Luke Vargas

Thank you for having me.

Coming up, we've got the day's top markets news, including President Trump's crackdown on the defense industry and a look at why LinkedIn is so good at grabbing our attention.

That and more after the break.

Shares in defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman slipped Wednesday after President Trump pledged to block company dividends, stock buybacks, and limit executive pay.

Trump posted the executive order on Truth Social, saying the sector needs to speed up its production and maintenance of military equipment or otherwise risk losing its business with the Pentagon.

Chinese automaker NIO plans to sell its EVs in Thailand, Australia and New Zealand this year as the company presses in overseas expansion amid intensifying competition in China.

According to research from Goldman Sachs, the Chinese auto market is getting increasingly crowded with 119 new model launches in the pipeline for this year.

And two oil majors are warning that falling oil and gas prices are hurting their bottom line.

Last night, ExxonMobil said upstream earnings would decline to $800 million in the fourth quarter, down from $1.2 billion in Q3.

Similarly, Shell said it expects to report higher oil and gas production, but warned of significantly weaker oil trading performance.

According to UBS, the industry will be grappling with depressed oil and gas prices for some time.

with analysts at Saxo saying the prospect of higher Venezuelan exports risks adding barrels to a market already grappling with ample supply.

And finally, while the spread of misinformation and deepfakes has raised concerns about a lot of social media, more people are now spending their time on LinkedIn.

Journal tech reporter Stu Wu says the Microsoft-owned network has lured people leaving other sites like Facebook and X, where content moderation is in decline.

And all that is paying off for LinkedIn, which has seen its revenues soar and membership double to around 1.3 billion users over the past five years.

And that's it for What's News for this Thursday morning.

Today's show was produced by Hattie Moyer and Daniel Bach.

Our supervising producer was Sandra Kilhoff.

And I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal.

We will be back tonight with a new show.