STREET LIFE
GM--Yes, GM--Boosts Market
Kerkorian's offer revs General Motors, and the Dow with it, as the markets' May heyday continues.
May 04 2005
By Andy Serwer
Fortune.com

A boost from the unlikeliest source. GM ? yes, that's right, GM ? and some fairly ducky earnings from the likes of Time Warner sent stocks broadly higher on Wednesday. Nice and strong at the close. Yah! Dow up 127 points or 1.24% to 10,384. Naz climbed 29 to 1962, up 1.5%. Hey, I just love May, the Dow's up almost 200 points (already!)?. Hey, watch me, Kilroy (was here. A ubiquitous WWII character. Read about the legend below.* Thanks Blue.), I mean Andy Serwer, on CNN's "American Morning" and "In the Money." Read Loose Change to find out what's worse: marijuana or e-mail. (Or better?) Here's what is going on:

YARD: First off, congrats to Howard Schultz of Starbucks. Glad to see your Sonics win. They HAD to do that to show they were real. Great for Ray Allen and nice to see Big Nick Collison really playing. Kings have just been disassembled! Have a Chantico on me babe!?. So Time Warner gets a nice pop today after a positive earnings announcement. That cable is rockin'. TWX climbed 60 cents to $17.28 (3.6%). Okay, now let's see if they can keep it going!? Morgan Stanley news? Of course there is: The firm named Shearman & Sterling senior partner David Heleniak as vice chairman in charge of all legal and regulatory affairs. Reuters puts it thusly: "The hire marks a career setback for the firm's longtime chief legal officer, Donald Kempf, who has come under criticism for his handling of lawsuits and regulatory actions. Kempf, **, had reported to Purcell but now will report to Heleniak." MWD was up 1.9%, though, a bit more than the overall market.? My Yahoo problemos continue, but I notice that I'm only having trouble when I'm using IE. When I go to another browser, i.e. (hee hee) Nettie 6, Yahoo works just fine. Hmmm? A competitive thing with MSFT? (What do you think, Fred?)? EA was a big loser today, falling 6.5% after saying its biz needs work. Save your spittle ? yes, I wrote them up recently, saying nice things? Renal Care way up on a German buyout and Renovis doubled on news that a stroke drug it has licensed to AstraZ showed effectiveness in a study. Wonder if I would show effectiveness in a study. Might show something, but probably not effectiveness. Maybe 'bold, new whiteness' or some such?. Okay, enuff!

CAPTAIN KIRK: Hard to believe he is at it again. The man who tried to take over Chrysler with Lee Iacocca. The man who bought and sold MGM ? three times. Who still controls the MGM Grand. Kirk Kerkorian, the 87-year-old billionaire, is at it again. He's looking to increase his stake in GM from some 4% to near 9%, for around $850 mil. Maybe there's some value in GM at $31. Some say GMAC, for instance, is worth more than the whole rest of the company. (Produced over $2.5 billion, or 80%, of company earnings last year.) You know Kirk isn't going to sit still. This coming a day after it was reported that GM's sales fell 7% in April. GM shares climbed by over 18% today ($5) to nearly $33 a share. Stunning! Stay tuned to this one. (The name for his company Tracinda, by the way, comes from his two daughters, Tracy and Linda.)

ENRON MOVIE UPDATE: In addition to fabulous reviews, the film, based on the book by our own Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, is off to boffo start at the box office (especially by documentary standards). First week of selected nationwide rollout, 49 theaters this past wknd, did better per-theater average than anything on the charts. Ranked #19 overall, with $412,000 gross last weekend. Will be in lots more theaters starting Friday. Our special: http://www.fortune.com/fortune/speci...027/enron.html

IDENTITY THEFT, HOW BAD IS IT REALLY? This from one who knows: "You know, I do not worry so much about data theft. If a tape gets lost, the person loading it would have to know what format the data is in. The bytes themselves are meaningless. It is not stored in ASCII text, but in some proprietary format of whatever database it is from. And our backups, at least, are usually splattered across several tapes, so that often to do a restore I need to get 2 or 3 tapes. So having a tape, in itself, is not all that useful. It's just a pile of data. Pictures? Sounds? Documents? Database data? What flavor? What version? What type? There are incompatible data types within one family of databases--moving data from one to another is very, very hard. It's just not easy to tell. They are not written to a tape like a Windows file system." ? Jim Blue
FORTUNE's look at ID theft: http://www.fortune.com/fortune/techn...056163,00.html

Loose Change

From AP: "TWX chief financial officer Wayne Pace said the company sold its remaining stake in Google for about $940 million shortly after the second quarter began." That was when GOOG was in the $190s, it's now in the $220s?. I watched 'Napoleon Dynamite' again last night: Vote for Pedro!? *Check me, Kilroy, out at http://www.kilroywashere.org/001-Pag...oyLegends.html and http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A508277 ?Are you all going over to the Maryland/Princeton lady lax game tonight? Me too!? Hmm, Could be two-time loser on this one: "Email Hurts IQ More Than Pot." A study of distraction caused by email in the UK found that people who do frequent email or text messages suffer a 10-point IQ drop ? roughly twice the IQ drop caused by marijuana. Check it out here: http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/04/22/text.iq/?. Feedback on mob lit: "A) *** Talese wrote about Joe Bonnano's son, Bill, not Joe Columbo's son, Joe Jr. B) BklynBoy was right, 'Blood of Our Fathers' is the best mob novel since Godfather. Why? Because I wrote it, of course. Experience makes all the difference. Have a new one coming out soon and am working with a group to do a mob reality show. Glad you point out the interest the average reader/viewer has in mob material. Shows you're one of us (the audience) and not them (the out of touch execs). ? Sonny"?. And a letter about Iron Mountain, or the company now known as Balsa Wood Mountain: "I'm a physician and used to use them to store patient records that were years old. When I finally decided to have the records destroyed, instead, they took two years to get my request straightened out ? and of course, they kept on billing me. What was especially telling is that I would complain to the accounting department, then complain to the records department, each in different states. They would each say they couldn't do anything until they heard from the other. Then each would promise to contact the other, but never did. I would ask, 'Isn't there one person, a superior who oversees both departments I can talk to?' Believe it or not, the answer was 'no.' No wonder they fired the driver. That'll fix the problem."

Email Andy Serwer at serwer@fortunemail.com.