Bloomberg - Evening Briefing - Tesla opens in Xinjiang

Tesla is opening a showroom in China’s Xinjiang region, where several nations and international groups say more than 1 million Uyghur Muslims have been held in internment camps. The electric vehicle maker run by Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and now worth more than $300 billion, revealed its new outpost a week after President Joe Biden signed a U.S. law banning imports from the region unless companies can prove the materials were not made through forced labor. The U.S. and other countries have also announced a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing 2022 Olympic Games. “As the first Tesla center in Xinjiang,” the company announced, “the store integrates sales, after-sales and delivery services, offering Xinjiang users one-stop service and escorting Tesla owners’ journey in western China.” —David E. Rovella

Bloomberg is tracking the coronavirus pandemic and the progress of global vaccination efforts.

Nevertheless, Tesla is off to a strong start financially in 2022. The electric-car maker smashed its quarterly record for deliveries in what one analyst called a “trophy-case” performance. The company’s shares jumped 14% in New York, their biggest gain since March and best start to a year since Tesla went public more than a decade ago. Here’s your markets wrap.

Banking on cheap stocks to outperform shares of faster-growing companies has been a losing proposition for years. But plenty of fund managers say they expect that to change in 2022, and this is why.

Apple’s stock-market value briefly rose above $3 trillion on Monday, shattering yet another record and underscoring how the pandemic has turbocharged Big Tech’s decades-long rise.

Shoppers wait in line at the Fifth Avenue Apple Store in New York City on Dec. 27. U.S. holiday sales jumped 8.5% from last year as consumers spent more money on clothes, jewelry and electronics. Photographer: Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg

A string of new studies has lent credence to initial suspicions about the omicron variant: Even as case numbers soar to records, severe cases and hospitalizations have yet to follow. The data, some scientists say, might signal a new chapter of the pandemic. “We’re now in a totally different phase,” said Monica Gandhi, an immunologist at the University of California, San Francisco. Here’s the latest on the pandemic.

With tensions rising as Russian troops mass on Ukraine’s border and China sends more military aircraft near Taiwan, worries over potential miscalculation have made nuclear weapons a critical issue once again. Perhaps with that in mind, the world’s leading nuclear-weapons states—U.S., Russia, China, France and the U.K.—issued a joint communique Monday pledging to reduce the risk of thermonuclear war.  

A Trident II missile, capable of carrying up to 14 nuclear warheads, being launched from an Ohio-class U.S. nuclear submarine Source: Getty Images/Hulton Archive

U.S. intelligence agencies (among others) long ago concluded Russia’s Vladimir Putin sought to tilt the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections in favor of Republican Donald Trump. Now it seems the Justice Department has a Kremlin insider who could shed light on the alleged hacking of Democratic Party emails at the center of the first alleged effort. In the days before Christmas, U.S. officials in Boston unveiled insider trading charges against a Russian tech tycoon they had been pursuing for months. But there may be a lot more to the case of Vladislav Klyushin.

Investigators located the ignition point of the devastating Boulder County, Colorado, wildfire that engulfed more than 1,000 buildings across drought-parched grasslands at the base of the Rocky Mountains. The state’s governor cited the accelerating climate crisis as a factor.

• Here’s just about everything Wall Street expects in 2022.
• This is what crypto analysts expect from Bitcoin this year.
• There’s no end in sight to the auto-sales slump: it’s about the chips.
• Chuck Schumer to press for Senate vote on changing filibuster rule.
• Biden launches plan to fight meatpacking giants on inflation.
• Bloomberg Opinion: Why this is the year to buy a luxury electric car.
• The next video game from BioShock’s creator is in development hell.

Chinese developer shares dropped following local media reports that China Evergrande Group has been ordered to tear down apartment blocks in a development in Hainan province. Evergrande halted trading in its shares and said the order affected more than three dozen buildings but had no impact on the rest of the development. Here’s your Evergrande update.

Unfinished apartment buildings at the construction site of a China Evergrande Group development in Wuhan, China  Photographer: Andrea Verdelli/Bloomberg

Like getting the Evening Briefing? Subscribe to Bloomberg.com for unlimited access to trusted, data-driven journalism and gain expert analysis from exclusive subscriber-only newsletters.

Cities are changing fast. Sign up for the Bloomberg CityLab Daily newsletter to keep pace with the latest news and perspectives on communities and neighborhoods around the world.