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437 AAPL +0.41% TSLA +2.12% IBM +1.07% META -0.40% Super Bowl 2024: The big business behind the big gameScroll back up to restore default view. Dylan Croll Dylan Croll·Markets Reporter Sat, February 10, 2024 at 10:10 AM EST·7 min read In this article: AAPL +0.41% Watchlist Watchlist Recommendation Rating Buy TSLA +2.12% IBM +1.07% META -0.40% Once upon a time, believe it or not, no one particularly looked forward to Super Bowl ads. That all changed when Washington faced Los Angeles on Jan. 22, 1984, in Tampa, Fla. Those who tuned in to the big game on CBS — and...

IBM Consulting this week told its US-based executives and people managers that, effective immediately, they must work from a corporate office at least three days per week, or face the consequences.John Granger, SVP of IBM Consulting, told staff in an email this is a company-wide policy that extends beyond the Consulting division. He issued a similar, if less emphatic, memo in 2022 that called for being in the workplace three days per week, "wherever possible," and exempted those designated as "work-at-home" employees from the office or client-site attendance.The email sent this week, however, tells those affected that they should "separate...

IBM is in hot water due to its discriminatory hiring practices. No, they’re not discriminating against blacks or Hispanics; they’re taking part in the popular new craze of treating whites and Asians like second-class citizens and denying them basic rights based on the color of their skin. This is the United States, and these actions are supposed to be illegal here. That’s why America First Legal, a group started by Trump loyalist Stephen Miller, is now suing IBM for racially discriminating against white and Asian Americans and for promising to fire, demote, or deny bonuses to corporate executives who fail...

VIDEOUPDATE: A source from inside IBM and Red Hat has just given us INTERNAL SLACK MESSAGES that reveal employee response to our reporting. According to one IBM / Ret Hat employee, “The truth is, it’s his fault (James O'Keefe's) that we are even having this conversation. We all made zero stink about this until the 'super mega awesome leaked IBM exec video'.“ Clearly, this is striking a nerve both inside and outside the tech giant.

O’Keefe Media Group on Monday evening released a leaked video of IBM CEO Arvind Krishna admitting to using coercion to fire people and take away their bonuses unless they discriminate in the hiring process... IBM, or International Business Machines, is a multinational technology company that specializes in producing and selling computer hardware, middleware, and software. “You got to move both forward by a percentage that leads to a plus on your bonus,” Krishna said about hiring Hispanics, “and by the way if you lose, you lose part of your bonus.” James O’Keege pointed out that after pulling ads from X...

CEO of IBM Arvind Krishna admits to using coercion to fire people and take away their bonuses unless they discriminate in the hiring process. “You got to move both forward by a percentage that leads to a plus on your bonus," Krishna said about hiring Hispanics, "and by the way if you lose, you lose part of your bonus.” After pulling ads from X for 'racism,' IBM chief Arvind Krishna says he will fire, demote or strip bonuses from execs who don't hire enough blacks, Hispanics — or hire too many Asians "Asians are not an underrepresented minority in tech...

IBM Corp. has abruptly pulled ads from X, formerly Twitter, amid a maelstrom of controversial comments from billionaire owner Elon Musk and the placement of IBM ads. “IBM has zero tolerance for hate speech and discrimination and we have immediately suspended all advertising on X while we investigate this entirely unacceptable situation,” the company said in a statement emailed to MarketWatch. IBM suspended advertising following a report by the Financial Times on Thursday that IBM ads appeared next to posts supporting Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. A Media Matters study also found ads from Apple Inc., Oracle Corp., and...

IBM is set to shake up its retirement benefits in 2024 much to the alarm of at least some staff. The IT giant on Wednesday informed its US workers that starting on January 1, 2024, the corporation will no longer match employee contributions to their 401(k) retirement plans. Instead, it will offer a new benefit called a Retirement Benefit Account (RBA).

Technology company International Business Machines (IBM) sponsors at least two discriminatory paid internship opportunities, one that bars white and Asian applicants, and another that is only for women, with an exception for men who identify as women. The two paid internships are held in conjunction with the American Physical Society (APS), a nonprofit organization that says it is “working to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics through its outstanding research journals, scientific meetings, and education, outreach, advocacy, and international activities.” “Applicants must be female, including all students who present or identify as women and/or trans women,” the eligibility requirements...

IBM said Tuesday it’s selling its weather unit, including The Weather Channel, Weather.com, Weather Underground and Storm Radar. IBM will sell the assets to Francisco Partners, a tech-focused private equity firm, for an undisclosed sum. The deal also includes the weather unit’s forecasting science and tech platform, as well as enterprise data services for the broadcast, media, aviation and ad tech industries. Francisco Partners plans to pivot part of the weather business to be more consumer-facing, adding new tools for users related to health and well-being, per the announcement. As part of the deal, IBM will retain access to the...

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna announced a hiring pause, but that’s not all. He also stated the company plans to replace nearly 8,000 jobs with AI. Krishna noted that back-office functions, specifically in the human resources (HR) sector, will be the first to face these changes. The transition will happen gradually over the next few years, with machines potentially taking over up to 30% of noncustomer-facing roles in the five years. This means that workers in finance, accounting, HR and other areas will likely find themselves facing stiff competition from robots and algorithms. The decision highlights the increasing reliance on automation...

One month ago, to much dismay and widespread denial, Goldman predicted that AI could lead to some 300 million layoffs among highly paid, non-menial workers in the US and Europe. As Goldman chief economist Jan Hatzius put it, "using data on occupational tasks in both the US and Europe, we find that roughly two-thirds of current jobs are exposed to some degree of AI automation, and that generative AI could substitute up to one-fourth of current work. Extrapolating our estimates globally suggests that generative AI could expose the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs to automation" as up to "two...

The IBM chief said that fields like customer service, human resources and positions within finance and health care could all see automation - not years from now but in the current day. The Artificial Intelligence (AI) trend has taken the world by storm. From passing medical and law exams to delivering speeches, AI has evolved so much that it even converses with users and offers solutions to their problems. Now speaking about AI systems and the explosion of language-based AI ChatGPT, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna has stated that artificial intelligence is on a rapidly progressive pace to take over "clerical...

It's the end of an era. As The Reg covered last week, IBM has transferred development of AIX to India. Why should IBM pay for an expensive US-based team to maintain its own proprietary flavor of official Unix when it paid 34 billion bucks for its own FOSS flavor in Red Hat? Here at The Reg FOSS desk, we've felt this was coming ever since we reported that Big Blue was launching new POWER servers which didn't support AIX – already nearly eight years ago. Even if it was visibly coming over the horizon, this is a significant event: AIX...

Woke corporate CEOs seem to think they know better than voters what’s best for the country. These titans are throwing their companies’ clout and cash behind activists pushing gender-fluidity lessons for kindergarteners and other extreme political causes. Expect this corporate activism to backfire. Corporations should be serving their customers, not trying to override the democratic process, like thousand-pound gorillas undoing what the electorate—including their own customers—wants. Walt Disney Co. CEO Bob Chapek declared his opposition Friday to a Florida state bill that bans instruction for children in grades K-3 about choosing their sexual orientation. The bill also bars teachers from...

Estee Lauder and IBM have become the latest Western brands to abandon Russia - but major international companies such as Reckitt, Unilever and British American Tobacco are staying put. Both New York-listed firms said they would suspend all their operations in the country. Estee Lauder, which earns 2.7% of its revenues there, will shut all its stores. They join a wave of blue chip companies that have left in protest at Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine - but others have risked a consumer backlash by choosing not to follow them. UK consumer goods titans Unilever and Reckitt have both condemned...

Top IBM executives were directly involved in discussions about the need to reduce the portion of older employees at the company, sometimes disparaging them with terms of art like “dinobabies.” A trove of previously sealed documents made public by a Federal District Court on Friday show IBM executives discussing plans to phase out older employees. Now it appears that top IBM executives were directly involved in discussions about the need to reduce the portion of older employees at the company, sometimes disparaging them with terms of art like “dinobabies.” A trove of previously sealed documents made public by a Federal...

They were a youthful brigade at Lotus Software in the 1990s, when the Cambridge firm was revolutionizing office work with its cutting-edge e-mail platform. When their company was swallowed by IBM, they helped the high-tech giant push into big data and digital health. More recently, when they’d moved into their peak earnings-and-savings years — just as IBM was scrambling to remake itself for what it called “a new era of technology” — they were summarily fired. “They basically throw you away after a long career,” said Kathleen Stuart of Milton, who worked for Lotus and IBM for 25 years. She...

Many view the United States as having the most sophisticated and capable national defense and intelligence apparatus globally. In totality, this is arguably true. However, often not taken into account is that all of America's capabilities rarely, if ever, come together to achieve a unified objective. Instead, you have constant and bitter bureaucratic infighting, with agencies often distrusting each other and operating as their own fiefdoms. Take, for example, Project GUNMAN. In 1978, the NSA discovered a sophisticated radio transmitter inside a false chimney in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. The NSA told the CIA and State Department that the...

Parag Agrawal, who was appointed this week as Twitter's CEO, has joined at least a dozen other Indian-born techies in the corner offices of the world's most influential Silicon Valley companies. Microsoft's Satya Nadella, Alphabet's Sundar Pichai, and the top bosses of IBM, Adobe, Palo Alto Networks, VMWare and Vimeo are all of Indian descent. Indian-origin people account for just about 1% of the US population and 6% of Silicon Valley's workforce - and yet are disproportionately represented in the top brass. Why? "No other nation in the world 'trains' so many citizens in such a gladiatorial manner as India...