Good morning. A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit against Elon Musk and his social-media company that claimed thousands of laid-off Twitter employees weren’t paid at least $500 million in severance.

The judge in California’s northern district said this week that the lawsuit by two ex-Twitter employees incorrectly claimed the company’s severance plan was governed by a federal law dictating minimum payment thresholds.

• Wave of lawsuits: The lawsuit is one of several related to Twitter layoffs and severance payments after Musk bought the company in 2022 for $44 billion. Twitter’s former chief executive, Parag Agrawal, and three other top executives sued the company earlier this year, saying Musk owed them $128 million in severance. Musk has denied wrongdoing, saying he fired the executives for cause.
   
• Big cuts: Musk dismissed many Twitter employees after buying the company. In April of last year, he said the company had about 1,500 employees, down from around 8,000. Musk renamed the social-media platform and upended norms within the organization.
   
• Second chance? Judge Trina Thompson said the former employees would have three weeks to refile their claims, potentially giving them another opportunity to sue Musk and the company, now known as X.

Amazon faces potential U.K. probe over treatment of grocery suppliers.

A U.K. government agency said Amazon.com risks a formal investigation if the e-commerce giant doesn’t improve its treatment of grocery suppliers, a sign that regulators on the other side of the Atlantic are ready to step up scrutiny of the company’s market power and labor practices.

The Groceries Code Adjudicator, the watchdog that regulates relationships between grocery retailers and their direct suppliers in Britain, said that fewer than half of Amazon’s suppliers felt the company complied with its code of practice, according to a recent survey.

SEC ends probe into Paxos over Binance USD token.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has ended its investigation into cryptocurrency firm Paxos Trust in relation to Binance USD, a digital asset that Paxos issues and lists, the cryptocurrency platform said Thursday.

Paxos said it received a formal termination notice on Tuesday from the SEC, saying it won’t recommend taking an enforcement action against the firm over BUSD, a Binance-branded stablecoin pegged to the dollar at a one-to-one ratio.

• Dollar General has agreed to pay $12 million in penalties to the Labor Department to settle alleged safety violations at the discount retailer’s stores.
   
• Marathon Oil reached a settlement with the Environmental Protection Agency and Justice Department resolving alleged Clean Air Act violations at the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota.
   
• New York's financial regulator has adopted guidance to protect consumers from unfair or unlawful discrimination by insurers using artificial intelligence.
   
• U.S. Republican lawmakers are seeking a probe into Microsoft’s $1.5 billion investment in artificial intelligence firm G42, citing concerns about the transfer of advanced technology and possible ties the Abu Dhabi-based company may have with China.
   
• Elon Musk’s social-media platform X is in breach of the European Union’s online-content law, opening the company up to a large potential fine, according to a preliminary decision from the bloc’s executive arm.
   
• Australia charged a Russian-born army private and her husband with an espionage-related offense and said they planned to pass defense information to Russia, in the latest effort by the key U.S. ally to crack down on foreign meddling.
   
• Japan’s Ministry of Defense on Friday reprimanded more than 100 people including some top officers for mishandling classified security information, in a case that comes amid concern about the country’s exposure to hacking by adversaries such as China.

PepsiCo, after years of price hikes, sounds an alarm on consumer spending.

Inflation-weary shoppers are finally cutting back on potato chips.

For the past few years as prices soared, many consumers kept buying affordable treats like Doritos and Lay’s in lieu of bigger-ticket splurges such as restaurants, concerts or travel. But now, they are limiting their spending in all areas, said Jamie Caulfield, PepsiCo’s chief financial officer.

The one-child policy boosted China’s economic miracle. Now it’s paying the price.

China's one-child policy supercharged the country’s workforce: By caring for fewer children, young people could be more productive and put aside more money. For years, just as China was opening its economy, the share of working-age Chinese grew faster than the parts of the population that didn’t work. That was a big factor in China’s economic miracle.

There was a price and China is now paying it. Limiting births then means fewer workers now, and fewer women to give birth. A United Nations forecast published Thursday shows how quickly China is aging, a demographic crunch that the U.N. predicts will cut China’s population by more than half by the end of the century.

• China warned the U.S. and its allies not to “provoke confrontation” after NATO took the unusual step of explicitly identifying Beijing as a threat to its interests.
   
• Chinese President Xi and other top Communist Party officials gather next week for the Third Plenum, a once-in-five-years meeting to chart a fresh course for the world’s second-largest economy.
   
• U.S. inflation eased substantially in June, extending a recent slowdown in price increases that clears a path for the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates by the end of the summer.
   
• Most economists believe inflation, deficits and interest rates would be higher during a second Trump administration than if Biden remains in the White House, according to a quarterly survey of forecasters by The Wall Street Journal.
   
• In America's fourth-largest city, which calls itself the energy capital of the world—widespread power outages keep happening.
   
• NATO’s declaration this week that Ukraine is on an “irreversible path” toward joining the alliance offers Kyiv a strong gesture of Western support, but membership could easily be blocked if Donald Trump returns to the White House next year.

AT&T says hacker stole data on nearly all its wireless customers.

AT&T said a hacker downloaded call and text-message information covering almost all of its wireless subscribers, the latest in a string of major customer-data leaks.

The cellphone carrier said in a securities filing that the data, mostly from 2022, was downloaded in April but it hadn’t found evidence that the information was shared publicly. It said the purloined records didn’t include personal subscriber information, such as names, credit card data or Social Security numbers.

AT&T said the attack targeted a third-party cloud workspace that held information from “nearly all” of its cellular subscribers, mobile reseller brands and landline customers who interacted with its wireless customers from May through October in 2022. The company said the stolen records also covered a sliver of customers’ records from Jan. 2, 2023.

• Juries are going “nuclear” with greater frequency, imposing giant verdicts on corporations as they seek to stand up for the little guy.
   
• Climate-tech investments were frequently a bright spot in a largely gloomy venture market over the past couple of years. No longer.
   
• Corporate tech leaders are looking for ways generative AI can not only boost efficiency but also generate actual revenue.
   

🎧 Listen to Microsoft’s sustainability chief discuss the company’s plans to reduce carbon emissions and help establish new power sources for its data center and AI expansions.

• President Biden and his team were in a fight to stop a stream of Democratic defections from turning into a mutiny Thursday. Watching Democrats grapple with the questions about President Biden’s candidacy has become some Republicans’ new guilty pleasure.
   
• Restaurant companies are making multimillion-dollar bets that robots can be taught to cook.
   
• It’s time to confront an urgent question: Am I the leader I used to be?
   
• A California man got tired of his big house, so he built a small one in the backyard. Accessory dwelling units are having a moment.
   
• A Russian plot to kill one of Europe’s most prominent defense-industry executives signals a significant escalation in Moscow’s covert efforts to sabotage Western weapons production and weaken support for Ukraine, Western officials said.

Follow us on X at @WSJRisk. Follow Risk & Compliance editor David Smagalla @DSmagalla_DJ and reporters Mengqi Sun @_MengqiSun, Dylan Tokar @dgtokar and Richard Vanderford @VanderfordRich.

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