As gold surged this year to its highest price ever, Xena Lin joined the frenzy by making monthly purchases of gold “beans,” pebble-like morsels of the precious metal. For Ms. Lin, a 25-year-old administrative worker in southern China, the $80 beans — small enough to rest on a fingertip and weighing about one-thirtieth of an … Read more
Berkshire Hathaway on Saturday reported strong operating earnings, which track the actual profit that its array of businesses produce, and a record pile of cash in the first quarter, underscoring the health of the conglomerate run by Warren E. Buffett. The results provided a positive backdrop for Berkshire’s annual shareholder meeting in downtown Omaha, the … Read more
This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times. It was in northeastern Pennsylvania that Min Matheson earned her reputation for fearlessness. Over her 20 years as director of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union there, she repeatedly faced down mobsters … Read more
The American investment firm 777 Partners, whose bid to buy the English Premier League soccer team Everton has been on hold for months amid doubts about the company’s finances, was accused by one of its lenders on Friday of running a yearslong fraud scheme worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The accusation came in a … Read more
Paramount’s proposed merger with Skydance has been the most tumultuous media deal in years. Now it has taken yet another turn after the exclusivity period for negotiations expired without an agreement in hand. A month ago, a special committee of Paramount’s board agreed to enter into exclusive talks with Skydance — a Hollywood studio run … Read more
Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, blindsided competitors, suppliers and his own employees this week by reversing course on his aggressive push to build electric vehicle chargers in the United States, a major priority of the Biden administration. Mr. Musk’s decision to lay off the 500-member team responsible for installing charging stations, and to … Read more
Something was very wrong with Jackie Kirks’s food stamp card. While standing at the checkout line in a cavernous Albertsons grocery store in Long Beach, Calif., last December, Ms. Kirks was told that she didn’t have enough money in her account to pay for food. “That’s impossible,” she told the cashier. Ms. Kirks, 70, knew … Read more
Near the end of 2022, Lucas Bolt, an environmental artist and Lego enthusiast in Amsterdam, was working on a design for a Lego set the company had crowdsourced to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons, the tabletop role-playing game. “I spent two very intense weeks working on it, every night, every weekend, all … Read more
Edens isn’t daunted. Over dinner one night, he told me about a hotel that he recently built in Jackson Hole, Wyo. The project included a club where members could store skis and have their cars parked by valets. Everyone, including partners, told him it wouldn’t work. “A lot of the locals said, ‘That’s not Jackson … Read more
Desperate to stem protests that have convulsed campuses across the country, a small number of universities have agreed to reconsider their investments in companies that do business with Israel. The deals, which have eased tension on campuses with only a few days left before students break for the summer, would have been unthinkable even a … Read more