6 Most Important Business Stories Today

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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6 Most Important Business Stories Today

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Japanese car supplier Takata has filed for bankruptcy in both the United States and Japan. It will be bought for $1.6 billion by Key Safety Systems. Millions of flawed airbags caused a massive number of lawsuits against the company. Its legal liabilities are likely well into the billions of dollars. The bankruptcy was expected.

Daniel Loeb’s Third Point LLC hedge fund took a $3.5 billion position in Nestle. His firm released comments:

Despite having arguably the best positioned portfolio in the consumer packaged goods industry, Nestle shares have significantly underperformed most of their U.S. and European consumer staples peers on a three year, five year, and ten year total shareholder return basis.

SpaceX launched a rocket that carried satellites yesterday. It followed a launch of another rocket the day before. SpaceX has challenged the industry with reusable rockets, which it says will bring down the cost of putting satellites into orbit.

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Hackers put pro-ISIS messages on several Ohio state websites, including that of Governor John Kasich. He was a candidate for president in the last election. The governor’s office issued comments that included: “… as soon as we were notified of the situation, we immediately began to correct it, and will continue to monitor until fully resolved.”

According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) will fund a number of original programs, putting it into competition with Netflix Inc. (NASDAQ: NFLX) and Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN). Reuters reported on the plans:

The social networking giant has indicated that it was willing to commit to production budgets as high as $3 million per episode

Facebook is hoping to target audiences from ages 13 to 34, with a focus on the 17 to 30 range

The company is expected to release episodes in a traditional manner, instead of dropping an entire season in one go like Netflix Inc

“Transformers: The Last Knight” was crushed at the box office, as it posted the worst opening weekend of the five-film Transformers franchise. According to Box Office Mojo:

Transformers: The Last Knight brought in a mere $69.1 million over its first five days in release, an estimated $45.3 million of which over the three-day weekend. While this is relatively on par with the $70 million industry expectations, it puts added pressure on the $217 million production’s international run.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

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.

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