Tim Cook Took Apple to $5 Trillion. John Ternus Must Win on AI.

John Ternus officially became Apple's CEO today, closing out Tim Cook's tenure in which the company grew to nearly $5 trillion in market cap and yearly iPhone sales more than tripled. But the transition comes at a moment when Apple faces a fundamentally different competitive landscape—one where it can no longer dominate supply chains the way it once did, and where its AI efforts are seen as lagging behind rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic. That was the dominant business story in this episode of WSJ What's News, which also covered SEC probes into pre-IPO share offerings, Novartis pausing cell therapy trials after patient deaths, and the Trump administration's crackdown on immigrant truck drivers.

The SEC Investigates Pre-IPO Share Promises

The Securities and Exchange Commission is turning up the heat on investment firms that promise access to shares in hot private startups before they go public. The agency is asking money managers to prove they actually hold shares in companies like SpaceX and Stripe. The mechanism under scrutiny is the special purpose vehicle, or SPV—a structure firms set up to acquire shares of private companies and then sell stakes to outside investors who want early exposure before an IPO.