Fintech firm Plaid has hired Ripsy Bandourian, formerly a vice president at Booking.com, as its head of Europe.
Plaid’s former head of international, Keith Grose, now focuses largely on running the U.K. business.
The company says it’s planning an “aggressive” expansion in Europe this year.
Electric-vehicle maker Lucid is debuting a new edition of its popular and powerful Air luxury sedan.
The company’s Air sedan has impressed critics in many ways since its launch last fall, in part for the astounding performance of the 1,111-horsepower Dream Edition.
U.S. deliveries of the new Grand Touring Performance model will begin in June.
The 47.5% figure includes a hardware platform fee of 30% for sales made through the Meta Quest Store, where it sells apps and games for its virtual reality headsets.
On top of that, Horizon Worlds, will charge a 17.5% fee.
Meta’s fees for the sale of virtual assets on Horizon Worlds are significantly more than the 30% Apple charges developers on its App Store.
David Zaslav officially takes over as the new CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery as the company begins trading on the Nasdaq on Monday.
Zaslav is known for his gregarious personality and has been on a monthslong “listening tour” of Hollywood.
Friends say he has a chance to be Hollywood’s next leader with high emotional intelligence, but he’ll have to be careful not to disenfranchise current leadership or get bogged down in minutia.
“It may be the right time for a new man because the industry is changing so rapidly,” longtime Zaslav associate Lloyd Blankfein
A slew of electric vehicle companies from Tesla to BYD in China have been forced to raise the prices of their cars and the cost of raw materials shoot up.
Analysts said some low-cost and smaller players could struggle and even be forced to cut models from their lineup.
Tesla and BYD are better positioned to weather rising prices due to their strong supply chains, the analysts said.
Uber has been granted a 30-month license to operate in London, according to Transport for London.
The move ends a years-long spat with the agency, which twice revoked Uber’s London license.
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.
