Wall Street Breakfast Podcast: Uber Settles Taxi Driver Suit

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Uber (UBER) to pay $178M to settle lawsuit by Australia taxi drivers. (00:27) SpaceX (SPACE) said to be building spy satellite network for U.S. space-based intelligence agency. (01:24) LinkedIn (MSFT) to launch gaming within its platform. (02:15)

This is an abridged transcript of the podcast.

Uber (NYSE:UBER) has agreed to pay A$271.8M ($178.4M) to settle a lawsuit filed by Australian drivers and taxi operators. They claimed to have lost money after Uber entered the market in 2012.

The class action lawsuit was launched in 2019 by Maurice Blackburn Lawyers, representing over 8,000 taxi and rental car owners and drivers.

“Uber (UBER) has blinked, and thousands of everyday Australians joined together to stare down a global giant,” the law firm’s principal lawyer Michael Donelly said.

Uber (UBER) said ride-sharing laws were nonexistent when the company was founded more than 10 years ago. “Since 2018, Uber has made significant contributions into various state-level taxi compensation schemes, and with the proposed settlement (in Australia), we put these legacy issues firmly in our past.”

The settlement is the fifth-largest class action settlement in Australia.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX (SPACE) is building a network of hundreds of spy satellites under a classified contract with a U.S. government agency that deals with space-based intelligence.

The contract is for a powerful new spy system that has hundreds of satellites bearing Earth-imaging capabilities that can operate as a swarm in low orbits.

According to Reuters, citing five sources familiar with the program, the network is being built by SpaceX’s (SPACE) Starshield unit under a $1.8B contract signed in 2021 with the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).

The NRO is an agency that operates space-based surveillance and reconnaissance systems to collect and deliver intelligence.

SpaceX (SPACE) and the NRO did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Seeking Alpha.

The LinkedIn experience is expected to get a whole lot better as it is planning to introduce puzzle-based games within its platform.

A company spokesperson told Seeking Alpha the goal is “to unlock a bit of fun, deepen relationships, and hopefully spark the opportunity for conversations.”

The news about LinkedIn came after an app researcher shared images showing the company’s plans on X. According to the researcher, one of its ideas includes plans to organize player scores based on users’ place of work.

However, a spokesperson for the social media platform told TechCrunch, which first reported the news that the images shared were inaccurate.

With more than 900M users, LinkedIn will be another avenue for Microsoft (MSFT) to expand its gaming business. For Q2, MSFT reported $7.1B in revenue from its gaming division, which accounted for more than a tenth of its topline and exceeded its Windows revenue for the first time.

Other articles to look out for on Seeking Alpha:

Earnings week ahead: FedEx, Nike, XPeng, Tencent, General Mills and more

How the Magnificent 7 valuations stack up against bubbles of yore

Citi screens for 25 stocks with growth capex opportunity

On our catalyst watch for the day,

• This is CERAWeek in Houston, Texas. The event is one of the premier gatherings of the year for the global energy and utilities industries, and also features automotive, manufacturing, policy, and financial executives along with a growing presence from tech. Speakers during the week include Exxon Mobil (NYSE:XOM) CEO Darren Woods, Chevron (CVX) CEO Mike Wirth, Shell (SHEL) CEO Wael Sawan, TotalEnergies (TTE) CEO Patrick Pouyanne, and Saudi Aramco (ARMCO) CEO Amin Nasser.

• S&P Global 39th Annual World Petrochemical Conference in Houston.

• The Game Developers Conference will take place in San Francisco. The event has generated buzz in the past with announcements on new tech, launch dates, and industry trends.

• Shareholder vote for PGT Innovations (PGTI) sale to Miter.

• Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang to present keynote at GTC 2024.

Wall Street on Friday closed out the week with marginal losses.

The Nasdaq (COMP:IND) slipped 0.96%. The S&P 500 (SP500) fell 0.65%, while the Dow (DJI) retreated 0.49%.

Of the 11 S&P sectors, seven ended in the red, with Tech falling more than 1%. Energy led the gainers.

For the week, the S&P fell 0.13%, the Dow fell 0.02% and the Nasdaq fell 0.70%.

Now let’s take a look at the markets as of 6 am. Ahead of the opening bell today, Dow, S&P and Nasdaq futures are in the green. Crude oil is up 0.8% at more than $81 per barrel. Bitcoin is up 1.1% at more than $67,000.

In the world markets, the FTSE 100 is up 0.16% and the DAX is up 0.3%.

The biggest movers for the day premarket: Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) is up 3.6% following reports that Apple is in talks to license Google’s Gemini suite of generative AI tools for future iPhones, with new features…