After months of drama that we dutifully catalogued right here, the U.S. plan to “force the sale of TikTok’s American operations” to Oracle and Walmart “has been shelved indefinitely.” The forced sale has “languished since last fall in the midst of successful legal challenges to the U.S. government’s effort by TikTok’s owner, China’s ByteDance Ltd.”…...By: Robins Kaplan LLP
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Tesla dropped an incredible $1.5 billion on bitcoin on Monday “and signaled its intent to begin accepting the cryptocurrency as a form of payment, sending prices to a record after the vote of confidence from the EV leader and recent stock-market darling” ......By: Robins Kaplan LLP
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Moved by Covid’s bite out of the energy industry, oil behemoths ExxonMobil and Chevron Corp. have held talks about joining forces, “testing the water for what could be one of the largest corporate mergers ever.”...By: Robins Kaplan LLP
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General Motors announced on Thursday its ambitious plans to “phase out petroleum-powered cars and trucks and sell only vehicles that have zero tailpipe emissions by 2035, a seismic shift by one of the world’s largest automakers that makes billions of dollars today from gas-guzzling pickup trucks and sport-utility vehicles.”...By: Robins Kaplan LLP
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Private equity behemoth Apollo Global Management’s CEO, Leon Black, is stepping down after an outside inquiry by Dechert—“ordered by the firm’s board at Mr. Black’s behest in October”—revealed that Black “had paid more than $150 million to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.” Black “intends to remain chairman of the New York firm, which manages…...By: Robins Kaplan LLP
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U.S. drug giant Merck is shuttering its coronavirus vaccine development “after early trial data showed [its pair of vaccines] failed to generate immune responses comparable to natural infection or existing vaccines.”...By: Robins Kaplan LLP
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Google has threatened to pull its search engine from the entirety of the Australian continent “if the government approved legislation that would force tech companies to pay for journalism shared on their platforms.” Facebook made a similar threat to “block users in Australia from posting or sharing links to news if the bill passed.”...By: Robins Kaplan LLP
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Markets gave a warm welcome to the Biden administration on Wednesday, as strong tech performance and hopes of “large-scale economic stimulus” helped power an across-the-board rally that brought all three major U.S. indices into “record territory”......By: Robins Kaplan LLP
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During its Q4 earnings report yesterday, Netflix announced a significant departure from past practice: it’s done borrowing money (for now, at least). After borrowing “over $16 billion to feed its titanic appetite for content” over the past decade, the ‘Flix is reporting that it’s not only making enough money to pay off its loans while…...By: Robins Kaplan LLP
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Fiat Chrysler and France’s PSA Group completed their mega-auto-merger first agreed-to in late 2019, “creating Stellantis NV, a global auto-making giant that executives say will have the heft needed to compete in the fast-changing industry”......By: Robins Kaplan LLP
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