Eggs are at an all-time average high of $4.95 a dozen in February (and $12 a dozen in some cities). Why? For starters, there aren’t many. A very infectious Asian bird flu virus has hit U.S. flocks, and the only way to stop the disease is by slaughtering laying hens. Farmers have slaughtered 166 million birds, most of them egg-laying hens, since 2022. Since the beginning of 2025, 30 million hens have been killed, and the USDA said Wednesday that egg prices will likely rise 41% this year. The USDA has already paid farmers about $1.2 billion for the birds they had to slaughter. More money will help rebuild flocks quickly, but it still takes 18–22 weeks for hens to begin laying eggs again.

The Trump administration has a plan to stop the pain of egg prices, which includes investing $1 billion in helping American farms tighten up biosecurity to keep the avian flu out of their laying flocks, and the administration is in talks to import about 70–100 million eggs from abroad in the coming months. However, with 7.6 billion eggs produced last month, that’s not going to move markets.

In fact, what’s accounting for much of the price rise is a combination of fear and greed. Fear has U.S. consumers hoarding eggs, said Brian Earnest, lead economist for animal protein at agricultural lender CoBank. “We have this major reduction of supply due to bird flu, but you also have panic-buying from the consumer,” Earnest told The Wall Street Journal.

And then there’s Cal-Maine Foods, which controls about 20% of the U.S. egg market and sells to Walmart and other large retailers. As the bird flu hit the egg market, Cal-Maine reported an 82% increase in revenue to $954 million for the quarter that ended in November from a year earlier. Those numbers “were primarily driven by an increase in the net average selling price of shell eggs as well as an increase in total dozens sold,” the company said. That sent profits up 500%, and retail egg prices have nearly doubled since then. Back in 2023, some of the nation’s largest producers were found liable for inflating prices in the 2000s, which prompted calls in Congress for a new price-fixing investigation. “Egg producers and grocery stores may leverage the current avian flu outbreak as an opportunity to further constrain supply or hike up egg prices to increase profits,” a group of Democratic lawmakers, led by Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, wrote in a letter to President Donald Trump last month.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by MICHAEL & COLIN (@michaelandcolin)

The Usual Suspects

• Seven-Eleven minus 12%? That’s how much shares in the Japanese-owned convenience store chain plunged in Japan after Junro Ito—a top 7-11 exec and son of founder Masatoshi Ito—was unable to get financial backing to take the company private. With profits falling, 7-11 needs to find a way to cut costs and grow revenue, or it faces a likely takeover by Canadian convenience store owner Alimentation Couche-Tard, which owns the Circle-K convenience stores. Both U.S. and Japanese regulators are expected to fight a Couche-Tard (French for “late to bed”) takeover on antitrust and national security grounds. In September 7-11 owner Seven & i rejected a $39 billion buyout bid from the Canadians, which was later raised to $47 billion. Thursday’s share drop lowered the company’s market cap to about $37 billion. Seven & i says it plans to spin off its North American stores and take the new entity public.
• Amazon’s quantum chip: Quantum computing is being quantum; apparently, it can be both at Amazon and Google at the same time. A week after the search engine and internet giant said it had developed a low-cost quantum computing chip, shopping engine and internet giant Amazon said it has done something similar with a chip called Ocelot, which could slash the cost of correcting errors in quantum computing by 90%. I’m not sure what all that means in technical terms, but in business terms, it means a race is on for sector dominance that may be even more lucrative than the quest for fully independent generative AI.
• Inflation again: Even Fox News is getting worried that Trump’s policies will backfire. “It’s fine to say, well, we should have less illegal immigrants, but to ship people back that are already here in the workforce, contribute to the economy and think it’s not going to be felt, it will be,” conservative economist Harry Dent told Fox News Digital. “You got an overstimulated economy, and then you’re going to send [millions of] people out, which would probably reduce GDP] 1 to 1.5% right there,” he said. “It only takes a 2, 3, 4% drop in GDP to literally throw you physically into recession. So I’m just saying…it’s a bit ill-timed…a big trigger.”
• Boeing Bonus: Japanese airline ANA said it will buy about $14 billion worth of new jets from Boeing, Airbus, and Brazil’s Embraer. The carrier said it will order 18 Boeing 787-9s as demand rises for travel between Asia and North America.
• Disney’s sure thing: Maybe there is a way to stop the cord-cutting, after all. The Disney/WB Discovery cable bundle that hooks together Disney+, Hulu, and HBO’s Max at a significant discount is keeping customers subscribed, reducing what the industry calls churn, and showing there may still be life in cable. Some 80% of subscribers were still paying three months after they signed up, according to industry data, making it even stickier than Netflix, which had a 74% retention rate over the same period.
• Home again? Oh dear: Sales of new single-family homes fell 10.5% in January from December, down 1.1% from a year earlier. That’s likely due to continued high interest rates on mortgages as well as the rising cost of homes as materials and labor costs rise. None of that is expected to change as the Fed keeps rates steady, Trump’s tariffs on Canada mean timber will get more expensive, and Trump’s deportation agenda has halted construction across the U.S. as construction workers without permanent residence fear they may be deported. Meanwhile sales of existing homes fell 4.9% in January.. Sales of new single-family homes fell 10.5% in January from December, down 1.1% from a year earlier. That’s likely due to continued high interest rates on mortgages as well as the rising cost of homes as materials and labor costs rise. None of that is expected to change as the Fed keeps rates steady, Trump’s tariffs on Canada mean timber will get more expensive, and Trump’s deportation agenda has halted construction across the U.S. as construction workers without permanent residence fear they may be deported. Meanwhile sales of existing homes fell 4.9% in January.

What do you think of Big Business This Week? Tell us how you really feel in this survey!

Elon’s World

Tesla’s big share drop: Oops, Tesla’s stock-market battery needs a recharge. With an 8% plunge Tuesday, Tesla shares have given back everything they made since Donald Trump won the White House with the help of at least $250 million from Elon Musk. Why? At least in part because Musk seems to have lost interest in Tesla after joining the Trump administration. Last year, Tesla’s car sales fell 1% even as the global EV market grew 25%; most of that growth was in China, where local carmakers dominate the market (Tesla’s share is about 6%). However, Musk, who’s traditionally kept Tesla on a tight leash, has not announced any plans to tackle the falling market share. Musk may just be spread too thin. Besides Tesla, Musk is running SpaceX, X (formerly Twitter), and xAI, as well as his government slashing project called DOGE, but which could easily be called exGov. Still, the shares are up about 45% in the past 12 months and more than 550% in the past five years. Maybe it’s time to bail. (E)x(it)-Tesla, anyone?

Get Big Business This Week in your inbox every week—and read it before everybody else! Sign up today.

The Short Stack

• Back on the moon? Private space exploration took a giant leap on Wednesday as a lunar lander named Athena took off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Intuitive Machines, a Texas-based company that says its goal is to “commercialize our solar system,” built the lander, which is packed with Moon-monitoring equipment made by private companies, some of them funded by the U.S. government. There are rovers galore—Nokia is testing cell-phone equipment on the moon through a rover built by a company called Lunar Outpost for carrying the equipment around the lunar surface; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology built its own tiny rover, called AstroAnt; and Japan’s Dymon built Yaoki, an 8-inch rover on one side. Intuitive also built a “hopper,” a 30-inch metal cube with tiny booster rockets that let it jump about 1,000 meters (yards) in the Moon’s low gravity to explore inside craters and other places a rover can’t easily go. The Falcon 9 is carrying two more commercial craft: Odin, a spaceship the size of a microwave oven built by AstroForge in southern California that’s headed to an asteroid to see if it can be mined, and Chimera Geo1, a spacecraft the size of a washing machine from Epic Aerospace of San Francisco, designed for putting small satellites into orbit. Athena is the third commercial lander launched toward the moon this year.
• Crypto-crook crackdown continues: Although the Trump Administration is talking about being more friendly to crypto, with Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggesting the U.S. add cryptocurrency to its strategic reserves, the Feds (at least in New York) are still cracking down on crypto crime. On Monday, a Seychelles-based company that operates OKX, one of the world’s largest crypto firms, pleaded guilty to operating as an unlicensed money-transmitting business, agreeing to pay $504 million in fines and penalties. Prosecutors said the company’s failure to register with the Treasury’s anti-money laundering unit let it process billions of dollars in suspicious transactions. A lawyer for OKX said it wasn’t convicted of money laundering. The plea came as the SEC said this week it had dropped investigations or lawsuits against online brokerage Robinhood and crypto exchange Coinbase.

Trumplandia

• Russia? Nyet, spasibo: As Donald Trump pressures Ukraine to accept a deal to sell or give the U.S. access to supposedly vast mineral reserves, secretary of State Marco Rubio (Little Marco, as Trump once called him) said an end to Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine offered the U.S. and Russia “potentially historic economic partnerships” as well as “incredible opportunities.” More than 1,000 U.S. businesses left Russia or cut back operations there after Russian troops invaded Ukraine in 2022, according to a count last year by the Yale School of Management. Few seem enticed by the prospect of jumping back into a market where Putin decides everything, frequently seizes the wealth of oligarchs and corporations that displease him, imposes price controls, and restricts the repatriation of profits Plus, there’s the country’s supply chain that’s been ripped apart by war and sanctions, a severe manpower shortage, and 21% inflation that’s devastated middle-class consumers. “The Russian business environment is extremely difficult, the risk of expropriation is high, and the Russian economy is not exactly booming,” Agathe Demarais, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told The New York Times.
• Can it: Speaking of tariffs, the Trump Administration on Thursday added another 10% to the existing 10% tariffs on Chinese goods, according to a post by Trump on his own social media network. It’s not clear if the 10% is an additional 10-point hike or simply 10% of the previously planned 10% tariff. Trump wrote that he is punishing China for supplying fentanyl that he says is then smuggled into the U.S. from Canada and Mexico. Nearly all the fentanyl seized in the U.S. comes from Mexico, and the bulk of that is made from chemicals shipped from China, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Meanwhile, Trump’s plans to impose 25% tariffs on imported aluminum are sending tremors through the U.S. manufacturing industry that depends on aluminum. The U.S. produces only about 40% of the aluminum it needs, and imports enter at prices below those of U.S. makers, forcing American smelters to cut their prices to compete. But there’s no hope that production can increase anytime soon as it takes years to plan and build new factories. Only four smelters operate in the U.S., down from seven in 2020, and 23 in 2000. Rising electricity costs have been a prime driver of the drop in domestic smelting, shifting production to Canada, where cheap hydroelectric power is plentiful. Now, 75% of raw aluminum consumed by U.S. manufacturers comes from Canada. The Aluminum Association, a U.S. trade group, urged Trump to exempt Canadian aluminum from tariffs because it would take at least a decade to build new smelters and expand the power supply in the U.S.
• Media matters: Washington Post owner and Trump deputy-bestie Jeff Bezos said he’s transforming the paper’s editorial page into a platform to advocate for “personal liberties and free markets” and will not publish opposing viewpoints. The paper’s longtime editorial czar David Shipley is stepping down after apparently failing to greet Bezos’ changes with “hell yes,” the Amazon founder said. The Musk-launched cuts to USAID are also hitting pro-Democracy news groups, including some that continued to report from exile on Putin’s Russia. Cuts of about $180 million caused layoffs and cutbacks at newsrooms around the world. “It’s really a blood bath,” said Anya Schiffrin, a Columbia University lecturer who studies international non-profit media. “These are the only journalists who are holding governments to account in many parts of the world, and without U.S. support there’s just not a lot of other money available,” Schifrin told the New York Times. The White House clamped down on coverage of the Trump Administration by deciding which news organizations get to cover the White House itself. The pool is a rotating handful of reporters who cover every move the President makes and supply brief, detailed factual reports for other reporters who can’t go where space is limited, such as the Oval Office or costly overseas trips (news organizations have to pay their own way to travel aboard Air Force One). The pool is usually made up of mainstream media outlets such as the Associated Press, CNN and Reuters. “This move tears at the independence of a free press in the United States,” wrote Eugene Daniels, a Politico reporter and the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association. “It suggests the government will choose the journalists who cover the president. In a free country, leaders must not be able to choose their own press corps.”

About those Ukrainian minerals…

Amid the on-again, off-again deal for Ukrainian minerals that Trump wants as payback for the weapons the Biden administration sent to Ukraine (after Washington paid U.S. arms makers to produce them), a few things are becoming clear: Ukraine doesn’t have proven reserves of rare earths, but it does have materials like lithium, which are vital for batteries to power the solar energy revolution Trump has promised to shut down. Many of those minerals sit on land occupied right now by Russia, which is trying to cut its own deal with Washington. As researchers at S&P Global Commodity Insights learned, however, the reports of those metals’ existence is based on Soviet-era surveys conducted between about 1960 and 1980. Few, if any, of the mineral deposits have been mined, and Ukraine has little or no ability to extract or process the ores during war—and neither does the U.S. “Unfortunately, there is no modern assessment” of rare earth reserves in Ukraine, Roman Opimakh, a former director general of the Ukrainian Geological Survey, told Commodity Insights in an email. Out of six rare earth deposits in Ukraine, only one, the Novopoltavske field in the Zaporizhzhia region has proven reserves. (That’s where the Russians keep firing at a nuclear power plant.) A deposit of phosphates and rare earths, it would require an investment of over $300 million to exploit, according to a Ukrainian government report from before the war. The deposit sits untouched for 35 years, since the breakup of the Soviet Union. “To my knowledge, there are no economically viable rare earth deposits in Ukraine,” Tony Mariano, an independent geologist consultant who worked in Ukraine, told S&P.