• Warren Buffett, the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, released his annual letter to shareholders on Saturday.
• Buffett wrote that he and his vice chairman, Charlie Munger, still hoped to make a large acquisition.
• Buffett said in last year's letter that he wanted to make a big deal, but companies' valuations were too expensive...

Tesla's board is still failing to monitor Elon Musk's tweets. Musk tweeted a false production target for Tesla this week, then took hours to correct himself. Even after he did, he left the misleading tweet online. The incident could get the company and Musk in trouble again with the SEC, which specifically ordered Tesla to oversee his investor communications on Twitter and elsewhere...

• Check out which 25 CEOs on the S&P 500 earn a salary that's higher than expected, given shareholder return.
• The list appears in a report from As You Sow, a nonprofit focused on shareholder advocacy.
• As You Sow also calculated the ratio of CEO pay to median employee pay.
• Ronald F. Clarke, CEO of Fleetcor Technologies Inc., took the top spot: He makes about $53 million a year, which means he's overpaid by 263%.

Most CEOs make a lot of money. No surprise there...

• Zillow shares fell in after-hours trading Thursday after the company said CEO Spencer Rascoff was leaving his post. Rascoff will remain on the board of directors.
• The real-estate database company named its co-founder and executive chairman, Rich Barton, as its new CEO.
• Zillow shares have plunged 31% in one year...

• At a growing number of companies, particularly in the tech sector, CEOs and other insiders have outsized control over their corporate decisions.
• The executives have that control through special shares that give them extra votes. Such arrangements used to be rare, but are becoming much more common.
• Lyft and several other tech companies that are likely to hold their initial public offerings this year will likely debut with such dual-class stock structures...

• One of Barclays' largest investors, US hedge fund Tiger Global, has sold its entire holding in the bank.
• It is a major blow to the lender as it bids to turnaround its performance in its investment banking division.
• Tiger Global had been a major backer of CEO Jes Staley, but the move points to a weaker sentiment in the lender.

One of the largest shareholders in Barclays has cut its stake in the lender during a crucial period for the bank...

• Gene Levoff, who worked as Apple's Senior Director of Corporate Law and Corporate Secretary until September 2018, has been accused of insider trading by the SEC.
• The SEC's lawsuit suit, filed Wednesday morning, says Levoff exploited his positions to unlawfully trade Apple securities ahead of Apple's quarterly earnings announcements.
• Levoff profited and avoided losses of approximately $382,000 through illegal insider trading that took place from 2015-2016, according to the SEC...

• 2018 saw record share buybacks by S&P 500 companies following the GOP's tax cuts with more than $1 trillion in stock bought back.
• Bernie Sanders and former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein have been feuding on Twitter about the value of the strategy ahead of potential Democrat plans to limit buyback options by corporations.
• Other leading figures in US politics have weighed into the debate including Steve Mnuchin and Elizabeth Warren...

• Billionaire David Tepper's Appaloosa LP made a strongly-worded call for change to drugmaker Allergan's board leadership structure on Tuesday.
• Appaloosa wants Allergan's board to separate the role of chairman and CEO, which today are both held by Allergan's Brent Saunders.
• In a Tuesday letter, Appaloosa slammed Allergan's executive decision-making, "the record for which has been fraught with ill-considered initiatives and self-inflicted wounds for several years now."..

• Tesla announced Monday that it plans to buy the battery maker Maxwell Technologies.
• Maxwell, based in San Diego, makes battery components including ultracapacitors and dry electrodes.
• Battery technology is key for Tesla as it ramps up production and expands its manufacturing presence into China.

Tesla is buying Maxwell Technologies in a deal that values the battery-maker at $218 million, the two companies announced Monday...

• Meg Whitman will not stand for re-election for the board of directors at Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
• This marks the final departure of Whitman from HPE, a company she helped create after presiding over the splitting of Hewlett Packard in 2015.
• Whitman stepped down as HPE CEO in early 2018, and is now CEO of video startup Quibi.
• HPE announced that Jean Hobby, most recently of PricewaterhouseCoopers, will join its board...

• A Barclays executive said that a complex deal with Qatar designed to rescue the bank during the 2008 financial crisis was "a nightmare," in conversations repeated at trial in London.
• When former bank executives realised that Qatari investors could end up with a higher shareholding than previously expected, plus seats on the board, one banker said: "we're fucked."...

• Women CEOs are 45% more likely to be dismissed than men CEOs, a new study finds.
• Even when a firm is performing well, women are more likely to be dismissed from the CEO position.
• The researchers think that may be the result of implicit gender bias.

Women who sit at the top of the corporate hierarchy have, presumably, shattered a piece of the proverbial glass ceiling.

But research suggests that even women CEOs may still face obstacles to success...

• Activist investor Edward Bramson has yet to lay out a vision for how he wants British lender Barclays to alter its strategy, despite taking a major stake and publicly agitating for change, according to the bank's CEO, Jes Staley.
• Bramson, whose hedge fund Sherborne Investors owns a 5% stake in the bank, is agitating for change, but according to Staley, has not set out a vision for doing so...

The CTO of one of the biggest consulting firms says CEOs and directors are beating a path to his door to get up-to-speed on the latest tech trends Troy Wolverton 0m Bill Briggs and his technology team at Deloitte are meeting much more frequently these days with CEOs and corporate directors. Deloitte Deloitte's technology consultants used to meet primarily with clients' chief technology and chief information officers...

• Global CEOs have become increasingly pessimistic about global economic growth in the past year and expect their businesses to suffer in the short to medium term as a result.
• CEOs have traditionally seen the US as the most attractive place to invest, but it is close to losing that crown, with China and India rising rapidly in the rankings...

• MoviePass parent Helios and Matheson on Friday said it would seek — again — to get shareholder authorization to reverse split its stock.
• The company is in imminent danger of having its stock delisted from the Nasdaq; the market is hearing the company's appeal of its delisting decision later this month.
• The proposal is basically the same one that the company withdrew in November in the face of widespread investor opposition...

• PG&E said Monday it intends to file bankruptcy petitions under Chapter 11, in order to protect the best interests of all stakeholders.
• Hedge fund BlueMountain Capital Management, one of its biggest shareholders, challenged its plan to seek bankruptcy protection, saying it's "damaging, avoidable, and unnecessary."
• PG&E has seen its value plunge by 85% after last November's deadly California wildfire...

• Sears chairman Eddie Lampert has reportedly won a bankruptcy auction to keep the 126-year-old retailer from liquidating.
• Lampert's bid will keep about 400 stores open and retain 50,000 jobs.
• "While there is no doubt that a shrunken Sears will be more viable than the larger entity which struggled to turn a profit, we remain extremely pessimistic about the chain's future," said Neil Saunders, CEO of GlobalData Retail...

• Santander said late on Tuesday that it will no longer be appointing UBS executive Andrea Orcel as its new CEO.
• The Spanish banking giant said that the level of compensation that was required to hire Orcel was "unacceptable."
• The sticking point in bringing Orcel to Santander was years of compensation that had previously been deferred by UBS, which, owing to his departure, the Swiss bank was reluctant to pay...

• Tokyo prosecutors indicted former Nissan Chairman Carlos Ghosn on two new charges of financial misconduct on Friday.
• Ghosn was charged with aggravated breach of trust for temporarily transferring personal investment losses to Nissan in 2008, and for understating his compensation for three years, from 2015 to 2017, according to his lawyer, Motonari Otsuru.
• Otsuru said his team was applying for bail to release Ghosn, who has been detained since his Nov. 19 arrest...

• Sears Chairman Eddie Lampert on Wednesday boosted his takeover bid to $5 billion, up from $4.4 billion.
• Lampert's new proposal will be assessed against competing parties' bids at an auction scheduled for Monday.
• Lampert's offer is the only one that would avoid a liquidation.

Sears Chairman Eddie Lampert has sweetened his bid for the company's assets in a final attempt to avoid a liquidation...

• Amazon could soon have a large new individual shareholder in the form of MacKenzie Bezos as a result of her impending divorce from the company's CEO.
• Jeff Bezos owns 16% of the e-commerce giant, and MacKenzie could be entitled to up to half of those shares, which would giver her, with Jeff, one of the two largest stakes in the company.
• Although the Bezoses are worth $137 billion on paper, nearly all of their assets are in the form of Amazon stock...

• Pier 1's market value has been almost completely wiped out over the past five and a half years, falling 97% since 2013.
• Analysts say the outlook is discouraging. Of the few surveyed by Bloomberg who cover the name, none rate the stock a "buy," two carry a "sell" rating, and four say "hold."
• Analysts say a combination of overwhelming store environments, offerings that don't reflect the latest trends, and expensive sourcing and supply chain costs have brought the retailer to its knees...