Daily Pulse: GM to Silicon Valley: Take That! Carl Icahn's Next Big Bet, Mossberg on 'Steve Jobs'

OG: General Motors posted a record $3.3 billion Q3 operating profit in its core North American unit, on the strength of trucks and SUVs. This helps offset weakness in China and the cost of the ignition-switch crisis. But even more importantly, argues Gautham Nagesh of The Wall Street Journal, the healthy results gives CEO Mary Barra bragging rights to back her claim GM can hold its own against Silicon Valley upstarts — Tesla, Alphabet, Apple — “which are looking to outcompete Detroit with autonomous electric cars in coming years.”

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Come Home. Practically All is Nearly Forgiven: Billionaire activist investor Carl Icahn pledged $150 million to a bespoke Super PAC that will lobby for legislation to repatriate "tax inversion" funds by US multinationals. Some $2.2 trillion is parked overseas and, as Vox reporter Matthew Yglesias notes, it’s a legitimate, bi-partisan issue. Indeed — Icahn is advocating for a bill that has the support of key Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer and presumptive incoming House Speaker Paul Ryan. But Yglesias also does some math Icahn doesn’t not particularly disclose: If signed into law this bill would reap Icahn some $250 bmillion from his Apple holdings alone. That’s a very nice ROI.

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Earnings Watch: Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet are all expected to report after today's close.

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BOOM/BUST/BOOM: The latest high-profile insider to fret publicly about a unicorn-driven tech bubble: Microsoft's Satya Nadella. It's the circle of life, Nadella explained to an audience at a conference in Austin, Texas. "The beauty of overfunding is lots of ideas get to flourish," he told Bloomberg Television’s Emily Chang. "Out of that there will eventually have to be a correction, a bust."

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The See Food Diet: Does your company provide free snacks for the taking throughout your office space? Where — perhaps even more than what — might have an impact on your waistline. A new study examined what the researchers called "kitchenscapes," and it was about the home environment. But it's not difficult to port the takeaways to what you can take away from any pantry, like the one(s) we're surrounded by at LinkedIn. In a nutshell, here's the idea:

Researchers photographed more than 200 kitchens in Syracuse, New York, to see what food people had on their countertops. They found that women who had breakfast cereal in plain sight were 20 pounds heavier than neighbors who didn't, and that those with soda in view were 24 to 26 pounds heavier. Meanwhile, in households with fruit bowls on the counter, women weighed 13 pounds less.

So, the answer is to get some apples between you and the Oreos you still know are on the top shelf of the far cabinet on the right.

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Steve Jobs: Highly respected tech writer Walt Mossberg knew the man and doesn't like the film: "The Steve Jobs I Knew Isn’t in This Movie." It's a slight departure for Mossberg, who in his own right is also larger than life. But Mossberg isn't ranging where he doesn't belong: he is one of the infinitesimal handful of reporters who had routine access to Jobs for years. Mossberg criticizes the Aaron Sorkin film as a biased, thinly-veiled fiction that portrays a one-dimensional Jobs through fictional encounters during a truly difficult period that was well before Apple's co-founder, well, changed the world. (Strangely, Mossberg doesn't mention "The Social Network," in which Sorkin's Mark Zuckerberg does things the real Zuck also did not). Mossberg's large point seems completely valid: The average person who doesn't know much about Jobs will come away with, at best, an incomplete picture, in a story that ends just as the real Job was about to come into his own. But Mossberg's truth is also a bit ironical since, as he says himself, he actually did not know Jobs during the period covered in the movie.

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Cover Art: A woman from Syria looks on as she waits to cross the border with Croatia near the village of Berkasovo, Serbia, October 21, 2015. REUTERS/Marko Djurica

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What you may have missed — and really should read:

• Adobe's Digital Analyst Scores the future in 'Back to the Future II'
• LinkedIn's Maya Pope-Chappell on how we're giving students a bigger voice
• Critics call dating app The League 'elitist'. Its founder has another story
• Don Peppers on the fall of Theranos

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