United States of America eSeries: $2 trillion tech 📱

$2 trillion tech 📱

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Welcome back. Let's head into this week week like Regina King walking into the Oscars.

By Allison Morrow

💰 $2 TRILLION CLUB

Apple is the only American company that's hit a $2 trillion market value. But it could soon have a lot more company in that elite club.

Hot on Apple's heels are the other titans of tech: Microsoft (which is worth just under $2 trillion), Amazon ($1.7 trillion), and Alphabet ($1.5 trillion).

Just as an aside: "trillion" is one of those words that looks like a typo. That's 12 zeroes. I tried to write out one trillion as a number just now and gave up.

WHY IT MATTERS

The fact that we may soon have four companies in the $2T club is a reflection of the diabolically different experiences tech companies have had versus everyone else in response to the pandemic.

Tech stocks went on a tear as lockdowns kept people stuck at home, staring at screens and ordering toilet paper, masks and bread baking tools online. The companies' strength, mixed with a flood of easy money from the Federal Reserve, pushed their stocks to record highs.

LOOKING AHEAD

Tech companies are expected to post solid earnings for the foreseeable future. Tesla posted yet another record quarter on Monday, cracking the $1 billion profit mark for the first time. Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Alphabet and Microsoft report earnings later this week.

"The earnings expectations for the S&P 500 are through the roof for this year as investors expect this great recovery, and tech is a big part of that," said Daniel Morgan, senior portfolio manager with Synovus Trust Company. "These companies are just so dominant."

RELATED: Apple is spending $1 billion to build a new campus in North Carolina.

💉 BAD BATCH

The timing of one biotech CEO's fortuitous stock sale — just before the shares tanked — is raising some eyebrows.

THE NEWS

Emergent BioSolutions' stock lost more than half of its value after the disclosure in March that it had ruined as many as 15 million doses of Johnson & Johnson's Covid-19 vaccine at its Baltimore plant.

But Emergent's CEO's own fortunes haven't taken a large hit because he dumped more than $11 million worth of stock ahead of the decline.

SOME BACKGROUND

Johnson & Johnson contracted Emergent to make the covid vaccine. But on March 31, J&J announced that problems at the Emergent plant had made the vaccine doses unusable.
Emergent agreed on April 16 to halt production of the vaccine and to quarantine existing material manufactured. Production still hasn't resumed.
The stock tumbled as news of those problems were disclosed.

Here's where it gets a liiitttttllllle bit sus: Emergent CEO Robert Kramer sold nearly 100,000 shares of the company's stock between January 15 and February 26, for a total of $11.1 million, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

If he had held onto those shares, they would be worth about $5 million less now than the price for which he sold them.

Emergent rejected any suggestion of impropriety with those sales. "Mr. Kramer, our executive team, and our board of directors are held to the highest ethical standards and follow strict compliance with all laws and regulations governing financial transactions. Any insinuation of wrongdoing is without evidence or merit."

As is common for executives, the shares were sold in accordance with a plan that Kramer put in place in November, according to the filings and a company spokesperson. However, the New York Times reported that the production problems at the Baltimore plant go way back to October, citing internal logs, a government official and a former company supervisor. So the timing still seems a little fishy.

CNN Business' Chris Isidore has more.

👀 NUMBER OF THE DAY

9.8 million

Hollywood's biggest night was also its smallest night ever. The 93rd Academy Awards drew an average of 9.8 million viewers for ABC on Sunday, according to early Nielsen numbers. That's 58% below the ratings from last year's show, the previous lowest-rated Oscars, which brought in in 23.6 million viewers.

🚚 CAR CRUSH

The latest in oh-my-god-everything's-expensive news: Tourists in Hawaii are renting U-Hauls rather than cars.

Yup. Rather than shell out $722 a day — the price of the cheapest rental car in Maui last month — visitors in need of wheels are going for deals wherever they can find them. And hey, I bet if you roll the windows down and try really hard not to think about being in a moving truck, it almost feels like a convertible.

This isn't just a Hawaii problem.

When the pandemic hit, car rental companies found themselves with a glut of unused vehicles as travel cratered. The industry sold off more than a half a million cars, about a third of its combined fleets, just to survive.

But now, with vaccines rolling out steadily and domestic travel heating up, supply is limited. Adding to the crunch: A global chip shortage has hobbled automakers and drastically stalled manufacturing.

WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON?

🔒 iOS 14.5: Apple is rolling out a major privacy feature on Monday that will allow iOS users to decide how they want their personal data handled — a move that has worried some companies, including Facebook.

🇮🇳 Pledging support: Google's Sundar Pichai and Microsoft's Satya Nadella are rushing aid to India as the country battles an onslaught of coronavirus cases.

🍕 The return of Noid: Domino's Pizza is bringing back its popular mascot from the 1980s — with a techy twist.