Business

Dave Calhoun, Boeing’s CEO, was questioned by American senators about recent safety incidents involving his company’s planes, such as the blowout of a door panel on a 737 MAX. Richard Blumenthal, the chairman of the committee investigating the failures, described Boeing as “an iconic company…that somehow lost its way”. Mr Calhoun, who is stepping down, apologised for the recent incidents and two earlier fatal crashes. Meanwhile, the latest whistleblower to make a complaint revealed that Boeing lost track of 400 faulty parts, and that some of them may have been installed on planes. Boeing’s share price is down by 30% this year.

Nvidia overtook Microsoft and Apple to become the world’s most valuable company, with a stockmarket value of more than $3.3trn. The maker of chips for artificial intelligence has seen its share price surge by 40% since issuing bumper quarterly revenues and profits a month ago, and expects sales to increase from the roll-out of its Blackwell chip, billed as the world’s most powerful. Nvidia is only one of a dozen companies to lead the S&P 500 since its creation in 1926. It recently split its stock, lowering the share price to make it more attractive to small investors.

Broadcom’s share price also hit new highs, after the chipmaker announced a ten-for-one stock split that comes into effect in July. Over the past few years big tech companies have been using stock splits to dilute the price of their surging shares, though Meta and Microsoft have notably not done so.