Driving the news: The long-beleaguered American motorcycle maker delivered a surprise fourth-quarter profit and surging sales as the company’s turnaround strategy takes hold and its electric motorcycle strategy begins to unfold.
It's a good thing Jack Dorsey pivoted Square to Block last year.
Catch up quick: Apple is set to transform iPhones into contactless credit card readers and payment processors later this year. That could, in theory, threaten Square's existing payment devices business.
Perhaps no company symbolizes the pandemic stock market more than Peloton, which will attempt a fresh start with a leadership change and significant workforce downsizing.
The big picture: Peloton has owned some strategic missteps and weathered a massive stock hit. Now it seems poised to tune out reports of activists and potential acquirers, and is settling in for the long haul as an independent company.
Apple is set to transform iPhones into contactless credit card readers and payment processors later this year.
Why it matters: The upcoming “Tap to Pay” feature — announced Tuesday — could make it easier for merchants to conduct their business and accept contactless payments without any extra equipment.
A handfulof prominent male economists, including former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, are freaking out — mostly on Twitter — about a weekend New York Times profile of economist Stephanie Kelton, known for her work on Modern Monetary Theory, or MMT.
Why it matters: This Twitter-based econ fight is about more than one economist. It's an argument over a natural economic experiment — the U.S. government spending unprecedented sums to keep the economy from free-falling during COVID.
The Daily Wire, a conservative media outlet best known for its popular podcast "The Ben Shapiro Show," is a $100 million business, according to its CEO and co-founder Jeremy Boreing.
Why it matters: It's one of the few commercially successful conservative media startups to launch in the past few years.
Recent conflicts at CNN are causing uncertainty and anxiety ahead of the completion of the $43 billion deal to combine parent company WarnerMedia with Discovery.
Why it matters: The decision to spin-off WarnerMedia by AT&T was done primarily to pay down debt. Now, AT&T will be able to offload several messy business headaches as well.
New York City delivery workers who call themselves "Los deliveristas" celebrated new protections and benefits last month, the latest development in the long history of Latinos in workers' rights movements.
Why it matters: Hispanics make up 18% of the US labor force, but are overrepresented as workers in food service (27%), cleaning and maintenance (37%), and farming (43%), occupations where workers have been protesting and striking since the pandemic’s onset — and for decades.
SPAC silliness hit a new high yesterday, in the form of a giant stock surge for the blank check company taking Rumble public.
Driving the news: Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski tweeted an offer to top podcaster Joe Rogan, offering him $100 million over four years to move his show to Rumble from Spotify.
Editor's note: The headline, graphic and story were corrected to reflect that BLS data from January cannot be compared to the prior month due to an annual re-weighting of employment numbers based on the latest population data.
Women are still struggling to get back to work, and the Omicron variant may have made that more difficult.
Driving the news: Men's labor force participation rate was up to 70% in January, according to numbers from the Labor Department released Friday. The women's rate is 58%.
Interested in participating in a clinical study? Make sure your medical providers don’t bill you for simply learning what’s involved.
The big picture: Clinical trials aren't free for patients, but experts interviewed for this story agreed that a hospital shouldn't charge people just for getting information about them.
The U.S. trade deficit reached record levels in 2021, rising 27% to a total of $859.1 billion, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau out Tuesday.
The big picture: The pandemic has caused people to shift their spending away from domestically produced services and toward imported durable goods, Axios' Neil Irwin reports.
Quaise Energy, a company with experimental tech to access hugely energy-dense geothermal resources 6 to 12 miles below Earth's surface, this morning announced $40 million in Series A funding.
Driving the news: Safar Partners, Prelude Ventures, Fine Structure Ventures, The Engine and others are backing the Cambridge, Massachusetts startup, which spun out of MIT in 2018.
Alchemy, which provides software infrastructure for cryptocurrency development and billing itself as the "Amazon Web Services for Web3," has raised $200 million additional Series C funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Silver Lake at a $10.2 billion valuations.
Why it matters: The company told Axios that it's already profitable and hasn't touched any of its cash since raising a Series B last April. It will use its new funding to expand its reach.
Corporate bond managers are getting a little nervous.
The big picture: Investors are concerned that weakness in the equity market will spill over to corporate debt, especially as the cost companies pay to borrow money is on the rise, the FT reports.
FOS, the sports business news publisher formerly known as Front Office Sports, has received a new growth equity funding round from Crain Communications, valuing the company at around $25 million dollars, the company confirmed Tuesday.
Why it matters: Crain Communications is a holding group for many smaller industry publications, including Ad Age, Automotive News and Modern Healthcare.
Peloton CEO John Foley plans to step down and become executive chair after a decline in demand and a reported production halt led to a steep sell-off of the company's shares, the exercise bike maker said Tuesday.
The big picture: Peloton also plans to cut about 2,800 jobs, including about 20% of its corporate workforce. But the company said those layoffs won't affect its roster of fitness instructors.
Stablecoins — the supposedly safe tokens that are the real currencies of the crypto world — pose a growing risk to the economy and financial markets. The House Financial Services committee is holding a hearing today to gather information and explore legislative fixes.
Why it matters: Stablecoins are increasingly intertwined with importantelements of our financial system.That means problems in this market could ultimately become the government's headache — and could even prompt a backdoor bailout of the crypto economy.
Foreign correspondents in China are speaking out after a Chinese security official pulled a Dutch reporter out of his live shot during the Olympic opening ceremony.
Why it matters: The International Olympic Committee called it an "isolated incident," but the press environment in China has deteriorated dramatically in the past two years. Foreign journalists have been kicked out of the country, and intimidation and physical violence targeting journalists have become more common.
Nvidia is officially pulling the plug on its planned purchase of Arm from SoftBank.
Details: SoftBank confirmed the news in a statement Tuesday announcing plans for an initial public offering for Arm within the fiscal year ending March 31, 2023.
