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Terran Orbital reported fourth-quarter results on Tuesday, posting annual revenue that more than doubled while the company continued to build its order backlog.
The Irvine, California-based company reported that revenue grew to $31.9 million in the fourth quarter, up from $27.8 million in the third quarter.
Terran Orbital delivered 19 satellites during the fourth quarter, including 10 under a contract through the Pentagon’s Space Development Agency.

Terran Orbital

Terran Orbital, a specialist in manufacturing small satellites, reported fourth-quarter results on Tuesday, with annual revenue nearing $100 million as it continued to build its order backlog.
For the full year of 2022, Terran Orbital brought in $94.2 million in revenue – more than double its 2021 total.

The Irvine, California-based company reported that revenue grew to $31.9 million in the fourth quarter, up from $27.8 million in the third quarter. Terran Orbital’s adjusted EBITDA loss doubled, however, both on a quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year basis, to $26.1 million, which the company attributed to an increase in expenses such as payroll, sales and marketing.
Shares of Terran Orbital slipped about 8% Tuesday from the stock’s previous close at $1.73.

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While Terran Orbital’s order backlog fell on a quarter-over-quarter basis, to $170.8 million in Q4 from $198 million in Q3, that number does not include its $2.4 billion deal with Rivada, announced in February. Terran Orbital’s year-end backlog was for about 60 satellites, with the Rivada contract adding around 300 to that total.
Terran Orbital delivered 19 satellites during the fourth quarter, including 10 under a contract through the Pentagon’s Space Development Agency. The company is expanding its manufacturing facilities to be able to make up to 250 satellites a year.

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Sales of previously owned homes rose 14.5% in February compared with January, according to a seasonally adjusted count by the National Association of Realtors.
It was the first monthly gain in 12 months and the largest increase since July 2020, just after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Higher mortgage rates have been cooling home prices since last summer, and for the first time in a record 131 consecutive months — nearly 11 years — prices were lower on a year-over-year comparison.

Sales of previously owned homes rose 14.5% in February compared with January, according to a seasonally adjusted count by the National Association of Realtors. That put sales at an annualized rate of 4.58 million units.
It was the first monthly gain in 12 months and the largest increase since July 2020, just after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Sales were, however, 22.6% lower than they were in February of last year.

These sales counts are based on closings, so the contracts were likely signed at the end of December and throughout January, when mortgage rates had fallen sharply. The average rate on the popular 30-year fixed loan hovered in the low 6% range throughout January after reaching a high of 7% last fall.

A “For Sale” sign outside of a home in Atlanta, Georgia, on Friday, Feb. 17, 2023.
Dustin Chambers | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The relative drop caused a jump in sales of newly built homes, before rates jumped back toward 7% in February. They now stand at 6.67%, according to Mortgage News Daily.
“Conscious of changing mortgage rates, home buyers are taking advantage of any rate declines,” said Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the Realtors, in a release. “Moreover, we’re seeing stronger sales gains in areas where home prices are decreasing and the local economies are adding jobs.”
Higher mortgage rates have been cooling home prices since last summer, and for the first time in a record 131 consecutive months — nearly 11 years — prices were lower on a year-over-year comparison. The median price of an existing home sold in February was $363,000, a 0.2% decline from February 2022.
That lower median price could be a sign that homes on the more affordable end of the market are selling.

Sales might have been even higher were it not for what is still very low supply. There were just 980,000 homes for sale at the end of February, according to the Realtors, flat compared with January. At the current sales pace, that represents a 2.6-month supply. A balanced market between buyer and seller is considered a 4- to 6-month supply.
“Inventory levels are still at historic lows,” Yun added. “Consequently, multiple offers are returning on a good number of properties.”
This could start to heat prices again, but with mortgage rates now higher than they were in January it will be harder for some buyers to compete.
At a recent open house in Cleveland, Ohio, home shopper Katie Berardi said higher mortgage rates have had an impact on what she and her husband can afford.
“The mortgage percentage has lowered our original range that we were looking in. Originally it was like $440,000. Now we’re looking more at like the $300,000 range,” said Berardi.
The home she was touring was originally listed at $450,000, but no one showed up at the first open, according to the listing agent, who subsequently slashed the price.
“This is a bigger house; you cannot build this house for $450,000 right now,” said Michelle Santoro, an agent with Russell Realty Services. “But unfortunately, the market just didn’t like my thoughts, so we went down to $350,000, and now I’ve created a market frenzy.”
All-cash sales accounted for 28% of transactions in February, down from 29% in January but up from 25% in February 2022. Individual investors returned, making up 18% of buyers, up from 16% in January but down from 19% in February 2022.
When looking at sales at different price points, they were all down in the range of 20% from February last year, with sales down the most in the top, million-dollar-plus segment.

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Is tiktok’s time up? As the social-media app’s chief executive, Shou Zi Chew, prepares for a grilling before Congress on March 23rd, TikTok’s 100m-plus users in America fret that their government is preparing to ban the Chinese-owned platform on security fears. Their anguish contrasts with utter glee in Silicon Valley, where home-grown social-media firms would love to be rid of their popular rival. With every grumble from Capitol Hill, the share prices of Meta, Snap, Pinterest and others edge higher.TikTok’s fate hangs in the balance. But what is already clear is that the app has changed social media for good—and in a way that will make life much harder for incumbent social apps. In less than six years TikTok has weaned the world off old-fashioned social-networking and got it addicted to algorithmically selected short-form video. Users love it. The trouble for social apps is that the new model makes less money than the old one, and may always do so.The speed of the change is astonishing. Since entering America in 2017, TikTok has picked up more users than all but a handful of social-media apps, which have been around more than twice as long (see chart 1). Among young audiences, it crushes the competition. Americans aged 18-24 spend an hour a day on TikTok, twice as long as they spend on Instagram and Snapchat and more than five times as long as they spend on Facebook, which these days is mainly a medium for communicating with the grandparents (see chart 2).TikTok’s success has prompted its rivals to reinvent themselves. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has turned both apps’ main feeds into algorithmically sorted “discovery engines” and launched Reels, a TikTok clone bolted onto Facebook and Instagram. Similar lookalike products have been created by YouTube (Shorts), Snapchat (Spotlight), Pinterest (Watch) and even Netflix (Fast Laughs). The latest TikTok-inspired makeover, announced on March 8th, was by Spotify, a music app whose homepage now features video clips that can be skipped by swiping up. (TikTok’s Chinese sister app, Douyin, is having a similar effect in its home market, where digital giants like Tencent are increasingly putting short videos at the centre of their offerings.) The result is that short-form video has taken over social media. Of the 64 minutes that the average American spends viewing social media each day, 40 minutes are spent watching video clips, up from 28 minutes just three years ago, estimates Bernstein, a broker. However, this transformation comes with a snag. Although users have a seemingly endless appetite for short video, the format is proving less profitable than the old news feed. TikTok monetises its American audience at a rate of just $0.31 per hour, a third the rate of Facebook and a fifth the rate of Instagram (see chart 3). This year it will make about $67 from each of its American users, while Instagram will make more than $200, estimates Insider Intelligence, a research firm. Nor is this just a TikTok problem. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, told investors last month that “Currently, the monetisation efficiency of Reels is much less than Feed, so the more that Reels grows…it takes some time away from Feed and we actually lose money.”The most comforting explanation for the earnings gap is that TikTok, Reels and the other short-video platforms are immature. “TikTok is still a toddler in the social-media ad landscape,” says Jasmine Enberg of Insider Intelligence, who points out that the app introduced ads only in 2019. Platforms tend to keep their ad load low while getting new users on board, and advertisers take time to warm to new products. “You can’t really wave a magic wand and declare that your new ads are ‘premium’ without any performance history to back it up, so they start at the end of the line,” says Michelle Urwin of Skai, a digital marketing agency.Meta points out that it has been here before. Instagram’s Stories feature took a while to get advertisers signed up but is now a big earner. Meta is ramping up Reels’ monetisation and expects it to stop losing money around the end of this year. But it acknowledges that it will be a long time before Reels is as profitable as the old news feed. “We know it took us several years to bring the gap close between Stories and Feed ads,” Susan Li, Meta’s chief financial officer, said on an earnings call last month. “And we expect that this will take longer for Reels.”Some wonder if the gap in fact will never be closed. Even mature video-apps cannot keep up with the old social networks when it comes to monetising their users’ time. YouTube, which has been around for 18 years, makes less than half as much money per user-hour as Facebook or Instagram, estimates Bernstein. In China, where short-form video took off a few years before it did in the West, short-video ads last year monetised at only about 15% the rate of ads on local e-commerce apps.For one thing, the ad load in video is inescapably lower than on a news feed of text and images. Watch a five-minute YouTube clip and you might see three ads; scroll Instagram for five minutes and you could see dozens. Watching video also seems to put consumers in a more passive mood than scrolling a feed of friends’ updates, making them less likely to click through to buy. Booking 1,000 impressions for a video ad on Instagram Reels costs about half as much as 1,000 impressions for an ad on Instagram’s news feed, reports Tinuiti, another big marketing agency, implying that advertisers see Reels ads as less likely to generate clicks.Auctions for video ads are less competitive than those for static ones, because many advertisers have yet to create ads in video format. Big advertisers prize video ads (and report record engagement on TikTok, where products have gone viral with the hashtag #TikTokmademebuyit). But the long tail of small businesses from which social networks have made their billions find video spots tricky to produce. Just over 40% of Meta’s 10m or so advertisers use Reels ads, the company says. Getting the remaining 60% to create video commercials may be made easier by artificial intelligence. One senior executive imagines a near future in which a small retailer can create a bespoke video ad using only voice commands. Until that moment arrives, half the long tail is lopped off.Short-video apps are also hampered by weaker targeting. For audiences, part of the appeal of TikTok and its many imitators is that the user need do no more than watch, and swipe when they get bored. The algorithm uses this to learn what kinds of videos—and therefore ads—they like. But this guesswork is no substitute for the hard personal data harvested by the previous generation of social networks, which persuaded users to fill in a lengthy profile including everything from their education to their marital status. The upshot is that many advertisers still treat short-form video as a place for loosely targeted so-called brand advertising, to raise general awareness of their product, rather than the hyper-personalised (and more valuable) direct-response ads that old-school social networks specialise in.Here, at least, TikTok’s imitators have an advantage over TikTok itself. Using a trove of data built up over a decade and a half, when there were few rules against tracking users’ activity across the wider web, Meta already knows a lot about many of the users watching its videos and can make well informed guesses about the rest. If a new, unknown user watches the same videos as a group who are known to be rich, female graduates with children, say, it is a good bet that the new user has the same profile. TikTok says it has made big investments in its direct-response ads, including new tools for measuring their effectiveness. But it still has catching up to do. “Meta are leveraging their history,” says Mark Shmulik of Bernstein. The social apps will not be the only losers in this new, trickier ad environment. “All advertising is about what the next-best alternative is,” says Brian Wieser of Madison and Wall, an advertising consultancy. Most advertisers allocate a budget to spend on ads on a particular platform, he says, and “the budget is the budget”, regardless of how far it goes. If social-media advertising becomes less effective across the board, it will be bad news not just for the platforms that sell those ads, but for the advertisers that buy them. ■To stay on top of the biggest stories in business and technology, sign up to the Bottom Line, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter. More

Is tiktok’s time up? As the social-media app’s chief executive, Shou Zi Chew, prepares for a grilling before Congress on March 23rd, TikTok’s 100m-plus users in America fret that their government is preparing to ban the Chinese-owned platform on security fears. Their anguish contrasts with utter glee in Silicon Valley, where home-grown social-media firms would love to be rid of their popular rival. With every grumble from Capitol Hill, the share prices of Meta, Snap, Pinterest and others edge higher.TikTok’s fate hangs in the balance. But what is already clear is that the app has changed social media for good—and in a way that will make life much harder for incumbent social apps. In less than six years TikTok has weaned the world off old-fashioned social-networking and got it addicted to algorithmically selected short-form video. Users love it. The trouble for social apps is that the new model makes less money than the old one, and may always do so.The speed of the change is astonishing. Since entering America in 2017, TikTok has picked up more users than all but a handful of social-media apps, which have been around more than twice as long (see chart 1). Among young audiences, it crushes the competition. Americans aged 18-24 spend an hour a day on TikTok, twice as long as they spend on Instagram and Snapchat and more than five times as long as they spend on Facebook, which these days is mainly a medium for communicating with the grandparents (see chart 2).TikTok’s success has prompted its rivals to reinvent themselves. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has turned both apps’ main feeds into algorithmically sorted “discovery engines” and launched Reels, a TikTok clone bolted onto Facebook and Instagram. Similar lookalike products have been created by YouTube (Shorts), Snapchat (Spotlight), Pinterest (Watch) and even Netflix (Fast Laughs). The latest TikTok-inspired makeover, announced on March 8th, was by Spotify, a music app whose homepage now features video clips that can be skipped by swiping up. (TikTok’s Chinese sister app, Douyin, is having a similar effect in its home market, where digital giants like Tencent are increasingly putting short videos at the centre of their offerings.) The result is that short-form video has taken over social media. Of the 64 minutes that the average American spends viewing social media each day, 40 minutes are spent watching video clips, up from 28 minutes just three years ago, estimates Bernstein, a broker. However, this transformation comes with a snag. Although users have a seemingly endless appetite for short video, the format is proving less profitable than the old news feed. TikTok monetises its American audience at a rate of just $0.31 per hour, a third the rate of Facebook and a fifth the rate of Instagram (see chart 3). This year it will make about $67 from each of its American users, while Instagram will make more than $200, estimates Insider Intelligence, a research firm. Nor is this just a TikTok problem. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, told investors last month that “Currently, the monetisation efficiency of Reels is much less than Feed, so the more that Reels grows…it takes some time away from Feed and we actually lose money.”The most comforting explanation for the earnings gap is that TikTok, Reels and the other short-video platforms are immature. “TikTok is still a toddler in the social-media ad landscape,” says Jasmine Enberg of Insider Intelligence, who points out that the app introduced ads only in 2019. Platforms tend to keep their ad load low while getting new users on board, and advertisers take time to warm to new products. “You can’t really wave a magic wand and declare that your new ads are ‘premium’ without any performance history to back it up, so they start at the end of the line,” says Michelle Urwin of Skai, a digital marketing agency.Meta points out that it has been here before. Instagram’s Stories feature took a while to get advertisers signed up but is now a big earner. Meta is ramping up Reels’ monetisation and expects it to stop losing money around the end of this year. But it acknowledges that it will be a long time before Reels is as profitable as the old news feed. “We know it took us several years to bring the gap close between Stories and Feed ads,” Susan Li, Meta’s chief financial officer, said on an earnings call last month. “And we expect that this will take longer for Reels.”Some wonder if the gap in fact will never be closed. Even mature video-apps cannot keep up with the old social networks when it comes to monetising their users’ time. YouTube, which has been around for 18 years, makes less than half as much money per user-hour as Facebook or Instagram, estimates Bernstein. In China, where short-form video took off a few years before it did in the West, short-video ads last year monetised at only about 15% the rate of ads on local e-commerce apps.For one thing, the ad load in video is inescapably lower than on a news feed of text and images. Watch a five-minute YouTube clip and you might see three ads; scroll Instagram for five minutes and you could see dozens. Watching video also seems to put consumers in a more passive mood than scrolling a feed of friends’ updates, making them less likely to click through to buy. Booking 1,000 impressions for a video ad on Instagram Reels costs about half as much as 1,000 impressions for an ad on Instagram’s news feed, reports Tinuiti, another big marketing agency, implying that advertisers see Reels ads as less likely to generate clicks.Auctions for video ads are less competitive than those for static ones, because many advertisers have yet to create ads in video format. Big advertisers prize video ads (and report record engagement on TikTok, where products have gone viral with the hashtag #TikTokmademebuyit). But the long tail of small businesses from which social networks have made their billions find video spots tricky to produce. Just over 40% of Meta’s 10m or so advertisers use Reels ads, the company says. Getting the remaining 60% to create video commercials may be made easier by artificial intelligence. One senior executive imagines a near future in which a small retailer can create a bespoke video ad using only voice commands. Until that moment arrives, half the long tail is lopped off.Short-video apps are also hampered by weaker targeting. For audiences, part of the appeal of TikTok and its many imitators is that the user need do no more than watch, and swipe when they get bored. The algorithm uses this to learn what kinds of videos—and therefore ads—they like. But this guesswork is no substitute for the hard personal data harvested by the previous generation of social networks, which persuaded users to fill in a lengthy profile including everything from their education to their marital status. The upshot is that many advertisers still treat short-form video as a place for loosely targeted so-called brand advertising, to raise general awareness of their product, rather than the hyper-personalised (and more valuable) direct-response ads that old-school social networks specialise in.Here, at least, TikTok’s imitators have an advantage over TikTok itself. Using a trove of data built up over a decade and a half, when there were few rules against tracking users’ activity across the wider web, Meta already knows a lot about many of the users watching its videos and can make well informed guesses about the rest. If a new, unknown user watches the same videos as a group who are known to be rich, female graduates with children, say, it is a good bet that the new user has the same profile. TikTok says it has made big investments in its direct-response ads, including new tools for measuring their effectiveness. But it still has catching up to do. “Meta are leveraging their history,” says Mark Shmulik of Bernstein. The social apps will not be the only losers in this new, trickier ad environment. “All advertising is about what the next-best alternative is,” says Brian Wieser of Madison and Wall, an advertising consultancy. Most advertisers allocate a budget to spend on ads on a particular platform, he says, and “the budget is the budget”, regardless of how far it goes. If social-media advertising becomes less effective across the board, it will be bad news not just for the platforms that sell those ads, but for the advertisers that buy them. ■To stay on top of the biggest stories in business and technology, sign up to the Bottom Line, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter. More

Fanatics will replace Adidas as the official uniform supplier for the National Hockey League starting with the 2024-2025 season.
The 10-year deal marks a deepening of the company’s relationship with the NHL and the first time Fanatics branding will appear on official player uniforms in professional sports.
Fanatics runs the NHL’s e-commerce site for fans with more than 90 million customers worldwide.

Fanatics will replace Adidas as the official uniform supplier for the National Hockey League starting with the 2024-2025 season, the league announced on Tuesday.
The 10-year deal marks a deepening of the company’s relationship with the NHL and the first time Fanatics branding will appear on official player uniforms in professional sports. Terms of the deal were not immediately available.

“This is a seminal moment in the history of Fanatics, and a testament to the hands-on, collaborative relationship with the NHL that we’ve built over the years,” said Fanatics founder and CEO Michael Rubin in a statement.
Fanatics runs the NHL’s e-commerce site with more than 90 million customers worldwide. Since 2018, the company also has produced the league’s performance and training apparel, in addition to all headwear for players and coaches.
In addition, Fanatics has long-standing relationships with more than 80 current and former hockey stars through its memorabilia and collectibles division.
“Fanatics is a sports industry market leader and with its proven track-record in e-commerce and retail operations … our players and fans should look forward to what Fanatics will bring to the best uniforms in all of sports,” said NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman in a statement.
The league notified apparel companies in July that jersey rights were back in play after Adidas announced it would not be seeking renewal at the end of its seven-year contract.

Adidas took over the rights from Reebok beginning with the 2017-2018 season. That deal was worth an estimated $70 million annually, according to ESPN.
Fanatics said Tuesday it will manufacture the new NHL uniforms in Canada at the same factory that had been making the NHL’s on-ice uniforms for the last three decades. Over the next 18 months, the company said, it will build teams and expand resources in preparation for the rollout.
Fanatics said it will begin immediately working with all 32 clubs, equipment managers and players.
“Everything we do as a company pushes the boundaries to create more highly engaged experiences and revolutionary products for fans, athletes, and partners, and I can’t wait to see our brand on official on-ice uniforms for the first time,” said Rubin.

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Ford Motor on Tuesday unveiled its first all-new electric vehicle exclusively for the European market and said it plans to leverage the well-known Explorer nameplate to gain traction.
The EV crossover is part of Ford’s plans to transition its European lineup to be entirely electric by 2030.
Ford has no plans to offer the midsize electric crossover in the U.S., the company said.

Ford revealed the electric 2023 Explorer for Europe on March 21, 2023.

DETROIT — Ford Motor on Tuesday unveiled its first all-new electric vehicle exclusively for the European market and said it plans to leverage the well-known Explorer nameplate to gain traction.
The EV crossover is part of Ford’s plans to transition its European lineup to be entirely electric by 2030.

Other than the Explorer name and some design attributes, the new vehicle shares little to nothing with the gas-powered SUV in the U.S., or a plug-in hybrid version that’s currently available in Europe. The naming is part of the company’s strategy to leverage its “most iconic” brands for EVs, including the Mustang Mach-E crossover and F-150 Lightning.
Ford said it has no plans to offer the midsize electric crossover in the U.S. It is one of two vehicles expected for Europe that leverages the Volkswagen Group’s all-electric “MEB” platform at Ford’s factory in Cologne, Germany.

Ford revealed the electric 2023 Explorer for Europe on March 21, 2023.

Ford and Volkswagen first announced a broad collaboration on electric and autonomous vehicles in 2019. The collaboration on EVs was intended to speed up the process of getting vehicles to market as Ford works on its own dedicated platform.
The Detroit automaker expects to produce 1.2 million electric vehicles using Volkswagen’s platform over six years, starting in 2023 — double its previous production plans. Those plans include 600,000 EVs a year in Europe by 2026.
Ford said the Explorer EV will be offered in two trims: Explorer and Explorer Premium, with a starting price of less than 45,000 euros (about $48,250) when sales launch later this year. The company declined to disclose the expected range and other performance statistics.

Ford revealed the electric 2023 Explorer for Europe on March 21, 2023.

Ford has said it wants to reference its American roots more in the marketing and styling of European passenger cars, according to Automotive News.
“Explorer is a trailblazer for a new breed of exciting Ford electric vehicles,” Martin Sander, general manager of Ford’s European EV business, said in a release. “Steeped in our American roots but built in Cologne for our customers in Europe, it is road trip-ready for the big adventures and fully loaded with everything our customers will need for their daily drives.”
The push for EVs by Ford comes amid a restructuring of its European operations that thus far has included thousands of layoffs. Ford executives have said the automaker is looking toward a “leaner, more competitive cost structure” for the region.

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Dodge is resurrecting its controversial muscle car model, the Challenger SRT Demon, with a final special edition of the vehicle before production ends on the brand’s current V8 engine cars later this year.
Dodge says the new car will deliver 1,025 total horsepower, 945 foot-pounds of torque and reach 60 mph from a rolling start in 1.66 seconds.
The 2023 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon 170 will start at $96,666 but can top $120,000 with fees, options and accessories, according to Dodge.

2023 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon 170

DETROIT — Dodge is resurrecting its controversial muscle car model, the Challenger SRT Demon, as a final special edition of the vehicle before production of the brand’s current V8 engine cars ends later this year.
The limited-edition drag racing car will be the fastest, most powerful version of the Dodge Challenger ever produced by the automaker. It builds upon a 2018 Challenger SRT Demon model that some criticized for being too powerful and barely street legal.

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Dodge says the new car will deliver 1,025 horsepower and 945 foot-pounds of torque on E85 ethanol blend fuel. It can achieve 60 mph from a rolling start in 1.66 seconds. The vehicle’s performance falls slightly when using fuel with lower amounts of ethanol, but even on common E10 fuel it boasts 900 horsepower and 810 foot-pounds of torque.
The 2023 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon 170 will start at the diabolically evocative price of $96,666 — the last three figures are a reference to the devil — but it can top $120,000 or more with fees, options and accessories, according to Dodge. Ordering for the vehicle opens on March 27.
Dodge, owned by Stellantis, only plans to build as many as 3,000 of the vehicles for the U.S. and 300 for Canada, pending the availability of parts and supply chain problems. That would be similar to production of the 2018 model.

2023 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon 170

Dodge CEO Tim Kuniskis declined to disclose the capital investment for the vehicle, which was revealed Monday, or its expected profit margins.
“These cars are ending on a high,” Kuniskis said. He referred to the Demon 170 as “the new pinnacle of factory crazy.”

When asked about the vehicle’s fuel economy, he said “it’s horrible,” but later called the car “eco-friendly” because fuel with high ethanol levels runs cleaner than traditional gasoline while also burning more quickly. The car will be subject to a $2,100 mandatory gas-guzzler tax.   
The “170” moniker is in reference to a high proof of alcohol, as the car can run on ethanol fuel. Each owner will also receive a special glass decanter with their vehicle purchase.

2023 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon 170

The new car will be capable of popping wheelies, where the vehicle’s front tires lift off the ground due to the amount of power coming from the rear wheels.
Dodge was expected to reveal the car earlier this year, but engineers were “blowing up” engines attempting to get as much performance as possible out of the car, Kuniskis said. The problems led engineers to develop a new supercharged engine for the vehicle.
The 2023 Demon SRT is the seventh special-edition muscle car for Dodge as it celebrates the upcoming end of production of the current Challenger and Charger muscle cars. Dodge has sold more than 2 million of those vehicles since their introductions more than a decade ago.
“You have to celebrate this end,” Kuniskis told CNBC, adding the Challenger serves as a “halo” model for the brand, attracting the attention of customers who go on to buy other vehicles. “We do crazy better than anybody.”

2023 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon 170 

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Virgin Orbit senior leadership held daily talks with potential investors through the weekend, people familiar with the matter told CNBC.
One possible buyer balked at a proposed sale price of near $200 million, one person told CNBC — a price just below the company’s market value as of Friday’s close.
Meanwhile contingency planning is underway for a potential bankruptcy filing as soon as this week.

Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne rocket on display in Times Square, New York.
CNBC | Michael Sheetz

Virgin Orbit is scrambling to secure a funding lifeline and avoid bankruptcy, which could come as early as this week without a deal, CNBC has learned.
The rocket builder paused operations last week and furloughed most of the company, as CNBC first reported, while it sought new investment or a potential buyout.

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Virgin Orbit CEO Dan Hart and other senior leadership held daily talks with interested parties through the weekend, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked to remain anonymous in order to discuss internal matters.
During an all-hands meeting last week, Hart told employees that the company hoped to give an update on the situation as soon as Wednesday.
Meanwhile top talent is already hitting the job market: Many of Virgin Orbit’s approximately 750 employees are looking elsewhere for openings. That talent ranges from executives to senior and lead engineers to program managers who are actively searching for and finding new jobs, according to a CNBC analysis.
While a door remains open to avoiding bankruptcy, people close to the situation describe a sense of panic as the company struggles to get a deal done. One possible buyer balked at a proposed sale price of near $200 million, one person told CNBC — a price just below the company’s market value as of Friday’s close.
At the same time, Virgin Orbit is bracing for a potential bankruptcy filing as soon as this week, one person said. Virgin Orbit hired a pair of firms — Alvarez & Marsal and Ducera Partners — to draw up restructuring plans in the event of insolvency, CNBC has learned. Sky News first reported the firms had been hired.

A Virgin Orbit spokesperson declined to comment.
Shares of Virgin Orbit have continued to fall since its pause in operations, with its stock slipping to close at $0.52 a share on Monday.
The company developed a system for sending satellites into space that uses a modified 747 jet, which drops a rocket from under the aircraft’s wing midflight. Its last mission suffered a midflight failure, and its rocket failed to reach orbit.

Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit, with a rocket under the wing of a modified Boeing 747 jetliner, takes off for a key drop test of its high-altitude launch system for satellites from Mojave, California, July 10, 2019.
Mike Blake | Reuters

The company was spun out of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic in 2017 and counts the billionaire as its largest stakeholder, with 75% ownership. Mubadala, the Emirati sovereign wealth fund, holds the second-largest stake in Virgin Orbit, at 18%.
But the company has struggled to sustain its cash coffers. It went public in December 2021 near the tail end of the SPAC craze and was unable to tap the markets for fundraising in the same way as its sister company Virgin Galactic, which built its cash reserves to more than $1 billion through stock and debt sales.
Virgin Orbit aimed to raise $483 million through its SPAC process, but significant redemptions meant it raised less than half of that, bringing in $228 million in gross proceeds. The funds it did manage to raise came from Boeing and AE Industrial Partners, among others.

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Virgin Orbit has been looking for a financial lifeline for several months. Branson was not willing to fund the company further, people familiar said, and instead shifted strategy to salvaging value.
Since the fourth quarter, Virgin Orbit has raised $60 million in debt from the investment arm of Branson’s Virgin Group — giving it first priority over Virgin Orbit’s assets. Around the same time, Virgin Orbit hired Goldman Sachs and Bank of America to explore other financial opportunities, ranging from a minority-stake investment to a full sale.
George Mattson, who sits on Virgin Orbit’s board of directors, has been heavily involved in the process of selling the company, people told CNBC. Mattson spent nearly two decades as a banker at Goldman Sachs, before co-founding the SPAC called NextGen, which took Virgin Orbit public at a $3.7 billion valuation.
Virgin Orbit disclosed in a filing Monday that it had approved a severance plan for top executives, if they are terminated “following a change in control” of the company. The plan covers Hart, as well as Chief Strategy Officer Jim Simpson and Chief Operating Officer Tony Gingiss, and includes paying out base compensation and annual bonuses. In the event of termination, Hart would receive a cash severance equal to 200% of his base salary, which is $511,008, according to FactSet.

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