Elon Musk's $44 billion acquisition of Twitter was the largest leveraged buyout ever of a technology company. To do the deal, Musk loaded about $13 billion in debt on the company—which posted losses in eight of the past 10 years, the New York Times reports. With Twitter currently generating less money per year than what it owes its lenders, Musk probably has to slash costs—and find more money.
The 20 richest tech billionaires together have lost nearly half a trillion dollars this year amid the stock market’s sharp tumble, a loss of wealth that is more than the market values of all but seven companies in the S&P 500, the Wall Street Journal reports. Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, and Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com Inc., have each lost more than $58 billion in wealth. The wealth of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has fallen by more than $87 billion.
Tired of sitting in Zoom meetings, former Yext CEO Howard Lerman has created Roam, a new kind of virtual office software that allows employees to communicate less formally and more efficiently, CNBC reports. A beta version of the platform, which functions like an office building in the cloud, launched Wednesday. The company has raised $40 million so far.
On Nov. 1, the European Union’s Digital Markets Act came into force, starting the clock on a process expected to force Amazon, Google, and Meta to make their platforms more open and interoperable in 2023, Wired reports. That could bring major changes to what people can do with their devices and apps, and change the internet forever.
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The annual Fast Company list of the most innovative companies this year features businesses across a wide range of industries, from advertising to wellness, and every corner of the globe. At the top of the list is Stripe, chosen for pressuring the carbon economy by creating a market for removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
The full Amazon Music library is now available to Prime members, boosting the number of streamable songs from 2 million up to 100 million, all of it ad-free. But, TechRadar says, there's a slight catch: Users will only be able to shuffle play by artist, album, or playlist—you can’t actually select a specific song for playback, without upgrading.
The OpenSSL Project, developer of a widely used open-source code library, has released a patch to resolve two new high-risk security vulnerabilities in its tools that could allow hackers to remotely execute new code or trigger website crashes, Axios reports. OpenSSL is a commonly used code library to enable secure communications across the internet, and the majority of HTTPS websites rely on some version of it.
The UK's communications regulator Ofcom is weighing changes to telecom rules that could formalize the fax machine’s obsolescence, the BBC reports. Ofcom said: "Not only are alternatives to fax machines now more widely available, migration of telephone networks to internet protocol (IP) technology means fax services can no longer be guaranteed to work in the same way."
Google this week finally ended Hangouts, which has been its primary messaging platform since 2013, Search Engine Journal reports. Users will be redirected to Google Chat. A text, video, and voice chat app built into Gmail, Hangouts began sunsetting in July.
How can you increase your walking speed by 250 percent? A team of robotics engineers who spun off their work at Carnegie Mellon University into a new company called Shift Robotics claim to have the answer: the Moonwalkers. A strap-on design allows the Moonwalkers to be used with almost any pair of shoes, Gizmodo reports. Each unit features a 300-watt electric motor that powers a set of eight polyurethane wheels.