Business, Financial & Legal News - Page 103

Amazon founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos has announced via his personal Instagram account the is launching a new fund to battle climate change - the Bezos Earth Fund.

Bezos took to his Instagram to announce what is called the Bezos Earth Fund, and this fund will be dedicated to fighting the effects of climate change. Bezos says that he wants to work alongside others that are fighting climate change, and to kick things off for the Bezos Earth Fund, he will be donating $10 billion that will go towards grants that will be issued out this summer.

Bezos says that the Bezos Earth Fund will fund scientists "scientists, activists, NGOs - any effort that offers a real possibility to help preserve and protect the natural world". He also says that to save the Earth it will require collective action from "big companies, small companies, nation states, global organizations, and individuals." It should also be noted that the Bezos Earth Fund is separate from Amazon's own initiatives and that the $10 billion came from Bezos' personal account.

The court for Berlin-Brandenburg has officially ordered Tesla to stop all forest clearing and building preparations for their coming gigafactory.

According to a recent report from Reuters, U.S electric car manufacturer, Tesla has been ordered to stop all forms of preparation for their planned construction of a gigafactory. The court has ordered this after it gave Tesla the green light to remove 92 hectares of forest for the construction of the building.

This decision by the court has come after environmental activists (Green League of Brandenburg) have expressed their concerns over the de-forestation being a threat to wildlife and water supplies. It should be noted that Tesla was only three days away from completing the forest clearing, but the court states "It should not be assumed that the motion seeking legal protection brought by the Green League lacks any chance of succeeding." At the moment, Tesla has two gigafactories, one located in the United States and the second in Shanghai, China.

Apple and Nuvia are in the headlines over the weekend, with a former Apple chip executive being sued for 'betraying' Apple by launching a new startup and poaching Apple employees... while Apple is also reportedly trying to poach his new staffers. But the story is a lot juicier than that.

Bloomberg is reporting that Gerard Williams III, who left as the lead chip architect at Apple and co-founded Nuvia, says that Apple is stopping his new company from hiring engineers, all while hiring Nuvia staff from under him. Bloomberg reports that Apple's new lawsuit was made to "suffocate the creation of new technologies and solutions by a new business, and to diminish the freedom of entrepreneurs to seek out more fulfilling work".

But where this gets interesting is that Williams said he is maintaining a distant relationship with Apple and his former colleagues, but AnandTech founder Anand Shimpi -- who left his site to work for Apple, has "sent him numerous texts after Williams left the company, including material marked "Apple Confidential" in an April conversation. Williams said he told Shimpi this was "inappropriate and unwelcome," according to the filing. Apple didn't immediately respond to a query about Shimpi", reports Bloomberg.

Phishing scams are currently one of the most common ways to scam someone, and while you'd probably think that it would never happen to you, it just happened to the Puerto Rico government.

In a new report by the Associated Press, the Puerto Rico government transferred funds equating to over $2.6 million dollars to a phony bank account through a phishing scam. The incident was discovered just this past week, and at the moment, government officials are working with the FBI to recover the stolen funds.

So how did this happen? According to Ruben Rivera, who is the finance director of Puerto Rico's Industrial Development Company, the department received an email that said that a bank account that was tied to government payments needed changing. In response to the email, officials transferred the funds into the changed bank account, which they later discovered was fraudulent.

Amazon is extremely upset over losing a $10 billion dollar Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud computing contract to Microsoft. So, as any good business would do, they claim it bias.

According to a new report from CNBC, Microsoft's contract with the Pentagon is has now been paused because Amazon believes that President Trump has a bias towards Microsoft. Amazon's argument is that President Trump personally doesn't like Bezos or Amazon, and through his supposed dislike, he influenced which company would get the contract.

Now, the judge that is ruling the case has put the contract on pause to hear out Amazon's beliefs. Here's Amazon's statement, "The question is whether the president of the United States should be allowed to use the budget of the DoD to pursue his own personal and political ends." CNBC also says that Amazon has said it would pay out $42 million for any "costs and damages" that are resulted from this contract being put on pause.

A new report has come out from The Wall Street Journal that claims Amazon CEO and founder; Jeff Bezos has bought the most expensive property in Los Angeles.

Amazon founder has reportedly bought the Warner Estate, the most prestigious property in all of Los Angeles from David Geffen for $165 million dollars. Bezos' net worth is currently sitting at around $131.9 billion, which means that if he did purchase the estate from Geffen for $165 million, that's only one-eight hundredth of his net worth.

The Warner Estate was built in the 1930s for Jack Warner, who was the former president and driving force behind the now-massive Warner Bros. Studios. The estate took around a decade to be built and features everything you could dream of; terraces, guest houses, golf courses, pools, tennis courts, and a lot more.

Can you believe we're in 2020, where you'll be able to major in weed at Colorado State University-Pueblo? It's true, with Denver Post reporting that the university just received approval for the Denver's first degree program focused on cannabis.

The program is called "Cannabis, Biology and Chemistry" and will see the course similar to double-majoring in biology and chemistry, while focusing on the science required to work in the world of cannabis, according to David Lehmpuhl, dean of CSU-Pueblo's College of Science and Mathematics.

Lehmpuhl said: "It's a rigorous degree geared toward the increasing demand coming about because of the cannabis industry. Hemp and marijuana has really come to the forefront in a lot of economic sectors in the country. We're not pro-cannabis or anti-cannabis. What we're about will be the science and training students to look at that science".

Elon Musk has taken to his personal Twitter account to ask the public their thoughts on whether or not he should build a new gigafactory in Texas.

Musk posted a poll to his Twitter account with the simple, yet effective caption "Giga Texas?". At the time of writing this, 80.1% of people voted "Hell yeah," and only 19.9% of people voted "no." If this plan goes ahead, this will mark Musk's fourth gigafactory, the first being near Reno, Nevada, the second in Buffalo, New York, third in China, Shanghai, and fourth near Berlin, Germany.

At the moment, Musk is on a roll with his electric vehicle and clean energy company Tesla, as the company's stock price recently hit an all-time high. This all-time high pushed the company's total market value over Bitcoin's market value, quite an achievement if you ask me. In other news about Musk's ventures, SpaceX recently launched 60 more Starlink satellites into the atmosphere in an effort to bring a global internet connection to everyone.

It has been a question for quite some time - how much does Google make from hardware sales? Until now, no one has ever really known, but we have just been thrown a bone (pardon the rhyme).

Alphabet, Google's parent company recently conducted its Q4 earnings call, and according to that report, Google's hardware division is a "multi-billion dollar" hardware business. There were no specific numbers released on what device/s are Google's most profitable, but since Alphabet stated "multi," we can accurately assume that hardware sales exceed $2 billion.

Google as a slew of hardware products; examples include Pixel phones, laptops, Nest doorbells, cameras, speakers, routers, and Chromecasts. Which of these is the top-selling is still a mystery, but we do know from Google hardware chief Rick Osterloh (last May) that the company's hardware numbers are "good, but not where we want to be at the end of five years".

Tesla has shaken up the financial market with the company's stock price skyrocketing in comparison to where it was sitting a year ago. Now, the market cap of Tesla has exceeded Bitcoin's.

According to CNBC, Tesla opened at nearly $883 per share, then it hit an all-time high of $968.99 per share, bringing the company's total market cap to above $170 billion. For a helpful comparison to just how big that is, other car companies such as GM and Ford closed out Tuesday with a combined market cap of $85 billion. Tesla is more than double that.

Now a new metric has been thrown into the mix. Tesla's market cap is now larger than Bitcoin's. Yes, Tesla, the automotive and energy company, was worth more than a digital currency (at that period in time). At the time of writing this, Bitcoin's market cap is currently sitting at around $166 billion, according to CoinMarketCap. This means that during Tuesday's high, Tesla's market cap was larger than Bitcoin's, quite an achievement for Mr. Musk and Tesla as a whole.