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Your Evening Briefing

Your Evening Briefing

(Bloomberg) --

A factory in a forest outside Berlin could soon churn out 500,000 electric cars a year, employ 12,000 people and pose a huge challenge to German automakers. Tesla’s first European plant will make batteries, powertrains and vehicles including the Model 3 sedan and Model Y. The carmaker feared by the fossil fuel industry and avidly shorted by some on Wall Street seems headed for its biggest year yet. Elon Musk certainly still faces troubles, but 2020 is looking like it might be his time

Here are today’s top stories

Twitter, like Facebook, played a starring role in Russia’s campaign to throw the 2016 U.S. presidential election. It’s also used by troll armies and bots to attack other targets, like the aforementioned Musk. So CEO Jack Dorsey recently turned to the quirky billionaire for advice on how to fix his troubled social media platform. This is what Elon told Jack to do.

There are rich Americans looking to pay their fair share. Really. Meet the so-called patriotic millionaires who want to shell out more taxes to address the nation’s massive income inequality. As for the mega-rich, a desire to “leave a legacy” doesn’t make fighting the climate crisis a big priority.

According to a new book, “A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America,” the president complained that American companies should be free to bribe foreign officials. As it turns out, the White House is considering legalizing acts of bribery by U.S. executives.

Toyota is pouring more money into another North American plant to boost production of SUVs and trucks, fulfilling U.S. consumer demand for the gas-guzzling vehicles.

Bombardier, the Canadian train and plane maker, is approaching the abyss once more, and it may have only itself to blame.

Bloomberg Opinion: Noah Smith writes how the new show “Superstore” portrays a life of low pay, irregular hours and heartless bureaucratic managers. In other words, the reality of post-organized labor America.

What’s Luke Kawa thinking about? The Bloomberg cross-asset reporter is talking semantics. Dallas Fed chief Robert Kaplan refers to the Fed’s Treasury purchases as a “derivative” of quantitative easing, a remark Luke contends clashes with Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s description of its program of bill-buying. Luke argues this is quantitative normaling, not QE: that the Fed’s actions are designed to ensure the proper transmission of the current stance of monetary policy, not ease conditions beyond that. It seems, however, that investors have settled on it being QE, and are attributing the exuberance of the stock markets to precisely that.

What you’ll need to know tomorrow

What you’ll want to read tonight in Businessweek

Global warming may someday make them redundant, but for now, there are some wealthy folks out there more than happy to build their own greenhouse. They’re willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars—or millions—constructing homes for their plants.

Your Evening Briefing

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