Financial Mindset

It’s a tale as old as time, or at least as old as TikTok: chicken nuggets lovingly topped with a dab of caviar. McDonald’s is embracing the trend this Valentine’s Day with a limited-time McNugget Caviar kit. The free kit, which will be available on McNuggetCaviar.com on Feb. 10, pairs a one-ounce tin of Paramount’s Siberian sturgeon caviar with a $25 McDonald’s gift card to buy McNuggets. McDonald’s is even throwing in some crème fraiche and a caviar spoon. Valentine’s Day is big business for U.S. restaurants. It’s the second-most popular holiday for dining out after Mother’s Day, according to the National Restaurant Association. Casual, sit-down restaurants see the biggest lift in traffic, especially when Valentine’s Day is on a weekday, according to Circana, a market research firm. Fast-food restaurants see less of a bump in sales. But McDonald’s is one of several fast-food chains hoping to change that with special promotions or products. For the 35th year in a row, White Castle ...

Walt Disney’s new CEO Josh D’Amaro has been set up with a lucrative pay package for his first year, with a total grant-date value of roughly $45 million and a mandate to lead one of the most exciting and well known companies in the world. But he’ll also get something that could prove to be the most valuable factor in the succession game: Bob Iger’s planned exit. According to Disney’s announcement , two-time CEO Iger will step down from the board’s powerful executive committee after the annual shareholder meeting next month on March 18, and he’ll depart completely at the end of the year. After the chief-executive baton is passed to D’Amaro next month, Iger’s employment will transition into an advisory role. In the interim, the four-decade veteran leader will report “exclusively” to the board where he will remain as a member and stand for re-election before investors at the shareholder meeting in March. That’s a big change from the last time Iger left the corner office. In comparison...

The new “Project Vault” critical minerals stockpile launched by the White House and the U.S. Export-Import Bank is “absolutely” needed, but it represents just the first step of many to break China’s supply chain dominance of minerals , including rare earths, over several years to come, industry analysts said. The plans for the emergency national stockpile of certain critical minerals, announced Feb. 2, comes after the Trump administration already has taken the unusual step of making direct investments in several U.S. and Canadian critical minerals mining and processing companies over the past 10 months. While supply chain disruptions began showing up during the COVID-19 pandemic, the beginning of a tariff trade war with China last year triggered the “weaponization” of the dominance it had built up over several decades in critical minerals mining, processing, and magnet-manufacturing supply chains. Specific minerals, especially the 17 rare earths metals, are vital to manufacturing eve...

Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX has acquired xAI, the artificial company founded by Musk three years ago, in a massive, and unconventional, deal that combines the two privately held firms into a company with an astounding $1.25 trillion reported valuation and plans for a historic IPO this year. Musk, who is the CEO of both companies as well as publicly traded electric vehicle and robotics company Tesla , described the combination as one that will “form the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth, with AI, rockets, space-based internet, direct-to-mobile device communications and the world’s foremost real-time information and free speech platform,” he wrote in a blog post on SpaceX’s website. Musk cited the potential for space-based data centers, the energy intensive computing facilities necessary to power AI services, as one of the most important benefits of the combination, even though the concept is still unproven and largely theoretical. “Glob...

Independently and immediately, a flood of people reached the same conclusion: This had to be a mistake. It was the summer of 2017, and as word spread that Mamoon Hamid was joining venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, some people wondered if it was a joke, or “fake news.” And they didn’t hold back.  “I got calls from friends in the venture business, other GPs [general partners], asking: ‘Are you sure this is happening? Is this real?’” Hamid recounts. “People kept asking: ‘What are you doing?’”  One concerned friend even asked Hamid if he’d already signed anything (he had).  Hamid had helped build one of Silicon Valley’s buzziest new VC firms, Social Capital, leading a string of wins including investments in Box (one of 2015’s biggest IPOs) and Slack (at the time valued at $5.1 billion). Kleiner Perkins on the other hand, was widely viewed as an institution in decline, a bit like the largest gold-plated ship of a 19th-century fleet—grand for where it had been, but not...

Palantir Technologies declared, “We are an n of 1” in the artificial intelligence software market on Monday, as the data analytics group reported yet another set of record quarterly results , sending its shares surging nearly 8% in late trading. Investors cheered a powerful combination of faster growth, fatter margins, and a revenue outlook “crushing consensus expectations,” prompting a sharp rebound in a stock that had stumbled to start the year. ‘Incredible’ quarter tops forecasts The Denver-based company reported fourth-quarter revenue of about $1.41 billion, topping analyst expectations and marking another record period for the company famously named after a magical object from Lord of the Rings . Adjusted earnings per share came in at 25 cents, two cents above consensus, while net income climbed to about $609 million, helping deliver one of Palantir’s strongest profitability performances to date. Management highlighted a “rule of 40” score—the sum of revenue growth...

U.S. shale producer Devon Energy will acquire Coterra Energy for nearly $26 billion in a combination that creates a domestic oil and gas juggernaut trailing only household names Exxon Mobil , Chevron , and ConocoPhillips in sheer production volumes, the companies announced Feb. 2. After a couple of years of rapid consolidation in the energy sector, dealmaking slowed down dramatically last year as oil prices fell when OPEC ramped up its output and the Trump administration implemented a series of tariffs worldwide. Now, with crude oil prices stabilizing— albeit at lower levels —M&A is making a comeback, analysts said. The all-stock merger of near equals creates the largest oil and gas producer in the western lobe of the booming Permian Basin—the Delaware Basin in west Texas and southeastern New Mexico. It is the biggest oil and gas merger in two years since Diamondback Energy bought Endeavor Energy Resources to make a goliath in the Permian’s eastern lobe, the Midland Basin. T...