Author: starbpo

In order to make a bigger effect on the world, OpenAI, a huge AI startup worth about $157 billion, wants to become a public benefit corporation, or B-Corp. OpenAI said it wants to turn holding stakes in its business into ordinary shares, or common shares of stock, but it didn’t give a time frame. This structure points the way toward the company becoming a publicly traded one. “Once more, we need to raise more money than we thought,” the group wrote on its blog late Thursday. “Investors want to help us, but we need standard equity and less structural customization…

The shares of Apple Inc. have done something that hasn’t happened in 14 years and almost never in the company’s 44-year public history. However, this might not be such a good thing for investors over the next month. As of late Friday trading, AAPL -1.32% fell 1.6%, marking the first drop in six days. Apple stock was still up 0.1% for the week, but it was about to end a five-week run of weekly gains of at least 2%. A BTIG technical strategist said that the company had not risen by 2% or more for five weeks in a row…

In a letter sent to congressional leaders Friday afternoon, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that her agency will have to start taking “extraordinary measures,” or special accounting moves, as soon as January 14 to keep the country from going over the debt cap. In a letter to the leaders of the House and Senate, Yellen said, “Treasury expects to hit the statutory debt ceiling between January 14 and January 23.” At that point, the government would have to take extraordinary steps to keep it from going over the debt ceiling, which has been put on hold until January 1,…

A day before he takes office on January 20, President-elect Donald Trump made a request to the Supreme Court on Friday to put a hold on a law that would prohibit or mandate the sale of TikTok. He stated that he wanted to “negotiate a resolution” to save the social media platform while also addressing the purported national-security concerns that are posed by the site. John Sauer, whom Trump has appointed to the position of solicitor general, argued in a court brief that the timing of the ban interfered with Trump’s “ability to manage the United States’ foreign policy and…

Buffett’s company, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., has been busy buying stock in an internet domain-name registry company over the past week in order to become the biggest shareholder in that business. There was a Form 4 report with the SEC late Thursday night that Buffett and Berkshire made. It said that Berkshire had bought 143,424 shares of VeriSign Inc. VRSN +0.60% for $28.55 million over the three sessions that ended Dec. 24. Berkshire bought 377,736 VeriSign shares for a total of $73.95 million over the six sessions leading up to December 24. This means that the average price paid for the…

What makes the Federal Reserve’s plans to cut interest rates next year so Scrooge-like is how strong the economy is right now. The most recent report on GDP over the summer is another warning. In the third quarter, the U.S. economy grew at a very fast 3.1% yearly rate, and it looks like that will happen again in the last three months of the year. Gross domestic product, which is the economy’s official rating, went up from 2.8% to 2.9% after the government got new data. In each of the last two quarters, the U.S. economy has grown by at…

Some well-known Republicans have said they want the child tax credit to be expanded as they get ready to deliver a tax package next year. That’s where Vice President-elect J.D. Vance is. He brought up the idea of raising the credit from $2,000 to $5,000 per child four months ago. This week, Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley called for an expansion in the same way, saying that he is following Vance’s lead and wants to give each kid $5,000. “People who work and have kids voted for President Trump.” “They should get a big tax cut from next year’s tax…

The year 2024 has been very rough for people with college loans. A huge amount of debt was forgiven for millions of people, including government workers, people who had been paying back their loans for decades, and people who were scammed by their schools. Other borrowers saw the Biden administration propose broad loan forgiveness plans, which were then criticized by opponents and taken back. More than a million people are still in the dark because two federal courts stopped a new repayment plan that the Biden administration pushed as a way to help struggling borrowers. And it looks like it…

How do you make a college football team that’s just okay great? What about a $20 million war chest and one of the best NFL coaches of all time? Last week, the University of North Carolina hired Bill Belichick, the former coach of the New England Patriots, to try to take its football program to the next level. The team hasn’t won an Atlantic Coast Conference title since 1980. In 2024, UNC’s football team went 6-6. The school is better known for its basketball teams. After the news came out, it was said that UNC’s name, image, and likeness (NIL)…

Anything too pricey for a billionaire? It turns out that the answer is yes. A new study from Goldman Sachs called “Getting in the Game: The Future of Sports Investing” says that individual billionaires may no longer be able to afford to own sports teams. The report said, “In general, valuation growth has outpaced the ability of high-net-worth individuals to take control ownership of teams.” In recent years, sports teams have become more valuable, especially in the U.S. This is mostly because of the media and broadcasting deals that the National Basketball Association, the National Hockey League, and Major League…