In an attempt to court younger audiences, Disney’s ESPN is planning to add some user-generated content to its yet-to-be-named flagship streaming service, which will debut later this year.

While the details are still unclear, ESPN will allow subscribers to post their own content at some point in the application’s evolution, according to people familiar with the matter. The technology likely won’t be available at launch, which the company hopes will occur before the National Football League season begins in September. An ESPN spokesperson declined to comment.

Disney executives have also considered adding user-generated content to Disney+ and discuss YouTube’s influence on streaming on a near daily basis, CNBC reported last year.

Alphabet’s YouTube, which leans heavily on creator-led content, is the most popular streaming service with an 11.1% share of total TV usage in the U.S., according to Nielsen.

ESPN executives are targeting a price of either $25 per month or $30 per month for the ESPN streaming service, which will include all of ESPN’s linear programming plus other digital add-ons, the people said.

The company plans to announce a name for the service, a price and a launch date in the coming months, the people said.

Media and professional sports league executives are focusing on how to capture the attention of younger viewers that are opting to watch YouTube or TikTok over live games. ESPN spends tens of billions of dollars each year on the media rights for live sports.

Walmart is known for its low prices and no frills approach.

So it may come as a surprise that wealthier shoppers are helping to fuel the retailer’s growth.

For more than two years, the discounter has noticed more customers with six-figure incomes shopping on its website and in its stores. Households earning more than $100,000 made up 75% of the company’s market share gains in the fiscal third quarter, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said on the company’s earnings call in November.

Those newer and more frequent customers have helped support the company’s aspirations to sell more higher-margin items, such as clothing and home goods. They are driving Walmart’s e-commerce sales, which have grown by double digits for 10 consecutive quarters. And they can boost the retailer’s newer revenue streams, such as subscription-based membership program Walmart+ and its advertising business Walmart Connect.

As Walmart reports its latest earnings on Thursday, Wall Street will be watching whether those upper-income customers are sticking around, after market share gains helped the retailer’s shares soar about 83% in the last year. Yet some investors have questioned whether Walmart’s traction with affluent shoppers has staying power, especially if the sticker shock of inflation cools.

In an interview with CNBC, Walmart U.S. CEO John Furner acknowledged that the retailer has gained and then lost upper-income customers before, such as in 2008 and 2009 during the Great Recession. Affluent shoppers stretched their dollars at the big-box retailer, but then ultimately returned to competitors.

This time, Furner said the gains will last because Walmart can save shoppers both time and money with e-commerce options.

“It’s different because we deliver to you at the curb [of the store],” he said in the late January interview. “We deliver to your house. We deliver your refrigerator. That whole Supercenter, which is an amazing retail format, is available in an hour or two for a large part of the country and growing really quickly.

Walmart’s expanding digital services have helped convince higher-income shoppers to give it a shot, said Brad Thomas, a retail analyst and managing director at KeyBanc Capital Markets. Some of those newer or more frequent customers have joined Walmart+, a subscription-based membership program that includes perks like free home deliveries. Walmart+, which launched about five years ago, is Walmart’s answer to Amazon Prime.

Walmart has not disclosed the program’s membership count, but it has reported double-digit membership income growth in each of the past four quarters..

Thomas said e-commerce options wipe out a potential hurdle for affluent shoppers: a potential stigma about shopping at the big-box stores themselves.

“There’s a customer in America that doesn’t think of itself as a Walmart shopper,” he said. “They think of themselves as a Target shopper or a Publix or a Whole Foods shopper and through the app and through the delivery capabilities, they can remain a non-Walmart core shopper, but get all the benefits of getting the branded items at Walmart prices.”

As inflation forced shoppers of all incomes to hunt for deals, some wealthier consumers realized they can get the same national brands like Tide detergent or Bounty paper towels from Walmart cheaper and often faster than at Amazon because of Walmart’s nearby stores, he said.

Walmart’s website and app have increased their selection, too, as the company has bulked up its third-party marketplace. Starting this summer, the company began offering premium beauty brands through its website, including hairdryers from T3 and perfumes from Victoria’s Secret.

Shoppers can now find handbags from Chanel and Louis Vuitton, too. Last month, Walmart announced a deal with resale platform Rebag, which sells the items through Walmart’s marketplace.

Yet as Walmart tries to keep those customers, it wants to encourage them to shop in person, as well. Walmart has stepped up investments in its stores to freshen its look and counter negative perceptions that higher-income shoppers might have.

Walmart has sped up the pace of remodels for its more than 4,600 stores across the U.S., with plans to revamp about 650 locations per year, an acceleration from a prior cadence of 450 to 500 per year, said Hunter Hart, senior vice president of Walmart Realty.

Remodeled stores have brighter lighting, wider aisles and mannequins, said Alvis Washington, Walmart’s vice president of retail brand experience. The stores also feature Walmart’s newer and more fashion-forward brands like Scoop and Free Assembly, and national brands that shoppers would recognize, such as Reebok.

The discounter launched a new grocery brand, BetterGoods, last year with colorful packaging and creative flavors that looks similar to merchandise that shoppers might find at Trader Joe’s or Target.

The Walmart U.S. CEO Furner said some of those changes have drawn upper-income customers to the company’s stores and app.

He said Walmart’s market share gains with affluent shoppers have come from online and in-store shopping, but added curbside pickup orders showed early signs of popularity with those customers. Even before the pandemic, Walmart saw that people who shopped with curbside pickup bought more higher-priced items, such as prime beef and seafood, Furner added.

He said that still rings true: Walmart sees more premium items in the shopping baskets of customers who buy online, get home deliveries or use curbside pickup.

Washington said Walmart treaded carefully with its store redesign, realizing it could risk its reputation for low prices and resonance with core customers, who typically have lower incomes. It promoted newer brands, but mixed in familiar staples, such as folded piles of inexpensive bath towels and denim.

“Having a great, elevated experience and great value aren’t mutually exclusive,” Walmart’s Washington said, recounting the company’s approach. “So when we looked at this, it’s like, how do we do both and make sure we can gain new customers and maintain the customers that we have?

When comparing remodeled stores to the rest of the fleet, Washington said higher comparable store sales reflect that customers like the different look. Walmart declined to provide specific numbers, saying it won’t release sales numbers until it reports fourth-quarter earnings.

Walmart’s customer mix for its U.S. e-commerce business hasn’t changed, even as it attracts higher-income shoppers, according to an analysis by market research firm Euromonitor. About 34% of Walmart’s online customers in the U.S. last year had incomes of $100,000 and above, which is roughly flat compared to two years prior.

Michelle Evans, global lead for retail and digital shopper insights at Euromonitor, said that indicates that Walmart is also gaining market share from lower- and middle-income customers.

Walmart still has a smaller share of higher-income shoppers than some key rivals: 49% and 48% of online U.S. shoppers at Target and Amazon, respectively, have incomes above $100,000.

Amazon remains a formidable competitor, especially when it comes to wealthier shoppers and general merchandise categories, Evans said. But Walmart’s biggest edge is its grocery department.

One of Walmart’s newer, higher-income shoppers is Francesca Frink. The 30-year-old lives in the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge, Ill. with her husband, Sam, 1-year-old son and their English setter. The Frink family’s combined annual household income is over $200,000.

Last fall, Francesca Frink signed up for Walmart+ after her mother-in-law ordered a stroller from Walmart’s website and got it dropped at her door three hours later.

Initially, she said she hesitated to order fresh foods from Walmart. She bought packaged items like pasta and flour. Yet over time, the couple began ordering a larger portion of groceries, dog treats and even clothes for their son from Walmart.

The Frinks have stopped going to their old grocery store, Kroger-owned supermarket Mariano’s. They estimate that their weekly grocery bill is about 20% cheaper.

Previously, the couple said they avoided Walmart because their nearest store is outdated. Yet Sam Frink said the game has changed with curbside pickup and home deliveries.

“You don’t have to go in,” he said. “That’s the biggest thing.”

Francesca Frink said home deliveries from Walmart, included in their Walmart+ membership, save the couple time while they juggle two careers, a toddler and a dog. Plus, she said she found that Walmart had the grocery items she wanted and even those she didn’t expect, including organic blueberries, natural peanut butter and specialty mushroom ravioli.

Still, Francesca Frink said she still faces some apprehension from friends and family about buying groceries from Walmart.

But she said they’ve been surprised when they’ve tried and liked food items from Walmart.

In her day job, Euromonitor’s Evans tracked Walmart’s digital gains with higher-income shoppers. Yet she also saw it firsthand in her household.

Her husband signed the family up for Walmart+. During the holiday season, he told her all of his Christmas purchases would be coming from the discounter.

“He made a comment that all the gifts were coming from Walmart, and obviously that comes with a certain impression,” she said.

So she was surprised when she opened his gift and discovered it was a Michael Kors tote.

JetBlue Airways is talking with “multiple airlines” about a potential new partnership after federal judges struck down two previous deals, the carrier’s president said Wednesday.

“If we find a deal that’s accretive, we’ll absolutely do it,” JetBlue’s president, Marty St. George, said at a Barclays industry conference.

A federal judge in 2023 ruled the New York airline’s partnership in the Northeast with American Airlines was anticompetitive, while a different judge last year blocked JetBlue’s plan to acquire budget carrier Spirit Airlines, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last year.

JetBlue representatives didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

JetBlue, which marked its 25th year of flying this month, has been searching for partnerships and deals to grow, contending it must do so to better compete with larger carriers like Delta, American and United.

St. George said a potential tie-up would benefit the company’s loyalty program, noting that customers say the frequent flyer points on JetBlue are not as strong as those of the big three U.S. carriers.

“Given that we really don’t have full global earn and burn, I think to be able to add that to our network would be very, very helpful,” he said.

Walmart would likely see some impact from tariffs President Donald Trump is seeking to impose, especially if ones threatened against Canada and Mexico are implemented, the retailer said Thursday.

The big-box giant reported quarterly earnings and also signaled slowing profit growth. Its shares fell about 6% amid a broader market decline Thursday morning.

In an interview with CNBC, Chief Financial Officer John David Rainey said that while some two-thirds of Walmart’s products are sourced from the U.S., the company was “not going to be completely immune” from trade duties.

“We’ve lived in a tariff environment for the last seven or eight years, and we’ll do what we know how to do,” he said. “We’ll work with suppliers. We’ll lean into our private brand. We’ll shift supply where necessary to try to take advantage of lower costs that we can then pass on to consumers.”

Since Walmart is not sure if the tariffs will take effect next month, the company did not factor them into its guidance, Rainey said.

While a given company must pay a tariff up front if it imports a good from an affected country, the firm is ultimately forced to decide how to mitigate on those costs — and they often get passed down to shoppers.

Rainey previously told CNBC that there would likely be cases where prices for consumers would increase as a result of tariffs, adding that they are ‘inflationary’ for customers.

U.S. companies are seeing mounting queries about how they would be impacted by the levies Trump has called for. So far, only a supplemental 10% duty on Chinese goods has gone into effect, though the president has threatened a vast new array of tariffs depending on a given country’s current trade posture with the U.S. Steel and aluminum tariffs are set to kick in next month, while Trump this week called for new tariffs on automobiles, drugs, semiconductors and lumber imported to the U.S.

CNBC has found the word ‘tariffs’ has come up on more than 190 calls held by S&P 500 companies in 2025, putting it on track to see the highest share in half a decade. However, many, like Walmart, stated they were not yet figuring the effect of them into their official forward guidance and outlooks.

“We’ve game-planned out several scenarios and steps we could take depending on what actually goes into effect,” R. Scott Herren, the chief financial officer at the tech group Cisco, said in recent comments.

This week, the Federal Reserve indicated that discussion of tariffs had come up during its policy meetings, and had gone into its calculation for keeping interest rates elevated.

‘Business contacts in a number of Districts had indicated that firms would attempt to pass on to consumers higher input costs arising from potential tariffs,’ the central bank reported — something that could threaten to accelerate inflation.

And in its “upside risks to the inflation outlook,’ it cited ‘the possible effects of potential changes in trade and immigration policy.“

Microsoft on Wednesday announced Majorana 1, its first quantum computing chip. 

The achievement comes after the company has spent nearly two decades of research in the field. 

Technologists believe quantum computers could one day efficiently solve problems that would be taxing if not impossible for classical computers. Today’s computers use bits that can be either on or off while quantum computers employ quantum bits, or qubits, that can operate in both states simultaneously.

Google and IBM have also developed quantum processors, as have smaller companies IonQ and Rigetti Computing. Microsoft’s quantum chip employs eight topological qubits using indium arsenide, which is a semiconductor, and aluminum, which is a superconductor. A new paper in the journal Nature describes the chip in detail.

Microsoft won’t be allowing clients to use its Majorana 1 chip through the company’s Azure public cloud, as it plans to do with its custom artificial intelligence chip, Maia 100. Instead, Majorana 1 is a step toward a goal of a million qubits on a chip, following extensive physics research.

Rather than rely on Taiwan Semiconductor or another company for fabrication, Microsoft is manufacturing the components of Majorana 1 itself in the U.S. That’s possible because the work is unfolding at a small scale.

“We want to get to a few hundred qubits before we start talking about commercial reliability,” Jason Zander, a Microsoft executive vice president, told CNBC.

In the meantime, the company will engage with national laboratories and universities on research using Majorana 1. 

Despite the focus on research, investors are fascinated by quantum.

IonQ shares went up 237% in 2024, and Rigetti gained nearly 1,500%. The two generated a combined $14.8 million in third-quarter revenue. Further gains came in January, after Microsoft issued a blog post declaring that 2025 is “the year to become quantum-ready.”

Microsoft’s Azure Quantum cloud service, which lets developers experiment with programs and algorithms, offers access to chips from IonQ and Rigetti. It’s possible that a Microsoft quantum chip might become available through Azure before 2030, Zander said.

“There’s a lot of speculation that we’re decades off from this,” he said. “We believe it’s more like years.”

Rather than exist as a stand-alone category, quantum computing might end up boosting other parts of Microsoft. For example, there’s Microsoft’s AI business, which has an annualized revenue run rate that exceeds $13 billion. Quantum computers could be used to build data used to train AI models, Zander said. 

“Now you can ask it to invent some new molecule, invent some new drug, something that really would have been impossible to do before,” Zander said.

Trump Media and its fellow conservative-oriented social media company Rumble on Wednesday sued a Brazil Supreme Court justice whose clash last year with Elon Musk led to the blocking of Musk’s own social media firm, X, in that country.

The Tampa, Florida, federal court lawsuit accuses Justice Alexandre de Moraes of allegedly illegal attempts to censor a “well-known politically outspoken user” of Rumble with orders to suspend that user’s U.S.-based accounts.

The new lawsuit suit notes that Trump Media’s social media site Truth Social “relies on Rumble’s cloud-based hosting and video streaming infrastructure to deliver multimedia content to its user base.”

“If Rumble were to be shut down, that shut down would necessarily interfere with Truth Social’s operations, as well,” the suit says.

The suit was filed a day after Brazil’s prosecutor-general charged the country’s former president, Jair Bolsonaro, with an attempted coup as he tried to remain in office following his 2022 election loss. Bolsonaro — who was invited to President Donald Trump’s inauguration last month — is accused of participating in a plot with nearly three dozen other people, which allegedly planned to poison current Brazil President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and kill Moraes.

Trump had been the majority owner of Trump Media stock shares. In December, the then-president-elect transferred his entire stake of shares to a revocable trust of which he is the sole beneficiary.

The suit mentions Musk’s feud with Moraes, when the justice suspended X in Brazil for Musk’s defiance of requests to ban some user accounts and remove content that Moraes said violated the country’s laws.

Brazil’s Supreme Court also suspended bank accounts in that country of X and Starlink, the satellite internet service provider owned by Musk’s company SpaceX, as part of that battle.

Musk, who is also the CEO of Tesla, has been tasked by Trump to oversee a wide-ranging effort to cut federal government suspending and employee headcount.

Trump Media CEO Devin Nunes in a statement Wednesday on the suit said that the company “is firmly committed to upholding the right to free expression.”

“This is not just a slogan, it’s the core mission of this company,” Nunes said. “We’re proud to join our partner Rumble in standing against unjust demands for political censorship regardless of who makes them.”

Trump Media last week reported a net loss of nearly $401 million for 2024, and revenue of just $3.6 million.

The company in a statement last week said that about half of the $61 million in cash used in operating activities in 2024 “comprised legal expenses including costs related to the Company’s March 2024 merger with a special purpose acquisition company.”

“Partly as a result of obstruction by the Biden-era Securities and Exchange Commission, which turned the process into one of the longest SPAC mergers in history, [Trump Media] incurred significant legal expenses related to its merger and has brought litigation seeking to recoup its damages,” the suit said.

For decades, popcorn has been a staple of the movie theater experience and exhibitors’ bottom lines. Now, the receptacle it comes in is becoming just as important.

As recently as three years ago, AMC Entertainment didn’t sell any merchandise. Last year it hawked novelty popcorn buckets, drink sippers and T-shirts to the tune of about $65 million in revenue.

“It started with us in a big way with our own movie, ‘Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,’ that we released in October of 2023 and we sold just an incredible number of popcorn buckets,” said AMC CEO Adam Aron. “That sparked us to do it almost all the time … just literally every month.”

Other theater chains like Cinemark, Marcus, Regal and B&B Theatres have also embraced popcorn buckets, using these specialty items to drive concession purchases, create a sense of urgency to see big movies on opening weekend and add value to the theatrical experience.

“Post-Covid, we realized that the eventizing of cinema has never really been as important as it is now,” said Paul Farnsworth, executive director of communication and content at B&B Theatres. “We recognized during that time that the greatest casualty for our industry was people just fell out of the habit of going to movies.”

Hollywood production issues led to fewer theatrical releases and smaller ticket sales in 2024, with box office receipts down 3.4% from 2023 to $8.74 billion. Farnsworth noted that unique popcorn buckets can add value to a customer’s trip to the movies and creates a memory of the trip that can be taken home, propped up on a display shelf or repurposed for movie nights in.

“It is very good for the bottom line,” he said. “The big value for us is that people come in and there’s these fun things they get to take home and they’re taking pictures with them in the theater. There’s immense value in that.”

For Cinemark, the proof of concept came with the release of “Scream VI” in 2023.

“We made a ‘Scream’ popcorn bucket and it completely caught us by surprise,” said Sean Gamble, CEO of Cinemark. “This thing just had this huge uptake. We sold out of the thing immediately and we were basically selling them to people online afterwards.”

Commemorative popcorn buckets have long been a part of theme park merchandising, driving revenue of the likes of Disney and Universal both domestically and internationally. However, U.S.-based movie theaters were late to adopt the trend.

Marketing and merchandise company Zinc has been designing and manufacturing branded popcorn buckets and drink sippers for over a decade internationally, but turned its attention stateside in 2016.

“Theaters were reticent because the cups didn’t fit in the holders,” said Rod Mason, vice president of business development at Zinc Group, one of the biggest players in the premium popcorn space.

A shift came in 2019 with an R2-D2 popcorn bucket created for “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker,” Mason said.

“AMC took a punt on it,” he explained. “They took multiple tens of thousands of pieces. They sold through it in about three or four days at an incredibly high price. Nothing like that had ever been done before, and it was like ‘OK, well, this works.’”

A revamped version of the droid popcorn bucket was re-released for the 25th anniversary screenings of “Star Wars: Episode 1 — A Phantom Menace.”

The popcorn bucket and drink cup combo sold for $49.99.

However, the true watershed moment for the niche market came nearly five years later with a now-infamous popcorn bucket in honor of “Dune: Part Two,” released in last March. The bucket was modeled after the sandworms featured in the film but inspired crude comparisons to an adult product.

“The beauty of the ‘Dune’ bucket was it just wasn’t intended to be viral,” Mason said.

The $24.99 bucket sold out and found momentum on secondary markets. Receipts from eBay show these popcorn buckets sold for between $50 and $210 apiece on the reseller site.

“The popularity of the popcorn buckets on social media combined with the perception of limited supply of the popcorn buckets leads to a feeling of ‘fear of missing out’ among consumers who are driven to buy the buckets when [they] see them available,” said Lindsay Brookshier, content director at online Disney guide MickeyVist.com.

The “Dune” bucket inspired “Deadpool & Wolverine” actor and producer Ryan Reynolds to design a cheeky popcorn bucket for the release of his film.

“Years from now they will look back at 2024 as when the War of the Popcorn Buckets began,” Reynolds wrote on X to promote the concession container, which was shaped like Wolverine’s head with its mouth wide open to house the popcorn.

The $29.99 bucket was exclusively available at AMC and was released the same weekend as San Diego Comic-Con and the “Deadpool & Wolverine” film release.

Studios and theaters have been more proactive about working with companies like Zinc to create unique popcorn buckets for moviegoers.

“It’s a very competitive business,” said Mason. “Everyone is trying to outdo, and not just the companies like us, but also the companies that are buying it. They’re trying to make sure that they have the coolest item … that competition has been magnified over the last 12 months because there’s so many eyes on this segment of the business.”

And the movie industry is about to have an influx of blockbuster titles now that production delays from the pandemic and dual Hollywood strikes are in the rearview mirror.

Following “Captain America: Brave New World,” which debuted Friday, the 2025 calendar has “Thunderbolts*,” ” Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning,” “How to Train Your Dragon,” “Jurassic World Rebirth,” “Superman,” “Fantastic Four: First Steps,” “Wicked: For Good,” “Zootopia 2,” and “Avatar: Fire and Ash.”

And 2026 has equally promising tie-ins for popcorn buckets with a “Super Mario Bros.” sequel, “Avengers: Doomsday,” “The Mandalorian and Grogu,” “Toy Story 5,” “Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow,” “Minions 3,” “Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping,” “Ice Age 6″ and “Shrek 5.”

“We’ve missed out on a couple,” B&B’s Farnsworth said. “We didn’t have that crazy ‘Dune’ one. But that was kind of one of the hinge points for us. It was like, ‘Alright, we really have to pay attention.’”

B&B, the fifth-largest cinema chain in America with 58 locations, still has to be very intentional about which products it offers and how many it purchases. Films like “Wicked,” with a massive built-in audience craving merchandise, are a safer bet. But theaters have a very short window to sell the specialty items.

“Unlike our normal popcorn bags, which are evergreen, if you don’t sell the [product], you’re probably not going to sell them a month after the movie,” Farnsworth said.

Meanwhile, AMC is investing more heavily.

“One of the big things that we’re doing in 2025 is we’re significantly increasing the quantities,” Aron said, noting that AMC was already placing orders for 100,000 units or more. “We’re buying, because there’s no need for us to sell out on opening day. There’s plenty of people coming to see that movie for weeks and weeks.”

Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal and CNBC.

Sentiment among the nation’s single-family homebuilders dropped to the lowest level in five months in February, largely due to concern over tariffs, which would raise their costs significantly.

The National Association of Home Builders’ Housing Market Index (HMI) dropped a sharp 5 points from January to a reading of 42. Anything below 50 is considered negative sentiment. Last February, the index stood at 48.

“While builders hold out hope for pro-development policies, particularly for regulatory reform, policy uncertainty and cost factors created a reset for 2025 expectations in the most recent HMI,” said NAHB Chairman Carl Harris, a home builder from Wichita, Kansas.

Of the index’s three components, current sales conditions fell 4 points to 46, buyer traffic fell 3 points to 29 and sales expectations in the next six months plunged 13 points to 46. That last component hit its lowest level since December 2023.

Builders are already facing elevated mortgage rates. The average rate on the 30-year fixed was over 7% for January and February after earlier being in the 6% range. Home prices are also higher than they were a year ago, weakening affordability further.

While President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Canada and Mexico, originally proposed to take effect in early February, were delayed roughly a month, builders are still expecting higher costs.

“With 32% of appliances and 30% of softwood lumber coming from international trade, uncertainty over the scale and scope of tariffs has builders further concerned about costs,” said NAHB chief economist Robert Dietz.

Homebuilder sentiment had been gaining steadily since August on the expectation of lower mortgage rates and, as the builders noted, potential pro-development policies. Single-family housing starts are trending lower than they were a year ago, despite a lean supply of existing homes for sale.

The drop in builder sentiment, coming right before the all-important spring market, signals potentially even less supply in the market. Several homebuilders have noted the pullback in buyer demand in recent earnings reports.

“Despite Federal Reserve actions to lower short-term interest rates, mortgage interest rates remained elevated in the fourth quarter, which impacted buyer demand as homebuyers continue to face affordability challenges,” said Ryan Marshall, CEO of PulteGroup, in its fourth-quarter earnings release.

The share of builders lowering prices dropped to 26% in February, down from 30% in January and the lowest share since May 2024. Other sales incentives also fell.

This may be because incentives are becoming less effective at attracting buyers, since high prices and high rates have reduced the pool of buyers for whom these benefits move the needle, according to the NAHB.

When a buyer is solidly priced out, no incentive helps, and with rates remaining higher, the pool of marginal buyers may be shrinking. Offering incentives to buyers who would buy regardless of price or rates is of diminishing value for builders.

KFC is leaving Kentucky.

The fried chicken chain’s U.S. headquarters will move from Louisville, Kentucky, to Plano, Texas, owner Yum Brands said Tuesday.

About 100 KFC U.S. employees will be required to relocate over the next six months.

The relocation is part of Yum’s broader plan to have two corporate headquarters: one in Plano, the other in Irvine, California. KFC and Pizza Hut’s global teams are already based in Plano, while Taco Bell and the Habit Burger & Grill’s teams are located in Irvine.

Additionally, Yum’s U.S. remote workforce, roughly 90 workers, will also be asked to move to the campus where their work is based.

But Yum isn’t entirely abandoning Kentucky. The company and the KFC Foundation plan to maintain corporate offices in Louisville. Plus, KFC still plans to build a new flagship restaurant in its former hometown.

Since the Covid-19 pandemic, many employers have been rethinking the location of their corporate headquarters, often spurred to move because of lower taxes and changes to office space needs due to the hybrid or remote workforce. With its business-friendly policies, Texas has been the most popular relocation choice, according to a 2023 report from CBRE.

In 2020, Yum rival Papa Johns moved its headquarters from Louisville to Atlanta. It later canceled plans to sell its old headquarters, instead opting to hold on to the building for the corporate workers who stayed in Louisville.

Argentine President Javier Milei is facing withering criticism, including some calls for impeachment, after promoting a new cryptocurrency on his social media account.

In a since-deleted post from his personal account on X on Feb. 14, Milei shared a link to a site where users could purchase a cryptocurrency called $LIBRA, a coin attached to a new initiative called Project Libertad, whose website indicates funds from the coin launch were designed to support Argentine businesses. 

In his post, Milei indicated the coin and the project would help the country’s economy and small businesses. 

Soon after launching, the coin’s price rose from about $0.22 to more than $5. Yet within an hour of the launch, buyers began to notice sales from early purchasers, and the price tanked some 70%.  

According to crypto analytics firm LookOnChain, eight digital wallets linked to early trading of the coin cashed out a total of $107 million, while data reported by crypto news site ICOBench showed some 60 individual traders each lost more than $500,000, while 24 traders lost at least $1 million.     

Today, LIBRA coin is worth about $0.30 according to CoinMarketCap.com.

The timeline of events has led to accusations on social media that the coin’s developers, or those with early awareness of the project, executed a “rug pull” on later buyers, to whom they knew they could sell at a higher price. 

Representatives for the project did not respond to a request for comment.

The situation has drawn some parallels with President Donald Trump’s promotion of a cryptocurrency just prior to taking office; that coin, TRUMP, has fallen in value by some 80% to about $16 from its immediate post-launch high of nearly $78. 

However, while early backers of TRUMP coin also saw large windfalls, the project was more transparent about its ownership structure.   

In a post on X, Hayden Davis, an American, denied accusations of wrongdoing in launching LIBRA and accused Milei himself of reneging on the project. 

“It is crucial to recognize that memecoin investments are driven by trust and endorsement,” Davis wrote. “When Milei and his team deleted their posts, investors who had purchased the token based on their trust in his endorsement felt betrayed. This led to a wave of panic selling, further exacerbating the situation. The sudden loss of confidence had a catastrophic impact on the token’s market stability.”

Davis did not respond to a request for additional comment. 

On Saturday, Milei’s official account posted a lengthy description of what had occurred, stating that Milei himself has since invoked Argentina’s anti-corruption investigator to look into the matter, including the president’s own involvement.

In a television interview Monday, Milei admitted he had likely erred in promoting the coin.

“I’m a techno-optimist . . . and this was proposed to me as an instrument to help fund Argentine projects,” he said according to the Financial Times. “It’s true that in trying to help out those Argentines, I took a slap in the face.”  

His office said that while he had met twice with representatives of the project, he was never involved in its development.

“The most interesting lesson is that . . . I need to put up more filters, it can’t be so easy for people to reach me,” Milei said in the interview. 

While some analysts say getting enough votes to pass impeachment articles may be unlikely, Milei’s opposition is already pouncing on the incident, with one coalition calling it “a scandal without precedent” and another group for the creation of an independent commission, according to The New York Times.

Milei was the first foreign leader to meet Trump after the November election, and has developed what some have called a “bromance” with Elon Musk. Milei pioneered a new government agency, the Ministry of Deregulation and State Transformation, last year that has parallels with the Department of Government Efficiency Musk has spearheaded.   

Milei took office in December 2023 promising to tackle his country’s longtime inflation woes. Although some progress has been made, the country’s poverty rate has also increased.