After selling the Washington Post for $250 million in June, Jeff Bezos has relinquished the role of CEO of Amazon, the company he founded in 1994 as an online book shop in Seattle.
With a wealth of $199 billion, Bezos left his position as CEO as the world’s richest man. And, although he just bought a $500 million superyacht, all signs point to his spending little time on it.
Space
Since he was a youngster, Bezos has been fascinated by space, telling the Miami Herald that he planned to “build space hotels, entertainment parks, and colonies for 2 million or 3 million people who will be in orbit.”
Fast forward to 2000, two years before Elon Musk started SpaceX, Bezos created Blue Origin, his rocket company.
Bezos began working at Blue Origin at least one day a week in 2016, and we think that number may now be increased.
Bezos’ philanthropy includes the Bezos Earth Fund, which has donated $10 billion to climate-focused programs, as well as the Bezos Day One Fund, which has given $2 billion to increase access to education and fight homelessness. However, MacKenzie Scott’s large donations have overshadowed Bezos’ philanthropic activities, and he has yet to join the Giving Pledge.
The future of his assets
After selling his audio streaming company to Yahoo for $5.6 billion in 1999, Mark Cuban bought the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks the following year. Will Bezos invest in a sports team as well? It’s conceivable since he’s reportedly shown interest in purchasing an NFL franchise.
China begins to obstruct DiDi
DiDi This weekend, Chinese authorities barred new users from joining the program and ordered it to be withdrawn from app shops. The stock has fallen more than 20% in pre-market trading.
What exactly is going on? Regulators are worried that Didi’s vast data-gathering might end up in the wrong hands. This could be an issue addressed in a 2015 piece that went viral on Monday: It estimated how much overtime Didi workers worked by looking at how many journeys Didi made to and from government agencies in a single day.
Didi isn’t the only one who has been entangled in Beijing’s web. China’s Cyberspace Administration said yesterday that it was investigating three more domestic firms (one of whose parent companies recently issued stock in the United States) and that new user signups for their platforms had been halted.
Zooming out: China is growing warier of its digital behemoths and is starting to reign in their power, which had previously been unchecked. After delaying Ant Group’s IPO in April, Chinese regulators forced the world’s biggest fintech company to restructure.
Another ransomware assault, and this time it’s the largest!
This seems to be something out of a science fiction film, yet it occurred this past weekend: A cybercriminal gang claims to have hacked into 1 million machines across 17 countries. It now demands $70 million in bitcoin in return for a “universal decryptor” that would enable customers to restore access to their accounts.
Hackers targeted the US IT company Kaseya, then used Kaseya’s software to access the victims’ computers, which they are now holding hostage. They also seemed to have timed the assault for the Fourth of July weekend, anticipating a strike by US office workers.
Most of those killed were government agencies and small businesses, such as Coop, a Swedish grocery chain that had to shut down most of its 800 locations for the weekend.