Ferrari’s First EV, the $640,000 Luce, Fails to Impress

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Mississippi is breaking new ground for business at a historic pace. Amazon, XAI, Toyota, Milwaukee Tool, and GE Aerospace have all tapped into our deep talent pool, prime geographic location, and welcoming communities. This is bigger than megasites. Mississippi offers a thriving business ecosystem with affordability, greater collaboration with energy partners, and record-breaking speed to market.

Looking to expand? Break new ground at mississippi.org.

Imani Moise (0:33)

British energy company BP removes its chairman after concerns about bullying. Plus, the housing market's latest problem, soaring costs for materials like copper.

Ryan Dezember (0:43)

Data centers, the EV makers, the electrification buildout is colliding with homebuilders.

Imani Moise (0:49)

Ferrari launched its first electric car. The $640,000 Luce failed to impress investors. It's Tuesday, March 26th. I'm Imani Moise for The Wall Street Journal, filling in for Alex Ossola. This is the PM Edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories that move the world today.

We start today's show with leadership turmoil at BP.

The British energy giant has removed its chairman, Albert Manifold. WSJ has learned that the board was told he was verbally abusive to both junior and senior employees. The board also believes that he shared privileged information with people who weren't supposed to have it. Manifold didn't respond to requests for comment. The company has now had three chief executives and three chairmen since 2023 BP shares today dropped 4% in London.

And in Spain, Jonathan Andick, the vice president of fashion chain Mango, is temporarily leaving his role. Last week, a judge accused him of being criminally responsible for his billionaire father's fatal fall during a hiking trip near Barcelona. Andick said today that he was stepping aside to focus his energy on proving his innocence. Mango chief executive Tony Ruiz says he supports Jonathan Andick. He said that he expects that the traditional process will be resolved quickly and favorably. Turning to aviation, Delta Airlines is scrambling to hire more pilots. A jump in flight cancellations is jeopardizing its reputation for reliability. Data from aviation analytics firm Serium show Delta's domestic cancellation rate has been running above the industry average. And the airline's senior vice president of flight operations, Ryan Gumm, said in an April memo that cancellations tied to pilot availability are happening at more than 10 times historical levels.

Delta is now trying to shore up operations ahead of the busy summer travel season.

Stock markets were mixed today, with gains in chip and memory stocks helping the Nasdaq levels up 1.2 percent. The S&P also climbed, while the Dow slipped 0.2 percent. In the housing market, high prices for materials are making it more expensive for companies to build homes. WSJ reporter Ryan Dezember joins us now to discuss how the run-up in commodities is making an affordability crisis even worse. So Ryan, we've been feeling the burn of inflation for a while now, but the latest data is pretty staggering. In your story, one economist says that prices for materials used in homes like copper and wood rose more in the first four months of 2026 than they did over the entire previous three years combined. So how is that impacting the housing market?

Ryan Dezember (3:23)

You know, it takes a while for this stuff to flow through, but what we're seeing now is some of the builders' biggest costs after the land and the construction labor are the materials, lumber, copper. The average American home has more than 400 pounds of copper. You know, at record prices for copper, that adds up. Aluminum is nearing record prices. You also, of course, have the fuel costs. Diesel's up roughly 50% from before the war started, and so you have a lot of that being passed on. So it's all adding up and really adding to the price tag for building a home.

Imani Moise (3:56)

Does that mean that the price tag for home buyers is also going to go up?

Ryan Dezember (4:00)

Pulte, one of the big home builders, talked about this on their last earnings call, where, you know, they're very careful to say the cost of building a home is going up. They haven't necessarily committed to passing all that on.

For the past, really, two years or so, with high interest rates, we've had builders giving a lot of concessions to buyers to get home sold and keep their crews moving and building. We could see more of that. So it's sort of to be determined on whether that will balloon the price tag that home buyers pay later this year, or if builders will absorb some of that.

Imani Moise (4:32)

The war and tariffs have pushed prices for some materials higher, but also the AI boom. Can you connect the dots between AI and housing?