5 Most Important Things in Business Today

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Mar 13, 3:07PM EDT · Published Sep 14, 5:04AM EDT

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5 Most Important Things in Business Today — © Wikimedia Commons, Brian Solis

SpaceX may start to take people to the moon. According to The Wall Street Journal:

Elon Musk’s SpaceX, demonstrating its founder and chief executive’s penchant for showmanship, announced that it had signed up the first private passenger seeking to fly around the moon. But the company provided no timetable or other details about the plan.

In a message on Twitter Thursday night, the closely held Space Exploration Technologies Corp. said the mission is slated to use its largest rocket, dubbed the BFR, which is still under development and, according to industry officials, may be at least a year or two from an initial test flight.

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Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) will expand its fact-checking capacity. According to The Wall Street Journal:

Facebook Inc. will begin fact-checking photographs and videos posted on the social media platform, seeking to close a gap that allowed Russian propagandists to promote false news during the last U.S. presidential election.

The company said Thursday it will use technology and human reviewers to try to staunch what it called in a statement “misinformation in these new visual formats.” Previously, the company’s efforts had been focused on rooting out false articles and links.

Volkswagen will end production of its famous Beetle. According to The Wall Street Journal:

Volkswagen AG is calling it quits for its iconic Beetle, ending an 80-year global run for a car that introduced many Americans to the German brand in the 1960s.

The German auto maker said it would stop building the compact next year at a factory in Mexico, the last plant in the world to make the car.

Sears Holdings Corp. (NASDAQ: SHLD) reported another horrible quarter. According to The Wall Street Journal:

Sears Holdings Corp. is limping into the critical holiday season, after the struggling company reported its quarterly sales fell 26% and it continues to close dozens of stores.

Total revenue plunged by more than $1 billion to $3.18 billion for the three months ending Aug. 4, compared with a year earlier. Sales excluding newly opened or closed stores fell 4.0% at Sears and 3.7% at Kmart locations.

The car industry in China is being battered by tariffs. According to CNBC:

U.S. automakers in China are feeling the most pain as some American companies are getting hurt by new tariffs from both the White House and Beijing, according to a survey released this week from the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai and Beijing-based American Chamber of Commerce in China.

The automobile industry is in the crosshairs of rising trade tensions between the two countries. In July, China raised the tariff on imports of U.S. autos to 40 percent just days after broadly cutting duties on foreign-made vehicles and parts to 15 percent from 25 percent.

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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.