Embattled genetic testing company 23andMe said on Tuesday that it’s started exploring strategic alternatives for a second time, which could include a sale of the company or its assets, a restructuring or a business combination.
The stock, which lost 82% of its value last year, fell 10% in extended trading and was briefly halted.
The announcement coincided with the release of 23andMe’s third-quarter results. Revenue in the company’s consumer services business dropped 8% to $39.6 million from $42.9 million in the same period last year.
The company said it will “need additional liquidity” to fund its operations, and it is looking to raise capital.
This is brilliant… sort of. This is a technique that private companies have used for some time. When a company knows that it will need to downsize, offering a generous buyout for employees is a good way to ease the decision for the employer and the employee. The next step, of course, is letting people go to get the organization down to the right size. I don’t think, however, that this sort of widescale technique has been used in government. And frankly, with all of the employment turmoil our economy has seen through the pandemic – much of that turmoil caused by government employees who sat securely in their jobs – my “give a darn” about their complaints is pretty much gone.
President Donald Trump’s administration is offering federal workers the chance to take a “deferred resignation,” which would mean they agree now to resign but get paid through September.
A senior administration official told NBC News that they expect 5%-10% of the federal workforce to quit, which, they estimate, could lead to around $100 billion in savings.
All full-time federal employees are eligible, except for members of the military, employees of the U.S. Postal Service, positions related to immigration enforcement and national security and other jobs excluded by agencies.
[…]
The offer went out to the federal workforce through a new system the Trump administration set up that gives officials the ability to email all federal employees at once.
The email included a draft resignation letter for them to review. If a person wishes to resign, they will be able to reply with the word “resign.”
The resignation period will begin Tuesday and go through Feb. 6.
“If you choose to remain in your current position, we thank you for your renewed focus on serving the American people to the best of your abilities and look forward to working together as part of an improved federal workforce,” the email that will be sent to federal workers reads. “At this time, we cannot give you full assurance regarding the certainty of your position or agency but should your position be eliminated you will be treated with dignity and will be afforded the protections in place for such positions.”
SeaD Consulting, a food safety technology company, tested shrimp from randomly chosen restaurants in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Biloxi, Mississippi; Galveston, Texas; and Tampa Bay, Florida. Researchers found a significant number of the restaurants were passing off their shrimp as locally sourced, even though they were grown on foreign farms and imported to the U.S.
The cities with the highest “shrimp fraud rate” were Tampa Bay and St. Petersburg, Florida, at 96%, according to SeaD Consulting. Only two of the 44 restaurants sampled were serving authentic shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico, a study found.
The U.S. Navy has instructed its members to avoid using artificial intelligence technology from China’s DeepSeek, CNBC has learned.
In a warning issued by email to “shipmates” on Friday, the Navy said DeepSeek’s AI was not to be used “in any capacity” due to “potential security and ethical concerns associated with the model’s origin and usage.”
A spokesperson for the U.S. Navy confirmed the authenticity of the email and said it was in reference to the Department of the Navy’s Chief Information Officer’s generative AI policy.
The race for domination in artificial intelligence was blown wide open on Monday after the launch of a Chinese chatbot wiped $1tn from the leading US tech index, with one investor calling it a “Sputnik moment” for the world’s AI superpowers.
Investors punished global tech stocks on Monday after the emergence of DeepSeek, a competitor to OpenAI and its ChatGPT tool, shook faith in the US artificial intelligence boom by appearing to deliver the same performance with fewer resources.
The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite closed down 3.1%, with the drop at one point wiping more than $1tn off the index from its closing value of $32.5tn last week, as investors digested the implications of the latest AI model developed by DeepSeek.
The most important aspect of this is to, once again, highlight how we will never take the economic leaps ahead of China that our work and ingenuity deserve until we secure American IP from being stolen. This is a warning shot that China is intent on taking the leadership in the tech sector just as they did in manufacturing.
This also should refocus investment efforts in the US. If the value of a company can be destroyed overnight because China stole their IP, it makes every investment in AI that much riskier.
BEIJING — A record share of U.S. companies in China are accelerating their plans to relocate manufacturing or sourcing, according to a business survey released Thursday.
About 30% of the respondents considered or started such diversification in 2024, surpassing the prior high of 24% in 2022, according to annual surveys from the American Chamber of Commerce in China.
[…]
While India and Southeast Asian countries remained the most popular destination for relocating production, the survey showed 18% of the respondents considered relocating to the U.S. in 2024, up from 16% the prior year.
The majority of U.S. companies did not plan to diversify. Just over two-thirds, or 67%, of respondents said they were not considering relocating manufacturing, a 10 percentage point drop from 2023, the survey showed.
The latest AmCham China survey covered 368 members from Oct. 21 to Nov. 15. Trump was re-elected U.S. president on Nov. 5.
The project, dubbed Stargate, was unveiled at the White House by Trump, Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison.
The executives committed to invest an initial $100 billion and up to $500 billion over the next four years in the project, which will be set up as a separate company.
“What we want to do is we want to keep it in this country,” Trump said of AI, noting that China is a major competitor in the nascent industry.
Stargate’s first joint venture will be to construct data centers in Texas — an effort that is already underway, Ellison said in the Roosevelt Room.
OpenAI later said in an X post that the project “will not only support the re-industrialization of the United States but also provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies.”
Softbank’s Son will be the chairman of Stargate, while semiconductor company Arm, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle, and OpenAI will be “the key initial technology partners,” OpenAI said in the post.
This is yet another feel-good idea that will have negative consequences. The entire point of a credit score is to help lenders gauge the amount of risk a person has and the person’s ability to pay off a new debt. Medical debt is still debt that a person must pay. By hiding the medical debt, it is giving the lenders the false impression that the borrower has a greater ability to pay than they actually do. The result is that lenders will lend money to more people who can’t actually afford it. When they can’t pay it back, both the lender and the borrower will be the worse for it. This is harmful policy.
Live within your means and pay cash. Then you don’t have to worry about your credit score.
In a major change that could affect millions of Americans’ credit scores, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Tuesday finalized a rule to remove medical debt from consumer credit reports.
The rule would erase an estimated $49 billion in unpaid medical bills from the credit reports of roughly 15 million Americans, the CFPB said.
That could help boost those borrowers’ credit scores by an average of 20 points, helping them qualify for mortgages and other loans.
President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday announced a $20 billion foreign investment to build new data centers across the United States.
Emirati billionaire Hussain Sajwani, a Trump associate and founder of the property development company DAMAC Properties, is pledging “at least” that amount, the president-elect said at his Florida home, Mar-a-Lago.
“They may go double, or even somewhat more than double, that amount of money,” Trump said of Sajwani’s company.
The “first phase” of the plan will take place in Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan and Indiana, Trump said.
Sajwani suggested that the Republican’s election spurred him to commit to the investment.
Ouch. This is the stuff I want Trump focusing on when he assumes office – not vendettas or side issues. Border. Economy.
Continuing claims, the total number of Americans collecting jobless benefits, climbed by 46,000 to 1.91 million for the week of Dec. 14. That’s more than analysts projected and the most since the week of Nov. 13, 2021 when the labor market was still recovering from the COVID-19 jobs wipeout in the spring of 2020.
The rising level of continuing claims suggests that some who are receiving benefits are finding it harder to land new jobs. That could mean that demand for workers is waning, even though the economy remains strong.
This season, 36% of American consumers took on holiday debt, according to a new survey from LendingTree.
Those who racked up balances this season took on an average of $1,181 in debt, upfrom $1,028 in 2023. However, that is still down from $1,549 in 2022, LendingTree found.
Less than half — 44% — of the people who took on debt expected to acquire those balances, a sign that this holiday season is still financially challenging for many people, according to Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree.
The biggest problem isChina’s shift from traditional gasoline-powered cars in recent years to electric vehicles or plug-in hybrids, which now make up a majority of its market. The country had introduced policies and incentives that pushed buyers towards EVs, where they found better cars and better values in the Chinese brands.
“Ten years ago, President Xi Jinping and the Chinese automakers decided: ‘We have been chasing global automakers in internal combustion engine vehicles, and we’re not catching up. We’re going whole hog into electric,’” said Dunne.
Western automakers tried to stay the course with gasoline-powered cars, and for the most part, so did their JV partners. Now those companies — other than Tesla, which has a factory in Shanghai — are trailing far behind in an effort to keep up with lower priced EVs and hybrids from Chinese automakers, such as BYD.
It was a massive miscalculation by Western automakers, said Bill Russo, head of Shanghai-based investment advisory firm Automobility and head of Chrysler’s Northeast Asia operations from 2004 to 2008.
Awesome. I’m envisioning a bunch of chubby Wisconsinites making weight loss drugs and it brings me joy.
Eli Lilly said on Thursday it will invest $3 billion to expand the manufacturing plant it bought in Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin earlier this year, as it scrambles to meet soaring demand for its weight-loss and diabetes drugs.
The new investment in the factory, which it acquired from Nexus Pharmaceuticals, will help boost production of Lilly’s powerful weight-loss drug Zepbound as well as its diabetes treatments and other medicines, the company said.
“Today’s announcement represents our single largest U.S. manufacturing investment outside our home state of Indiana and will add to our ability to expand capacity to make both our existing and future pipeline of medicines,” said Edgardo Hernandez, Lilly’s president of global manufacturing.
[…]
Lilly, which has become the world’s most valuable healthcare company worth over $790 billion, said it plans to start construction on the expansion next year, and previously said it expects production at the facility to begin at the end of 2025.
The company said it expects to add 750 jobs to the Wisconsin plant, which already has more than 100, including operators, technicians, engineers and scientists.
SEATTLE (Reuters) – Boeing’s U.S. West Coast factory workers accepted a new contract offer on Monday, ending a bitter seven-week strike that halted most jet production and deepened a financial crisis at the troubled planemaker.
The union said members voted 59% in favor of the new contract, which includes a 38% pay rise spread over four years, easing pressure on new Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg after two previous offers were voted down in recent weeks.
Shares of the planemaker were up nearly 2% in premarket trading on Tuesday.
“This is a victory. We can hold our heads high,” Jon Holden the union’s lead negotiator, told members after the results were announced. “Now it’s our job to get back to work.”
Ouch. But government continues to add jobs as the private sector contracts.
Total nonfarm payroll employment was essentially unchanged in October (+12,000), and the unemployment rate was unchanged at 4.1 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment continued to trend up in health care and government. Temporary help services lost jobs. Employment declined in manufacturing due to strike activity.
[…]
The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for August was revised down by 81,000, from +159,000 to +78,000, and the change for September was revised down by 31,000, from +254,000 to +223,000. With these revisions, employment in August and September combined is 112,000 lower than previously reported.
A growing number of companies are bringing automation to agriculture. It could ease the sector’s deepening labor shortage, help farmers manage costs, and protect workers from extreme heat. Automation could also improve yields by bringing greater accuracy to planting, harvesting, and farm management, potentially mitigating some of the challenges of growing food in an ever-warmer world.
But many small farmers and producers across the country aren’t convinced. Barriers to adoption go beyond steep price tags to questions about whether the tools can do the jobs nearly as well as the workers they’d replace. Some of those same workers wonder what this trend might mean for them, and whether machines will lead to exploitation.
I’ve been to Buc-ee’s many times. It’s a great place to get gas, a sandwich, a change of clothes, some jerky, and a deer stand. It’s fun. It’s not a place to necessarily get your morning coffee or just a quick fill up. There’s no doubt, however, that it’s a draw. Buc-ee’s are almost always busy. I prefer a Kwik Trip for everyday use.
This article is annoying because the reporter doesn’t actually do the work to put the various candidates on record on whether or not they would support Buc-ee’s or not. The article says that the future of Buc-ee’s in Wisconsin depends on the outcome, but doesn’t give voters any insight into which candidates favor it and which ones don’t. And I don’t think it’s necessarily a partisan issue. These issues normally come down to local preference and tolerance for corporate welfare.
As a result, the proposed Buc-ee’s plan includes a $15 million upgrade to the Interstate 39/90/94 interchange. Without it, the convenience store is likely to cause traffic to back up onto the interstate, he said.
Buc-ee’s plans to reimburse 47% of the cost of the interchange project, Chang said, leaving local officials to figure out the rest. In June, he told the Journal Sentinel that the village was brainstorming ways to foot the bill, such as a tax improvement district.
Now, Chang said the village is waiting to see who wins multiple local and state government seats in the Nov. 5 election: Dane County executive, State Assembly District 42 and State Senate District 14.
“We anticipate that we’ll need some political help with the interchange project …,” Chang said. “I hate to make it an issue about elections, but we really are just waiting to see who’s going to help us because we definitely can’t do it ourselves, and we know that the impacts are far-reaching.”
[…]
Buc-ee’s owns the DeForest land and plans to build a 74,000-square-foot store with 120 gas pumps and 20 electric vehicle charging stations. This rivals the brand’s biggest store, a 74,707-square-foot one in Sevierville, Tenn.
[…]
The entire Buc-ee’s project is estimated to cost $50 million, Chang said. The store is expected to bring in $25 million in gross taxable sales per year, including $1 million annually in sales tax revenue for the state. The store will create between 200 and 225 jobs, he said.
Let’s see… an administration that has weaponized every agency for political gain, and a BLS whose monthly reports are almost universally too high and are revised substantially downward in later months, issues a big positive jobs report the month before the presidential election, and then the media all takes the same line that the jobs report supports Harris’ economic agenda?
A hotter-than-expected jobs report released Friday sets up a contrast for the final month of the 2024 campaign as Democrats and Republicans prepare their closing economic arguments.
Bills of lading, the digital receipts of freight containers, show that the delivery mechanisms for insulin and weight-loss drugs rely on East Coast ports for incoming trade.
“Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly are both heavily reliant on the Port of Norfolk,” said William George, director of research at ImportGenius, which tracks the customs data.
In the past year, Novo Nordisk has imported through Norfolk 419 twenty-foot equivalent unit, or TEU, containers worth of pharmaceuticals and injection devices that contain semaglutide, a compound in its branded weight-loss drugs, according to George. “Novo fine syringes commonly used for insulin injections come into the U.S. by ocean freight as well,” he said.
Novo Nordisk has raked in nearly $50 billion in sales from Wegovy and Ozempic, with most of that revenue coming from the U.S., its CEO said in recent testimony before the U.S. Senate.
