Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Friday, April 24th, and this is your FT News Briefing. Big tech jobs took a hit yesterday, and BP ruffled some feathers at its annual meeting. Plus, the Trump family is now in a legal spat with a crypto tycoon. We'll take a look at how the relationship fell apart. I'm Mark Filippino, and here's the news you need to start your day.
Chapter 2: What major layoffs is Meta planning and why?
Meta announced yesterday it's cutting 10% of its workforce next month. That's about 8,000 jobs, and it's to offset a huge spending spree on AI. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has spent billions on the technology. The company said in a memo to staff yesterday that the layoffs are also meant to, quote, run the company more efficiently.
Along the same lines, Microsoft announced that it's offering voluntary redundancy to 7% of its U.S. staff. And like Meta, it's also on the back of a big AI bet. Microsoft cut more than 15,000 jobs last year. BP didn't get a ton of love at the oil majors annual meeting yesterday. Management put forward two special resolutions for shareholders to vote on. They both failed by a long shot.
BP is facing mounting pressure from activist investors and pension funds after it moved away from renewable energy last year. The FT's Malcolm Moore was at the meeting and he joins me now. Hey, Malcolm. Hi, Mark. So tell us about these two failed resolutions.
So one resolution was actually to reverse some previous shareholder resolutions around climate reporting. So in 2015, and then again in 2019, BP had put out resolutions which obliged it to basically release a lot of data around its sort of climate change performance.
BP now argues that's just pointless duplication because we have a sort of mandatory reporting framework, which already encompasses all that stuff. But obviously, it just put the backs up of all the people who think that BP, this oil major, is reversing its climate obligations. And so there was a kind of a symbolic vote, and it only got 47% support.
The other resolution, they wanted to hold electronic annual general meetings. And their argument here is basically lots of our shareholders are across the world. Therefore, we want to democratize the process by giving them the right to attend. But I guess again, here, there were big questions about whether shareholders would be able to have their say. And so that one also only got 47% support.
Okay, so not great. Malcolm, you were at this meeting, can you tell me about the atmosphere?
Well, look, it should have been a pretty upbeat meeting, right? Because if you look at BP's performance this year, the shares are up 30%. You know, you've got a new chair who's clearly very active. You've got a new chief executive, Meg O'Neill, who just started on the 1st of April.
And they're promising that they're going to pay a lot more attention to shareholder value after years of destroying billions of dollars of shareholder value. Everyone should be happy.
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Chapter 3: What happened at BP's annual shareholder meeting?
More than a thousand people in Hollywood signed an open letter this month opposing it. They're concerned that selling Warner Brothers to Paramount could lead to widespread job losses and fewer opportunities across the industry. The Trump family's crypto company is feuding with one of its biggest backers. World Liberty Financial got hit with a lawsuit recently.
It came from crypto tycoon Justin Sun. He also publicly attacked World Liberty in recent weeks. Here to discuss what's going on is the FT's Jill Shaw. She's our U.S. trading and crypto correspondent. Hi, Jill. Hi.
Hi.
All right. So before we get into this legal drama for our listeners who aren't super familiar with world liberty, tell me a little bit more about it and the role that it plays in the crypto space.
Sure. So World Liberty is founded by Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., who are, of course, the sons of the U.S. president, and also by the sons of Steve Witkoff, the U.S. envoy to the Middle East. And he's a key Trump ally in the administration right now. World Liberty, they're trying to merge the decentralized finance and traditional finance.
And in practical terms, Royal Liberty has its own token. They've also got a stable coin, which is a dollar pegged digital token. And they've got a small lending and borrowing platform that is pretty small as far as market share is concerned.
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Chapter 4: What were the failed resolutions proposed by BP's management?
So the Trump family is participating in the crypto sphere very actively. And the Trump administration has been very crypto friendly, too. It's eased regulations in a way that has been pretty unprecedented. But I want to talk to you about this crypto tycoon that I introduced a little earlier, Jill. His name is Justin Sun. Why is he suing World Liberty?
Yeah, so Justin Sun is a crypto billionaire. He has a blockchain company that he's founded. He bought in using those World Liberty tokens to support World Liberty Financial. He has sort of become one of the biggest public backers of the Trump family's crypto efforts. And that relationship, as you said, has since fallen apart.
What happened recently was that Justin Sun filed a lawsuit against Royal Liberty, essentially alleging that they had frozen him out of being able to sell those Royal Liberty tokens. and that the executives at World Liberty were extorting him to put more investment into the project. So this tension has been building for some time.
There were public spats on Axe, the social media platform, where Justin Sun was publicly accusing the World Liberty team of not properly communicating giving people access to their tokens, which in a decentralized finance platform, being able to access your tokens and freely trade them are important functions for crypto traders.
So a real downfall in this relationship between Sun and World Liberty and the Trumps. How has World Liberty responded to all this?
So Eric Trump came out on social media and said the lawsuit was ridiculous. And Zach Witkoff, who is the CEO of Royal Liberty, said something similar, that the claims are entirely meritless and Royal Liberty is looking forward to getting the case thrown out.
Jill, do you think this is the beginning of some serious cracks in the relationship between the Trump administration and the broader crypto sector? They had grown so close over the past couple of years.
It does seem like the major crypto ventures that the Trump family has pursued are either in hot water, such as in the case of Royal Liberty, or just not performing all that well. The Trump meme coin is trading at all-time lows. I think it's down 95% from its peak.
And of course, we have to remember that this is in a wider sell-off in meme coins and other wider troubles in decentralized finance and crypto. There is, of course, still a great deal of benefit that the crypto industry has gotten from this administration. But it does seem like Traders are waking up to the fact that the ventures aren't delivering everything that they promised.
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