The daily business briefing: January 3, 2022

1. Twitter permanently suspends Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's account

Twitter said Sunday it had permanently suspended Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's personal account for violations of its policies against spreading misinformation about COVID-19. The ban came after Greene made her latest false tweet about the pandemic on Saturday, saying there had been "extremely high amounts of COVID vaccine deaths." Twitter called the post Greene's fifth "strike," meaning that under its rules her account now can't be restored. She got her fourth strike in August for falsely claiming on the site that vaccines were "failing." Less than a month earlier, she received her third strike for tweeting that COVID-19 was not dangerous. Greene posted on the conservative social media platform Telegram that Twitter "is an enemy of America and can't handle the truth."

The New York Times Reuters

2. Tesla says deliveries rose by 87 percent in 2021

Tesla delivered 87 percent more cars in 2021 than it did the year before, reaching a total of 936,000 cars with a boost from a single-quarter record of 308,600 electric vehicles in the fourth quarter. Industry analysts had expected the company to ship out just 855,000 vehicles for the year. Most of the deliveries were Tesla Model 3 sedans and Model Y hatchbacks. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in July that the electric-car maker was working to get around a global computer-chip shortage that was hampering production for other auto manufacturers by switching to more readily available types of chips. "The numbers are hard to poke holes in," Daniel Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, wrote in a note to investors. "Tesla continues to dominate market share."

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CNBC The New York Times

3. Airlines have canceled more than 15,000 flights since Christmas Eve

Airlines canceled more than 2,100 flights into, out of, or within the United States on Sunday, bringing the total number of canceled U.S. flights since Christmas Eve to more than 15,000, USA Today reported Sunday. Staffing shortages have plagued airlines as the Omicron coronavirus strain infects some employees and leaves others afraid to go to work. According to BBC, even the offer of increased pay has been ineffective at luring flight crews back. On New Year's Day, almost 4,400 flights were canceled worldwide, The Washington Post reports. More than 2,600 of those were flights for which the U.S. was either the origin, the destination, or both.

USA Today

4. Stock futures rise on 1st trading day of 2022

U.S. stock futures gained early Monday ahead of the first day of trading in 2022. Futures tied to the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 were up by 0.6 percent and 0.7 percent, respectively, at 6:30 a.m. ET. Nasdaq futures were up by 0.8 percent. The three main U.S. indexes made big gains last year. The S&P 500 led the way, rising nearly 27 percent in 2021. Stocks fell slightly on Friday as the year's trading ended, but they still finished in positive territory over the last week of the year. Trading starts in 2022 with Wall Street focused on potential fallout from surging COVID-19 cases fueled by the fast-spreading Omicron coronavirus variant, which has forced thousands of flight cancellations and forced some businesses and universities to cut back on in-person activities.

CNBC

5. Jury deliberations set to resume in Elizabeth Holmes fraud trial

The jury weighing on fraud charges against former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes will resume deliberations Monday after a brief holiday break. The eight men and four women on the jury could not reach a verdict by the middle of last week, so the court gave them Thursday off in addition to the previously scheduled New Year's Eve holiday on Friday. The jury already has reviewed stacks of evidence for 40 hours over six days in a San Jose, California, courthouse. Holmes, 37, was once a rising Silicon Valley star, but she now faces up to 20 years in prison if found guilty of lying to investors and patients about her company's blood-testing technology, which Theranos continued to tout as a medical breakthrough despite evidence that it was frequently wildly inaccurate.

The Associated Press