Welcome to The Globe and Mail’s business and investing news quiz. Join us each week to test your knowledge of the stories making the headlines. Our business reporters come up with the questions, and you can show us what you know.
This Week: As he continues to carve up the U.S. government, Elon Musk has turned his attention to buying his rival Sam Altman’s company, OpenAI. How is that going for him? Take our quiz and find out.
d. Five years earlier than expected. CPPIB said it reached the $700-billion mark five years faster than the Chief Actuary of Canada projected in reports published in 2000 and 2018. The fund has earned an average annual return of 9.2 per cent over the past decade.
a. T-shirts emblazoned with swastikas. A Shopify spokesperson said Ye's store did not follow “the rules of our platform” and “did not engage in authentic commerce practices.” It did not specify exactly what rules were broken.
d. They have slid. It seems impossible but maybe, just maybe, we have witnessed peak Timbits (at least on a per store basis). In 2024, the average Tim Hortons restaurant in Canada produced $305,000 in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA). That is markedly below the heights that stores attained during the caffeine-saturated glory days of 2018, when the average location generated $320,000 in EBITDA.
b. Toronto-Dominion Bank said it plans to use the money to bolster its Canadian operations. Nationalism? Not really. TD has limited options after pleading guilty last year to conspiracy to commit money laundering in the United States. It is now operating under a cap imposed by U.S. authorities that limits the amount of assets that the bank’s U.S. retail arm can hold. With U.S. growth so constrained, the bank is hoping to find new opportunities back in Canada.
d. About two-thirds. You have to wonder what Mr. Trump is thinking. According to the Aluminum Association, an industry trade group, Canada supplies around two-thirds of the primary aluminum the U.S. uses every year. In addition, about 90 per cent of U.S. scrap imports come from either Canada or Mexico. “It would take billions of investment over decades to make the United States fully self-sufficient for its metal needs,” the association said in a statement.
c. The number of marriages in China plummeted by a fifth last year, the biggest drop on record. One reason for the decline in newlyweds was sputtering economic growth. The lack of opportunity has increased insecurity among young people and made it difficult for university graduates to find work.
c. BP. Investors want sweeping reform at BP and they are counting on Elliott Management, a hedge fund known for its hard-nosed tactics, to deliver it. BP has produced underwhelming returns in recent years.
b. Chevron wants to slash its 40,000-employee workforce. The No. 2 U.S. oil producer is wrestling with cost overruns at a large project in Kazakhstan and is locked in a court battle with its larger rival Exxon Mobil over its bid to acquire oil producer Hess.
a. No, thank you, but we will buy Twitter for $9.74-billion if you want. Oooh, burn! To understand the taunt, you need to understand the feud between the two men. A quick recap: Mr. Musk, chief executive of Tesla and good buddy of Donald Trump, was a co-founder of OpenAI, but left before the company took off and then launched his own AI start-up. He sued Mr. Altman and others this past year for allowing OpenAI to deviate from its original not-for-profit mission. In other news, Mr. Musk has been struggling to find traction at X. He purchased the company, then called Twitter, for US$44-billion in 2022, but it has since plummeted in value. Got all that? It’s basically a case of two very rich men who don’t like each other much.
b. It offered severance packages to 1,200 employees. BCE blamed the layoffs on unprecedented challenges facing Canada’s telecom sector. The company is paying out more in dividends than it earns in free cash flow and it is labouring under heavy debt.
a. They have fallen 13 per cent. Listed rents for Vancouver apartments have dropped for 14 consecutive months. They now stand at $2,896 a month – still an intimidating sum, to be sure, but 13 per cent lower than at their peak. A similar trend is evident in Toronto, where average apartment rents have slid for 12 consecutive months. They are now down to $2,615 a month, a 7.6 per cent decline from their peak.
c. U.S. streaming services. You can take my Californian wine, my can of Bud and my winters in Florida, but don’t touch my Netflix. A Leger survey of 1,590 Canadians found 81 per cent are trying to buy more Canadian-made products. More than half said they are willing to ditch U.S. alcohol and U.S. travel. Only 28 per cent, though, are willing to cancel their subscriptions to U.S. streaming services.