Business
Musk and Zuckerberg Reflect New Blows Against D.E.I. Policies
The war on D.E.I. intensifies
Even before Donald Trump won in November, the conservative backlash against diversity, equity and inclusion policies was going strong.
But new revelations about the next Trump administration’s efforts to constrain what’s commonly known as D.E.I. — and corporate titans’ willingness to put such programs aside — suggest just how strident the pushback will be.
Elon Musk’s cost-cutting initiative is eyeing big cuts to federal diversity programs, according to The Washington Post. The nongovernmental panel, the Department of Government Efficiency, is said to be considering a report by a right-wing civil rights group that claims to have identified more than $120 billion in potential cuts in D.E.I.-related programs.
Among them, according to The Post, are ending programs to benefit Black farmers and businesses, as well as a Biden-era executive order reserving 15 percent of federal contracts for minority-owned businesses. (Separately, the F.B.I. confirmed that it had closed its Office of Diversity and Inclusion, prompting Trump to express anger that it had existed at all.)
The Times shed more light on Mark Zuckerberg’s move to unwind D.E.I. at Meta. In a meeting with Stephen Miller, the influential Trump aide, Zuckerberg signaled that he would do nothing to obstruct the president-elect’s agenda of cracking down on corporate D.E.I. culture. The tech mogul said new guidelines were coming — and soon after announced a rollback of content moderation rules and an end to Meta’s D.E.I. efforts.
Moreover, Zuckerberg blamed Sheryl Sandberg, his former longtime lieutenant who was known for cultural advocacy programs like Lean In, for encouraging employee self-expression in the workplace, The Times adds. (The revelation stoked outrage online.)
The news underscores how defenses of D.E.I. are faltering. Many companies had already been rethinking their commitment to diversity programs before Trump’s victory, especially after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action at universities. But several corporate giants, including Amazon and McDonald’s, have ended or scaled back such programs post-election.
For some corporations, work on diversity will still take place, using language that isn’t as politically charged. But as corporate leaders respond to pressure from ascendant right-wing activists and seek to get on Trump’s good side, the pressure on D.E.I. isn’t going away.
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In related news: Meta’s chief technology officer said the company had mishandled how it rolled out changes to diversity policies and content moderation. And for some workers whose careers haven’t advanced how they like, diversity programs may have simply been an excuse to sugarcoat the real reason they were passed over, according to a Wall Street Journal column.
HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING
Israel’s security cabinet meets to approve the cease-fire deal. The vote is taking place after Israeli and Hamas negotiators resolved remaining disputes, with ministers expected to clear the agreement this weekend. If approved, Israel would withdraw eastward and both sides would release hostages or prisoners, potentially paving a path to ending the 15-month war.
China’s economy grows, but its population shrinks again. New data showed that the Chinese economy grew 5 percent last year, with increased exports and investment in manufacturing offsetting a slump in construction. But Beijing also disclosed that China’s population fell for a third straight year, despite an unexpected rise in births, portending a longer-term challenge to economic growth.
The Biden administration files a final flurry of regulatory actions. Regulators including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department struck settlements with companies including American Express, Block, General Motors and Toyota, and recommended charges against the parent of Snapchat. They’re a last burst of oversight actions before the Trump administration, which is expected to take a lighter hand in regulating business, takes office next week.
Markets feel reassured by Bessent
Bitcoin, stock futures and government bonds — all are rallying modestly on Friday, the final trading day of the Biden era.
Their fortunes appear to be buoyed by renewed bullishness for the next Trump administration, with investors feeling relieved about what they’ve heard from the president-elect’s Cabinet picks on how they intend to operate.
Markets were especially heartened by Donald Trump’s Treasury secretary pick, Scott Bessent. In his confirmation hearing on Thursday, Bessent played down the inflationary risks of Trump’s agenda.
Here are the highlights:
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Bessent called for renewing and extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts to avert “economic calamity.” But while he said cutting fiscal spending was also important, he was noncommittal about repealing the country’s debt ceiling and said entitlement programs like Medicare would be safe.
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He said tariffs should be imposed on select countries to fix trade imbalances or used as leverage to negotiate favorable trade deals. A new round directed at China seems inevitable. In response, China is zeroing in on American chipmakers.
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Bessent said that Fed independence is key to American fiscal stability. But he warned that Trump, who has long grumbled about high interest rates, was still “going to make his views known.”
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He demurred on the idea of the Fed creating a digital currency. Still, Bloomberg reports that Trump is expected to designate crypto as a national priority. Speculation is also growing that Trump will greenlight a federal Bitcoin reserve.
Other confirmation hearings raised questions about how the second Trump administration was shaping up. Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota, the choice for interior secretary, criticized renewables as part of a wider national “electricity crisis.” The country needed to refocus on fossil fuels to maintain its global lead in energy-intensive sectors like artificial intelligence, he added.
But Lee Zeldin, Trump’s choice to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, dodged questions about Trump’s repeated vows to roll back or scrap the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature climate legislation.
And Scott Turner, the former N.F.L. player tapped to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development, offered little detail about how he would address a housing crunch. His lack of clarity came as new Freddie Mac data showed mortgage rates hitting an eight-month high.
The surge is pricing some prospective buyers out of the market — despite the Fed having lowered borrowing costs — in a trend that has alarmed some market watchers.
The TikTok countdown continues
As TikTok nears a potential ban in the United States, elected officials are racing to find ways to delay a crisis that many of them helped stoke by backing the law behind the punishment.
Here’s where things stand.
President Biden is trying to make it Donald Trump’s problem. An administration official told NBC News that the White House was “exploring options” to forestall the app from going dark. Biden also does not plan to fine the companies that host the TikTok app, like Google and Apple, according to NBC News.
That would leave it up to Trump to enforce any punishments against TikTok and its partners. The president-elect has been weighing an executive order to let the app keep running until a U.S. buyer is found, though it is unclear how effective that would be.
Senate Democrats scrambled to arrange a delay. Lawmakers led by Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and Cory Booker of New Jersey have sought to pass a bill giving TikTok more time to find a buyer. But Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, objected, citing concerns about dangers posed by the app.
A spokesperson for Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, told The Wall Street Journal that the minority leader spoke with Biden on Thursday about creating a delay.
TikTok’s C.E.O. is continuing to court Trump as well. In addition to sitting on the dais for the inauguration with top Cabinet picks and other tech moguls, Shou Chew is hosting a party for pro-Trump creators Sunday night, which will cost TikTok about $50,000 to throw.
Chew is also expected to attend a Trump victory rally on Sunday at the Capital One Arena, sitting in the suite of Raul Fernandez, a Trump donor and a partner at Monumental Sports and Entertainment, the sports team owner.
Musk’s gaming rank
Elon Musk has famously and unapologetically clashed with regulators and heads of state. But he is coming up against opponents who appear to have touched a nerve: gamers who have questioned his claims to video game mastery.
A recap: Musk has boasted lately on X lately about his gaming prowess, including soaring to the top of the global leader boards in Diablo IV and Path of Exile 2. Such feats require skills, sure, but also a lot of screen time, leading skeptics to question how the C.E.O. of six companies and a key adviser to Donald Trump finds the time.
Online sleuths increasingly believe they have found the answer: They’ve accused Musk of paying others to use his accounts and put in the hours to boost his rankings.
A popular YouTube gaming personality named Asmongold in particular accused Musk of being disingenuous about his rapid rise to the top.
Musk has taken those charges personally. The billionaire has shared videos of himself in action as a way to prove he’s the real deal. Musk also fired back at Asmongold, saying of the YouTuber, “he is NOT good at video games.”
Others came to Asmongold’s defense, using X’s Community Notes feature to annotate Musk’s posts.
Given the level of discussion online, this spat feels like it’s far from over.
THE SPEED READ
Deals
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Rio Tinto and Glencore reportedly held talks last year about a deal, which would have combined two of the world’s biggest miners, though discussions aren’t currently active. (Bloomberg).
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Junior investment bankers beware: Artificial intelligence tools can write 95 percent of an I.P.O. prospectus in minutes, according to David Solomon, Goldman Sachs’s C.E.O. (FT)
Politics, policy and regulation
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Meet Ken Howery, the tech investor and friend of Elon Musk who will spearhead any deal talks with Denmark over Greenland. (NYT)
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A group representing Capitol Hill staffers who work for progressive lawmakers is pushing for a 32-hour workweek. (Politico)
Best of the rest
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A SpaceX rocket broke up on Thursday during a test flight, forcing the F.A.A. to divert several commercial flights to avoid the debris. (CNBC)
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David Lynch, the director behind classic movies and TV shows including “Blue Velvet,” “Mulholland Drive” and “Twin Peaks,” has died. He was 78. (NYT)
We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com.
A landmarked downtown Los Angeles apartment building designed by famed Los Angeles architect John Parkinson is on the market as its owners face foreclosure.
Residences in the Metropolitan, a 10-story tower built in 1913, are nearly filled with tenants but its ground floor retail spaces on Broadway and 5th Street are unoccupied, as are other street-level stores in downtown’s Historic Core.
The historic building was once considered one of the best in the city and is owned by the Fallas family, which operated a chain of value-priced clothing stores based in Gardena including one called Fallas Paredes in the Metropolitan.
Fallas-Paredes at 449 S. Broadway, Los Angeles, CA 90013.
(Google Maps)
Around 2011, Michael Fallas, who once worked in family’s downtown store as a stock boy, converted the upstairs floors from offices to apartments while continuing to operate Fallas Paredes. The store closed more than five years ago in the wake of a 2018 filing by its parent company for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Earlier this month in state Superior Court, a special servicer representing Fallas’ lender asked for a judicial foreclosure of the property, alleging that Fallas had stopped making payments on a $32 million loan dating to 2017. After leasing the property for years, Fallas bought the building in the 1990s.
Fallas didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The location of the Metropolitan where the buildings stands was hailed in a Times story in 1912, saying “it is regarded by many realty men as the most valuable piece of real estate in Los Angeles.”
The building today is recognized as a city historic-cultural monument because “Broadway became the commercial center of the Southland, a title it retained until well after World War II,” with its development, the city said. One of the architects who designed the Metropolitan in the Beaux-Arts style was John Parkinson, who is credited with designing such well-known local structures as City Hall, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and Union Station.
Notable tenants in the Metropolitan have included the Los Angeles Public Library, Owl Drug Co., variety store J.J. Newberry and real estate company Janns Investment Co., which sold the land where UCLA is built and developed Westwood Village, among other Los Angeles neighborhoods.
In recent years, the buildings around the Metropolitan have struggled to keep retail tenants after a spurt of residential conversions of historic buildings starting in the early 2000s brought commerce to the neighborhood. Many downtown businesses have struggled since the pandemic reduced occupancy in offices downtown and reduced the flow of visitors.
“The lack of bodies on the street is generally hurting downtown, and that’s one of the reasons that has building has problems,” said downtown real estate broker Hal Bastian, who lives in the Historic Core.
There are close to 1,000 residential units in historic buildings at the intersection of Broadway and 5th Street, Bastian said, but all the ground floor stores are closed. Drug stores there suffered substantial losses from shoplifting he said, and now, “our challenge on Broadway is leasing.”
The 88 apartments in the Metropolitan are 91% rented, according to a listing for the property by the Zacuto Group, which also touts its roof deck with pool, fitness center and barbecue grills. No sale price is set.
Business
January 2025 wildfire victims seek tougher penalties against State Farm over claims handling
A fire survivors’ group announced Thursday it was seeking tougher penalties against State Farm over its handling of January 2025 wildfire claims.
The Every Fire Survivor’s Network said it was petitioning to join a state enforcement action announced this year against the company to make sure the case results in meaningful changes at California’s largest home insurer.
“We’re seeking a systematic review of all their claims and penalties calibrated to the actual scale of the harm — and we’re seeking the payouts that families are owed,” said Joy Chen, executive director of the group, at a Pacific Palisades news conference joined by victims of the fires.
The Department of Insurance in May filed an administrative action against State Farm General — the subsidiary of the giant Bloomington, Ill., insurer that handles California home insurance — after completing a “market conduct” exam.
The Jan. 7, 2025, fire damaged or destroyed more than 18,000 structures and killed 31 people.
State Farm has received more January 2025 claims than any other insurer — more than 13,700 auto and homeowners claims as of May 4, with payouts totaling $5.7 billion, according to the company.
The market conduct exam looked at 220 sample claims filed by the victims and found 398 violations of state law in about half of them.
Among other alleged violations, it found that the company failed in numerous cases to pursue a “thorough, fair and objective investigation” into claims, failed to come to “prompt, fair, and equitable settlements” and made settlement offers that were “unreasonably low.”
In announcing the action, Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara called the company’s claims handling “unacceptable” and said his department was taking “decisive action to hold them accountable.”
The state is seeking a “cease and desist” order to stop the insurer from engaging in unfair or deceptive practices.
It also has threatened to suspend State Farm’s license over the alleged violations, which each carry a penalty of up to $5,000 — or twice that figure if found to be willful. That could amount to a penalty of $2 million or more.
The threat to actually suspend State Farm’s license and its authority to write policies has been viewed skeptically by some, given its roughly 20% market share of the state’s home insurance market.
The company, which had an opportunity to include its responses in the exam report, denied fault in some cases and admitted fault in others. It often blamed problems on individual adjusters and denied systemic issues with its claims handling.
The petition filed by the wildfire survivor’s group criticizes the sample size of the market conduct exam as too small to capture all the alleged deficiencies in State Farm’s claims handling, which it claims are a “general business practice” of the company.
The group is seeking to conduct discovery, cross examine witnesses, present testimony from fire victims and bring more that 1,600 firsthand policyholder statements regarding State Farm’s practices into evidence, according to the petition.
It also wants State Farm to reopen cases in which claimants were paid too little, and it is seeking to participate in settlement discussions in order to increase any penalty State Farm would pay.
It calculated that a $2-million penalty would amount to a minute fraction of the assets of the State Farm Group.
“I submit to you that doesn’t defer bad conduct, it just allows you to continue to do it,” said Michelle Meyers, an attorney for Every Fire Survivor’s Network, at the news conference.
Consumer Watchdog, which has been a harsh critic of State Farm, also is providing legal support for victims’ effort.
Sevag Sarkissian, a spokesperson for State Farm, said the company was aware of the petition.
“We recognize that many wildfire survivors, including those that are State Farm General policyholders, continue to face difficult recovery challenges,” he said. “Our focus remains on helping customers recover.”
Michael Soller, a spokesperson for Lara, said the department is “acting with urgency to assist wildfire survivors in their ongoing recovery by investigating formal complaints filed by survivors and conducting the expedited market conduct exam that led to this enforcement action.”
He added that the department’s position is the state’s Administrative Procedure Act does not contemplate the commissioner or department staff authorizing intervention requests in the case.
He said that would be a hearing officer’s or administrative law judge’s decision when one is assigned to the case.
Meyers acknowledged the request was novel but said her reading of the law is that Lara can make the decision because no judge is yet assigned.
In response to the criticism, State Farm pledged earlier this year to improve its claims handling, including by providing single points of contact and improved communication so there are “fewer handoffs, fewer repeated explanations, and seamless support.”
It also named a new vice president of customer relations for State Farm General.
The state’s trial attorneys and Uber say they have reached a last-minute deal to scrap their dueling ballot measures and avert what was gearing up to be one of most expensive battles of the November election.
The deal, which comes a day after both measures qualified for the November ballot, has Uber agreeing to bulk up safety measures, while the trial attorneys will limit how much they can claim for lien-based medical treatment of victims who get in Uber or Lyft accidents, according to spokespeople for both sides of the campaign.
“Both sides agree: Californians deserve a system that’s safe, fair, and accountable,” read a joint statement from Uber and the Consumer Attorneys of California, a powerful attorney trade group. “This agreement protects patients from unnecessary treatment or getting overcharged, ensures access to medical care and legal representation, and strengthens safety measures.”
The agreement, finalized Thursday, means the ride-share giant will kill its ballot measure to cap how much attorneys can earn in vehicle collision cases and limit medical damages to rates based on insurance. Uber has argued that the costs for medical treatment done on a lien, which allows doctors to get paid from a cut of the plaintiff’s payout, far exceed what it would cost if the victim had used their own insurance.
In return, the Consumer Attorneys of California will cancel its competing ballot measure that sought to increase legal liability for ride-share companies if a passenger is sexually assaulted by a driver. The measure followed an investigation by the New York Times into sexual assault by drivers.
Both sides had poured tens of millions into the campaigns, plastering billboards across Los Angeles.
Lawyers claimed the fight had turned existential with the measure threatening to decimate the profit margin of many personal injury cases and leave drivers with small or thorny cases unable to find an attorney willing to take their case.
Spokespeople say the deal is predicated on their agreement being codified into a bill within the next week. Otherwise, they said, each side will move forward with its ballot measure.
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