In an open letter released Tuesday, Carl Icahn has taken issue with Cigna’s planned acquisition of pharmacy-benefits manager Express Scripts Holding Company. The billionaire activist shareholder called the price tag “ridiculous.” But critics say consumers could also end up overpaying if the deal goes through. Cigna CI, +0.97% announced in March that it planned to purchase Express Scripts ESRX, +1.69% for $54 billion in cash and stock. The deal has a total transaction value of $67 billion...

There’s a three-minute joke about Snap Inc. that Chief Executive Evan Spiegel wants you to hear. It goes like this: Annual shareholder meeting. The first such event for Snapchat’s parent company lasted less than three minutes from beginning to end, and consisted entirely of a company lawyer reading a script on a recording...

--Shares in Vodafone Group rose in late Monday trading after news service Dealreporter said activist investor Elliott has acquired a stake in the telecommunications company...

A profit of about $200 million could be enough to get Carl Icahn to stop fighting Michael Dell. Icahn is unlikely to push Dell Technologies Inc. to sweeten its deal to buy back shares that track Dell’s interest in VMware Inc. VMW, -1.02% , after reaping a paper profit of around $200 million on the tracking stock and VMware’s publicly traded shares, according to people familiar with the matter...

A Silicon Valley money machine soared with the tech boom, but grew greedy and obsessed with winning until its entire culture came crashing down around top executives who embodied its approach. This was no startup looking to “disrupt” a staid industry with a mobile app and a distaste for regulations, though...

The Securities and Exchange Commission is looking to limit whistleblower payouts after doling out tens of millions of dollars in a recent case. The SEC voted 3-2 Thursday to propose a limit limiting whistleblower payouts after an $83 million award in March to three tipsters – the largest payday in the history of the SEC’s whistleblower program—raised concerns that the jackpots may be getting “too large,” according to the proposal...

AmTrust Financial Services Inc. AFSI, -0.68% said Thursday that shareholders approved its plan to be taken private by two New York families and a private-equity firm. The bid was initially challenged by activist investor Carl Icahn, who recently owned as much as a 9.4% stake in the company. Icahn said the first deal was “happening at the wrong price at the wrong time” and was an attempt by the families and firm to manipulate shareholders into voting for a deal that benefits only them...

The new requirement for companies to report how much more their CEOs made than the typical employee may have produced some “oohs” and “aahs,” but that’s about it. If there is anything to glean from all the pay ratio disclosures, it’s that there needs to be more consistency in how they are calculated and reported before they can be useful to investors...

THE HAGUE--Royal Dutch Shell PLC RDSB shareholders voted down Tuesday a proposal requiring the company align its strategy with efforts to limit global warming, signaling support for steps the company has already taken on climate change. The resolution, put forward by Dutch activist shareholder group Follow This, won just 5% of the shareholder proxy vote...

Transparency on executive pay shows how the other half lives. Chief executive pay in the U.S. is among the highest in the world, according to a new report by the staff of Keith Ellison, a Democratic congressman for Minnesota. U.S. publicly-listed companies have begun releasing how much their CEOs make compared to the rest of their staff. The revelations are required under a 2015 rule in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010...

Activist investor Carl Icahn completely divested his stake of American International Group Inc. AIG, +0.59% while adding to his position in Herbalife Nutrition Ltd. HLF, -1.04% according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission late Tuesday. Icahn showed no stake in AIG for the past quarter, according to the most recent filing, after reporting a more than 40-million-share stake in the prior quarter...

The boards of Sprint Corp. and T-Mobile US Inc. struck an all-stock $26 billion merger that, if allowed by antitrust enforcers, would leave the U.S. wireless market dominated by three national players.

It is the third time in recent years that the two rivals have attempted the combination...

Shares of CommVault Systems Inc. CVLT, +1.69% shot up 11% in premarket trade, putting it on track to open at an eight-month high, after the company said activist investor Elliott Management disclosed a 10.3% stake in the data management company. That would make Elliott the largest shareholder, based on FactSet data. CommVault said Elliott, a hedge fund founded by billionaire investor Paul Singer, has nominated four people to join CommVault's board of directors...

Cars.com Inc. CARS, +0.30% said Friday it has agreed to appoint activist investor Starboard Value LP's nominees to its board of directors, and expand the size of the board to 11 members from eight. The appointees will be Michael Kelly, chief executive of investment firm Kelly New Ventures and former CEO of The Weather Channel Companies, Bryan Weiner, executive chairman of digital advertising agency 360i and an additional independent director to be agreed upon later...

Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Chief Executive Warren Buffett makes less than twice the company’s typical employee, the conglomerate said in a filing Friday. Buffett has earned a $100,000 salary for decades, and receives no bonus or other compensation. Berkshire said its median employee received $53,510 in 2017, or a ratio of 1.87 to 1. Berkshire’s second in command, Vice Chairman Charles T. Munger, has also received a $100,000 salary and no other compensation for years...

Activist shareholder Starboard Value LP said Wednesday that three of the directors nominated to the board of consumer brand company Newell Brands Inc. NWL, -1.35% have pledged to purchase $25 million of Newell stock with their own money if Starboard succeeds in its aim of replacing the Newell boards. Starboard and other participants in its solicitation own about 4.5% of Newell, which owns brands including Rubbermaid, Papermate and Elmer's...

As the public debates the merits of the recent corporate tax cuts, most people are dangerously oblivious to a bigger and in the long run costlier problem: that of picking the wrong CEOs to lead companies in the first place. After all, even the most aggressive tax cut affects only a relatively small portion of a company’s income. But a CEO chosen to lead a business impacts its entire bottom line and the livelihood and well-being of every employee and their families...

The Dropbox Inc. initial public offering looks like it will avoid some of the issues that plagued Snap Inc.’s stock market debut, but there are still governance and financial concerns. Dropbox DBX, +0.00% , an 11-year-old cloud-storage company based in San Francisco, officially filed its long-awaited IPO documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday...

Newell Brands Inc. NWL, -5.26% said Friday that it received notice that activist investor Starboard Value and Opportunity Master Fund Ltd. plans to nominate 10 members to the consumer goods company's board of directors . Newell responded by saying the board is currently comprised of "nine highly ...

Activist shareholder Elliott Advisors is calling on BHP Billiton PLC (BLT.LN) management to undertake a full, independent and transparent review of unification at the dual-listed mining firm by Feb. 20, when it reports first-half earnings. In a letter on Monday to BHP Chairman Ken MacKenzie, Elliott said that unification will deliver more than $22 billion in value to shareholders and cost only $391 million...

Activist investor Dan Loeb's Third Point LLC is keeping pressure on Nestlé SA, saying the giant consumer company needs to do more to realign its portfolio, including getting out of its stake in cosmetics giant L'Oréal SA. The activist, writing to his own investors, says Nestlé has taken some "important" steps recently, pointing to new board members the company announced and plans to increase margins, but believes more is needed. A representative for Nestlé wasn't immediately able to comment...

Some employees really don’t like how much their CEOs get paid — and that can affect the company’s performance. It’s common for chief executives to make significantly higher salaries than lower-level employees do, but that disparity can actually hurt companies , according to a new working paper by Ethan Rouen, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School. When a CEO is “overpaid” and employees are “underpaid,” the firm performance suffers the most, he said...

Netflix Inc. said Thursday that it plans to increase the annual salary for a number of its top executives in 2018, and cited the recently passed tax overhaul for the change. Most notably, Netflix NFLX, +3.47% Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos will earn a $12 million base salary in 2018, after bringing in a salary of just $1 million in each of the past three years, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission...

Are you concerned about climate change, or about social issues such as corporate board diversity? Can you as a shareholder have your preferences communicated to company management and perhaps impact corporate policy on these issues...