Rocket Cos. acquires Redfin in $1.75B deal

Mortgage lender Rocket Cos. has agreed to acquire online real estate brokerage Redfin in an all-stock deal valued at $1.75 billion.

The transaction, announced Monday, gives one of the nation’s largest mortgage lenders an in-house network of more than 2,000 real estate agents across 42 states and Redfin’s popular home and rental housing listings platform, which draws nearly 50 million monthly visitors.

The deal values Redfin at $12.50 per share. Shares in Seattle-based Redfin soared 68.5% in morning trading to $9.81 per share, while shares in Detroit-based Rocket Cos. slumped 15%.

Detroit-based Rocket expects the acquisition will save the company $140 million in costs by eliminating duplicative operations and other expenses. Rocket also anticipates the move will boost revenue by more than $60 million by enabling the company to connect its clients with Redfin’s agents and, ultimately, offering those customers other real estate services that Rocket provides. Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman is expected to remain at the helm of the real estate brokerage, reporting to Rocket’s CEO, the companies said.

Tesla shares tumbles most since 2020

Tesla shares plunged the most since 2020 on growing concerns across Wall Street about the electric-car maker’s deliveries.

Its stock tumbled 15% on Monday after UBS Group AG’s Joseph Spak cut projections both for the first quarter and the full year. Robert W. Baird & Co. analyst Ben Kallo similarly lowered his estimates for Tesla deliveries on March 6.

Spak sees Tesla delivering only 367,000 vehicles this quarter, a 16% reduction from his prior estimate. He’s also no longer expecting the company to sell more vehicles in 2025 than last year, projecting a roughly 5% annual drop. On average, analysts surveyed by Bloomberg are expecting a roughly 10% increase for the year, and Tesla executives have said the company will return to growth in 2025.

Blowback against Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk is hurting Tesla’s standing in some of the world’s biggest EV markets early this year. In Germany, for instance, registrations plummeted 70% during the first two months of the year as Musk weighed in on the country’s closely contested federal election.

X outages blamed on ‘Massive cyberattack’

Elon Musk blamed widespread disruptions on his social media platform X on a “massive cyberattack,” which he claimed was orchestrated by a “large, coordinated group” or country.

Tens of thousands of users globally reported intermittent outages on X on Monday, according to the monitoring website Down Detector. New posts were failing to load for users in countries including the U.S., UK, France and India at various points throughout the day. The service disruptions lasted a few minutes each.

Dark Storm, a pro-Palestinian ‘hacktivist’ group, took credit for the attack via its Telegram page, but has not provided proof.

Editor’s note on gold report

A change made by The Associated Press on its data charts removed the market price of gold and silver from the daily report. The production team at the Southern California News Group is working on a way to get those commodities back into the chart.

Compiled from Bloomberg reports.