Raphael Stevens

Verizon chairman and Oscar Health CEO Mark Bertolini told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that the telecom company’s board “needed to act” with its leadership transition.
Former CEO Hans Vestberg was replaced by Dan Schulman in October.
Bertolini said Schulman has a plan to revive Verizon from its period of share losses.

Verizon chairman Mark Bertolini said Thursday that the company’s new CEO, former PayPal boss Dan Schulman, is working to revive Verizon from its period of share losses under former CEO Hans Vestberg.
Bertolini, who is also the Oscar Health CEO and who was named Verizon chairman last month, told CNBC’s Becky Quick on “Squawk Box” that the company needs to “do something different” as it undergoes its leadership change.

“Verizon has gone from number one in market cap, bond ratings and market share to number three. And the network isn’t as differentiated as it used to be, in large part because everybody’s been spending money to put these 5G networks in place,” Bertolini said. “So losing 30% share over the last eight years is an issue, and we have to do something different.”
In October, the company announced Schulman would be replacing Vestberg, who had led the company since 2018. In a statement at the time, Schulman said Verizon was at a “critical juncture” and that he believed the company had a “clear opportunity to redefine our trajectory.”
Schulman previously led PayPal through significant revenue growth and has served on Verizon’s board of directors since 2018.
Vestberg is remaining on the the board of directors until the 2026 annual meeting and serving as a special advisor through Oct. 4, 2026.
Bertolini said Thursday that Schulman is evaluating underlying cost structures and other aspects of the company to ensure its success.

“We believe that once we have that plan in place, we’ll have a good story,” Bertolini said. “The Street reacted early on that there’s going to be a price war; I think it’s less about price war than the value of what we’re offering to people through the product.”
Bertolini added that Schulman will be revealing his plan for turning around the company “sooner rather than later.”
“The board needed to act, and we acted,” Bertolini said. More

Disney beat analyst estimates on earnings but missed on revenue expectations.
The company’s entertainment unit was buoyed by streaming as the linear TV business experienced further declines in ad revenue. 
Its flagship streaming service Disney+ added 3.8 million subscribers during the period, bringing its total to 131.6 million. 
Disney will hold a call with analysts at 8:30 a.m. ET.

A statue of Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse stands in a garden in front of Cinderella’s Castle at the Magic Kingdom Park at Walt Disney World on May 31, 2024, in Orlando, Florida.
Gary Hershorn | Corbis News | Getty Images

Disney reported fiscal fourth-quarter earnings on Thursday that topped analyst expectations for earnings but missed on revenue as the company’s entertainment business was weighed down by its TV networks and a lackluster theatrical film slate.
Disney stock fell more than 4% in premarket trading.

Here is what Disney reported for the period ended Sept. 27, compared with what Wall Street expected, according to LSEG: 

Earnings per share: $1.11 adjusted vs. $1.05 expected
Revenue: $22.46 billion vs. $22.75 billion expected

Net income for the quarter was $1.44 billion, or 73 cents a share, more than double the $564 million, or 25 cents per share, that Disney reported in the same period last year. Adjusting for one-time items Disney reported earnings per share of $1.11. 
The company’s overall revenue for the quarter was nearly $22.5 billion, slightly less than the same quarter last year. 
“Overall we’re leaving the year with a lot of momentum,” Disney CFO Hugh Johnston told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” Thursday regarding the company’s streaming and experiences businesses.

Streaming strides, linear struggles

Revenue for Disney’s entertainment unit fell 6% from last year to $10.21 billion, dragged down by the linear TV networks and theatrical releases. 

Disney’s TV networks, including ESPN, have been unavailable for customers of Google’s YouTube TV, a streaming provider of the pay TV bundle since Oct. 31 due to an ongoing carriage dispute between the two companies.
Johnston told “Squawk Box” on Thursday that Disney is still in the midst of negotiations with YouTube TV, but the company was prepared for what it expected to be “challenging battle,” and Disney is “ready to go as long as they want to.”
Advertising revenue for the networks, which includes broadcast network ABC and pay TV channels like FX, also suffered. Part of this was attributable to lower political advertising, or a $40 million impact compared with the same quarter last year, Disney said. The company also noted that its 2024 joint venture deal for India Hotstar impacted its linear network results.
Streaming remained the bright spot in the business as consumers continued to turn away from the pay TV bundle. Operating income for the linear networks dropped 21% to $391 million while it rose 39%, to $352 million, for streaming. The higher operating income for streaming occurred as prices increased for Disney’s streaming services. 
Disney’s streaming growth was also the result of more options for its services. Earlier this year its carriage deal with Charter Communications broadened, giving the cable TV provider’s customers access to ad-supported Hulu. Initially, Charter’s pay TV customers had been receiving only Disney+.
While about half of the streaming subscriber increase could be attributed to the Charter carriage deal, Johnston said “the other half was retail,” with a big portion of that coming from international markets. Disney, like its media peers Warner Bros. Discovery and Netflix, has seen most of its recent streaming growth come from global customers.
The company in August also launched its ESPN direct-to-consumer app, which mirrors all the content of the TV networks, ESPN+ and other additions. The app is also available for Charter’s pay TV subscribers.
Disney stopped reporting subscriber metrics for ESPN+, and did not give guidance on the newly launched app that goes by the same name as the TV network. Johnston on Thursday said the availability of ESPN via streaming has helped to stem customer losses and has also boosted engagement with ESPN.
However, Johnston called out Disney’s bundles as a driver of the ESPN app and streaming in general.
“One of the things I think we’re most excited about is fully 80% of those new retail subs on ESPN are actually bundled subs, which again, should contribute to engagement, should contribute to retention, and frankly make the service more valuable over time,” Johnston told “Squawk Box.”
The flagship streaming service Disney+ added 3.8 million paid subscribers, bringing its total to 131.6 million, while Hulu had 64.1 million customers. Disney has been in the process of integrating Hulu — which it took full control of earlier this year — into the Disney+ app. 
This marks the last time the company will report subscriber numbers and the average revenue per unit, or ARPU, for its streaming services, which includes Disney+ and Hulu.
Instead, Disney will follow in the footsteps of streaming behemoth Netflix, which earlier this year stopped updating investors on its subscriber count.
Revenue for Disney’s sports division, namely ESPN, was up 3% to roughly $4 billion, while operating income was flat at $898 million when compared with the same period last year. ESPN’s domestic operating income in particular decreased due to costs associated with the launch of the app in August, as well as higher programming costs. 

Positive experiences

Disney Cruise Line’s Disney Dream is seen docked in Port Canaveral, Florida, on July 30, 2021. (Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
Mark Gauert | Sun Sentinel | Getty Images

Revenue for the experiences segment, which consists of theme parks, resorts and cruises, as well as consumer products, rose 6% to $8.77 billion. Operating income for the segment was up 13% to $1.88 billion. 
The current economy hasn’t affected the Disney consumer when it comes to its experiences business, Johnston said Thursday on “Squawk Box.” He noted that bookings are up 3% and spending per person at parks was also up 5% in Disney’s fiscal first quarter.
“We’ve got continued momentum there,” Johnston said.
Disney attributed the growth in its cruise business to its gains, despite being offset by higher fleet expansion costs. Disney’s fleet will expand once again later this month.
Johnston noted cruises are selling out at the same rate that they had before, even though the fleet is bigger. “So that added capacity is filling up quickly,” he added. More

Arrived is creating a so-called stock market for real estate, where investors can buy and sell shares of rental homes.
Investors can buy in for as little as $100 and build their own portfolio of properties.
Arrived is announcing a new $27 million fundraise to help launch a secondary market platform.

Row of single-family detached houses in Alexandria, Virginia.
Grace Cary | Moment | Getty Images

A version of this article first appeared in the CNBC Property Play newsletter with Diana Olick. Property Play covers new and evolving opportunities for the real estate investor, from individuals to venture capitalists, private equity funds, family offices, institutional investors and large public companies. Sign up to receive future editions, straight to your inbox.
Fractional ownership isn’t exactly a new concept in real estate, but one company is taking it to a new level, with the help of new funding from big-name investors. It’s creating a so-called stock market for real estate.

Arrived, which launched in 2021, is a platform for real estate investors to buy and sell shares of rental homes for as little as $100. Rather than investing in a public REIT, they can build their own portfolio of properties, which are managed by Arrived. Not only do the properties generate income from rents, but they can appreciate over time. Because the properties can each be owned by hundreds of investors, they are taxed as REITs.
“We spent about a year working with the SEC to create this framework within the regulation so that both accredited and non-accredited investors can participate,” explained Ryan Frazier, co-founder and CEO of Arrived. “So we have a recurring offering structure through the SEC to register each property, and then each property to qualify as a REIT.”
Frazier describes it as “unbundling” the REIT into individual properties, so investors can pick and choose what they like. Some properties have more than a thousand investors. So far Arrived has roughly 500 properties across 65 cities. It’s been doubling its property count each year. 
Investment platform Roofstock, which mostly sells entire investment properties on its site, also has fractional ownership opportunities but with a much higher minimum investment.
Arrived is now announcing a new $27 million fundraise to help launch a secondary market platform, where investors can trade their shares of individual homes across the U.S. in minutes. This allows them to quickly exit or expand positions as well as capture appreciation and rebalance portfolios. 

“Now investors can buy and sell shares from each other on Arrived,” said Frazier, noting in the first three weeks that the option has been live, investors have submitted 57,000 buy and sell orders on the marketplace.
“I think it’s exciting, because we’re really bringing this liquidity to the real estate market that I think facilitates real estate investing just moving online,” he added.
The new funding was led by Neo, a VC fund and mentorship community.

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“The Arrived team is cracked, and I love the audacity of their vision: a stock market for real estate,” said Ali Partovi, CEO of Neo in a release. “I’m betting on them to democratize and digitize access to America’s $50 trillion in residential real estate.” 
Participation also included Forerunner Ventures, Bezos Expeditions and Core. Other existing investors include Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Match Group CEO Spencer Rascoff and Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, bringing total funding to $61.7 million to date.
Since its inception, more than 850,000 investors have collectively invested over $330 million in Arrived homes, according to the company.
This new platform comes at a time when traditional homebuying has stalled and investors are finding it increasingly expensive to purchase single-family rentals on their own. Home prices are still historically high, and interest rates are significantly higher than they were just three years ago during the last housing boom. 
Investors are making up the highest share of homebuyers on record this year, according to Cotality, but only because the pool of owner-occupant buyers has shrunk so much. 
In order to protect itself against weakness in the overall housing market, Frazier said Arrived has become very choosy about its markets and has stopped using long-term leverage in the portfolio. The majority of properties on the Arrived platform, he said, are owned by investors with 100% equity, adding that for those that do have mortgages, the average interest rate is below 4%. More

Investment firms for ultra-rich families expect millennial and Gen X heirs to make their mark when they take the reins, according to a new survey by Bank of America.
Nearly three-quarters of family offices with hands-off principals anticipate the next generation will change the firm’s purpose or mission, and possibly shut down their family offices altogether.
Family office decision-makers predict the next generation will have different investment priorities and increasingly use AI to achieve them.

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A version of this article first appeared in CNBC’s Inside Wealth newsletter with Robert Frank, a weekly guide to the high-net-worth investor and consumer. Sign up to receive future editions, straight to your inbox.
Keeping wealth in the family is easier than controlling how your heirs invest it.

For investment firms of ultra-wealthy families, the stakes are especially high. A recent Bank of America survey of 335 family offices, with 60% of respondents holding at least $500 million in assets, found that 87% had yet to pass down assets to the next generation.
More than a third of family offices with principals fully involved in firm operations expected heirs to change the family office’s mission or purpose. For firms with principals who are less involved with decision-making, the share jumps to 73%, according to the survey.
“It’s more than just passing down the wealth. We know that next generation will usher in a new era of investing, of how they think about philanthropy, how they use technology,” Bank of America’s Elizabeth Thiessen told Inside Wealth.

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Thiessen, who leads family office solutions for the private bank division, said heirs tend to make significant changes such as prioritizing philanthropy over investing or even shutting down the family office altogether.
“The next generation may decide, ‘We don’t want this infrastructure. We don’t want this complicated set of responsibilities around governance and being on the board, and we want to simplify this,'” she said.

This sea change is approaching quickly, with 59% of respondents reporting that they expected to transfer assets to the next generation within 10 years.

Thiessen said heirs are more likely to make dramatic shifts when principals have not taken the steps to integrate them in the family office.
This can also lead to strife, with nearly half of family offices with less involved principals expecting an increase in family disputes compared with 29% of firms with fully involved principals.
Regardless of principal involvement, most family offices said they expected successors to grow their fortune and increase their use of technology and artificial intelligence in firm operations.
More than half of respondents said they had already tried AI for market research and other tasks with most reporting positive experiences. Larger family offices were most likely to use it, with nearly three-quarters of firms with at least $1 billion in assets reporting doing so, compared with 40% of family offices holding less than $500 million.
A majority of respondents — 56% of family offices with fully involved principals and 73% of firms with less involved ones — also expected heirs to increase their allocations to alternative investments. These predictions are in line with family offices’ bullish attitudes toward private equity, direct investments in companies and real estate, which were the three most favored opportunities to create future wealth.
Respondents already boast a high allocation to alternatives, excluding cryptocurrencies, with an average of 34.5%, nearly on par with marketable securities at 36.4%. A slim majority anticipated heirs would raise their allocations to cryptocurrencies, which have a current average allocation of 6.4%, according to Bank of America.
These millennial and Gen X heirs are also widely expected to sustain or increase their sustainable or impact investments, despite broader backlash to ESG investments. Last quarter, global sustainable funds saw $55 billion in net outflows, with the lion’s share derived from redemptions in BlackRock funds, according to Morningstar.
While 64% of respondents said their top challenge was growing and preserving their wealth, family offices were widely bullish about the economy. Six in 10 respondents said they were optimistic about the U.S stock market; private equity; and merger and acquisition activity over the next year. More than half of firms holding at least $500 million in assets expected U.S. gross domestic product to increase during the next year. More

Flight cancellations eased to the lowest rate in almost a week on Wednesday ahead of a House vote on a bill that could end the longest-ever government shutdown.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and major airlines warned that flight disruptions could linger even after the shutdown.
Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian urged officials to make sure air traffic controllers are paid the next time there’s a shutdown.

The FAA Air Traffic Control tower at LaGuardia Airport (LGA) in the Queens borough of New York, US, on Friday, Nov. 7, 2025.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The Department of Transportation late Wednesday froze flight cuts it imposed less than a week ago as air travel disruptions eased across the U.S. ahead of a House vote on a funding bill that could end the longest federal government shutdown in history.
The House on Wednesday night cleared a procedural hurdle required before a vote could begin on a funding bill that would keep the government open through January. President Donald Trump would sign the bill on Wednesday, the White House said.

On Wednesday, 816 U.S. departures were canceled, 3.5% of airlines’ schedule, the lowest rate and number of cancellations since last Thursday, according to aviation data firm Cirium.
The shutdown again put air travel in the spotlight and heightened strains on air traffic controllers, who have been required to work without receiving their regularly scheduled paychecks. The DOT said Wednesday night in a statement that there was a “rapid decline” in callouts from controllers in the last two days.

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Trump administration officials on Friday started requiring airlines to trim their schedules, citing safety risks and additional strain on controllers. The required cancellations rose from 4% of domestic flights at U.S. airports to 6% on Tuesday, blaming increased strain on air traffic controllers. They would have increased to 10% by Friday, but DOT froze the increases on Wednesday night.
But the cuts weren’t enough to avoid further disruptions that were worsened by widespread staffing shortages and bad weather, leading to an influx of cancellations and delays last weekend.
Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said Wednesday on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” that the shutdown will have a financial impact on the carrier but it wouldn’t come close to wiping out the airline’s profits. He warned that he thinks there will be another shutdown at some point and said air traffic controllers should be paid if that happens.

U.S. airline shares were up broadly on Wednesday before the House vote.
Thin air traffic controller staffing has been on the rise during the shutdown that started Oct. 1, leading to thousands of flights being slowed or altogether canceled and disrupting travel plans of 5 million passengers, according to Airlines for America, an industry group that represents the largest U.S. carriers. Some air traffic controllers were forced to take second jobs to make ends meet, the controllers’ union and government officials have said.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and major airlines this week warned that air travel won’t immediately snap back to normal even after the shutdown.
“We’re going to wait to see the data on our end before we take out the restrictions in travel but it depends on controllers coming back to work,” Duffy said at a news conference at Chicago O’Hare International Airport on Tuesday. More