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      G.M. Reports Big Jump in Profit on Gasoline Car Sales

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      General Motors has struggled with electric vehicles and in foreign markets but it is selling lots of combustion engine cars and trucks in North America.General Motors on Tuesday reported a big jump in profits for the first three months of the year, based on the strength of its gasoline vehicle business, and raised its outlook for the rest of the year.The company saw slow growth in electric vehicles, but robust sales of internal combustion vehicles, especially pickup trucks, helped raise its profit to $3 billion in the first quarter, a 24 percent jump from the same period a year ago. G.M. also said that it now expects to make $10.1 billion to $11.5 billion in profit this year, up from a previous forecast of $9.8 billion to $11.2 billion.“We’re maximizing the strength of our ICE business, we’re growing our E.V. business and improving profitability,” G.M.’s chief financial officer, Paul Jacobson, said in a conference call with reporters, using the shorthand for internal combustion engine.Mr. Jacobson said G.M. has ironed out production difficulties in battery pack manufacturing and is ramping up output. He repeated an earlier forecast that G.M.’s battery-powered cars and trucks would start generating profits in the second half of this year.G.M. made all of its profit in North America and lost money in the rest of the world, including a $106 million loss in China; a year earlier, the company reported an $83 million profit in that country.G.M. sold 895,000 vehicles globally in the first quarter, an increase of 4 percent.In the first three months of the year in the United States, G.M. sold 9,385 electric vehicles that use its latest battery technology. That’s an increase from 972 in the same period a year ago, but significantly fewer than G.M. had originally expected.The company plans to add several new electric vehicles this year that utilize the new Ultium batteries. They include a GMC Sierra pickup truck that is supposed to have maximum range of 440 miles, and a Chevrolet Equinox sport-utility vehicle that G.M. said would have a starting price of $34,995 and a range of up to 319 miles. More

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      Soho House Seeks to Knock Back Its Critics

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      The members club operator disclosed improving financial results as it faces criticism from a short seller and weighs going private again.Soho House has refocused its business on operating members clubs, including a newly opened location in Portland, Ore.Mason Trinca for The New York TimesSince going public nearly two years ago, the members club chain Soho House has endured a sharp decline in its stock price, economic turmoil and a short seller declaring that its shares are worthless.But the company’s chief executive, Andrew Carnie, insists it is on the right track — even as its main shareholders consider taking the business private again.“There’s no looking back,” Mr. Carnie said in an interview. “We’ve been pretty consistent over the past 12 months in delivering results.”The company released its latest quarterly financial results on Friday, reporting that it lost $118 million last year, down from a loss of $220.6 million in 2022. Using the pro forma earnings measure known as adjusted EBITDA, which excludes some expenses, it doubled its profit to $128 million.The results come amid a shift in strategy since the company’s initial public offering in July 2021.Back then, the company was still navigating pandemic-related restrictions and said it was focused on new offerings like digital memberships in countries without clubs, as well as its nascent co-working business.Soho House now believes its core business of high-end private clubs in major cities is enough to deliver the robust growth demanded by the stock markets and maintain its cool reputation.Soho House has continued to grow. Over the last year, it has opened locations in Mexico City; Portland, Ore.; and other cities. It operates 43 houses and has a membership waiting list of more than 100,000 people.In its results on Friday, Soho House reported rises in revenues both from membership fees and spending at its houses.But the company’s stock is down nearly 60 percent from its initial offering price. Developer partners have been hurt by the decline of commercial real estate and an increase in labor costs. And in November, the company blamed bad weather and the temporary closure of its location in Tel Aviv for disappointing quarterly results.The earnings announcement on Friday will be closely scrutinized in light of a report last month by the short-seller Glasshouse Research that derided the company as having a “broken business model and terrible accounting” and compared it to WeWork. Short sellers profit from declines in a company’s stock price.“The report is pretty false and inaccurate,” Mr. Carnie said. “The way it was written, it was designed to grab headlines.” (Soho House’s stock price dipped after the report was published, but it has largely recovered.)A bigger question is what Soho House’s biggest shareholders, including the billionaire Ron Burkle, have in mind for the company. In its rebuttal of the Glasshouse report, Soho House disclosed that a special committee of its board was weighing potential transactions, including taking the company private.Mr. Carnie declined to comment on those deliberations, but said he would be happy to keep running Soho House as a publicly traded company.“There are no regrets,” he said. “I’m really happy with our progress over the last 12 months.” More

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      NYCB Reports $2.4 Billion More in Losses as CEO Resigns

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      The lender said its earnings were far weaker than it had earlier stated, and it disclosed the discovery of “material weaknesses” in its internal controls.New York Community Bank, the lender teetering under mounting real-estate-related losses, shared several pieces of fresh bad news on Thursday: Its fourth-quarter losses were $2.4 billion worse than it had earlier stated; its chief executive and an allied board member are out; and the bank has identified what it called “material weaknesses in internal controls.”The all-at-once disclosures, released in securities filings late Thursday, were an uneasy reminder of the price the bank is paying for a breakneck expansion strategy that included acquiring an ailing rival less than one year ago. They sent the bank’s already pressured shares into another nosedive, down more than 20 percent in after-hours trading. The stock had already fallen 54 percent this year.The ugly developments were the last thing NYCB needed after weeks of trying to assuage investors’ concerns about its financial health. For weeks, questions have swirled about the depth of its losses in investments and loans tied to both office and apartment buildings — an area of concern for banks in general, but one in which NYCB has particular concentration.Despite its name, the bank has a national presence, partly because of its acquisition of much of Signature Bank, which collapsed during last year’s banking crisis. Based on Long Island, NYCB operates more than 400 branches under brands including Flagstar Bank across the Midwest and elsewhere. Flagstar is one of the nation’s largest residential mortgage servicers, making the bank particularly at risk to any weakness in the housing market in an era of persistently elevated interest rates.In January, NYCB shocked investors and its peers when it unexpectedly posted a $252 million loss for the fourth quarter, slashed its dividend and set aside a significant amount of reserves to cover any future losses. NYCB’s disclosures on Thursday mean it took an additional impairment of $2.4 billion for the fourth quarter.The bank’s troubles are resurfacing fears from a year ago about how small lenders have been weathering the sharp rise in interest rates since March 2022, though NYCB’s disclosure last month didn’t set off a widespread sell-off.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Berkshire Hathaway Reports Profit of $97 Billion Last Year, a Record

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      The conglomerate saw major gains in its insurance operations and in investment income. But revenues at its railroad and utility businesses declined from 2022.Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate run for decades by Warren E. Buffett, recorded its highest-ever annual profit last year. But its chief executive found reason to blame government regulation for hurting the results of some of its biggest businesses.In his letter to investors that traditionally accompanies the annual report, Mr. Buffett also paid tribute to Charlie Munger, his longtime lieutenant and Berkshire’s vice chairman until his death in November at age 99.The company — whose divisions include insurance, the BNSF railroad, an expansive power utility, Brooks running shoes, Dairy Queen and See’s candy — disclosed $97.1 billion in net earnings last year, a sharp swing from its $22 billion loss in 2022 because of investment declines.Berkshire also reported $37.4 billion in operating earnings, the financial metric that Mr. Buffett prefers because it excludes paper investment gains and losses, for the year, up 21 percent from 2022. (Investors often see Berkshire as a bellwether of the American economy, given the breadth of its business.)Those gains arose from the powerful engine at the heart of Berkshire, its vast insurance operations that include Geico car insurance and reinsurance. The division reported $5.3 billion in after-tax earnings for 2023, reversing from a loss in the previous year thanks to fewer significant catastrophic events, rate increases and fewer claims at Geico.The business that Berkshire is best known for, stock investments using the enormous cash that the insurance business throws off, also performed well last year. Investment income jumped nearly 48 percent amid rising market valuations. (About 79 percent of the conglomerate’s investment income comes from just five companies: Apple, Bank of America, American Express, Coca-Cola and Chevron.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Snap Lays Off 10% of Its Work Force

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      The company laid off more than 500 of its employees on Monday, or about 10 percent of its global work force.Snap, the parent of messaging app Snapchat, on Monday said it would lay off more than 500 employees, joining other tech companies in a wave of new cost-cutting measures.The layoffs amount to 10 percent of its global work force; the majority will occur in the first quarter of 2024. “We have made the difficult decision to restructure our team,” the company said in a securities filing, adding that it would take pretax charges of $55 million to $75 million, primarily for severance and related costs.Amazon, Google and Microsoft have announced layoffs this year, following tens of thousands across the sector last year. Snap laid off a small number of employees on Friday, Business Insider reported.The company is set to report earnings on Tuesday. Cost-cutting measures at other companies have buoyed stock prices. Snap shares were trading about 2 percent lower before the market opened on Monday.Like other social media companies reliant on advertising, Snap has had a rough couple years. Changes by Apple to its privacy policy in 2021 made it tougher for advertisers to track users — something that hurt Snap and also had a heavy effect on Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.Snapchat, which has more than 400 million daily active users, experienced a revenue decline in the first two quarters of last year and only 5 percent growth in its most recent quarter, which ended Sept. 30.In 2022, Snap cut 20 percent of its work force, or 1,300 jobs, and also discontinued at least six products. It let go nearly 20 product managers in November and in September shut a division that sells augmented reality products to businesses, laying off 170 people. More

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      Oil Giants Pump Their Way to Bumper Profits

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      Exxon and Chevron reported robust earnings and large payouts to investors as they continued to expand their fossil-fuel production.Exxon Mobil and Chevron, the largest U.S. energy companies, on Friday reported sizable profits for the final quarter of last year, showing that the oil and gas industry remained robust at a time of doubts because of climate change concerns.The companies’ earnings were down from the bonanza year of 2022, when a surge in prices pushed up profits, but were otherwise the strongest in recent history.Exxon earned $7.6 billion in the fourth quarter of 2023, a 40 percent fall from the same period in 2022. For all of 2023, the company reported $36 billion in earnings, compared with $55.7 billion in 2022. Before that, the last time Exxon made more than $30 billion in a year was in 2014.Chevron reported earnings of $2.3 billion in the fourth quarter, down from $6.3 billion a year earlier. The change was because of lower commodity prices and write-downs, especially in the company’s home state, California. For the year, the company made $21.4 billion, down from $35.4 billion in 2022 but, like Exxon, otherwise its biggest annual profit in a decade.The companies generated enough cash to fund big dividends and share buybacks. Such payouts are what investors now look for in the industry, analysts say. “In 2023, we returned more cash to shareholders and produced more oil and natural gas than any year in the company’s history, “ Mike Wirth, Chevron’s chief executive, said in a statement.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Boeing Suspends Financial Outlook as It Focuses on Safety

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      The manufacturer is under pressure to improve quality control after a panel blew off a 737 Max 9 plane during an Alaska Airlines flight this month.Boeing on Wednesday said that it would not provide a full-year financial forecast, the clearest indication yet that the company is trying to assure customers that it is prioritizing safety amid growing concerns about its popular 737 Max jets.Even as it announced its quarterly earnings, the company chose to focus instead on discussing quality control. Boeing is trying to stem the fallout from an incident less than four weeks ago in which a hole blew open on an Alaska Airlines 737 Max 9 plane shortly after takeoff.“While we often use this time of year to share or update our financial and operational objectives, now is not the time for that,” Boeing’s chief executive, Dave Calhoun, wrote in a message to employees. “We will simply focus on every next airplane while doing everything possible to support our customers, follow the lead of our regulator and ensure the highest standard of safety and quality in all that we do.”With the Jan. 5 incident still under investigation by federal officials, Boeing executives had been grappling with how much to emphasize its efforts to improve safety while also reassuring shareholders about its financial performance. Quality concerns have taken on new urgency after news accounts, including a report in The New York Times, that Boeing workers opened and reinstalled the panel that blew off the plane, known as a door plug.The incident terrified passengers and forced the pilots to make an emergency landing in Portland, Ore. It renewed concerns among some aviation experts that Boeing has long focused too much on increasing profits and enriching shareholders through buybacks and dividends and not enough on engineering and safety. Experts raised similar concerns after two accidents on the 737 Max 8 killed nearly 350 people in 2018 and 2019.The effects of the incident on Boeing’s financial performance are not yet known: The results it announced on Wednesday were for the three months that ended Dec. 31.In its earnings release on Wednesday, the company said it was producing 737 Max jets at a rate of 38 per month at the end of the year. It had hoped to increase that rate to 42 per month this year.But the Federal Aviation Administration said last week that it was limiting Boeing’s ability to increase production of all 737 Max planes, including approving any additional assembly lines, until the company proved that it had resolved its quality control issues.The company said Wednesday that it lost $30 million in the fourth quarter, an improvement from a loss of $663 million in the same period a year earlier. Revenue rose to $22 billion, from about $20 billion a year earlier.The National Transportation Safety Board is expected in the coming days to release a preliminary report on the Alaska Airlines incident. More

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      FTX’s Near-Collapse Batters the Crypto Industry

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      Prices of digital currencies have tumbled even after the exchange FTX announced a provisional lifeline by a top rival, Binance. A humbling downfall for Sam Bankman-Fried.Erika P. Rodriguez for The New York TimesA crypto giant’s fate is in doubtDevastation in the crypto market continued on Wednesday, after the giant crypto exchange Binance announced a bombshell deal to buy its embattled rival, FTX. (The deal excludes FTX’s American operations.) The entire market’s capitalization now stands at $900 billion, down from $3 trillion just one year ago, while major cryptocurrencies were down by double-digit percentages. The damage is largely contained within crypto; both the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq closed up yesterday.But investors fear that Binance won’t go through with the rescue plan, and that more pain awaits after their industry’s biggest Lehman-esque moment to date.What happened? Binance, an early investor in FTX turned rival, said over the weekend that it planned to sell its holdings in FTT, a token used for trading on FTX’s platform — a stunning move that cast doubt on the financial health of FTX and its trading arm, Alameda Research. The token’s value has plunged by roughly 80 percent in the past 36 hours to just under $5.Traders withdrew over $1.2 billion from FTX on Monday alone, according to the research firm Nansen. By Tuesday, FTX had stopped processing withdrawals; its chief executive, Sam Bankman-Fried, who was reportedly casting about for a financial lifeline from billionaires, finally turned to Binance for salvation.Binance has cemented its dominance over crypto. It was already the largest exchange worldwide for digital currencies and derivatives; FTX’s trading volumes in September were just a fraction of Binance’s. Its founder, Changpeng Zhao — widely known as CZ — showed off his power by effectively kneecapping FTX and then swooping in with a rescue. “This elevates Zhao as the most powerful player in crypto,” Ilan Solot of the derivatives trader Marex Solutions told The Financial Times.It’s a humbling downfall for Bankman-Fried, who in just three years rocketed from obscurity to become one of the best-known moguls in crypto, earning comparisons to Warren Buffett and J.P. Morgan. Months ago, Bankman-Fried sought to live up to the Morgan comparison, swooping in to bail out troubled crypto companies like Celsius and Voyager Digital (deals whose status is now unclear); he also became a frequent presence in Washington, calling for more regulation of the crypto industry, to the ire of CZ and other executives.At the beginning of the year, FTX was valued at $32 billion, backed by heavyweight investors like BlackRock, SoftBank and Tiger Global. (Investors said yesterday they were blindsided by the deal.) The 30-year-old Bankman-Fried — known in the crypto world as S.B.F. — was said to have a net worth of over $16 billion. But a document leaked to CoinDesk purportedly showed that FTX and Alameda, whose finances had long been murky, were highly illiquid and financially vulnerable.The crypto world fears other shoes will drop. Investors worry that CZ may yet pull out of his rescue deal: He noted on Tuesday that the transaction was nonbinding and subject to due diligence. Meanwhile, tokens associated with FTX, including Solana, have continued to plunge in value.Other crypto players sought to distance themselves from the FTX meltdown. Brian Armstrong of Coinbase, the biggest U.S.-focused exchange, said FTX’s troubles appeared to arise from “risky business practices” that his company doesn’t engage in. Still, Coinbase shares fell nearly 11 percent yesterday.And regulators say the news justifies more scrutiny of crypto companies. “This is a major market event for the digital asset sector,” said Joe Rotunda of the Texas State Securities Board Enforcement Division, which had already been investigating FTX.HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING Elon Musk sells billions more in Tesla stock to pay for his Twitter deal. He sold nearly $4 billion worth of shares in recent days, according to regulatory filings, bringing his total sales for the year to $36 billion. The electric carmaker’s shares were up slightly in premarket trading.The United Nations seeks to end “sham” corporate net-zero pledges. Companies that claim to be trying to cut carbon emissions but invest in fossil fuels should be shamed, António Guterres, the U.N. secretary general, said at COP27. Meanwhile, more rich countries pledged to pay poorer ones compensation for damage from climate change.Disney reports a jump in streaming losses. The media giant said its direct-to-consumer unit — including Disney+ — doubled its third-quarter losses from a year ago, to $1.5 billion. But Disney said the quarter was the “peak” for losses, and noted it had added 12 million new subscribers.TikTok lowers its worldwide revenue targets amid a spending slump. The video platform cut its sales goals by 20 percent after its advertising and e-commerce operations struggled, The Financial Times reports. TikTok also revamped its leadership in the United States.Adidas cuts its profit forecast after breaking from Kanye West. The warning from the sportswear giant came weeks after it ended its highly profitable collaboration with the rapper now known as Ye. Separately, Adidas named Bjorn Gulden, the former head of Puma, as its next C.E.O.The red wave that wasn’t Republicans haven’t quite had the night they expected. As of 7 a.m. Eastern, Republicans were 21 seats shy of retaking control of the House. But leadership of the Senate remains up in the air after the Democrats flipped a seat in Pennsylvania. Here are the big highlights so far:Pennsylvania: John Fetterman, the state’s Democratic lieutenant governor, beat Mehmet Oz in the closely watched Senate race. Political analysts now say Democrats need to win two of three hotly contested Senate races — in Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, all currently held by Democrats — to maintain power in the chamber.Georgia: The Senate contest looks like it’s headed for a runoff on Dec. 6, pitting the incumbent, Raphael Warnock, against his Republican challenger, Herschel Walker.Governor races: Voters backed high-profile incumbents, including Kathy Hochul, Democrat of New York; Greg Abbott, Republican of Texas; and Tony Evers, Democrat of Wisconsin.Ballot initiatives: Voters in Michigan approved making abortion access a right protected under the State Constitution. Those in Maryland and Missouri voted to legalize marijuana, though similar measures were rejected in Arkansas and North Dakota.A rough night for Donald Trump: Several candidates that he endorsed, including in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania, lost or were behind. And a potential rival for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, handily won re-election.Meta slices through its work forceFacebook’s owner Meta will lay off 11,000 employees, equivalent to 13 percent of its work force, the company announced on Wednesday morning, in the biggest restructuring in the social media giant’s history. A slump in digital advertising and ballooning losses from its pivot to the metaverse have pushed the company to make a series of wide-ranging cuts.In a note to employees, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s co-founder and C.E.O., admitted that the company had hired too aggressively during the pandemic as homebound consumers spent more time socializing and shopping online. Meta mistakenly assumed this trend would continue: “I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that,” he wrote.The company has begun cutting costs across its operations, “scaling back budgets, reducing perks, and shrinking our real estate footprint,” Zuckerberg wrote. The stock was up 3.7 percent in premarket trading, outperforming the Nasdaq.The economic downturn is forcing companies across industries to shrink. Citigroup and Barclays are expected to lay off hundreds in their investment banking units, Bloomberg reports. And, according to Protocol, Salesforce could cut as many as 2,500 positions in the coming weeks as the activist investor Starboard Value seeks big changes in corporate strategy.Exclusive: Keurig Dr Pepper buys stake in Athletic Brewing Keurig Dr Pepper has invested $50 million in Athletic Brewing, the nonalcoholic beer company, as part of a $75 million fund-raise by Athletic, DealBook is first to report. It’s the beverage giant’s second foray into the nonalcoholic booze category — it announced a deal to acquire a nonalcoholic cocktail brand called Atypique this summer — and another sign of interest in this fast-growing category.Athletic Brewing was founded in 2017 by Bill Shufelt, a former trader at the hedge fund Point72, and John Walker, a former craft brewer. It now sells its products — including lager, light beer and sparkling water — at retailers like Trader Joe’s. With its new backer, Athletic is looking to expand in Australia, France and Spain.Sales of nonalcoholic beer are skyrocketing, growing almost 70 percent between 2016 and 2021 in the U.S., to about $670 million, according to Euromonitor. While that is still a tiny portion of the overall beer market, its popularity stands in stark contrast to overall sluggishness in beer sales, as the younger generation drinks less and cares more about its waistline. Beer giants like Heineken, Budweiser and Sam Adams have released nonalcoholic alternatives in the last five years.It’s not just for recovering alcoholics or nondrinkers. Shufelt said 80 percent of his customers drink alcohol, and three-fourths are between the ages of 21 and 44. About half are women, he added.THE SPEED READ DealsThe E.U.’s antitrust watchdog will deepen its scrutiny of Microsoft’s $75 billion takeover of Activision Blizzard. (WSJ)Goldman Sachs has reportedly weighed buying payment-technology companies to expand its credit-card business. (WSJ)The electric carmaker Lucid said it planned to raise up to $1.5 billion in fresh capital. (NYT)PolicyThe private equity giants Apollo, Carlyle and KKR disclosed inquiries by regulators over their dealmakers’ use of messaging apps like WhatsApp for business. (Bloomberg)Supreme Court justices are weighing a Pennsylvania law that requires companies to consent to being sued in its courts for conduct done anywhere. (NYT)Kenya published some details of a 2014 loan it took out from China, potentially straining relations with the country’s biggest source of infrastructure financing. (NYT)Best of the restVirginia Giuffre, a victim of Jeffrey Epstein, now says she may have misidentified the Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz as an abuser. (NYT)Twitter may now offer two kinds of check marks to verify users. (The Verge)Levi’s named Michelle Gass, Kohl’s chief executive, as its next C.E.O. (NYT)Would you take a Zoom meeting in a movie theater? AMC hopes so. (Insider)UBS’s chief risk officer, Christian Bluhm, is quitting to become … a professional photographer. (FT)Thanks for reading! We’ll see you tomorrow.We’d like your feedback. Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com. More