Opinion

Elon Musk brought Tesla Inc. into this world, and he seems determined to take it out. The billionaire’s latest self-destructive act was an appearance last night on the podcast of comedian Joe Rogan, where, among other things, Musk confirmed Bob Dylan’s thesis that “everybody must get stoned.” It’s the latest in a long chain of Musk stunts, which Liam Denning ...

There are already 170,000 small, unmanned aerial vehicles licensed in the US, and the Federal Aviation Administration predicts another half-million more of them to be airborne by 2022. Drones are everywhere, doing all sorts of things, including delivering hamburgers and pizzas. They’re taking group photos and scouting properties. They’re also competing, and the competition is serious. Lockheed Martin Corp. has ...

The sight of a flooded Kansai International Airport and 3,000 stranded people after Typhoon Jebi slammed into southern Japan should be a warning to the world’s infrastructure investors. Airports have been a highly rated asset class over the past decade. The combined market capitalization of the companies that run the terminals in Paris, Shanghai, Sydney, Frankfurt, Copenhagen and Thailand has ...

The logjam in insurance M&A has broken. French mutual Covea Group is attempting an ambitious 8.3 billion-euro ($9.6 billion) takeover of reinsurer Scor SE, run by charismatic veteran chairman Denis Kessler. Securing an agreement for the mooted deal doesn’t look easy. The timing of the approach makes sense. After Axa SA’s deal for XL Group Ltd. at the beginning of ...

Does America adapt by crisis or consensus? Do we spontaneously change because we see we must, or must we be coerced by events that leave us no choice? — “The Good Life and Its Discontents: The American Dream in the Age of Entitlement” That’s what I wrote more than 20 years ago. Americans would solve their most pressing problems through ...

For a staunch supporter of central bank “forward guidance,” Mark Carney changes his mind a tad too often. From when he will leave his job running the Bank of England (BOE), to when the BOE’s Monetary Policy Committee will next raise interest rates, there are plenty of examples. Yet on one crucial subject for the British economy, Carney has been ...

Another day, another negative headline about Deutsche Bank AG. First came the warning that the battered German lender is being evicted from the index of the top 50 stocks in the euro zone. Then came the another news that China’s HNA Group Co., one of the bank’s top shareholders, is selling its entire stake. The shares fell as much as ...

State technological, geopolitical and social objectives are the driving force behind what could be China’s biggest-ever telecom merger. Shareholders celebrating the deal might do well to remember that. Shares of China Unicom (Hong Kong) Ltd. and China Telecom Corp. surged after Bloomberg News reported that top leaders were reviewing a proposal to merge their state-controlled parents. The Hong Kong-traded units ...

The stock market is a weighing machine of companies’ potential rather than their current circumstances. That is doubly true for Amazon. Amazon.com Inc. has briefly reached a stock market value of $1 trillion. It’s a meaningless (and unoriginal) milestone but a notable symbol for a company that until recently hardly looked like a world-shaking giant. Amazon’s market cap is six ...

Europe’s national regulators are discovering the limits of their ability to police cross-border money laundering in a complex and globalized financial system that’s full of holes. As incomplete and imperfect as the region’s banking union may be, more supranational oversight and co-operation would help. The severity and complexity of corruption probes hitting supposedly humdrum, diversified consumer-and-business banks should be a ...