Amazon’s Jeff Bezos pledges $10 billion fund to tackle climate change

Climate change is the biggest threat to our planet,’ says Bezos, whose net worth is estimated to be around $130 billion

His company is often criticized for its environmental record, but Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon and the world’s richest man, said he was committing $10 billion to a new fund to tackle climate change. In a post to his 1.4 million followers on Instagram on Monday, the e-commerce tycoon said the Bezos Earth Fund would “fund scientists, activists, NGOs — any effort that offers a real possibility to help preserve and protect the natural world.”

“Climate change is the biggest threat to our planet,” said Bezos, whose net worth is estimated to be around $130 billion. Hundreds of Amazon employees last month signed a blog criticizing the online retail giant’s climate policies and demanding it do more to tackle climate change. Amazon has been accused of creating vast amounts of waste from the packaging it uses for doorstep deliveries, as well as for the greenhouse gas emissions from huge fleets of vehicles.

The company, which in December said its workforce had hit 750,000, has also been denounced over its carbon footprint because of the high energy consumption of its server farms for its lucrative cloud computing activities. “I want to work alongside others both to amplify known ways and to explore new ways of fighting the devastating impact of climate change on this planet we all share,” Bezos said in his announcement on Monday…

US court grants Amazon motion for pause in Microsoft’s Pentagon deal

The Pentagon, which had planned to start work on the contract on Friday, said it was disappointed in the ruling.

A US judge on Thursday granted Amazon.com Inc’s request to temporarily halt the US Department of Defense and Microsoft Corp from moving forward on an up-to-$10 billion (£8 billion) cloud computing deal that Amazon says reflected undue influence by President Donald Trump.

Amazon, which had been seen as a front-runner to win the contract, filed a lawsuit in November just weeks after the contract was awarded to Microsoft. Trump has publicly derided Amazon head Jeff Bezos and repeatedly criticized the company. Judge Patricia Campbell-Smith issued a preliminary injunction but did not release her written opinion. She also ordered Amazon to post $42 million in the event the injunction was issued wrongfully.

The Amazon lawsuit said the Defense Department’s decision was full of “egregious errors,” which were a result of “improper pressure from President Donald Trump, who launched repeated public and behind-the-scenes attacks” to steer the contract away from Amazon “to harm his perceived political enemy” Bezos. Bezos also owns the Washington Post, whose coverage has been critical of Trump and which has frequently been a target of barbs by Trump about the news media…

Saudi prince may have sent spyware via Whatsapp to hack Bezos’ phone: Probe

Saudi authorities rejected the latest allegations on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman

Amazon chief Jeff Bezos’s phone was likely infected by spyware hidden in a message from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, according to an analysis released Wednesday, prompting calls for an official investigation.

A forensic analysis by technical experts retained by Bezos after a leak of his personal information in early 2019 suggested that the Bezos iPhone was compromised by “tools” procured by a close associate of the Saudi de facto ruler. The suggestion of the Saudi prince’s role in the hacking prompted calls for further investigation by UN human rights officials looking into the October 2018 killing of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist and contributor to The Washington Post, which is owned by Bezos.

“The alleged hacking of Mr Jeff Bezos’s phone, and those of others, demands immediate investigation by US and other relevant authorities,” UN Special Rapporteurs Agnes Callamard and David Kaye said in a statement in Geneva. Any investigation should also look at the “continuous, multi-year, direct and personal involvement of the Crown Prince in efforts to target perceived opponents,” they added.

Callamard, the UN expert on summary executions and extrajudicial killings, and Kaye, the expert on freedom of expression, said the latest revelation “suggests the possible involvement of the Crown Prince in surveillance of Mr Bezos, in an effort to influence, if not silence, The Washington Post’s reporting on Saudi Arabia.”

Amazon founder Bezos’s phone ‘hacked by Saudi crown prince’ in 2018: Report

According to The Guardian, a digital forensic analysis revealed that the encrypted message from the number used by Mohammed bin Salman included a malicious file that infiltrated his phone

Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos’s mobile phone was hacked after receiving a message from the Saudi Arabian crown prince, The Guardian newspaper reported.

According to the British daily, a digital forensic analysis revealed that the encrypted message from the number used by Mohammed bin Salman included a malicious file that infiltrated his phone. The analysis also found that the intrusion could have been triggered by an infected video file sent from the account of of the Saudi prince.

While the details of the data taken from the is unclear, the revelation of the security breach comes almost a year after Jeff Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie announced that they would be separating after 25 years of marriage. After the divorce was finalised, Bezos, in a blog post, accused National Enquirer – a US tabloid – of threatening to publish embarrassing text messages and photos unless he publicly affirmed that there was no political motivation or outside force behind the tabloid’s coverage.

The National Enquirer had earlier disclosed an extramarital affair between Bezos and Lauren Sanchez, a former television anchor, in a series of reports that relied, in part, on intimate text messages sent by Bezos. However, Gavin de Becker, a security consultant for Bezos, told The Guardian that he believed the Saudi Arabian government had accessed Bezos’s phone before the Enquirer exposed the affair…

Amazon not doing India a favour by investing billion dollars: Piyush Goyal

Minister’s remarks come a day after Bezos announced $1 billion investment

Amazon is not doing India a favour by investing a billion dollars, said Piyush Goyal, Minister of Commerce and Industry, a day after the e-commerce giant’s founder and CEO Jeff Bezos announced the incremental investment in the country.

Speaking at the Raisina Dialogue 2020, an annual event organised by the Observer Research Foundation, Goyal said on Thursday, “they may have put in a billion dollars but then if they make a loss of a billion dollars every year, then they jolly well have to finance those billion dollars. So it’s not as if they’re doing a great favour to India when they invest a billion dollars.”

Bezos, considered the richest man in the world with a net worth of $117 billion, is in India for the first edition of his firm’s micro, small and medium enterprises focused event — Amazon Smbhav. In New Delhi, he announced the investment of $1 billion, in addition to the $5 billion Amazon has invested over the past five years.

The latest round of investment will go towards digitising 10 million MSME businesses in India, and help such firms export $10 billion worth of “Make in India” goods by 2025 through its platform. However, Goyal was clearly not pleased with the announcement. Talking about the losses incurred by Amazon’s marketplace, he added that if the company was bringing in money “largely to finance its losses”, which amount to $1-1.5 billion a year at a turnover of $10 billion, then it raises the question of how the losses occurred.

Ahead of Jeff Bezos visit, Amazon pumps in Rs 1,715 crore into India units

Fresh investment comes at a time when CCI has ordered an investigation against Amazon and Walmart-owned Flipkart on complaints of deep discounting practices and tie-ups with preferred sellers

Ahead of Jeff Bezos’ visit, the world’s largest online retailer Amazon.com Inc has stepped up its investment in India. The Seattle-headquartered firm has pumped in a total investment of Rs 1,715 crore into its digital payments arm Amazon Pay (India) Pvt Ltd and Amazon Wholesale (India) Pvt Ltd.

The funding is expected to help Amazon tap India’s booming digital payments market, compete with Walmart-owned PhonePe, Alibaba-backed Paytm, and Google’s mobile payment service Google Pay. The funding would also help it to take on its rival Flipkart with whom the company is in a fierce battle for dominance in India’s online retail market.

Amazon Pay (India) allotted 135.50 crore equity shares of Rs 10 each aggregating to Rs 1,355.00 crore at par on rights basis to the existing shareholders of the company, according to the regulatory documents filed by Amazon, which were sourced from business signals platform Paper.vc. Also, Amazon Wholesale (India) Pvt. Ltd., allotted 36 crore equity shares of Rs 10 each aggregating to Rs 360 crore to the same existing shareholders of the firm on rights basis. The resolution for this capital infusion was passed by the board of directors of both the entities from December 30-31, 2019..

India has potential for rapid economic growth over next decade: Bill Gates

The positive outlook by Gates for the Indian economy comes at a time when it is reeling under major slowdown amid apprehensions that the cycle may last for a longer period

India has the potential for “very rapid” economic growth over the next decade which will lift people out of poverty and allow the government to invest in health and education priorities in an “exciting way”, billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has said.

In an exclusive interview to PTI, Bill Gates, the world’s richest person, specifically complimented India’s Aadhaar identity system and the country’s performance in the financial services and pharma sectors. The positive outlook by Gates for the Indian economy, Asia’s third largest, comes at a time when it is reeling under major slowdown amid apprehensions that the cycle may last for a longer period.

“I don’t have any knowledge about the near term, but I’d say over the next decade, there’s potential for very rapid growth, which will lift people out of poverty and allow the government to invest in health and education priorities in a really exciting way,” he said.

On Friday, 64-year-old Gates, with a net worth of USD 110 billion, regained the position of the world’s richest person surpassing the Amazon Inc’s Jeff Bezos. The Microsoft co-founder has so far donated over USD 35 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for poverty reduction and social development programmes in various countries…

Amazon challenges Pentagon’s $10-billion cloud deal with Microsoft

The 10-year contract for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure program will see all military branches sharing information in a system boosted by artificial intelligence

Amazon has challenged the awarding of a USD 10 billion Pentagon cloud computing contract to Microsoft, alleging “unmistakable bias” in the process.

The 10-year contract for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure program, better known as JEDI, ultimately will see all military branches sharing information in a system boosted by artificial intelligence. “It’s critical for our country that the government and its elected leaders administer procurements objectively and in a manner that is free from political influence,” a spokesperson for Amazon Web Services said on Thursday.

“Numerous aspects of the JEDI evaluation process contained clear deficiencies, errors, and unmistakable bias.” Amazon said it filed a notice in US court last week signaling its intent to protest the handling of the bidding process. US President Donald Trump has repeatedly lashed out at Amazon and company founder Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post. The newspaper is among US media outlets most critical in its coverage of Trump and his administration.

The president told reporters during a news conference in July that he had asked aides to investigate the JEDI contract, citing complaints from companies that compete with Amazon. “I’m getting tremendous complaints about the contract with the Pentagon and with Amazon. … They’re saying it wasn’t competitively bid,” Trump said. “Some of the greatest companies in the world are complaining about it, having to do with Amazon and the Department of Defense, and I will be asking them to look at it very closely to see what’s going on.”

If you aren’t worried about American democracy, you haven’t paid attention

In at least two cases, Trump appears to have tried to use his power to punish Amazon, whose founder, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post, which the president considers to be an enemy

Democracies used to collapse suddenly, with tanks rolling noisily toward the presidential palace. In the 21st century, however, the process is usually subtler. Authoritarianism is on the march across much of the world, but its advance tends to be relatively quiet and gradual, so that it’s hard to point to a single moment and say, this is the day democracy ended. You just wake up one morning and realise that it’s gone.

In their 2018 book “How Democracies Die,” the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Bit by bit the guardrails of democracy were torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of the ruling party, then were weaponised to punish and intimidate that party’s opponents. On paper these countries are still democracies; in practice they have become one-party regimes. And the events of the past week have demonstrated how this can happen right here in America.

At first Sharpiegate, Donald Trump’s inability to admit that he misstated a weather projection by claiming that Alabama was at risk from Hurricane Dorian, was kind of funny, even though it was also scary — it’s not reassuring when the president of the United States can’t face reality. But it stopped being any kind of joke on Friday, when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a statement falsely backing up Trump’s claim that it had warned about an Alabama threat…

Amazon is turning 25 – here’s a look back at how it changed the world

Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, set his sights on making it an ‘everything store’

A fourth of a century back, on July 5, 1994, an organization, which imparted a name to the world’s biggest waterway, was consolidated. It offered books to clients who got to its site through a dial-up modem. It wasn’t the main book shop to sell on the web. (Books.com propelled in 1992.) But it acted like a neighborhood store, whose businessperson realized clients by name – a chime even rang in the organization’s Seattle home office each time a request was put.

Amazon’s author, Jeff Bezos, put his focus on making it an “everything store.” The organization would proceed to end up an everything store, except an “everything organization.”

Today, after 25 years, Amazon has reshaped retailing for all time. It is one of the main three most important organizations on the planet, with a market capitalization floating around US$1 trillion, more prominent than the GDP of almost 200 nations. On the off chance that you had purchased $100 worth of its IPO partakes in 1997, it would be worth about $120,000 today.

Reclassifying retail

Amazon persistently took shopping comfort to fresher levels. Prior to 1994, customers needed to head out to stores to find and purchase things. Shopping used to be diligent work – meandering down different passageways looking for an ideal thing, managing crying and bothering children, and holding up in long checkout lines. Today, stores attempt to connect with customers anyplace, whenever and through various channels and gadgets.

After first encountering two-day free delivering from Amazon’s Prime participation program, customers began expecting no less from each online retailer. Around 100 million customers worldwide have Amazon Prime.

MacKenzie Bezos to be world’s 4th-richest woman after divorcing Amazon CEO

She’ll receive a 4 percent Amazon stake, currently worth about $36 billion, as part of the settlement

Companies News: MacKenzie Bezos is set to become the world’s fourth-richest woman after her divorce from Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos is finalized. She’ll receive a 4 percent Amazon stake, currently worth about $36 billion, as part of the settlement, according to a filing Thursday from the Seattle-based company. The divorce is expected to be completed in about 90 days.

Her stake in Amazon ranks her behind the $54 billion fortune of L’Oreal SA heiress Francoise Bettencourt Meyers, the $44 billion held by Alice Walton and the $37 billion net worth of Jacqueline Badger Mars, according to calculations by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Jeff Bezos, 55, will continue to exercise sole voting authority over the shares, according to the filing. He will probably remain the world’s richest person, with a 12 percent Amazon stake that’s currently valued at $107 billion. He will retain other assets, including the Washington Post and space-exploration company Blue Origin, which adds $4 billion to his fortune, according to the index.

“Happy to be giving him all of my interests in the Washington Post and Blue Origin, and 75 percent of our Amazon stock plus voting control of my shares,” MacKenzie Bezos, 48, said in a tweet. Jeff Bezos said in a tweet that he was “grateful to all my friends and family for reaching out with encouragement and love. It means more than you know. MacKenzie most of all.”

Amazon now has customers in 100% serviceable pin-codes in India: Jeff Bezos

If things fall in place, then a deal with a major offline retailer might happen by the end of this year, according to a source

 

Amazon.in might be the most visited shopping site in India, but for Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of the technology giant, it is still Day 1 in what may be the second-most important market for the firm outside the US.

Bezos, in a letter to customers, said that Amazon now has customers in 100 per cent serviceable pin-codes in the country and is shipping packages from more than 50 fulfillment locations in 13 states.

From talking about how Alexa plays devotional songs in local Indian languages to Amazon India working closely with communities in rural areas, Bezos said that the online marketplace has now become part of the country's culture and has adapted all its services and offerings accordingly.

Stressing that Amazon India has captured the top spot for the last two years, Bezos pointed out that amazon.in is the most visited site in the country.

Amazon, which has completed five years in India, has managed to reach the top spot while taking on local favourites Snapdeal and Flipkart. Bezos, in a letter to customers, said that Amazon now has customers in 100 per cent serviceable pin-codes in the country and is shipping packages from more than 50 fulfillment locations in 13 states.

Also Read : In Second Most Important Market, It Is Still Day 1 For Amazon In India

“We’re five years into our journey, but as we say at Amazon, its Day 1, and I am energised and humbled by the opportunities ahead. Amazon.in is India ki apni dukaan,” he said in the letter.

Bezos also said that the company is working with ‘tens of thousands’ of third-party developers to increase the capabilities of its voice assistant 'Alexa'.

In the past five years, Amazon has grown from just one seller to 300,000. During the last one year itself, amazon.in expanded its network of third-party affiliates and service providers to ensure that sellers from non-metros and smaller towns get easy access and the required support to start and manage their online businesses, he added.

According to industry analysts, Amazon has pumped more than $3 billion into its Indian operations. One of its India units, Amazon Seller Services, alone has received over $1.28 billion during the financial year 2017-18 from the US parent, as per documents filed with India's corporate affairs ministry.

Bezos had committed investments of $5 billion for the Indian market. However, industry insiders believe that the number is going to increase significantly over the next few months with Walmart planning to expand Flipkart's operations. Investments have also been made in other Amazon entities in India, including Amazon Pay and its wholesale business.

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