Major shakeup at Ford, where CEO Jim Hackett is out after a three-year stint in which he “achieved mixed results” but didn’t impress Wall Street enough to keep his job. Ford has installed COO James Farley, a Toyota alum who’s been at Ford since 2007, in the top spot as Hackett’s replacement – NYTimes and WSJ
The SEC has opened an investigation into the “circumstances around Eastman Kodak Co.’s announcement of a $765 million government loan to make drugs at its U.S. factories,” the news of which pushed Kodak’s share price up dramatically for a time and “briefly produced a potential windfall for company executives who owned stock-option grants, some of which were granted on July 27, the day before the loan was officially announced” – WSJ and MarketWatch
Energy giant BP reported a $16.8 billion quarterly loss this week and cut its dividend in half for the first time since the Deepwater Horizon debacle 10 years ago. Yet for all those rough waters, the company’s stock jumped on Tuesday thanks to CEO Bernard Looney’s “ambitious plan” for remaking BP into a “diversified purveyor of cleaner energy within a decade” – NYTimes and Bloomberg
EU authorities have opened an anticompetition probe into Google’s $2.1 billion purchase of fitness-tracking company Fitbit and raised “alarms about the health data the internet giant would be acquiring as part of the deal” – NYTimes and WSJ and Law360
Many small businesses are finding that despite carrying business interruption insurance policies, the lack of “direct physical damage” means that their pandemic-induced losses aren’t subject to coverage. More than 400 of them have taken their insurers to court in an effort to change that – NYTimes
New filings reveal that the DOJ is seeking a staggering $18.1 billion from bankrupt opioid maker Purdue Pharma, “a demand that could disrupt the company’s monthslong effort to reach a settlement with states and local communities that accuse it of helping fuel the opioid crisis” – WSJ
Federal bankruptcy judge Michael Wiles has approved the sale of McClatchy Company—a “newspaper chain run by the same family since 1857”—to a New Jersey hedge fund (Chatham Asset Management) that controls some $4 billion in assets. The deal “is in keeping with a broader trend that has alarmed many press advocates, who argue that finance firms are imperfect stewards of an industry built on the watchdog work of chronicling government and commerce” – NYTimes
Disney posted a nearly $5 billion Q2 loss, as the pandemic all but shut down its theme parks and cruise lines. A bright spot for Big Mouse was its announcement that more than 60 million subscribers have joined its Disney+ streaming service since less than 9 months ago – WSJ and MarketWatch and NYTimes
Top Apple marketing exec (and fellow Eagle) Phil Schiller is stepping down, to be replaced by Greg Joswiak. Schiller joined Apple in 1987 and will stay on as an Apple Fellow – NYTimes
We’ve been watching Netflix’s “Dark,” so we’re admittedly primed for a bit of time travel, but who wouldn’t want to turn back the geological clock to get a taste for the Bronx as a salt marsh, right? – NYTimes
Stay safe,
MDR
