Kim Kahn

In the news this weekend, a California jury found Tesla CEO Elon Musk defrauded Twitter investors through certain public statements about the company's user metrics, ruling that his comments were materially false or misleading.

The case centered on Musk's May 13th and May 17th tweets in 2022, including one that said the deal was temporarily on hold, pending confirmation that bots accounted for about 5% of users, as disclosed in SEC filings.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs said total damages could reach as much as $2.6 billion, a small fraction of Musk's net worth.

And OpenAI is planning a major hiring push.

According to the Financial Times, the company aims to nearly double its workforce to about 8,000 employees by the end of 2026, up from roughly 4,500 today, as it seeks to narrow the gap in the anthropic.

Most of the hires would focus on product development, engineering, research, and sales.

OpenAI is also expanding its technical ambassadorship initiative, specialists who help enterprise clients make better use of its tools.

And for income investors, Broadcom goes ex-dividend on Monday with a payout date of March 31st.

Dividend heavyweight Altria and Seagate go ex-dividend on Wednesday.

Altria pays on April 30th, while Seagate pays out on March 25th.

Dick's Sporting Goods goes ex-dividend on Friday with an April 10th payout date.

Welcome to Seeking Alpha's Wall Street Lunch, our afternoon update on today's market action, news, and analysis.

Good afternoon.

Today is Monday, March 16th, and I'm your host, Kim Kahn.

Our top story so far.

Wealthy investors sought to pull more than $10 billion from some of the largest private credit funds in the first quarter, forcing managers to limit redemptions and threatening one of Wall Street's fastest-growing businesses.

The FT reports that funds run by Blackstone, BlackRock, Cliffwater, Morgan Stanley, and Monroe Capital agreed to honor roughly 70% of the $10.1 billion in redemption requests received so far.

More withdrawals are expected in the coming weeks as Ares, Apollo, Blue Owl, Oaktree, and Goldman Sachs tally their figures.

Retail credit funds ballooned from $34 billion at the end of 2021 to $222 billion by the end of last year, according to Goldman Sachs.

That growth is now reversed, and Goldman expects the sector could shrink by $45-70 billion over the next two years.