As shares fall, Match faces woes
Match Group Inc. shares plummeted after the online dating behemoth gave quarterly forecasts that missed Wall Street estimates, due to mounting legal costs and economic factors that are denting sales growth. The shares slumped the most in a year.
The Dallas-based company said fourth-quarter revenue will be $545 million to $555 million. Wall Street was expecting $560 million. Adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization will be $205 to $210 million in the period, also below analysts’ estimates, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
“Legal costs have jumped significantly this year from last,” Chief Financial Officer Gary Swidler said on a conference call with analysts Wednesday morning. In 2018, the company spent about $15 million on legal costs. This year, legal bills have climbed to around $40 million, Swidler said.
Match is involved with three high-profile lawsuits. The company is suing rival dating app Bumble over allegedly stealing intellectual property from its star performer, Tinder. At the same time, Tinder’s founders are suing Match for allegedly misleading them about the app’s valuation.
Tesla’s ‘cybertruck’ to be unveiled Nov. 21
Tesla fans who have been waiting for the electric car company to unveil its long-promised pickup can now circle a debut date on their calendars: Nov. 21.
Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk tweeted out that date
Wednesday morning for when the company plans to show off what he has called on many occasions the “cybertruck.”
“Cybertruck unveil on Nov. 21 in LA near SpaceX rocket factory,” Musk tweeted. SpaceX, one of the other company’s that Musk runs, is headquartered in Hawthorne, Calif., near Los Angeles.
Musk, and Tesla, have been somewhat coy about what the truck will look like. The company has hinted about the truck for months, and in March, Musk tweeted out what could only be called the barest of conceptual photos of the vehicle, which he included along with a mention of the sci-fi classic film “Blade Runner.”
Self-driving car didn’t recognize jaywalker
Uber Technologies Inc.’s selfdriving test car that struck and killed a pedestrian last year wasn’t programmed to recognize and react to jaywalkers, according to documents released by U.S. safety investigators.
The National Transportation Safety Board on Tuesday released more than 400 pages of reports and supporting documents on the March 2018 crash that killed 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg as she walked her bicycle across a road at night in Tempe, Ariz.
The report said the car’s sensors detected Herzberg and her bicycle but its computer failed to recognize the hazard. “The system design did not include a consideration for jaywalking pedestrians,” it said.
Herzberg was crossing the road outside of a crosswalk.
Boeing CEO says he’s thought about leaving
Boeing Co.’s embattled boss said he had considered stepping down in the wake of two deadly crashes but vowed to stay on to lead the planemaker through one of the worst crises in its 103-year history.
“It’s fair to say I’ve thought about it,” Chief Executive Officer Dennis Muilenburg said about resigning, speaking Wednesday at a conference. “But to be frank, that’s not what’s in my character.”
The Chicago-based manufacturer has been engulfed in crisis since March, when regulators grounded its best-selling 737 Max after two accidents killed 346 people. The pressure on Muilenburg has mounted as the plane’s anticipated return has slipped from May to the fourth quarter — or beyond — while regulators scrutinize redesigned software for the jet’s flight control system.
The accidents “happened on my watch, and I feel obligated, I feel responsible to stay on it, work with the team to fix it, to see it through,” Muilenburg said at the New York Times Dealbook Conference in New York.
Muilenburg said he would still like to be Boeing CEO three years from now, adding that he intended to stay on “as long as the board allows me to serve in this role.”
Group calls for FTC to probe HireVue
A prominent rights group is urging the Federal Trade Commission to take on the recruitingtechnology company HireVue, arguing the firm has turned to unfair and deceptive trade practices in its use of face-scanning technology to assess job candidates’ “employability.”
The Electronic Privacy Information Center, known as EPIC, on Wednesday filed an official complaint calling on the FTC to investigate HireVue’s business practices, saying the company’s use of unproven artificial-intelligence systems that scan people’s faces and voices constituted a wide-scale threat to American workers.
HireVue’s “AI-driven assessments,” which more than 100 employers have used on more than a million job candidates, use video interviews to analyze hundreds of thousands of data points related to a person’s speaking voice, word selection and facial movements. The system then creates a computergenerated estimate of the candidates’ skills and behaviors, including their “willingness to learn” and “personal stability.”
Candidates aren’t told their scores, but employers can use those reports to decide whom to hire or disregard. The Utahbased company was the subject of a Washington Post report last month, in which AI researchers criticized its technology as “profoundly disturbing.”
HireVue’s “intrusive collection and secret analysis of biometric data” causes substantial privacy and financial harms, EPIC officials wrote. And “because these algorithms are secret,” they added, “it is impossible for job candidates to know how their personal data is being used or to consent to such uses.”