Elon Musk is now the third-richest person in the world.

Musk passed Facebook Inc. co-founder Mark Zuckerberg Monday as shares of Tesla Inc. continued their unrelenting rally after undergoing a forward stock split. Musk is now worth $115.4 billion compared with $110.8 billion for Zuckerberg, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Also Monday, Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife MacKenzie Scott became the world’s richest woman, passing L’Oreal SA heiress Francoise Bettencourt Meyers. Scott, 50, who received a 4% stake in Amazon.com Inc. as part of her divorce from founder Bezos, is now worth $66.4 billion.

Musk, 49, has seen a meteoric rise in his wealth, with his net worth growing by $87.8 billion this year as Tesla shares surged almost 500%. Also helpful: an audacious pay package -- the largest corporate pay deal ever struck between a chief executive officer and a board of directors -- that could yield him more than $50 billion if all goals are met.

Tesla’s $464 billion market value now exceeds that of retail behemoth Walmart Inc, the largest company in the US by revenue.

Last week, Musk joined Zuckerberg, Bezos and Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates in the rarefied centibillionaire club as tech stocks rose.

The heady pace of wealth accumulation in recent months is in stark contrast to the state of the global economy. Growth has slumped sharply since the pandemic began with companies laying off millions of workers and consumer demand cratering. The brunt of economic pain has been borne by young and lower-wage workers, whose jobs are typically more vulnerable to COVID-related layoffs.

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Billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX has raised $1.9 billion in new funding, according to a regulatory filing on Tuesday.

This would be the largest single fundraising round to date by SpaceX, according to PitchBook data.

Bloomberg, which reported about the funding round last week, said the private rocket company will have an equity value of $46 billion after the transaction, citing people familiar with the matter.

The funding comes as SpaceX races to build out its Starlink satellite constellation to offer broadband internet commercially by the end of 2020. The company launched its eleventh batch of satellites on Tuesday and operates over 600 satellites in low-Earth orbit.

SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule completed its first two-month mission carrying astronauts for NASA in early August, with plans to start routine crewed missions to the International Space Station in late October.

Source: Reuters

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Apple has finally issued an on-the-record apology to WordPress asking them to monetise its free app. Last week, netizens were left in a bit of a shock as they learnt that Apple managed to force WordPress to monetise its free app, The Verge reported. Apple had asked WordPress to sell premium plans and custom domain names in order to get its traditional 30 per cent cut.

As per a report in The Verge, Apple has released an official apology saying -- "We believe the issue with the WordPress app has been resolved. Since the developer removed the display of their service payment options from the app, it is now a free stand-alone app and does not have to offer in-app purchases."

"We have informed the developer and apologize for any confusion that we have caused," it added.

The company is issuing a rare on-the-record apology, and it says that WordPress will no longer have to add in-app purchases now that all is said and done.

Source: ANI/RSS

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Elon Musk said on Thursday that Tesla Inc’s (TSLA.O) factory in Nevada was a target of a “serious” cybersecurity attack, confirming a media report that claimed an employee of the company helped the Federal Bureau of Investigation(FBI) thwart the attack.

News website Teslarati said that the electric carmaker was the unnamed company in a statement issued by the U.S. Department of Justice on Tuesday about a Russian national's arrest, in connection with a planned attack on an unidentified company.

“This was a serious attack,” Musk said in a tweet, in response to the Teslarati article.

The Justice Department said that Egor Igorevich Kriuchkov, 27, a Russian national, was arrested and charged with conspiracy to intentionally cause damage to a protected computer by trying to recruit an employee to introduce a malware into a system.

The malware was aimed at extracting data from the network and then to threaten the company for ransom money, the statement said.

According to the Justice Department, Kriuchkov had promised the employee an incentive of $1 million upon introducing the malware into the system.

But the employee alerted the FBI, who were successful in thwarting the attack, a complaint filed by the FBI’s Las Vegas Field Office showed.

source:Reuters

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A new report claims that factors are increasingly pointing to Apple expanding Siri search results and Spotlight Searches even farther, with the company potentially working on a universal search engine.

Apple already has a search engine it uses for Spotlight Searches and Siri. However, if a new report is accurate, Apple may be looking to ditch the financial arrangement it has for Google to be the default on the iPhone, and launch its own full search engine.

The main tentpole to the argument made on Thursday morning by Jon Henshaw at Coywolf says that it isn't clear if Siri Suggestions are using Google at all anymore. Instead, Apple is returning search results with Spotlight Search, and is bypassing other search engines.

In AppleInsider's own brief tests on Thursday morning, some outgoing and return traffic to and from Google for Siri Suggestions in iOS 14 passed through our router. The same search terms in iOS 13 pulled nearly entirely from Google.

The report goes on to say that Apple is investing heavily on search, and pointing to job postings for search engineers. However, the number of available jobs in related fields has decreased in the last year, versus increased. This may be a factor of coronavirus limitations more than anything else, making a year-over-year comparison difficult.

An update to the "Applebot" web crawler page for web developers was made in June as well. Henshaw notes that the changes included how to verify traffic was actually coming from Applebot, and the company provided details about differences in the crawler between desktop- and mobile-centric searches. The update also made clear that the crawler renders ages similarly to Google, and a section about search rankings was amplified upon. At present, the information Apple has promulgated about the crawler is very similar, if not identical, to how Google scans pages.

Henshaw also notes that the AppleBot web crawler has been busy, with him noticing it just recently. A quick perusal of AppleInsider crawler traffic has shown no notable increase or decrease in Applebot crawler traffic since 2015, following a slow launch in the fall of 2014.

However, despite some evidence that suggests that there is not an increase in factors that suggest an imminent launch, a full Apple search engine available to all makes some sense. Henshaw says that Apple's engine would weaken Google's stranglehold on search, provide better promotion for Apple services, tighten Apple's control of the full hardware and software stack, and allow developers to promote apps in larger search results beyond just App Store searches.

A big factor against Apple developing its own full search engine include the loss of the billions of dollars per year that Google pays Apple for the privilege. Additionally, it may draw some additional antitrust attention from regulators if it does so, in a time where the investigations and testimony demands are at an all-time high.

Henshaw does note that the product may never come to market.

"At this point, everything is based on observation and conjecture. They may never release a search engine. It's also possible that iOS, iPadOS, and macOS users will be using it and not even be aware of it," writes Henshaw. "It could be so tightly integrated into the operating system and native apps that alerts and Spotlight Searches slowly steal away queries that would have otherwise been made on Google."

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