From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, these are the top stories that moved markets and had investors, business leaders, and entrepreneurs talking this week on Cheddar.

  • Tariffs Sting Markets Markets ended the week ー and the month ー on a sour note following President Trump's shocking announcement that he planned to add a new front to the trade war. Trump said he would institute a 5 percent tariff on all goods coming from Mexico as a way to punish that country for the flow of illegal immigration over the southern border, despite the vast majority of those migrants coming from Central America. Under the president's plan, those tariffs would automatically increase by 5 percent every month until reaching 25 percent. Markets reacted to the policy, announced on Twitter, by plunging to make May the first down month of 2019 for all the major indices. See more.

  • Uber Earnings Uber ($UBER) reported its first earnings results as a public company, less than a month after an IPO that opened with a whimper. Earnings came in about where Wall Street expected, with the ride-hail giant notching a loss of about $1 billion on $3 billion in revenue. Uber shares remain below the $45 IPO price, having never traded at the value set on its opening day. Bookings rose 41 percent from a year ago, and the company says it's now averaging 17 million trips every day. See more.

  • Tesla in China Tesla ($TSLA) swung open the doors on its Chinese business, announcing pre-orders for its made-in-China Model 3 with deliveries to begin in six to 10 months. Tesla had teased a surprise announcement all week, with analysts assuming it had to do with the progress of the Gigafactory being built around-the-clock in Shanghai. The Chinese-built Model 3 is priced $7,000 below the imported version and is inoculated from tariffs. Electric-vehicle sales in China are on fire, up 118 percent year-over-year. Tesla stands to benefit from the popularity of its brand and its CEO, Elon Musk, among Chinese consumers, though it faces stiff competition from domestic Chinese luxury EV brands like Nio ($NIO).

  • Facebook Annual Meeting Facebook ($FB) CEO Mark Zuckerberg again cemented his power atop the social media giant he founded. At the company's annual shareholder meeting, multiple proposals that would have limited Zuckerberg's influence were put up to a vote. They all failed. Even if shareholders had voted to adopt the proposals, including one to appoint an independent board chair, it wouldn't have mattered. The way Facebook has its voting shares set up, Zuckerberg's vote is effectively the only one that matters.

  • Seven-Day Shipping FedEx ($FDX) will expand package delivery to seven days a week beginning next January to account for the explosive growth of online shopping. The company will also take back millions of deliveries that it currently outsources to the Post Office, which it says will make truck routes more efficient. FedEx didn't point to a company named after a river in South America as reason for the expanded operations, but said e-commerce has grown so much that the move was necessary. "Shoppers don't run on business days – they run every day," the company posted on Twitter. FedEx has said it believes the number of packages it handles will double over the next six years.

ーby Carlo Versano