6 Most Important Things in Business Today

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 11, 10:03PM EST · Published Jun 22, 5:13AM EDT

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6 Most Important Things in Business Today — © Thinkstock

Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA) will shutter part of its solar business. According to Reuters:

Electric car maker Tesla Inc’s move last week to cut 9 percent of its workforce will sharply downsize the residential solar business it bought two years ago in a controversial $2.6 billion deal, according to three internal company documents and seven current and former Tesla solar employees.

The latest cuts to the division that was once SolarCity – a sales and installation company founded by two cousins of Tesla CEO Elon Musk – include closing about a dozen installation facilities, according to internal company documents, and ending a retail partnership with Home Depot Inc that the current and former employees said generated about half of its sales.

America’s largest banks passed Federal Reserve stress tests. According to The Wall Street Journal:

The Federal Reserve determined the largest U.S. banks were healthy enough to withstand a severe economic downturn and would continue lending during a crisis, as the industry posts record profits and prepares for a wave of regulatory relief.

The Fed’s “stress test” scenario for the 35 largest bank holding companies, which hold 80% of the assets at banks operating in the U.S., found the firms were “strongly capitalized” and would retain adequate capital levels in severely adverse conditions, according to the first round of results released Thursday by the central bank.

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Fiat Chrysler Automobiles N.V. (NYSE: FCAU) topped a list of car recalls. According to The Wall Street Journal:

A glitch in its vehicles’ cruise-control feature has vaulted Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV to the No. 1 spot in a category in the U.S. most car companies want to avoid: recalls.

The Italian-U.S. auto maker launched a recall campaign in late May to address a flaw in more than five million vehicles that could prevent drivers from canceling cruise control should an “unlikely sequence of events” occur, the company said.

A senior official at Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) has lost most of his responsibility. According to CNBC:

Just three months after the head of Amazon’s massive marketplace left the company for WeWork, the highest ranking remaining executive in the business has been stripped of much of his authority.

Peter Faricy, the vice president of the Amazon Marketplace and a 12-year company veteran, currently has no direct reports except for his assistant, according to an internal document viewed by CNBC. Many of the functions previously overseen by Faricy or his former boss, Sebastian Gunningham, who joined WeWork in March, appear to have been reassigned to executives in Amazon’s retail group, led by Doug Herrington.

A new version of TV show “Roseanne” will relaunch without Roseanne Barr.

Disney-owned broadcaster ABC is moving ahead with a spinoff of the hit sitcom “Roseanne,” which was cancelled in May following a racist comment from the show’s star.

ABC announced on Thursday the spinoff was greenlit straight to series, with an order of 10 episodes and a working title “The Conners.” Roseanne Barr, the star of the original sitcom, will have no financial or creative involvement in the new series, according to ABC.

SpaceX took another step toward commercial use of its rockets. According to CNBC:

SpaceX’s behemoth Falcon Heavy rocket has won U.S. Air Force’s certification before even launching a second time, marking another milestone for CEO Elon Musk’s space venture.

The Department of Defense said Thursday that SpaceX won a $130 million for a contract to launch the Air Force Space Command-52 satellite into orbit. The military said SpaceX beat out another bid, although it did not specify the competing company or provide further details on the competing offer. The work for the contract is expected to be complete in just over two years.

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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.