Big Business This Week is a guided tour through the biggest market stories of the week, from winning stocks to brutal dips to the facts and forecasts generating buzz on Wall Street.
ESPN'S BIG BET
ESPN is going all in on sports betting with a naming deal that will rebrand an existing app as ESPN Bet. Penn Entertainment will pay $1.5 billion to use one of the most recognizable sports brands in the U.S. It's a surprising move for ESPN, which is co-owned by Disney, a brand whose family-friendly image seems to be in contrast to the vice of gambling. Penn also announced it sold Barstool Sports back to founder Dave Portnoy, who was itching to get control back.
DISNEY STREAMING CRACKDOWNS
Speaking of the House of Mouse, Disney CEO Bob Iger announced plans to make its streaming services profitable by this fall, and that means customers will have to pay up. The price of ad-free Disney+ and Hulu are going up $3 per month to about $14 and $18, respectively. The company is also planning to crack down on password sharing. Making the service less appealing to customers comes at an interesting time: Disney+ reported the second straight quarter of subscriber losses. Still, with everything going on this week, Disney ended the week up almost 3 percent.
WEWORK STILL DOESN'T WORK
Let's time travel back to 2019: nobody had heard of Covid-19, SPACs were all the rage, and co-working giant WeWork had taken the real estate work by storm…until it all came crashing down. Just as the company was going to IPO with a $47 billion valuation, questions about its finances and founder Adam Neumann's governance sank it. SoftBank took over, Naumann was ousted, and the company went public in 2021. Now, it warns it could go be in trouble again if it can't renegotiate its leases, control spending and find additional sources of cash in the next year.
CAMPBELL SOUP BUYS RAO'S
Campbell Soup announced it will be snapping up the company behind Rao's pasta sauces for about $2.7 billion. Fans of the popular tomato sauces were quick to register worries that Campbell will mess with the beloved recipes, but CEO Mark Clouse told CNBC, “We’re not touching it! Anyone who thinks we’re going to touch the sauce, no." Campbell Soup ended the week down less than 1 percent.
LUXURY FASHION MERGER
Coach's parent company Tapestry announced it will buy Capri Holdings, the company that runs some of fashion's biggest names, like Versace, Michael Kors and Jimmy Choo. When the $8.5 billion deal closes next year, Tapestry hopes it will put it in a better position to compete with LVMH and Kering – two luxury fashion powerhouses. Capri Holdings' stock jumped 50 percent on the news this week while Tapestry dropped 17 percent.
At 100 years old, the Goodyear Blimp is an ageless star in the sky. The 246-foot-long airship will be in the background of the Daytona 500 — flying roughly 1,500 feet above Daytona International Speedway, actually — to celebrate its greatest anniversary tour. Even though remote camera technologies are improving regularly and changing the landscape of aerial footage, the blimp continues to carve out a niche. At Daytona, with the usual 40-car field racing around a 2½-mile superspeedway, views from the blimp aptly provide the scope of the event.
You'll just have to wait for interest rates (and prices) to go down. Plus, this deal's a steel, the big carmaker wedding is off, and bribery is back, baby!
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem: Restaurants are struggling with record-high U.S. egg prices, but their omelets, scrambles and huevos rancheros may be part of the problem. Breakfast is booming at U.S. eateries. First Watch, a restaurant chain that serves breakfast, brunch and lunch, nearly quadrupled its locations over the past decade to 570. Fast-food chains like Starbucks and Wendy's added more egg-filled breakfast items. In normal times, egg producers could meet the demand. But a bird flu outbreak that has forced them to slaughter their flocks is making supplies scarcer and pushing up prices. Some restaurants like Waffle House have added a surcharge to offset their costs.
William Falcon, CEO and Founder of Lightning AI, discusses the ongoing feud between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, and how everyday people can use AI in their lives.
U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum “will not go unanswered,” European Union chief Ursula von der Leyen vowed on Tuesday, adding that they will trigger toug
The Trump administration has ordered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to stop nearly all its work, effectively shutting down the agency that was created to protect consumers after the 2008 financial crisis and subprime mortgage-lending scandal. Russell Vought is the newly installed director of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought directed the CFPB in a Saturday night email to stop work on proposed rules, to suspend the effective dates on any rules that were finalized but not yet effective, and to stop investigative work and not begin any new investigations. The agency has been a target of conservatives since President Barack Obama created it following the 2007-2008 financial crisis.
