Yahoo Finance TikTok owner ByteDance’s rapid growth, Nadella joins Microsoft board, Gates-backed vaccine fails
Julie Hyman breaks down Thursday's business headlines, including: TikTok's parent company ByteDance experiencing rapid growth as the platform maintained 1.9 billion monthly active users, the U.S. DOJ filing a lawsuit against Aon to stop its $30 billion purchase of Willis Tower Watson, CureVac's Covid vaccine failing a critical-late stage study that saw a 47% effective rate, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella being named chairman of the board replacing John Thompson
Video transcript
JULIE HYMAN: Let's talk about some other business headlines we are watching right now. The owner of TikTok saw revenue more than double last year to $34.3 billion. ByteDance, which is privately held, said in a memo to employees that gross profit rose 93%, to $19 million. ByteDance also owns Douyin, the Chinese equivalent of TikTok, and some other apps as well. It had 1.9 billion monthly active users across all of its platforms as of last December.
The least successful COVID-19 vaccine trial so far, Germany's CureVac, estimated its experimental mRNA vaccine had efficacy of only 47% in a study with 40,000 volunteers. The company plans to continue that trial and still file for approval, but experts say chances for success are low. The European Union had agreed to buy 405 million doses of the vaccine if the European Medicines Agency approved it.
The Justice Department is suing to block the $35 billion acquisition of Willis Towers Watson by Aon. It's the agency's first major action under the Biden administration. The DOJ said the combination would eliminate competition in several insurance brokerage markets.
The past decade has seen a wave of corporate separations between the roles of CEO and Chairman. Microsoft, though, is going in the other direction. Chief Executive Satya Nadella was just elected Chairman of Microsoft's board. And other board members praised his performance, which has pushed the shares to record highs.
