Taylor Swift's concert economics, the newest weight loss drug, and Spirit Airlines sinks: Business news roundup

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

It didn’t take much, just a quarter and a nickel off the share price, but Spirit Airlines stock closed at $5.21 Wednesday, 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 Bloomberg report that Spirit creditors are preparing for the worst.

Read More

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 Monday, American Airlines made clear it was not deviating from its tried-and-true formula of catering to these customers.

Read More

Super Micro Computer’s stock soared above the clouds after the S&P Dow Jones indices awarded it a coveted spot in the S&P 500.

After the news broke early on Monday, the 31-year-old server and computer infrastructure company hit a record rally, with shares popping more than 25% in trading, adding over $220 per share. Super Micro — which trades as SMCI on the Nasdaq — currently has a market capitalization of roughly $63 billion. The median market cap for S&P 500 companies is $33.7 billion.

Read More

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

Read More

Novo Nordisk stock surged Thursday morning, reaching an all-time high and surpassing Tesla’s market capitalization. The Denmark-based pharmaceutical giant known for its diabetes and weight loss drugs, Ozempic and Wegovy, is now the world’s 12th most valuable company by market cap.

Read More

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

Read More

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.”

Read More

Of all the many, many ways armchair philosophers have come to define art and the act of human expression, AI-generated images don’t have much in relation. There is certainly skill in knowing the correct type of prompt to get the results you want, but there’s no real intent behind an image. If the AI is the “artist,” how can any human claim the generated output as their own?

Read More