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A bipartisan group of state attorneys general said on Thursday they had opened an investigation into Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, for promoting its social media app Instagram while knowing of mental and emotional harms caused by the service.

At least 11 states are involved in the investigation, including California, Florida, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Tennessee and Vermont, as well as the District of Columbia.

Maura Healey, the Massachusetts attorney general and one of the leaders of the investigation, said the states were examining whether the company’s actions violated state consumer protection laws and put the public at risk.

“Facebook, now Meta, has failed to protect young people on its platforms and instead chose to ignore or, in some cases, double down on known manipulations that pose a real threat to physical and mental health — exploiting children in the interest of profit,” Ms. Healey said.

The move comes after a trove of documents from a former employee detailed research inside of the social media company that suggested teenagers suffered body image issues when using Instagram. The documents, called The Facebook Papers, were shared with journalists in October. The Wall Street Journal first reported on the documents and the issues at Instagram with the help of Frances Haugen, the whistle-blower.

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The head of a Boston local who urged a more assertive stand toward employers like the United Parcel Service — and an aggressive drive to organize workers at Amazon — declared victory Thursday in his bid to lead the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

If the result is confirmed, the victory by Sean O’Brien, an international vice president of the Teamsters, would put a new imprint on the nearly 1.4 million-member union after more than two decades of leadership by James P. Hoffa, who did not seek another five-year term.

The outcome appears to reflect frustration over the union’s most recent contract with UPS and a growing dissatisfaction with the tenure of Mr. Hoffa, whose father ran the union from 1957 to 1971.

With about 90 percent of the ballots tallied, Mr. O’Brien had more than two-thirds of the vote in his race against Steve Vairma, a fellow international vice president who had been endorsed by Mr. Hoffa. The election was conducted by mail-in ballots that were due Monday.

Mr. O’Brien, 49, railed against the contract that the union negotiated with UPS — where more than 300,000 Teamsters work — for allowing the company to create a category of employees who work on weekends and top out at a lower wage, among other perceived flaws.

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A group of cryptocurrency fans lost a much-anticipated bid for a rare first printing of the U.S. Constitution at a Sotheby’s auction on Thursday.

The group, ConstitutionDAO, conducted a frenzied, weeklong online crowdfunding campaign to place a bid on the artifact, one of only 13 copies known to exist. It had raised more than $40 million in less than a week for the bid.

The final sale price was $43.2 million, according to a Sotheby’s spokesman. The winner’s identity was not immediately known. Minutes after the gavel, ConstitutionDAO confirmed the loss on Twitter.

“While this wasn’t the outcome we hoped for, we still made history tonight with ConstitutionDAO,” it said, adding that contributors would have their donations refunded, minus fees.

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The South Korean media conglomerate whose entertainment arm produced the winner of the 2019 Oscar for best picture, “Parasite,” has acquired a majority stake in the scripted arm of Endeavor Content, a subsidiary of the entertainment company Endeavor Group.

Upon closure of the $775 million deal, which was announced late Thursday night, the South Korean conglomerate, CJ ENM, will own 80 percent of the business and the Endeavor Group 20 percent. The companies said they expected the deal to close in the first quarter of 2022.

The Wall Street Journal reported the news earlier.

“At the end of the day, CJ ENM strives to become a major global studio that encompasses content that appeals to a global audience — like this deal with Endeavor Content, we will continue to expand our presence in the global market,” Kang Ho-Sung, the conglomerate’s chief executive, said in a statement.

Endeavor is being forced to reduce its ownership stake in its scripted content business as a result of a settlement this year with the Writers Guild of America, whose writers went on strike to protest what they saw as a conflict of interest at agencies that owned both talent representation businesses and production companies.

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CVS will close about 300 stores a year in the next three years, the company said on Thursday, as the pharmacy chain focuses on offering more health care services and expanding its digital services.

The closures, which will affect about 9 percent of the company’s stores, are part of an effort to realign its retail strategy, CVS said in statement on its website.

The company operates more than 9,900 stores in the United States, according to its website. A CVS spokesman said the company did not expect CVS pharmacies in Target stores to be affected.

“We remain focused on the competitive advantage provided by our presence in thousands of communities across the country, which complements our rapidly expanding digital presence,” said Karen S. Lynch, the president and chief executive of CVS Health.

CVS is aiming to remake many of its stores. Some will offer primary care services, and others will offer broader health care services than standard pharmacies, such as treatment for diabetes. The company will also maintain traditional CVS stores, which provide prescription services and health products.

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Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon and the Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd are joining Blackstone in investing in Spanx, the DealBook newsletter was first to report. Blackstone closed its deal to acquire a majority stake in the shapewear brand that values it at $1.2 billion on Thursday.

Founded more than 20 years ago, Spanx has become synonymous with the foundation garments it sells. Ms. Winfrey helped put the brand on the map in its early days when in 2000 she named Spanx her favorite product of the year. (Sara Blakely, Spanx’s founder, said Ms. Winfrey had earlier validated her business idea when the talk show host told the audience one day that she cut the feet off her pantyhose.)

“I’m happy to be part of the evolution,” Ms. Winfrey said about the brand in a statement.

It’s the latest investment deal for Ms. Winfrey and Ms. Witherspoon, whose financial backing is valued as a stamp of approval for consumer brands. The TV and film stars are also familiar partners for Blackstone. Ms. Winfrey invested alongside Blackstone in Oatly, the oat milk brand, which went public this year. Blackstone also recently acquired Ms. Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine production studio, adding her to the board of its parent media company. Ms. Wolfe Herd’s Bumble, a dating app, was acquired by Blackstone in 2019 before going public this year.

Ms. Winfrey, Ms. Witherspoon and Ms. Wolfe Herd are investing in Spanx directly, outside any Blackstone fund. They were also joined by the investment funds G9 Ventures and Able Partners.

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Republican senators took turns describing her as a communist, a socialist and a radical on Thursday, but it was the circumspect stance of moderate Democrats that spoke loudest about Saule Omarova’s prospects for becoming one of the country’s top banking regulators.

Ms. Omarova, President Biden’s pick to lead the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, has faced steep opposition from industry groups and Republican lawmakers, with critics at times suggesting that her birthplace — the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan — and her education in Moscow were reason to be suspicious of her.

During Thursday’s hearing to consider her confirmation, she sought to fend off critics on the Senate Banking Committee by declaring her devotion to American capitalism. “I fell in love with this country and its people from Day 1,” she said, praising the United States’ “dynamic and diverse markets.”

Ms. Omarova, a Cornell Law School professor, worked with banks as a lawyer at the white-shoe firm Davis Polk & Wardwell and was a policy adviser in the Treasury Department during the presidency of George W. Bush. But in her academic career she has explored ideas that would amount to sweeping overhauls to the structure of the financial system, including a plan she sketched out to let the Federal Reserve provide bank accounts to small-time customers using its own digital currency.

Ms. Omarova has also proposed a new infrastructure investment authority that would pair private money with government input to fund projects that companies might not deem profitable on their own, and she has often denounced the way banks and their leaders keep spoils of boom times for themselves, then turn to the public for bailouts when things go wrong.

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At least 70 of the largest companies in the United States would pay more in taxes under a new minimum tax that Democrats are proposing as a way to pay for the spending bill moving through Congress, according to an analysis released on Thursday by Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts.

The report offered a first look at which companies could face higher tax bills under the proposal, which calls for enacting a 15 percent minimum tax on companies that report more than $1 billion in profit to shareholders, even if they have zero federal tax liability. The plan is included as a source of revenue in a $1.85 trillion social policy and climate bill that President Biden is trying to push through Congress.

The new tax would apply to the so-called book income that companies report to their shareholders but not to the Internal Revenue Service. Many profitable companies are able to reduce or eliminate their tax liability through the use of tax credits, deductions and previous losses that can carry over.

The book tax aims to raise money from companies without increasing the 21 percent corporate tax rate. Mr. Biden originally pledged to raise the corporate tax rate to 28 percent, but moderate Democrats have resisted that proposal.

The report by Ms. Warren found that the tax would require companies such as Amazon, Facebook, FedEx, General Motors, Google, T-Mobile and Verizon to pay more to the U.S. government. A recent report by the Joint Committee on Taxation determined that the proposal would generate $319 billion over 10 years.

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Macy’s, the beleaguered department store chain, reported rosy third-quarter sales on Thursday and raised its sales and earnings forecast for the year, in a positive signal for retailers that struggled during the pandemic.

The company said its sales for the three months that ended on Oct. 30 were $5.4 billion, and it posted a net profit of $239 million. Comparable sales rose 37 percent from the same period last year and about 9 percent from 2019. Macy’s noted that a Friends and Family event fell into the third quarter this year from the fourth quarter in 2019.

Retail sales overall jumped 1.7 percent in October, the third monthly increase, the Commerce Department said Tuesday, a sign of the strength of the U.S. economic recovery from pandemic restrictions. Walmart and Home Depot each reported quarterly earnings this week that topped Wall Street’s expectations.

Retailers like Macy’s, which also owns Bloomingdale’s and Bluemercury, are benefiting as customers resume social activities and gear up for a busier holiday season than last year, when the country was in the depths of the pandemic and before vaccines were widely available.

The company said its downtown stores had yet to recover as tourism remained depressed and many office workers continued to work remotely.

The company, which is trying to accelerate its digital sales, separately said on Thursday that it would introduce an online marketplace next year with third-party merchants.

Alibaba, China’s biggest e-commerce company, reported its slowest sales growth in a year and a half on Thursday, the effect of Beijing’s regulatory clampdown on internet giants and tough competition from rival online retail destinations in China.

On a conference call with analysts, Alibaba’s chief executive, Daniel Zhang, also blamed “economic headwinds” for the weak results. China’s economic growth was slower in the July-to-September period than in the quarter before.

Retail sales growth has been bumpy. Alibaba’s revenue for the latest quarter increased 29 percent from a year earlier. Profit shrank by 81 percent, which the company attributed to increased spending on newer businesses such as its Lazada shopping platform in Southeast Asia.

Other factors depressing Alibaba’s earnings relate to the Chinese government’s campaign to stop internet companies from behaving in ways it considers unfair or anticompetitive. In April, the country’s antitrust regulator fined Alibaba a record $2.8 billion for restricting the merchants on its virtual bazaars from selling on other platforms.

Two days later, Alibaba pledged to go further to help those merchants by lowering the fees it charges them and by spending on new services for them. Income from such fees — Alibaba’s largest source of revenue — grew just 3 percent in the latest quarter, in part because of the initiatives. The company’s increased spending to support vendors also crimped its profit.

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In the first 11 weeks of the trial of Elizabeth Holmes, who founded of the blood-testing start-up Theranos, jurors have heard from only about 25 witnesses in proceedings that have been mired by delays, including a coronavirus scare, a broken water main and technical issues.

Despite the interruptions, the trial has pressed forward. Jurors are being asked to decide whether Ms. Holmes, 37, misled investors by appealing to their egos and withholding crucial information or whether investors simply failed to do their due diligence, ignoring red flags as they poured money into the Silicon Valley start-up.

Ms. Holmes has pleaded not guilty to multiple counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Prosecutors have said they are likely to rest their case against her this week.

Here are some highlights from the prosecution’s case so far:

• Sept. 14: Erika Cheung, a key whistle-blower, testified that she had joined Theranos because she was dazzled by Ms. Holmes’s charisma. “She was very articulate and had a strong sense of conviction about her mission,” Ms. Cheung said of Ms. Holmes.

  Ms. Cheung eventually resigned over her misgivings about Theranos’s testing services. “I was uncomfortable processing patient samples,” she said. “I did not think the technology we were using was adequate enough to be engaging in that behavior.”

• Sept. 22: James Mattis, the retired four-star Marine Corps general and former defense secretary under President Donald J. Trump, said he was excited by the prospect of the military using Theranos’s blood analyzers. He joined the company’s board but became disillusioned, testifying that Ms. Holmes had not been forthcoming with Theranos’s directors about the problems.

  “We were unable to help her on the fundamental issues that she was grappling with if we only saw them in the rearview mirror,” Mr. Mattis said.

• Sept. 28: Dr. Adam Rosendorff, a former lab director at Theranos, emerged as a key witness for the prosecution, providing greater detail about the range of problems and patient complaints. He said Ms. Holmes had been aware of his concerns but pressed forward with Theranos’s commercial launch anyway.

  In his testimony, he said he became increasingly uncomfortable with the failure rate of Theranos’s blood-testing machines and the volume of physician complaints about inaccurate test results. “The company was more about P.R. and fund-raising than patient care,” he said.

• U.S. stocks rose on Thursday, with the S&P 500 rebounding from Wednesday’s losses. The benchmark index edged up 0.3 percent, while the Nasdaq composite gained 0.5 percent.

• Retailers have been posting their quarterly financial performance reports this week, signaling strong profits and optimistic forecasts. Several retailers reported grappling with a tight labor market and a snarled supply chain.

• Shares of Macy’s jumped more than 21 percent after the company reported in its quarterly earnings report on Thursday that its profit grew to $239 million in the three months ending in October, compared with a $91 million loss during the same period last year. Kohl’s reported that sales grew 15.5 percent during its third quarter.

• Alibaba shares fell more than 11 percent after the company reported its slowest sales growth in a year and a half on Thursday, attributing it to Beijing’s regulatory clampdown on internet giants. The Chinese e-commerce giant said in its quarterly earnings report that profit shrank by 81 percent.

• Shares of Nvidia rose more than 8 percent after the tech company reported on Wednesday that its revenue climbed 50 percent to $7.1 billion compared with the same period last year.

• The Labor Department reported on Thursday that initial claims for state jobless benefits fell to 268,000 last week, down 1,000 from the previous week. “Initial claims should continue to gradually work their way back toward prepandemic levels as employers facing shortages of workers will likely keep layoffs to a minimum,” Nancy Vanden Houten, lead economist at Oxford Economics, wrote in a note on Thursday.

• European stock indexes dipped, with the Stoxx Europe 600 down 0.5 percent.

• Apple has pushed back its return-to-office plans to Feb. 1, according to an internal memo circulated at the company. Apple will begin a “phased approach,” asking small teams to return to the company’s global offices one to two days a week for four weeks before ramping up to three days a week, with the option to work remotely on Thursday and Friday.

  The company also said it had doubled its remote work policy to four weeks a year, saying that it would allow employees to travel, see friends or family or “shake up their routines.”