6 Most Important Stories in Business Today

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 12, 9:24AM EST · Published Aug 7, 4:47AM EDT

Follow 24/7 Wall St. on Google

This post may contain links from our sponsors and affiliates, and Flywheel Publishing may receive compensation for actions taken through them.

6 Most Important Stories in Business Today — © Thinkstock

During a weekend of particularly poor ticket sales, “The Dark Tower” took the top spot at the box office with receipts of $19.5 million. The film is based on a novel by Steven King. “Dunkirk” continued its strong run. According to Box Office Mojo:

Dunkirk finished in second with an estimated $17.6 million, dropping only 34% in its third weekend in release for a domestic cume just shy of $135 million. Internationally, Dunkirk delivered an estimated $25 million from 63 markets bringing its overseas cume to $180.6 million for a global tally that now stands at $314.2 million. Looking ahead, the film opens in Italy at the end of August followed by early September releases in China and Japan.

According to the Financial Times, the United States has collected $150 billion in fines for actions taken by financial firms during the financial crisis that helped trigger the Great Recession.

The value of bitcoins continued to surge and rose 16% Friday to $3,292 apiece.

[nativounit]
Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL) struggled with the fallout of a memo from one of its workers that put the employee diversity efforts of the company in a harsh light. According to Bloomberg:

Illustrating how Silicon Valley is grappling with the role of women in technology, Google’s new diversity chief forcefully pushed back against a male worker’s argument that the company has a “politically correct monoculture” that ignores differences between the sexes.

The engineer, in a memo that has gone viral, provided a detailed list of what he called possible “non-bias” causes for the under-representation of women in the industry, saying that the company’s left-leaning workplace culture prevents honest discussion of the issue.

Facebook Inc.’s (NASDAQ: FB) Mark Zuckerberg probably isn’t running for president after all. According to The New York Post:

Facebook founder Zuckerberg, worth some $70 billion, is continuing to build out his ever-growing political team from within his “foundation,” presumably to enhance philanthropic efforts. Yeah, right.

Let’s be clear: Just because President Trump, a businessman with billions of his own, successfully squashed 17 Republican primary opponents and one Democratic opponent, it does not mean any random billionaire can win the presidency.

[wallst_email_signup]

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.