Symantec’s board has left the $14 billion cybersecurity firm exposed. Chief Executive Greg Clark is suddenly leaving after almost three years in charge – but with no successor in place. That’s poor planning for any company’s directors. But Symantec’s board had plenty of reasons to be better prepared. Granted, Clark is leaving to care for an ailing family member. At the very least directors should be ready for such unexpected developments, though, by being able to elevate another executive to the hot seat, even if they haven’t got a longer-term candidate in place. Instead, Symantec has had to rely on

Buyout firms EQT and Digital Colony Partners have downloaded a promising $14 billion data deal. They are buying serial acquirer Zayo on the cheap. The fiber and data center firm’s subdued growth and hefty need for capital made for an uncomfortable five-year ride as a public company. A brighter future, helped by 5G growth, awaits as a private firm. At the turn of the millennium, companies like WorldCom, Global Crossing and a slew of smaller firms went on an investment rampage laying fiber-optic cable to transmit data. The result was a tsunami of bankruptcies. Zayo was formed a few years

Apple’s cash and services help salve iPhone worries. The $740 billion tech giant’s holiday quarter was dismal, as foretold. A 5 percent sales drop shows Tim Cook’s company can no longer expect to sell significantly more phones or jack up prices. Rising margins on extras sold to iPhone users and the promise of $130 billion of capital returns buys Apple time to refresh. The iPhone has transformed Apple over the past dozen years, providing about 60 percent of revenue, but the smartphone market has matured. The number of units sold worldwide should grow less than 3 percent this year, estimates

Elon Musk is adding to the gloom that has enveloped much of the automotive sector in recent months. Tesla’s chief executive on Friday effectively issued the firm’s first profit warning. In an email to employees he wrote that he would be reducing staff by 7 percent. In addition, he admitted not only that fourth-quarter profit would be lower than in the previous three months, but also that it would take “great difficulty, effort and some luck” to turn a “tiny profit” between January and the end of March. Shareholders immediately wiped almost 10 percent off the stock, reducing the company’s

John Bogle, the founder of Vanguard who died on Wednesday, defined value in more ways than one. He turned the once-heretical idea of tracking the broad stock market into the dominant form of investing. Instead of pursuing personal riches, he spread the ethos of low-cost fund management, saving investors untold billions and building the mutually owned firm into a $5 trillion juggernaut. Bogle’s rise was anything but predictable. His senior thesis at Princeton on the mutual-fund industry got him a job at Wellington Management, and he once derided the notion that asset managers should try to merely track the market.

Wall Street’s top watchdog has a bad case of denial – about denials. As a condition of settling cases, the Securities and Exchange Commission typically bars alleged wrongdoers from later claiming they’re innocent. This so-called gag rule arguably violates free-speech rights, though. If a new lawsuit challenging it succeeds, the regulator may finally have to start – gasp! – proving its accusations. The suit was filed on Wednesday by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank that wants to publish a currently anonymous author’s memoir about being forced to settle what he contends were the SEC’s false charges of running

The world’s richest have long been prepared for the worst, be it financial meltdown, long-term power outages, cyber attacks or pandemic flu. Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sam Altman has an arrangement with billionaire investor Peter Thiel to take a private plane to New Zealand in the event of a systemic collapse, the New Yorker has reported. The general public can’t join these plutocratic “preppers” in their bunker, but they can still align their stock portfolios in anticipation. Breakingviews suggests some ways to turn anxiety over the end of days into investment alpha. Kimberly Clark Toilet paper, toothpaste and diapers will become

If Facebook can negotiate a difficult year ahead, it may be on its way to becoming Silicon Valley’s version of JPMorgan. A decade ago, financial firms were taking a whipping from politicians, just as tech companies are today. As Jamie Dimon’s bank shows, those who survive the process can end up even stronger. Mark Zuckerberg’s social network faces a world of pain from Washington in 2019. A new Democratic majority in the U.S. House of Representatives has tougher privacy rules on its agenda. Several Democrats want to see those modeled after Europe’s new data protection law, known as GDPR. Facebook’s

Johnson & Johnson’s talc crisis will linger for years. Investors erased $40 billion of its market value on Friday, after Reuters revealed the U.S. healthcare giant knew for decades its baby powder was sometimes tainted by asbestos. The company says the story is an “absurd conspiracy theory” as “every method available to test J&J’s talc for asbestos has been used by J&J, regulators, or independent experts, and all of these methods have all found that our cosmetic talc is asbestos-free.” If history is a guide the market may have over-reacted, but lawsuits and brand damage don’t easily dissipate. J&J faces

Every new arrival in New York City has a story to tell, whether it’s a sidewalk mugging or a fleecing by apartment brokers. Amazon is getting a bit of both. One month after picking New York for half of its second headquarters, the $810 billion e-commerce giant is already getting bashed by local politicians and unions. Jeff Bezos’s firm stands to get as much as $3 billion in tax credits and grants for building its facility in the city. Most of those are offered under existing state and city programs and require the firm to meet or exceed its planned

Tencent Music Entertainment and rival Spotify are now officially engaged in a duet, or maybe a duel. The Chinese streaming music service’s initial public offering valued it at the same $23 billion as its Swedish peer. Their business models are worlds apart, but from here on in they are likely to get much more alike. Having priced its shares at the bottom of its indicated range, Tencent Music did better than might have been expected given the recent whipsawing of tech stocks. The shares managed roughly a 10 percent pop on their Wednesday debut. The resulting valuation of around eight

Will Stitch Fix hit its revenue target for the next quarter? Probably. Do millions of Americans want to receive packages of mystery outfits picked by strangers? That’s harder to say. The latter question is the most important one, though – which explains the terrible performance of the $2 billion retail-tech company’s shares. Stitch Fix, which listed just over a year ago, reported quarterly earnings late Monday that outgunned consensus forecasts. The snag in Stitch Fix’s stocking, which drove the shares down as much as 29 percent on Tuesday, was that active users increased by 22 percent year-on-year, rather than the