On Wednesday, federal authorities arrested Archegos Capital Management’s Bill Hwang and the company’s former CFO Patrick Halligan over an alleged “stock manipulation scheme they called staggering in size and brazen in its execution.” Exposure of the scheme last year “sent shock waves through the stock market . . . and left Wall Street banks with $10 billion in losses almost overnight” - NYTimes and WSJ and Bloomberg and MarketWatch and Law360
Though exceeding some analyst expectations, Meta profits generally disappointed in Q1, down 21% from a year earlier. The performance marked the “company’s first back-to-back profit declines in over a decade” and showed the difficulties Zuck & Co. are having pivoting to their metaverse-based future for the company. Still, a return to user growth was enough to boost company shares in after-hours trading - NYTimes and WSJ and Bloomberg and MarketWatch
Though buoyed by the promise of the F-150 Lightning—the first 2,000 models of which it will deliver in coming weeks—Ford reported a $3.1 billion loss for the first three months of 2022. The losses were largely due to “a sharp drop in the stock price of Rivian, an electric vehicle start-up that Ford has taken a stake in” as well as “slowing sales stemming from an ongoing shortage of computer chips.” Setting aside the Rivian effect, Ford actually made $2.3 billion (before interest and taxes) for the quarter - NYTimes and WSJ and MarketWatch
Good stuff here from the Times’ Peter Coy on “total factor productivity”—the secret sauce for economic growth that’s all about putting “existing resources to better use” rather than merely adding labor or capital to the system - NYTimes
Twitter owner? Looking likely. Free tweeter? Not necessarily, as a federal judge denied a request from Elon Musk to release him from “a 2018 agreement he signed with securities regulators” that “requires him to run his social media posts by a company lawyer if the statement contain[s] material information about his electric car company, Tesla.” Musk had argued that the agreement infringed on his right to freedom of speech, but SDNY Judge Lewis Liman found this week that “none of the arguments hold water” - NYTimes and Law360
Still, because when one’s got this much legal action cooking, the wins come with the losses, Elon scored a victory today in Delaware Chancery court, where a judge found that Musk “didn’t act unlawfully” in Tesla’s “roughly $2.1 billion takeover of SolarCity Corp.,” another Elon venture. A group of Tesla shareholders had accused Elon of conflicts of interest in the deal due to his “financial interest in both companies,” but the court ruled that Tesla’s “board . . . meaningfully vetted the deal” despite an “imperfect” negotiation process - WSJ and MarketWatch and Law360 and TechCrunch
Not far removed from its turn as “market darling,” “struggling” used car-sales company Carvana has turned to Apollo Global for a $1.6 billion “junk-bond lifeline” that will help the company “fund an acquisition and make new investments” - Bloomberg and WSJ
More trouble for Boeing, which—under pressure from the FAA following the deadly crashes involving its 737Max model—took a deeper look at its production of the popular 787 Dreamliner model and found a slew of problems requiring an entire “retool[ing of] its production system” - WSJ
Two top MGM execs are heading to the exits just weeks after Amazon “closed its $8.5 billion acquisition of the film studio.” Michael De Luca and Pamela Adby joined MGM in 2020 “in an effort to bolster the studio and ready it for a sale,” and while their artistic track record in the past two years was a bit checkered, they delivered on the sale piece even in the midst of a pandemic - NYTimes
Join us on a morning meander through some of Frederick Law Olmsted’s most enduring contributions to American life as we remember the landscape architect and social reformer during the week of the 200th anniversary of his birth - NYTimes
Stay safe,
MDR
