Could Apollo Global finance Elon Musk’s bid to buy Twitter? Private equity firm Apollo Global is considering backing a possible Twitter buyout. It could provide Tesla boss Elon Musk or another bidder, like private equity firm Thoma Bravo, with support — through equity or debt — for an offer, reports the Wall Street Journal, citing sources in the know. Apollo is reportedly considering a collaboration between the social media giant and Yahoo, which Apollo owns. After Musk announced an offer to buy Twitter last week for USD 43 bn, the social media giant’s board adopted the poison pill strategy to prevent the richest man in the world from taking sole ownership of the company.

EV sales are defying expectations as consumers continue to buy despite rising costs: The cost of lithium-ion battery cells rose to an estimated USD 160 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) in the first quarter from USD 105 per kWh last year due to supply chain disruptions and sanctions on Russian metals, reports Reuters, citing industry data. Nonetheless, EV demand hasn’t been dented, even as rising battery costs put double digit markups on price tags. Instead, global EV sales in the 1Q2022 jumped nearly 120% y-o-y, according to data from EV-volumes. The trend flips the script on analyst predictions that EV sales would only increase when battery prices fell under a certain benchmark.

Shoppers are returning to stores, stripping e-commerce retailers of their lockdown-era edge: The massive shift towards e-commerce during the height of the pandemic, spurred by lockdowns that limited in-person shopping, has proved to be temporary as consumers are now moving back to visiting brick-and-mortar stores, the Wall Street Journal reports, citing industry data. The e-commerce boom brought in record revenues for companies like Amazon, Shopify, and Paypal, but this trend is now slowing down as digital retailers selling clothes, furniture, and other items that some of us prefer to see and touch in-person are seeing a slowdown in sales, with shoppers now creating their own new balances between online and offline shopping. “We’ve got over 100 years as a society of going into a store to buy something. That muscle memory doesn’t just switch off because you were forced to buy things online a couple of times during a pandemic,” one analyst at Bernstein Research said.