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Elon Musk’s SpaceX rolled out price changes for residential Starlink customers, according to emails to customers reviewed by CNBC.
Prices will rise for residential users of its satellite internet service in “limited capacity” areas but will fall for users in “excess capacity” areas, effective April 24.
SpaceX continues to expand its Starlink network through regular satellite launches and has broadened its product offerings to include maritime and aviation services.

A Starlink user terminal, also known as an antenna or satellite dish, on the roof of a building.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX rolled out new prices for residential Starlink customers based on the company’s capacity to deliver service, according to emails to customers reviewed by CNBC.
The changes, outlined on Tuesday, split residential users of its satellite internet service into areas of “limited capacity” and “excess capacity.” Prices will rise $10 per month, to $120, for users in limited capacity areas, while prices will drop $20 a month, to $90, for those in excess capacity areas. The new pricing will take effect on April 24.

The company also made changes to pricing for its RV customers, increasing the service cost by $15 a month to $150.
The price adjustments come about a year after SpaceX hiked prices across the board for products and services, citing “excessive levels of inflation.”

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SpaceX continues to expand its Starlink network through regular satellite launches, with nearly 4,000 launched to date. Its service reached 1 million subscribers in December and it is steadily expanding its product offerings — selling services to residential, business, RV, maritime and aviation customers.
Earlier this month, SpaceX leadership announced that Starlink “had a cash flow positive quarter” in 2022 as it works to make the business profitable.

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Starbucks interim CEO Howard Schultz said the new olive-oil coffee line will be a “market-maker.”
The drinks will launch in Italy before arriving in some U.S. markets this spring.
Schultz is stepping down from his interim CEO role in April and will be replaced by Laxman Narasimhan.

Starbucks’ new line of olive oil-infused coffee drinks could disrupt the industry, interim CEO Howard Schultz told CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Tuesday.
“This is a transformational moment in the history of our company creating a new category, a new platform,” Schultz told CNBC’s “Mad Money.” He said Starbucks’ new olive-oil coffee, which he conceived after an inspirational trip to Sicily, will be incremental to the business over time.

The drinks debut Wednesday at the company’s 25 Italy locations. Schultz believes it will be a “market-maker” in an industry that has felt the squeeze of tightening consumer demand. The “Oleato,” which is named after the Italian word for “with oil,” will come to the U.S. this spring, starting in California.
Alongside olive oil coffee, Starbucks is also unveiling an Oleato espresso martini, which will be available in select locations in Italy, as well as Seattle and New York.
Schultz is launching the new coffee line ahead of his April departure as interim CEO. Incoming chief executive Laxman Narasimhan will take over the position, though Schultz, 69, will maintain his board seat and act as an ambassador for the Oleato brand.
“I’ll carry the Starbucks flag and the American flag all over the world for Oleato,” said Schultz, who will be concluding his third tenure as chief executive. “But make no mistake, Laxman is the CEO and at the annual meeting on March 23, there’s only one leader at Starbucks. It’s going to be him.”
Starbucks’ olive oil coffee comes as the company continues to navigate a tough macro environment, though Schultz has maintained optimism. He noted that the company has added roughly $40 billion to its market cap since he started as interim CEO.

To be sure, Starbucks has raised prices about 5% to offset inflation, but Schultz said he does not expect any more increases.
“I’m not worried about inflation going forward, and I might be the only CEO in America that feels like we’re going to have a soft landing,” said Schultz.
The company has seen sagging international sales after a resurgence in Covid cases in China led to shrinking demand in that market. Going forward, Schultz is anticipating a rebound for China and for consumer demand at large.
“The wind is at our back,” Schultz said.

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Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said he wants to help lower inflationary prices and won’t participate “in a recession if there is one.”
The company reported fourth-quarter earnings that beat Wall Street’s expectations.
Walmart is entering its new fiscal year with caution, acknowledging the continued squeeze on consumer demand.

Doug McMillon, president and CEO of Walmart.
Adam Jeffery | CNBC

Walmart CEO Doug McMillon wants to help bring inflationary prices down by keeping his company’s own private brands priced low, telling CNBC’s Jim Cramer Tuesday that the company is “not participating in a recession if there is one.”
“I think we have historically shown that we can bring prices down,” said McMillon in a “Mad Money” interview.

McMillon said he would prefer that Walmart’s brand partners and suppliers “step forward” on their own to lower prices, but regardless he wants “to play a role in helping get prices down.”
The retail giant reported healthy holiday-quarter earnings on Tuesday as it capitalized on inflation-weary consumers looking for cheaper alternatives and discounts. The company reported record annual revenue of $611 billion.
McMillon told Cramer he was confident that Walmart’s lower-priced products could push other brands to bring down their own prices, even as Walmart and its peers face rising costs.
“Over time, the market works,” McMillon said. “We believe branded manufacturers and all of our suppliers of all types will have to respond to that market in time.”
Walmart is proceeding with caution as it heads into the new year, issuing more conservative guidance for the current fiscal year than Wall Street expected.
“It’s hard to know exactly what the back half of the year will look like,” said McMillon.

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Nikola will begin offering an advanced driver-assist system on its electric heavy trucks starting late next year.
The system, made by Plus and called PlusDrive, is similar to highway driving systems offered by automakers including Tesla, General Motors and Ford Motor.
Nikola said that several of its fleet customers, including PGT Trucking and Christenson Transportation, have agreed to test prototype PlusDrive-enabled semitrucks.

Nikola Motor Company Two truck
Source: Nikola Motor Company

Nikola will begin offering an advanced driver-assist system on its electric heavy trucks starting late next year, the company said Wednesday.
The system, made by Plus and called PlusDrive, is similar to the highway driving systems offered by automakers including Tesla, General Motors and Ford Motor – while a human driver must be present and attentive, the system can handle most highway driving tasks on its own, in addition to assisting the human driver in non-highway situations including backing up to loading docks.  

Plus says its “autonomous driving technology offers the industry’s best-in-class perception system and deep learning models to quickly, accurately, and safely perceive the vehicle’s surroundings, predict what’s coming next, and control the vehicle to make its next move.”
But a Nikola representative told CNBC the system as it will be integrated into the company’s semitrucks is designed to be an “eyes-on-road, hands-on-wheel” system.
Nikola CEO Michael Lohscheller said in a release that the electric steering and braking systems already used in the company’s trucks will simplify the integration of Plus’ system, which includes radar, cameras and lidar sensors to detect obstacles around the truck.
Plus already provides the PlusDrive system to Italian heavy-truck maker Iveco, a longtime Nikola partner. Iveco began testing its own PlusDrive-enabled trucks earlier this month.
Nikola said that several of its fleet customers, including PGT Trucking and Christenson Transportation, have agreed to test prototype PlusDrive-enabled Nikola semitrucks. The company expects to begin offering PlusDrive on its regular production battery-electric and fuel cell trucks by the end of 2024.

Nikola is scheduled to report its fourth-quarter and full-year results before the U.S. markets open on Thursday.
Clarification: Plus’s advanced driver-assist system as integrated into Nikola’s semitrucks is designed to be an “eyes-on-road, hands-on-wheel” system, according to a company representative. An earlier version of this story mischaracterized the functionality.

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“It’s free and always will be,” Facebook vowed on its landing page for nearly a decade. The world’s largest social network still is. But from this week its users and those of its sister app, Instagram, will have the option of paying $11.99 a month for a “verified” account, buying them better customer service, more widely distributed posts and a blue badge next to their name.The subscription is the latest example of a growing trend. Last June Snapchat, a messaging app popular among 20-somethings, launched a $3.99 plan called Snapchat+. In December Twitter relaunched Twitter Blue, an $8-per-month service. Like Meta’s offering, both offer an assortment of perks, the most significant being a more prominent place for the user’s posts in the feeds of others.It is hardly surprising that ad-supported networks are looking to diversify their sources of revenue. After years of non-stop growth the online-advertising business has hit a speed bump. The great one-off shift of ad budgets from offline locations, like newspapers, to the web is mostly complete. And since 2021 mobile advertising has been hampered by anti-tracking rules pioneered by Apple, which make it harder for apps like Facebook to target ads and measure their effectiveness.The results have been painful. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, has reported falling revenue in each of the past three quarters. Despite a recent rally its stock is trading at less than half the value at its peak in 2021. Snap, which owns Snapchat, has lost nearly 90% of its market value in the same period. Twitter, which was bought last October by Elon Musk, a mercurial self-styled “technoking”, is “trending to breakeven” having previously faced bankruptcy, its owner tweeted this month.Subscriptions are no substitute for ads. Snap said on February 17th that 2.5m people had signed up to Snapchat+, less than 1% of its app’s 375m daily users. That implies annual subscription sales of no more than $120m, or less than 3% of Snap’s total revenue last year. Though Twitter has not said how many have joined Blue (its entire press office seems to have been sacked), a recent leak put the figure at below 300,000. The product remains a work in progress, with promised features such as fewer ads still billed as “coming soon”. On February 17th Twitter adopted a new approach to driving sign-ups, announcing that two-factor authentication by text message, a security feature, would shortly be turned off for those who don’t cough up.Meta says its offering is aimed at “creators”, who use its platforms for work and might be most willing to pay for verification and extra reach. Whereas “Elon has a plan for everyone to buy Twitter Blue (but has yet to give good reasons why), for Meta it is about a scalable way to prevent impersonation of businesses [and] celebs,” suggests Benedict Evans, a tech analyst. Rob Leathern, a former Facebook executive, rejects the idea that the plan is a copy of Snap’s and Twitter’s efforts: Facebook has been working on verification for years, he says, citing its acquisition in 2018 of Confirm.io, a biometric-ID startup.To the extent that social networks embrace subscription it will mean a windfall for the mobile platforms that host their apps. Google, which runs the Android operating system, and Apple, which runs iOS, make no money from apps’ advertising revenue, but take a cut of consumers’ in-app purchases, including recurring subscriptions. Having whacked the mobile ad business with new privacy rules, Apple and Google stand to profit from the resulting move to subscriptions.There may be a sting in the tail. Whereas Meta’s new service costs $11.99 for those signing up on the web, the price if paying via the app is $14.99. Similarly, Mr Musk, who has called Apple’s fees “a 30% tax on the internet”, charges $8 for Twitter Blue online and $11 in app. Such two-tier pricing has proved controversial, with Apple blocking apps such as Fortnite, a video game which told users they could pay less in a browser. But as more large companies embrace differential pricing, consumers may learn that they can get a big discount by signing up outside Apple and Google’s ecosystems. ■ More

Target said it will spend $100 million to build a larger network of sortation centers that speed up and lower the cost of delivering online orders.
The big box retailer is pressing ahead with its e-commerce strategy, even as it anticipates slower sales.
Target will report its holiday-quarter earnings Tuesday.

The Target Corporation logo displayed on a smartphone screen.
Rafael Henrique | SOPA Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Target said Wednesday it will spend $100 million to build a larger network of supply chain hubs to speed up and lower the cost of delivering online orders.
The retailer plans to have at least 15 of the facilities, dubbed sortation centers, by the end of January 2026. It already has opened nine, after testing the concept in its hometown of Minneapolis. The expansion will also grow Target’s workforce. On average, more than 100 people work at each sortation center.

The company is betting on e-commerce growth, despite struggling with a glut of inventory and a noticeable pullback in sales. Target lowered its holiday-quarter outlook and announced plans to cut up to $3 billion in costs over the next three years. It will report fiscal fourth-quarter earnings and its full-year expectations on Tuesday.
E-commerce sales growth has slowed for the company, too, partially because of the sharp rise during the earlier days of the pandemic, which created tough comparisons. Digital sales increased less than 1% in the most recently reported quarter, which ended in late October. That compares to nearly 29% growth in the year-ago third quarter.
This week, Target’s retail peers Walmart and Home Depot forecasted a tougher year ahead, after the pandemic-fueled sales boom and as inflation weighs on household budgets. Walmart said it expects same-store sales for its U.S. business to rise by 2% or 2.5%, excluding fuel, in the fiscal year. Home Depot said it expects sales growth for the fiscal year to be roughly flat.
Gretchen McCarthy, Target’s chief global supply chain & logistics officer, said regardless of the economic backdrop, Target has to keep up with customer expectations — namely getting online purchases conveniently and quickly.
“We are absolutely tracking consumer spending closely. We’re taking recent trends into account,” McCarthy said, pointing to the retailer’s lowered forecast.

But, she added, the delivery hubs will help Target better meet customers’ needs, whether they’re shopping online, in stores or using curbside pickup.
She said up to 40% of packages that go through sortation centers and get delivered by Shipt arrive to customers’ doors next day — and Target aims to get that number higher.
Over the roughly the past six years, Target has leaned into a strategy of “stores as hubs.” It has turned its approximately 1,950 stores into mini warehouses where employees help pick and pack the majority of the company’s online orders. Nearly 97% of its total sales were fulfilled by a store in the fiscal third quarter, according to company filings.
As online sales grew, however, Target’s backrooms became crowded with packages. Target began testing sortation centers, a facility where packages arrive from about 30 to 40 nearby stores, get grouped into more efficient delivery routes and get picked up by a third-party carrier or a vehicle of a contract worker for Shipt, a third-party delivery company that Target owns. It opened the first one in 2020 in Minneapolis.
It has opened sortation centers across major markets in Minnesota, Texas, Colorado, Illinois, Georgia and Pennsylvania. Last month, it opened them in the Chicago and Denver area.
By switching to the model, Target has cleared space in its backrooms and freed up time for store employees to help customers, McCarthy said. She declined to specify the savings that come from each hub, but said since the sortation centers have opened the company has saved “tens of millions of dollars in last-mile expense.”
In the coming year, she said Target expects to deliver 50 million packages through the sortation centers — up from 26 million packages in 2022.

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Nikola will begin offering an advanced driver-assist system on its electric heavy trucks starting late next year.
The system, made by Plus and called PlusDrive, is similar to the hands-free highway driving systems offered by automakers including Tesla, General Motors and Ford Motor.
Nikola said that several of its fleet customers, including PGT Trucking and Christenson Transportation, have agreed to test prototype PlusDrive-enabled Nikola semitrucks.

Nikola Motor Company Two truck
Source: Nikola Motor Company

Nikola will begin offering an advanced driver-assist system on its electric heavy trucks starting late next year, the company said Wednesday.
The system, made by Plus and called PlusDrive, is similar to the hands-free highway driving systems offered by automakers including Tesla, General Motors and Ford Motor – while a human driver must be present and attentive, the system can handle most highway driving tasks on its own, in addition to assisting the human driver in non-highway situations including backing up to loading docks.  

Nikola CEO Michael Lohscheller said in a release that the electric steering and braking systems already used in the company’s trucks will simplify the integration of Plus’s system, which includes radar, cameras and lidar sensors to detect obstacles around the truck.
Plus already provides the PlusDrive system to Italian heavy-truck maker IVECO, a longtime Nikola partner. IVECO began testing its own PlusDrive-enabled trucks earlier this month.
Nikola said that several of its fleet customers, including PGT Trucking and Christenson Transportation, have agreed to test prototype PlusDrive-enabled Nikola semitrucks. The company expects to begin offering PlusDrive on its regular production battery-electric and fuel-cell trucks by the end of 2024.
Nikola will report its fourth-quarter and full-year results before the U.S. markets open on Thursday.

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Major League Soccer and Adidas have renewed their partnership.
Adidas will also work with MLS on expanding the U.S. audience for soccer.
MLS kicks off its 28th season this week.

Major League Soccer and sportwear giant Adidas agreed to a multiyear extension of their partnership.
The deal, announced days before MLS kicks off its 28th season, goes through 2030 and is valued at $830 million, according to a person involved in the deal. It represents Adidas’ largest-ever investment in North American soccer.

Their current contract, set to expire next year, was signed in 2017. At the time, it marked a record-breaking deal for North American soccer for Adidas. That deal was valued at $700 million.
Under the terms of the new agreement, Adidas will continue to supply the league with branded apparel, footwear, training gear and the official match ball.
“We have sponsorship revenue of nearly a billion dollars over a period of time, lots of ticket revenue, lots of local sponsorship, getting the largest company in the world to give us the first global digital partnership — every game on a device,” MLS Commissioner Don Garber told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” Wednesday. “So that’s the pitch deck and obviously when you got a partnership like this it takes that to another level.”

Adidas renews its longtime partnership with Major League Soccer until 2030.
Source: Major League Soccer

The German sportswear giant will also work with MLS on various initiatives and financial investments to grow the sport and business on and off the field ahead of the 2026 World Cup that’s being held in North America.
“Looking ahead to the 2026 World Cup, we see many possibilities to build upon the strong foundation and positive momentum we have already created together. The league’s future is bright and we are proud to be part of it,” Rupert Campbell, president of Adidas North America, told CNBC.

The relationship between Adidas and MLS dates back to the league’s inception in 1996. Eight years later, Adidas became league-wide partners, an arrangement that has continued until the present.

Ups and downs

It has been a tumultuous year for Adidas, including the turmoil surrounding Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, following his antisemitic remarks. The company expects $1 billion in losses after dropping the rapper and fashion mogul. The brand is also under the new leadership of Bjorn Gulden, the former CEO of rival Puma.
These issues didn’t affect the negotiations, which took a year, according to a person familiar with the situation. MLS was also confident that Adidas would properly resolve the issues with Ye, said the person, who declined to be named because they were not authorized to speak on the matter.
Major League Soccer has seen rapid fan and financial growth since the last contract negotiations. The league has grown from 16 clubs in 2010 to 29 teams today. Since 2019, the average team value has jumped 85% to $579 million, according to Forbes. Earlier this month, Los Angeles Football Club became the first team in the league’s billion-dollar club, with a franchise valued at $1 billion. In 2008, the average club valuation was $37 million.
Attendance is also at all-time highs. The league saw a record 10 million fans in 2022, breaking the previous record of 8.6 million in 2019.
Investors have taken notice. The league has attracted a diverse group of celebrity owners that includes basketball star James Harden; actors Matthew McConaughey, Will Ferrell and Reese Witherspoon; musicians Ciara and Macklemore; and football stars Russell Wilson and Patrick Mahomes.
In June, the league entered into a 10-year deal with Apple TV to stream all MLS Leagues Cup matches through the MLS Season Pass exclusively. Commissioner Don Garber has said he hopes that the new partnership will help the league to continue to connect with a younger demographic. That deal is widely reported to be worth $2.5 billion, with Apple paying MLS $250 million annually.
The league and Adidas are trying to expand their cultural reach, as well. Adidas introduced a special Nashville SC Johnny Cash jersey last week. The team will wear it during its season opener, with Johnny Cash music blaring from the stadium. Nashville minority owner Witherspoon won an Oscar for playing June Carter Cash in 2005’s “Walk the Line,” which can be streamed through Apple.
The MLS season begins Saturday.

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