Others, like a call for a report on race- and gender-based pay gaps at the company and a pledge to prohibit sales of facial recognition to government entities, failed.
Mr. Gates solicited at least two employees while he was running Microsoft, according to reports in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
Tesla, one of the biggest companies in the S&P 500, was one of the worst performers in the index, falling 6.8 percent.
“We have a set of tools — they are very effective — and we will use them to bring inflation back down,” Lael Brainard, a Fed governor whom President Biden has nominated to become the central bank’s vice chair, said on Thursday at a Senate hearing.
What’s more, shares of many technology companies trade at high valuations because of fast growth and expectations that they will produce significant profits in the future.
The deal, announced Thursday, requires Navient to cancel $1.7 billion in delinquent private student loan debts for nearly 66,000 borrowers and pay $95 million in restitution.
Most of those who took out the loans that will be forgiven under the settlement attended for-profit schools — like the defunct ITT Technical Institute — that often have low graduation rates and poor job-placement records.
At some schools, Navient anticipated that more than 90 percent of the loans would default.
Under Education Department rules, no more than 90 percent of a school’s tuition payments can come from federal funding.
Navient, which did not admit any fault in the settlement, said in a statement that it did not act illegally.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sued in federal court over what it called mistakes and tactics by Navient that inflated borrowers’ bills by billions of dollars.
Those claims are the focus of the settlement that was announced on Thursday, but it also resolved the states’ charges that Navient inflated borrowers’ bills by steering federal loan borrowers into costly long-term forbearance instead of more affordable income-based repayment plans.
But some who attended those schools will still be left out: Navient agreed to eliminate the remaining balance on those loans only for people in locations that participated in the deal.
Notably, students who were current on their loans as of June 30, 2021 — meaning they’re still paying their bills — will not have their loans canceled.
While the eliminated loans will be a great relief to the borrowers who took them out, most of the debts Navient is agreeing to wipe out are long-overdue loans for which it was already unlikely to be repaid.
Navient appeared willing to resolve the bureau’s investigation in the final months of the Obama administration, but the talks broke down after President Donald J.
Navient decided last year to get out of the federal student loan business.
In a hearing marked by limited contention — one that suggested Ms. Brainard could enjoy some bipartisan support — the nominee expressed a willingness to combat high and rising prices by removing Fed help for the economy.
“I believe we’ll be able to see inflation coming back down to target while the employment picture continues to clear,” Ms. Brainard said, after noting that the Fed would communicate its plans for withdrawing support clearly.
The jobless rate has been plummeting, but millions of workers are still missing from the job market compared with before the pandemic, and many employers complain that they cannot find employees, suggesting that health concerns and other challenges are keeping many people on the sidelines for now.
Fed officials have increasingly signaled that they expect to raise interest rates in 2022 to keep high inflation from becoming permanent.
About 8,000 Delta employees — more than one in 10 — had called out sick in recent weeks, Delta’s chief executive, Ed Bastian, said on CNBC on Thursday.
United Airlines, which canceled more than 2,500 flights over that period, said this week that about 3,000 employees, more than 4 percent of its staff, had recently tested positive for the virus.
Shortly before Christmas, Delta warned the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that the virus could disrupt holiday travel and asked the agency to shorten its recommended isolation time for people who test positive for the virus, a move also supported by some public health experts.
The airline expects losses in January and February and a return to profitability in March, with revenue over those three months expected to be about 72 to 76 percent of the level in a similar period in 2019.
The private equity firm TPG is set to begin trading on the Nasdaq on Thursday morning, after pricing its initial public offering at a $9 billion valuation.
TPG’s listing is the first big stock market debut of the year, with bankers closely watching its performance to monitor the health of the business of initial public offerings.
Having a publicly traded stock will give the firm a new way of compensating employees and a currency for buying new businesses.
It is going public at an auspicious time for publicly traded private equity.
The firm’s executives counter that TPG was among the first firms to push into growth equity, including early investments in Uber and Airbnb, and that it was ahead of the curve on investments with environmental, social and governance, or E.S.G., credentials.
Executives acknowledge that TPG has scope to diversify.
He stepped down as chief executive of Twitter in November to advance Block’s cryptocurrency ambitions, and he has said Bitcoin is the most important thing he can work on in this lifetime.
First up on the docket: Tulip Trading, a Seychelles-based firm run by Craig Wright, a litigious Australian computer scientist who claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym of Bitcoin’s creator.
That is hitting people’s wallets, but has done little to slow corporate America’s profit boom.
Earnings season is about to begin, with four of the nation’s largest financial firms — BlackRock, Citigroup, JPMorgan and Wells Fargo — all publishing their latest quarterly results on Friday before the market opens, the DealBook newsletter reports.
Fourth-quarter earnings for the S&P 500 are expected to show growth of 22 percent versus the same period in 2020, but growth in the first quarter of this year is expected to be around 6 percent, according to FactSet.
In the end, many companies were able to raise their prices by as much as, or more than, the increase in costs, and holiday sales came in stronger than anticipated.
“The Wall Street consensus is that profit margins will break above prior peaks this year,” Ohsung Kwon, a U.S.
Corporate profits have become a political issue in the debate about the causes of inflation.
Steag operates several coal- and gas-burning power plants in western Germany, and generates power from renewable sources including wind, biomass and geothermal.
Last week, another leading German utility, Uniper, announced that high energy prices had forced it to seek extra credit worth 10 billion euros .
Other German energy companies, including RWE and EnBW, said that they had taken similar steps to ensure they had sufficient credit to weather the volatility in the European energy market, but declined to give details.
In a statement explaining the decision to provide Uniper with extra financing, Fortum said that European gas prices reached “unprecedented levels” in December.
Global demand for energy jumped last year, after the world economy reawakened from widespread shutdowns aimed at slowing the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.
The surge means the wholesale price of electricity has reached stratospheric levels, making headlines across Europe as consumers, battered by the pandemic, are now hit by big increases in their home energy bills.
1 for staff who are working remotely because of the surge in coronavirus cases, a company spokeswoman confirmed on Thursday.
Ms. Holmes, who was found guilty on three counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison for each count.
As the Omicron variant of the coronavirus surges across the country, tests are in short supply.
Unlike other company perks, like free snacks, virus tests are a vital public health tool.
The federal government has been slow to authorize rapid antigen tests, because it has held them to a high standard for medical devices.
The result is a testing shortage, and a decentralized system in which schools, hospitals and companies are competing to get tests.
With testing kits scarce, some health experts are questioning the distribution of tests.