather than through enforcement actions — should have been considered for classifying crypto assets under the federal securities laws,” Uyeda said during a roundtable centered on the regulation of digital assets.

One week later, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) issued new guidance saying that FDIC-supervised institutions can conduct crypto-related activities without prior FDIC approval, provided they adequately manage the associated risks.

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That’s according to a report Saturday (April 12) by the Financial Times (FT), which said Americans are signaling financial stress as they prepare themselves for tariff-related price hikes. 

The report cited JPMorgan’s recent first quarter earnings, which showed that its credit card charge-offs had reached their highest level in 13 years. For the entire industry, charge-off rates are at a higher level than before the COVID pandemic, reversing the trend in which consumers were able to pay down their credit card bills thanks to government stimulus money.

This era of uncertainty means “there’s a wide range of potential outcomes,” JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said, agreeing with the bank’s economists that the odds of a recession are 50/50. This is driven in part by worries that consumers are chafing at paying higher prices thanks to 10% tariffs on many imports, along with 145% tariffs on goods from China.

“Looking at the April data is what would appear to be a little bit of front loading of spending, specifically in items that might have prices go up as a function of tariffs,” said JPMorgan Chief Financial Officer Jeremy Barnum. 

Meanwhile, consumer sentiment has been on the downswing since December thanks in part to “growing worries about trade war developments,” the University of Michigan said in its monthly measure of how consumers are feeling, released Friday (April 11).

The latest installment of the survey found that the share of consumers who expect higher unemployment levels in the coming year rose for the fifth consecutive month, the highest level of such expectations in 15 years.

The FT report also pointed to store foot traffic data from Placer.ai, indicating that American shoppers flocked to low-priced warehouse club stores in the final week of March, possibly signaling the need to stock up before the tariffs kicked in.

Both consumers who live paycheck to paycheck and those who are more financially comfortable were rethinking their spending even prior to the tariffs, PYMNTS Intelligence research shows.

“Tech purchases, eating out and buying coffee at the local coffee shop are consistently on the chopping block, even for those who do not feel financial pressures,” PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster wrote last week.

“Those living paycheck to paycheck are concerned because higher prices crimp how far their paychecks can or will go. Those not living paycheck to paycheck are pulling back because they want to keep their powder dry, just in case.”

The post Consumer Spending Grows Shakier Amid Wave of Tariffs appeared first on PYMNTS.com.

The government announced late Friday (April 11) consumer electronic imports from China would be excluded from the steep tariffs the U.S. has imposed on that country. 

However electronics goods such as smartphones would eventually fall under a separate round of tariffs on semiconductors, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in an interview with ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday (April 13).

“What he’s doing is he’s saying they’re exempt from the reciprocal tariffs,” Lutnick said of Trump. “But they’re included in the semiconductor tariffs, which are coming in probably a month or two.”

That could mean that tariffs on iPhones could return within weeks, he added.

“We need our medicines and we need semiconductors and our electronics to be built in America,” Lutnick said. “Remember, all — virtually all — semiconductors are made now in Taiwan and they’re finished in China. It’s important that we reshore them.”

A report on Lutnick’s comments by the Financial Times (FT) argued these remarks will generate even more business uncertainty in connection with the tariff rollout. The government has paused and reversed course on the matter more than once, causing days of stock market turmoil and leading to a wave of sell-offs in the $29 trillion U.S. Treasurys market.

The report added that any relaxation of tariffs on Chinese imports would be a victory for companies like Microsoft and Apple, the latter of which makes most of its iPhones in China.

Even before the government formally enacted the tariffs, the idea of the new levies was fostering uncertainty, as PYMNTS Intelligence found when it surveyed chief financial officers at U.S. middle-market firms in mid-February. That survey found that 20% of respondents said they would raise prices on their goods and services in response to the tariffs.

“But crucially, only a sliver said they would do so immediately as their first response to the tariffs,” the PYMNTS Intelligence report “Tariffs and Business Uncertainty: The Current State of Play, March 2025” said. “In any case, most companies hadn’t even started to plan for a global trade war.”

The report also found that 32% of these businesses said they have or will miss opportunities due to that uncertainty, 33% faced delays in getting products to market, and 31% saw client turnover because of their own uncertain business outlooks.

“Let that sink in,” PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster wrote in response to those findings. “That’s roughly a third of U.S. businesses making between $100 million and $1 billion in annual revenue — and the integral bridge between the enterprise and small business supply chains — who face some sort of economic uncertainty.”

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The round, as reported Friday (April 11) by the Financial Times (FT), values the company at $32 billion, a more than sixfold increase from the last time the firm raised money.

It’s the latest sign for continued investor enthusiasm in AI companies, even if — as the FT report noted — the company in question does not yet have a product.

The company has not provided much info on how it plans to overtake the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic, but co-founder Ilya Sutskever told the FT last year that he and his team had “identified a new mountain to climb that’s a bit different from what I was working on previously.”

Sources told the news outlet that SSI has been closed-mouthed even with its backers, though three sources close to the company said SSI was working on “unique ways” of building and scaling AI models.

A separate report from Reuters — also citing unnamed sources — said that Google and Nvidia were among the investors in this round. PYMNTS has contacted SSI for comment but has not yet gotten a reply.

SSI was launched last year by Sutskever — former chief scientist at OpenAI — Apple AI vet Daniel Gross and AI researcher Daniel Levy.

In the fall of 2023, Sutskever was involved in an unsuccessful attempt to oust OpenAI CEO Sam Altman from his position. Sutskever announced he would leave the company in May, apparently on good terms with Altman.

Still, SSI has taken a different approach than OpenAI, PYMNTS wrote last year, focusing solely on developing safe superintelligence without pressure from commercial interests.

“This has reignited the debate over the possibility of achieving such a feat, with some experts questioning the feasibility of creating a superintelligent AI, given the current limitations of AI systems and the challenges in ensuring its safety,” that report said.

“Critics of the superintelligence goal point to the current limitations of AI systems, which, despite their impressive capabilities, still struggle with tasks that require common sense reasoning and contextual understanding.”

These critics contend that the jump from narrow AI, which excels at specific tasks, to a general intelligence that exceeds human capabilities requires more than just increasing computational power or data.

Skeptics also argue that the challenges involved in creating a safe superintelligence could be insurmountable, due to humanity’s understanding of AI and the technology’s limitations.

The post OpenAI Co-Founder’s Firm Value Jumps Sixfold After $6 Billion Funding Round appeared first on PYMNTS.com.

Startups in the U.K. took in just £16.2 billion ($21.1 billion) last year, the Financial Times (FT) reported Sunday (April 13), citing data from Dealroom. That figure, the report said, is the lowest since 2020. At the same time, American tech startups raised more than £65 billion during 2024, a 71% increase over the prior year.

Now, the CEOs of several U.K. startups tell the FT that their wish to entice American investors has led them to incorporate in the U.S., even though they are based in London.

“Recognizing that most venture funding comes from the U.S., we set up as a Delaware corporation — the preferred and familiar structure for U.S. investors,” said Mati Staniszewski, co-founder of artificial intelligence (AI) company ElevenLabs, which was valued at $3.3 billion after completing a funding round in late January.

The report added that of the 70 U.K.-founded, venture-backed tech startups now based in the U.S., nearly a fifth of them were incorporated after 2020.

The FT also noted that this trend is happening as the British government is pushing the growing AI sector as a possible engine for growth.

However, young companies warn that trouble in finding capital was hindering British businesses from competing with their global peers. The report also points to the tradition of leading U.K. tech companies being purchased by much larger international investors, like the now-Google-owned-DeepMind.

Meanwhile, U.S. lawmakers say they want to make it easier for companies to get funded, with the House Financial Services Committee (HSFC) recently taking up 40 bills aimed at that goal.

“Our capital markets should work for everyone,” HFSC Chairman French Hill, R-Ark., said in a news release. “That means reducing barriers for startups to access funding, incentivizing investment in regional businesses, and reforming outdated regulations that improve access to growth capital to ensure a public offering is a more viable option again.”

Members of the committee argue that most venture capital (VC) funding is concentrated in just a few states, that just 19% of American households were defined as accredited investors in 2022, and that the number of public company listings in the U.S. has declined.

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The number of travelers from western Europe who spent at least one night in the U.S. dropped by 17% year over year in March, the Financial Times (FT) reported Friday (April 11), citing data from the International Trade Administration (ITA).

From some countries — Ireland, Germany and Norway among them — travel declined by more than 20%, the ITA data showed.

This trend, the FT noted, threatens America’s tourism industry, which makes up 2.5% of the country’s gross domestic product. Some airline and hotel companies have warned of cooling demand for transatlantic travel and a “bad buzz” about visiting the U.S.

The number of overseas visitors to the U.S. fell by 12% year over year in March, the sharpest decline since March 2021, the middle of the COVID pandemic.

“In just two months [Trump] has destroyed the reputation of the U.S., shown one way by diminished travel from the EU to the U.S.,” said Paul English, co-founder of travel website Kayak. “This is not only one more terrible blow to the U.S. economy, it also represents reputation damage that could take generations to repair.”

The report said some of the reluctance is being fueled by U.S. immigration policy amid a rash of incidents in which overseas travelers were detained at the border.

Reports of those incidents led Gloria Sync, an artist and author in Nottingham, England, to call off a visit to San Francisco planned for next month.

“The borders seem unsafe,” Sync, who is transgender and said she was concerned about the “unwanted attention” her identity could bring at the border, told the FT. “I don’t know if I’ll ever go back, to be honest.”

The decline in EU to U.S. tourism comes as Americans are spending less on travel, with airline fares down 5.3% according to the latest Consumer Price Index figures.

Meanwhile, Delta Airlines warned last week of widespread uncertainty as it released its quarterly earnings.

“Consistent with our update last month, February and March reflected a much more challenging macro environment than anyone initially planned for,” Delta CEO Ed Bastian said during an earnings call. “Coming into 2025, we were positioned for another year of strong growth. However, given broad economic uncertainty around global trade, growth has largely stalled.”

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As Reuters reported Saturday, businesses ranging from toy stores to lip balm makers to concert halls are all feeling the effect of the levies, whether it means increased service costs or a jump in the price of goods.

“We’re constantly dealing with the uncertainty of the future and of our future supply chains,” said Steve Shriver, the founder and CEO of Eco Lips, a Cedar Rapids, Iowa, health and beauty company that sources ingredients from more than 50 countries, selling its products in 40,000 stores around the country.

On the day Trump announced the tariff pause, Shriver wrote to 300 clients, letting them know Eco Lips was raising prices.

“I don’t trust it. It’s a 90-day pause. It could change again in 10 days,” Shriver said. “There are still 10% tariffs across the board, and that’s a substantial addition to our prices.”

He projected that his yearly cost of goods could climb by $5 million, in addition to the $10 million Eco Lops usually spends on things like ingredients that cannot be grown in the U.S., such as vanilla, coconut oil and cacao.

Other businesspeople interviewed by Reuters said they were worried about ongoing economic turbulence, saying they have canceled purchase orders, or delayed hiring and expansion plans.

Aisha Ahmad-Post, the executive director for the Newman Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Denver, told Reuters the tariffs have crimped her organization’s plans to replace the 971 chairs in one of its concert halls.

“The chairs are already in production, it’s not like we can just pivot,” Ahmad-Post said. “Now we’re stuck trying to figure out how we’ll pay for this.”

Research by PYMNTS Intelligence has shown that close to 20% of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are pessimistic about their odds of survival over the next five years.

That research — from the report “Brewing Storm: Why 1 in 5 Smaller Businesses Without Financing Fear They May Not Survive Tariffs” — found that 7% of all SMBs — and 13% of SMBs without access to financing — said they were unlikely to make it through the next two years.

These businesses were surveyed between Feb. 5 and Feb. 12, when the White House had introduced tariffs against Canada, China and Mexico but before many countries announced retaliatory levies and a global trade war kicked off.

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It’s also equally astounding that we have been fighting Windows bugs and frozen screens for decades — and yell “Come on!” when it decides to do long software updates just before an important business presentation.

Microsoft is now one of the most valuable companies in the world, but there was a time when things were touch and go. Even Bill Gates, who co-founded Microsoft with Paul Allen on April 4, 1975, wasn’t sure if they’d make it.

“I was always running scared,” Gates said in an interview with Geekwire. However, by the late 1990s, “we were so successful that even I could say, ‘Ok, we might even make a few mistakes and not disappear.”

Then the internet arrived, promising a new era of disruption for a mature Microsoft — along with an antitrust lawsuit from the U.S. government seeking to break the company up due to its Windows operating system dominance.

“We had this schizophrenic thing — ‘Are we so obsolete that nobody should care about us? Or are we so dominant we have to be split into pieces? I mean, which one is it? Just tell me!’” said Gates, throwing his hands up.

Read more: Microsoft to Invest $80 Billion in AI-Focused Data Centers Amid ‘Golden Opportunity’

‘Developers, Developers, Developers!’

Gates, the company’s first CEO, would step down in 2000 to make way for Steve Ballmer, a former Harvard classmate. As CEO, Ballmer made some smart moves, diving into enterprise software and launching the Xbox gaming console and Microsoft’s Azure cloud business. All are big money makers.

But he also had some doozies: acquiring Nokia to boost a failing phone business and launching Bing. Ballmer also famously laughed at the iPhone.

“$500, fully subsidized with a (phone) plan? That is the most expensive phone in the world and it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard,” he said in 2007, the year the iPhone launched.

Ballmer brought his trademark energy to work: He’s known for running on stage at Microsoft’s conferences screaming, “developers, developers, developers!”

In 2014, Satya Nadella, an Azure executive, took over from Ballmer as CEO. He got rid of the failed phone business — Windows Phone and Nokia — changed the culture to be more collaborative and is doubling down on artificial intelligence (AI).

Today, Microsoft has a market cap of $2.84 trillion (as of midday on April 9) as the second most valuable company in the world, after Apple.

Without further ado, here are Microsoft’s greatest hits and epic fails as the company celebrates half a century of existence.

See also: Senators Press Microsoft and Google Over AI Cloud Alliances Amid Antitrust Concerns

The Magnificent 5

1. Windows 95 — the launch heard around the world (literally a six-second chiming sound)

Microsoft paid the Rolling Stones a reported $3 million to use their song, “Start Me Up,” in the marketing campaign to launch Windows 95. People camped outside stores to get their copy. It was the first Windows with a “start” button and task bar.

But it also arguably gave birth to a generation of IT guys who are still telling employees with computer problems: “Did you try turning it off and on?”

2. Microsoft Office — the productivity machine that runs the world

Love it or hate it, Office has been the backbone of productivity since floppy disks were actually floppy. PowerPoint single-handedly created an entire genre of corporate torture in countless business meetings.

Word has processed more college essays, resumes and passive-aggressive office memos than all other software combined. Excel’s ability to calculate complex formulas saved accounting departments from nervous breakdowns.

There’s even a Microsoft Excel Championship — no, it’s not a marketing gimmick by the company. It’s an esport played by hundreds of Excel fans, created by a financial analyst from Latvia (not making this up).

3. Xbox — from zero to Halo hero

While Sony PlayStation and Nintendo were duking it out, Microsoft crash-landed into the gaming world with a giant black box and literally changed the game. Xbox Live basically invented online console gaming as we know it.

Xbox is the exclusive home of one of the biggest gaming hits ever: Halo. It has reportedly made as much as $10 billion for Microsoft. Not bad, Ballmer.

4. Azure — the money printing machine

While AWS got the early lead, Microsoft came back swinging. Azure is now the cloud platform your CEO pretends to understand and your IT department depends on. Azure transformed Microsoft from a has-been software company into a cloud computing juggernaut. Nadella essentially turned “boring enterprise solutions” into the buzziest part of Microsoft’s business solutions — like making accounting the most popular major at college.

5. OpenAI investment — bull’s eye on AI

Microsoft first invested in this tiny startup called OpenAI in 2019, with $1 billion. That’s a lot of money to give a startup. But three years later, it looked like a savvy bet when ChatGPT took the world by the proverbial storm. AI became a household word. Microsoft would invest a total of more than $13 billion in OpenAI and enjoy exclusive access to its pre-AGI foundation AI models as competitors scrambled to match them.

It’s Microsoft’s shrewdest move since coming up with CTRL+ALT+Delete.

Read more: Microsoft’s Q2 AI Business Soars but Cloud, Guidance Disappoint

The ‘What Were They Thinking’ Flops

1. Cippy — the annoying sidekick

“It looks like you’re writing a letter. Would you like help?” NO, CLIPPY, WE WOULD NOT.

Microsoft’s early, bumbling version of a digital assistant in the form of an overeager animated paperclip invaded our documents with the persistence of a telemarketer. Clippy was so disliked that Microsoft killed him off in 2001 — the only office supply that was both famous and infamous. One headline: “The Tragic Life of Clippy, the World’s Most Hated Virtual Assistant.”

2. Zune: The iPod killer that became a meme

Remember Zune? No? Exactly. Microsoft’s answer to the iPod arrived with a resounding thud. It wasn’t actually bad, but Zune landed at exactly the wrong time, launched in 2006 just as everyone was switching to smartphones. Now, it’s a meme.

Yet there still exists an enclave of Zune diehards — on Reddit.

3. Windows Vista: The OS that made everyone miss Windows XP

Among Microsoft’s Windows releases, Windows Vista is often considered the most reviled operating system version for business and home users — verified by an online vote. (Windows Millennium Edition was actually more hated, but it’s meant only for home users.)

“After the great success of Windows XP, Windows Vista was a fiasco,” according to a Howtogeek.com blog post. It not only came in six “confusing” editions — Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Enterprise and Ultimate — but “ran sluggishly” on PCs and was a “memory hog.”

Who could forget the “dreaded” User Account Control prompts that would “pop up every few minutes to cover the screen” when using the computer? Thankfully, Windows 7 fixed Vista’s problems, according to the blog post.

4. Nokia acquisition — the $7.2 billion dumpster fire

In 2013, Microsoft bought Nokia’s phone division for $7.2 billion as it tried to revive its own handset ambitions. At the time, it had the Windows Phone mobile operating system and its Lumia line of Microsoft phones. But by then, mobile was a two-horse race between Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android.

Nadella ended Microsoft’s foray into mobile phones in 2017, which he later told Business Insider as something he regrets.

5. Bing — is an explanation even needed?

As Zune was Microsoft’s answer to the iPod, Bing was its rebuttal to Google Search. The results were similar: Microsoft fell flat. Google has an 89.7% global market share compared to Bing’s 4%, according to Statcounter.

Let Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, express how consumers feel about Bing.

During a deposition in the U.S. government’s antitrust lawsuit against Google, Cue was asked about the decision to choose Google Search over Bing to power iPhones and other iOS devices.

Cue said they wanted a revenue-sharing arrangement and Google had the best search engine while Bing was “inferior.” Google would bring more money to Apple over time.

But even if Microsoft matched Google, Apple would never switch. “I don’t believe there’s a price in the world that Microsoft could offer us,” Cue said.

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