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Shareholders in inhaler company Vectura have been stuck between two less-than-ideal suitors of late. Now, they must decide whether to accept a recommended offer from a tobacco company that could taint their ESG credentials.

Late Thursday, Vectura’s board put its weight behind Philip Morris International ’s £1.1 billion offer for the company, equivalent to $1.5 billion. The Marlboro maker’s approach is audacious considering the London-listed target makes inhalers that are used to treat respiratory illnesses such as asthma. Health organizations have criticized the move and warned that Vectura could be blocked from participating in clinical trials if it is owned by a big tobacco business.

The Carlyle Group said earlier in the week that a rival £958 million offer was final. The buyout firm probably didn’t want to get into an expensive bidding war with such a deep-pocketed competitor. Instead, it argued that shareholders should accept less money for ethical...

They were bored. Or worried about layoffs. Or tired of working hard for a meager raise every year. They got another job offer.

Now they have a secret.

A small, dedicated group of white-collar workers, in industries from tech to banking to insurance, say they have found a way to double their pay: Work two full-time remote jobs, don’t tell anyone and, for the most part, don’t do too much work, either.

Alone in their home offices, they toggle between two laptops. They play “Tetris” with their calendars, trying to dodge endless meetings. Sometimes they log on to two meetings at once. They use paid time off—in some cases, unlimited—to juggle the occasional big project or ramp up at a new gig. Many say they don’t work more than 40 hours a week for both jobs combined. They don’t apologize for taking advantage of a system they feel has taken advantage of them.

“It’s two jobs for one,” says a 29-year-old software engineer who has been working...

Paul O’Neill, a former U.S. Treasury secretary and Alcoa chief executive whose independence and blunt speaking style led to clashes with President George W. Bush, died early Saturday at his home in Pittsburgh.

He was 84 and had been under treatment for lung cancer. His death was unrelated to the novel coronavirus, his family said.

Mr. O’Neill’s unlikely career path took him from bored undergraduate at Fresno State College to Alaskan highway surveyor, federal bureaucrat, chief executive of the world’s largest aluminum company and U.S. Treasury secretary.

His quirky style served him well as the CEO of Aluminum Co. of America, or Alcoa , where he oversaw huge increases in profits and improvements in safety standards. Those traits worked less well when he was Treasury secretary during Mr. Bush’s first term in 2001 and 2002. After a rocky 23 months, President Bush fired him in December 2002. His apparent offense: straying from the president’s tax-cutting...

Electric bikes and scooters may be better for the planet than for your portfolio.

“Micromobility” company Helbiz makes its trading debut on Nasdaq on Friday, a first for the U.S. stock market. Like better-known peers Bird and Lime, Helbiz offers consumers rides on two-wheeled electric vehicles via a smartphone app. Helbiz is the market leader in Italy, with plans to expand in the U.S.

The bigger event for investors will be when Bird goes public later this year. The U.S. market leader announced a deal with a special-purpose acquisition company in May that gave it an enterprise value of $2.3 billion. Lime, which is backed by ride-hailing giant Uber, hasn’t followed suit yet, but the temptation to tap SPAC cash must be strong. All those scooters don’t come cheap.

Like ride-hailing, micromobility promises to fill in city-transport gaps by offering a software-enabled alternative way to travel short distances. One difference for investors between “mobility”...

Credit Suisse Group AG enlisted two heavyweights of European banking to join its board and help supervise risks after losing $5.5 billion from failed family office Archegos Capital Management.

The Swiss bank proposed Axel Lehmann, a former UBS Group AG executive, and Juan Colombas, a former lieutenant to Credit Suisse Chairman António Horta-Osório, for board election in October. If approved by shareholders, Mr. Lehmann will become chair of the board’s risk committee, a role vacated by Andreas Gottschling in April after shareholders refused to back his re-election.

Mr. Lehmann has worked at UBS for more than a decade, initially as a board member between 2009 and 2015, before joining its executive team as chief operating officer. He became president for personal and corporate banking and for UBS Switzerland, and then stepped down in January. While he was on the UBS board, he was chief risk officer for Zurich Insurance Group, where he spent almost 20 years.

Dan Loeb’s Third Point LLC is a prototypical activist investor, agitating for changes at huge companies such as Intel Corp. , Sony Group Corp. and Prudential PLC.

Now his listed investment vehicle is the target of an activist campaign of its own, and while the two sides are at loggerheads, shareholders are enjoying the spoils of the fight.

Third Point Investors Limited, a fund listed on the London Stock Exchange with $1 billion in assets under management, invests in a fund managed by the New York-based Third Point. Mr. Loeb is the investment manager of the fund, which launched in 2007 and allows investors who might not otherwise be able to get access to his strategy. It holds a grab bag of stocks, bonds and private companies mostly in the Americas and Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

In May, Asset Value Investors, one of the listed fund’s shareholders with a more than 10% stake, began clamoring for changes. The London-based investor, which manages...

Walt Disney Co. now has to pull off the difficult balancing act of entertaining people at home while also drawing them back out. The entertainment giant proved adept at both in its latest quarter.

Disney’s results for its fiscal third quarter ended July 3 showed both an acceleration in growth in its vital streaming business and a strong recovery trend for its theme parks. The first reporting period to mirror last year’s full shutdown created an easy comparison; combined revenue for domestic and international parks soared 867% year over year to nearly $3.2 billion. That also exceeded Wall Street’s forecast, with the additional surprise of domestic parks eking out a small profit for the first time since the start of the pandemic. The period included the reopening of the company’s Disneyland resort in Southern California.

Early signs of the parks’ recovery were evident in the company’s last report three months ago. But that report also included disappointing...

Six months before Los Angeles-based Shepherd University collapsed into bankruptcy in 2017, accounting firm BW CPA Group Inc. gave the school’s finances a clean bill of health.

State regulators called the audit “grossly deficient,” saying it missed red flags for potential fraud and left numerous errors in the financial statements uncorrected. The year before, BW CPA Group failed its second every-three-year peer review in a row, state regulators said.

Until regulators took disciplinary action in 2019, there was no way for the public to know that a fellow auditing firm twice took the rare step of giving a failing grade to BW CPA. The firm was banned from auditing last year.

Firms that audit private entities essentially police each other, often with no public disclosure. A Wall Street Journal analysis of the system shows that auditors give top grades to one another, hardly ever find fault with the biggest accounting firms and often don’t disclose failures...

The rapid spread of the Covid-19 Delta variant is raising borrowing costs for leisure-and-travel companies as debt investors recalculate the risks facing those industries.

Cruise operator Royal Caribbean Group borrowed $1 billion in bond markets Wednesday but the deal came at a hefty premium relative to the interest rate the company paid just a few weeks ago. Investors demanded a yield of 5.5% on the new five-year debt, up from the 4.25% they accepted when the company issued a similar bond in July. Royal Caribbean didn’t immediately return requests for comment.

Bond yields remain well below the elevated levels companies were forced to pay to raise cash during the spring of 2020. But the spread of Delta is forcing airlines, cruise operators, hotel companies and others to reduce revenue forecasts for the rest of the year.

The difference, or spread, between the yield of junk-rated bonds in the leisure industry and the yield of U.S. Treasurys has jumped...

Futures are wavering, putting the S&P 500 and the Dow on course to end a muted week near record highs after a blockbuster round of corporate results. Here’s what we’re watching ahead of Friday’s opening bell.

We are delighted that you'd like to resume your subscription.

You will be charged $ + tax (if applicable) for The Wall Street Journal. You may change your billing preferences at any time in the Customer Center or call Customer Service. You will be notified in advance of any changes in rate or terms. You may cancel your subscription at anytime by calling Customer Service.

Please click confirm to resume now.

Companies are pushing to narrow legislation that would require them to report cyberattacks to the U.S. government, as a series of hacks has added momentum to a nearly decadelong effort in Congress to approve such a law.

Emerging proposals in the House and Senate offer competing visions for how businesses operating most U.S. critical infrastructure would feed information to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which could then share it across the public and private sectors. Several businesses and trade associations have called for tightly defining the kind of hacks covered by legislation as well as a 72-hour period for reporting incidents, instead of the 24-hour period a Senate bill proposes, according to people familiar with the matter.

Investors have been slower to take notice, though. Advance Auto Parts shares are up 32% since the beginning of 2020 but have lagged behind a basket of retailers by 30 percentage points. Meanwhile, a basket of used- and new-car sellers’ stocks has done far better over the same period, even after excluding high-growth e-commerce names such as Carvana.

The blockbuster profits seen in the used-car selling business will wind down when the chip shortage eases. The effects on the car parts and repairs business, however, could prove lasting. The average age of cars and light trucks on U.S. roads is a record 12.1 years according to IHS Markit. In particular, there has been healthy growth in cars aged 4-to-11 years, which is deemed a sweet spot as they are often past their warranty and can be serviced by independent garages—an important customer cohort for Advance Auto Parts.

The scarcity of new vehicles and higher used-car prices should prompt more car owners to...

Hollywood directors can’t intentionally make cult movies, and companies can’t set out to create meme stocks. But there’s no harm in trying.

The owner of Regal Cinemas, the second-largest U.S. chain of movie theaters after AMC, said Thursday it was considering tapping the New York stock market. Cineworld , whose shares are currently traded in London, could shift or split its own listing, or it could hold an initial public offering for part of Regal, which accounted for 72% of its first-half revenues. Its shares rose about 6%.

The company has had a turbulent pandemic. Its cash flows collapsed amid widespread closures and the deferment of big movie releases. Audiences have been slow to come back: In July it sold just 45% of the tickets it did in July 2019. Its recovery hinges on the fourth quarter, when the latest installments of the James Bond, Top Gun and Matrix franchises, among other big movies, are due for release.

Given the huge debt load it...

The oldest millennials are approaching a new money milestone: their high-earning years.

After two recessions and a world-changing pandemic, the arrival of the high-earning years for millennials born in the 1980s are around the corner. Yet data suggest this phase of life might not provide the financial security other generations found at the same age.

With a higher debt-to-income ratio and other financial obligations already pressing on their budgets, some millennials entering their high-earning years have delayed homeownership and family formation, said Lowell R. Ricketts, a data scientist for the Institute for Economic Equity at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

“In perspective, you can kind of understand how the millennial generation is a microcosm of the K-shaped recovery that we’re seeing and also just the divergence in wealth overall,” Mr. Ricketts said. “I think you have to factor in the labor market changes over time as well, but there’s a...

It took just a few months for a 36-year-old entrepreneur to take over America’s most talked-about company—and make $1 billion for himself in the process.

Ryan Cohen rose to become chairman of GameStop Corp. with the verve of an old-school corporate raider. Wielding little more than a minority stake and a sharp tongue, Mr. Cohen pushed out GameStop’s executive team and installed longtime associates on the company’s board. The tactics made the co-founder of online pet store Chewy Inc. a favorite of the individual investors who sent GameStop’s stock on a roller-coaster this year; they call him “Papa Cohen.”

If Mr. Cohen has made winning look easy thus far, it is far from clear what comes next. From his perch as chairman, he has to revamp GameStop’s business, if only to justify the stock’s remarkable run. The stock closed Wednesday around $159 per share, up more than eightfold this year, but far below the high of $483 it touched in January. The company has...

BlackRock Inc. and other heavyweight investors were more willing to flex their muscles against companies in the past year, setting the stage for future showdowns over issues from board seats to climate-change disclosure.

BlackRock funds withheld support from 10% of board directors on company shareholder ballots, or more than 6,500 director election proposals, in the year ended in June.

That is up from 8.5% in the prior year. In addition, the world’s largest asset manager increased support for shareholder-led proposals. It backed 64% of environmental proposals, up from 11% during the prior year.

BlackRock cast key votes alongside other big investors in signature shareholder battles that forced companies to make changes.

Earlier this year, BlackRock, Vanguard Group and California pensions joined others in backing dissident directors at one of America’s most-prominent companies, Exxon Mobil Corp. It was the culmination of...

Online-dating companies might look like scorned lovers in the stock market these days, but that doesn’t mean they won’t find their happily ever after.

After a solid first quarter, Match Group and Bumble reported second-quarter earnings over the past two weeks that topped Wall Street’s expectations. But after significant gains earlier this year for both stocks, even big numbers have done little to keep the fire alive. As of Wednesday’s close, Match’s shares were down 7% this year, including a 12% selloff this month. And while Bumble’s shares soared on their first day of trading in February, closing 63% above their offering price, they have lost 32% of their value since.

Chances are, some of those losses will linger. In part because of Covid-19’s impact, Match’s third-quarter revenue guidance last week came in slightly below analysts’ forecast, excluding Hyperconnect, the Korean social-discovery app Match bought this year. Bumble’s guidance looked solid for the...

The economic impact of the Covid-19 Delta variant and rebounding output mean that expectations of global oil demand outstripping supply are fading, the IEA and OPEC said Thursday.

In its closely watched monthly market report, the International Energy Agency said that the worsening of the pandemic, as well as revisions to historical data, mean its global oil demand outlook has been “appreciably downgraded,” with some of this year’s forecast recovery shifted to 2022.

Investors have become concerned about falling commodities demand in China, where Beijing authorities last week canceled all large-scale exhibitions and events for the remainder of August. That, and other measures aimed at slowing the spread of the Delta variant, has in recent days spooked traders who were already worried about the fragile nature of China’s economic recovery.

The IEA cut its 2021 global oil demand growth forecast by 100,000 barrels a day, while upgrading its 2022 forecast by...