Taylor Swift's masterclass, Bitcoin's big moment, Novo Nordisk soars, Spirit sinks: The week's most popular stories

Taylor Swift’s concerts move local economies. The tens of thousands who descend on a city to see the mega star perform can boost spending at local businesses by double digit percentages. Not that this phenomenon is particularly new: Economists have long written about the potential large spillover effects of popular music concerts. Singapore, more than eager to benefit from the economic effects of Swift concerts, came up with a shrewd strategy.

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Bitcoin finally broke its previous all-time high record, after several weeks of continuous gains. But an upcoming technical event known as “halving” is set to keep bitcoin surging even further in the coming months.

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Novo Nordisk’s weight loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy are popular, and powerful. Like, really popular. So popular that they’re raising the GDP of the company’s native Denmark. So popular that food company executives are fearfully calling Novo Nordisk CEO Lars Fruergaard Jorgensen to ask for advice because patients don’t want to eat. And now the company is teasing a pill that might be twice as powerful.

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It didn’t take much, just a quarter and a nickel off the share price, but Spirit Airlines stock closed at $5.21, the lowest point ever. Not only were investors glum about the carrier calling off its $3.8 billion merger with JetBlue Airways, they’re also digesting a report that Spirit creditors are preparing for the worst.

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Apple has had a terrible start to 2024 — and one man could make it worse. The tech giant’s stock has consistently tumbled in the first two months of the year. This comes as the AI boom has helped other tech companies’ stocks soar, including Microsoft and Nvidia. Still, one analyst warns that the worst could still be yet to come for Apple, the second-most valuable company in the world.

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The core customer in the sky has long tended to be a business traveler making their way to a conference or a big meeting, not the occasional vacationer. And at its investor day, American Airlines made clear it was not deviating from its tried-and-true formula of catering to these customers.

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Salesforce CEO and cofounder Marc Benioff has donated $150 million to a group of medical organizations in Hawaii, he said, one of the largest private gifts in the state’s history.

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If you’re a Subway franchisee then you better get with the times or find yourself a new business to run. Subway CEO John Chidsey recently told franchisees at a company conference that they should remodel their restaurants or part ways with the company entirely.

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Nvidia directors joined a growing list of Big Tech insiders cashing in on the so-called “Magnificent 7” stock rally. Nvidia director Tench Coxe sold 200,000 shares and made $170 million, filings from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission show. Coxe has been on the AI chipmaker’s board since 1993. He acquired shares for just $0.82 in 1997 before the company went public two years later.

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Alef Aeronautics CEO Jim Dukhovny is very excited about his company’s Model A flying car, and so are 2,850 other people with $300,000 to spare. He said the company has that many pre-orders, and he made some big claims.

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Elon Musk is back at it again. The Tesla CEO and owner of X, formerly known as Twitter, aimed at McKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, on Wednesday in reply to a tweet criticizing her philanthropy. An X user who Musk often replies to complained that Scott donates money to organizations that deal with “issues of race and/or gender,” and said her foundation is “the ultimate expression of the most awful group in the US.” Musk replied, and later deleted his post: “Super rich ex-wives who hate their former spouse’ should filed [sic] be listed among ‘Reasons that Western Civilization died.”

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Target is aiming to keep up with the competition. The retail giant said that, starting next month, it will launch Target Circle 360, a new paid membership. Let’s take a look at how Target’s new paid membership compares to competing ones offered by Amazon and Walmart.

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Elon Musk’s spacecraft company SpaceX will launch a third test flight for its rocket Starship next week. The reusable spacecraft is still in development, designed to carry out missions to the Moon and Mars.

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Tesla has lost more than $77 billion in market capitalization over the course of a week, burdened by a sales slump in China and arson near the electric vehicle maker’s German factory. 

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