Business

Donald Trump appointed Andrew Ferguson as the next chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, which will bring an end to Lina Khan’s controversial tenure in the job. Mr Ferguson is an FTC commissioner. After his promotion he said the regulator would “end big tech’s vendetta against competition and free speech”. Mr Trump also nominated Mark Meador, an antitrust lawyer, as a commissioner, which will give the Republicans a majority on the FTC.

At the checkout

Meanwhile, a judge imposed an injunction against the merger of Kroger and Albertsons, in an antitrust case brought by the FTC and eight states. A judge in Washington state also issued an injunction in a separate trial. With the supermarket chains’ hopes of combining in ruins, Albertsons sued Kroger for failing to secure the merger.

An American appeals court rejected TikTok’s attempt to overturn the Biden administration’s order to ban it. The government fears the Chinese government uses the app to collect data. The court said the order was constitutional; TikTok had claimed that it violated free speech. Mr Trump, who tried to ban TikTok in his first administration, has said he will now try to save it.

In another blow to the DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) movement, an appeals court struck down Nasdaq’s rules for setting racial and gender targets for the boardrooms of companies that list on the exchange. The Securities and Exchange Commission, which approved the rules, had “intruded into territory far outside” its domain, the court said.

SpaceX has been valued at $350bn, after an increase in the price of shares that are owned by investors and employees. Elon Musk’s rocket company is now the world’s most-valuable start up, surpassing Byte Dance, the parent company of TikTok, which was recently valued at $300bn.

Rupert Murdoch lost his legal attempt to change the terms of the Murdoch family trust so that his eldest son, Lachlan, would control his media empire when he dies. The court reportedly found that Mr Murdoch had acted in “bad faith” in trying to amend the trust. Three of his other children, including his estranged son, James, stood to lose their influence. The siblings apparently started discussing the matter in 2023 following an episode of “Succession”, in which the head of a family business dies.

Police charged Luigi Mangione, a software engineer with an Ivy League education, with the murder of Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare. Mr Mangione was caught carrying a document expressing “ill will” towards corporations, describing health-insurance companies as parasites.

General Motors overhauled its Cruise autonomous-driving project and scrapped its development work in robotaxis “given the considerable time and resources that would be needed to scale the business”. It will instead focus on self-driving systems for personal vehicles, which GM says it is “fully committed to”.

Following the success of its first fully electric sedan car, Xiaomi, a Chinese tech company better known for its smartphones, announced that it would launch its first sport-utility vehicle next June or July. The YU7 will run on batteries supplied by CATL, a Chinese manufacturer that has just signed a deal to build a $4.3bn battery plant in Spain in a joint venture with Stellantis.

Google unveiled a new quantum-computing chip that can hold a stable state for up to an hour, an important milestone in building a useful quantum computer, though that remains some way off yet.

The European Central Bank cut interest rates by another quarter of a percentage point, which takes its deposit facility to 3%. The ECB’s main focus now is avoiding a recession in the euro zone.

America’s annual rate of inflation rose slightly in November to 2.7%. The core inflation rate, stripping out energy and food prices, held for the third month in a row at 3.3%.

Nippon Life, a Japanese insurance company, struck a deal to acquire Resolution Life, a privately held global insurer, for $10.6bn. And Aviva is to take over Direct Line in a £3.6bn ($4.6bn) transaction. The combined company will hold a fifth of Britain’s motor- and home-insurance market.

Omnicom agreed to buy Interpublic, in a $13bn deal that creates the world’s biggest advertising agency by revenue. Omnicom said the combined company would accelerate “significant opportunities created by new technologies”, namely artificial intelligence, and give it better leverage to counter the power of the tech giants in digital advertising.

Wildest dreams

Taylor Swift’s 18-month Eras tour came to end. Selling 10m tickets for 149 shows the tour’s revenues of $2.1bn are by far the most for a concert series. Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres concerts (there have been 177 so far) are the next most lucrative, taking in over $1bn, followed by Elton John’s farewell tour, which raked in $939m. The Rocket Man’s final tour is the subject of a new documentary film from Disney titled “Never Too Late”, or Never Too Old, as some call it.■