Business

Axios reports: Americans send and receive more text messages on Christmas than any other day of the year, according to wireless carrier data shared with Axios. AT&T’s busiest day last year was Christmas. Group messages and photo or video messages were especially popular. It’s also the busiest day for T-Mobile, whose network saw 3 billion messages last year. Read the …

The Associated Press reports: Gift cards get lost or forgotten, or recipients hang on to them for a special occasion. In a July survey, the consumer finance company Bankrate found that 47% of U.S. adults had at least one unspent gift card or voucher with an average value of $18. That’s a total of $23 billion. Every year, big companies …

Florida Politics reports: Disney is suing its own government for records in the latest escalation in the long legal fight between The Walt Disney Company and Florida Republicans. Disney accused the state-controlled Disney board of taking months to respond to public records requests and self-selecting which records the board does release. Disney filed the lawsuit Friday, the last working day …

CNN Business reports: After three-plus years of prices steadily — and sometimes sharply — increasing month after month after month, they fell in November. Last month, for the first time since April 2020, prices fell on a monthly basis, according to a closely watched report released Friday by the Commerce Department. November’s Personal Consumption Expenditures price index, a comprehensive measure …

Reuters reports: Twitter violated contracts by failing to pay millions of dollars in bonuses that the social media company, now called X Corp, had promised its employees, a federal judge ruled on Friday. Mark Schobinger, who was Twitter’s senior director of compensation before leaving Elon Musk’s company in May, sued Twitter in June, claiming breach of contract. Schobinger’s suit alleged …

Reuter reports: Tesla is recalling 120,423 vehicles in the U.S. over the risk of cabin doors being unlocked during a crash, the country’s road safety regulator said on Friday, days after announcing another recall by the electric-vehicle maker. Tesla recalled over 2 million vehicles in the U.S. last week, its largest ever recall, covering nearly all of its vehicles on …

Bloomberg News reports: Hyperloop One, the futuristic transportation company building tube-encased lines to zip passengers and freight from city to city at airplane-like speeds, is shutting down. The company had captured the public’s imagination since its founding in 2014, a year after Elon Musk released a white paper outlining a vision for hyperloop technology. The concept was a tantalizing promise …

Reuters reports: Records and interviews reveal for the first time that the automaker has long known far more about the frequency and extent of the defects than it has disclosed to consumers and safety regulators. The documents, dated between 2016 and 2022, include repair reports from Tesla service centers globally; analyses and data reviews by engineers on parts with high …

NBC News reports: Parler, one of the Trump-era social media apps that featured little content moderation and became popular among conservatives, has been sold again and is planning for a relaunch early next year ahead of the 2024 presidential election, its new owners said Monday. The app, known for its use by participants in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, will …

The Washington Post reports: A U.S. inspection of a plant in Ecuador that manufactured pouches of contaminated applesauce linked to at least 125 cases of suspected lead poisoning in children found “extremely high” levels of the metal in a key ingredient: cinnamon. The Food and Drug Administration said Monday that samples of cinnamon from the plant that were tested contained …

CNET reports: Apple will pause sales of its Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 smartwatches in the US this month as the result of an ongoing legal battle with health tech company Masimo. The US International Trade Commission, the federal agency that handles trade-related mandates, previously issued an order that would prohibit Apple from importing the Series 9 and …

Politico reports: A trio of super PACs backed by cryptocurrency executives and investors said Monday that they’ve raised $78 million as part of a major new push to influence the 2024 elections. The campaign, which has support from venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz, U.S. crypto exchange Coinbase and Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, marks of a revival of the digital asset …

The Messenger reports: Target’s new self-checkout policy has been met with criticism online, as customers complain that the 10-items-or-less limit is creating problems due to the store’s lack of staff. When this new policy was introduced in late November, John Mulligan, chief operations officer at Target, said it was meant to create shorter wait times for customers. However, for some, …

CNN Business reports: BP said Monday that it would pause all shipments through the Red Sea because of increased attacks on vessels by Houthi militants in Yemen. “In light of the deteriorating security situation for shipping in the Red Sea, BP has decided to temporarily pause all transits through the Red Sea,” the company said in a statement. “We will …

The New York Times reports: The Transportation Department on Monday announced a $140 million fine against Southwest Airlines over a meltdown last winter that disrupted travel for about two million people during the holiday season. Of the $140 million, Southwest Airlines will pay $35 million to the federal government. For the remaining amount, the department is giving the airline credit …

Mediaite reports: Maye Musk, the mother of billionaire X/Twitter owner Elon Musk, complained to President Joe Biden on Wednesday after the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) opted not to give Musk’s Starlink nearly $900 million in government subsidies. After FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr protested the decision and accused his agency of joining a “growing list of federal agencies engaging in the …

Reuters reports: The U.S. Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday reaffirmed its 2022 decision to deny SpaceX satellite internet unit Starlink $885.5 million in rural broadband subsidies. The FCC said the decision impacting Elon Musk’s space company was based on Starlink’s failure to meet basic program requirements and that Starlink could not demonstrate it could deliver promised service after SpaceX had …

The Washington Post reports: Tesla is recalling more than 2 million vehicles to fix Autopilot systems that U.S. safety regulators determined did not have enough controls to prevent misuse. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said Tesla’s method of ensuring drivers are still paying attention while the partially automated system is activated is “insufficient.” The recall comes after a years-long …

Bloomberg News reports: Elon Musk’s X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, is on track to bring in roughly $2.5 billion in advertising revenue in 2023 — a significant slump from prior years, according to people familiar with the matter. X generated a little more than $600 million in advertising revenue in each of the first three quarters of …

Ars Technica reports: Tesla has revived a contract clause that says the electric carmaker could sue Cybertruck buyers for $50,000 or more if they resell during their first year of ownership. As we reported a month ago, the Cybertruck-only clause was added to the public version of Tesla’s Motor Vehicle Order Agreement Terms & Conditions and then deleted after the …