Diageo swaps Cîroc vodka for LeBron James-backed tequila brand
Drinks group offloads the rights to a struggling brand at the heart of its dispute with Sean Combs
Diageo has swapped a majority share of Cîroc vodka, one of the brands at the centre of a legal dispute with rap mogul Sean Combs, for a tequila brand backed by basketball star LeBron James.
The London-listed group on Monday said it had formed a joint venture with celebrity investor and advisory firm Main Street Advisors, with Diageo taking a majority stake in its tequila and mezcal brand Lobos 1707 in exchange for the rights to Cîroc in North America.
Diageo was reportedly looking to sell Cîroc following the termination of its partnership with Combs, who is also known as Diddy.
The rapper-turned-entrepreneur sued Diageo in 2023 for allegedly neglecting Cîroc and DeLeón, a tequila brand the two sides acquired in 2014, because of his race.
Diageo said at the time that Combs had failed to meet his promises to fund DeLeón and it had “tried for years to salvage the broken relationship”.
Last year the two parties settled the dispute just as it was about to proceed to a public trial. Combs has since been charged with sex trafficking. He denies the charges.
Main Street Advisors helps manage the fortunes of celebrities such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Billy Eilish and James, who plays for the Los Angeles Lakers. James and his business manager, Maverick Carter, co-founded Lobos 1707 with actor Diego Osorio and Paul Wachter, chief executive of Main Street Advisors.
Diageo, which also counts Johnny Walker scotch and Guinness stout among its stable of brands, will keep the rights to Cîroc in the rest of the world.
Diageo’s North America chief Sally Grimes said: “The Main Street Advisors track record speaks for itself and together, we will establish a strong platform to unleash the full potential of the Cîroc brand for new generations and to drive the next phase of growth for Lobos 1707.”
Sales of Cîroc had plummeted in recent years. In 2024, its net sales slumped 26 per cent, making it the group’s worst performing key brand globally.
Diageo chief executive Debra Crew is under pressure to boost financial performance as the FTSE 100 company battles stagnant alcohol sales, amid a global slowdown in consumer spending and a growing trend for moderation.
Investors have called on Crew to set a clearer direction for the group, as they grow frustrated with promises of a recovery that is yet to materialise.
At its last trading update, in February, the drinks maker scrapped a long-standing sales growth target, blaming uncertainty over US tariffs and weak demand in important markets.
Diageo has been steadily offloading underperforming brands over the past year, including Venezuelan rum Pampero and Dutch liqueur Safari, as well as a number of its African brewing operations.
Bill Ackman’s main fund drops 15% this year as he criticises Donald Trump’s policies
Billionaire’s Pershing Square Holdings hit by US president’s trade war
Shares in billionaire Bill Ackman’s main investment vehicle have fallen 15 per cent this year as Donald Trump’s trade war hits the portfolio of one of his most ardent Wall Street backers.
The drop in Pershing Square Holdings, Ackman’s London-listed investment trust, comes as the financier has turned sour on some of the US president’s policies in a major public reversal. The trust’s share price fell more than 3 per cent on Monday.
“If . . . on April ninth we launch economic nuclear war on every country in the world, business investment will grind to a halt, consumers will close their wallets and pocket books, and we will severely damage our reputation with the rest of the world that will take years and potentially decades to rehabilitate,” he said on X on Sunday.
Fewer than 100 days into Trump’s second term, the unravelling of the financial markets has pummelled many of Ackman’s biggest bets, leaving his investment trust nursing large losses.
The billionaire’s investment trust holdings in Nike, Mexican-style fast-food chain Chipotle, asset manager Brookfield and Alphabet have taken the biggest hits since the start of the year. They were all down more than 20 per cent by late afternoon in London trading on Monday.
Alphabet and Brookfield were two of Ackman’s biggest positions in the trust at the end of last year, worth almost $2bn and $1.8bn, respectively, according to the company’s annual report.
As of last Monday, Pershing Square’s underlying investments, also known as the vehicle’s net asset value, were down 1.2 per cent for the year, based on the firm’s public disclosures. It had reported no hedging positions entering last week’s market plunge.
But Ackman is not the only casualty of Trump’s trade war among prominent Wall Street investors.
Fellow billionaire hedge fund manager Dan Loeb, another critic of the tariffs on X, has seen shares in his publicly listed fund Third Point fall almost 10 per cent since the start of the year. The fund’s net asset value was down 1.4 per cent for the year as of last Wednesday before US equities markets plunged on Trump’s so-called liberation day tariff announcements.
Ackman also pleaded with the president to institute a 90-day “time out” to negotiate “unfair asymmetric tariff deals” on X on Sunday.
Later on the same day, he lashed out at US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, who has said he is a strong supporter of the tariffs on live TV, alleging that he and his company Cantor Fitzgerald profit “when our economy implodes”.
On Monday he backtracked, stating it was “unfair” to criticise Lutnick. Ackman said on X that he was “sure [Lutnick] is doing the best he can for the country”, but suggested that Trump was “not an economist” and was relying on tariff calculations by his advisers that were made in error.
Ackman was a vigorous Trump supporter on the campaign trail and in his early presidency when he said the incoming administration would be one of the most “pro-business” in American history.
As Trump was ascending in the polls last year, Ackman was working to raise a $25bn US-based investment fund, a precursor to taking his hedge fund Pershing Square Capital public.
But Ackman was forced to shelve those plans, leaving him to manage the about $16bn he manages mostly through his London-listed investment trust.
Not all parts of Ackman’s portfolio have taken a hit. His investments in government-backed mortgage sponsors Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which Ackman believes Trump’s administration will privatise and fuel their market value, were up 60 per cent and 32 per cent, respectively.
Pershing Square declined to comment.
An anonymous Twitter account sent markets reeling today
Journalists really need bulletproof BS meters right now
Monday’s trading action was bizarre in many ways.
But one specific mystery — about a misleading headline that sent stocks ping-ponging all over the place — highlights just how fragmented and expensive access to breaking financial news can be, even at times when it really matters to retail investors.
The US stock market did indeed go bananas this morning, thanks to a headline that falsely* claimed White House adviser Kevin Hassett had said President Donald Trump was considering a 90-day pause in tariffs.
CNBC anchors read out the headline on air, as they tried to explain why markets had started to soar. In all, the S&P 500 rallied nearly 6 per cent from where it had been trading right before the mystery headline.
The White House said within the hour that no one knew about this supposed plan, a rare chance to properly use the term “Fake News”. Stocks sold off by the same amount they’d rallied, and then see-sawed around for a while. By mid-afternoon they were basically flat for the day.
So where exactly did the headline come from? That’s a tougher question to answer than you’d think.
The obvious point of contagion was the Walter Bloomberg account, using the X handle @DeItaone (with a capital I instead of an “L”) which says it’s based in Switzerland.
This is not a guy named Walter Bloomberg, nor does he write for Bloomberg. The account’s entire deal is just reposting financial newswire headlines.
Here’s the post via a screengrab (since the account has since deleted the post). As you can see, it came at 10:13am, and really made the rounds within the next 30 minutes or so, thanks to the account’s ~848,000 followers:
So did someone posting as “Walter Bloomberg” make up a headline to save the market? To cash out? Or just to introduce some chaos into the day? If so, it’d be a little strange for the account to keep posting! Mostly because that type of thing seems . . . actionable. It also seems like it’d be a bad idea for the account to attract this type of scrutiny.
As we said, it basically just copies financial breaking-news headlines from newswires, and those wires often come with an extremely pricey subscription. If Hassett had done an exclusive interview about major US policy decisions — he did not, probably* — only a major financial news service would’ve been able get that exclusive access.
The newswires don’t just offer one uniform news feed, either. While we aren’t 100% up to speed on the latest business models, some newswires have been known to deliver news feeds to different subscribers at different speeds. This is reasonable, to an extent, because not all professional subscribers can use the same level of access.
So it does seem possible that some experimental headline-writing product (or a budget subscription) published a bad headline that was then picked up by the Walter Bloomberg account.
There’s also one less-than-obvious analogue with reality that could’ve been misinterpreted by an overzealous headline writer or (ahem) LLM. In a Fox & Friends interview, National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett stalled by saying “yep” before saying “the President is going to decide what the President is going to decide.”
This was obviously not confirmation, especially because he then argued that observers are overreacting to the tariffs news. Another problem with that explanation is that the interview happened nearly two hours before @DeItaone published the headline.
Whoever’s running the account isn’t helping to solve the mystery, either.
When asked by followers, it cited both Reuters and CNBC as the sources of the headline. Remember, though, the CNBC anchors seemed to be reading his post! One of his screengrabbed sources shows a Reuters newswire headline. But that was from 10:23am, and cites CNBC:
Now, it’s not great if CNBC flashed a headline because one of their anchors read a social-media post that turned out to be nonsense. In their defence, however, markets had already started to take off before they read it!
So it’s starting to look like the main thing we’ve learned today is the influence of the @DeItaone account and its ~849,000 followers. Are that many traders really following an aggregator to save money? Or are markets just so hyperresponsive that even an X Anon can cause a 6-per-cent swing?
Things get even weirder.
An account called Hammer Capital posted the same headline at 10:11am. That’s before the post from Walter Bloomberg, or CNBC, or any other sources we’ve found. Hammer Capital’s been on X since March 2021, and we’re including a screengrab of his post below, in case it’s deleted:
We’ve contacted both him and the “Walter Bloomberg” account for comment. That was through DMs, though, so it’s unclear whether we’ll have much success.
We’ve also contacted Reuters. They haven’t responded, but did publish an “ADVISORY-Story withdrawn on Hassett’s comments on tariff pause”. In that retraction, Reuters said it originally published the story because of CNBC. We’ve contacted CNBC for comment as well, and will update with anything we hear.
Anyway, the market has been zigzagging all over the place since this morning. That’s presumably because some traders think the US President can be swayed by market reactions to fake news.
Or, as the @Quantian account puts it:
So we bounced 8% on a fake headline, sold off when people realized it was fake, and then bounced again when it occurred to people that if we bounced that much on a fake headline imagine how much we’d bounce on a hypothetical real one.
*The original headline’s accuracy could, of course, change entirely at any moment, at the whims of one man. How fun!
BlackRock’s Larry Fink warns US economy is ‘weakening as we speak’
Head of world’s biggest asset manager says market ructions are ‘impacting Main Street’
Larry Fink said the US economy was “weakening as we speak”, warning the market ructions triggered by Donald Trump’s tariffs were rippling across corporate America.
The head of BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, told a gathering of chief executives and investors in New York that there was “a real downturn” developing in several sectors and that “more and more people were pausing and slowing down consumption”.
“When you see a 20 per cent market decline in three days obviously it has significant impacts and the ripple effects of the potential of tariffs is going to be long-standing,” Fink said. “The market is impacting Main Street.”
His comments come as investors grapple with a sell-off that has sheared trillions of dollars off of global equity valuations. Wall Street’s S&P 500 share index shed 10.5 per cent last Thursday and Friday alone, and swung violently at the start of this week as traders assessed the president’s plans to hit trading partners with steep levies.
The aggressive market pullback — the S&P 500 has fallen 17.3 per cent from its February high — has sparked a wave of margin calls on hedge funds, as traders stump up money or face being stopped out of their positions.
“Markets are down 20 per cent, some stocks are down 30, 40 per cent from their high water marks from January,” he said. “But in the long run this is more of a buying opportunity than a selling opportunity. That doesn’t mean we can’t fall another 20 per cent from here too.”
Fink’s comments at the Economic Club of New York prompted audible gasps from the audience. Many financiers have watched as shares of their investment groups have slumped since Trump’s ‘liberation day’ speech, as investors fret over a looming recession, lower profitability and the potential for corporate defaults. BlackRock’s shares have fallen 25 per cent from their all-time high in January.
Fink said he was troubled that the US was destabilising markets globally and that he saw “zero chance” the Federal Reserve would cut interest rates as investors were currently pricing, given the inflationary pressures developing.
“I’m concerned about inflation if all the proposed tariffs truly go into place,” he said.
Fink also declined to say if he believed in a so-called ‘Trump put’, which would entail the president reversing tariffs if markets continued to sink. “I don’t know how to value that.”
Atelier Logistique’s Underground Storage Hub to Transform Champ-Élysées Retail
Built beneath Paris’ famed shopping street, the nine-story facility frees up prime storefronts, accelerates deliveries and cuts emissions.
PARIS — Five stories below the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, AI-controlled robots are already at work.
They are testing the systems for Atelier Logistique, a 172,200-square-foot stock storage and logistics space being built by Swiss Life Asset Managers and Mont Thabor to support the retail infrastructure of the nearby shopping areas.
The partners converted a disused nine-story underground parking garage, which reaches well below the level of the Seine river, and was originally intended to be refurbished. But with Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s ambitious plan to reduce car use, with schemes like revamping the famed shopping street with fewer traffic lanes, the project was reconsidered and transformed into a remote storage solution for retail.
With only a 3 percent vacancy rate on the Champs-Élysées, brands are fighting for space but using valuable square footage on storing stock. Swiss Life’s research put that number at between 8 percent and 14 percent of space that could instead be used for retail. The median price per square meter on the Champs-Élysées and surrounding luxury streets rings up at 15,000 euros, the group said, making that loss of shopping space costly.
“In the luxury market, we know that some of the retailers may want to boost the retail experience,” said Swiss Life Asset Managers head of research and innovation Béatrice Guedj.
That retail experience is two-fold, she said: first, to upscale space and shopping services in-store; second, to hold more product to support omnichannel supply for online ordering, in-store pick-up and returns.
“This is the vision we have, and luxury brands also have, in mind. That’s why we assume that there is a winning play for them to rethink their retail supply chain,” she said.
This should also reinforce the luxury goods market in Paris, as it risks losing sales to other fashion capitals such as Milan.
Brands will be able to store their goods in Atelier Logistique and have them delivered by bike, on foot or pick them up in person within minutes. The center can also serve the nearby Avenue Montaigne within five minutes, Rue Saint-Honoré within 10 minutes, the Saint-Germain district within 15 minutes and the Marais within 20 minutes by bike or small electric vehicle.
“With the performance of the avenue, they will need extensions, and we are like a mutualization of storage for them. The cost of logistics and also the centralization here could be something that makes it easier on [the retailers] on a day-to-day basis,” said Swiss Life Asset Managers head of asset management Waiseng Ma.
The Atelier Logistique project was developed with the support of the city, as well as the Developed with the Comité Champs-Élysées retail organization. The transformation of the parking lot was led by architect Damien Antoni.
Of the space, 108,000 square feet will be dedicated to storage alone, while the rest will be devoted to customer service. An above-ground entrance will host a space for employees to pick up stock on foot, while other spaces will be dedicated to prepping and packaging stock for personal or hotel delivery after an in-store order, for example. In this case, brands may place their own employees or those trained in their packaging style inside the Atelier, which will also hold the correct shopping or garment bags with branding. Other spaces will be lounges for employees.
The center will also provide reverse logistics quality control, in order to have any returned items inspected and back on the sales floor without the need to transport them hundreds of miles.
“We want to bring services to retail, and be seen as an extension of retail and not just pure logistics,” said Swiss Life Asset Managers head of retail Fabrice Lombardo.
Executives did not disclose the cost per square foot but said that leasing space within the Atelier will be “clearly competitive for them [and] far less expensive than a pure retail area.”
The Tech Specs
While the developers expect to create about 100 jobs with the Atelier, much of the space will be managed by AI and autonomous robots which accept deliveries, move the merchandise and monitor stocks.
With an entrance on the Champs-Élysées, there are two delivery docks on Rue de Ponthieu and Rue de La Boétie, with incoming deliveries taking place at the former and pickups or external deliveries leaving through the latter. Small 12-ton trucks will be able to deliver at night, offloading all their goods within 20 minutes, with the merchandise stored or delivered to the retailers as needed. The center will be in operation 24 hours a day.
The robots were developed by Swiss Life in conjunction with a French defense contractor that cannot be disclosed, to operate specifically within the building’s parameters. The robots, which accept, deliver and move goods within the warehouse levels, will never cross the pickup area or bike lane to avoid bottlenecks.
Swiss Life developed the small electric vehicle delivery trucks with Renault for the project, and Kleusters for the cargo bikes, and will oversee the transport operations as well.
Brands and hotels will be directly connected to the Atelier’s AI warehouse management system. Clients can then directly request goods, which can be delivered or picked up within 15 to 30 minutes.
The use of robots will help the Atelier stay in line with new emissions and traffic rules, which will ultimately ban large trucks and day deliveries in many retail areas around Paris.
The delivery restrictions will not only affect the luxury brands, but the mass market retailers such as Zara, which opened an omnichannel-focused flagship on the Champs-Élysées in 2023 and is set to soon double its size, which will need to restructure its’ daily deliveries of goods, for example.
“With the [low traffic zone] it’s a math exercise against the potential turnover they can generate by [storing and sorting stock] here. When you do a simulation, it’s a winning game that’s twofold,” Guedj said.
“We are able with this asset to be able to cope with the low emissions regulations. It’s really compliant with the municipality’s anticipated regulations from 2030,” Ma said. Some of the low traffic zone rules are already in effect and will continue to roll out over the next five years.
The use of small electric vehicles, bike or foot delivery is estimated to save 476 tons of carbon annually, cutting delivery emissions for the associated brands by 32 percent per year.
The Atelier Logistique will begin functionality later this year and be fully operational by mid-2026. The developers are currently seeking an operating partner that is specialized in logistics to manage the space, though options from a single brand contracting exclusivity to acquisition remain on the table.
The Paris facility is a pilot project and Swiss Life hopes to develop the concept in other cities to reduce carbon emissions and make “last-mile” delivery more efficient for brands.
Analyst says Apple, Tesla have biggest exposure to Trump’s tariffs
Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives slashed his price targets for Apple and Tesla over the weekend as President Trump’s tariffs threaten to disrupt both businesses.
“The tariff economic Armageddon unleashed by Trump is a complete disaster for Apple given its massive China production exposure,” Ives said in a warning note over the weekend. “In our view, no U.S. tech company is more negatively impacted by these tariffs than Apple with 90% of iPhones produced and assembled in China.”
Wedbush cut its price target for Apple stock by $75, down to $250 per share. Apple’s shares are down this afternoon by 4.3% and trading at $180.
Ives also cut his price target for Tesla to $315 from $550, which is still well above Tesla’s current share price of $233.94 as of 2:10 pm ET.
Ives said the affect of tariffs isn’t the only reason for the price cut. He also cited CEO Elon Musk’s politics, which has created a brand crisis for the automaker. Musk’s association with Trump and his tariffs policies are affecting sales in the U.S. and Europe and also threaten Tesla’s popularity in China, “further driv[ing] Chinese consumers to buy domestic such as BYD,” said Ives.
“Tesla has essentially become a political symbol globally,” he wrote. “It is time for Musk to step up, read the room, and be a leader in this time of uncertainty.
Tesla shares were down nearly 10% compared to Friday’s closing price, but have rebounded somewhat as of Monday afternoon.
Apple Plans to Source More iPhones From India as Potential Tariff Fix
Levies on Chinese goods have created worst three-day rout for iPhone maker in about 25 years
Apple AAPL -4.54%decrease; red down pointing triangle plans to send more iPhones to the U.S. from India to offset the high cost of China tariffs, people familiar with the matter said.
The adjustments are a short-term stopgap while Apple attempts to win an exemption from President Trump’s tariffs—which Chief Executive Tim Cook obtained during the first Trump administration. The company sees the situation as too uncertain to upend long-term investments in its supply chain, the people said.
Trump’s tariff package raises levies on Chinese goods to at least 54% while imposing a 26% rate on Indian goods. On Monday, Trump threatened to add to China tariffs if the country doesn’t remove the retaliatory duties they announced after U.S. tariff plans were revealed on April 2.
The iPhone is Apple’s signature product and makes up about 50% of its revenue. The company’s heavy reliance on China for manufacturing has spooked investors concerned about its exposure to tariffs, leading to a 20% decline in its shares, their worst three-day performance in nearly 25 years.
Apple will make about 25 million iPhones in India this year, around 10 million of which would normally supply the local Indian market, said Bank of America analyst Wamsi Mohan. If Apple were to redirect all India-made iPhones to the U.S., it could meet about 50% of American demand for the device this year, he said.
The tariff on Chinese goods could add about $300 to the current $550 hardware cost to Apple of an iPhone 16 Pro that currently retails for $1,100, according to TechInsights. Apple could limit the damage by importing phones from India where the tariff is about half as high.
While Trump has called for a manufacturing renaissance in the U.S., analysts and suppliers said moving iPhone production to Apple’s home country was a nonstarter because the cost would be far beyond the cost of paying the tariff.
“If consumers want a $3,500 iPhone we should make them in New Jersey or Texas or another state,” research firm Wedbush said in a recent note.
Apple makes many iPhone components in China but in recent years has assembled more of the devices in India. That allows the company to stamp India as the country of origin for those devices because they undergo “substantial transformation” there—from a pile of parts to a functioning smartphone.
Since 2017, Apple has worked with partners to assemble iPhones in India, starting with older models and gradually expanding to include the latest ones. The policy both addresses China risk and avoids import tariffs when selling in India, one of the world’s fastest-growing smartphone markets. Apple plans to increase iPhone production in India.
Yet the company’s production is still centered in China. Its manufacturing partners such as Foxconn operate huge facilities there, taking advantage of the country’s deep network of suppliers, skilled labor and government support.
Apple is investing in making other products in the U.S., including the servers needed for artificial intelligence such as the Apple Intelligence service.
In February, Apple said it planned to spend more than $500 billion over the next four years in U.S. manufacturing—an announcement touted by Trump as evidence his policies were working. The money includes committing to buy more advanced chips made by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing in Arizona.
Vietnam, which has become a hub for making AirPods, the Apple Watch and iPads, received a tariff of 46% under Trump’s plan, nearly as high as China’s. But Trump suggested in a social-media post Friday after speaking to Vietnam’s leader that he might offer a better deal.
Putting together an iPhone is still a labor-intensive process, demanding a large workforce capable of performing intricate tasks with precision and speed. While the U.S. has a skilled workforce in many high-tech areas, the sheer number of workers needed for mass-market consumer electronics assembly is more readily available in Asia, and at lower cost.