Top story for the morning: SpaceX borrowed $20 billion, Nike to lay off 1,400 people for automation

Israel and Lebanon extend a U.S.-brokered truce. Nike will cut staff for the sake of automation. And SpaceX attracted $20 billion as a loan before potentially the largest IPO in history. About these and other topics - in our review of key events for the morning of April 24.

Israel and Lebanon agreed to extend the ceasefire for three weeks after a meeting at the White House with senior US officials, US President Donald Trump said, CNBC reports. He said the talks were successful and the truce extension gives the sides additional time for diplomacy.

The U.S. also intends to cooperate with Lebanon to strengthen its security amid the threat from Hezbollah. The meeting was attended by U.S. Vice President Joe D. Vance, U.S. Secretary of State Mark Rubio and the U.S. ambassadors to Israel and Lebanon.

Elon Musk's SpaceX has taken out a $20 billion bridge loan to refinance most of its existing debt ahead of its expected U.S. IPO, according to documents for regulators, Reuters reports. The loan was provided by a syndicate of lenders, and in case of non-payment within six months after the offering, the company may be forced to allocate funds from the IPO for its repayment.

The loan replaced five debt lines, including loans related to X and xAI, and reduced the company's total debt to $20.07 billion, as of March 2. SpaceX had fixed that figure at $22.05 billion at the end of 2024. SpaceX's equity offering could be the largest in history with a valuation of about $1.75 trillion, and the loan itself is for 18 months with an option to extend.

Shareholders of Warner Bros. Discovery backed its $110 billion merger with Paramount Skydance, a key step toward closing the transaction expected in the third quarter of 2026, subject to regulatory approval, Yahoo Finance reports.

The deal will combine HBO Max and Paramount+ to form one of the biggest players in the streaming market with about 200 million subscribers and an extensive library of content. The deal also ends the rivalry with Netflix, which had previously pulled out of talks.

Chinese startup DeepSeek has released a preview of its new V4 language model, allowing users to test its features, CNBC writes. The model, like the previous version V3, is distributed open source, giving developers the ability to run it locally and modify it. The company claims V4's high performance in tasks with agents, knowledge processing and logical inference, as well as optimization for popular tools.

DeepSeek gained global attention following the V3 and R1 models, which have shown strong results at lower costs than Western competitors, the channel notes.

Nike announced it will cut 1,400 jobs - less than 2% of its workforce - as part of an effort to accelerate its business transformation, Bloomberg reports. The main impact will be on technology positions in the global operations team as the company simplifies its structure and more aggressively embraces automation, its chief operating officer Venkatesh Alagirisamy said.

This is another stage of reorganization under the new CEO of Nike Elliott Hill: earlier Nike has already cut corporate staff and laid off about 775 warehouse employees. Despite the growth of shares by 0.7% in the postmarket, since the beginning of the year the company's securities have lost almost 30%.

US Special Forces Master Sergeant Gannon Ken Van Dyke has been arrested on charges of using classified information to bet on the Polymarket platform before the operation to capture Nicolas Maduro, CNBC reports. According to the US Department of Justice, he was involved in planning the mission and a week before it made bets for about $33 thousand, earning almost $410 thousand, betting on the introduction of US troops into Venezuela and the ouster of Maduro.

Investigators say Van Dyke tried to cover his tracks by transferring funds into cryptocurrency and deleting accounts. He faces charges of fraud, unlawful use of confidential information and other offenses that carry up to 20 years in prison. The case highlights the growing risks of insider trading amid the popularity of prediction markets.

- Japan's broad Topix index was up 0.2 percent on April 24, while the Nikkei 225 was up 0.8 percent.

- Hong Kong's Hang Seng index was little changed, while mainland China's CSI 300 index fell 0.9 percent.

- In South Korea, the Kospi index was down 0.1%, while the Kosdaq was up 2.1%.

- Australia's S&P/ASX 200 was down 0.2 percent.

- Futures on the S&P 500 were unchanged, futures on the Nasdaq Composite were adding 0.4%. Exchange contracts on Dow Jones Industrial Average were down 0.2%.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor