Tech

In this articleETSYJosh Silverman, CEO of Etsy.Adam Jeffery | CNBCE-commerce firm Etsy announced Wednesday that it is buying the second-hand fashion marketplace app Depop for $1.62 billion as part of an effort to reach a younger audience.Founded in the U.K. in 2011, Depop claims to now have approximately 30 million registered users across 150 countries. The online marketplace gives people the ability to sell on their used clothes and other items in a similar way to apps like Gumtree and Shpock.Etsy CEO Josh Silverman said in a statement that the company is “thrilled” to be adding what it believes to be the “resale home for Gen Z consumers” to Etsy.”Depop is a vibrant, two-sided marketplace with a passionate community, a highly-differentiated offering of unique items, and we believe significant potential to further scale,” he said.”Depop’s world-class management team and employees have done a fantastic job nurturing this community and driving organic, authentic growth in a way that aligns well with Etsy’s DNA and mission of keeping commerce human. We see significant opportunities for shared expertise and growth synergies across what will now be a tremendous ‘house of brands’ portfolio of individually distinct, and very special, ecommerce brands.”Depop’s CEO Maria Raga said in a statement

Elon Musk, Founder and Chief Engineer of SpaceX, speaks during the Satellite 2020 Conference in Washington, DC, United States on March 9, 2020.Yasin Ozturk | Anadolu Agency | Getty ImagesShares of Samsung Publishing, a major shareholder in the producer of “Baby Shark,” soared on Wednesday after a tweet by Tesla CEO Elon Musk about the viral children’s song.Shares of Samsung Publishing in South Korea soared more than 10% at one point during regular trading on Wednesday, before paring some gains to close 6.29% higher. The company has no affiliation with South Korean conglomerate Samsung Group, even though they share the Samsung name.Wednesday’s gains came on the back of a tweet by Musk on Tuesday morning Asia time, which said: “Baby Shark crushes all! More views than humans.”The stock remains off its year-to-date high of 59,000 Korean won in April, according to data from Refinitiv Eikon, though it has already surged more than 97% since the start of the year. Samsung Publishing shares were sitting at 47,300 Korean won by Wednesday’s close.The stock surge was another example of Musk’s apparent outsized influence.Cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and dogecoin previously saw sharp moves in their prices following comments by the tech billionaire. His

In this articleAMZNAn Amazon fulfillment center in Frankenthal, Germany.Thorsten Wagner | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesAmazon is bringing its Prime Day megasale back to its normal summertime schedule after the company last year postponed the annual event due to the coronavirus pandemic.The company announced Wednesday that this year’s Prime Day will take place on June 21 and 22. Members of Amazon’s Prime subscription program will get access to “more than 2 million deals” across every category, said Jamil Ghani, vice president of Prime, during a press event Tuesday.Prime Day, which started in 2015, is typically held in July. The discount celebration is partially designed to attract new Prime subscribers, to promote Amazon’s products and services, and to provide a sales boost during a normally slower shopping period.Last year, the company was forced to delay Prime Day until mid-October due to pandemic-related uncertainty and strains on its fulfillment and logistics capacity. Amazon is postponing this year’s Prime Day in India and Canada due to the worsening spread of Covid-19 in those countries.Amazon previously confirmed that Prime Day would be held in June, but it stopped short of sharing a kickoff date. Bloomberg reported last month that Amazon would select June 21 and

A digital Chinese currency red packet is seen on a mobile phone in an arranged photograph as Chengdu city starts to distribute 200,000 E-CNY ‘red packets’ worth 40 million yuan on February 24, 2021 in Yichang, Hubei Province of China.VCG | Visual China Group | Getty ImagesGUANGZHOU, China — China will hand out 40 million renminbi ($6.2 million) of its digital currency to citizens in Beijing in a lottery.Residents of the Chinese capital can use two banking apps to apply to win one of 200,000 so-called red packets as part of the lottery, according to the Beijing Local Financial Supervision and Administration Bureau.Each envelope contains 200 yuan (about $31) of the digital currency which can be spent with selected merchants. The deadline to register is midnight on June 7.The world’s second largest economy has yet to do a nationwide rollout of the digital yuan, which it has been developing since 2014, but is instead focusing on trials in the form of lotteries around the country.Li Bo, deputy governor of the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), said in April that the central bank would expand the scope of its pilot projects and could even allow foreign visitors at the 2022 Beijing

Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., arrives at the Axel Springer Award ceremony in Berlin, Germany, on Tuesday, Dec. 1, 2020.Liesa Johannssen-Koppitz | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesLast spring, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission admonished Tesla and CEO Elon Musk for allegedly violating terms of a 2019 revised settlement agreement, according to correspondence first obtained and reported on by the Wall Street Journal.SEC officials pointed to a tweet on May 1, 2020, in which Musk said that Tesla’s stock price was “too high,” prompting a more than $13 billion decline in the company’s market value, according to the report. The SEC also pointed to Musk tweets from 2019, where he discussed solar roof production numbers without obtaining pre-approvals, the Journal said.While the securities regulators monitored Musk’s use of Twitter amid the pandemic, and confronted him and Tesla via correspondence, they did not file a motion to compel enforcement of the settlement agreement.Musk is required to have Tesla-related tweets that contain material company information approved by an attorney before posting them. A so-called “twitter sitter” was part of a revised settlement agreement struck between the SEC, Musk and Tesla. The settlement terms also required Musk

Seven years after spinning out of LinkedIn, cloud software developer Confluent is going public.Confluent, which sells software that developers can use to quickly move data for use inside applications, filed its IPO prospectus on Tuesday, seeking to become the latest enterprise business to go from open-source project to multibillion-dollar public company.Revenue in the first quarter jumped 51% from a year earlier to $77 million, with most of its sales coming through subscriptions. The company’s let loss widened to $44.5 million from $33.6 million, as sales and marketing costs jumped.At the foundation of Confluent’s software is Apache Kafka, which got its start inside of LinkedIn. The founders of Confluent — Jay Kreps, Jun Rao and Neha Narkhede — created Kafka in 2011 and then formed Confluent in 2014 with an investment of about $500,000 from LinkedIn. The company was most recently valued at $4.5 billion in a round last year led by Coatue Management and Altimeter Capital.”We rolled it out at scale for early use cases at LinkedIn, handling data streams with billions of messages,” Kreps, Confluent’s CEO, wrote in a letter in the prospectus. “But even then, our ambition was bigger. Kafka was built to be open source, and we

Amazon CEO Jeff BezosAlex Wong | Getty ImagesAmazon is throwing its weight behind federal legislation to legalize marijuana, while pledging to no longer screen some of its workers for the drug.In a blog post Tuesday, Amazon’s consumer boss Dave Clark said the company supports the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act, reintroduced in the House late last month. The measure would decriminalize cannabis at the federal level, expunge criminal records and invest in impacted communities.”We hope that other employers will join us, and that policymakers will act swiftly to pass this law,” Clark wrote.Amazon also said it would adjust its corporate drug testing policy for some of its workers. The company will no longer include marijuana in its drug screening program for any positions not regulated by the Department of Transportation.”In the past, like many employers, we’ve disqualified people from working at Amazon if they tested positive for marijuana use,” Clark said. “However, given where state laws are moving across the U.S., we’ve changed course.”WATCH: A closer look at Amazon’s warehouse injuries

Monitors display Coinbase signage during the company’s initial public offering (IPO) at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, on Wednesday, April 14, 2021.Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesCoinbase is finally getting into dogecoin.Starting Tuesday, the crypto exchange is offering its Pro users the option to trade dogecoin, a cryptocurrency that was started as a joke and has taken off this year, helped by the frequent tweeting of Tesla CEO Elon Musk.Dogecoin is currently trading at 32 cents, up almost 6,000% for the year. However, it’s dropped by more than 50% since reaching a high in May.Coinbase is one of the largest crypto exchanges on the planet, and its Pro service, as the name suggests, is designed for professional traders. Dogecoin is also available for purchase on Robinhood’s app and through Gemini.Coinbase said in a blog post that it will “immediately” begin accepting inbound transfers to Coinbase Pro. If there is enough liquidity, trading of dogecoin will begin on or after 9 a.m. Pacific Time on Thursday, in supported locations. However, trading will be staggered.The company says it plans to launch in three phases: post-only, limit-only and full trading.”If at any point one of the new order books does not

In this articleZMZoom Video Communications Inc. founder and CEO Eric Yuan at the company’s IPO at Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, April 18, 2019.Victor J. Blue | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesZoom reported better-than-expected first-quarter results Tuesday, with sales growth of 191%. The shares rose 3% in extended trading after initially falling as much as 5% on concerns of a looming slowdown.Here’s how the company did:Earnings: $1.32 per share, adjusted, vs. 99 cents per share as expected by analysts, according to Refinitiv.Revenue: $956.2 million, vs. $906.0 million as expected by analysts, according to Refinitiv.Revenue in the quarter, which ended on April 30, jumped from $328.2 million a year earlier, according to a statement. In the previous quarter revenue rose 369% as Zoom lapped the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S., which brought in millions of new users.The company’s gross margin widened to 73.9% from 69.4% in the previous quarter, primarily because of optimization of public-cloud resources, the company said. Zoom said its Zoom Phone product, including cloud-based phone services along with video calls and other capabilities, had 1.5 million seats at the end of April, up from 1 million in January.Zoom said it expects $1.14 to $1.15 in adjusted

In this articleSOFIShares of SoFi were up more than 5% Tuesday after the online finance company made its public debut.SoFi, short for Social Finance, went public by merging with Social Capital Hedosophia Corp V, a blank-check company run by venture capital investor Chamath Palihapitiya.Special purpose acquisition companies, known as SPACs, raise money through a shell company to buy an existing company and have become increasingly popular in the past year.The shares were previously listed under the ticker IPOE for Palihapitiya’s special purpose vehicle. Shares of Palihapitiya’s venture closed at $20.15 on Friday, up 70% year to date.Founded in 2011 with a focus on student loan refinancing for millennials, SoFi offers stock and cryptocurrency trading, personal and mortgage loans and wealth management services.”We’re the only one stop shop to do all your financial service needs at one platform,” CEO Anthony Noto told CNBC’s “TechCheck.” “Many people talked about broadening the suite of products but only SoFi has done it on one mobile platform.”SoFi was last valued at $5.7 billion in private markets. It’s attracted funders such as Peter Thiel, private equity firm Silver Lake and Softbank, according to PitchBook.– CNBC’s Kate Rooney contributed to this report.SIGN UP for our weekly, original newsletter