Media

6 Most Important Things in Business Today

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Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) will construct a huge facility in Texas. According to Reuters:

Apple Inc is investing $1 billion to build a new campus in North Austin, Texas and will spend another $10 billion for new data centers as part of a five-year investment aimed at creating 20,000 jobs in the United States.

The Cupertino-based company said on Thursday it would also to set up new sites in Seattle, San Diego and Culver City, California and expand operations in Pittsburgh, New York and Boulder, Colorado over the next three years.

The Boy Scouts may go bankrupt. According to The Wall Street Journal:

The Boy Scouts of America is considering filing for bankruptcy protection as it faces dwindling membership and escalating legal costs related to lawsuits over how it handled allegations of sex abuse.

Leaders of the Boy Scouts, one of the country’s largest youth organizations, have hired law firm Sidley Austin LLP for assistance with a possible chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, according to people familiar with the matter.

Tennessee was hit by an earthquake. According to The Wall Street Journal:

Engineers are inspecting the Watts Bar Nuclear Plant in Tennessee as a precaution after a magnitude-4.4 earthquake struck nearby.

The U.S. Geological Survey says the earthquake struck eastern Tennessee and could be felt in Atlanta.

The light earthquake occurred Wednesday around 4:14 a.m. about 7 miles northeast of Decatur, Tenn. About 13 minutes later, a 3.3 magnitude aftershock struck.

The FBI made comments about the dangers of Chinese spying. According to The Wall Street Journal:

Chinese corporate espionage has metastasized into a critical national and economic security threat, top federal investigative officials told U.S. senators on Wednesday, issuing stark warnings that Beijing is exploiting American technology to develop its own economy.

The disclosures, at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, came as the Trump administration is preparing to lay out an unprecedented amount of evidence in coming days about Chinese spying and hacking operations designed to steal secrets from U.S. companies.

America will continue to dominate oil markets. According to CNBC:

The U.S. might have been left out from the big summit between OPEC and non-OPEC producers in Vienna last week but the country’s influence over global oil markets is only going to get stronger, the International Energy Agency (IEA) stated in its latest report.

“While the U.S. was not present in Vienna, nobody could ignore its growing influence,” the IEA said in its December report, published Thursday. “Last week’s meeting reminded us that the Big Three of oil – Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United States – whose total liquids production now comprises about 40 percent of the global total, are the dominant players,” the IEA said.

The head of the company that controls MoviePass holds stock that is close to worthless. According to CNBC:

At this time last year, MoviePass was the darling of the entertainment industry, boasting millions of subscribers and a cult following. But since then, the business model has proved faulty, causing the company to repeatedly pare down its once-generous subscription plan. That prompted a swift backlash from its subscribers.

But it’s not just movie buffs who are feeling hurt by the company. Ted Farnsworth, CEO of MoviePass parent company Helios and Matheson Analytics, has taken a financial beating. Thanks in part to the failures of MoviePass, $7.25 million worth of Helios and Matheson stock Farnsworth was awarded in 2017 was worth less than $50 as of Dec. 8, as Quartz pointed out after a Dec. 10 SEC filing by the company.

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