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Shares of WWE, the company behind “Smackdown” and “WrestleMania,” haven’t traded at these levels since summer 2019.
The wrestling and media company is the subject of acquisition rumors.
Vince McMahon retired as CEO earlier this year after revelations that he made $20 million in unrecorded payments to accusers and Donald Trump’s foundation.

Vince McMahon attends a press conference to announce that WWE Wrestlemania 29 will be held at MetLife Stadium in 2013 at MetLife Stadium on February 16, 2012 in East Rutherford, New Jersey.
Michael N. Todaro | Getty Images

World Wrestling Entertainment is defying broader market trends this year.
The company’s stock is up more than 50% in 2022, hitting a 52-week high Monday, and trading at levels it hasn’t seen since summer 2019. The S&P 500, by comparison, is down more than 20% this year.

The stock’s strong performance this year occurred as WWE’s live wrestling events business came roaring back after months of Covid restrictions and the company increasingly became the subject of sale talks. The stock continued to do well after WWE’s longtime leader and biggest shareholder, Vince McMahon, retired from the company over the summer in a cloud of scandal.
Shares of WWE were effectively flat Monday after hitting $76.90. The company’s market capitalization is more than $5.6 billion.
Industry insiders believe WWE could be an acquisition target. A deal could come before the company’s next U.S. TV rights renewal — likely to be announced in mid-2023. WWE’s current U.S. streaming deal with NBCUniversal’s Peacock expires in 2026.
Analyst John Healy of Northcoast Research, who covers WWE, sees the stock’s success as a confluence of successful ratings, upcoming media deal opportunities and the speculation about a possible acquisition.
“That speculation has been going on for a long time, and I think will always be around this company given the unique asset that it is and the ownership structure,” Healy told CNBC on Monday.

He also noted that WWE is relatively insulated from consumer trends, saying that “two-thirds of the revenue is coming from locked-in relationships” with media companies. Given a highly saturated media market, Healy expects high bidding for the rights to “Raw” and “Smackdown,” which are set to be renegotiated in the coming year.
WWE has also had to deal with McMahon’s controversies. He retired in July after it was revealed that he had paid nearly $20 million in previously unrecorded expenses.
Of those payments, almost $15 million went to settle sexual misconduct allegations from four women against McMahon over the last 16 years, and $5 million went to Donald Trump’s foundation from donations made in 2007 and 2009.
WWE has hinted that the hush money payments to alleged victims, already the subject of an ongoing independent review overseen by the company’s board, are under investigation by other entities.
Still, WWE stayed in the family. Stephanie McMahon, McMahon’s daughter, took over as chairwoman and co-CEO alongside Nick Khan, the company’s former president. Stephanie’s husband and longtime wrestler Paul “Triple H” Levesque has taken over as the company’s top creative executive, the role the elder McMahon had before he retired.
Vince McMahon, 77, remains the largest stakeholder in the company, holding about 32% of shares.
Disclosure: Comcast owns NBCUniversal, the parent company of CNBC.
– CNBC’s Chris Hayes contributed to this report.
Correction: This story was updated to correctly characterize Nick Khan’s role in WWE.

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Stellantis’ electric vehicle plans put it in competition with firms such as Elon Musk’s Tesla as well as companies like Volkswagen, Ford, and GM.
According to the International Energy Agency, electric vehicle sales are on course to hit an all-time high this year.

The Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares photographed next to a Jeep Avenger at the Paris Motor Show on October 17, 2022.
Nathan Laine | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The CEO of Stellantis told CNBC Monday that the company would use its own sites to generate half the energy it needs for manufacturing by the middle of this decade.
“We have decided the appropriate investments for Stellantis to be able, from a manufacturing standpoint, in 2025 to produce 50% of our energy needs within our own sites,” Carlos Tavares, who was speaking to CNBC’s Charlotte Reed at the Paris Motor Show, said.

Tavares’ comments came as Stellantis geared up to debut what he called the “first pure-EV Jeep” after details of the vehicle were published last month.
According to Stellantis, the Jeep Avenger’s “targeted electric range” is 400 kilometers, or a little under 249 miles.
The firm — whose brands include Fiat, Chrysler and Citroen — is set to open up reservations for the Avenger on Monday, and it’s slated to arrive in showrooms next year.
Stellantis wants all passenger sales in Europe to be battery electric by the year 2030. In the U.S., it wants a “50% passenger car and light-duty truck BEV sales mix” within the same timeframe.
The above targets come as major economies lay out plans to move away from the internal combustion engine in favor of battery electric vehicles.

Read more about energy from CNBC Pro

Shift to electric vehicles

During his interview with CNBC, Tavares was asked whether talk of recession, the cost of living crisis, inflation and energy prices would have a delaying effect on the shift to electric vehicles.
“Well of course, energy is the number one precondition for success of electrification, that is no surprise,” he replied.
“The question that you are asking me is the question that you should ask to the political leaders because, as you know, electrification has been triggered by regulations,” he said.
“So yes, of course it’s a bump in the road,” he later added. “I hope it’s a short term hurdle that we will be all able to overcome, and Stellantis is now full speed ahead with all the electric vehicles, starting with the new Jeep Avenger, the first pure EV Jeep.”
Asked about the EU’s plans to phase out the sale of new ICE cars and vans by 2035, Tavares said it was “clear that the decision to ban pure ICEs is a purely dogmatic decision.”
Expanding on his point, the Stellantis chief said he would recommend that Europe’s political leaders “be more pragmatic and less dogmatic.”
“I think there is the possibility — and the need — for a more pragmatic approach to manage the transition.”

More from CNBC Climate:

Stellantis’ electric vehicle plans put it in competition with firms such as Elon Musk’s Tesla as well as companies like Volkswagen, Ford, and GM. According to the International Energy Agency, electric vehicle sales are on course to hit an all-time high this year.
In recent years, a range of factors have created pressure points when it comes to the supply of the materials crucial for EVs, an issue the IEA highlighted earlier this year in its Global EV Outlook.
“The rapid increase in EV sales during the pandemic has tested the resilience of battery supply chains, and Russia’s war in Ukraine has further exacerbated the challenge,” the IEA’s report noted, adding that prices of materials like lithium, cobalt and nickel “have surged.”
“In May 2022, lithium prices were over seven times higher than at the start of 2021,” it added. “Unprecedented battery demand and a lack of structural investment in new supply capacity are key factors.”
On the raw materials required for EVs and their batteries, Mercedes-Benz CEO Kallenius sketched out the current state of play as he saw it.
“Raw material prices have been quite volatile in the last 12 to 18 months — some have spiked and actually some have come back down again,” he said.

Read more about electric vehicles from CNBC Pro

“But it is true as we become electric, all-electric and more and more automakers go into the electric space, there is a need to increase mining capacities and refining capacities for lithium, nickel, and some of those raw materials that are needed to produce electric cars.”
“We have everything that we need now, but we need to look into the mid to long term and work with the mining industry here to increase capacities.” More

Kanye West, who now goes by Ye, agreed to buy Parler, a conservative social media app, after other platforms suspended him over antisemitic posts.
“In a world where conservative opinions are considered to be controversial we have to make sure we have the right to freely express ourselves,” Ye said in a release.
Parler is one of several right-wing-friendly social media platforms to emerge in the Donald Trump era.

Kanye West arrives at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party on Feb. 9, 2020, in Beverly Hills, Calif.
Evan Agostini | Invision | AP

Kanye West, the superstar rapper who has made several inflammatory and antisemitic comments in recent weeks, has agreed in principle to buy conservative social media platform Parler, the app’s parent company said in a statement Monday.
“In a world where conservative opinions are considered to be controversial we have to make sure we have the right to freely express ourselves,” said West, who now goes by Ye, in a statement released by Parler.

Financial terms of the deal weren’t announced. The company previously said it had raised $56 million in funding from outside investors.
The move comes after Ye was locked out of his Twitter and Instagram accounts for making antisemitic remarks. In one post, Ye played into a long-standing antisemitic conspiracy theory that fellow rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs is being controlled by Jewish people. On Twitter, meanwhile, Ye’s account was restricted after he said he would go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.”
A representative for Ye didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Ye’s net worth is reportedly $2 billion. Much of his fortune comes from from his Yeezy sneakers brand and partnerships with Gap and Adidas. However, Ye severed business ties with Gap recently, and Adidas said it’s also reviewing its business relationship with him. JPMorgan Chase also cut ties with the rapper.
Parler is one of several right-wing-friendly platforms to emerge during the Donald Trump era, as the former president’s supporters claim unfair treatment by Twitter and other apps. There’s also Gettr, which is run by former Trump advisor Jason Miller, and Trump’s own app, Truth Social, whose parent company is under federal investigation as it seeks to go public. Conservative-friendly video platform Rumble went public last month.

Parler, which initially launched in 2018, was swept up in controversy last year over the role it played in the Jan. 6, 2021, riots at the Capitol building. That led a slew of tech companies, including Google and Amazon, to blacklist the service, rendering its app and website inaccessible.
In September, however, Google reinstated the app on its Play Store, stating the company changed some of its content moderation policies and enforcement. Apple restored the app on its App Store platform earlier, in April 2021.
Parler has sought to reduce its dependence on technologies from other firms by establishing its own cloud infrastructure in-house. The company set up a new parent company in September, called Parlement Technologies, aimed at providing its own cloud service for online business. “The future is uncancelable,” the company said at the time.
Ye and Parler’s parent company expect to finalize the deal before the end of the year, the company said. The terms of the deal include technical support for Parler from its parent company, as well as the use of its private cloud services.
After Ye’s suspension from Instagram, the rapper turned to Twitter, posting for the first time since 2020. “Look at this Mark How you gone kick me off instagram,” he wrote, referring to Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Instagram parent Meta.
Elon Musk, a friend of Ye’s, responded saying, “Welcome back to Twitter, my friend!”
Ye was then locked out of his Twitter account for a violation of its policies, after which Musk tweeted he had talked to Ye and “expressed my concerns about his recent tweet, which I think he took to heart.”
Musk is currently pursuing an acquisition of Twitter. That takeover was revived last week after the Tesla CEO said he would buy the social media platform at the $54.20 a share price they initially agreed on in April. The billionaire, who calls himself a “free speech absolutist,” has said he wants to make Twitter a “digital town square” that promotes free expression.
Commenting on the agreement Monday, Parlement Technologies CEO George Farmer said it “will change the world, and change the way the world thinks about free speech.”
“Ye is making a groundbreaking move into the free speech media space and will never have to fear being removed from social media again,” Farmer said in a statement. “Once again, Ye proves that he is one step ahead of the legacy media narrative. Parlement will be honored to help him achieve his goals.”
Farmer is married to American conservative activist Candace Owens, one of Ye’s advocates on social media. He is also the son of Michael Farmer, a British Conservative politician who sits in the upper chamber of the U.K. Parliament.
Farmer was named CEO of the conservative-leaning social app in May of last year, after a dispute between its early investor Rebekah Mercer and ex-Parler chief John Matze led to Matze’s ousting. Mercer, the heiress daughter of hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, is Parler’s controlling shareholder.

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It is night-time at the Soapstone Comedy Club. In fact, it always is. The club is a space in Horizon Worlds, Meta’s flagship metaverse app, where users can watch and perform comedy in virtual reality (vr). “It’s hard to do stand-up when you have no legs,” quips one performer, gesturing to his hovering avatar, before accidentally dropping the virtual microphone and floating offstage. A night out in vr lacks some of the atmosphere of a real bar, though it does cause authentic dizziness and nausea.It is almost a year since Mark Zuckerberg announced that his company would change its name from Facebook to Meta, to reflect its commitment to the metaverse and, no doubt, to escape the firm’s toxic public image. Many were unsure what the word meant, but with the company’s value at a near-all-time high of $1.1trn, and its core social-network advertising business humming away on the back of a pandemic boom, investors were willing to indulge the experiment.A year on, things look different. The metaverse on which so much has been staked remains unproven and unpopular. On October 16th the Wall Street Journal reported that, according to internal Meta documents, user numbers had declined since the spring. Meanwhile there are signs that both users and advertisers are drifting away from the social networks that pay Meta’s bills. Since its rebranding the company’s share price has dropped by 60%, destroying more than half a trillion dollars of market value (see chart 1). Forecasts for profits in 2023 have fallen by about 50%, according to data from Bloomberg. Meta’s next earnings results, due on October 26th, represent an “existential quarter”, says Mark Shmulik of Bernstein, a broker.What has gone wrong? The sell-off of Meta stock began in February, after the company reported its first-ever drop in daily users of Facebook, its first and largest social network. After 18 years of uninterrupted growth it lost 1m of them between January and March (see chart 2). It has since bounced back, adding 39m more, while users of Meta’s “family of apps”, which includes Instagram and WhatsApp, have kept growing. But the new users increasingly come from poor countries, and are therefore less valuable to advertisers. Last year Frances Haugen, a whistleblowing former Meta executive, claimed that in Facebook’s five most valuable markets, account registrations for under-18s had fallen by a quarter within a year. Meta has hurried out a new short-video product, Reels, to stem the bleeding to TikTok and other new rivals.As users wobble, so do advertisers. In the second quarter Meta’s revenue fell year on year, for the first time in its history (see chart 3). Inflation, interest rates and war all played a part. But the ad business has been permanently changed by Apple’s new rules. These make it harder for apps to track users’ online activity, which in turn makes it harder to serve them relevant ads and see whether they work. Meta has said that Apple’s changes will cost it $10bn this year in forgone revenue. Companies are shifting their advertising to what admen call the bottom of the funnel: points at which the consumer is close to a purchase (Amazon, which serves ads to customers based on what they have just searched for, has been a big beneficiary).Meta is better equipped than many of its rivals to overcome these obstacles. Reels already accounts for more than 20% of time spent on Instagram, and is making more money than Instagram’s successful Stories feature did at the same stage of its introduction, the company says. Heavy investment in artificial intelligence (ai) is helping Meta develop “probabilistic” ad models to replace the signal that was lost with Apple’s changes. Advantage+, a recent Meta ad product, uses ai to help advertisers develop and place ads. A trickier ad business serves to widen Meta’s competitive moat, points out Mr Shmulik: smaller rivals like Snap, whose share price has fallen by nearly 90% in the past 12 months, are the real casualties. Still, Meta’s advertising franchise has probably been permanently impaired. And the company is scrambling to rebuild its ad business without the architect of its previous one, Sheryl Sandberg, who left the company last month.All this would be enough to give investors jitters. The fact that Meta is simultaneously making a colossal bet on the metaverse threatens to test their faith to breaking point. Reality Labs, the company’s metaverse division, has so far run up losses of $27bn. Meta has sold more than 17m Quest 2 vr headsets, estimates idc, a data company, mostly at or below cost. It has also been on a hiring spree, last year announcing 10,000 new metaverse jobs in Europe. The pace of hardware development continues: on October 11th the company unveiled a more advanced Quest Pro headset, and Mr Zuckerberg showed off prototype hardware including a wrist-worn neural-input device. A Quest 3 and Quest Pro 2 are already in the works.When—or whether—the metaverse will take off remains unclear. The Quest’s main use so far is gaming. Fitness is a growing niche, though Meta’s attempt to buy Within, a maker of vr fitness apps, has been blocked by antitrust regulators. The Quest Pro is aimed at businesses; on its launch this month Meta announced a partnership with Microsoft, which will provide vr versions of apps like Teams and Office. A “Quest for Business” subscription will be available next year. But the social uses of vr, about which Mr Zuckerberg is most enthusiastic and where Meta should have the greatest advantage, remain unpopular. In February Meta reported that just 300,000 people had used Horizon Worlds; the firm has said nothing since. A leaked internal memo suggested that even company employees were having to be cajoled to use it (“If we don’t love it, how can we expect our users to love it?”). Mr Zuckerberg is hardly the only one who sees potential in vr. In the first half of next year Apple is expected to release its debut headset, and Sony will launch its latest gaming-focused goggles for its PlayStation console. If headsets do become the new pcs, as Mr Zuckerberg has predicted, Meta will have a considerable first-mover advantage. The Quest 2 accounted for 88% of global vr headset sales in the first half of this year, says idc. The Quest Pro is the most advanced set of vr glasses around. Meta’s hiring binge means it has much of the top vr talent, says Jitesh Ubrani of idc. If Meta can control and tax a successful vr platform, as Apple and Google control their smartphone operating systems, it will own a gold mine (Meta already skims off as much as 47.5% from Horizon Worlds purchases).The question is timing. Meta’s unusual structure gives Mr Zuckerberg total control. The firm’s board proved to be ineffective at dealing with Facebook’s scandals over privacy and misinformation. Now, rather than urge caution, it has allowed a flawed chief executive to gamble billions on the metaverse. In May Mr Zuckerberg admitted as much when he told Protocol, a news site: “If people invest in our company, we want to be profitable for them…But I also feel a responsibility to go for it…[Meta] is a controlled company, so I can make more of these decisions than most companies would.” Yet the more Meta’s core business wobbles, the less investors will be willing to give Mr Zuckerberg’s metaverse plans the benefit of the doubt. A company can only spend that much on a new idea if investors are willing to fund it. They might be willing if “your core profitability from your core business is on solid footing”, says Mr Shmulik. That is Meta’s difficulty. “The core isn’t on a solid footing at the moment.”To calm investors’ nerves, Meta is reining in its spending a little. It expects its total expenses this year to be about $7.5bn lower than it forecast at the end of last year. It has scrapped some projects, including a smart watch that was in development, and bumped up the price of the Quest 2 by $100. And it expects to reduce its headcount.Meta executives compare the company’s predicament now to ten years ago, when it was managing the transition of its social network to mobile. Shifting a billion Facebook users from desktop to phone was no mean feat, made harder by the fact that Mr Zuckerberg was late to spot the importance of mobile. That experience may have influenced his approach to the metaverse. Meta’s new vr technology, he said on October 11th, was for those “who’d rather be early than fashionably late”. The risk, as investors grow impatient, is that this time Meta has made its move too soon. ■ More

“Emily the Criminal,” a thriller about a woman who gets involved in credit card fraud, is at heart about the student loan crisis.
CNBC spoke with the screenwriter and director, John Patton Ford, about his personal interest in the subject.
At one point, he owed more than $90,000 in student debt. “It pretty much ran my whole life,” he said.

Emily the Criminal
Courtesy: John Patton Ford

In the new film “Emily the Criminal,” the title character, played by actress Aubrey Plaza, is almost always in a state of fear.
There are moments where Emily’s dread lifts: after one of her successful heists, when she’s painting in her apartment to classical music or when she’s falling in love with Youcef (Theo Rossi), who has introduced her to the world of credit card fraud. But these reprieves are always brief, and soon the fear is back. That’s largely because of another constant in Emily’s life: her $70,000 in student debt.

More from Personal Finance:Student loan forgiveness applications go live soonThis is the best time to apply for college financial aidColleges struggle with enrollment declines, underfunding
The paltry wages from her food delivery job barely allow her to keep up with the interest accumulating on her student debt each month. So Emily reinvents herself as a criminal, purchasing pricey electronics with stolen credit cards, in pursuit of a less predictable life.
“I think fear is the great motivator of human beings,” said John Patton Ford, 40, the film’s screenwriter and director. “We do nearly everything out of fear. The only reason anyone would do what she does is because they’re horribly afraid of the consequences of not doing them.”

John Patton Ford

I spoke with Ford — whose film was a critic’s pick of The New York Times and has received awards at the Annapolis Film Festival and the Deauville American Film Festival in Deauville, France, this year — about his interest in the student loan crisis and his decision to make his first feature film about the subject.
The film debuted in theaters in August, just days before President Joe Biden revealed his highly anticipated plan to forgive a large share of Americans’ student loan debt. Even if the plan survives Republican challenges, outstanding student loan debt will still exceed $1 trillion, and every year an additional 5 million Americans borrow for their education.

For those who haven’t yet seen the film, the discussion below — which has been edited and condensed for clarity — includes spoilers.
Annie Nova: From the start of the film, Emily is in a really desperate financial situation. Why did you make her student debt such a big part of her panic? 
John Patton Ford: Personal experience. I went to the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, and graduated in 2009 with around $93,000 in debt. Every decision came down to it: Can I fly home to visit my family over the holidays? Can I afford to get coffee with a friend?  It pretty much ran my whole life. And I knew I wasn’t alone in this crisis. There are tens of millions of Americans who are dealing with the same thing, but I’d never seen a movie about it. 

AN: Have you paid off the debt by now?
JPF: I don’t have the debt any longer, but it took a miracle. Getting a screenwriting career is an absolute miracle. I think there are about the same amount of people in the Writers Guild of America as there are Major League Baseball players. And even then, I wasn’t able to pay the debt off. It took becoming a director and getting a first movie made, which is astronomically difficult. My sister went to medical school — she’s an anesthesiologist — and she’s been working for like 15 years now, and she’s still paying off her student debt.  

‘No other country would tolerate this’

AN: Did you research the student loan crisis for the film? What did you learn?
JPF: It really started in 1980 with Ronald Reagan deregulating the economy so that major corporations could figure out a way not to pay their taxes. And now, 40 years later, the net outcome is that the government no longer makes the tax revenues that they used to. They’re not able to subsidize education, and so we hand off the expenses to people who are now going into massive amounts of debt to go to school.

This happened so slowly that we haven’t really reckoned with the fact that we’re the only country in the Western world that has this system. No other country would tolerate this. If this happened for one day in France, there would be mass protests. They’d set buildings on fire.
AN: I found it really interesting that you made Emily a painter — and a talented one, too. But her lifestyle leaves little room for her to make art. What is the film trying to say about the impacts of student debt on artists? 
JPF: We’ve set up a society that doesn’t make it easy for artists. So many artistic innovations that have happened throughout the years happened because artists were in a society that supported or enabled them. Would the Beatles have existed without the robust social programs in England in the 1950s that allowed them not to work full time or that made it so inexpensive to go to college? They got to take classes, then go home and practice as a band. But if the Beatles had $100,000 in student debt, they’d be working in a coal mine. The amount of talent that is not being developed today and that we’ll never get to profit from as a society is tragic.
AN: There are so many things you could have made Emily do to try to pay off her student debt. Why did you have her get into credit card fraud?
JPF: I think the more disenfranchised you become with the way things work, the more nihilistic you feel, and you can become like, ‘Well if they’re ripping me off, I’m going to rip someone else off.’ The minute you lose faith in things, you kind of become just as bad as the system.
AN: I really liked the scene where Youcef is talking about the kind of house he wants to live in one day, with an open kitchen. And then later, he’s excited to introduce Emily to his mother. Why make this person, involved in all these financial crimes, also have these very ordinary desires and dreams?
JPF: It says something about our vision of what is realistic in this day and age. As someone who lives in L.A., I can tell you, you can’t own a home here unless you’re a millionaire or a kind of criminal. You start doing the math, and you suddenly go, ‘Yeah. I’m willing to commit credit card fraud in order to throw a grenade into the system so I can actually own something.’ That just seemed like a more relatable, down-to-earth reason for doing things.
AN: At the end of the film, Emily is running her own credit card scheme in South America. It feels like a victory in that she hasn’t been caught and she’s still alive, but she’s also still locked in this dangerous and precarious cycle.
JPF: The story is ultimately a character study; it’s about someone figuring out what they’re good at, and what they like to do and what they’ll probably continue doing. It’s a coming-of-age story less than a thriller. Emily gets this opportunity to go to a foreign country and maybe focus on art, but then subsequently realizes that it’s just not enough. I wanted to end it where Emily finally gets what she thinks she wants: She really likes being the boss of things, and art never enabled her to do that but this new life of crime does. I have that last scene to show her full progression as a character.
AN: How can films shine a light on the student loan crisis in a way that other mediums can’t?
JPF: Near the end of his life, someone asked Roger Ebert to define a movie. And he said, “A machine that creates empathy.” I always thought that’s a pretty good answer. Movies have a superpower that’s hard to compare with other mediums. They really quickly get the audience to empathize with the central character and to feel what that person is feeling.

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Starting in 2015, GM union auto workers in Michigan were learning the ins and out of manufacturing EVs, with training taking them to South Korea and more recently into virtual learning environments.
Much of EV assembly is similar to an ICE vehicle — installing doors, windows, tires, brakes, seats and instrument panels — but the powertrain, comprising the engine and transmission, is a major difference as the lithium ion battery becomes the critical power source.
Making its first Bolt EVs while also making existing car models at the Orion, Michigan, auto plant is what’s called a “slow build” process, according to a GM launch manager, and he added, “We know it’s not going to be smooth the first time.”

UAW Local 5960 member Kimberly Fuhr inspects a Chevrolet Bolt EV during vehicle production on Thursday, May 6, 2021, at the General Motors Orion Assembly Plant in Orion Township, Michigan.
Steve Fecht for Chevrolet

In 2015, Marland “Lanny” Brown learned how to build an all-electric car.
A member of United Auto Workers Local 5960, he’d been an hourly employee for General Motors for nearly 31 years, mostly at its vehicle assembly plant in Lake Orion, Michigan, when he joined a core team of 15 fellow Local 5960 workers sent to GM’s technical center in Incheon, South Korea, for training to assemble the Chevrolet Bolt EV.

The Orion plant, in operation since 1983, was beginning to transition from making a variety of internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles to EVs. Following their reskilling, the popular term for upgrading job skills, Brown and the team went back to Orion and over several months trained roughly 1,000 other assembly workers on both the subtle and the substantial differences in putting together an EV. Part of the changes for workers’ duties were related to retooling in the body shop and on the engine line to accommodate components and production processes distinct to EVs.
While much of the EV assembly, Brown said, is similar to an ICE vehicle’s — such as installing doors, windows, tires, brakes, seats and instrument panels — the powertrain, comprising the engine and transmission, are remarkably different. In place of a gas-powered engine and multi-speed transmission is a lithium-ion battery pack, mounted underneath the cockpit, which energizes a zero-emissions electric motor and single-speed transmission. “Going down the engine line, instead of putting on a carburetor, we’re putting on a power distribution unit,” Brown said, citing one example.
The first Bolts started rolling down the line in October 2016, marking GM’s initial foray into an all-electric vehicle (the discontinued Chevy Volt was a plug-in hybrid), and well before the automaker announced in 2021 that it would make only EVs by 2035. Yet for the next three years, the Orion plant also continued building two ICE vehicles — the Chevy Sonic and Buick Verano — before switching over exclusively to the Bolt in 2020 and then adding the Bolt EUV (electric utility vehicle) in 2021.
In the industry, this is called a slow build, said Jack Hund, the launch manager at Orion, who’s overseen numerous new model introductions at various GM plants during his 23 years with the company. “We started slowly introducing the Bolt on the assembly line,” he said, a process that can take up to a year while working out the bugs. “We know it’s not going to be smooth the first time.”
“Progressively, we built more and more [EV] units,” Hund said. “The people on the line were so used to the ICE vehicles, it took a little time for them to wrap their arms and minds around it. There was a different skill set they had to apply to the EV,” for instance, learning the nuances of new torque tools to fasten parts onto the car with a specific amount of pressure.

“Being in an ICE environment my entire career, the big change has to do with high-voltage electrical cable connections,” Brown said. There’s specialized training required for all the assembly workers on how to deal with those potentially dangerous connections in a safe manner, he said. In essence, “it takes more of an electrician than it does a mechanic” to assemble an EV, Brown said..
Besides on-the-job reskilling, GM provides some workers with a virtual component. “We have a system where you’re on a computer and doing the elements of the work in [a prescribed] order,” said Reuben Jones, the plant manager at Orion. “They get mental reps to help them once they get to the line. Building vehicles at the right quality level and in a safe manner is extremely important. Virtual training has taken things to another level. That saves time, that saves money and helps us get the product to market much faster.”
Another off-site training program takes place at GM’s Technical Learning University (TCU) in nearby Warren, Michigan. The recently upgraded center houses manufacturing laboratory facilities that simulate steps along the assembly line, including robotics and sheet metal fabrication. In addition to that technical training, “We intertwine what we’re now calling human skills, which incorporate how to listen, how to have teamwork and critical-thinking skills,” said Kimberlea Dungy, global technology learning lead at TCU.
As the reskilling of UAW workers continues during the Big Three automakers’ steady migration to EVs, there’s a related issue that concerns the union. Because there are fewer parts in EVs than in ICE vehicles, Volkswagen Group’s then-CEO Herbert Diess said in 2019, building an EV requires about 30% less effort, which means cutting jobs. While that figure has been repeated by other executives and researchers, there has been no empirical study to support the assertion. For its part, the UAW continues to study the matter and remains vigilant.
The UAW’s current contracts with GM, Ford and Stellantis (formerly Fiat Chrysler), ratified in September 2019, help protect workers at assembly plants like Orion that switch from ICE to EV production. Essentially, the UAW and each of the companies negotiate to bring massive EV-related investments into current UAW-represented facilities to preserve jobs at those locations and offer reskilling opportunities.
In a September interview with the Washington Post, GM CEO Mary Barra addressed the issue of EV-related jobs, stating that “we’re allocating EVs or components for EVs into our existing footprint. So that’s something we’ll continue to do. It’s an advantage not only because of the workforce, it’s also an advantage because we have the facility.”
“Historically, there’s always been anxiety around the loss of jobs, but since EVs have found their way into the Big Three [assembly plants], we’re understanding more about them,” said David Michael, communications coordinator for UAW Local 5960. No jobs have been lost at Orion as a result of EV production, he said, and in fact, “we see the addition of jobs.”
When asked about the fate of workers whose jobs were specific to ICE vehicles and are no longer needed, Michael said they “are now either building EV components, drivetrains or doing alternative work to build EVs. They’re all right here. We had an assembly line where [ICE] engines came down, and now they’re electric drivetrains.”
The likelihood of continued job retention and hiring at Orion is promising following the announcement earlier this month that GM will increase Bolt production from nearly 44,000 vehicles this year to more than 70,000 in 2023. While the overall U.S. market for EVs is still only around 5% of new-car sales — but rapidly growing — among the 1.65 million EVs that were sold in the first nine months of 2022, the Bolt accounted for more than 22,000.

General Motors Chairman and CEO Mary Barra announces a $300 million investment in the GM Orion Assembly Plant plant for electric and self-driving vehicles at the Orion Assembly Plant on March 22, 2019 in Lake Orion, Michigan.
Bill Pugliano | Getty Images

Nonetheless, the Orion assembly plant is scheduled for another major makeover. GM revealed in January that it will invest $4 billion to again retool the facility, this time for production of all-electric models of the Chevy Silverado and GMC Sierra, pickups to compete with the Ford F-150 Lightning, the EV version of the perennial best-selling vehicle in the U.S. As for the future of the Bolt, GM has not confirmed anything beyond the fact that its production will continue while the facility is converted for the electric pickups.
The switch to EV pickups, GM said, will begin in 2024 and is expected to create more than 2,350 new jobs at Orion and retain approximately 1,000 current jobs when the plant is fully operational. The new jobs at Orion will be filled by a combination of GM transferees and new hires, GM said.
This latest transition will require another round of reskilling of the Orion workforce. “We have a core team working on the electric pickups, interacting with engineers and suppliers to learn how the vehicles will be assembled,” said GM’s Tom Wickham, senior manager, manufacturing communications at Orion, in an email. “As they have done with previous launches, the core team will eventually help train the rest of the Orion team before we begin regular production of the Silverado and Sierra EVs.”
GM also announced that as part of its Ultium Cells joint venture with South Korea’s LG Energy Solution to manufacture EV battery cells, the companies are investing $2.6 billion to build a third plant, in Lansing, Michigan, which is expected to create more than 1,700 new jobs when the plant is fully operational.
This raises a nagging question about whether those battery manufacturing jobs, as well as others to make EV parts, will be represented by the UAW, if so, at what wage rate. In July, Bloomberg reported that at the existing Ultium Cells plant in Lordstown, Ohio, laborers earn up to around $22 an hour, compared to the $32 hourly wage for a traditional UAW assembly worker. Ultium has said it “respects workers’ right to unionize and the efforts of the UAW or any other union to organize battery-cell manufacturing workers at our manufacturing sites,” according to Reuters.
“One of the things I’ve been paying attention to is whether some employers in the [auto] industry are going to use this shift [to EVs] as an opportunity to try to downgrade the pay and benefits and quality of jobs,” said Gordon Lafer, director the the Labor Education and Research Center at the University of Oregon in Eugene. “It’s really not clear what the quality of those jobs will be.”
Concern over the impact of EVs on jobs and facilities was a contentious issue during the 2019 contract talks between GM and the UAW, which broke down, resulting in a six-week UAW strike at GM plants. The work stoppage cost GM nearly $2 billion in lost production and employees nearly $1 billion in wages. The two sides did agree, however, to convert GM’s Detroit-Hamtramck plant, which had been slated for closure, for EV production. Today that facility, now known as Factory ZERO, builds the electric Silverado and Sierra pickups and the electric Hummer.
The UAW’s contract with GM expires next year, and the production of EVs, batteries and related components is sure to again be on the docket. “It will absolutely be a focal point for those negotiations,” said Michael. “The UAW leadership is centered on EVs and where that work is going to go. We have a union- and worker-friendly president [Biden] who’s passing great legislation that has benefitted the automakers’ transition to EVs, so we’re going to do everything we can to leverage every job in the United States.”
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Donald Trump’s media company fired an executive after he shared internal documents from an SEC whistleblower complaint with The Washington Post.
Wilkerson filed the SEC whistleblower complaint in August, alleging that the company relied on “fraudulent misrepresentations … in violation of federal securities laws.”
The report comes as Trump Media and Digital World Acquisition Corp., the shell company trying to take it public, face multiple federal investigations.

In this photo illustration, the social media platform, Truth Social logo seen displayed on a smartphone with a photo of former US President Donald Trump displayed in the background.
Rafael Henrique | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Former President Donald Trump’s media company fired an executive Thursday after he shared internal documents from a Securities and Exchange Commission whistleblower complaint with The Washington Post and spoke with the newspaper, the news outlet reported Saturday.
Will Wilkerson was a senior vice president of operations at Trump Media and Technology, which owns the social network Truth Social, and was one of the company’s first employees.

Wilkerson filed the SEC whistleblower complaint in August, alleging that the company relied on “fraudulent misrepresentations … in violation of federal securities laws,” according to the Post, in its bid to be taken public via an investment vehicle known as special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC.
In the article, Wilkerson also described strife within Trump Media, including tension with CEO Devin Nunes, who, as a Republican congressman, was one of Trump’s most loyal defenders. Wilkerson also said another executive detailed how Trump pressured him to give shares in the company to his wife, Melania Trump.
A spokeswoman for Trump Media pushed back on the Post’s story and touted Truth Media’s availability on the Apple App Store, the Google Play Store and Samsung’s Galaxy Store. “As Chairman of TMTG, President Trump hired Devin Nunes as CEO to create a culture of compliance and build a world-class team to lead Truth Social,” the spokeswoman said a statement emailed to CNBC.
Digital World Acquisition Corp., the SPAC seeking to take the media company public, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
CNBC also reached out to Wilkerson’s attorneys for comment.

Trump Media fired Wilkerson for making “unauthorized disclosures” to the Post, the newspaper said. One of his lawyers called the firing a retalation against a whistleblower, according to the report. There are laws that protect whistleblowers.
The report comes as DWAC pushes its shareholders to vote to delay its planned merger with Trump Media, which was announced last year. DWAC has warned it could liquidate if it doesn’t complete the merger, which would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Trump Media.
DWAC CEO Patrick Orlando directed another of his companies to give DWAC funding to keep it afloat until December. He has already adjourned a shareholder meeting four times, an indication that he doesn’t have the shareholder support to delay the merger.
The Trump Media-DWAC deal is being investigated by regulators at the SEC and prosecutors in the Justice Department. Trump Media has blamed the SEC for delaying the deal.
In the article, he also described undisclosed discussions between Trump, his media company’s executives and Orlando last year, before DWAC went public and the deal was announced. Those talks may have violated SEC rules.
Wilkerson shared internal logs, memos, photographs, videos and other material relevant to the SEC investigation with the Post. All of the materials were previously provided to government investigators, the Post said, citing Wilkerson’s attorneys.
Trump Media had suspended the executive after the Miami Herald first reported the SEC complaint on Oct. 6, calling it a “blatant violation” of his nondisclosure agreement, the Post said.
Read the full Washington Post report here.
– CNBC’s Jack Stebbins contributed to this article.

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Elon Musk said in a tweet Saturday that his company SpaceX would continue to fund Starlink satellite internet terminals for the Ukrainian government as it battles invading Russian forces.
The tweets follow a statement from Musk on Friday in which he said that SpaceX cannot continue fund Starlink terminals in Ukraine “indefinitely.”

A smartphone with the Starlink logo displayed on the screen.
Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Elon Musk said in a tweet Saturday that his company SpaceX would continue to fund Starlink satellite internet terminals for the Ukrainian government as it battles invading Russian forces.
“The hell with it,” the billionaire tweeted, “even though Starlink is still losing money & other companies are getting billions of taxpayer $, we’ll just keep funding Ukraine govt for free.”

It was not immediately clear whether Musk, who is also the CEO of Tesla, was being sarcastic. In response to a tweet about the move, Musk said, “we should still do good deeds.” Responding to another tweet saying that Musk had already paid taxes that are funding Ukraine’s defense, he said, “Fate loves irony.”
The tweets follow a statement from Musk on Friday in which he said that SpaceX cannot continue fund Starlink terminals in Ukraine “indefinitely,” after a report suggested his space company had asked the Pentagon to cover the costs.
Musk did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
In a letter from SpaceX to the Pentagon, the company said that the use of Starlink in Ukraine could cost close to $400 million over the next 12 months, according to a report by CNN. SpaceX has signed several contracts with the U.S. government.
SpaceX’s donated Starlink internet terminals have been crucial in keeping Ukraine’s military online during the war against Russia, even as communication infrastructure gets destroyed. Russia began its invasion of Ukraine in February.

Musk drew criticism from Ukrainian officials earlier this month when he posted a Twitter poll gauging support for what he claimed was a likely outcome of the Russia-Ukraine war.
He appeared to confirm that SpaceX was planning to leave Ukraine in some capacity Friday, replying to a Twitter post that referenced the Ukrainian ambassador telling Musk to “f— off.”
“We’re just following his recommendation,” Musk said.
The SpaceX founder is also in the middle of a $44 billion bid to buy Twitter, which he had tried to get out of. A judge ruled that he has until Oct. 28 to close the acquisition if he hopes to avoid a trial.

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