A virtual meeting was held today with President-elect Joe Biden and various CEOs and labor union leaders.
General Motors (GM +1.3%) CEO Mary Barra, Microsoft (MSFT -0.3%) CEO Satya Nadella, Target (TGT +1.7%) CEO Brian Cornell and Gap (GPS +6.5%) CEO Sonia Syngal were joined in the meeting by union leaders like AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, SEIU president Mary Kay Henry, UAW leader Rory Gamble, AFSCME president Lee Saunders and UCFW President Marc Perrone.
The purpose of the meeting was to discuss building the economy back. Biden has been advocating controlling the rapid spread of COVID-19 as a measure to see the economy bounce back quicker.
In general, analysts have been viewing the economic recovery more favorably with a split government than under a Blue sweep.
President Trump hasn’t conceded the election yet.
Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) has a definitive deal with JOYY (NASDAQ:YY) to acquire JOYY’s live-streaming business in China (YY Live), for about $3.6B in cash.
JOYY is up 5.7% after hours. BIDU is up 0.1%.
The deal includes the YY mobile app, YY.com website and PC YY.
The deal’s expected to close in the first half of 2021.
“Baidu has built a vibrant mobile ecosystem in the past few years to enable the fast growth of our non-advertising revenues by increasing log in users, adding social engagement to our platform and expanding non-advertising offerings, including membership, live streaming and online games,” says Baidu co-founder and CEO Robin Li. “This transaction will catapult Baidu into a leading platform for live streaming and diversify our revenue source.”
Earnings for both companies are coming up shortly.
Twitter (TWTR -1.9%) has named a noted hacker to take over a new role as head of security, with the company looking to shore up its engineering as it faces growing regulatory scrutiny.
The company named Peiter Zatko – otherwise known by the name Mudge – to the role, and has given him a broad mandate to shape its structure and practices. He tells Reuters he’ll examine “information security, site integrity, physical security, platform integrity – which starts to touch on abuse and manipulation of the platform – and engineering.”
Zatko most recently oversaw security for Stripe, and had previously worked on special projects for Google.
He answers to CEO Jack Dorsey and will take over key security functions after a 45- to 60-day review.
The most notable Twitter security incident came this summer, when employees were tricked into enabling access to internal tools that gave attackers access to high-profile accounts including Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Joe Biden (which were leveraged to enable a Bitcoin scam).
Cisco Systems (CSCO +1.8%) says it plans to acquire Hungary’s Banzai Cloud – its second recent cloud-native acquisition.
The deal follows its October pact to acquire Israel-based Portshift for a reported $100M.
Cisco plans to acquire substantially all assets of Banzai Cloud in a deal to close by the end of its second quarter.
Banzai Cloud’s team will join Cisco’s Emerging Technologies and Incubation group.
“This team has demonstrated experience with complete end-to-end cloud-native application development, deployment, runtime and security workflows,” says Cisco’s Liz Centoni. “They have built and deployed software tools that solve critical real-world pain points and are active participants in the open-source community as sponsors, contributors and maintainers of several open-source projects.”
IBM (NYSE:IBM) announces reaching a definitive agreement to acquire TruQua Enterprises, an IT services and consulting SAP development partner, for undisclosed terms.
The acquisition enhances IBM’s ability to migrate financial platforms to SAP to help enterprises monetize their financial processes.
“Our clients are reimagining their core finance processes with cloud, AI and other exponential technologies to drive increased value for their organizations. Our acquisition of TruQua further strengthens IBM’s deep global expertise in finance and demonstrates our continued commitment towards supporting Chief Financial Officers’ strategic initiatives,” says Rahul Kalia, Global Managing Partner, Enterprise Cloud Applications, IBM Services. “IBM will leverage TruQua’s extensive experience in SAP S/4HANA Finance & Group Reporting solutions to deliver better business outcomes, enabled by intelligent workflows and hybrid cloud.”
IBM shares are up 1.3% to $118.41.
