Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Thursday.

1. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was grilled by Congress for claims of anti-conservative bias he says just aren't true. The Republicans have repeatedly pushed claims that big tech firms are biased against conservatives.

2. Jeff Bezos complains to his staff if he goes a week without a brainstorming session, and is always working "two or three years into the future." In a new Forbes profile, Bezos discussed his management style, and explained how he and his leadership prefer to focus on the long-term goals at Amazon.

3. Elon Musk is said to have hired a lawyer who used to work for the SEC as the agency reportedly investigates his "funding secured" tweet. Musk has hired two lawyers, Roel Campos and Steven Farina, as the Securities and Exchange Commission reportedly investigates statements Musk made about converting Tesla into a private company, Fox Business Network reports.

4. Jeff Sessions is summoning state attorney generals to discuss whether tech companies are "intentionally stifling" free speech. The US Justice Department said in a statement that it would convene a meeting to discuss whether social media platforms are purposefully stifling free speech and obstructing competition.

5. A congressman shut down a far-right protester during Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey's testimony by speaking like an auctioneer. Missouri congressman Billy Long, who was an auctioneer in Missouri for more than 30 years, began speaking like an auctioneer to drown the protester out as she was escorted from the room.

6. Jack Dorsey shared a look at his spiking heart rate while he was getting grilled by Congress. The 41-year-old CEO, who fasts every day, has an impressively low resting heart rate.

7. NASA's longest-lived robot on Mars may be dying due to a global dust storm that has been raging on the planet since June. If the robot can't get enough sunlight, its batteries may lack the electricity to power heaters, and the blistering cold on Mars can snap electronic circuits.

8. Actor-turned-investor Ashton Kutcher thinks it's "absurd" if anyone has a problem with the scooters that were littering San Francisco's sidewalks. Electric scooter companies like Lime, Bird, and Spin faced regulatory issues after introducing their pay-as-you-go scooter services to the streets of San Francisco earlier this year.

9. Apple's largest new iPhone could have the weirdest name yet. Apple is expected to launch a trio of new iPhone models next week, and the biggest and most expensive one could be called "iPhone Xs Max," according to a report.

10. More than one in four Americans have deleted the Facebook app in the past year, according to a new survey. A new study from Pew taken shortly after the Cambridge Analytica scandal found that 26% of Americans had deleted the Facebook app from their phone in the last year.

Have an Amazon Alexa device? Now you can hear 10 Things in Tech each morning. Just search for "Business Insider" in your Alexa's flash briefing settings.

There's a new front in the dockless scooter war.

European ride-hailing firm Taxify is to launch electric scooters for hire in Paris this week, expanding beyond private hire cabs for the first time and jumping on a major Silicon Valley bandwagon.

The company will roll out a fleet of dockless scooters in the French capital this week under the new brand name of Bolt. Passengers will be able to see Bolt scooters available for hire around the city through Taxify's main app, and hire them for €0.15 a minute, with a minimum fare of €1.

Taxify

The scooters will come with inbuilt GPS, and passengers will be able to "unlock" them by scanning a QR code on the vehicles. Taxify said it would collect scooters every evening for recharging and maintenance.

Paris has become the primary jumping off point for scooter startups launching in Europe because electric scooters are currently illegal in the UK thanks to the Highway Act 1835.

Established US startups Bird and Lime have raised huge amounts of money from venture capital and flooded American cities with scooters before pushing into Europe in recent months, starting with Paris.

Taxify CEO Markus Villig said his firm has the advantage of 500,000 users in Paris already. He also said regulation didn't pose much of a challenge to launching.

"You need to have good relations with a city to deploy hundreds or thousands of scooters," he told Business Insider. "We have been in talks with the local mayor for months and they are essentially very welcoming of scooters."

Bird launched in Paris at the beginning of August with a similar offering to Taxify, while Lime launched in the French capital at the end of June.

Asked about the competition, Villig said the goal was to persuade rivals onto the Taxify app.

"Currently we own all our scooters, but we have an ecosystem where we can plug in other providers," Villig said. "At the end of the day, our goal is to be a transportation provider... giving passengers as many options as we can.

"The journey should start with 'Where do you want to go?' and we then offer them a range of options. But we don't have to do it all ourselves."

Taxify

Uber, which is also expanding from ride-hailing into electric bikes and scooters, has already struck a similar partnership with Lime.

Taxify said it planned to launch scooters in other European cities, and Villig told Business Insider the firm was in talks with London's transport regulator about a British launch. The company is already barred from operating its ride-hailing service in London thanks to issues with its licence, and is currently fighting to relaunch in the capital.

Villig said: "We're in talks with the city on both the ride-hailing front and on launching scooters. It's quite obvious that in the long-term, small vehicles are much more efficient from a traffic point of view, [and] environmental impact, [and] ease of use... It's a matter of how fast cities will realise this and regulate."

Both Bird and Lime are currently lobbying for a change in the law to allow scooters in the UK.

Taxify raised $153 million from auto firm Daimler in May to fund its expansion. Asked if the company planned to follow Uber and Lyft down the IPO route, Villig said a float would probably happen but the company was still in the building stages.

"Definitely, as we need further funding, an IPO is one of the options for us," he said. "We are currently still in the developing phase [and that is] a bit longer down the line."

He also said a long-term partnership with Daimler could involve exploring autonomous vehicles.

At 58 stories and 645 feet high, the luxury Millennium Tower is the tallest concrete structure in San Francisco. It's also one of the most unstable.

On Saturday, an apartment owner detected a large fissure in his window on the high-rise's 36th floor, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Earlier that day, residents reported hearing a series of creaking noises, followed by a loud pop.

As of Tuesday, the building's management company had 72 hours to report on the issue. Though officials blocked off part of the sidewalk, a spokesperson for the Department of Building Inspection said there was no safety risk for pedestrians.

It's concerning news for inhabitants of 301 Mission Street, who have already had to contend with the fact that their building is sinking. In 2016, an independent consultant found the tower had sunk 16 inches and tilted 2 inches to the northwest since its completion in 2008.

By 2018, it had sunk an additional inch and tilted another 12 inches. The builders originally anticipated that the structure would sink only 4 to 6 inches over the course of its lifetime. This rapid shift has led to speculation that the building's facade is separating from its interior, making it vulnerable to an earthquake or fire.

Stress gauges have been used to measure floor-to-ceiling cracks in the parking garage of the Millennium Tower. Eric Risberg/AP

While the Department of Building Inspection has since determined that the tower is safe to live in, residents are concerned about their investments. When the building first opened, its units sold for anywhere from $1.6 million to more than $10 million. Since then, around 100 condo owners have each seen a $320,000 drop on average in their apartment value. The high-rise has also endured a string of lawsuits, including one spearheaded by the homeowners' association.

Developers have gone back and forth over who's to blame.

Millennium Partners, the real estate company behind the tower, cites the 2010 construction of the recently-completed Salesforce Transit Center as the reason for the sinking. The developers contend that construction workers pumped too much water out of the ground while the transit center was being built, causing the sand to compress and the tower to settle. But the Transbay Joint Powers Authority, which oversaw the center's development, argue that the sinking started before they broke ground.

Earlier this year, engineers proposed a solution to the tower's structural instability: a project with a price tag up to $500 million that involves anchoring the building to bedrock, which is more compact and tends to shake less than sand.

Until then, residents may continue to witness unsettling damages, such as cracks in the basement or malfunctioning elevators, as the tower continues to shift.

Kai-Fu Lee, the former president of Google China, doesn't give his former company very good odds of success if it decides to re-enter the Chinese market.

Speaking to an audience at the Disrupt 2018 conference in San Francisco, Lee suggested that Google's current management doesn't have the right stuff to compete in China's growing and rough-and-tumble Internet markets.

"The heads of multinationals are really just professional managers," said Lee, who worked for Google from 2005 until 2009. "If they were to compete against local entrepreneurs who are gladiators in this Coliseum I don't think the American companies will have a high chance of succeeding."

Google managers last month confirmed that the company is considering a plan to once again operate a search application in China. In 2010, Google announced it had decided to pull out of China rather than adhere to the demands by the Chinese government to censor information. Apparently, managers have reconsidered their previous stance on censorship.

While most of the attention since then has been on whether a return to China is ethical, Lee focused his evaluation for a Google reboot in China on the company's chances of success.

He wasn't optimistic for multiple reasons.

"When I left, we had a much higher market share than when I joined," Lee told the crowd. "We went from 9 % to 24%. We were making progress. Their revenue was approaching billions. It was pretty good. But afterwards they made certain decisions to pull out. I understand their decisions but regarding their possible re-entry, I think re-entry is always difficult because either you're acknowledging what you did earlier was not right or you're not. And either way there's some trickiness to it."

At the time Google pulled out of China, the main competition was Baidu, which dominated, and continues to dominate the Chinese search engine market.

But Lee noted that the market in China has changed in several important ways since Google's 2010 departure, and Google's ability to appeal to Chinese consumers, and to attract Chinese employees, would be more difficult today.

"The bigger issue really is can an American multinationals succeed in China now that China has bifurcated into this parallel universe," Lee said. "The entire dynamics are different (since Google departed). People aren't looking for another search engine or an app store. New companies are emerging and addressing previously unknown customer needs. Innovations are coming out. The new grads generally prefer to work for Chinese companies."

Lee is now Chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures, a $2 billion dual currency investment fund.

Eventually Lee softened his tone and said that Google had "as good a product as anybody" and that they had "a higher chance" of succeeding--presumably compared to other foreign companies. He signed off by wishing Google the best.

Google was not immediately available to respond to Lee's comments.

There's a reason why they call it the hot seat.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey may have appeared calm and collected on the outside during several hours of testimony during back-to-back congressional hearings on Wednesday. But one look at his Apple Watch makes clear that he was actually quite stressed.

Dorsey shared a screenshot on Twitter of his Apple Heart app, which tracked his heart rate through his Apple Watch throughout his busy day on Capitol Hill.

As you can see from Dorsey's tweet below, the 41-year old's heart rate spiked to 109 beats per minute during the time he was at the hearings.

And who can blame him?

After all, Dorsey was in the line of fire for several hours responding to Republican allegations that Twitter — the social media platform of choice for President Donald Trump — is censoring conservative voices, witnessing loud protests from both sides of the political spectrum and even getting accosted by agitated conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

Perhaps just as interesting was Dorsey's impressive resting heart rate of 44 beats per minute.

Dorsey, who fasts all day until dinner, falls far below the normal heart rate. The average resting heart rate for a male is between 60 to 100 beats per minute, according to the Mayo Clinic.

Dorsey's low heart rate is more aligned with well-trained athletes, whose heartrates can sometimes go as low as 40 beats per minute.

It was Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey's turn to sit in the political hot seat on Wednesday, as he was forced to defend Twitter from allegations of bias from Republicans even as Democrats decried the hearing as a baseless and politicized farce.

The New York-based exec appeared before two, back-to-back congressional hearings — one hosted by the Senate intelligence committee, and another by the House energy and commerce committee.

The questions from senators, which Dorsey appeared before alongside Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in the morning, focused largely on election interference and malicious activity from foreign actors. The afternoon House hearing, by contrast, focused squarely on alleged anti-conservative social media bias — an allegation that has been repeatedly pushed by Republicans in recent months, including president Trump.

The 41-year-old tech figure repeatedly denied any intentional bias from Twitter in a monotone voice — while Democrats attacked Republicans' allegations in far more strident terms. Democratic Pennsylvania Congressman Mike Doyle was blunt: "It's a load of crap."

Google was conspicuous by its absence

The hearings come after a bruising few years for social media firms — especially Facebook — that have shaken much of the optimism and goodwill the industry once held.

Russian operatives were able to game Facebook and Twitter to spread propaganda in the run-up to the 2016 US election, and since then there has been one scandal after another, from Cambridge Analytica to the role of Facebook in spreading hate speech in Myanmar amid ethnic cleansing.

Read more:

The Senate is tearing into Google for refusing to send a top exec to testify — and even left an empty chair and name tag to highlight its displeasure

Congressman shuts down far-right protester during Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey's testimony by speaking like an auctioneer

Jeff Sessions is summoning state AGs to discuss whether tech companies are 'intentionally stifling' free speech

The Senate hearing was the fourth in a series of public hearings convened to discuss this subject. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's cofounder and CEO, had been hauled in front of lawmakers earlier in the year to answer their questions.

Some of the harshest rhetoric during the hearings was reserved for Google — which opted not to heed the committee's request and make CEO Sundar Pichai available (The committee could have subpoenaed Pichai, forcing his attendance, but opted not to.) The search giant was represented at the table by a symbolic empty chair and name-tag, and senators lined up to throw jabs at it.

"Given its size and influence, I would have thought the leadership at Google would want to demonstrate how seriously it takes these challenges and to lead this important public discussion," ranking Democratic senator Mark Warner remarked.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Beyond digs at Google, the tougher criticism at the hearing was targeted at Twitter. Susan Collins, a Republican senator for Maine, attacked Twitter for failing to notify users adequately about Russian bots, prompting Dorsey to concede that "we simply haven't done enough" and that the status quo is "unacceptable."

Florida's Marco Rubio also attacked Twitter over its willingness to censor content on geographic grounds in certain countries, while Arkansas' Tom Cotton was critical of Twitter's decision to refuse to let the CIA access its enterprise data product Dataminr.

Politicians are bitterly divided over the issue of social media bias

The second hearing of the day focused on alleged social media bias, and Dorsey's message was essentially simple: Twitter isn't biased.

Donald Trump. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images The company has made mistakes in the past, he said — including a filter that reduced the spread of 600,000 accounts that some of the right perceived to be unfairly targeted towards conservatives — but these have been corrected. There's more work still to be done, the exec said, but there are no intentional attempts to silence conservative voices on the platform.

Republicans were clearly skeptical of this argument. Dorsey faced multiple allegations of bias against conservatives, with lawmakers alternately asking about the verification process (broken, he admitted), the motivations of the developers writing Twitter's algorithms, search results, and recommended accounts to follow.

Democrats, meanwhile, rubbished the entire event, with New Jersey's Frank Pallone labelling it "one more mechanism to raise money and generate outrage." Colorado's Diana DeGette called it a "borderline conspiracy theory," and Maryland's Paul Sarbanes suggested the complaints of "non-existent bias" were intended to actually push social media platforms towards unfairly promoting conservatives over liberals.

"It's a shame, frankly, that this committee has been drawn into such a charade," he said.

Republicans are doubling down

Dorsey's denials — and the Democrats' outrage — seems unlikely to dissuade right-wingers from this line of argument, and some Republicans are leaning heavily into it as a tool to stoke the party's base.

In an interview published in right-wing news site The Daily Caller on Wednesday, President Trump accused tech firms of "interference" in the 2016 presidential election without evidence.

And as the Senate hearing concluded, the US Department of Justice announced that attorney general Jeff Sessions is convening a meeting of some state attorneys general to discuss whether tech firms are "intentionally stifling" freedom of speech and obstructing competition.

As an early investor in companies like Uber and Airbnb, Ashton Kutcher is used to entrepreneurs hitting coming to him, or at least his firm Sound Ventures, for some investment capital.

At TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, Kutcher explained onstage the key to piquing his interest -- and it largely has to do with how well an entrepreneur can spin a compelling narrative.

"One of the critical tests that I try to run when I'm sitting across from a founder is: Can you sell me your idea?" said Kutcher.

For Kutcher, the ability to convey a company's mission determines whether or not they'll be able to snag the best talent in a competitive job market.

"If you can't sell me, how are you going to sell your first hire, your second hire, your third hire?" Kutcher asked. "How are you going to create the capacity for the rest of your team to sell those next hires?"

He continued, "For early stage companies, generally the CEO of the company has to hire the first 40 people ... If you're competing for the best talent in the world and you can't sell your idea to the best talent in the world, how are you going to get all A players around you to turn this into an explosive company? If at the end of the conversation [you] can't sell me to work for you, how are you going to sell your first 50 employees?"

Kutcher described this ability to tell the story of an early stage company as integral to its future growth.

"I think the storytelling piece has to happen," he said. "You can refine it and make it better and improve it and figure out how to communicate it to a consumer over time, but [for] early stage companies, that person has to do all of those things."

Ford reported August US sales on Tuesday, and although the market has been weakening compared with 2017, the automaker's tally was up about 4% versus a year ago.

The story was all about pickup trucks and SUVs, vindicating a decision that Ford, under CEO Jim Hackett, made earlier this year to reduce its future passenger-car offerings in the US to essentially one vehicle: the iconic Mustang.

Hackett's goal: to improve Ford's competitive fitness and give Wall Street a reasons to get excited about the automaker's stock, which has lagged behind peers'.

In a statement, Mark LaNeve, Ford's VP of US marketing, sales and service, cited 16 months of gains for the F-Series line of pickup trucks, along with a 21% improvement in sales of SUVs, as August highlights.

"Sales of our all-new Expedition were up a strong 95 percent," he added. "Right now, the hottest vehicle in America is our all-new Lincoln Navigator, which saw sales expand by more than 100 percent in August."

A strategic move away from passenger cars

The new Lincoln Navigator. Hollis Johnson/Business Insider

In an interview with Business Insider, LaNeve commented on Ford's strategic move away from passenger cars, which for decades have been at the core of the US market but have been displaced in the past few years as new sales records have been set.

"We've been seeing the trends coming on for a while," LaNeve said. "But it's been accelerating in 2018 over 2016 and 2017."

He indicated that Ford is starting to see the benefits of it move away from cars, whose future has been much-debated in the industry amid consumer buying patterns that suggest a structural shift is underway and that Americans may never revise the four-door sedan.

"We're focusing our marketing resources," LaNeve said. "We're not spending money advertising passenger cars."

Ford has been in a similar position before. Prior to the financial crisis, it was easy to think of the company as a maker of Mustangs and pickups. Former CEO Alan Mullaly sought to bring more fuel-efficient vehicles into the mix, but for several years now, consumers have voted against those products with their wallets.

Back to the future — but a different future

The Mustang. Ford

"It's back to the future for Ford," Autotrader analyst Michelle Krebs said in a email. "Ford is back to being largely a truck company. Its August sales performance demonstrated its strength in trucks."

LaNeve, however, pointed out that Ford's new future is different from its old one. Buyers no longer have to compromise when buying an SUV or pickup as they did in the past, when these vehicles delivered poor fuel economy relative to sedans. Technological advancement has greatly improved engine efficiency, putting many SUVs and crossovers on par with with their sedan stablemates.

"It's a generational shift," LaNeve said, adding that passengers cars aren't coming back. He recalled his time at Cadillac in the early 1980s, when the entire luxury market in the US was made up of big sedans and two-door coupés. "In the course of my career, the entire market has shifted."

And the onetime complaint against Ford has also changed.

"We're probably a truck and Mustang company," he said. But he said it with pride — and not without noting that Ford is also aggressively pursuing electrification of its vehicles, as well as autonomous mobility.

It certainly helps that Ford's pickups and SUVs are highly profitable, funding a potentially costly restructuring outlined by Hackett.

"You've got to pick the places where you want to compete," LaNeve said. "As the market shrinks, there's less demand, and the demand that's left is less profitable."

Ford also has a bit of a secret weapon outside of passenger cars: commercial vehicles. Its Transit van saw a 25% sales boost in August.

"Commercial is number one by a wider margin than retail trucks," LaNeve said. "Our team really knows that business."

One of the largest icebergs ever documented is still mostly intact more than a year after it broke off Antarctica, despite losing a big chunk and having its northern flank smashed to bits.

However, a recent turn may prove fateful in speeding the Maryland-size ice block toward its inevitable doom.

Iceberg A68, or A68a as it's sometimes called (to denote it's now the parent of smaller icebergs), calved from Antarctica's Larsen C ice shelf in July 2017. It's hard to say exactly when A68 was born due to limited satellite coverage and thick cloud cover, but it happened last year between July 10 and 12.

Scientists at the time estimated iceberg A68 to be about 1,000 feet thick and weigh 1.1 million tons — roughly the mass of 20 million Titanic ships.

Satellites in space have kept watch on the iceberg as it floats in the Weddell Sea a few dozen miles off the ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula. It's lost about a city's worth of area from repeatedly smashing and grinding into the nearby ice shelf, according to a blog post published in July by the Project Midas research program.

However, a new animation shared by Adrian Luckman, a glaciologist at Swansea University and a member of Project Midas, reveals that strong winds have rotated the 100-mile-long 'berg 90 degrees.

"Until recently, the iceberg was hemmed in by dense sea ice in the East and shallow waters in the North around Bawden Ice Rise," Luckman wrote in a blog post on Wednesday, adding that A68 has since rotated into the Weddell Sea. "Here it is much more free to begin moving away and be carried further North into warmer waters."

Luckman put it more succinctly in a tweet on Monday: "Iceberg A68 is on its way," he said.

The time-lapse animation below comes by Luckman and was made using Sentinel satellite image data. It shows part of the Antarctic Peninsula from March 12, 2017 through September 3, 2018. You can see a huge crack in the Larsen C ice shelf creep north until the iceberg completely breaks off in July 2017, then begin a clockwise turn in August 2018.

Red lines illustrate the paths of previous Antarctic icebergs.NASA Scatterometer Climate Record Pathfinder; ESA

Antarctic icebergs calve naturally as snow piles up, forming ultra-dense ice that gravity then drags toward the ocean.

From there, a predictable yet erratic story plays out.

Most icebergs that calve from the Antarctic Peninsula get caught up in wind and water currents that drag them clockwise around the Southern Ocean as they move north.

Scientists can't be sure where iceberg A68 will ultimately float, though some think it could drift more than 1,000 miles north to the Falkland Islands. The largest 'bergs can even reach South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands before vanishing.

Martin O'Leary, a researcher at Swansea University and Project Midas, said on Reddit last year that A68 could take a couple of years to drift that far. Then it could be many years before it completely melts. A68's recent turn into the open Weddell Sea may now accelerate that timeline, though.

In the case of B15, the second-biggest iceberg in recorded history, the process has taken nearly two decades. B15 snapped off Antarctica's Ross ice shelf in 2000. It had a surface area of 4,200 square miles — twice that of A68. Today it's drifting in warm waters near South Georgia.

St. Andrews Bay on South Georgia Island.Shutterstock

Warmer air causes surface melt that "works its way through the iceberg like a set of knives," Kelly Brunt, a glaciologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a NASA Earth Observatory post in October 2017. "This is often the end of the life cycle of a lot of Antarctic icebergs."

Scientists continue to study and debate what caused A68 to break off, including the role of climate change driven by human activity.

"To me, it's an unequivocal signature of the impact of climate change on Larsen C," Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at NASA JPL, told CNN in July 2017. "This is not a natural cycle. This is the response of the system to a warmer climate from the top and from the bottom. Nothing else can cause this."

This story has been updated with new information. It was first published on July 10, 2018.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — The first on-demand startups tended to follow a strategy of asking forgiveness, rather than permission, when it came to entering new markets.

As an early investor in both Uber and Airbnb, actor-turned-venture capitalist Ashton Kutcher is familiar with this particular playbook. Now, Bird — a red-hot scooter startup in which Kutcher's Sound Ventures is an investor — is facing problems of its own. In the wake of a backlash from the residents of San Francisco, Bird and other startups have been barred from operating in the city; only rivals Skip and Scoot were granted the permits necessary to return.

Kutcher, for one, thinks that people who take issue with the scooters. During an onstage chat at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, Kutcher described the steep regulation facing Bird as "absurd."

"Fundamentally...the Uber thing was very frustrating the whole way through," said Kutcher. "The Airbnb thing— regulatory-wise — has been incredibly frustrating. To me, [the scooter issue] is the simplest of them all." Ashton Kutcher's venture firm, Sound Ventures, has invested in Bird.Facebook/Bird

He continued: "Nobody wakes up in the morning, opens their front door, looks outside and says, 'God look how many cars there are parked everywhere. They're f--king parked everywhere! ... It's ridiculous! And they're clogging up the roads...' But boy, we open up the door and go, 'Man! There are just scooters all over the place. And it's like hold on...wait a second. This is just aversion to change.'"

"If you think about it from a pure square footage perspective — how much space a scooter takes up relative to a car, this is absurd, right? And fine, I understand, maybe we need to find appropriate parking places for these and everything else, but the regulatory function on this [is] just something you're not used to. It's just a better world if this takes off and works."

Bird, the fledgling Santa Monica-based electric scooter startup, has taken in a whopping $415 million since it was founded less than one year ago.

Earlier this year, competing electric scooter startups Bird, Spin, and Lime introduced their dockless scooters on the sidewalks of San Francisco. While many praised the new form of transportation for its ease and efficiency, others took issue with the number of scooters littering the city's sidewalks.

Regulation was swift: In April, San Francisco's city attorney issued a cease-and-desist order, effectively shutting down the companies' free range use of the city's sidewalks. Currently, the startups are embattled in a long-running permitting issue with San Francisco's Municipal Transportation Agency, with Skip and Scoot being granted the permits necessary to return starting in October.

"Captain Marvel" is expected to be a game changer for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It features the first female character in the franchise to headline a solo film, and is directed by the franchise's first female filmmaker, Anna Boden (along with co-director Ryan Fleck). And the title character was teased in "Avengers: Infinity War" as possibly the Avengers' best hope in defeating Thanos.

There's a lot riding on "Captain Marvel," including the future of the MCU.

The "Infinity War" sequel, due in theaters in May 2019, will be a turning point for the franchise. Veteran actors have teased they are ready to depart, including Captain America actor Chris Evans, who said earlier this year that he'll retire from the role after "Avengers 4."

And executives have indicated that the current era of the MCU will come to an end with the movie: Disney CEO Bob Iger said in May that the MCU will try a "new franchise beyond 'Avengers,'" and Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige has said that the "Avengers" movies are heading toward a "conclusion."

But before "Avengers 4" points the MCU in a new direction, March's "Captain Marvel" may lay the groundwork for what comes after that. The movie may take place in the 1990s, but it's looking to the future.

Entertainment Weekly released new images and details from the movie on Wednesday that included the anticipated first look at star Brie Larson in the title role and a look at Samuel L. Jackson as a digitally de-aged young Nick Fury. But it was other details that signal potentially big things to come for the MCU.

In the movie, Ben Mendelsohn plays Talos, the leader of a shape-shifting alien race called the Skrulls who are at war with the Kree (Captain Marvel is half-human, half-Kree). EW revealed that Talos has infiltrated S.H.I.E.L.D. in the movie.

The inclusion of the Skrulls in the MCU could eventually lead to an event-sized movie like "Infinity War," and carry the franchise beyond just the "Avengers" movies, especially if the X-Men and Fantastic Four are introduced via the Disney-Fox deal.

A 2008 comic-book event called "Secret Invasion" revealed that Skrulls had been posing as many characters in the Marvel Comics universe for a number of years, including Hank Pym, Spider-Woman, and Elektra. The battle ends when Norman Osborn (a.k.a. the Green Goblin) shoots the Skrull queen. This makes Osborn a hero in the eyes of the world and he is appointed the director of H.A.M.M.E.R., an organization created to replace S.H.I.E.L.D.

The fact that a Skrull has already infiltrated S.H.I.E.L.D. in the MCU's history means that the idea of a future movie loosely based on "Secret Invasion" isn't a stretch: the MCU has already been inspired by other comic events like "Civil War," "Planet Hulk," and "The Infinity Gauntlet," and if it wants to sustain itself for another decade without the Avengers as we know them, it will have to keep drawing on the content available in the comic books.

A more subtle detail paints a smaller picture for the MCU's future: According to EW, Lashana Lynch plays Maria Rambeau, "one of Carol's oldest friends" and a "top-notch Air Force pilot with the call sign 'Photon,' and she's also a single mother to a young daughter."

The young daughter mentioned is most likely Monica Rambeau, who in the comics is the superhero Photon (and former Captain Marvel). In fact, Larson's Carol Danvers isn't the only Captain Marvel in the comics: Jude Law's character, Mar-Vell, was the first Captain Marvel in the comic books, and will be Danvers' mentor in the movie.

This means Photon could be introduced in the future, which would expand the Captain Marvel film mythology even further (Marvel has already said that they plan to introduce Muslim superhero Ms. Marvel).

"Captain Marvel" doesn't arrive in theaters until March 8, but the MCU's future already seems to be shining bright.

The Dutch search company Elastic filed to go public on Wednesday, more than two months after the startup reportedly filed its paperwork confidentially Elastic plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "ESTC."

Since its founding in 2012, Elastic — previously called Elasticsearch — has raised a total of $104 million from investors at Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures and New Enterprise Associates, all prominent Silicon Valley venture firms. The company was last valued at $700 million in 2014.

The company didn't disclose its share price in its filing Wednesday, but Recode previously reported at the time of the confidential filing that Elastic seeking a valuation between $1.5 billion and $3 billion.

Elastic describes itself as a "search company."

"Search is foundational to a wide variety of experiences. Elastic makes the power of search—the ability to instantly find relevant information and insights from large amounts of data—available for a diverse set of applications and use cases," it wrote in the S-1.

Its software is used by other companies like Uber, Tinder, Walgreens and Adobe to sift through incredible amounts of data. But Elastic says that it's more than just a search engine — it's also a player in the growing market for the growing market for AI-powered algorithms.

"Dragging your finger across a map on a smartphone screen is search. Zooming into a specific time frame in a histogram is search. Mining log files for errors is search. Forecasting storage capacity two weeks into the future is search. Using natural language processing to analyze user sentiment is search," reads the filing.

Aligned with its peers in the IPO space, Elastic still isn't profitable. The company saw net losses of $52 million and $52 .7 million in its 2017 and 2018 fiscal years, respectively. This is in part because of its open-source model, where it offers a core product to developers for free, spreads primarily through word-of-mouth, and then upcharges for certain premium products and features.

Despite the losses, the company's revenues, composed primarily of subscriptions to its service, are growing fast.

Revenues were up 81% between fiscal 2017 and 2018 — up from $88.2 million to $159.9 million. Its paying customers grew from 2,800 in April 2017 to 5,500 in July 2018.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has hired two lawyers as the Securities and Exchange Commission reportedly investigates statements Musk made about converting Tesla into a private company, Fox Business Network reports.

One of the lawyers Musk reportedly retained, Roel Campos, was an SEC commissioner from 2002 until 2007. Campos is a partner at the firm Hughes Hubbard & Reed and lists securities enforcement, securities litigation, and regulatory cases among his areas of focus on the firm's website. Musk has also reportedly retained Steven Farina, a partner at Williams & Connolly who focuses on securities enforcement and securities litigation, among other practice areas, according to the firm's website.

The Fox Business reporter Charles Gasparino said on Twitter that Tesla's board of directors has retained Daniel Kramer, a partner at Paul Weiss. Kramer lists securities litigation and regulatory cases among his specialties on the firm's website.

Tesla, Campos, Farina, and Kramer did not immediately respond to Business Insider's requests for comment.

Musk attracted controversy in August over his statements about wanting to take Tesla private, which raised questions about the certainty of funding Musk referenced in a tweet and where exactly that funding would come from. Fox Business and The New York Times reported that the SEC had sent subpoenas to Tesla concerning Tesla's plans to explore going private and Musk's statements about the process.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the agency had been investigating how the company communicated production issues it faced with its Model 3 sedan before Musk's tweets about going private.

Two weeks after saying he was considering taking Tesla private, Musk said it will remain a public company. Though he said in a post on Tesla's website that he believed there was "more than enough funding" to complete a go-private deal, he said the process of going private could create distractions for the company and problems for its current investors, some of whom had told Musk they would prefer Tesla remain public, he said.

Have a Tesla news tip? Contact this reporter at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says he "very rarely" focuses on the short-term, daily operations of Amazon, and instead is looking and working years ahead.

In a new Forbes profile, Bezos discussed his management style, and explained how he and his leadership prefer to focus on the long-term goals at Amazon. He said he pretty much only works on Amazon's roadmap, and leaves daily tasks to other Amazon employees.

"Friends congratulate me after a quarterly-earnings announcement and say, 'Good job, great quarter,'" Bezos said to Forbes. "And I'll say, 'Thank you, but that quarter was baked three years ago.' I'm working on a quarter that'll happen in 2021 right now."

Bezos also said he needs at least a weekly brainstorm meeting to unload ideas in, and said he'll complain to his office if he goes a week without one.

The Forbes interview provided some insight into how Bezos, the richest man in the world, runs Amazon, which briefly reached a valuation of $1 trillion this week— making it the second US company to do so. Read the full profile here.

People at Burning Man festival in Nevada, which finishes on Monday, are transfixed by this 100-foot high orb on a mast.

It has an 84-foot diameter and stands an impressive 100 feet tall, towering above the dusty venue:

Some people at the festival, running from 25 August to September 1, think the shiny sphere is a mini-planet, and creators Bjarke Ingels and Jakob Lange from Denmark wrote that it's actually a 1/500,000 scale model of earth.

Before the festival the designers shared this virtual rendering of the orb on their indiegogo page:

They wanted to raise $50,000 to get the orb to Burning Man. In the end they got $34,300, which was enough.

This is what the finished product looked like:

Designer Lange posted the erected artwork on his Instagram:

But some are content with it being a huge disco-ball for party goers:

"The ORB is a tribute to mother earth & human expression - designed to easily inflate and deflate," said Lange.

This year's theme was I-Robot.

A group of top British broadcasters have signed a letter calling for more regulation of tech giants like Twitter, Google and Facebook.

The letter was published in the Sunday Telegraph and signed by the heads of the BBC, Sky, ITV, Channel 4, BT, and Talk Talk. They called for "independent oversight" of tech companies that publish news, in the form of a watchdog.

"We do not think it is realistic or appropriate to expect internet and social media companies to make all the judgment calls about what content is and is not acceptable, without any independent oversight," said the letter.

"There is an urgent need for independent scrutiny of the decisions taken, and greater transparency. This is not about censoring the internet, it is about making the most popular internet platforms safer, by ensuring there is accountability and transparency over the decisions these private companies are already taking."

The signees said they see upcoming government proposals on internet safety as a "golden opportunity" to address their concerns.

Big tech companies have come under heavy fire recently for misfires in the way they filter content. In July an undercover investigation by Channel 4 revealed that Facebook moderators in Dublin were being trained to leave images of child abuse and racist memes on the platform. Last week, the social network was criticised for deleting a post showing nude, emaciated Holocaust victims.

At the same time, traditional TV is under considerable threat from tech firms. A 2017 Ofcom report found that YouTube was the most recognised content brand for viewers aged between 12 and 15 years old. And only last week, Facebook released its video-on-demand service, Watch, globally.

Business Insider has contacted Facebook, Google, and Twitter to ask for their response to the letter.

Liu Qiangdong, one of the richest men in China, was briefly arrested during a trip to the US on sexual misconduct allegations.

Liu, the founder and CEO of the e-commerce company JD.com, was arrested around 11:30 p.m. on Friday and released shortly after 4 p.m. the following day, according to Hennepin County Sheriff's Jail records.

Minneapolis police arrested the 44-year-old on suspicion of criminal sexual conduct charges, the jail records said. There are no further details of the alleged incident.

John Elder, a police spokesman, declined to provide any further details of the case or circumstances of the arrest because the investigation is still considered active, according to the Associated Press.

Liu is the 16th richest person in China. AP

JD.com on Sunday said the accusations were false and unsubstantiated. The company didn't name the charges.

It said in a statement on Chinese microblogging platform Weibo: "Mr Liu Qiangdong encountered a false accusation while on business in the US. An investigation by local police did not find any evidence of misconduct, and he will continue his trip as planned. We will take the necessary legal action against false reporting or rumors."

Elder also told the BBC: "There is absolutely no restriction on his travel. The understanding is that if we need to get in touch with him, we will be able to do so."

Liu's arrest came shortly after he tried to distance himself from another sexual misconduct scandal. In late July he said he didn't know anything about a sexual assault that was alleged to have taken place at a party he was hosting in Sydney in 2015. He was not accused of any wrongdoing.

Liu, also known as Richard, has a net worth of $10.8 billion (£8.4 billion), according to Forbes. He was named by the Forbes billionaire list as the 16th richest person in China and the 140th richest person in the world.

JD.com is the second largest Chinese e-commerce company after Alibaba. The company had 292.5 million active customer accounts in 2017, and reaped a net profit of 50.8 billion yuan ($7.8 billion) in FY17, the company said in its annual statement.

He is the husband of Zhang Zetian, who at 24 is China's youngest female billionaire.