Imagine not working for 35+ years, getting a multimillion-dollar makeover paid for by Ford, and then being serenaded by Diana Ross and Big Sean at an Eminem-produced concert. That’s reality for Detroit’s Michigan Central Station, where a star-studded show will take place outdoors tonight to mark the beginning of the formerly abandoned building’s new life as a Motor City business hub.

To backtrack: Fenced in by barbed wire, the former railroad depot stood in disrepair from 1988, the year before the Berlin Wall fell, until 2018, when Ford bought the much-vandalized, 18-floor building for $90 million with plans to help revive Detroit’s economy, five years after the city’s bankruptcy.

$900+ million in renovations later…Ford is finally unveiling the refurbished station. It’s intended to house some of the company’s operations, other businesses, and startups, shops, an event space, and more community draws. Google’s Code Next Detroit, an education program, is slated to move in this month.

Don’t sleep on Detroit’s comeback

Central Station 2.0 is expected to bring thousands of tech jobs to the area and boost surrounding service-industry businesses, like restaurants and hotels. And it’ll just be one building at the heart of Ford’s planned 30-acre, $1 billion technology campus, which the carmaker said will be mostly running in three to five years.

On the up: In 2023, Detroit’s population increased for the first time in almost seventy years. Plus, offices there aren’t facing vacancy issues like in Los Angeles and Chicago. That’s largely thanks to the Ford family and the owners of Rocket Companies and Little Caesars, a triumvirate of billionaires who have invested so much in downtown Detroit that they own ~70% of its offices.

While that’s a boon for property values…locals are also worried about gentrification. Median rent in Detroit’s metro area increased 5x the national average in April, and area homeowners and small business owners told the New York Times that they’ve fielded countless calls from out-of-towners or realtors who want their properties.—ML

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Multibillion-dollar trial over NFL’s Sunday Ticket kicks off. The trial in an antitrust suit filed by fans over the NFL’s Sunday Ticket package for watching out-of-market games that aren’t part of local broadcasts on Sunday afternoons began in a Los Angeles courtroom yesterday, nine years after the case was filed. The suit claims that NFL teams conspired with DirecTV to keep the price high. The NFL argues its broadcasting deals are exempt from antitrust rules under federal law. If a jury agrees that the league’s actions were out of bounds, the NFL could face as much as $21 billion in damages, according to the WSJ.

NYC’s controversial congestion pricing halted indefinitely. In a last-minute switcheroo, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul pressed pause on the city’s plan for new tolls to cut back on traffic and raise revenue just weeks before it was scheduled to take effect on June 30. Hochul said the plan “risks too many unintended consequences,” but some economists and transportation advocates accused her of tossing out decades of work on the congestion pricing plan to avoid a sensitive election topic. Critics of the plan—including the governor of New Jersey, who celebrated its demise—decried it as a tax on commuters.

🛒 Dollar Tree mulls selling Family Dollar. Sometimes when your relationship isn’t working out, it’s best to break up, and that seems to be why Dollar Tree is thinking about selling off Family Dollar, which it acquired in 2015 for almost $9 billion. Yesterday, Dollar Tree said it was thinking about selling the brand off, after shuttering hundreds of stores last quarter. Dollar Tree outbid rival Dollar General to snap up Family Dollar, but the chain turned out to be in bad shape and Dollar Tree has been struggling ever since while Dollar General has thrived.

The only thing that has seen more delays than a Boeing spacecraft? The airlines using its planes on MDW. But the company’s first crewed spaceflight mission launched successfully yesterday, so execs could finally pop that bottle of unintentionally aged Dom Pérignon to celebrate.

With the Atlas 5 rocket’s 1.6 million pounds of thrust underneath them, astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore blasted off at 10:52am ET yesterday onboard Boeing’s Starliner capsule.

They’re headed for the International Space Station (ISS). The journey is expected to last 25 hours before the capsule docks on the ISS, where the astronauts will spend over a week before returning to Earth on June 14.

Boeing is still behind. We won’t even get into its expensive air and land messes. Nearly a decade ago, NASA gave as much as $6.8 billion in contracts to Boeing and SpaceX to shuttle its astronauts to space. And while Boeing’s first launch was delayed for seven years and came in $1.5 billion over budget, SpaceX is gearing up today for its fourth test flight of the Starship rocket and Super Heavy launch vehicle. A lunar variant of the Starship will be used as part of the NASA Artemis 3 mission to the moon in 2026.—MM

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A group of investors fed up with Wall Street are taking the bull by the longhorns and starting a national stock listing to rival the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq.

The Texas Stock Exchange is planning to file with the SEC later this year after raising $120 million from various investors and hotshot firms like Citadel and BlackRock, according to the WSJ.

Why make the TXSE when there’s the NYSE? The group leading the charge for an “anti-woke” exchange sees an opportunity to capitalize on 1) the Southeast’s skyrocketing economy and 2) growing disillusionment with perceived burdensome regulation at the New York-based exchanges. The TXSE pledged to be more “CEO-friendly,” drawing a clear distinction from the Nasdaq, which requires companies on the exchange to meet a diversity requirement or explain why they can’t.

Everything’s bigger in Texas. Many have tried and failed to compete with the established rulers of the stock exchange world, but with institutional backing and an industry ready to head south, TXSE might be able to pull it off. The state is transforming its reputation from a location for underperforming analysts to a new financial epicenter: It’s tied with New York as the state with the second-most Fortune 500 companies, and JPMorgan’s Texas employee count is now higher than New York’s.—CC

It’s bad enough when your mom asks why you’re not married and tries to set you up, but if you live in Tokyo, the government will also soon be trying to find you someone to have babies with. The city’s leaders are debuting their own dating app after learning that 70% of people who want to get married aren’t attending events or joining apps to meet a partner. “We want to give them a gentle push to find one,” the official in charge of the app told Agence France-Presse. Users will have to prove they’re legally single and willing to marry, plus provide proof of their income. It’s all part of a response to Japan’s declining birth rate. Japan had more than twice as many deaths as births last year.