The daily business briefing: April 6, 2023

1. Cash App creator dies in San Francisco stabbing

Cash App creator Bob Lee, who also was chief product officer of cryptocurrency company MobileCoin, was killed in a stabbing in San Francisco this week, MobileCoin CEO Josh Goldbard said in a statement Wednesday. Lee's father confirmed the news in a Facebook post. Lee had moved to Miami but traveled to San Francisco for a MobileCoin leadership summit last week. "Bob was a dynamo, a force of nature. ... He was made for the world that is being born right now, he was a child of dreams, and whatever he imagined, no matter how crazy, he made real," Goldbard wrote in a statement to USA Today. San Francisco police confirmed that a 43-year-old man died in a hospital after being stabbed, but didn't confirm his identity.

USA Today The Wall Street Journal

2. Swiss government slashes Credit Suisse managers' bonuses

The Swiss government said Wednesday it ordered the bonuses of top Credit Suisse executives to be cut sharply or eliminated altogether. Swiss regulators pushed through an emergency $3.3 billion sale of Credit Suisse to larger rival UBS last month after a run on the bank sent its stock price plunging. Nearly 1,000 Credit Suisse managers will be deprived of a total of $55 million to $66 million in bonuses. Some executives will lose a quarter or half of the bonuses they had been due to receive last year. Others will lose their entire bonus. The Federal Council, a seven-member panel that runs Switzerland's executive branch, had suspended bonus payouts after the deal was announced.

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The Associated Press

3. Stellantis: Ram electric pickup to have 500-mile battery range

Stellantis said Wednesday its electric Ram pickup truck will be able to drive 500 miles on a single charge. The claim escalated the battle for buyers of electric work vehicles. The Ram's range would surpass those of the Ford F-150 Lightning (320 miles, according to EPA estimates), and General Motors' Chevrolet Silverado 1500 EV and GMC Sierra EV, which GM expects to have a range around 400 miles. Tesla, which dominates the EV market, says its Cybertruck will also have a range of up to 500 miles. Stellantis says the Ram EV will be able to tow up to 14,000 pounds, which matches Tesla's Cybertruck. GM has said it eventually will offer electric trucks that can tow 20,000 pounds.

CNN

4. Exxon abandons exploratory wells off Brazil

Exxon Mobil Corp. is ending its multibillion-dollar search for oil in deep waters off Brazil, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. The decision came after the Texas oil giant's wells failed to find commercially viable amounts of crude after more than five years of work. Exxon and partners spent $4 billion in 2017 for rights to the offshore area. Now the company has ended the exploratory work and moved the geologists and engineers who were working on the effort to other countries, including Canada, Guyana, and Angola, the Journal's sources said. Exxon CEO Darren Woods said in December that Brazil was one of the company's potential "growth opportunities."

The Wall Street Journal

5. Stock futures little changed after sign of hiring slowdown

U.S. stock futures were mixed early Thursday after new data on private payrolls showed that job growth slowed in March. Futures tied to the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 were little changed at 7 a.m. ET. Nasdaq futures were down 0.3 percent. The Dow rose a little more than 0.2 percent on Wednesday, while the S&P 500 fell by a little more than 0.2 percent. The tech-heavy Nasdaq fell 1.1 percent. The moves came after ADP's private payrolls report for March, released Wednesday, showed hiring increased by 145,000, far below the 210,000-job increase economists had forecast. The data fueled concerns that the Federal Reserve might have hiked interest rates too aggressively in its campaign to fight inflation.

CNBC