So you thought you could keep a secret? Well, now every secret encoded in your DNA is about to be sold to the highest bidder as the genetic testing company 23andMe goes into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Now the millions of people who paid $99 to check their DNA, hoping to learn about their ancestry, lost siblings, or hereditary disease, are wondering who’s now gonna know everything about them. Co-founder and CEO Anne Wojcicki, who took the company from nothing to a $6 billion valuation and back down to $14 million on Wednesday, said she’ll stay on as interim CEO and will mount her own third bid to buy the company, but this time the board of directors that nixed her first two lowball offers has itself resigned.
23andMe’s problems seem endemic to its business model: Faced with the realization that there’s no such thing as a recurring customer in this business (consumers have their DNA tested once, and unless they live near Chernobyl, their genetic makeup is unlikely to change), Wojcicki hoped to boost the firm’s fortunes by taking the DNA of its customers and using it to create wonder drugs. That failed—drug-making is expensive! That’s left the bank of 15 million-plus DNA samples in line to be sold.
Should 23andMe customers be worried? A company spokesperson told The Washington Post that it isn’t changing how it stores, manages, or protects customer data and that any buyer will have to comply with applicable privacy laws.
That’s left many privacy advocates unconvinced. “Delete, delete, delete,” Sara Geoghegan, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told the Washington Post. “Consumers should delete their accounts while they still can.”
The Usual Suspects
- Dollar for dollar: Dollar Tree, the parent of both Family Dollar stores and its own Dollar Tree discount chain, says it’s selling the 7,600-store Family business to a pair of private equity funds for $1 billion. In 2015, Dollar Tree paid $8.5 billion for Family Dollar, but failed to make a go of it. Last year, the Tree vowed to shut 1,000 of the Family’s stores. Family Dollar lost $1.8 billion in the year that ended in January 2025. The new buyers are Brigade Capital Management and Macellum Capital Management. Meanwhile, Dollar Tree says it is winning over more higher-income shoppers as inflation keeps grocery prices high, but Trump tariffs will force it to raise some prices.
- Snow White blues? Disney’s $DIS live-action remake of Snow White drew a lower-than-expected $43 million in U.S. box office income in its first weekend, suggesting the Hose of Mouse’s film studio may still be waiting for a Prince Charming of a blockbuster to wake it from its slumber. Disney spent $300 million om the film, which was buffeted by everything from co-star Gal Gadot’s comments on the war in Gaza to angry onscreen attacks by real dwarves protesting their replacement by politically correct computer-generated images.
- Just sell it? Nike says sales are gonna drop in the “low end” of “the midteens range,” in the current fiscal quarter, as the company faces a slew of problems: new models that didn’t fly with consumers, Trump tariffs, a slower-than-expected turnaround from some big restructuring moves, and drooping consumer confidence. Sales in the quarter ended Feb 28 were down 9%, and shares have lost 30% in the past year.
- Construction spike: Building contractors are hiking prices by as much as 20% in anticipation of Trump tariffs that would cover everything from Canadian lumber to Mexican sheetrock, according to Jon Paul Perez, CEO of developer Related Group. A recent survey by the National Association of Home Builders said higher prices for construction materials could add $9,200 to the cost of a typical home.
- Meme stocks gotta meme: Looks like GameStop just can’t stop the slide. The videogame retailer rose to prominence when loyal gamers mounted a populist charge against shortsellers back in 2021, costing the shorts hundreds of millions of dollars. But its stock has been dropping ever since, down about 70% from its peak. Now the company says it wants to put part of its $4.6 billion in cash reserves into Bitcoin as a way to make money, emulating a tech firm called MicroStrategy that boosted its share price the same way. “The problem with that thinking is MicroStrategy trades at about two times their Bitcoin holdings. If GameStop were to buy all Bitcoin with their $4.6 billion in cash and trade at two times, the stock would drop five bucks,” Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter told Yahoo Finance.
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Trumplandia
The sturm und drang of tariffs and DOGE cuts, not to mention the Signal chat memes, is taking a whack at America’s productivity, and even as the short-term outlook for inflation remains reassuringly stable, medium-term inflation risks are growing. That’s because the turmoil is making everyone apprehensive, so they indulge in pre-inflationary behavior. Economist Greg Daco at Ernst & Young calls it “preemptive inflation anxiety,” and warns that through hoarding and stockpiling and cutting back spending, it could end up creating the very inflation it fears.
Meanwhile, The Conference Board reported that its Expectations Index—based on consumers’ short-term outlook for income, business, and labor market conditions—dropped 9.6 points to 65.2, the lowest level in 12 years and well below the threshold of 80 that usually signals a recession is coming. “Consumers’ optimism about future income—which had held up quite strongly in the past few months—largely vanished, suggesting worries about the economy and labor market have started to spread into consumers’ assessments of their personal situations,” said Conference Board senior economist Stephanie Guichard.
But there are also some real issues with rising prices. A 25% tariff on imported cars announced this week will raise the price not only of the half of cars sold in the U.S. that are made or assembled abroad, but probably of every other car, because they all use foreign parts. First NAFTA, and then Trump’s rejiggered NAFTA+, called USMCA, created a nearly tariff-free zone in North America, prompting carmakers to optimize prduction across the region. That cost savings is now gone, and it would take a decade or more to build capacity to make everything at home, and that’s only if companies believe Trump’s tariffs have any staying power.
The DOGE plan to stymie the IRS might sound great to small-govenment fans, but it could bring the country close to default as early as May—instead of a previous prediction of Septemebr—if the IRS fails to collect enough taxes to keep the government running. Then the debt ceiling will have to be raised, an uncertain prospect these days. (Treasury and IRS officials say they expect a 10% drop in the amount of tax collected, down from the $5.1 trillion collected last year.)
All that uncertainty has turned corporate CFOs glum. Average optimism among chief financial officers surveyed by the Fed and Duke University dropped from a pandemic era high of 66 out of 100 to 62.1 this quarter. The index had jumped 6 points on Trump’s election. The drop appears tied to rising concerns about tariffs and trade. The CFOs now anticipate slower growth and higher prices than they did at the end of last year.
Cashing in, again: Trump just can’t quit crypto. Trump Media and Technology Group, which owns the Truth Social platform, says it’s reached agrement with Crypto.com to launch a series of exchange-traded funds with a “Made in America” focus, and will launch after getting regulatory approval later this year. Donald Trump’s still its main shareholder, and shares in the company are down more than 65% in the past year. A Trump crypto coin, launched just before his inaurugration in January, has dropped from about $72 to just over $11, and now the company that launched it, World Liberty Financial, created by Trump Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, says it plans to launch a Trump-identified stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar.
Inflation: The consumer price index, a key gauge of inflation, showed that prices rose by 2.8% in February from a year earlier, driven by price relief from airfares and gas, the Labor Department said Wednesday. That was cooler than the 3% annual gain reported for January.
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Elon’s World
- Shouting at the TV: With Tesla shares down nearly 40% since Donald Trump’s inauguration, Musk took a swipe at protesters who’ve been setting Tesla cars alight, yelling during a Zoom call with employees, “This is psycho! Stop being psycho!” He also urged employees to “Hang on to your stock” at the late-night meeting last week. Musk says he’s still confident Tesla will one day conquer the world with fleets of self-driving cars, cybercabs, and robots doing manual labor. But competition from Alphabet’s Waymo driverless taxi service and Chinese carmakers is eclipsing Tesla’s self-driving technology.
- Trade-ins: Meanwhile, more Tesla owners traded in their cars this month than ever before, said auto-industry data provider Edmunds. “Shifts in Tesla consumer sentiment could create an opportunity for legacy automakers and EV startups to gain ground,” Jessica Caldwell, head of insights at Edmunds, told CNBC.
- Regulatory trouble: Seems like Elon’s chainsaw didn’t slice away enough for the SEC: He received a summons last week in connection with the SEC’s lawsuit over his alleged failure to properly disclose purchases of Twitter stock in 2022 before he bought the company. The SEC alleges that not reporting his purchases for 10 days kept shareholders in the dark and allowed Musk to underpay for some shares by $150 million.
- Meanwhile, up north: Canadian authorities are holding back US$30 million in rebates to Canadian Tesla buyers while they investigate whether the rebates were obtained legally. Tesla sold 8,600 cars in three days out of four showrooms in Canada, equating to a car sold every two minutes.
- One bit of good news: Ad sales are up at X, said research firm Emarketer (but still below revenue when Musk bought X, then Twitter, in 2022). Ad revenue is expected to grow 17.5% to $1.31 billion in 2025, while global ad sales could rise 16.5% to $2.26 billion. Still, it’s not clear that brand value is driving the rise. “Some of this year’s growth is also being driven by fear. Many advertisers may view spending on X as a cost of doing business in order to mitigate potential legal or financial repercussions,” Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Emarketer, said in the report.
The Short Stack
- One sure sign the economy is in turmoil: More than a quarter of all jobs in computer programming (not the same thing as software development) have been eliminated, according to Department of Labor data obtained by The Washington Post. The Post blames ChatGPT for taking over mundane programming tasks.
- Wake up! Remember Napster, the file-sharing system that shook up the music industry back in the last millennium and then died? Well, somehow, it just sold itself for $207 million. A 3D-tech company called Infinite Reality bought it, and says it plans to create virtual 3D spaces where music fans can listen to concerts or hold listening parties, and where musicians or labels can sell physical and virtual merchandise. Anyone remember Second Life?
- Maybe Shakespeare was right: When Donald Trump signed an executive order (of questionable enforceability) limiting the security clearances of attorneys at Paul, Weiss, a law firm that has represented his opponents, alarm bells sounded across the firm’s glass-walled conference rooms. Without security clearance, Paul, Weiss attorneys couldn’t represent top clients like Microsoft that have government contracts. The big question was whether Big Law would band together and tell Trump to get lost. That didn’t happen. Instead, as The New York Times reported, top Paul, Weiss attorneys got calls from rival firms, including Sullivan & Cromwell and Kirkland & Ellis, offering them prized partnerships if they left Paul Weiss. It’s a jungle out there.
- Buffett’s Madness Challenge: It took a decade, but a Berkshire Hathaway employee has finally won boss Warren Buffett’s promised $1 million prize for correctly guessing all but one of the March Madness first round winners. The unnamed winner got the first 29 games correct, and 11 runners up, who also picked 31 of 32 but who whiffed out earlier, each got $100,000. In 2014, Buffett, now 94, offered $1 billion to any employee who could correctly predict every single game in the tournament. No one’s taken home that prize. Yet.
Peter S. Green is a veteran reporter and editor who has spent more than two decades covering business and finance from Eastern Europe to New York City, and has worked for Bloomberg News, The New York Post, The New York Times and The Messenger. He lives in New York City and is always looking for the next big story.
