Francesca Fontana

An activist investor wants a J&J spinoff to boost its stock price. The hedge fund Starboard Value has taken a sizable stake in Kenvue, the consumer-products company spun out of Johnson & Johnson last year, The Wall Street Journal reported on Oct. 20. The hedge fund believes the Tylenol- and Listerine-maker has some of the best consumer brands in its industry, but its stock has underperformed peers and the broader market since its debut, the Journal reported.

Here are some of the major companies whose stocks moved on the week’s news.

President-elect Trump is deepening his ties to Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk. The president-elect said the group—also led by former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy —would operate outside of the federal government and aim to cut spending and streamline bureaucracy. Musk’s relationship with Trump made Tesla’s stock a big winner of the so-called “Trump trade” ahead of the 2024 election.

Warner Bros. Discovery and the National Basketball Association are ending their legal battle over TV rights. While the entertainment giant is losing long-held rights to regular and postseason games for its TNT network after this season, the settlement will give it rights to a significant amount of NBA content domestically and abroad, the Journal reported. Warner Bros. in July filed a breach of contract lawsuit against the NBA after the league signed new rights deals with Disney ESPN, Comcast NBCUniversal and Amazon Warner Bros. alleged that the league violated a matching-rights clause with its TNT cable network by making a deal to put games on Amazon’s Prime Video.

Macy’s is investigating how hundreds of millions of dollars were hidden by one employee. The retailer delayed its quarterly earnings after finding that an accounting employee had hidden up to $154 million in corporate delivery expenses over several years. Macy’s said the person didn’t pocket the amounts in question and declined to say how it uncovered the erroneous bookkeeping entries or how it went undetected by the company’s auditor, KPMG.

Macy's is investigating how hundreds of millions of dollars were hidden by one employee.

General Motors has scrapped its robotaxi program after nearly a decade—and $10 billion of development. GM said it owns about 90% of Cruise and intends to buy out the remaining investors. It plans to combine its Cruise and GM technical teams into a single effort to advance autonomous and assisted driving.

A passenger plane in South Korea crashed on Dec. 29, killing nearly all of the 181 people on board, in one of the deadliest aviation disasters in recent years. The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board said it was leading a team of American investigators—including representatives from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and Boeing —to assist South Korea’s officials in their probe. The Boeing 737-800 suffered an apparent bird strike as it approached Muan International Airport, attempted to land at a high rate of speed without its landing gear down, slid off the runway and slammed into a concrete barrier.

Meta Platforms is ending fact-checking and speech restrictions across Facebook and Instagram, as Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg embraces a second Trump presidency. Starting in the U.S., Meta will be replacing fact-checkers with a so-called Community Notes system. Zuckerberg built up Facebook’s content-policing efforts in the wake of Trump’s first presidential election.

MARKETS MAIN The Score is a weekly review of the biggest stock moves and the news that drove them. Goldman Sachs A rebound on Wall Street fueled surging profits at banking giants last quarter. On Wednesday, Goldman Sachs JPMorgan Wells Fargo and Citigroup all posted profits that were better than expected.