6 Most Important Things in Business Today

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 11, 6:01PM EST · Published Sep 13, 4:58AM EDT

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The United States may rekindle trade negotiations with China. According to The Wall Street Journal:

The Trump administration is giving Beijing another chance to try to stave off new tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese exports, asking top officials for a fresh round of trade talks later this month, people briefed on the matter said.

The invitation from Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin comes as some Trump officials said they sense a new vulnerability—and possibly more flexibility—among Chinese officials pressured by U.S. tariffs imposed earlier this year and threats for more

AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) wants to press further into the video streaming business. According to The Wall Street Journal:

AT&T Inc.’s T boss said the company may shift resources to HBO from other parts of its newly acquired Time Warner business to step up programming investments and use data on its customers’ tastes and habits to inform its content bets, part of a plan to compete with streaming giant Netflix Inc.

Chief Executive Randall Stephenson also said the reams of data the telecom and television giant has—from the viewing preferences of its DirecTV subscribers to where customers take their phones—will help build up an advertising analytics business that could benefit the television industry more broadly, helping media companies compete with Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google.

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Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) said it has improved its skills to track members who try to interfere in elections. According to The New York Times:

Mark Zuckerberg began the year by promising to make Facebook safer from election interference around the world. He has spent most of the rest of the year apologizing for not recognizing the problem earlier.

On Wednesday, Mr. Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, published a roughly 3,300-word blog post cataloging all the steps the company has taken.

Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA) plans to improve its customer service. According to Bloomberg:

Tesla Inc. is getting overwhelmed by demand and isn’t responding to customers quickly, Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said, acknowledging the pitfalls of progress his company has been making in producing more electric cars.

“Due to a large increase in vehicle delivery volume in North America, Tesla customers may experience longer response times,” Musk wrote in a tweet Wednesday. “Resolving this is our top priority.”

The global oil supply hit an all-time high. According to CNBC:

Global oil supply was firing on all cylinders in August, reaching a record 100 million barrels per day (bpd), the International Energy Agency revealed in its monthly Oil Market Report Thursday.

Higher output from Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) managed to more than offset seasonal declines from non-OPEC members, although non-OPEC supply was also up 2.6 million bpd in August of the previous year, led by the U.S. The IEA forecasts non-OPEC production to grow by 2 million bpd in 2018 and 1.8 million bpd in in 2019, characterized by “relentless growth led by record output from the U.S.”

Tesla has lost another senior manager. According to CNBC:

Another Tesla executive is leaving the company, the electric car maker confirmed Wednesday.

Vice president of worldwide finance Justin McAnear will leave Tesla to become chief financial officer at an unnamed firm. It is the latest departure for Tesla which has seen tremendous turnover in its ranks as it struggles to grow into a mature mainstream automaker.

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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.