Weekly Summary 1 - Climate change, Twitter and FB, and, is Jeff Bezos no longer CEO?

Climate Change could have played a significant part in the Coronavirus Pandemic

As we know, the SARS-Cov-2 was first reported in the Chinese city of Wuhan, Hubei. We don’t know exactly how the virus got transmitted from bats to humans - it most likely happened via an intermediary animal.)

What’s been reported is that as the world climate changed, the environment in the Chinese province of Yunnan changed with it - to be more accommodating to bats. Scientists say more than 40 species of bats have “moved in” to the region with the capital in Kunming since the early XX century - bringing around 100 coronaviruses with them. Even though the province is far, far away from Wuhan, the variant that changed so many lives around the world is closely related to the one researchers found in Yunnan.

Twitter and Facebook moving into the newsletter territory

As the aforementioned virus shook the world, people started to adapt - increasingly having to look for new ways to generate income, and finding an escape from reality. Becoming content creators combined the two, as numbers suggest.

One of the ways through which creators make money are paid newsletters, which is why Twitter acquired Revue, and why Facebook is reportedly building their own newsletter tool.

We are yet to see the effects of these moves, however for Twitter, this looks as a good move - the platform wants to leverage their rich community of creators, explains product lead Kayvon Beykpour in a blog post. It should also suit their platform more - because of the “you post publically by default” approach. As for Mark Zuckerberg’s company it is likely both an extension of their news offering, and a move support independent creators together with Facebook Gaming and Facebook’s video service. It’s likely it might be simply aimed to copy Twitter’s feature, as critics point out.

The turn of events is is quite ironic, as the creative industry was hit really hard; only the airlines seem to be affected more; at least in the EU

Jeff Bezos to give away his seat as a CEO this summer

The person who led the growth of an online bookstore to an international behemoth announced he will step down this summer with the AWS CEO Andy Jassy taking over.

The move comes with the company among increased pressure and criticism for numerous reasons, including, but not limited to, very loose oversight over what’s sold on their platform resulting in sales of more than 4000 items being sold that were declared unsafe by the US federal agencies, their fierce anti-union actions including surveillance programs even though it’s illegal for them to do so, their treatment of warehouse workers (source 1, source 2) and more, with the US House Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust releasing a report saying “Amazon’s online retail dominance gives it monopoly power over third-party sellers on its marketplace.”.

Jeff Bezos will, however, remain an executive chairman. As Brian Olavsky, Amazon’s CFO suggested, he could still very well be involved with decision-making within the company. “Retail experts and Wall Street analysts” claim he will indeed play an important part in the venture.