SITTING ON THE board of a large American company is at once the plummest and most thankless work in business. Plum because, when everything is going right, you pocket $300,000 a year in cash and stock for showing up to a well-catered meeting every month and a half. Thankless because you seldom get credit for things going right but take the blame when they go awry. And awry they go with disturbing regularity. More
It’s that time of year again, when we celebrate our successes and gloss over our failures. For our 2024 employee awards we have all our classic categories, from team member of the year and newcomer of the year to the big one: employee of the year. As usual, the winner of that award will enjoy a weekend away in a location of our choosing. More
It was as if the sun came out on Wall Street. Donald Trump’s election victory was met not just with a blistering stockmarket rally, but also a flurry of dealmaking. Mondelez, a snack-seller, is reportedly trying to buy Hershey, a chocolatier. Consolidation beckons for the advertising industry. Bankers are expecting that many more tie-ups will follow. The surge in activity partly reflects a level of certainty that would have materialised whoever won the election. But it also has much to do with the changing of the guard at America’s antitrust authorities. More
“Change is neither good nor bad. It simply is,” declares Donald Draper, the unflappable star of “Mad Men”, a television drama set in 1960s adland. Not all advertising executives share his sangfroid. Today, technology is changing the industry faster than at any time since Mr Draper’s era. The result is a reshaping of Madison Avenue that is leaving some admen choking on their Old Fashioneds. More
Whoopi Goldberg started the All Women’s Sports Network with George Chung, co-founder of international media holding company Jungo TV.
Goldberg told CNBC her childhood passion for sports and desire for greater female representation in the field inspired her to start the network.
AWSN is available in the U.S. on the free streaming service Vizio WatchFree+.
Hollywood icon Whoopi Goldberg hopes her newly launched All Women’s Sports Network will bring more attention to women’s sports.
Goldberg started the network with George Chung, co-founder of international media holding company Jungo TV. It’s the first global media channel dedicated exclusively to highlighting women’s sports and is available in the U.S. on the free streaming service Vizio WatchFree+.
Goldberg told CNBC her childhood passion for sports and desire for greater female representation in the field inspired her to start the network.
“I want little girls to have what we used to call baseball cards for their new favorite players, and I want them to follow just like I used to follow Mickey Mantle,” Goldberg said.
AWSN is also available via international partners in India, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and the Philippines.
The network will air 2,000 hours of live sports the remainder of this year and into 2025. It will feature a wide range of sports from soccer, basketball, volleyball and field hockey to cricket, judo and table tennis.
Actor & comedian Whoopi Goldberg arrives on the Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon on Wednesday, November 6, 2024.
Todd Owyoung | Nbcuniversal | Getty Images
Goldberg said she hopes the growth of women’s basketball and soccer will help put the spotlight on other women’s sports.
“We started to see amazing basketball being played, and I think more people said, ‘Hey, I want to watch more of that.’ What other sports are women playing that we don’t know about? Like hockey or roller derby. I love roller derby. I want America to have a roller derby team,” Goldberg said. “I want it out there because women are doing it.”
Chung said Vizio currently reaches 20 million television sets, and, within the next three to four months AWSN expects to be available over on 100 million devices in the U.S.
Goldberg acknowledged she faced some initial resistance in launching the network, but once she met Chung, their goals aligned.
“I like a good business proposition, and I want this to go way past my lifetime. I want it to be as well known as an ABC, NBC or CBS,” she said.
Disclosure: NBC and CNBC are divisions of NBCUniversal. More
The biggest supermarket merger in American history is dead. In the space of just a few hours on December 10th, federal and state judges both sided with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), America’s main antitrust regulator, to block the acquisition of Albertsons, a big supermarket chain, by Kroger, another such firm. By the next day the pair were adversaries: Albertsons has not only called off the deal, it is also now suing Kroger for failing to make “best efforts” to get regulatory approval. More
Shares of major health-care companies fell nearly 5% on Wednesday on concerns related to potential changes to their complex business models.
That includes UnitedHealth Group, Cigna and CVS Health, which operate three of the nation’s largest private health insurers and drug supply chain middlemen called pharmacy benefit managers.
The stock reaction on Wednesday appeared to be in response to new bipartisan legislation that aims to break up pharmacy benefit managers.
UnitedHealth Group signage is displayed on a monitor on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Shares of major health-care companies fell as much as 5% on Wednesday as investors feared pressure from lawmakers and patients could force changes to their business models.
The declining stocks include UnitedHealth Group, Cigna and CVS Health, which operate three of the nation’s largest private health insurers and drug supply chain middlemen called pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs. They also own pharmacy businesses. Shares of all three companies closed at least 5% lower.
The stock reaction on Wednesday appeared to be in response to new bipartisan legislation that aims to break up PBMs, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. PBMs have faced yearslong scrutiny from Congress and the Federal Trade Commission over allegations they inflate drug costs for patients to boost their profits.
The share moves also come as insurance companies and their practices face heightened public criticism following the fatal shooting of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealth Group’s insurance arm, last week. Health stocks had already fallen in the days after Thompson’s killing.
A Senate bill, sponsored by Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Josh Hawley, R-Mo., would force the companies that own health insurers or PBMs to divest their pharmacy businesses within three years, the Journal reported. The lawmakers told the Journal that a companion bill is scheduled to be introduced in the House on Wednesday.
“PBMs have manipulated the market to enrich themselves—hiking up drug costs, cheating employers, and driving small pharmacies out of business,” Warren said in a release. “My new bipartisan bill will untangle these conflicts of interest by reining in these middlemen.”
The release added that health-care companies that own both PBMs and pharmacies are a “gross conflict of interest that enables these companies to enrich themselves at the expense of patients and independent pharmacies.”
The largest PBMs — UnitedHealth Group’s Optum Rx, CVS Health’s Caremark and Cigna’s Express Scripts — are all owned by or connected to health insurers. They collectively administer about 80% of the nation’s prescriptions, according to the FTC.
PBMs sit at the center of the drug supply chain in the U.S., negotiating rebates with drug manufacturers on behalf of insurers, large employers and federal health plans. They also create lists of medications, or formularies, that are covered by insurance and reimburse pharmacies for prescriptions.
The FTC has been investigating PBMs since 2022.
— CNBC’s Bertha Coombs contributed to this report.
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THE 12 DAYS of Christmas are meant to start on December 25th. But not in the world of artificial intelligence (AI). On December 5th OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, began a blizzard of product shipments dubbed, gratingly, the “12 days of shipmas”. It has included a full roll-out of Sora, its video-generation tool, as well as Canvas, a writing and coding product. More
