By Gram Slattery, Gabriel Araujo, Peter Frontini and Roberto Samora

RIO DE JANEIRO/SAO PAULO -Brazilian state-run oil company Petrobras on Thursday formally elected Jose Mauro Coelho as its chief executive for a one-year term, ending weeks of turmoil in which the government struggled to fill the top position.

Coelho, a government technocrat, pledged to maintain the company’s current pricing policy, a controversial topic that ultimately helped bring down his two predecessors.

The oil giant pegs its fuel prices to international crude prices rather than subsidising fuel for Brazilians.

This is an election year and many Brazilians have demanded that Petrobras limit price increases for gasoline and diesel, which have soared recently, hurting President Jair Bolsonaro’s popularity.

“Market prices are a necessary condition to create a competitive business environment, attract investment and new players, expand the country’s infrastructure, and secure supply,” the new CEO said during his inaugural speech.

He also said the company would keep divesting from mature, smaller oilfields and refineries, while focusing on the pre-salt and deepwater fields.

Coelho was Bolsonaro’s second pick to replace retired army general Joaquim Silva e Luna, who was ousted in March after disagreeing with the far-right leader on the firm’s fuel pricing policy.

Bolsonaro initially tapped well-known academic and energy consultant Adriano Pires for the role, but he ended up turning it down as he could not reconcile his consulting job with Petrobras’ command, paving the way for Coelho’s nomination.

Coelho previously served as the secretary of oil, gas and biofuels at Brazil’s Mines and Energy Ministry.

NEW BOARD

Coelho’s election came right after the company voted him onto its board earlier in the day, as under Petrobras’ statutes the chief executive is required to be on the board.

A new composition for the 11-strong board was also approved at the Petrobras annual shareholder meeting, which began on Wednesday afternoon and concluded early on Thursday, expanding minority shareholder footprint.

Since the government tapped Coelho, his ascent was widely expected. The rest of the board was a more contentious issue.

The government, which holds a controlling stake in the company, held seven seats going into the meeting while market investors had three representatives and company workers had one.

But market shareholders successfully increased their representation to four at the meeting, a list provided by the company showed, including billionaire businessman Jose Joao Abdalla Filho. As a result, the government is now down to six representatives.

Analysts at Itau BBA said the meeting was an important milestone in returning Petrobras to its day-to-day business after weeks of turmoil, “as well as to bringing more balance to the composition of the board and strengthening the company’s governance.”

Brazil-traded preferred shares in Petrobras were down 0.8% at 31.40 reais in afternoon trading, in line with a 0.7% drop in the broader Bovespa stock index.

(Reporting by Gram Slattery in Rio de Janeiro, Gabriel Araujo, Roberto Samora and Peter Frontini in Sao Paulo; Editing by David Gregorio, Kenneth Maxwell, David Goodman and Bernard Orr)

By David Randall

NEW YORK – With a stable of businesses ranging from electric cars to private rocket ships, iconoclastic billionaire Elon Musk has become the richest person in the world by building a fortune firmly planted in 21st century technology. With an all-cash $43 billion offer to buy Twitter Inc, Musk may soon emulate the tycoons of the past by controlling a media platform that contributed to his rise to fame.

Musk, the chief executive of electric car maker Tesla, revealed the takeover bid in a regulatory filing made public on Thursday and said he would take Twitter private.

Owning Twitter would be the next evolution of a polarizing figure. Musk has earned Wall Street’s admiration and ire by combining the free-flowing obsessions of aerospace visionary Howard Hughes with an intense focus on revolutionizing auto production reminiscent of Henry Ford into a new model of a billionaire who is as likely to take on short-sellers as he is to shoot a red luxury sports car into orbit, as he did in 2018.

“Whatever your feelings on Musk, he would certainly shake things up, with the only question as to whether he would make things worse or improve them,” said Michael Hewson, chief market analyst at CMC Markets.

Musk, 50, has a $273.6 billion fortune estimated by Forbes that makes him the wealthiest person in the world, worth $92.3 billion more than runner-up Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com Inc. Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa to a Canadian mother and South African father and later attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated in 1997.

He did not invent rockets or electric cars, nor did he found Tesla, which he has led from 2008. But his insight that Tesla’s electric cars should be high-performance machines with sophisticated, smartphone-style software revolutionized the global auto business, prompting established companies to try to catch up while spurring new, all-electric competitors such as startup Rivian.

While many initially expected Tesla to fail – which it almost did during the 2008-2009 financial crisis and in 2017-2018 when it stumbled through what Musk called “manufacturing hell” in the launch of its high-volume Model 3 sedan – the company began turning quarterly profits in 2020.

Wall Street has underscored Tesla’s achievement by lifting the company’s market capitalization to more than $1 trillion – more than all three Detroit automakers plus Toyota Motor Corp, combined – and making it the fourth-largest company in the benchmark S&P 500 index, the backbone of millions of Americans’ retirement savings plans.

At the same time, his company SpaceX, led day to day by President Gwynne Shotwell, has upended space launch industry incumbents by developing rockets capable of putting satellites into space and returning to Earth for re-use.

Perhaps more than any other person, Musk has helped bring bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies into the mainstream, with Tesla holding about $2 billion in bitcoin on its balance sheet and the company among the few to accept dogecoin as payment.

Musk has run through a trail of subordinates who could not keep pace or got fed up with his relentless demands. Even his largest shareholders have appeared to lose patience with him at times. Noted stock picker Cathie Wood, whose outsized position in Tesla powered her ARK Innovation ETF to the best performance of any U.S. fund in 2020, suggested at a conference on Tuesday that she is put off by Musk’s “antics” and has little contact with him personally.

Labor advocates have criticized Musk for hostility toward unions. Musk has also clashed with former business associates, state and federal regulators, and Wall Street figures such as short seller Jim Chanos of Kynikos Associates. Chanos came under fire from Musk for suggesting that Musk’s production estimates for Tesla and his tunnel business The Boring Company were unattainable.

“What bothers me is not so much the personal stuff and the personal attacks. I’m used to that. It’s the willingness to say things that I think he knows are a stretch, to be polite,” Chanos told CNBC in 2018.

Reuters, too, has faced his ire, with Musk tweeting in 2018 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1014800936198213633 that a reporter misled the public about Model 3 production and “followed that up with mean tweet to me” on his birthday.

GLOBAL REACH

Twitter helped Musk become a household name. He has 81 million followers and built a pop culture following large enough to help him earn a spot hosting the venerable U.S. comedy TV show “Saturday Night Live” in 2021.

A Twitter takeover would add Musk to the long line of U.S. business tycoons who solidified their fortunes with media properties, ranging from William Randolph Hearst in the late 19th century to Jack Welch’s 1986 decision to buy the parent company of broadcast network NBC while he was chief executive of General Electric.

Musk has used Twitter to go after short-sellers large and small. He also has posted everything from Dad jokes to polls on what he should do with his unrealized gains from Tesla’s surging stock price.

His Twitter content has been the source of an ongoing battle with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commision. Musk is bound by a 2018 settlement with the agency requiring him to obtain pre-approval on some Twitter posts after he tweeted that he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private. The SEC said he defrauded investors, though the settlement included no admission by Musk or an indication of innocence. Musk has since accused the SEC of “unrelenting harassment.”

“Twitter has been intertwined with Musk’s global reach, which is why he feels so passionately about the platform,” said Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities. “But for the Twitter board this is a living nightmare because unless they want to eat lawsuits for breakfast they have to find another bidder.”

(Reporting by David Randall; Additional reporting by Joseph White; Editing by Will Dunham)

By Emma Farge

GENEVA -The head of the World Trade Organization told Reuters on Thursday that negotiations on an intellectual property deal for COVID-19 vaccines were ongoing between the four parties, saying they were seeking to agree on the proposal’s final terms.

Since the draft compromise emerged in the media a month ago, pressure from civil society groups has been rising for the parties – the United States, the European Union, India and South Africa – to walk away from the deal. Other public figures have also criticised it such as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and former U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, saying it is too narrowly focused on vaccines.

“People are saying the text is now being rejected. It is not true,” Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala told Reuters by telephone. “They are still trying to iron out the last things. It’s just the last few tweaks,” she said, without elaborating.

Okonjo-Iweala, who took over the top job a year ago with a mandate to reinvigorate the 27-year-old institution, has been brokering the talks for the past few months in an effort to break a more than year-long stalemate at the WTO.

India and South Africa, backed by dozens of other WTO members, had proposed a broad waiver of IP rights for COVID-19 drugs and vaccines, but failed to overcome opposition from members like Britain and Switzerland who argued that pharmaceutical research required such protections.

The compromise proposal that Okonjo-Iweala referred to, if finalised among the four negotiators, still needs to be presented to all 164 WTO members which each hold a veto.

No date has yet been fixed for that meeting.

Okonjo-Iweala said in the same interview that she plans to meet U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai next week to discuss a ministerial trade conference at the WTO’s Geneva headquarters in June and to brief U.S. Congress.

(Reporting by Emma Farge; editing by Diane Craft and Stephen Coates)

SANTIAGO – Chilean President Gabriel Boric faces an economic slowdown and high inflation, which conflicts with his goal to expand social programs, and could increase pressure for more financial stimulus, according to a Bank of America report released on Thursday.

The government recently announced a $3.7 billion economic recovery plan to support sectors still affected by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and while the report states the plan is “reasonable and targeted so far … there will be pressure to spend more.”

The report says that higher food prices and a weakening economy clash with the population’s high expectations of reform from the new government and the drafting of a new constitution, putting pressure on more spending.

On Tuesday, the government presented a limited pension withdrawal plan in an attempt to block a larger withdrawal promoted by legislators.

The bank said that while the government’s limited proposal would have less impact on inflation as it represents a fifth of the money from the larger withdrawal, it still presents risks for the economy and prices.

“This is naturally less damaging than a full pension withdrawal, but it increases disposable income and may have some impact on demand and inflation,” the bank said.

The report also said that Chile’s central bank has taken a “dovish rhetoric” on raising interest rates given fears of a recession, but this will be “tested by recent inflation surprises.”

In March, Chile reported a monthly inflation rate of 1.9%, the highest level since 1993.

A separate report from Capital Economics predicts Chile’s central bank will deliver at least 200 basis points of additional rate hikes in the current cycle, to 9%.

“That’s more tightening than the path implied by the central bank’s rate corridor as well as the latest analyst consensus,” the Capital Economics report stated.

(Reporting by Carolina Pulice and Fabian Cambero; Editing by Sandra Maler)

By Elizabeth Howcroft

LONDON – Crypto entrepreneur Sina Estavi made headlines in March 2021 when he paid $2.9 million for an NFT of Twitter boss Jack Dorsey’s first tweet. But his efforts to re-sell it have run aground, with a top bid of just $6,800 as of Thursday.

The initial purchase was at the time among the most expensive sales of a non-fungible token, or NFT, and came amid a flurry of interest in the niche crypto assets which have since generated billions of dollars in sales.

Estavi put the tweet up for resale on the popular NFT marketplace OpenSea last week, initially asking for $48 million.

That price tag was removed after offers in the first week were in the low hundreds of dollars. As of Thursday, the highest bid was 2.2 of the cryptocurrency ether – equivalent to around $6,800.

“My offer to sell was high and not everyone could afford it,” Estavi, who was recently freed from jail in Iran, told Reuters via Twitter direct message, adding that he was no longer sure if he would sell the NFT.

“It’s important to me who wants to buy it, I will not sell this NFT to anyone because I do not think everyone deserves this NFT,” Estavi said.

NFTs are a form of crypto asset which can record the ownership of a digital file such as an image, video or text.

There is no guarantee of an NFT’s value and the market is rife with scams, fraud, counterfeits and market manipulation.

But Estavi was confident in the value of his purchase.

“This NFT is not just a tweet, this is the Mona Lisa of the digital world,” he said.

“VICTIM OF CRYPTO”

Estavi, who lives in Malaysia, said he had been arrested last May during a trip to Iran and held in solitary confinement until he was freed in February. Iranian state media reported in May 2021 that he was accused of “disrupting the country’s economic system”.

Estavi said he had been arrested because of the growth of his crypto exchange, Bridge Oracle, and described himself as a “victim of crypto”.

Reuters was unable to independently verify these details.

“I need the support of the cryptocurrency community,” Estavi told Reuters.

While announcing the NFT sale in a tweet on April 6, he pledged to give 50% of the proceeds – which he expected to be at least $25 million – to charity.

He said the rest would go to support Bridge Oracle.

(Reporting by Elizabeth Howcroft; Editing by Catherine Evans)

By Jane Lanhee Lee

(Reuters) – Automaker Stellantis has signed a multiyear deal to use Qualcomm’s next-generation connected-car technology in its vehicle lineup, the companies said on Thursday.

Fourteen Stellantis brands, including Peugeot, Fiat and Jeep, will use Qualcomm’s vehicle cockpit and 5G telematics technology starting in 2024 with the Maserati brand being the first out the gate, said the companies, which did not disclose the deal value.

Stellantis Chief Executive Carlos Tavares said in a statement the collaboration helps the company more closely manage the complete electronics supply chain. 

Qualcomm general manager of automotive, Nakul Duggal, told Reuters more automakers are working directly with chip makers rather than just relying on their other suppliers to act as a go-between.

“If you go back even a couple of years, it was quite uncommon for (automakers) to make a decision like this,” Duggal said. “This is now becoming much more common.”

He added Qualcomm’s recent acquisition of self-driving tech software company Arriver gives its so-called “digital chassis” the ability to offer a full set of driver assistance and self-driving capabilities in addition to cockpit and telematic technology. But the deal with Stellantis this time does not include that newer offering.

Qualcomm said that since it first unveiled its driver assistance and self-driving system – called Snapdragon Ride – in 2020, its automotive business deal pipeline has increased to $13 billion last year from $3 billion in 2017.

In a statement the two companies said the in-car communication and infotainment systems for Stellantis is being designed and engineered together with tech giant Amazon.com and Taiwanese manufacturing company Foxconn. 

(The story is updated to correct spelling of Qualcomm automotive general manager’s last name to Duggal)

(Reporting by Jane Lanhee Lee; editing by Ben Klayman and Cynthia Osterman)

By Sinéad Carew

(Reuters) – Wall Street stocks finished lower while bond yields and the dollar rose on Thursday as investors worried about the potential for aggressive U.S. policy tightening as other central banks around the world moved to reduce support.

The benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury yield jumped, following two days of declines, after a flurry of U.S. economic data such as retail sales and jobless claims and the European Central Bank’s announcement of less aggressive than expected tightening plans.

New York Fed President John Williams said on Thursday that the U.S. Federal Reserve should reasonably consider raising interest rates by a half percentage point at its next meeting in May, which was seen as a further sign that even more cautious policymakers are on board with bigger rate hikes.

This was after the ECB said it plans to cut bond purchases – known as quantitative easing – this quarter, then end them at some point in the third quarter.

Investors also eyed hefty rate hikes by New Zealand’s central bank and the Bank of Canada, and a surprise rate hike by the Bank of Korea as well as policy tightening by the Monetary Authority of Singapore.

These moves all exacerbated bond yield increases and stock price declines, according to Mona Mahajan, senior investment strategist at Edward Jones who also noted that Thursday’s data showed the Fed’s need to act fast.

“All systems are go for the Fed to move pretty aggressively,” said Mahajan. “Generally it’s a global battle to fight inflationary pressures.”

U.S. stocks had gained on Wednesday on hopes that price increases could be peaking. But Robert Pavlik, senior portfolio manager at Dakota Wealth in Fairfield, Connecticut, saw Thursday’s trading action as a sign that there was little conviction behind those hopes.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 113.36 points, or 0.33%, to 34,451.23 while the S&P 500 lost 54 points, or 1.21%, to 4,392.59 and the Nasdaq Composite dropped 292.51 points, or 2.14%, to 13,351.08.

After the pan-European STOXX 600 index rose 0.67% and MSCI’s gauge of stocks across the globe shed 0.71%.

“Today’s probably the right reaction,” said Sameer Samana, senior global market strategist at Wells Fargo Investment Institute in St. Louis. “Until inflation is under control, it’s not under control. There’s too much uncertainty.”

Samana also pointed to the tone of the ECB’s comments about threats to growth heading in the wrong direction will risks to inflation are “to the upside.”

Meanwhile in forex, the euro plunged to a two-year low against the dollar as comments from ECB President Christine Lagarde were viewed as a sign that the bank was in no rush to raise interest rates.

The dollar index rose 0.524%, with the euro down 0.52% to $1.0828.

The Japanese yen weakened 0.21% versus the greenback at 125.94 per dollar, while Sterling was last trading at $1.3076, down 0.30% on the day.

Benchmark 10-year notes last fell 36/32 in price to yield 2.8275%, from 2.689% late on Wednesday.

Along with the moves by Seoul and Singapore, New Zealand’s central bank raised interest rates by a hefty 50 basis points on Wednesday, the biggest hike in over two decades. The Bank of Canada also raised rates by the same level, making its biggest single move in more than two decades and flagging more hikes to come.

GRAPHIC: The rate hiking cycle is off https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/mkt/akvezjbkwpr/rates1404.PNG

Oil prices rose on Thursday after an early decline as investors covered short positions ahead of the long weekend and on news that the European Union might phase in a ban on Russian oil imports.[0/R]

U.S. crude rose 2.02% to $106.36 per barrel and Brent was at $111.41, up 2.42% on the day.

Gold eased on Thursday after the dollar strengthened and yields rose as investors geared up for U.S. interest rate hikes, but safe-haven demand triggered by the Ukraine crisis and mounting inflation kept bullion on track for a weekly gain.

Spot gold was last down 0.3% to $1,971.40 an ounce.

(Additional reporting by Tom Wilson in London; Editing by Bernadette Baum, Susan Fenton, Cynthia Osternman and Sandra Maler)