Good morning.
Uber kicks off its road show today, and has told investors that its stock sale may value the company at up to $100 billion. That’s less than the $125 billion that had been floated previously — probably reflecting the poor performance of Lyft’s shares, which have dropped 15 percent since its IPO last month. But it would still make Uber more valuable than, say, GE. Uber is expected to publish its public offering prospectus today. Still to come in this year of the IPO: Pinterest, Postmates, Slack and Zoom.
Meanwhile, Amazon and Microsoft are the sole remaining competitors in the Pentagon’s winner-take-all competition for its $10 billion cloud services contract. That’s a nice chunk of business. The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud – known as JEDI, with an intentional evocation of Star Wars – will be the data repository for the U.S. military worldwide. Oracle and IBM were bumped out of the competition.
News below.
| Alan Murray | |
| @alansmurray | |
| alan.murray@fortune.com |
Top News
Halloween Brexit
The Brexit date has now been pushed back to Halloween, which is a bit on-the-nose for what has become an ongoing horror story, but there you go. The new date was a compromise between those EU leaders who only wanted to grant the U.K. a short extension (e.g. France's Emmanuel Macron) and those who wanted a year-long delay so the country could really sort itself out (e.g. President of the European Council Donald Tusk.) There is nothing to say the U.K. may not ask for a further extension at the end of October, as it's quite possible that it will squander the time it's been given. BBC
Trump Taxes
Democratic lawmakers wanted the U.S. Treasury Department to hand over President Trump's tax returns yesterday, but Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said no-can-do. Legal experts reckon the spat will end up in the courts. Guardian
Fed Pressure
The IMF is not impressed by President Trump's pressure on the Federal Reserve. "Undermining central-bank independence would be dangerous," said Tobias Adrian, director of the IMF's monetary and capital-markets division. "It's very much rooted in the institution that they don't have to listen if they get calls" from politicians, he added. Bloomberg
China Talks
There's been a limited breakthrough in the U.S.-China trade talks: the two sides have agreed to establish enforcement offices that would monitor whether each side is implementing the pledges it makes. China has been worried that U.S. officials monitoring its policies would constitute an infringement of sovereignty, but now they'll get to do the same in return. South China Morning Post
Around the Water Cooler
Vale Charges
Brazilian prosecutors may file charges, ranging from murder to environmental damage, against the mining giant Vale over the deadly collapse of a dam at its mine in Minas Gerais, which killed some 300 people in January. Evidence reportedly shows that some mine employees knew the dam was unsafe. Wall Street Journal
Boeing Suppliers
Spare a thought for Boeing's suppliers, who are seeing their parts pile up due to the U.S. plane manufacturer's decision to cut output, while its 737 Max jets remain grounded. Analysts think Boeing is taking a $1 billion hit each month now, but it's harder to calculate the effect on its suppliers. The largest suppliers say they're still pumping out parts to match Boeing's pre-lull rate of 52 new planes per month. Financial Times
HSBC Turkey
HSBC's Turkey CEO has been acquitted of a charge of insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Selim Kervanci retweeted a video—one of those Downfall Hitler-parody clips—and a private citizen reported him. Kervanci said he retweeted the clip without watching it. This was in 2013, when anti-government protests were a big thing in Turkey. Reuters
YouTube Lesson
The House Judiciary Committee held a livestreamed hearing about online hate, with the session going out on YouTube. Guess what happened—so many white nationalist memes, anti-Semitic slurs and misogynistic insults flooded the stream that YouTube was forced to disable comments. Which somewhat undermined the idea that the tech platforms have a handle on this stuff. Fortune
This edition of CEO Daily was edited by David Meyer. Find previous editions here, and sign up for other Fortune newsletters here.
