MEDIA

A federal jury on Tuesday ruled against Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska and Republican vice-presidential nominee, in her yearslong defamation lawsuit against The New York Times. The jury reached the verdict after two hours of deliberations. Palin sued the Times in 2017 after the newspaper published — and then swiftly corrected and apologized for — an editorial that wrongly suggested that she had incited a deadly shooting in Arizona years earlier. The case became a bellwether for battles over press freedoms and media bias in the Trump era, with Palin’s lawyers saying they hoped to use it to attack a decades-old Supreme Court precedent that makes it harder for public figures to sue news outlets for defamation. This is the second time a federal jury has concluded that the Times was not liable for defaming Palin in its editorial. The case first went to trial in 2022, and both the jury and the judge ruled in favor of the Times. But last year, a federal appeals court invalidated those decisions, setting the stage for this month’s retrial. It is unclear whether the verdict will be the end of the lawsuit’s eight-year run or whether Palin’s lawyers will again appeal. Outside the court after the verdict, Palin said she was going to “go home to a beautiful family” and “get on with life.” She declined to say whether she would appeal the verdict. “We haven’t talked about what we’ll do next legally,” she told reporters. Danielle Rhoades Ha, a spokesperson for the Times, said in a statement: “The decision reaffirms an important tenet of American law: Publishers are not liable for honest mistakes.” — NEW YORK TIMES

REAL ESTATE

The hotel that inspired Stephen King to write his bestseller The Shining is turning to the municipal-bond market to pay for a sweeping overhaul in a bid to cement its status in the film industry, particularly among horror aficionados. The new owners of the Stanley Hotel, which is in Estes Park, Colo., roughly 40 miles from Boulder, plan to borrow nearly $300 million this month to expand its facilities, bond documents show. The majority of the offering, which will be issued through a state authority, is tax-exempt and will be backed by revenue generated by the hotel as well as other streams. The project, which includes a new event center, is the result of a decade’s worth of planning by the state and the hotel owner along with cultural and film organizations around how to attract more regional tourism. Part of the goal is to tap into the Sundance Film Festival’s planned move to Boulder in 2027 from Utah. King and his wife stayed in the hotel for one night in 1974, and had the unusual experience of being the only guests as it was closing the next day for the winter, the author recalls on his website. — BLOOMBERG NEWS

CRYPTOCURRENCY

President Trump’s social media company has moved one step closer to transforming itself into a financial services firm that intends to market investment products, including cryptocurrency, to retail investors. Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social, which has become Trump’s main online megaphone, said Tuesday that it had signed a binding agreement with a cryptocurrency trading platform and a newly created Florida investment firm to launch a series of exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, by the end of the year. The move to market ETFs to investors is part of a strategy by Trump Media to generate a more reliable source of revenues after failing to attract sufficient advertising dollars to Truth Social. In the deal, Trump Media will team up with Crypto.com, a digital asset trading platform with more than 140 million customers, and Yorkville America Digital, a company with ties to the founders of Yorkville Advisors, an investment firm based in Mountainside, New Jersey. — NEW YORK TIMES

TECH

Kevin Systrom, the cofounder of Instagram, testified Tuesday in a landmark federal antitrust trial that his startup was starved of resources after Meta bought it because Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO, was afraid of the success of the photo-sharing app. “Mark was not investing in Instagram because he believed we were a threat to their growth,” Systrom said. Systrom’s testimony was among the most pointed for the government’s case that Meta had purchased Instagram in 2012 as part of a “buy-or-bury strategy” to illegally cement its social media monopoly by killing off its rivals. The Instagram cofounder made millions when Zuckerberg bought his company, but Systrom sharply contradicted Meta’s defense during hours on the stand in US District Court for the District of Columbia. Last week, Zuckerberg testified that the social media giant, formerly known as Facebook, used its deep pockets to invest in Instagram after its purchase. Systrom countered Tuesday that he left Meta in 2018 because of Zuckerberg’s lack of investment. At that time, Instagram had grown to 1 billion users, about 40 percent of Facebook’s size, yet the photo-sharing app had only 1,000 employees compared with 35,000 employees at Facebook, he said. “We were by far the fastest growing team. We produced the most revenue, and relative to what we should have been at the time, I felt like we should have been much larger,” Systrom said. — NEW YORK TIMES

PHARMACEUTICALS

Roche Holding AG said it will invest $50 billion in the United States in the next five years, joining rival drug makers in trumpeting American expansion plans as President Trump prepares to slap tariffs on pharmaceutical imports. The Swiss firm will expand and upgrade manufacturing and distribution capabilities in Kentucky, Indiana, New Jersey, Oregon, and California. Roche will also build a manufacturing plant to support the expansion of next-generation weight-loss drugs, though it didn’t disclose the location. The pledge echoes a move by Swiss rival Novartis AG, which earlier this month laid out plans to invest $23 billion in the United States to ensure its key drugs for Americans are made in the country. Roche said that its investments will create more than 12,000 new jobs in the United States, mostly in construction and manufacturing. Roche already has long and deep ties with the United States, including its ownership of San Francisco-based Genentech, a pioneer in modern cancer medicine and other therapies. Roche currently has more than 25,000 workers in the country. The drugmaker also reiterated previously announced plans to build a gene therapy manufacturing facility in Pennsylvania and a research and development center in Massachusetts. “Construction is either ongoing or just getting started” on those sites, the company said. Once all the new and expanded manufacturing capacity comes online, Roche will export more medicines from the United States than it imports, the company said. Currently, its diagnostics division has an export surplus from the United States. — BLOOMBERG NEWS