(Bloomberg) — What’s buzzing on social media this morning:
BUZZING COMPANIES
Tesla CEO Elon Musk inserted himself into another squabble about Constitutional rights, but this time he’s waging his battle in the Supreme Court, not on Twitter.
Musk joined an amicus brief filed last week that challenges the constitutionality of the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission’s “no deny” rule, implemented after defendants enter settlements with the regulatory agency.
Musk is under a 2018 agreement that required all his Tesla-related tweets to be screened by a company official. Musk and his fellow petitioners, including Mark Cuban, argue the “no deny” rule hampers the flow of information critical to healthy markets. Regulators are likely to argue that the rule is in place to uphold the legitimacy of the SEC and prevent defendants from publicly suggesting that they entered settlements despite not having done anything that deserved an enforcement action.
Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway is back in the stock-buying game, adding more Occidental Petroleum Corp. and Chevron shares and striking an agreement to buy Alleghany Corp. for $11.6 billion in cash.
After hoarding cash for roughly the last three years, the company’s ended the first quarter with $106 billion, the lowest level since the third quarter of 2018. Berkshire, which is holding its annual investor day Saturday, also slowed its share repurchases.
Bobby Kotick, the chief executive of Activision Blizzard Inc., could net as much as $520 million if Microsoft Corp.’s deal to purchase the video game developer closes. In a securities filing Friday, Activision said Kotick would receive $14.4 million in severance if he is terminated. Wall Street is betting that Biden antitrust enforcers could unravel the merger.
BUZZING HEADLINES:
The New York Mets threw a combined no-hitter against the Philadelphia Phillies on Friday, only the second no-hitter in the team’s history. Five Mets’ pitchers, lead by starter Tyler Megill, chipped in on what was the 17th combined no-hitter in Major League Baseball history.
Madison Cawthorn, the Republican Congressman from North Carolina, has found himself in more hot water just a week after being detained for a second time carrying a gun at an airport. A video has surfaced of Cawthorn being groped in a car by another man whom the New York Times reports is the lawmaker’s senior aide. Cawthorn, who describes himself as a hyper-masculine Christian Conservative, has also been hit with an ethics complaint. Cawthorn has said he’s the target of a “drip campaign.”
Former Attorney General William Barr said it would be a “big mistake” for former President Donald Trump to be the GOP’s nominee in 2024.
“I don’t think he should be our nominee — the Republican Party nominee,” Barr said during an interview with Sean Spicer on Newsmax. Although Trump has not formally declared he will run in 2024, most political observers expert him to do so. In January, he called himself the “45th and 47th” president in a video filmed by a golfing buddy.
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2022 Bloomberg L.P.
