articles_data.csv

title,url,text
The C . E . O . s Who Just Wont Quit - The New York Times,https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/09/magazine/forever-ceos.html,"Of the many riddles that confront corporate chief executives in the course of their work, perhaps the most important is when to quit. It’s the maneuver that cements a C.E.O.’s legacy. The cost of overstaying is steep, especially when tallied in missed opportunities: Ballmer famously scoffed at the invention of the iPhone, believing that businesspeople would never want it because it didn’t have a keyboard. Reflecting on Ballmer’s leadership, the Harvard Business School executive fellow Bill George told me: “It was obvious certainly at the 10-year mark, maybe before, what he was doing was cheering on the strategies Bill Gates had put in place.”

Over the last several decades, as Americans have lived longer, career has become the ascendant source of meaning in a country increasingly eschewing religion. And now, perhaps inevitably, workers of all kinds and levels say they are going to defer retirement. That’s especially true of striving and hard-driving institutional leaders; just look to Washington D.C. But particularly for the people running corporate America, the reasons to overstay in leadership are even more compelling. There’s the authority, the personal assistant, the corner-office views, the feeling of being needed, the flattering, the deference and, of course, the money. American chief-executive pay in 2022, across the S&P 500, averaged $16.7 million. When power and pay is that densely concentrated, people will cling to it whether or not it’s good for business.

The executives with the longest tenures — Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway (54 years), Jamie Dimon of J.P. Morgan (18 years) and Jensen Huang of Nvidia (31 years) — often get to stay so long because they’re considered effective. But even for them, long tenures can become excessive and ill advised. A chief executive who overstays might make a rushed decision about succession — and putting the wrong person in charge can be unimaginably costly.

But just what constitutes overstaying is hardly clear. The ideal tenure is 4.8 years according to a group of researchers scattered across several universities in the United States and China who studied 356 businesses from 2000 to 2010 and tried to measure their health with factors including stock price and product quality. It could very well be longer. When the search firm Spencer Stuart examined every S&P 500 chief executive over more than two decades, it determined that the companies had some of their highest performing years once their chief executives had put in 11 to 15 years of their own. And according to George, the sweet spot is around a decade.

After advising dozens of chief executives over the years, George has found that when top bosses stay too long, they become risk-averse. He believes that long-serving leaders tend to fixate on short-term stock prices because they crave validation of the strategies that defined their tenure. With every passing year, it gets harder for them to accept when they are being shortsighted — that’s just part of the job."
"C . Gordon Bell , Creator of a Personal Computer Prototype , Dies at 89",https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/21/technology/c-gordon-bell-dead.html,"C. Gordon Bell, a technology visionary whose computer designs for Digital Equipment Corporation fueled the emergence of the minicomputer industry in the 1960s, died on Friday at his home in Coronado, Calif. He was 89.

The cause was pneumonia, his family said in a statement.

Called the “Frank Lloyd Wright of computers” by Datamation magazine, Mr. Bell was the master architect in the effort to create smaller, affordable, interactive computers that could be clustered into a network. A virtuoso at computer architecture, he built the first time-sharing computer and championed efforts to build the Ethernet. He was among a handful of influential engineers whose designs formed the vital bridge between the room-size models of the mainframe era and the advent of the personal computer.

After stints at several other startup ventures, Mr. Bell became the head of the National Science Foundation’s computers and information science and engineering group, where he directed the effort to link the world’s supercomputers into a high-speed network that led directly to the development of the modern internet. He later joined Microsoft’s nascent research lab, where he remained for about 20 years before being named researcher emeritus.

In 1991, he was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.

“His main contribution was his vision of the future,” said David Cutler, a senior technical fellow at the Microsoft Research Lab and a leading software engineer, who worked with Mr. Bell at both Digital and Microsoft. “He always had a vision of where computing was going to go. He helped make computing much more widespread and more personal.”"
"Wayve , an A . I . Start - Up for Autonomous Driving , Raises $1 Billion",https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/06/technology/wayve-ai-self-driving-vehicles.html,"Wayve, a London maker of artificial intelligence systems for autonomous vehicles, said on Tuesday that it had raised $1 billion, an eye-popping sum for a European start-up and an illustration of investor optimism about A.I.’s ability to reshape industries.

SoftBank, the Japanese conglomerate that backed Uber and other tech companies, was the lead investor, along with Microsoft and Nvidia. Previous investors in Wayve include Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief A.I. scientist.

Wayve, which had previously raised about $300 million, did not disclose its valuation after the investment.

Wayve was co-founded in 2017 by Alex Kendall, a Cambridge University doctorate student focused on computer vision and robotics. Unlike generative A.I. models, which create humanlike text and images and are being developed by OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, the so-called embodied A.I. systems made by Wayve serve as the brains for physical objects, be they cars, robots or manufacturing systems. The A.I. allows a machine to make real-time decisions on its own."
Biden to Announce A . I . Center in Wisconsin as Part of Economic Agenda,https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/08/us/politics/biden-data-center-wisconsin.html,"President Biden on Wednesday announced the creation of an artificial intelligence data center in Wisconsin, highlighting one of his administration’s biggest economic accomplishments in a crucial battleground state — and pointing to a significant failure by his predecessor and 2024 challenger.

At the Gateway Technical College in Racine, Mr. Biden said the $3 billion project, which will be built by Microsoft, was an example of how he has delivered on promises that former President Donald J. Trump did not.

The Microsoft data center will be built on grounds where Mr. Trump, as president, announced in 2017 that Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer, would build a $10 billion factory for making LCD panels. Mr. Trump promised that it would be the “eighth wonder of the world,” and visited the site with elected officials and golden shovels. But the project never materialized as expected.

On Wednesday, Mr. Biden took direct aim at the failed promise. “Look what happened — they dug a hole with those golden shovels, and then they fell into it,” Mr. Biden told the crowd."
How Rich Candidates Burned Cash on Running for Office,https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/16/us/politics/trone-bloomberg-wealth-campaign-funding.html,"The costly realm of campaign politics has claimed its share of the fortunes of yet another business magnate with aspirations to higher office.

Representative David Trone, Democrat of Maryland who co-owns the largest wine retailer in the country, poured more than $60 million of his personal fortune into his Senate campaign in Maryland, according to campaign finance reports filed to the Federal Election Commission. He lost the Democratic primary this week to Angela Alsobrooks, a county executive whose campaign had spent about a tenth of that amount.

A day after Mr. Trone’s loss, Nicole Shanahan, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate and a Silicon Valley investor who recently divorced the Google co-founder Sergey Brin, announced that she was doubling her stake in Mr. Kennedy’s independent presidential campaign. Her donation of another $8 million brings her total contributions to nearly $15 million, despite the fact that no third-party or independent candidate has come close to winning a presidential election in modern U.S. history.

Mr. Kennedy’s campaign is so far only about half as expensive as the costliest self-funded presidential campaign this cycle: Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican entrepreneur, spent more than $30 million of his own wealth on his failed candidacy, dropping out in January after spending $3,500 per vote won in the Iowa caucuses. Doug Burgum, the governor of North Dakota who sold his software company to Microsoft for $1 billion, didn’t even get that far: He dropped out before a single vote was cast after having spent nearly $14 million on his presidential campaign."
Judge Grills U . S . and Google on Antitrust Claims,https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/02/technology/judge-mehta-google-antitrust-closing-arguments.html,"“It seems to me a hard road for you to go down for me to conclude that Google hasn’t innovated enough,” Judge Mehta said.

The Justice Department also argued that because Google had a monopoly and didn’t face strong competition, it hadn’t put privacy protections into its search engine. The judge interrupted Mr. Dintzer to say there may be a “trade-off” for privacy versus the quality of search. Judge Mehta added that his challenge was how to measure if Google had done enough to protect the privacy of users.

Judge Mehta prodded Google’s lead litigator, John E. Schmidtlein, on the argument that companies like Amazon and ESPN are true competitors to its search engine. He noted that if he wanted to know who the shortstop for the Baltimore Orioles was in 1983, he would most likely use Google.

The judge questioned how it would be possible for another company to beat Google out as the search engine that automatically populates for Apple’s web browser, Safari. He posited that it could be impossible without having billions of dollars to spend to build a competitive search engine and billions more to pay Apple.

Judge Mehta also asked why Google needed to pay to be the default search engine across the web if its product was already better than those made by its competitors."
Forest Restoration Is Creating a Buzz in the Amazon,https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/02/climate/amazon-reforestation.html,"Six months after the first round of planting, the team was ready to measure the 44 trees in one sample plot. Luiz Carlos Batista Lobato, a botanist who specializes in tree censuses, walked across the plot to document three trees that had died, many that were taller than him and one that was more than two inches thick.

In a few years, Mr. Batista Lobato said, monkeys and armadillos would come to eat the fruits of different trees and birds would feast on the açaí berries, dispersing their seeds as they move around the forest.

“That’s the cycle,” he said.

Watching the trees start to grow helped to dispel some of the skepticism that farmers across the region still have. Back in Maracaçumé, Djalma Soares, a rancher who works on land next to the Re.green project, said that, though he still loves his cattle, he can’t deny that the idea of bringing the forest back to life is “beautiful.”

Mr. Soares said he never had the privilege of studying all the other things he could do with his farm beyond raising cattle. But, still, he feels the unrelenting heat. Seeing his neighbors work to address that, he said, is inspiring.

“We end up feeling like following the same path,” he added, as he watched the sun set on a vast pasture. “We see that it’s the future.”"
The Judge Deciding Google Landmark Antitrust Case,https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/02/business/judge-mehta-google-antitrust.html,"One of Amit P. Mehta’s first cases after becoming a federal judge in late 2014 proved to be a crash course in antitrust.

Sysco, the nation’s largest distributor of food to restaurants and cafeterias, was trying to buy the rival US Foods, and the Federal Trade Commission had sued to block the $3.5 billion deal, arguing that it would stifle competition.

Judge Mehta told lawyers on both sides that he would need help educating himself. Over the next few months, he was a tireless and bright student, according to lawyers for the government and Sysco, absorbing the details of antitrust law and asking sharp questions about precedents, economic theory and the food-distribution business.

After the trial in 2015, Judge Mehta wrote a comprehensive, closely reasoned 128-page opinion and ordered a temporary halt to the deal. Within days, Sysco abandoned its acquisition plan."
What Will It Take for the Fed to Lower Interest Rates ? ,https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/02/business/dealbook/fed-powell-interest-rates.html,"There are signs of a cool-down in the jobs market. Labor Department data released on Wednesday showed that the pace of hiring had begun to abate, with the number of unfilled job openings falling to a roughly three-year low.

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HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING

Exxon Mobil strikes an agreement to win regulatory approval of its $60 billion megadeal. The oil giant will agree not to add Scott Sheffield, the former C.E.O. of Pioneer Natural Resources, as a director in exchange for the F.T.C. clearing the transaction, according to The Wall Street Journal. Elsewhere, shares in Shell were up after the producer reported $7.7 billion in adjusted quarterly earnings, beating analyst expectations.

The U.S. imposes sanctions on Chinese companies over military support for Russia’s war effort. The Biden administration announced on Wednesday nearly 300 sanctions, including on more than a dozen Chinese businesses, aimed at disrupting Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Both Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Secretary of State Antony Blinken had warned Chinese officials during their recent trips there about what they say is Beijing’s continued support of Russia’s war.

Novo Nordisk feels the heat from competition in weight-loss drugs. Shares in the Danish drug maker were down on Thursday despite the company more than doubling sales of its blockbuster Wegovy treatment and raising revenue forecasts. The culprit: pressure on prices, amid growing competition from Eli Lilly’s Zepbound, supply constraints and scrutiny from lawmakers.

A top U.S. lawmaker investigates the F.T.C.’s work with the E.U. on a failed Amazon deal. Representative James Comer, Republican of Kentucky, and the chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, demanded the agency’s correspondence with the European Commission related to Amazon’s aborted $1.4 billion takeover of iRobot. While global competition agencies regularly communicate about their scrutiny of deals, Comer wants to know whether the American agency coordinated with its counterpart to effectively block the deal."
Who Could Be Trump VP Pick ? - The New York Times,https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/us/politics/donald-trump-vp.html,"Election 2024 Who Might Donald Trump Pick for Vice President?

Donald J. Trump says he will reveal his running mate on Monday, as the Republican National Convention begins in Milwaukee. Follow the latest here.

Mar-a-Lago courtiers generally agree that any résumé for the No. 2 spot on the ticket must include some Trump-specific requirements that defy demographics or electoral upside: absolute loyalty to the Trump brand, a willingness to filter every decision and public comment through a subservient lens, and the know-it-when-you-see-it “central casting” look the former president prizes.

Here’s a look at his top choices.

The Leading contenders Trump is unpredictable, but his search narrowed as it reached its final stages. J.D. Vance The best-selling author and former venture capitalist is now a senator from Ohio, thanks largely to a Trump endorsement. Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times PROS He and Trump resolved their differences and have become particularly close.

Vance is one of Trump’s most vigorous defenders, which sets him apart in a Senate populated with skeptics of the former president.

Both are immigration hard-liners who also share similar views on trade. CONS He’s much younger than Trump, but he wouldn’t add any gender or ethnic diversity to the ticket.

Ohio is no longer a presidential battleground.

Vance is fiercely anti-abortion, which could add to the party’s difficulties on that issue. Doug Burgum North Dakota’s governor came up short in the 2024 presidential race. But he did put himself in the mix for the party’s No. 2 slot. undefined PROS Trump loves surrounding himself with status and wealth, and Burgum checks that box after selling his software company to Microsoft for more than a billion dollars in 2001. Trump praised his business acumen in a North Dakota radio interview in December.

Burgum showed little interest in attacking Trump during his primary race, and was the first Republican presidential contender this year to end his campaign and then endorse Trump.

His performance at the first primary debate will be remembered for his repeated pleading with moderators for time to talk about energy issues in North Dakota; there is no risk that he would steal the spotlight from Trump. CONS Burgum’s relative obscurity cuts both ways. Unlike Mike Pence, who brought credibility with evangelical voters, there’s no natural constituency for Burgum.

He’s never been tested on a national stage. Marco Rubio The Florida senator, a rival to Trump in 2016, has hummed along as a reliable Trump ally and leading Republican voice on foreign policy issues. Scott McIntyre for The New York Times PROS Experienced on the national stage, Rubio is a known quantity.

His pro-Israel, anti-Putin track record is particularly timely.

He is a fluent Spanish speaker, and his Cuban heritage figures prominently in his political bio.

Rubio and Trump have quietly had a close relationship for years. Before Trump was voted out of the White House in 2020, he was considering Rubio as a possible secretary of state nominee. CONS Rubio has never quite fulfilled the expectations that many Republicans held for him — and that he helped stoke — after his underdog Senate victory in 2010.

He very publicly said he didn’t want to be considered for Trump’s ticket in 2016.

What could disqualify him is the central role he played in a 2013 immigration overhaul effort that, even a decade later, remains anathema to the Republican base."