The daily business briefing: May 19, 2016

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1. Zuckerberg meets with conservatives to discuss Facebook bias concerns
2. Minutes show Fed leaders actively considering June interest rate hike
3. Google to launch Google Home smart speaker to rival Amazon's Echo
4. Tesla plans to sell stock to help fund Model 3 production
5. Walmart's stock jumps after earnings beat expectations

last updated 19 May 2016

1. Zuckerberg meets with conservatives to discuss Facebook bias concerns

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg met with about 15 conservative leaders Wednesday to "build trust" after tech news site Gizmodo reported that former contractors downplayed news from conservative sources on Facebook's "trending topics" section. Zuckerberg's guests included broadcaster Glenn Beck, Fox News host Dana Perino, and Donald Trump campaign adviser Barry Bennett. Zuckerberg said he knows conservatives don't trust Facebook to post news "without political bias," but an internal investigation has "found no evidence" of censorship.

Federal Reserve policy makers expressed support for raising interest rates at their June meeting if the economy continued to improve, according to minutes of their April meeting released Wednesday. The meeting's participants said it would be appropriate to raise rates if inflation continues to head toward the Fed's two percent target and employment conditions continue to improve. The "hawkish" tone probably surprised many investors, said Tony Bedikian of Citizens Bank. Stocks lost some ground after the minutes came out.

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Google announced Wednesday that it is launching a new voice-responsive home device to help people organize their lives. The device, Google Home, will compete with Amazon's Echo. Like the Echo, Google Home will respond to questions and carry out basic tasks, such as calling an Uber, ordering pizza, or looking up film times. It also will adjust results, if, for example, you say you need movies appropriate for kids. "We want to have an ongoing, two-way conversation with our users," Google CEO Sundar Pichai said at the Google I/O conference.

Tesla Motors said Wednesday it wanted to raise $1.4 billion to $1.7 billion by selling stock to help bankroll production of its first mass-market electric car, the Model 3. Tesla shares fell by 7 percent immediately after the news came out, then recovered and ended down by 3 percent. Tesla recently announced it planned to build 500,000 of the vehicles by 2018. The company already has received about 373,000 deposits on the Model 3 pre-orders.

Walmart shares shot up by 8 percent in premarket trading Thursday after the giant retailer reported quarterly earnings that beat expectations. Walmart posted net income of 98 cents a share, down from $1.03 last year but above the consensus FactSet forecast of 88 cents per share. Sales were also slightly better than anticipated, with same-store sales increasing by 1 percent on a 1.5 percent bump in traffic.

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Harold Maass is a contributing editor at The Week. He has been writing for The Week since the 2001 debut of the U.S. print edition and served as editor of TheWeek.com when it launched in 2008. Harold started his career as a newspaper reporter in South Florida and Haiti. He has previously worked for a variety of news outlets, including The Miami Herald, ABC News and Fox News, and for several years wrote a daily roundup of financial news for The Week and Yahoo Finance.