Google's Plan to Buy Security Firm Wiz Gets Antitrust Review
Justice Department antitrust enforcers are reviewing whether Google's planned $32 billion acquisition of cybersecurity company Wiz Inc. would illegally limit competition in the marketplace, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
Officials in the department's antitrust division, who are probing the deal, have been examining the contours of the Alphabet Inc. unit's plan following its announcement in March, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing a confidential matter. Such inquiries include discussions with the merging companies as well as competitors and customers.
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Is This Market-Thumping Stock-Split Stock a Buy Right Now With $10,000?
Stock splits might drive a lot of attention from investors, but they don't change anything fundamentally about a business. There's a thriving niche retailer that just implemented a massive stock split, which could continue its impressive historical share price gains. Instead of buying $10,000 worth of stock at once, dollar-cost averaging might be a better idea. 10 stocks we like better than O'Reilly Automotive › It's not a surprise that investors want to own companies whose stocks soar. However, an issue can arise when a business has done so well over a long period of time that its share price becomes nominally high. This makes it extremely difficult for investors with small sums of capital to buy whole shares. Here's where a stock split comes into play (more on this below). Investors looking to put money to work in the market appreciate these rare opportunities because it could lead to strong portfolio gains. There's greater excitement surrounding a particular company. There's one dominant retail stock that has climbed 509% just in the past decade, crushing the S&P 500 index. And it's up 14% in 2025 (as of June 10). Plus, it just put in place a massive stock split. Should you buy the business with $10,000 right now? It's important that investors first develop a basic understanding of how exactly a stock split works. Boards of directors and executive teams want shares of their companies to be accessible to the most investors, as this can grow demand. A stock split is conducted to artificially lower the stock price. On the flip side, there is a proportionate increase in the number of outstanding shares. On March 13, O'Reilly Automotive's (NASDAQ: ORLY) board of directors voted to approve a 15-for-1 stock split. Shareholders also approved this decision, and the stock split was implemented on June 10. O'Reilly's share price went from about $1,350 to $90 overnight. O'Reilly's outstanding share count expanded by a factor of 15, while the stock price was divided by 15. While a stock split gets a lot of attention from investors, it's worth pointing out that nothing changes with the company on a fundamental or operational basis. Undergoing a stock split won't change O'Reilly's corporate strategy, revenue, profits, or market cap. This fact can get lost in all the noise. Shares of O'Reilly have significantly outperformed the broader index in the past decade. If we zoom out further, the numbers are even more impressive. Since the company's initial public offering in April 1993, the stock has skyrocketed 56,350%. This must be a wonderful business if it has taken care of its shareholders like that. As of March 31, O'Reilly had 6,416 stores (6,298 in the U.S.) that sell aftermarket auto parts, like brakes, batteries, and motor oil, to both DIY customers and professional mechanics. What's noteworthy about this business is that demand is relatively stable. In both good and bad economic times, consumers need the stuff that O'Reilly sells. That's because having a working automobile is an urgent need for people that's not up for negotiation. People tend to drive more in robust economic times, increasing wear and tear on cars. And when there's a recession, these consumers might hold off on buying a new vehicle, instead choosing to spend money maintaining their existing cars. This supports demand. O'Reilly generates meaningful profits. It raked in $2 billion in free cash flow in 2024, before reporting $455 million in Q1. The leadership team has a history of plowing this cash into share buybacks. Just in the last five years, O'Reilly's diluted outstanding share count was reduced by 24%, which boosts earnings per share. However, the valuation isn't cheap. The stock trades at a price-to-earnings ratio of 33.3. This is 38% more expensive than the trailing-10-year average. My view is that investors should wait for a pullback before adding this outstanding company to their portfolios. If you're bullish on O'Reilly, then I can understand why a dollar-cost average strategy might make sense to buy $10,000 of this stock-split stock over the next year or so. Before you buy stock in O'Reilly Automotive, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the for investors to buy now… and O'Reilly Automotive wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $655,255!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $888,780!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 999% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 174% for the S&P 500. 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Business Insider
37 minutes ago
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The scariest thing about AI might be the way your boss is talking about it
CEOs sending scary AI memos to employees may be doing more harm than good. In recent months, some company leaders have gone public with strikingly bleak outlooks, predicting generative AI tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini will displace wide swaths of white-collar workers and shrink job opportunities for recent college graduates. "It does not matter if you are a programmer, designer, project manager, data scientist, lawyer, customer support rep, salesperson, or a finance person — AI is coming for you," wrote the CEO and founder of the freelance-job site Fiverr in an email to employees that he shared on LinkedIn. Other company chiefs, including the bosses of chatbot maker Anthropic and payments provider Klarna, have voiced similarly grim employment forecasts tied to the AI surge. "This is unusual," Johnny Taylor, president of the Society for Human Resource Management, told Business Insider, noting that chief executives aren't typically so forthcoming or pessimistic. "But AI is unusual. There is going to be a fundamental shift in how work will be done." AI adoption kicks up Last year, 78% of workers said their organizations had used AI in at least one function, up from 55% in 2023, according to an AI-focused survey, released in March, by the global management consulting firm McKinsey. Companies' rapid adoption of AI is putting CEO communication to the test. While transparency is key to building trust with employees, leadership experts say telegraphing expectations of doom and gloom, no matter how sincere, can sink morale and hamper productivity. As an employee "you're using so much cognitive and emotional resources to deal with that threat," said Cary Cherniss, a professor at Rutgers University who studies emotional intelligence in the workplace. Increased turnover is another likely outcome. "If everybody is nervous about their jobs, they're going to start looking for other jobs," he said. AI's arrival in the workplace coincides with a sharp decline in employee confidence. Last month, the share of workers reporting a positive six-month business outlook fell to 44.1% from 48.2% a year earlier, setting a new record low last recorded in February, according to the careers platform Glassdoor. In times of great uncertainty and agitation, voices of fear and panic about AI can add to the unrest and increase anxiety, said Heidi Brooks, a senior lecturer in organizational behavior at Yale University's School of Management. "People's nervous systems are already so defensive and jacked up," she said. Striking a balance Still, company bosses shouldn't stay entirely mum if they truly anticipate major AI-driven disruption, according to Chris Yeh, a general partner at Blitzscaling Ventures and who co-authored two books about startup leadership with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. "Some jobs will likely be endangered," he said. The best approach, leadership experts said, is for CEOs to strike a balance by being honest about what changes they foresee while helping employees respond constructively. "The thing that leaders need to really understand is that you need to responsibly bring AI into the workforce," said Sarah Franklin, CEO of Lattice, a people-management platform. Balanced communication alone, though, may not be enough. Company leaders may also need to equip employees with training, resources and moral support, said SHRM's Taylor. "We're seeing more and more companies doing that," he said. Prediction follies Gary Rich, founder of executive-leadership firm Rich Leadership, suggests company chiefs talk about AI to employees like how they talk to Wall Street analysts. "You don't make stuff up and you don't speculate," he said. Making an accurate prediction about a seemingly transformative technology isn't easy anyway and can cause reputational harm, added Rich. History is littered with faulty forecasts, such as how people once thought television would replace radio and that e-commerce would kill bricks-and-mortar retail. "Ultimately, it erodes their own credibility when they're wrong," he said. AI's actual impact on employment has so far been mixed. Last year 13% of CEOs polled by professional-services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers said they reduced their headcounts due to generative AI over the previous 12 months, while 17% attributed the technology to increases in their workforces during that period. Melissa Valentine, a senior fellow at Stanford University who studies enterprise usage of AI, said workers should consider getting up to speed on how the technology applies to their field given how prominent and widespread it's become. But there's no need to panic as AI isn't going to change how most companies operate overnight. "It takes a ton of work to automate agents," she said.
Yahoo
40 minutes ago
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Trump Just Revoked California's EV Rules. How Much Is California To Blame?
President Donald Trump just revoked California's permission to enforce its nation-leading clean-car rules — and Mary Nichols understands why. "No one likes being regulated," she told me ahead of Thursday's Oval Office signing ceremony. Nichols knows that better than almost anyone. As head of California's Air Resources Board for 17 years, she brought the world's biggest automakers to heel using the state's unique authority to go further than the federal government in setting vehicle emissions standards. It's those same automakers who lobbied Trump to "rescue the U.S. auto industry from destruction by terminating California's electric vehicle mandate once and for all," as Trump put it Thursday. It didn't have to get to this point. California officials had been in talks with automakers prior to the November election about how to keep them on board, but the state overplayed its hand, Nichols said. "Many people were acting on the assumption that it was going to be the Democrats continuing in power," she said. "So the state felt like they had all the cards in their hand, and then after the election, it was pretty hard to reset the conversation." To hear Nichols tell it, California may have gone too far this time in nudging the industry to ever-higher sales of zero-emission vehicles. The rules would have required automakers to hit increasing percentages — 35 percent by model year 2026 and 68 percent by model year 2030 — before reaching 100 percent of new-car sales in 2035. Maybe that would have worked if it were just about California. But a dozen other states are signed on to California's targets, and they have been slower and less generous with incentives and EV charging infrastructure. Where California has more than a quarter of its new car sales coming from EVs, New Jersey is at 15 percent, and New York is under 12 percent, according to the industry's latest figures. "They were definitely having issues with the California program because they didn't think they could meet the sales numbers in the mandate, especially [Gov. Gavin] Newsom's target of nothing but ZEVs with a deadline attached to it," Nichols said. "That was scary, and even the interim targets were going to be hard to meet." The pendulum has swung against California before: The George W. Bush administration was the first to attempt to deny California's permission from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to require automakers to sell increasing percentages of zero-emission vehicles, and Trump went further in his first term by attempting to revoke the state's already-issued authority. But Republicans had never resorted to doing it through Congress, via an untested maneuver that congressional watchdogs have warned is likely illegal but that still drew 35 Democratic votes in the House and one in the Senate (Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), in the tradition of Detroit's John Dingell). It's a far cry from the bipartisan consensus that reigned when President Richard Nixon famously signed the Clean Air Act, which set federal air pollution levels for the first time but gave California permission to continue going further, owing to its decade-plus of vehicle emissions rules aimed at the smoggy Los Angeles basin. The automakers have been steadily lobbying against the rules since then, with a brief ceasefire from 2009-16, when ten automakers and the United Auto Workers signed a nonaggression pact in President Barack Obama's Rose Garden with California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the EPA. That it happened at the same time that the federal government was taking an equity stake in General Motors was no coincidence, said Nichols, who helped broker the pact. "They saved them from bankruptcy," she said. California has less recourse this time around. Where Newsom signed deals in 2019 with Ford, Volkswagen, Honda, BMW and Volvo to abide by the state's rules even in the event of federal cancellation, he now only has Stellantis, which signed a separate agreement last year that goes through model year 2030. And several of the state's allies are peeling off. California had 12 other states signed on to follow its lead as of last year, but it now has 10, after Republican-led Virginia dropped out and Vermont delayed enforcement by 19 months. And Democrats are getting cold feet, too: Maryland Gov. Wes Moore signed an executive order in April delaying enforcement, and Democratic lawmakers in New York introduced a bill this year to delay their participation by two years. (California and the other 10 states immediately sued Thursday to preserve the emissions standards.) "If it was only California, I think [automakers] wouldn't have been as eager to jump in on the federal level and work with the Republicans, but it's the fact it's the other states that had the California standards that were killing them, especially New York," Nichols said. That echoes the automakers' argument. "The problem really isn't California," John Bozzella, CEO of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, said in a statement after the Senate's vote last month to overturn the rules. "It's the 11 states that adopted California's rules without the same level of readiness for EV sales requirements of this magnitude."
