Axios

The New York Stock Exchange says its iconic trading floor can get more crowded starting next week — the latest reopening sign in the country's financial center.

Driving the news: Firms can increase how many traders they have on the floor, if all of their staff have been vaccinated. They will be exempt from certain COVID protocols, like random testing.

The rental car scramble — and the leap in prices — is a huge consumer headache, but it's paying off for car rental companies.

Why it matters: The pummeled industry is staging a stunning comeback, thanks to pent-up travel demand and increasingly hard-to-find rental cars.

This week's biggest release is "Resident Evil Village," the latest in gaming's most popular horror series. In the new one, players must explore a creepy town and battle its monstrous citizens.

Driving the news: We asked the "RE: Village" producer Tsuyoshi Kanda about how the team figures out how scary their games should be.

In 2019, Epic Games agreed to a special deal getting a skeptical Sony to let PlayStation customers compete against Xbox gamers.

Why it matters: It was never clear why one of gaming's most frustrating barriers fell two years ago, especially given Sony's obvious, public resistance to cross-platform play.

The Apple/Epic trial includes formerly private emails between top CEOs and officials.

Why it matters: Both companies introduced documents into the court record highlighting each other’s failures, though that also showed how they handle emergencies.

Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.) said at a virtual Axios event Tuesday Congress make permanent the community advantage program that aims to help underserved businesses.

Why it matters: The pandemic hit minority-owned businesses particularly hard. Structural barriers and narrower cash buffers already put them at a disadvantage prior to the coronavirus.

The clouds still aren't parting for Ant Group, Alibaba's fintech arm, which has been caught up in a major antitrust push by China's regulators.

Driving the news: U.S. mutual fund Fidelity Investments halved its valuation of Ant after the Chinese regulatory crackdown, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Dish Network chairman Charlie Ergen sent a note to more than a dozen senators on Monday expressing his concerns with T-Mobile's plans to shut down an older CDMA phone network still used by millions of Dish customers.

Why it matters: Dish has said it expected to have until at least 2023 to move customers over to newer networks, while T-Mobile now plans to shut down the network at the beginning of next year.

AEye, a Dublin, Calif.-based lidar technology developer, amended terms of its SPAC merger with CF Finance Acquisition Corp III, dropping the implied valuation to $1.52 billion from $2 billion.

Why it matters: It's a reminder that SPAC deals can't stand apart from sector trends, even if the broader SPAC bucket should be uncorrelated. Shares of rival lidar developers Luminar and Ouster have both fallen by double digits since their post-SPAC debuts.

Tiger Global is talking to investors about raising $10 billion for a new growth equity fund, just one month after raising $6.7 billion for its last one, Axios has learned from multiple sources.

Why it matters: Tiger's investment pace is unprecedented, which means we have no idea how it's going to play out.

Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine generated $3.5 billion in revenue in the first quarter of 2021, which was nearly a fourth of the company's $14.6 billion income during the period, the pharmaceutical giant reported in an earnings call Tuesday.

Why it matters: The vaccine was the biggest source of revenue for Pfizer — which, unlike some of its competitors — elected to collect the profit from sales of its vaccine, the New York Times notes.

Ford and BMW, along with the VC firm Volta Energy Technologies, are investing $130 million in the solid-state battery startup Solid Power.

Why it matters: Solid-state batteries hold the promise of more energy density, durability and safety than existing battery tech with liquid electrolytes, but successful and widespread commercialization remains a challenge.

The distributed generation company Mainspring Energy has raised $95 million in new funding led by Fidelity Investment's private equity arm, alongside other new and existing backers like Chevron, Princeville Capital and Bill Gates.

Why it matters: There's growing interest in low-carbon onsite power sources as a way to fight climate change and to create more flexibility and resilience as grids are increasingly stressed by extreme weather.

The new upstart media company led by media veterans from Luminary, The New York Times and The Athletic is adding a fourth partner, a person familiar with the company's plans tell Axios.

Details: Condé Nast's Liz Gough will join as co-founder and chief operating officer of the company, managing its business operations, B2B marketing and advertising.

Recount Media, the two-year-old startup founded by veteran journalists John Battelle and John Heilemann, has raised $18 million in a series B funding round led by Foundry Group, Battelle tells Axios.

By the numbers: The new investment brings its total funding to $31 million. The company currently has a little more than 40 employees.

Twitter on Tuesday announced it's acquiring Scroll, the venture-backed news upstart from former Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile.

Why it matters: It's Twitter's second acquisition this year that's meant to help people read more long-form on the platform. In January, Twitter bought the newsletter publishing platform Revue.

New data from Chartbeat provided to Axios finds that working from home has pushed people to scroll deeper through article pages on desktop, and slightly less through articles on mobile.

Why it matters: The change, which coincides with the start of the pandemic, could suggest that users prefer to engage more with article pages when they have the opportunity to read them on a bigger screen.

Increased broadband usage is a pandemic trend that's here to say, analysts and telecom executives argue.

The big picture: Broadband usage increased 40% over the past year, the highest annual growth rate in nearly 10 years, according to new data from OpenVault. The massive jump is attributed to people spending more time at home with their devices, primarily streaming video.

While the overall ISM manufacturing index fell in April after a big jump in March and missed expectations, the prices paid index increased again, touching a fresh 13-year high.

What it means: Prices continue to rise for businesses as supply chain disruptions have been unrelenting and commodities prices march steadily upward. But the positive sentiment for businesses that has accompanied those price hikes could be fading.

The S&P 500's economically sensitive cyclical sectors like consumer staples, energy and materials outperformed Big Tech stocks meaningfully on Monday, as stellar earnings reports have again focused traders' attention on the reopening trade.

Where it stands: The Dow rose 0.7%, with the S&P up 0.3% while the Nasdaq fell 0.5%. Major names like Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook and Microsoft all ended lower, despite each of those companies reporting strong earnings for Q1.

Fed chair Jerome Powell on Monday further detailed the U.S. central bank's focus on inequality and disparities in outcomes for poor Americans and communities of color, but never mentioned the part the Fed has played in exacerbating that inequality.

Why it matters: The Fed's newly trained aim of achieving a "broad and inclusive" recovery, as Powell has termed it, rings hollow for many when Fed policymakers neglect to acknowledge the enormous role they play in the issue.

Yamiche Alcindor, White House correspondent for "PBS NewsHour," today was named the ninth moderator of "Washington Week" in the venerable program's 54-year history.

Why it matters: Alcindor follows in the footsteps of the show's longtime moderator and her mentor, Gwen Ifill, who became the first Black woman to anchor a national political talk show in 1999.

The upcoming sale of Yahoo and AOL to a private equity firm for $5 billion represents a massive media markdown.

By the numbers: At their dotcom bubble peaks, Yahoo and AOL were valued at more than $125 billion and $200 billion, respectively, or $193 billion and $318 billion in 2021 dollars.

A subway train derailed in Mexico City after an overpass partially collapsed onto a road Monday night, killing at least 23 people and wounding dozens of others.

Details: Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum told reporters early Tuesday that children were among the dead, and 49 wounded people had been taken to hospitals.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said Monday unruly airline passenger incidents have soared this year, with airlines reporting some 1,300 cases since February, per Reuters.

Why it matters: The FAA usually deals with 100-150 reports of such behavior in any given year, NBC News notes. Passenger numbers remain below pre-pandemic levels.

CVS and Walgreens, two pharmacy chains that have worked with the federal government to administer COVID-19 vaccines, wasted more doses than most states combined, per government data obtained by Kaiser Health News.

Why it matters: The wasted doses raise questions about the efficacy of the vaccine rollout, especially now as the U.S. starts sending extra doses to India and other COVID-stricken countries.