Business

Disneyland fans who have been waiting over a year for the popular theme park to reopen are being forced to wait hours to snag a ticket online as demand heats up. The Anaheim, Calif.-based park started selling tickets again on Thursday ahead of its planned April 30 reopening. But within a few hours of the ticket window reopening, the website was overwhelmed — creating a backlog that continued into Friday, according to social media posts. “Remember when we were Annual Passholders and we didn’t have to deal with this queue bulls–t,” tweeted one fan. The company on Friday acknowledged that guests may have to wait “several hours of more” for a ticket. “We are experiencing high demand given the historic nature of the Disneyland Resort’s reopening,” a spokesman from Disneyland told The Post. “To deliver a strong guest experience, we are deliberately pulsing guests through the system. Wait times may be several hours or more depending on when you joined the queue.” On Friday morning around 9 a.m. ET, the queue’s wait time was only around 20 minutes before ballooning to more than an hour just two hours later. “We still have plenty of reservation availability, and

Dogecoin has doubled from its Wednesday morning rally to reach prices of more than $0.30 Thursday night. The dog meme-inspired cryptocurrency — that began as a joke — is up 400 percent over the past week, according to Coindesk. The surge came a day after Wednesday’s stock market debut for the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, which was considered a sign of Wall Street’s acceptance of crypto. However, Dogecoin is not listed on Coinbase. Doge was the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter Thursday night, and at least one user told The Post they were unable to purchase the currency on Robinhood, due to the app crashing as its value skyrocketed. “Doge Barking at the Moon,” tweeted SpaceX’s Elon Musk, who once said Dogecoin is his favorite Bitcoin rival. “Me on Robinhood checking if #dogecoin has reached the moon every 2 seconds,” another user tweeted. “There is fixing to be a lot of Meme Millionaires,” one user posted. Dallas Mavericks owner Marc Cuban began accepting Dogecoin for payment for NBA tickets and merchandise last month.

 Online brokerage Robinhood on Thursday sued to invalidate Massachusetts’ recently-adopted fiduciary rule and block state regulators from proceeding with charges it encourages inexperienced investors to place risky trades without limits. Robinhood in a lawsuit filed in state court in Boston said the fiduciary standard of conduct for broker-dealers that Massachusetts Secretary of State Bill Galvin’s office adopted last year violates state and federal law. A spokeswoman for Galvin did not respond to a request for comment. Galvin, the state’s top securities regulator, in December filed an administrative case accusing Robinhood of using aggressive tactics to attract inexperienced investors and failing to prevent outages on its platform. He accused the app-based service of using strategies that treated trading like a game to lure young, inexperienced customers, including having confetti rain down for each trade made on its app. The case is the first enforcement action brought under a state fiduciary rule adopted in September that raised the investment-advice standard for brokers. Regulators are seeking a fine and order requiring Robinhood to engage a compliance consultant to review its platform and policies. Robinhood has denied wrongdoing.

The feds just doled out another 2 million stimulus checks — and a large chunk of them went to veterans. The Internal Revenue Service’s fifth batch of coronavirus relief payments under the American Rescue Plan included more than 320,000 checks for people relying Department of Veterans Affairs benefits, officials said. Those taxpayers are receiving compensation benefits or VA pensions available to veterans as well as their spouses or other relatives in some cases, according to the feds. Like many Social Security recipients who had to wait for their stimulus checks, these VA beneficiaries do not usually file tax returns and didn’t submit their payment info to the IRS when previous payments were distributed last year, the tax agency said Wednesday. The IRS had to review payment data it received from the VA to deliver money to the affected veterans, officials have said. The VA beneficiaries’ checks were among more than $3.4 billion worth of “economic impact payments” that the IRS said it started processing last Friday and officially paid on Wednesday. Nearly 850,000 payments in the latest batch went to people whose payment info the IRS did not have on record but recently filed a tax return, according to the

Facebook shelled out roughly $23.4 million in 2020 to protect its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The massive amount includes about $13.4 million for personal security for Zuckerberg, along with an additional annual $10 million pre-tax allowance for the protection of his family, according to a Proxy statement filed by Facebook last Friday. Zuckerberg’s company-instituted security program includes protection for the billionaire while traveling and at home. It also covers the costs of installation and maintenance of security measures at his residences. “We believe that the scope and costs of these security programs are appropriate and necessary,” the company said in the Proxy statement. “We believe that Mr. Zuckerberg’s role puts him in a unique position: he is synonymous with Facebook and, as a result, negative sentiment regarding our company is directly associated with, and often transferred to, Mr. Zuckerberg,” the statement continued. Overall in 2020, Facebook spent about $25.3 million on Zuckerbeg. His base salary was just $1.

Jordan Belfort, the infamous stockbroker who inspired the hit 2013 film “The Wolf of Wall Street,” is hosting a new documentary for the Discovery+ streaming service about the wild rise and fall of GameStop’s stock. Discovery took notice when Belfort weighed in as the GameStop saga unfolded, telling news outlets that the “little guy” can “play the same game” as the Wall Street overlords. He also posted a video to YouTube in which he reenacted a scene from Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-nominated “Wolf of Wall Street,” which was based on his 2007 memoir of the same name. Belfort recently sat down with The Post to chat about the meme stocks, how the Reddit rally took hold and what investors should do now. New York Post: You tweeted out that video that was very similar to “The Wolf of Wall Street” speech, and seemed to be urging the WallStreetBets guys to hold onto their investments. How would you compare the Reddit crowd to the traders at your old firm, Stratton Oakmont? Jordan Belfort: So that, that video was a joke. That was meant to be a funny thing. And just to be clear, I never invested in GameStop because I figured if I put a

The price of bitcoin climbed to a new record high above $63,000 Tuesday as the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase prepares to go public this week. The world’s largest and oldest digital coin hit an all-time peak of $63,209.45 Tuesday morning, according to CoinDesk, surpassing the previous record of $61,742 it hit last month. Bitcoin was recently trading at $63,171.14 as of 11:41 a.m., putting it up 5.5 percent from a day earlier and roughly 116 percent for the year so far, CoinDesk data show. Ether, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market value, also hit a new record high of $2,266.68 on Tuesday, CoinDesk says. Bitcoin has been on a tear over the past six months, but the latest rally came a day before Coinbase — the US’ largest cryptocurrency exchange — was set to start trading on the Nasdaq. The company’s direct listing slated for Wednesday — which could give it a valuation as high as $100 billion, according to CNBC — is viewed as a major milestone for cryptocurrency advocates and marks another sign of the mainstream financial world embracing the digital assets. “The Coinbase IPO is a seminal moment for the digital assets industry,” said Pete Cheyne, founder of Bottleypay,

Domino’s Pizza will be delivering pies with the help of driverless robot cars as part of a pilot in Houston beginning this week. The largest pizza chain in the US is partnering with Nuro, a self-driving delivery company that has raised more than $1 billion from investors including Softbank, and which received regulatory approval last year to begin unmanned deliveries. The companies announced their partnership in 2019, but the pilot for the service launches this week, the companies said on Monday. Nuro also launched a pilot in Houston with CVS last year to deliver prescriptions to consumers and it has been working with Walmart and Kroger as well. The collaboration with Domino’s comes amid a severe shortage of drivers available for food delivery, Nuro told Reuters in a statement. Consumers who are part of the pilot — which is being run out of the Woodland Heights Domino’s — can track the vans’ route via text alerts. They pre-pay for their delivery online and once the vans arrive they use a PIN code to retrieve their order from the vans, which are smaller than a regular vehicle. The ceiling doors open upwards and the pie is presented to the customer. “There is

Microsoft is in advanced talks to buy artificial intelligence and speech technology company Nuance Communications for about $16 billion, according to a source familiar with the matter. The price being discussed could value Nuance at about $56 a share, the source said, adding that an agreement could be announced as soon as Monday. Nuance shares closed Friday at $45.58. Bloomberg News, which first reported the deal (paywall) between Nuance and Microsoft, said talks are ongoing and the discussions could still fall apart. Burlington, Mass.-based Nuance whose voice recognition technology helped launch Apple’s assistant Siri, makes software for sectors ranging from healthcare to the automotive industries. The deal with Nuance would be Microsoft’s second-biggest deal, after its $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn in 2016. Microsoft and Nuance did not respond to Reuters’ request for comment.

Google has utilized a secret program to track bids on its ad-buying platform — and has been accused of using the information to gain an unfair market advantage that raked in hundreds of millions of dollars annually, according to a report. The initiative — dubbed “Project Bernanke” in an apparent reference to former Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke — was detailed in court filings in an ongoing Texas-led antitrust suit, which were initially uploaded to an online docket with incomplete redactions, The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday. In the documents, since re-filed under seal, Google reportedly acknowledged the existence of Project Bernanke and wrote that details of its “operations are not disclosed to [ad] publishers,” but denied that it gave the search titan an unfair advantage. Lawyers for the Lone Star State argue, however, that the program was tantamount to insider trading, particularly when combined with Google’s complicated, multi-layered role in the online advertising marketplace. The company operates simultaneously as the operator of a major ad exchange, a representative of both buyers and sellers on the exchange — and a buyer in its own right, according to the suit. By using Project Bernanke’s inside information on what other ad buyers