Briefs Busted Pipes 35m

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●●, Halliburton and Baker Hughes said they would terminate their $ 35 billion proposed merger, announced in 2014. The deal faced stiff opposition from regulators. The U.S. Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit in April to block the merger, which the oil service companies had said would help them better compete against rivals. ●●Í Time Warner posted first-quarter earnings that surpassed analysts’ estimates. Sales at its cable-network unit, which includes TNT and TBS, climbed 7.2 percent, to $2.91 billion, from a year earlier. The increase came largely from an 11 percent rise in fees paid by distributors like AT&T and Comcast to carry the channels, which have spent billions on sports rights. ●● Ellen Pao, the former Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers junior partner who last March lost a genderdiscrimination suit against the firm, has co-founded an advocacy group to promote diversity in the tech industry. Project Include will advise companies on recruiting, hiring, and retaining more diverse workers. ●●m Metlife will pay $25 million to settle a probe of abuses tied to variable annuities, the second-largest fine ever levied by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. The sum includes a $ 20 million fine and $ 5 million to be paid to customers for “negligent” misrepresentation and omissions, Finra says. Metlife neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing. ●● Changes are coming to the year-old $10-per-month Apple Music service. Apple plans to alter the user interface and better integrate its streaming and download businesses. An unveiling is expected in June.

To shorten airport security lines this summer, the Transportation Security Administration wants to add more screeners and bomb-sniffing dogs, plus boost overtime. “We have decided that we are not going to compete as a commodity provider; we are going to compete as a premium provider.” ——Ed Bastian, who became CEO of Delta Air Lines on May 2

important “discontinuity” that could render obsolete many of the traditional party methods of winning elections. “He will define more of this than we [Republicans] will,” Gingrich says. “He’s been so creative, and he does things so differently, and he will be so dominant, that we have to figure out how we build around him. This is not a collective where you sit down and have a planning team. This is one, singular person who is the Steve Jobs of modern politics. And he is going to drive the system.”

But Trump is also going to encounter a scale and intensity of attack from Clinton that he never experienced from his Republican primary opponents. “He’s about to walk into a billion-dollar buzz saw,” says Stuart Stevens, Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign manager. Trump has made no secret of his philosophy of how one should respond to political criticism. “Anybody who hits me, we’re going to hit them 10 times harder,” he told Fox News in November. Trump has already telegraphed the personal attacks he’ll use against Clinton, criticizing her paid Wall Street speeches and calling her an “enabler” of her husband’s marital infidelity, charges that advisers in both parties expect will be greatly amplified in the general election climate. “This is going to be Alien vs. Predator,” says one outside adviser with whom Trump has shared his plans.

For Trump, who’s broken with party orthodoxy on everything from trade to foreign policy to tax and entitlement reform, launching a fusillade of personal attacks against Clinton may be his best shot at uniting a fractured Republican Party. “There’s a lot aboutbout Dona Donald Trump that I don’t like, but I’ll vote for Trump over Hillary any day,” tweeted Ari Fleischer, the former press secretary to George W. Bush, whose administration Trump has criticized mercilessly.

Yet such a strategy, even if it manages to bring wavering Republicans into the fold, won’t guarantee Trump access to anything like the campaign war chests raised by recent GOP nominees. “Four years ago beginning in April,” says Stevens, “Mitt Romney had to start raising $100 million a month for the general election campaign.” While Trump may still be able to dominate the airwaves without that kind of money, he won’t be able to fund the nuts and bolts of a campaign infrastructure— and could therefore wind up at an even greater disadvantage than polls show he faces in a matchup against Clinton. (A May 4 CNN/ORC poll showed Clinton beating Trump by 13 points nationally, 54 percent to 41 percent.) “That money goes not just to the campaign,” says Stevens, “but to the assorted victory committees and all the empty party headquarters waiting to be filled with phone banks. That costs money that has to be raised by the presidential campaign. Trump doesn’t have a finance chairman, and he’s been calling donors crooks—so why would anybody want to give him money?”

Trump will have the backing of the Republican National Committee. He’ll also have at least rudimentary support from a pro-trump super PAC. But the financial asymmetry of a ClintonTrump race has begun to register with Republican officials and strategists such as Stevens who don’t share Trump’s blithe confidence that he’ll be able to sell himself to a general electorate in the same way he won over Republican primary voters. “If the guy is such a marketing genius, why is it he’s the most unpopular political figure in modern American history?” says Stevens.

Of course, Trump was also unpopular at the outset of the Republican primaries and still won. “Why would the consensus be that he can’t win?” asks Gingrich. “Sure, he can win.” (Gingrich may have a rooting interest here: He’s been mentioned as a possible vice president to Trump. Given an invitation to end the speculation by issuing a Shermanesque denial, he replies: “Nobody from Georgia issues Shermanesque statements. It goes against the state constitution.”)

The central problem with a mediadriven Trump campaign fueled by negative attacks is that it will make it much harder—and likely impossible— for him to broaden his appeal. This dilemma is a reminder that whatever genius disrupters may possess, they often fail. Radical though it may be, Trump’s campaign will have to solve this problem or end up going the way of Trump Vodka and Trump Steaks: into oblivion. �Joshua Green, with Kevin Cirilli and Jennifer Jacobs

€500 The European Central Bank will discontinue production of its highest-value denomination—popular among terroristsror and drug dealers—at the end of 2018. The bottom line As the presumptive Republican nominee, Trump faces the challenge of winning without a traditional campaign infrastructure.

unless they see charging equipment where they commonly drive or park,” says Pasquale Romano, chief executive officer of Chargepoint, based in Campbell, Calif., which sells charging equipment.

Independent companies such as Chargepoint are pushing back against a solution put forward by Pacific Gas & Electric: Let utilities run the show. In response to a request from regulators, PG&E submitted plans to spend $160 million raised from ratepayers to roll out more than 7,500 electric filling stations in its service area, which spans the northern twothirds of the state. “It’s a market that needs a bit of a jump- start,” says Aaron Johnson, PG&E’S vice president for customer energy solutions. “We want to see people using electricity as a transportation fuel. We think that’s great for our business.”

Under the PG&E plan, the utility would own and operate a network of stations but buy equipment from suppliers such as Chargepoint. Ratepayers will subsidize the PG&E stations until the electric-vehicle market catches up, an advantage startups don’t have. Chargepoint, which has installed 28,000 chargers in the U. S. and Canada, sells its equipment

There are about 153,000 gas stations in the U.S. but only public places to recharge your EV. Electric utilities want to add 12,500 more in California over the next three years. Offices and workplaces 1,335 AAA offices Hotels and resorts 1,653

to building or parking lot owners, who then buy power directly from utilities such as PG&E. Another company, San Francisco-based Volta Charging, provides power free through its network and makes money by selling ad space on its machines.

At hearings before the state Public Utilities Commission in late April, private operators expressed their opposition to handing over a big chunk of the market to the utility. “Northern California is ground zero for EV adoption worldwide,” says Abdellah Cherkaoui, vice president for government affairs at Volta, which reimburses host-site owners or pays utilities directly for the power it provides through its stations. “This is going to drive away private investment.” The commission is expected to make a decision on the utility’s plan this summer.

Until 2014, California’s utilities were effectively barred from entering the car- charging market. Regulators feared they would use their monopolies and guaranteed profits to squelch private competition. Two years ago, when it became clear that independent operators weren’t building charging stations fast enough, the state’s utilities regulator loosened the rules. “We’re coming up on a real kink point in targets that have to be met,” says Nancy Ryan, a former commissioner for the state’s utilities regulator who’s now a partner at E3, an energy consulting firm in San Francisco. “Utilities can be a huge funding source for EV infrastructure.”

Utilities in the southern part of the state won regulatory approval in January to move ahead with pilot projects. Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric plan to roll out 5,000 charging stations combined. Like PG&E, SDG&E will control its stations. Edison will spend $22 million to upgrade wiring to support independently operated charging stations.

A wide range of environmental groups, from the Sierra Club to the Natural Resources Defense Council, have thrown their support behind the utility proposals. “It’s too early to say which model is the best one,” says Max Baumhefner, an attorney at NRDC. “We need to be testing out different models in different parts of the state.” �Ben Elgin

The bottom line Private operators say they’ll be squeezed out if California utility PG&E builds a $160 million charging network for electric cars. Value of Princeton’s endowment, the fourth-largest among U.S. universities