Apple is showering its investors with cash. The company spent $22.8 billion buying back its own stock in the first three months of this year — more than any company in any quarter in American history, according to Howard Silverblatt, a senior industry analyst for S&P Dow Jones Indices. And Apple (AAPL), the most valuable company in […]

Bowing to pressure from African-American activists, Starbucks excluded the Anti-Defamation League from an upcoming daylong anti-bias training session. The ADL, whose mission is to fight anti-Semitism, will play an advisory role in the company’s long-term efforts to combat discrimination, Jaime Riley, a Starbucks spokeswoman, told POLITICO Monday. But the group won’t help develop the curriculum […]

The boards of Sprint Corp. and T-Mobile US Inc. struck an all-stock $26 billion merger that, if allowed by antitrust enforcers, would leave the U.S. wireless market dominated by three national players. It is the third time in recent years that the two rivals have attempted the combination. New technology, stiff competition from wireless rivals […]

SAN FRANCISCO — A Facebook notification on Gary Bernhardt’s phone woke him up one night in November with incredible news: a message from Mark Zuckerberg himself, saying that he had won $750,000 in the Facebook lottery. “I got all excited. Wouldn’t you?” said Bernhardt, 67, a retired forklift driver and Army veteran in Ham Lake, […]

While Amazon has spent years looking into counterfeit and otherwise mislabeled goods, the company continues to face the challenge of overseeing its own eCommerce platform. Through Amazon’s Marketplace, The Guardian was able to obtain several goods that weren’t as described. For example, The Guardian received genuine Apple iPhone chargers that were separated from returned and refurbished devices but were being sold as new. […]

Intel Corp (INTC.O) beat earnings expectations for the first quarter and raised its full-year revenue and profit forecasts on Thursday, driven by the biggest-ever quarterly jump in its data center business and small-but-steady growth in its personal computer business. Shares of the Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker rose 5.4 percent to $55.95 in after-market trading after […]

Facebook Inc. shares rose Wednesday after the social network reported a surprisingly strong 63 percent rise in profit and an increase in users, with no sign that business was hurt by a scandal over the mishandling of personal data. After easily beating Wall Street expectations, shares traded up 7.1 percent after the bell at $171, […]

LONDON  – Costa Coffee will be spun off after parent Whitbread (WTB.L) yielded to pressure from hedge funds who argued it was being held back by being grouped with the Premier Inn hotel chain. The world’s second biggest coffee chain after Starbucks Corp (SBUX.O) has attractive, long-term international potential, Whitbread said. Former brewing group Whitbread […]

Microsoft may not be a favorite in the race to a becoming the country’s first trillion-dollar public company. But recently, after its younger tech peers whizzed past in valuation, Microsoft has become the second most valuable firm—albeit intermittently—for the first time since 2015. On Tuesday, Microsoft was valued at $714 billion, about $3 billion above Alphabet and […]

Though dramatic and absurd, the Starbucks incident in downtown Philadelphia was following a script. Four weeks earlier, black teenagers at an IHOP in Maine were asked to pay before they received food. In both cases, and in many more that go unseen because there aren’t enough moral whites uploading videos, black customers have to authenticate […]