Markets

It seems even Jack Dorsey has a character limit. After more than a year and a half of pressure from activist investor Elliott Management, Mr. Dorsey will step down as the chief executive officer of Twitter , the company said Monday. Chief Technology Officer Parag Agrawal will succeed Mr. Dorsey as CEO, effective immediately, the company also said, noting that Mr. Dorsey will remain a member of Twitter’s board until his term expires next year. Twitter’s stock was up immediately after the news, but lost steam later in the day.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is introducing several new employee benefits, part of a bid to attract and keep employees in a pandemic that has made many people re-evaluate their careers. The Wall Street powerhouse is now offering paid leave for pregnancy loss and expanding the amount of time employees can take for bereavement leave, according to a memo sent to employees Monday and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. It is also introducing an unpaid sabbatical for longtime employees.

Turkey’s currency crisis has exposed a key weakness in its economy: a near total dependence on imported energy to keep households warm and factories humming.  Turkey is surrounded by some of the world’s richest reserves of fossil fuels, in the Middle East and Central Asia, but produces little oil, gas or coal of its own. The country imports 93% of the oil and 99% of the gas it consumes, a vulnerability when energy prices in dollars climb and the lira slides.

Two payment options are vying hard for shoppers’ attention this Cyber Monday: “buy now, pay later” services and store credit cards. There’s a reason for the avalanche of offers. Startups and established players in payments want a bigger piece of the e-commerce boom set off by the pandemic, and some are offering competitive holiday deals to woo consumers to their platform.

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Clearlake Capital Group LP said it struck a deal to buy Quest Software Inc. from Francisco Partners in the latest sign of private-equity firms’ voracious appetite for software. The deal values Quest at $5.4 billion including debt, according to people familiar with the matter.

Wall Street indexes opened higher, putting stocks on course to stabilize after last week’s Omicron-variant selloff. Here’s what we’re watching in Monday’s trading: Vaccine makers said they were assembling teams of scientists to assess the new Omicron strain of Covid. Shares of  Moderna , Pfizer and Novavax gained. New Covid restrictions are rattling the travel industry again, although airlines said the busy Thanksgiving weekend generally went smoothly.  Southwest Airlines , Delta Air Lines and American Airlines were up in morning trading. Cruise lines Carnival and Royal Caribbean were also recovering from some of their big declines last week. Crude prices were also clawing back some of last week’s drop, and energy producers were climbing. Occidental ...

Dating giant Match Group is facing an ugly lovers’ quarrel. Investors could wind up not just heartbroken but nearly broke. Tinder co-founder Sean Rad and other early employees of the hookup app are suing Match and its former owner IAC/InterActiveCorp . alleging they knowingly understated Tinder’s value to investment banks back in 2017 to devalue the stock options of its early employees. Tinder was and is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Match.

Friday’s global retreat from riskier assets exposes a vulnerability of the broad market advance of the past year and a half: the rising use of leverage, or borrowed money. Traders said the Black Friday rout, which hammered stocks and energy prices from France to India to the U.S., doesn’t necessarily presage a broader pullback unless further bad news about the new variant of Covid-19 comes to light. But the reversal underscores the fragility of the rebound from the March 2020 lows, which ranks as the fastest return to record highs following a decline of at least 20% from a previous peak.

Big leveraged buyouts are back, and this year’s crop might just be a taste of things to come. Private-equity firms have announced a record $944.4 billion worth of buyouts in the U.S. so far this year, 2.5 times the volume in the same period last year and more than double that of the previous peak in 2007, according to Dealogic. So far this year, there have been five $10 billion-plus deals in the U.S., equaling the total in all of 2007, though still below the high-water mark of nine in 2006.