Planet Business: A $1 billion mega-tour and other numbers of the year

€37.6 million

Sum in euro that former BP chief executive Bernard Looney will forfeit from his remuneration after the oil group said he “knowingly misled” its board. The Kerryman, who resigned in September over his failure to disclose past relationships with colleagues, said he was “disappointed” with how the situation was handled.

€116 million

Estimated cost to airlines of the 2,000-plus flight cancellations caused by August’s technical failure at Nats, the company controlling UK air traffic control systems. International Air Transport Association boss Willie Walsh dubbed the outage “staggering”, while Ryanair accused Nats of “lamentable incompetence”.

€241 million

Socio-economic benefits that will accrue to the Republic by its co-hosting of Euro 2028, according to the Football Association of Ireland. Meanwhile, the cost has been placed at €65 million-€93 million – a range that should cover most eventualities. Automatic qualification, alas, was not confirmed as part of October’s deal with Uefa.

$787.5 million

Sum that Dominion Voting Systems walked away with after Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News made a last-minute settlement with the US voting machine company in April. Dominion had sued the network for defamation after Fox’s result-doubting coverage of the 2020 US presidential election. High-fives followed.

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$1 billion

Taylor Swift’s Eras tour this year became the first ever music tour to bring in more than $1 billion in revenue, according to concert trade publication Pollstar. The US singer, who was the most streamed artist this year on Spotify and Apple Music, will be slowly lurching towards your favourite European city in 2024.

€6.3 billion

Record corporation tax receipts secured in November – an astonishing 27 per cent higher than the sum collected in the same month the year before, which had also been considered a bumper haul. The bonanza prompted French economist Thomas Piketty to complain that the Republic was “siphoning the tax base of others” thanks to its welcoming tax regime.

$8.9 billion

Customer assets “missing” from cryptocurrency exchange FTX in the wake of its collapse. In November, a New York jury convicted FTX founder and erstwhile “crypto-king” Sam Bankman-Fried on seven charges, including wire fraud on FTX customers and conspiracy to commit securities fraud and money laundering. He will be sentenced in March.

$50 billion

Valuation given to payment processor Stripe, founded by Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison, after a financing round in March. This makes it still a hugely valuable enterprise by anyone’s standards, but the fintech company’s estimated worth has nevertheless almost halved since its peak valuation two years ago of $95 billion.

€400 billion

The market capitalisation of Novo Nordisk crossed this threshold during 2023. In September, the fast-expanding Danish pharmaceutical giant behind diabetes and weight-loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy overtook French luxury goods group LVMH as Europe’s most valuable company. It shows no sign of relinquishing the title.

$1.2 trillion

Market capitalisation of Nvidia Corp as of mid-December, after a 235 per cent year-to-date surge in its share price. The chipmaker joined the “$1 trillion club” of mega-cap stocks in May as the rise of generative AI platforms such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard fuelled demand for its graphics processing units. Chips ahoy.

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