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20:05 EDT Fly Intel: Top five weekend stock stories - Catch up on the weekend's top five stories with this list compiled by The Fly: 1. Family-owned food giant Mars, whose candy brands include M&M's and Snickers, is exploring a potential acquisition of Kellanova (K), maker of snacks such as Cheez-It and Pringles, Reuters' Anirban Sen reports, citing people familiar with the matter. A deal would be one of the biggest ever in the packaged food sector, given Kellanova's market value of $22B, and test the appetite of U.S. regulators to allow consolidation in the sector. 2. Nvidia's (NVDA) upcoming artificial intelligence chips will be delayed by three months or more due to design flaws, a snafu that could affect customers such as Meta Platforms (META), Google (GOOGL), and Microsoft (MSFT) that have collectively ordered tens of billions of dollars worth of chips, The Information's Qianer Liu and Anissa Gardizy report, citing two people familiar with the matter. Nvidia this week told Microsoft and another large cloud provider about a delay involving the most AI chip in its new Blackwell series of chips, according to a Microsoft employee and another person familiar with the matter. 3. Berkshire Hathway (BRK.A; BRK.B) reported a jump in its operating profit earnings for Q2. Driven by higher insurance underwriting profits and increased income, Berkshire Hathaway's after-tax operating profit rose 15% in Q2 to $11.6B, up from $10B the prior year. The company also reported Q2 net earnings fell year-over-year to $30.35B from $35.91B. The net earnings per Class A share fell from $24,775 in Q2 2023 to $21,122 in Q2 2024. Berkshire said it repurchased $345M of stock in the period, which is one of the lowest quarterly totals in the last couple of years. Further, Berkshire's total cash pile rose to a record $277B on June 30, versus $189B on March 31. This largely reflects big sales of Apple (AAPL) as the company reduced its stake by almost 50% to 400M shares in the quarter. Berkshire sold a total of $77B of stocks in the period, mostly Apple. 4. PayPal (PYPL) stock jumped 8.6% after the company reported an earnings beat on Tuesday-and it was completely unfulfilling, Ben Levisohn writes in this week's edition of Barron's. There was nothing wrong with the earnings or the move. The results were good enough for even some skeptical analysts to walk away impressed, the author notes. In the big picture, though, there wasn't enough to get excited about. The publication still believe that PayPal stock will work its way higher. 5. Disney (DIS) and Marvel's "Deadpool & Wolverine" wins the weekend with another $97M in its second outing, the eighth biggest second weekend of all time and the fifth biggest for a Marvel Universe title. Overseas, the movie grossed another $110.5M for a foreign cume of $428.5M and $824.1M globally. The threequel has a 97% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, the second-best score ever for a Marvel title behind Sony (SONY) and Marvel's "Spider-Man: No Way Home."
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