In addition to Sunday’s executive bloodletting, Twitter’s stock was doing some weird things last week. On Wall Street, tech companies began reporting their quarterly earnings from the end of 2015. Here are the headlines that powered Re/code this past week:
Re/wind: Twitter’s Stock Slides and Earnings Season Gets Under Way
More and more trouble at Twitter.
BsWei / ThinkStock
- Twitter’s stock is trading at all-time lows, which means it’s a prime takeover target. On Wednesday, Twitter’s stock rose sharply for a bit as a rumor circulated that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp was considering making a bid. A News Corp spokesman told Re/code that the gossip was untrue. The day before, an “internal code change” brought down the service for eight hours, and ex-Twitter CEO Dick Costolo told Kara Swisher about his new fitness tech startup on the “Re/code Decode” podcast.
- Tech companies are starting to report quarterly earnings from Q4 2015. Peter Kafka interviewed Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and two other senior execs about the company’s pretty sold quarter. IBM beat Wall Street estimates for the fourth quarter, but its stock fell because the company lowered its guidance for 2016. Verizon posted strong revenue numbers, which it says is proof that it is weathering the T-Mobile and Sprint price-cutting onslaught just fine.
- Mark Bergen and Ina Fried were on hand for the DLD Conference in Germany. The EU’s antitrust chief said big data could be another target of the region’s regulatory bodies, and News Corp CEO Robert Thomson said the EU’s probe of Google might be justified. Microsoft, meanwhile, is pulling back its funding from a European watchdog group that has aggressively criticized Google.
- A kind of nutty statistic: There is more clothing available to buy on Amazon than in 250 Walmart supercenters combined. By next year, Amazon could pass Macy’s as the country’s No. 1 clothing retailer.
- Donald Trump said he wants Apple to make its products in the U.S. and that he will force the company to do so once he is elected president. Here is why that statement is complete nonsense.
- The market for tech IPOs is awful right now, so some companies are choosing to raise cash from the private market instead. Like the music streaming service Deezer, for example, which scrapped last year’s IPO plans in favor of a $110 million round it announced this week.
- On the “Re/code Decode” podcast, Peter Kafka interviewed BuzzFeed News boss Shani Hilton about building the BuzzFeed newsroom and why she tells her staffers not to get used to anything. On “Too Embarrassed to Ask,” Lauren Goode talks with Kara Swisher and Andreessen Horowitz partner Steven Sinofsky about carmakers, software and more.
- U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch shed some light on where the White House stands on encryption and back doors since meeting with tech executives in a sit-down a couple weeks back. She says that the government isn’t looking for back doors but still wants to work closely with the industry.
- General Motors has a new company, Maven, which is comprised of all its ride-sharing car rental services. Part of the deal will include launching a Zipcar-like pilot program in Ann Arbor, Mich.
- If TV channels were available a la carte and not as part of the traditional cable bundle, then it would cost a lot of money to watch channels like, well, ESPN. One analyst estimates that ESPN alone would cost about $36 a month. The next-most expensive channel would be TNT, at around $9 a month.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
