In the aftermath of Facebook’s ill-fated initial public offering, it was hard to blame Joe Facebook-fan for feeling like he’d gotten screwed. Not only had the share price failed to pop, it had plummeted, 13 percent in the first week of trading alone, not the results anyone expected before hopping on Mark Zuckerberg’s supposed-gravy train. Read More
Count Tesla CEO Elon Musk as the latest Silicon Valley entrepreneur unwilling to wait for the Securities and Exchange Commission to mark social media as an appropriate platform for sharing material information about public companies. Read More
I’m sure you heard the big news about Apple last week.
What? The bottom fell out of the company’s stock, you say? Nearly $52 a share—almost 9 percent—to $533?
That wasn’t what I was referring to. I meant to point you instead to a report from ABC News that revealed that the number of parents Read More
If you’re a fan of magic, one of the most enjoyable evenings available in New York City is a wonderful little show put on by one Steve Cohen out of a suite at the Waldorf Astoria several evenings a week. Mr. Cohen, known as “the millionaires’ magician,” thrills with sleight of hand and a witty banter that evokes the old-school parlor magicians of yore. But the highlight of his show is a segment in which he tells members of the audience things about themselves that he really shouldn’t know. Go see for yourself; it’s mind-boggling. Mr. Cohen has made quite a career out of his talent—he even had a special on the History Channel last week—but he may be in the wrong line of work.
See, there’s another man named Steve Cohen who has also made quite a career out of seemingly knowing things he shouldn’t know. Call him “the billionnaire magician.” Read More
In the hours since Hewlett-Packard stunned investors by announcing an $8.8 billion loss on its acquisition of Autonomy, competing narratives have emerged to describe just what went wrong.
H-P spoke first, explaining that “accounting improprieties” and “outright misrepresentations” committed before it acquired the British search engine maker for $11.1 billion last year led to Read More
It was the morning after the presidential election on the set of Bloomberg Television’s In the Loop, and Leo Hindery Jr., a partner at InterMedia Partners and a sometime adviser to Democratic officials, was pumping his arms in an off-air shimmy.
“Ohio, baby,” he said, naming the point in the previous night’s returns when he’d begun to celebrate. Then the cameras rolled, host Betty Liu repeated the question, and the private equity investor stifled a smile. Read More
Sometimes, sheer absurdity can be a beautiful thing to watch. Like Karl Rove on Fox News on election night. Or Will Arnett in pretty much any role he’s ever played. Or the behavior of Netflix stock over the past few weeks. After a year in which NFLX has Ping-Ponged between $53 and $133, it was suddenly—and absurdly—a safe haven in the midst of a post-Obama-re-election market meltdown. Apple may be taking over the world, but Netflix stock rose 2.5 percent to $78 last week while that of the Cupertino juggernaut fell by more than 5 percent. In hopes of getting by email spam filters and pesky copy editors, I will pose the resultant question as simply and cleanly as I can: WTF?
It’s been quite a month for shareholders of the DVD rental and online video streaming service. Read More
The situation in Greece: With Parliament set to vote today on austerity measures that would raise $17 billion for the cash-strapped government, protestors lobbed Molotov cocktails at police, who answered with giant fire hoses.
The austerity bill, expected to pass by the narrowest margin, would be Greece’s third in four years, raise the retirement age to 67 from 65, lead to layoffs of civil servants and benefit cuts for private sector employees. Read More
Mayor Bloomberg just announced that more than 10,000 people have donated more than $32 million to the Mayor’s Fund for New York City to help with recovery efforts. There are some interesting, if unsurprising names on the list. Big Real Estate—the Rudins, the Speyers, Brookfield Properties, the Related Companies, Glenwood Management among them—were big backers, even as many of their buildings were buffeted by the storm.Lloyd Blankfein made the list, as an individual, as did his firm Goldman Sachs, which is may be smart given the ire directed at Mr. Blankfein for keeping the lights on at Goldman HQ while power was out everywhere else downtown.
There are plenty of other Wall Street outfits, like Barclays, Evercore Partners, Julian Robertson, Stan Druckenmiller and New York Life. Diane Von Ferstenberg, Ralph Lauren, the CFDA, Sketchers and Vogue all donated money (maybe some warm fur coats, too?) as did casino kingpin Steve Wynn, Ron Perelman, the Giants (but no Jets), News Corp., Microsoft, and more. You can see all the cash donors, as well as the companies, like Walmart, Pepsico, North Face, Hunter Boots, JetBlue, Sullivan Street Bakery and Jamba Juice. Read More
The stock market plummeted in morning trading the day after President Barack Obama’s re-election, with the S&P 500 falling 1.9 percent and the Dow Jones Industrial Average both down 2 percent.
Those numbers, however, may not be a ringing indictment of President Obama’s second term: according to Bespoke Investment Group (hat tip to Sam Ro at Business Insider), today’s losses appear to be an amplification of a recent trend: Read More
