6 Most Important Things in Business This Morning
France wants to end sales of gasoline and diesel powered cars, Microsoft plans to cut close to 4,000 jobs and Berkshire Hathaway will buy a huge electric energy company.
This post may contain links from our sponsors and affiliates, and Flywheel Publishing may receive compensation for actions taken through them.
France wants to end sales of gas and diesel cars by 2040.
Tesla Inc.’s (NASDAQ: TSLA) stock plunge took away its crown as the number one U.S. car company by market cap. General Motors Co. (NYSE: GM) took back first place.
Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) plans to cut close to 4,000 sales and marketing jobs as it moves rapidly into the cloud business.
Samsung said its second-quarter profits would be a record, up nearly 75% year over year. A rise in memory chip prices helped fuel the improvement.
[nativounit]
The next worldwide cyberattack on business could cost insurance companies billions of dollars. According to Bloomberg:
Cyber crime insurers largely avoided costly claims from the recent attacks that hit business around the globe. The next global virus could change that.
“It’s exceptionally likely that we will see an event over the next months that will seriously affect insurers,” Graeme Newman, chief innovation officer at CFC Underwriting, said in an interview. “It would only need a combination of WannaCry’s wide reach and Petya’s destructive force to cost cyber insurers something like $2.5 billion, or a full year of gross premium income in the market.”
Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE: BRK-B) will buy a huge electric energy company. According to Reuters:
Berkshire Hathaway Energy, a unit of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc, said on Friday it would acquire Oncor Electric Delivery Company LLC in a deal that puts Oncor’s equity value at about $11.25 billion.
Berkshire Hathaway Energy said it agreed to buy reorganized Energy Future Holdings Corp (EFH), Dallas-based Oncor’s bankrupt parent, for $9 billion in cash.
The deal is a bold bet by Buffett that he could win approval for the acquisition from Texas regulators, after they blocked two earlier attempts to sell Oncor, one of the largest U.S. power transmission networks, to other companies.
[wallst_email_signup]
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
