Saudi Arabia is walking away from a deal with Virgin Hyperloop, the Financial Times reports. The deal included a feasibility study — the agreement for which was expected to be signed at the Future Investment Initiative conference, otherwise known as "Davos in the Desert."

The move comes in response to the company joining droves of others who pulled out of the conference, following the disappearance and possible murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a naturalized US citizen and Washington Post columnist.

Virgin Hyperloop One, one iteration of Elon Musk's visionary Hyperloop transportation project, unveiled its first pod prototype earlier this year. Saudi Arabia is one one of its most important backers, and heralded the project as one that could "enable all 4th-generation technologies to flourish in the Kingdom."

On Thursday of last week, as evidence was mounting that Saudi officials were believed to have killed the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the Kingdom's consulate in Istanbul, Branson joined the likes of JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and others in pulling out of the conference.

"I had high hopes for the current government in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and its leader Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and it is why I was delighted to accept two directorships in the tourism projects around the Red Sea," Branson said in a blog post published October 11.

"What has reportedly happened in Turkey around the disappearance of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, if proved true, would clearly change the ability of any of us in the West to do business with the Saudi Government."

You can read everything we know about the troubling disappearance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi here.

Global IT spending is forecast to hit $3.8 trillion in 2019, up 3.2% from the $3.69 trillion companies are expected to spend this year, according to newly-released Gartner data.

While corporate budgets continue to boom, Gartner's projection for 2019 IT spending actually represents a slowdown in growth. Gartner forecasts that spending in 2018 will ultimately grow 4.5% from 2017, while actual growth in 2017 was up 3.9% from 2016. And so, a year-over-year gain of 3.2% is a notable dropping-off.

Communications services — which includes everything from landline and mobile telephone services, to cloud communication tools like Zoom — is projected to take in $1.4 trillion in 2019, more than a third of overall spending for the year. But spending in that area is expected to grow just 1.2% from 2018.

The fastest-growing segment is enterprise software, which is projected to rake in $439 billion next year. This bucket includes customer relationship management software like Salesforce, as well as financial management and HR software like Workday.

Companies are expected to increase spending in enterprise software by 8.3% in 2019, following 9.9% projected growth in 2018, and 10.4% growth in 2017.

Even spending on data center systems, which have lost their edge thanks to growing corporate reliance on public clouds, is expected to grow by 1.6%. This is down from 6% growth projected in 2018, and the 6.4% growth realized in 2017.

This year's expected IT growth is "buoyed by a strong server market," according to Gartner. However, the steep decline in 2019 reflects the fact that the server market is expected to slow down once again, according to the report.

Shayanne Gal/Business Insider

Facebook is on the back foot. Again.

On Tuesday, a group of small advertisers added a complaint to a two-year lawsuit accusing Facebook of not reporting measurement problems for more than a year. The group claims that Facebook misreported an error in counting time spent watching videos.

While Facebook apologized in 2016 for measuring a metric measuring time spent with video incorrectly by 60% to 80%, the lawsuit claims the metric was inflated by 150% to 900% and that Facebook knew of the discrepancy for a little over a year.

Since then, Facebook has taken a number of steps to clean up its metrics, including putting together a measurement council and undergoing an audit from the Media Ratings Council to vet its metrics for third-party reporting. But it hasn't helped that on top of the metrics crisis, Facebook's also had to weather the Cambridge Analytica scandal and its recent hack of 50 million users.

These issues are collectively causing some marketers to lose faith in Facebook.

Facebook's string of problems is denting advertiser trust

While the lawsuit is two years old, marketers say the combination of problems is causing trust issues for advertisers.

"From an overall trust standpoint, this is another untimely black eye and there aren't enough black eyes for this to happen," said Mike Mother, founder and CEO of WPromote, an ad agency that primarily works with direct-response advertisers. "If you're thinking about 2019 planning, yes, overall it's driven by what's working — so I don't think there's a lot of boycotting — but the trust does have a material effect."

WPromote's clients primarily use third parties and conversion metrics to gauge the success of ads instead of video views that are often used by big brands to measure ads. That means that Facebook's string of measurement problems has not hit budgets.

"We haven't gotten a lot of calls saying 'What happened? Does this mean my spend for the last three years was bad?'" Mother said.

But it may be a different story for advertisers that aren't performance-based.

"For the other type of advertiser — the branding advertiser — this might be problematic. If they were comparing views and times to other things that are not performance-based, it suddenly may feel like things are over-reported," Mother said.

Marketers continue to have a rocky relationship with Facebook

After Facebook reported the video miscalculation, it reported a number of other incorrect metrics, including bugs within brands' Pages and analytics for Instant Articles.

In the case of the miscalculated video metric, "we always knew that the numbers didn't seem right," said David Herrmann, director of advertising at Social Outlier. "From my perspective, Facebook is saying 'go to video' and I never listened to them, and it's been proven true."

But he said that he doesn't expect advertisers to pull their budgets because Facebook ads still convert better than other platforms.

"It wouldn't shock me if people are saying that they're going to pull from Facebook but let's be honest, there aren't many other places for them to go — you're making a statement more than anything because it's going to hurt your business."

But Facebook's big Q4 earnings could take a hit

Some marketers think that the lawsuit will affect Facebook's financials.

According to Mark Hughes, CEO of C3 Metrics, a measurement firm that helps marketers analyze their campaigns, the lawsuit could hit Facebook's fourth-quarter results much in the same way that its Facebook's revenue faltered in the second-quarter of this year.

Hughes said that advertisers pulled back spend during the second quarter of this year when CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified to Congress about Cambridge Analytica. Spend since then has increased but could dip again during the last few months of the year, which is when advertisers up their spend.

Dado Ruvic/Reuters

"Budgets have been set already for October [but] I would not be surprised if in November and December, we see a pullback similar to earlier in the year in March and April," Hughes said. "I wouldn't be surprised if Q4 this year would be equal to Q2 for this year in term of revenue."

On top of those issues, engagement and ROI on Facebook has shrunk significantly, according to C3 Metrics' findings.

"It's confirmation of what we've been seeing, which is Facebook may not be the best playground to have your ad dollars in — the ROI is just not what it used to be," Hughes said. "I think they're going to try and settle this [lawsuit] and get it out of the news cycle very, very quickly."

Meanwhile, publishers are blaming Facebook for forcing them to pivot to video

A number of media executives pointed out that the timing of the discrepancy is suspect. It happened around the same time that publishers started pumping out video for the platform a few years ago, at its behest.

Former Teen Vogue exec and Out magazine's current editor-in-chief and Phillip Picardi said in a tweet that there is a correlation between the measurement discrepancy outlined in the lawsuit, and publishers' 'pivoting to video,' because of Facebook's ambition to push more video onto the platform.

"This is especially maddening because the 'pivot to video' is not, as this proves, necessarily a consumer-led initiative," he tweeted. "This is more likely behavior being forced on us by pressure from advertisers who prefer video ads to avoid ad-blockers and guarantee viewability."

Other media execs tweeted that they either weren't surprised by news of the lawsuit, or blamed Facebook and its measurement snafus for reorganizing publishers' newsrooms and teams, resulting in layoffs across the industry.

Back in the day, there were options when it came to search.

Choosing between AOL, Yahoo, or Alta Vista kind of just depended on your mood that day. And then came Google, and a clear search engine king was crowned.

The ubiquity of Google search today is astounding. In September, Google powered over 86% of desktop searches worldwide, according to Statista.

However, with personal privacy becoming more of a concern — especially the Google+ fiasco that led the company to shut down its less-than-beloved social network — perhaps search is headed for a shakeup.

If any privacy-focused search engine is going to rival Google Search, it might be DuckDuckGo. With 800 million daily direct queries as of this September (up 33% from last year), the search engine named after the children's game appears to be gaining some real traction. In fact, it's a profitable business.

Beyond not tracking my every move (DuckDuckGo doesn't collect or share your search history or clicks), there were some other aspects I learned to appreciate like less advertisements, comparable search results and an easy-to-navigate settings page that allowed me to freely switch between themes.

I tested DuckDuckGo for one week, completely locking myself out of Google search to see if I could survive on this more privacy-focused alternative.

Here's what I found.

Sometimes investors have a much better sense of what's in their best interest than the executives in charge of the companies they own or the advisors who get paid to tell them how to vote on company issues.

Such seems to be the case with the shareholders of Helios and Matheson, the beleaguered owner of MoviePass. They finally seeming to putting their collective foot down, in defiance of the company's management and even influential proxy advisors Glass Lewis and Institutional Shareholder Services.

Helios and Matheson is seeking investor approval for the second reverse-split of its stock in four months. Once a high-flier, the company's stock has been sunk under massive dilution and the huge cash outflow from MoviePass' money-losing subscription cinema ticket service and now trades at around 2 cents a share. With Helios and Matheson running the risk that its stock will be delisted by the Nasdaq market, it's hoping to reduce its share count and boost its stock price by as much as a factor of 500 to get back into compliance with listing regulations.

Investors seem to be dubious of the new reverse-split proposal

But the company seems to be having trouble getting shareholders on board.

It's not hard to find discontent among Helios and Matheson's investors. You need only check Twitter or the various online investor discussion boards.

While investors have been unhappy for months now, thanks to the company's slumping stock, their growing ire now seems to have put the reverse-split proposal in real jeopardy of failing.

MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe, left, and Helios and Matheson CEO Ted Farnsworth in happier times. MoviePass/Reuters On Monday, just three days before Helios and Matheson's special shareholder meeting was due to take place and the votes on the proposal officially counted, it issued a press release and sent out a proxy statement to shareholders noting that ISS and Glass Lewis were backing its reverse-split proposal. The proxy advisors had issued their recommendations weeks earlier, so the company wasn't exactly alerting investors to breaking news. Instead, its move to tout those recommendations in the closing days before a vote is finalized is just the sort of thing corporate managers do when they're worried about losing.

Then, the very next day, Helios and Matheson took the unusual step of delaying the shareholder meeting for two weeks, explaining that it wanted to give investors "more time to consider and vote upon the proposal." A company spokeswoman declined to say whether the company postponed the meeting because it was losing the vote, but you better believe that if the early returns were going Helios and Matheson's way, the meeting would have been held right on schedule.

Executives have done a great job of destroying shareholder value

Investors have good reason to oppose the reverse-split proposal, even if doing so puts the company in greater danger of having its shares delisted. Helios and Matheson's executives have driven the company into the dirt, destroying enormous amounts of shareholder value in the process and abusing investors' trust, even to the point where the company is now reportedly facing an investigation by New York's attorney general. Passing the proposal as written would give CEO Ted Farnsworth and his team leeway to do yet more damage.

Under the proposal, Helios and Matheson would essentially trade investors one new share of stock in the company for anywhere from two to 500 of its current shares. The move would affect the number of shares it has outstanding, the number of shares it has to set aside to pay off convertible notes, and the number of stock options it has outstanding. It would also immediately increase the company's stock price in inverse proportion to the reverse-split ratio.

What the proposal wouldn't do, though, is reduce the number of shares the company is authorized to issue. That amount would remain at 5 billion. So, one of the effects of the reverse-split would be to give the company lots more room to issue new shares.

Farnsworth and company have repeatedly taken advantage of just that latitude. In the last year, thanks in part to two shareholder-approved increases in Helios and Matheson's share count and its first reverse split in July, which reduced its outstanding shares and gave it more head room to issue new ones, the company's share count has increased nearly 3,900,00%, adjusting for that split.

The last reverse split is a bad portent for this one

However, investors don't have to look any further back than July to get a pretty good idea of what might happen if they pass another reverse split. Helios and Matheson's leaders offered some of the same rationale for that split as this one — that it was needed to boost the company's stock price to avert it being delisted from the Nasdaq. As with the current proposal, the company offered a range of ratios by which it might reverse split the stock, in that case from 1 to 2 on up to 1 to 250.

But at the shareholder meeting, Farnsworth tried to downplay the import of the reverse-split proposal, saying it was simply an "insurance policy" in case shareholders chose not to increase its share count. Either way, the company would get increased headroom to issue new shares.

After investors passed both proposals, Helios and Matheson took advantage of each of them. It reverse split its stock by 250-to-1, the maximum authorized by investors, freeing up as many shares as it could under that proposal. And then it proceeded in the coming weeks to sell shares like there was no tomorrow.

In just a week, the company's share count had already quadrupled. Two weeks later it was 100 times larger. By the middle of last month it had more than doubled again. Adding that increase to the billions of shares it had to set aside for its convertible notes, Helios and Matheson soon got to the point where it had more than maxed out the 5 billion shares it was authorized to issue. (The company has since renegotiated the terms of some of those notes, reducing the number of shares it needed to reserve.)

As you might imagine, with all that share issuance, the company's stock price plummeted. After trading at $22.50 a share immediately after the reverse split, it fell to below a $1 a share again within a week and was down below 10 cents a share within two weeks. It's been mired around 2 cents for weeks now. Thanks to that decline, the company not only doesn't meet the Nasdaq's per-share price requirements, it now falls shy of its market capitalization standards, meaning that even if the reverse-split boosts its stock price, it could still be delisted because it's not worth very much.

Thanks to all of its stock sales and debt issuance, Helios and Matheson raised some $210 million in just the first six months of this year. In that same period, its operations — which largely involved paying retail prices for millions of movie tickets that it gave away for free to customers — blew through $219 million.

The company looks set to do it all over again

The new reverse-split proposal would set Helios and Matheson up to do the same thing all over again. It already has authorization via regulatory filings to sell more shares. The split would give it billions of new shares it could issue to raise yet more funds that it can burn through, with few restrictions on management.

Both ISS and Glass Lewis declined to comment on their recommendations. Their reports on the issue were each terse. Neither proxy advisor seemed to take very seriously the previous dilution that Helios and Matheson has already inflicted on shareholders or how the proposal would give the company room to afflict them with still more.

But all indications are that investors are taking that prospect a lot more seriously than the proxy advisors and company executives. As well they should.

Now read:

In some respects, we're living in the heyday of the fake holiday. Thanks to social media, any company or person with a good enough idea and a following can get a new, made-up holiday trending.

What makes a hashtag holiday work online is the same thing that makes it work offline: connection.

"Trending hashtags provide brands and consumers the opportunity to talk about something meaningful to them, even it is something as trivial as their favorite donut," Deron Dalton, executive editor at The Tylt, an online debate site that pits one hashtag against another, told Business Insider.

"Perhaps #NationalCoffeeDay was created as a brand marketing ploy, but it started trending because everyone loves a good cup of coffee," he said.

Bill Gates has said he is "heartbroken" by the death of his childhood friend and Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen.

Allen, who also owned the NFL Seattle Seahawks and the NBA Portland Trail Blazers, died on Monday afternoon after a battle with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, his family confirmed to Business Insider. He was 65.

Gates said Allen helped change the world with the creation of the personal computer. He added that his life was marked by a "second act" in which he attempted to improve the lives of people in Seattle, where he was from, and others around the globe.

Gates' statement, which was carried by CNBC and The Washington Post among others, is copied below in full:

"I am heartbroken by the passing of one of my oldest and dearest friends, Paul Allen. From our early days together at Lakeside School, through our partnership in the creation of Microsoft, to some of our joint philanthropic projects over the years, Paul was a true partner and dear friend. Personal computing would not have existed without him.

"But Paul wasn't content with starting one company. He channeled his intellect and compassion into a second act focused on improving people's lives and strengthening communities in Seattle and around the world. He was fond of saying, 'If it has the potential to do good, then we should do it.' That's the kind of person he was.

"Paul loved life and those around him, and we all cherished him in return. He deserved much more time, but his contributions to the world of technology and philanthropy will live on for generations to come. I will miss him tremendously."

READ: Business Insider's Paul Allen obituary»

Thousands of Google employees participated in an internal protest against the company's participation in a high-tech military project earlier this year, but the unprecedented revolt at the company had little influence on management's decision-making, according to CEO Sundar Pichai.

At a gathering to celebrate Wired magazine's 25th anniversary, Pichai was asked whether Google's employees had anything to do with the company's announcement last week that it will not compete for a much sought-after $10 billion cloud-computing contract offered by the Pentagon.

"Throughout Google's history we've given our employees a lot of voice and say in it, but we don't run the company by holding referendums," Pichai said. "It's an important input. We take it seriously. But even on this particular issue it's not just what the employees said. It's also about the debate within the AI community."

In March, when word leaked that Google had quietly contributed to Project Maven, a Pentagon effort to use artificial intelligence to analyze drone video footage, more than 4,000 Google employees signed a petition demanding the company stop the work. Some employees leaked documents to journalists and about a dozen resigned.

In June, Google's leadership appeared to respond to the protest by releasing a set of AI principles designed to govern the company's ethical use of the technology. They included a promise never to build AI weapons. Back then, it sure seemed like the opposition within Google to Project Maven had forced the company's hand.

But on stage at Wired25, Pichai said that Google plans to work with the US Department of Defense in the future, perhaps in such areas as cyber-security or transportation planning. He said Google very much supports the US armed forces.

"We deeply respect what they do to protect our country," he said.

He made it clear, however, Google will not work on autonomous weaponry or anything that violates the company's AI principles.

Pichai was also asked about Google's possible plan to once again offer a search engine in China. This summer, The Intercept broke the news that Google had built a search engine that would censor information. Google search pulled out of China in 2010, claiming it could no longer comply with the government's demands that the company filter information.

To return to China, Google would again have to filter information that authorities find objectionable. Some groups argue that censoring information is a violation of human rights.

Pichai said the offering search in China, home to 20-percent of the world's population, is important to the company. As for a censored search engine, Pichai said the company wanted to see what a Google search engine that complied with Chinese law would look like. He gave no timetable for a return to China.

Google is the latest in a still growing number of US businesses to distance themselves from Saudi Arabia following accusations that the government there is behind the disappearance of a dissident journalist.

Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene was scheduled to speak at an investment event called the Future Investment Initiative, a conference sponsored by Saudi government, but has now dropped out.

"We can confirm Diane Greene will not be attending the FII Summit," said a Google spokesperson in a written statement.

A cloud of suspicion has hung over the Saudi government ever since Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist, a Saudi citizen, and a well-known critic of the government there, went missing on Oct. 2. The government of Turkey alleges it has proof that Khashoggi was killed inside the Saudi embassy in Turkey. Saudi officials have denied it had anything to do with Khashoggi's disappearance.

In response to the accusations, several high-profile tech leaders announced last week they had pulled out of the conference dubbed the "Davos in the Desert." Included among them are Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber's CEO, Steve Case, an AOL cofounder and venture capitalist, Arianna Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post, and Andy Rubin, cofounder of Android and former Google executive.

Greg Sandoval/Business Insider

The controversy comes at an awkward time for Google. The past year, the company has tried to strengthen ties with the Saudis. In April, Google's leaders met with Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman. According to reports, they discussed cooperating on cloud computing services and the possibility of building a digital hub in Saudi Arabia.

Later that month, after the company reported earnings, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced that Google would roll out cloud services in Saudi Arabia.

"Our global infrastructure continues to expand to support demand," Pichai told analysts on the call. "We commissioned three new sub sea cables and announced new regions in Canada, Japan, Netherlands and Saudi Arabia, bringing our total of recently launched and upcoming regions to 20."

Pulling out of the conference could conceivably harm Google's relationship with the crown prince, though had Greene attended, critics would have likely claimed that Google was once again at odds with the company's values.

The situation shows just how hard it can be for Greene to build Google's cloud business, and make up ground on two much larger rivals, Amazon AWS and Microsoft's Azure, while not running afoul of the company's moral codes.

Earlier this year, after thousands of the company's employees rose up in protest, Google stopped working on a military program called Project Maven, an effort that used artificial intelligence to analyze drone surveillance footage.

The company also published a list of principles that would direct its use of AI in the future. Those principles appear to demand some sacrifice from the company. Last week, Google said it would not bid on a $10 billion Pentagon contract due to potential conflicts with the AI principles.

Amazon is currently the favorite to win the contract. And Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos took a veiled shot at Google at a conference in San Francisco on Monday: "If big tech companies are going to turn their back on the US Department of Defense, this country is going to be in trouble," he said.

With a library full of Marvel, Star Wars, and other beloved franchises, Disney is expected to be a major force in the streaming wars when it launches its own service late next year.

A new report from analysts at Morgan Stanley, led by Benjamin Swinburne, estimated the service will gain around 23 million subscribers by 2024, and between 40-45 million by 2028. Based on an expected monthly subscription price of $9 at launch, which could increase to $13 by 2028, the analysts predicted the service will be profitable in 2026.

The analysts wrote that they saw the Disney service becoming a $6-billion-plus business, "with stand-alone EBIT profitability achieved in 2026E."

Disney would have been a formidable player in the streaming game even without the Fox merger, but the analysis was made with the assumption that the Disney-Fox deal will be completed as planned. Last week, 21st Century Fox president Peter Rice told Variety that the deal is expected to close by January 1, at which point Disney will own Fox's film studio and other assets. That means that Disney will own Fox's Marvel superhero properties the X-Men and Fantastic Four, as well as other franchises like "Avatar" and "Alien."

The Morgan Stanley report noted that Disney's service will be "more modest" in its scope of content and spending than its primary competition, Netflix. Netflix made it a goal this year to have 1,000 original shows and movies by year's end, and spent an estimated $8 billion to do so. The analysis estimated Netflix to have 227 million subscribers by 2022 compared to the 117 million it had last year.

But that doesn't mean that Disney isn't dropping big bucks on the service. Morgan Stanley expects Disney to spend nearly $2 billion on content for the streaming service prior to its launch in 2019, and "could have 8-10 original TV series (including at least 2-3 high-profile series with larger budgets), 3-4 original films, as well as other original TV movies and short-form content ready to be released."

"The service is also expected to include library content from Disney Channel and a steady pipeline of recent theatrical releases in the US following the expiration of its Netflix pay-1 deal in calendar 2018," the analysts added.

Netflix won't be Disney's only competition, though. AT&T, which now owns Time Warner, announced last week that it will launch its own streaming service next year that will include HBO. Amazon is developing a pricey "Lord of the Rings" TV series, and Hulu should never be counted out with a wide-range of content that includes the Emmy-winning "The Handmaid's Tale."

On Monday, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff had sharp words for San Francisco CEOs who aren't helping with the city's homelessness problem, just days after a heated exchange of tweets with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.

"I know if we're going to raise money for our schools, our hospitals, our homeless, our NGOs, there is a group of people in the city who are willing to give, and there is a group of people in the city who give nothing," Benioff said on stage at the Wired 25 conference, answering a question from interviewer Adam Rogers of Wired about his dissent from Dorsey.

"So you're in two buckets. You're either for the homeless and for the kids and for the hospitals, or you're for yourself. You can decide who you're for, and it's really that simple."

Benioff and Dorsey got into this Twitter spat last week over Proposition C, a measure on the upcoming San Francisco city ballot that would raise a certain tax on large companies to aid the city in tackling its growing homelessness problem. The two San Francisco tech giants debated the measure, with Benioff challenging Dorsey to list his charitable giving in the city, though they later spoke on the phone to patch things up, Dorsey tweeted.

When Rogers said at the conference that he loved the idea of taxing billionaires, Benioff agreed. Benioff has a net worth of $6.1 billion, according to Forbes.

Benioff said at the Wired 25 conference that he had spoken to "every high net worth individual in the city," and he knows who's willing to give money and who isn't. "I already have the lists," he said.

Not long after Benioff left the stage, Dorsey took his own turn in the spotlight at Wired 25. However, Dorsey wasn't asked about Proposition C or Benioff's comments, nor did he offer his own thoughts.

Below is the tweet that started it all.

You can watch Benioff's full interview here:

It's no secret that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has always looked to the stars — after all, Amazon's Alexa was designed with the intention of becoming like the all-knowing ship's computer from "Star Trek."

Now, a new feature from Wired sheds a lot more light on Blue Origin, the private spaceflight company that Bezos has described as his most important venture, more so than Amazon or the Washington Post. Indeed, Bezos sells $1 billion per year in Amazon stock just to fund Blue Origin's operations.

Notably, Bezos put one condition on his interview with Wired: Steven Levy, the reporter, would have to watch a black-and-white PBS program from 1975 before he would agree to discuss Blue Origin. In the special, believed lost to the ages until recently, famed science fiction author Isaac Asimov and physicist Gerard O'Neill discuss the need for humanity to spread beyond Earth — a notion that Bezos tells Wired he believes with "increasing certainty."

You can watch the thirty-minute video yourself here:

The video was apparently unearthed and uploaded to YouTube by the Space Studies Institute, which was founded by O'Neill — a highly influential voice in Bezos' life. The video, according to SSI, was "discovered in a crumpled box in the dark back of a storage locker in New Jersey" by one of its employees.

Bezos was so obsessed with O'Neill's vision of the future that Bezos' valedictorian graduation speech was about how he looked forward to seeing millions of people live among the stars. "Space, the final frontier, meet me there!" Bezos concluded, according to "The Space Barons," a book by Christian Davenport.

Meanwhile, Asimov was also an inspiration of a different sort to Elon Musk, whose SpaceX is something of a rival to Blue Origin. Musk has widely credited Asimov's classic novel "Foundation," which also deals with a humanity that has outgrown Earth, with inspiring his own efforts.

In his book "The High Frontier," O'Neill wrote about a televised interview with author Isaac Asimov. During the program, Asimov explained why sci-fi writers tend to place civilizations on the surface of a planet instead of in space itself.

"The anecdote is legendary in the Space Community. With no known copies of the show, it became almost mythical," the Space Studies Institute (SSI) wrote in a preamble to the full program. "For the first time since its original 1975 broadcast, here is the complete presentation."

"It's possible to have a rapid growth of wealth and productivity, and living space and comfortable living conditions for people, not on the Earth, and not on another planetary surface — the moon or Mars or anything like that — but rather in habitats which are built in free space ... at a distance from here which is similar to the distance to the moon" O'Neill said in the program. Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket.Blue Origin

"It's possible to make habitats which are relatively big — big enough to be very Earth-like — out of ordinary materials like steel and aluminum and glass. And it's possible to find those materials in very large quantities on the surface of the moon and eventually in the asteroids."

During the show, which was hosted by journalist Harold Hayes, O'Neill showed a drawing of a rotating, half-mile-long cylinder and space colony he called "Model 1" built from 98% lunar materials. But O'Neill also described much larger space colonies on the show.

"Model 4 could be something as big as perhaps five to 10 miles in diameter, perhaps as much as 20 or 30 miles long, within the limits of available materials," O'Neill said. O'Neill said he got the idea in 1969 while teaching a physics course to 320 college freshman. He pulled aside a handful of the top students in the class, then — together — they came up with the concept.

Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket.Blue Origin

After O'Neill spoke, Asimov pointed out that it's much easier to move raw building materials off of the moon than Earth, at least in theory, since the moon has a much weaker gravity field.

Hayes then asked Asimov if the author — in his then-158 works of science fiction — had ever anticipated building such colonies in space. That's when Asimov responded with his "legendary" line.

"Nobody did, really, because we've all been planet chauvinists. We've all believed people should live on the surface of a planet, of a world. I've had colonies on the moon — so have a hundred other science fiction writers," Asimov said. "The closest I came to a manufactured world in free space was to suggest that we go out to the Asteroid Belt and hollow out the asteroids, and make ships out of them. It never occurred to me to bring the material from the asteroids in towards the Earth, where conditions are pleasanter, and build the worlds there."

It's been four years since Facebook ditched the latter part of its "Move Fast and Break Things" motto, but we're still uncovering its consequences and experiencing its aftermath.

(In case you're curious: the mantra was phased out in 2014, and semi-seriously replaced with "Move Fast with Stable Infra," as in computing infrastructure.)

The hacking attack Facebook discovered recently is only the latest outgrowth of that mantra. But you can see its lingering effects in basically all of the company's scandals and fiascos over the last two years, including the Cambridge Analytica debacle and the Russian-linked propaganda effort during the 2016 election.

But what makes it so dangerous is that you can find the effects of that motto far afield from Facebook. That's because from that company it quickly became the mantra of Silicon Valley. It's been imbued in the culture and in the way the tech industry as a whole has developed products for much of the last decade.

You can detect its influence in everything from Uber's numerous scandals to Google's r ecently acknowledged security hole in its Google+ social network. And because of its pervasiveness, we're certain to see its effects in many more fiascos to come.

The hacking incident, though, was a particularly bad manifestation of it.

Facebook has shown it doesn't care about "breaking" users' privacy

As the company revealed on Friday, in the attack, hackers gained access to the personal data of some 30 million users. For nearly of those affected, the compromised data included when they were born, where they had physically been recently, where they went to school, and whether they had worked.

Google recently revealed a major security hole in its Google+ social network. Greg Sandoval/Sundar Pichai What makes the attack worrisome is that such information is a goldmine for scammers. It can be used to steal consumer's identifies and gain access to their financial and other sensitive accounts.

The hacking attack was the result of a vulnerability that dates back more than a year. The vulnerability in turn was the outgrowth of three separate bugs that were at least that old, if not older. Facebook discovered the vulnerability — and the underlying bugs — only after hackers started exploiting it last month.

The vulnerability emerged years after Facebook dropped the "and break things" part of its famous motto. But the company's apparently unwitting creation of the hole, and its failure to detect it before the vulnerability was exploited, indicates that it was operating under the same mentality.

Facebook, after all, was founded and built — and its business model depends — on the attitude that users' private data is a commodity to be exploited. While it may worry more than in the past about "breaking things" when it moves fast, it has shown repeatedly that users' privacy is very far down the list of things it's concerned about messing up.

Even now, in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, when it's supposedly turned a new leaf on privacy, it still collects more information than it arguably needs and uses that information in ways of which users likely aren't aware. Just recently, for example, researchers discovered that the company was surreptitiously using phone numbers users gave it for security purposes to target them with ads.

The "Move Fast" mentality led to the Cambridge Analytica scandal

But you can find the effects of the company's "Move Fast and Break Things" motto far beyond the latest security hack. The Cambridge Analytica scandal — which compromised the data of some 87 million users — was an outgrowth of that mentality. The company shared data about its users with developers without worrying about the potential consequences or downsides of doing that and without bothering to check — until after the fiasco — if the developers' use of the data was on the up and up.

Alexander Nix was the CEO of Cambridge Analytica, which gained access to the personal details of up to 87 million Facebook users. parliamentlive.tv Amid that scandal, Facebook revealed another hack, one that affected far more people — up to half of its 2 billion user base — through which malicious actors were able to scrape user profile information via a search tool. Again, the company had introduced a new feature without thinking through how it could be used in a malign way and without taking steps to prevent that use until it was too late.

And then there's the spread of fake news and propaganda via Facebook, from the Russian-linked effort during the 2016 US presidential election to the campaign against Myanmar's Rohingya minority. As has been made clear in the wake of those and other scandals, the company built a system that could quickly and efficiently spread information among groups of like-minded people without worrying about how that system could be hijacked by people with bad intentions.

It's one thing if what gets broken when Facebook moves fast is some feature on the site. But the company is no longer a small startup with a tiny user base. When it screws something up, the effects can be deadly.

Facebook finally seems to be starting to grapple with the aftereffects of its erstwhile motto — or at least the public relations damage it's recently led to. Among other things, it's introduced new privacy controls, changed the way its News Feed works to promote posts from users' friends rather than from publishers, and started investigating what developer did with users' data.

"Move Fast and Break Things" is now the motto of Silicon Valley

But even if Facebook succeeds in heading off future harms from its service, the consequences of its motto are likely to live with us for years to come. That's because the "Move Fast and Break Things" mantra was embraced far and wide in the tech industry.

LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman has a new book touting the Move Fast mentality under the title of "Blitzscaling." Drew Angerer/Getty Entrepreneurs and startups, venture capitalists and other investors, and the tech giants have all espoused it in some form or another. Tech industry trade groups such as the Consumer Technology Association and libertarian think tanks such as the Mercatus Center have touted the philosophy as part of the notion of "permissionless innovation." Even right now, when the drawbacks of the Move Fast mentality have become all too clear, LinkedIn founder Reed Hoffman is touting a new book promoting the idea, calling it "blitzscaling."

Because it's been so widely embraced, standards have arguably fallen everywhere. Those that haven't immediately adopted the Move Fast motto have been pressured to do so at the risk of being left behind by their peers. If your rivals aren't worrying about the aftereffects of the technology they create or the business methods they adopt but instead are charging ahead to seize as much of the market as quickly as they can, you're going to do the same — damn the consequences.

Just as has happened with Facebook, that mentality is starting to catch up with other tech companies and with society, particularly as the companies have become bigger. Facebook wasn't the only service that has been hijacked to spread propaganda during the 2016 election; Google and Twitter were too. And Facebook isn't the only company that recently acknowledged a privacy compromising security flaw; Google did also, with it its Google+ service.

We're seeing the consequences all over

In many cases, thanks to the Move Fast mantra, tech companies have created services that even they don't have a handle on. Take Google-owned YouTube. Numerous times last year, it was found to be distributing and promoting disturbing videos to children. YouTube repeatedly vowed to address the problem, and it repeatedly failed.

Under former CEO Travis Kalanick, Uber epitomized the "Move Fast and Break Things" mantra. Windle/Getty Images for Vanity Fair In other cases, under the Move Fast mentality, tech companies have flaunted local laws and local sensibilities in their rush to seize local markets. Uber and Lyft were notorious for this, but so too, more recently, were scooter rental companies such as Lime and Bird.

And what was broken in those cases weren't just ordinances that arguably protected the entrenched taxi industry. Uber and Lyft have contributed to increased traffic and massively depressed the wages of taxi drivers, while scooters have ended up blocking sidewalks and entryways, causing an uproar among non-scooter using citizens.

As we've seen repeatedly, when you're moving fast, you don't have any time for reflection. You don't have time to think about what, exactly, you might be breaking or the larger social consequences of what you're doing. And there's even less time for public officials or the rest of society to catch up and keep an eye on things — even though real people outside the company may and have been harmed.

"Move Fast and Break Things" has spurred innovation at Facebook and in Silicon Valley. But that consequence-free, "permissionless" innovation mindset has real costs that we'll be paying for a long time to come.

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Apple is famously, insanely secretive — and according to its head design guru, that's because it'd be weird not to be.

On Monday, Apple's chief design officer Jony Ive appeared at the Wired 25 conference in San Francisco, California, where he was interviewed by legendary fashion journalist Anna Wintour, who probed Apple's urge for secrecy.

"I actually think it would be bizarre not to be," Ive said. "I don't know many creatives who want to talk about what they're doing when they're halfway through it."

Wintour interjected: "Really? Then I obviously know very different people."

Apple jealously guards its secrets, tightly keeping its unannounced products under wraps and hiring an army of ex-NSA agents to police its workforce for leakers. Its practices have since become a model for other tech companies looking to emulate the Apple magic — to greater or lesser degrees of success.

Ive frames this urge towards confidentiality as necessary to not add "noise" to the process.

"I know lots of PR departments who want to talk about something that's been worked on," he said. "I've been doing this long enough where I actually feel a responsibility to not confuse or add more noise about what's being worked on because I know that sometimes it doesn't work out.

"I think its just in our nature when were working on a difficult problem — and so many of the problems we're working on now are so complex — it just seems rather odd to be telling everyone what you're doing."