Business

Fox Corp. said Wednesday that it bested Wall Street’s third-quarter estimates despite advertising sales declines compared to last year when it broadcast the Super Bowl. Shares of Fox rose 2 percent in after-hours trading. Fox attributed its profit growth to new investments, such as its acquisition of streaming service, Tubi, as well as 10 percent uptick in affiliate revenue from cable providers. For the period ended March 31, the New York-based company said net income totaled $567 million, or 96 a share. This compares with income of $78 million, or 13 cents, a year earlier. Excluding items, Fox said profit totaled $568 million or 88 cents a share, beating Wall Street’s estimates for earnings of 49 cents a share. Advertising sales fell 24 percent, dragging overall revenue down 6.5 percent to $3.22 billion from $3.44 billion last year. Fox attributed the ad declines to tough comparisons over last year when it broadcast the Super Bowl. Fox executive chairman and chief executive officer Lachlan Murdoch said the company “continues to deliver operationally and financially” despite the lack of Super Bowl ad sales as well as the pandemic’s impact on ad sales. The CEO said Fox News

Private equity firm Apollo Global Management has acquired Verizon’s media group for $5 billion, the two companies announced Monday.  Verizon Media, which includes properties from the former internet empires of AOL and Yahoo, will be rebranded as “Yahoo,” the announcement said. Verizon said it will keep a 10 percent stake in the company.  The sale includes online news outlets TechCrunch, Yahoo Finance and Engadget and others. Apollo and Verizon said they expect the sale to close in the second half of 2021. Verizon is cutting its losses on its media businesses, with the deal valuing the businesses at significantly lower prices than Verizon paid just a few years ago. Verizon bought AOL for $4.4 billion in 2015, and it bought Yahoo for $4.5 billion in 2017.

Cryptocurrency ether, the digital token of the Ethereum blockchain, topped $3,000 on Monday, hitting an all-time high and stealing attention away from the world’s largest crypto, bitcoin. Ether’s price rose about 8 percent Monday morning and exchanged hands at about $3,150 as of 6:45 a.m. ET, according to data from Coinbase. The token’s up more than 300 percent for the year so far, handily outpacing bitcoin’s 95 percent rise on the year. Bitcoin’s price also rose about 3 percent Monday, bringing its market cap to about $1.1 trillion, according to Coinbase. Ethereum’s market cap sits around $366 billion, Coinbase data shows.  The rapid rise of Ethereum comes as excitement around DeFi, or decentralized finance, grows and investors see strong potential on the Ethereum blockchain for more applications. The decentralized finance movement seeks to largely replace banks with blockchain technology as the home of financial transactions like borrowing, lending and trading.  Ethereum, which allows multiple software developers to build apps on its decentralized network, is particularly appealing to DeFi evangelists. Ether is the native token of the Ethereum blockchain. One popular trend in the so-called decentralized app space are non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, many of which are based on the Ethereum

Media giant Endeavor — home of mixed martial arts juggernaut Ultimate Fighting Championship, Hollywood talent agency WME and sports and fashion firm IMG — surged as much as 12 percent in its debut on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday. The Ari Emanuel-led firm opened trading under the ticker symbol EDR at $24 a share, and saw its stock initially jump as high as $26.96 a share before giving up its gains in midday trading. The stock recently changed hands on Thursday at $23.80. Hours earlier, Emanuel, who is the inspiration for the Ari Gold agent character in HBO’s “Entourage,” high-fived fellow Endeavor execs as he rang the ceremonial bell to kick off the trading day. As reported by The Post, Endeavor priced its IPO at $24 for a $10.6 billion valuation the night before with the goal of raising $511 million to more than $550 million. The public listing marks the end of a long road for Endeavor, which tried and failed to go public in 2019. At the time, the fiery Emanuel yanked the IPO when orders came in as low as $20 a share. The company, which had priced its stock to sell at $30 to

If you’re struggling to find work because you’re an ex-con, try hitting up Jamie Dimon. The hard-charging chief executive of JPMorgan Chase said this week he is helping launch and co-chair the Second Chance Business Coalition, a group that aims to expand hiring of former criminals. “Business has an important role to play in making it easier for people with criminal backgrounds to get back on their feet,” Dimon said in a statement. Dimon and his co-chair Craig Arnold, Chairman and CEO of power management company Eaton, said Monday they have enlisted close to 30 blue chip companies including AT&T, Bank of America, General Motors, McDonalds, Microsoft, Verizon, Walmart and Visa to join the coalition. The corporations, which represent a combined $9.8 trillion market cap, have committed to helping former criminals, partly by sharing resources and advice. Between 70 million and 100 million US adults have a criminal record, according to the Sentencing Project, a nonprofit group. “A felony conviction may as well be a life sentence when it comes to reentering the workforce,” Eaton’s Arnold said in a video announcing the Second Chance program. “Another hard truth is that the criminal justice system in the US disproportionately affects

GameStop shares rose more than 6 percent in early trading Tuesday after the company announced it raised $551 million through a stock sale to speed up the company’s turnaround effort. Shares of the company were up more than 11 percent in premarket trading after the announcement, before paring some gains once the markets opened. The video game retailer first announced the at-the-market offering of 3.5 million shares earlier this month. It’s one step by the company to benefit from the head-turning rally that’s sent the stock soaring almost 800 percent this year. GameStop said the cash will be used to “continue accelerating GameStop’s transformation.” The company said earlier this month that Ryan Cohen, billionaire entrepreneur and co-founder of pet food online retailer Chewy, would become chairman of GameStop later this year. Cohen, who is also manager of activist investor RC Ventures, has been building a stake in the company since last year in an effort to push the company to shutter unprofitable stores and focus on e-commerce growth. Cohen’s involvement in the company and his attempts to shake the 37-year-old firm up helped lead to the Reddit-fueled explosion of the stock in January, when retail traders created a massive short

Stocks tumbled Thursday on a report that President Biden is mulling a plan to nearly double what wealthy people pay on their investment gains. A Bloomberg News report that Biden wants to raise the capital gains tax to as much as 39.6 percent for people earning at least $1 million chopped 321 points off the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which closed down 0.9 percent to 33,815.90. Before the report hit, major averages were trading higher, buoyed by better-than-expected unemployment data and some positive earnings reports. But the report, which warned of an overall top tax rate of 43.4 percent when combined with an existing 3.8 percent tax on investment income to fund Obamacare, sent the blue-chip Dow benchmark down as much as 420 points at its lowest point. The S&P 500 index ended the day down 0.9 to 4,134.98, while the Nasdaq Composite slid 0.9 percent to 13,818.41. The current top capital gains rate is 20 percent. Experts predict more selling if Biden’s tax plan becomes a reality — potentially ending a bull market that has defied even the devastating economic fallout of coronavirus pandemic, including high unemployment. “Biden’s proposal effectively doubles the capital gains

Shares of AT&T rose Thursday after the telecom giant’s first-quarter results topped analyst expectations. The company’s wireless division, its largest unit, added 595,000 phone customers who pay a monthly bill, up from 163,000 in the same period in 2020. It also added 207,000 prepaid phone customers. In the WarnerMedia entertainment unit, revenue rose 9.8 percent to $8.5 billion. The company doesn’t break out how many people sign up for its streaming service, HBO Max, but said there are now 44.2 million subscribers to HBO Max or the traditional HBO channel in the US. Entertainment companies have launched several new streaming services in the past couple years in an effort to gain on Netflix and as the audience for traditional TV shrinks. AT&T also signed up 46,000 home internet customers and lost 620,000 video customers. AT&T is spinning off its DirecTV business after having lost about 60 percent of its satellite and cable TV customer base since buying DirecTV in 2015. The Dallas company reported first-quarter net income of $7.55 billion, or $1.04 per share. Adjusted for one-time items, they came to 86 cents per share, beating the average estimate of 77 cents per share from 16 analysts surveyed by Zacks Investment Research.

Religious leaders in Georgia on Tuesday will call for a boycott of Home Depot because of its silence on the state’s new voting curbs that activists say make it harder for black people and other racial minorities to vote. Other Georgia-based corporations — including Delta Air Lines and Coca-Cola — have been meeting with the activists for weeks and issued statements opposing the voting restrictions. Coca-Cola also hosted a meeting of several companies on April 13 with the faith leaders, but Home Depot did not attend and has since “ignored a series of follow-up requests, and has failed to speak publicly on the new law,” the activists — led by AME Bishop Reginald Jackson and representing more than 1,000 churches — said in a notice to media on Tuesday. “Blacks and others have become wary and frustrated with spending their money (at) companies that do not support us on our right to vote and other issues,” Jackson said last week. Republicans across the country are using former President Donald Trump’s false claims of voter fraud to back state-level voting changes they say are needed to restore election integrity. Opponents of the moves say they are intended to disenfranchise citizens who tend

The Well made a splash when it opened in the fall of 2019 as a private club near Union Square where you could book yoga classes, lunar gong baths, sessions with A-Rod’s sports doctor or Gwyneth Paltrow’s nutritionist followed by a glass of wine at the club restaurant. Its three founders, Kane Sarhan, Rebecca Parekh and Sarrah Hallock, had raised $18 million from investors, including billionaire real estate mogul Richard LeFrak and hotelier Barry Sternlicht. Six months later, in March 2020 they were just beginning to “hit their stride,” Sarhan tells Side Dish, when the pandemic hit. The Well closed in early March, just before all non-essential businesses were ordered under lockdown.  “We thought it would be for two weeks,” Parekh said. They didn’t reopen until April 8, 2021. “It was scary, and painful, to close, but it made us focus quickly on who we are and what we want to be,” Sarhan said. The Well is no longer a private club. Guests are met at reception with temperature checks and hand sanitizer. Masks are required. The Well, like many other businesses,  has been forced to adapt to myriad unexpected challenges, like the fact that 90 percent of the city’s