Following an employee survey that showed Google staffers are increasingly unhappy about pay, executives were hit with a barrage of questions on the topic.
“It’s a very competitive market,” said Bret Hill, Google’s compensation and rewards head.
CEO Sundar Pichai told employees that executives are discussing changes to their long-held pay assessments.
XPeng said Thursday it led an investment into a new $200 million fund along with high-profile venture capital players like Sequoia China and GGV Capital.
Rockets Capital will focus on “venture and growth stage investments in Smart EV industry value chain, clean energy, and frontier technology areas.”
The fund has already “entered into agreements” to invest in companies, XPeng said without disclosing any names.
Firefly Aerospace aims to make its second attempt to reach orbit with its Alpha rocket in the coming weeks, having received government approval to resume launch operations.
Private equity firm AE Industrial Partners last month acquired stake in Firefly from a fund run by Ukrainian entrepreneur Max Polyakov, who came under scrutiny for national security concerns.
Firefly also closed a $75 million fundraise led by AE Industrial Partners, which Markusic says means the company’s broader growth plan is “fully funded.”
“The SolarWinds hack was and really is and continues to be one of the biggest espionage campaigns recently discovered,” said Thomas Rid, a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University.
Microsoft, Google and several U.S. government agencies were among those compromised by the intrusion.
Downloads of privacy-focused messaging apps Signal and Telegram got a boost as users looked for alternatives to Facebook-owned WhatsApp.
The surge comes after WhatsApp updated its terms of service agreement that appears to give users little choice to opt out of sharing data with parent company Facebook.
Signal claims to have “state-of-the-art end-to-end encryption” as part of its service, which prevents messages from being read by those who are not the intended recipient.
Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin on Thursday completed the fourteenth test flight of its New Shepard rocket booster and capsule.
CNBC has learned that NS-14 also marked one of the last remaining steps before Blue Origin flies its first crew to space, with Thursday’s flight the first of two “stable configuration” tests.
Blue Origin aims to launch the second test flight within six weeks, or by late February, and the first crewed flight six weeks after that, or by early April, people familiar with the company’s plans told CNBC.
Shares of embattled electric vehicle start-up Nikola Corp. fell more than 8% during afterhours trading.
Nikola CEO Mark Russell failed to reassure investors of a deal being finalized with GM and that there wouldn’t be a selloff of its stock next week by founder and ex-chairman Trevor Milton.
There are roughly 360.9 million shares of company stock outstanding, making Milton Nikola’s largest single shareholder.
Hyperice, which makes muscle recovery equipment, has a new deal with the NFL.
Company CEO Jim Huether said the company should reach a $1 billion valuation in 2021 after the NFL partnership.
Hyperice secured a $48 million Series A funding in October, which Huether said values the firm at $700 million.
Electronic brokers were experiencing outages on Monday amid record highs in the Dow and S&P 500.
Charles Schwab said some clients are having difficulty logging in to their accounts and hold times are longer than usual.
Vanguard, TD Ameritrade and Fidelity also tweeted some clients were having technical problems.
The EU wants to ensure that competitors have a fair chance to succeed against the big firms.
Google has already voiced its concerns about the upcoming rules.
Apart from some lobbying, there is nothing the tech giants can do to stop the new rules in the short-term, Clifford Chance’s Vinje said.
