Elon Musk and Twitter brass struck a deal on Monday in which Musk will spend $44 billion to “take over the influential social network frequented by world leaders, celebrities and cultural trendsetters” and take it private. That price represents $54.20/share, “a 38 percent premium over the company’s share price this month before he revealed he was the firm’s single largest shareholder.” The deal will likely face “intense” scrutiny, though regulators “are unlikely to seriously challenge the transaction . . . since the government most commonly intervenes to stop a deal when a company is buying a competitor” - NYTimes and WSJ and Bloomberg and MarketWatch and Marketplace and Law360 and Mashable and TechCrunch
Recent lockdowns around China resulting from the country’s stubborn “zero Covid” strategy are prompting “a fresh wave of economic anxiety . . . as investors and companies whose supply chains run through China contemplated the impact of 70 new virus cases that the Beijing government said it had detected over the weekend” - NYTimes and WSJ and Bloomberg
Those two stories spelled “WHIPSAW” on Wall Street to start the week, with supply chain concerns driving markets down to start the day before Elon’s big Twitter buy rallied tech stocks and helped pull them back from early-day losses - NYTimes and WSJ and Bloomberg and MarketWatch
The Journal considers how America’s longstanding “chyimna rule”—“which exempts America tourists from duties on small purchases made abroad”—has turned into a strategy by “companies to avoid billions of dollars in tariffs.” Like 67 billion. Yikes - WSJ
Tuesday-morning quarterbacking on the rise and “near-instant collapse” of CNN+ - NYTimes
Get ready, Powell superfans. The Fed Chair’s holding his first in-person press conference in over two years next week following “the conclusion of the U.S. central bank’s two-day policy meeting” - Bloomberg
The CFPB plans to “make more use of its ‘dormant’ authority” to regulate nonbank financial companies in what amounts to a blueprint for expanding “its oversight of firms in the burgeoning fintech sector” in an effort to protect consumers – Law360
GM revealed this week that it is working on a hybrid version of its popular Chevrolet Corvette and that a “fully electric version of the iconic sports car is also in the works” - WSJ
Though carrying none of the buzz of Elon’s Twitter venture, Blackstone did some dealmaking of its own to start the week, dropping $7.6 billion to buy PS Business Parks, a real-estate investment trust that “owns and operates industrial and low-rise suburban offices and business parks, mostly in California, Miami, Texas and Northern Virginia” - WSJ
Because sometimes we just need a 14-minute takedown of something as ridiculous as 1997’s “Air Bud” – LastWeekTonight
Stay safe,
MDR
