OK, I look a little frowny. But I'm happy inside! I think it was just the awful Northeast weather of the past month weighing on my soul. Don't blame the RAM 1500!

This pickup is an absolute joy to drive, mainly because unlike the Ford and Chevy trucks that sell ahead of it, the RAM has a far more compliant suspension. In the case of our 1500 Limited tester, a four-corner air suspension that makes the truck feel as if it's floating on a sea of power. The Fords and Chevys still have tough leaf-spring suspension, and some truck owners prefer that. RAM went to something more easygoing a while ago, and for some folks, it will be preferable.

I sure liked it. But it doesn't make the truck feel overly domesticated. There is a big old iron-block Hemi V8 under the hood, and when you stand on the accelerator, that motor roars to life. Accelerating from 0-30 mph in the 1500 is as much fun as savoring the 0-60mph run, which passes is about seven seconds.

Brawn notwithstanding, it truly is the level of refinement that the RAM 1500 brings to the segment that helps it stand out, even as Ford and Chevy/GMC sell more trucks. RAM has carved out far more than niche at number three and isn't dropping the ball when it comes to what its loyalist expect.

The RAM 1500 Limited Crew Cab 4x4 proves that a truck lover can have it all: power, styling, capability, and comfort. We're very much looking forward to the all-new 2019 version.

Webflow CEO Vlad Magdalin Webflow

Webflow is unusual among Silicon Valley startups. It's only taken in a meager $2.9 million of venture capital money and yet it's still managed to build a break-even company that's doing $10 million in annual revenue.

And Webflow CEO Vlad Magdalin says that the company is growing fast — so much so, that he anticipates that the company will finish out the year on a $20 million annualized run rate, twice what it is today. Webflow has grown to 750,000 users in the four years of its existence, including developers at NASA, Dell, and MTV.

The reason for the boom, says Magdalin: Webflow makes it easier for designers to meet today's demand for slick, shiny webpages. It has a simple visual interface, but under the hood, the websites that Webflow creates are fully compatible with universal web standards, including HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript.

"What we're trying to do is take this concept of code and bring it to as many people as possible," says Magdalin.

Now, Webflow's next move is, perhaps, non-intuitive: It's unveiling a forthcoming tool for developers to set up online storefronts on the sites they design.

With this tool, Webflow handles the technology to power shopping carts and taking credit card payments; the designer can just focus on getting the look and feel of the store exactly right. It also brings Webflow into competition with $14 billion Canadian software company Shopify, which makes easy storefronts the core of its own business.

From Magdalin's perspective, it's all part of the mission. As software continues to eat the world, Magdalin sees tools like Webflow as a way to even the scales. A small business may not have the resources to hire whole teams of developers and designers. A tool like Webflow, however, means that a single designer can punch above their weight.

It's all part of a movement that Silicon Valley insiders have taken to calling "no-code:" The idea that professional developers shouldn't be the only ones with the tools to create software. Other examples include Airtable, an increasingly-popular spreadsheet app that also makes it easy to make custom, bespoke apps.

There will always be a place for skilled pros who can solve really hard problems, says Magdalin. But there's no reason why a solo web developer should need to enlist the help of a web developer. And when you do, you make it possible for even more software to be created.

Webflow is designed to be as easy as a consumer tool, but as robust as professional software. Webflow

"When you give normal people access to technology, entire businesses can be created," says Magdalin. "I can imagine a high school student creating a new site like Airbnb or Twitter on a no-code platform."

In the meantime, Magdalin says that Webflow has been moving upmarket. Whereas it originally targeted individual developers, it's been pivoting toward pitching at small teams of designers at ad agencies and other companies.

He says that it's the kind of move that Webflow wouldn't have been able to make if they had gone the traditional route of taking lots of investor money — he feels that venture capitalists would have pushed Webflow after the largest customers, or bust.

With this strategy, he acknowledges that growth will be a little slower than it might have been if they went after those big enterprises. Still, he says that it'll be a much steadier and less risky pace of growth, while also giving the team latitude to develop the product exactly as it sees fit. And the company is breaking even, reinvesting its profits in more research and development.

This approach is already bearing fruit, as happy customers spread positive word-of-mouth. He boasts that at one Webflow customer, one designer was able to do the work of three engineers, saving the employer money.

"That value difference is worth it to many businesses," says Magdalin.

The Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner. Benjamin Zhang/Business Insider

This weekend, Qantas will inaugurate a new route that will finally deliver non-stop scheduled flights between Australia and Europe.

The iconic Aussie airline will use its fleet of brand-new Boeing 787-9 Dreamliners for its new service between Perth, Western Australia, and London.

In October, Qantas took delivery of its first Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner. Currently, the airline boasts a fleet of four Dreamliners.

And by the end of 2018, that number will grow to eight aircraft.

The Dreamliner is the first new aircraft type introduced to the Qantas fleet in a decade and is destined to connect Australia and the UK with nonstop flying.

For Qantas, the significance of the new plane cannot be overstated.

"One of the big advantages of the Dreamliner is that it gives us a range of destinations we couldn't have done before," CEO Alan Joyce told Business Insider in an interview last October. "It gives you better economics because it's 20% more fuel efficient and with a lot lower maintenance cost given the new technology. That means there are routes we could have done before with distance, but couldn't do economically that now come onto the radar screen.

"For Qantas, it also starts overcoming the tyranny of distance we have," Joyce added.

Qantas also held a contest that allowed members of the public to submit names for the new plane. In the end, the name Great Southern Land was selected. It was chosen in honor of the '80s rock anthem of the same name by the band Icehouse, which is about the vastness and the beauty of the Australian landscape.

Boeing turned the plane over to Qantas at its Everett Delivery Center outside of Seattle, Washington.

As part of the festivities, Qantas allowed a group of journalists to experience the jet's delivery flight to company headquarters in Sydney alongside executives and dignitaries. Normally, delivery flights are fairly humdrum with only pilots and airline staff involved. However, this was a special occasion for Qantas, so the airline decided to make it a big event.

Business Insider was there. Here's how it went.

Robinhood

Robinhood, the brokerage startup known for pioneering free stock trading, reportedly landed a big $5.6 billion valuation recently.

It's adding new functions, such as crypto and options trading, at a breakneck clip. And its reported user growth is something its competitors on both Wall Street and Silicon Valley envy. At last check, the company claimed more than 4 million users with fully registered accounts. It launched in 2013.

Robinhood The company's newly rolled out web platform, which features a suite of features originally unavailable on its sleek smartphone app, is the latest service from the company.

But data showcased on the web platform also raises questions about the strength of its user base.

According to a list of the most owned stocks on the platform, about 140,800 Robinhood users own Apple — the most valuable company in the world and the most popular stock on the platform.

The next most popular stock, Ford, was owned by 127,000 users. GE rounded out the top three, with 122,500.

Based on those numbers, only 3.5% of Robinhood's 4 million registered accounts hold Apple.

"That's pretty surprising to me," Mike Dudas, a serial entrepreneur who cofounded the tech company Button, told Business Insider. That view was echoed by several industry insiders.

"It would shock me if less than 5% of Robinhood's registered users held Apple stock and even fewer held Snap," Dudas added. Snap has 68,000 holders on the platform, according to the website.

To be sure, Apple is a high-priced stock for those looking to make their first investment, closing Tuesday at $175.23. But more-affordable stocks like Ford ($10.99 a share) still have a comparatively small percentage of holders on the platform. The top exchange-traded fund on the platform, the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF, has 23,200 holders.

Five of the top 10 stocks on the platform have share prices below $15, which could suggest that many investors are strategically buying the lowest-priced stocks.

Two of the top 10 stocks, GoPro and Fitbit, trade for less than $10. A person familiar with the matter said their popularity could be due to Robinhood's referral program. Under that program, users who invite friends to the platform can be rewarded with free stocks. For the most part, the stocks given out are cheap, with a 98% chance the stock will be valued between $2.50 and $10, according to the company.

To be sure, just because a stock has a low price doesn't mean it isn't a good investment pick. In fact, the company prides itself on being a home to young, less wealthy investors.

"Our mission is to democratize access to America's financial system and we're thrilled that all types of investors choose to trade on Robinhood," the company said in a statement.

The top 10 stocks on the platform have a combined 1.1 million holders, though many of the investors holding Apple could also be invested in GoPro or Facebook or Twitter.

Brian Barnes, the CEO of M1 Finance, an automated financial adviser, told Business Insider he didn't think it was possible that Robinhood had 4 million funded accounts given the data, drawing a distinction between registered accounts, in which a user has signed up, and a funded account, in which a user has deposited cash to invest.

"Robinhood has 4 million brokerage accounts on the platform," Robinhood said in a statement. "As we expect, not all 4 million people own positions in equities or ETFs at all times."

Listen to Business Insider's recent conversation with Robinhood cofounder Vlad Tenev, here>>

Cheddar's valuation is on the rise. Facebook

Nobody seems to have a clear idea of how many people actually watch Cheddar. And it probably doesn't matter.

The web-video startup, which aspires to become the business-news outlet of record for millennials, has just pulled in another $22 million in funding, bringing its total to $54 million and landing it an impressive $160 million valuation in just two years of existence.

Those numbers are eye-opening, particularly in light of the recent fallout in digital media.

The fuzzier math: How many people are actually watching Cheddar?

It's tough to gauge. Even its founder, Jon Steinberg, says so.

Nielsen and comScore don't seem to have an answer. If the biggest TV networks in the US are having a hard time measuring how many people watch their shows on multiple devices and apps, consider that Cheddar is live eight hours a day on several fledgling streaming services, including Sling TV and Philo, while distributing live and on-demand clips on Facebook and Twitter, as well as on YouTube, Pluto TV, and Xumo, and even at some airports.

Can anybody come up with a rating number that captures all that?

According to the analytics firm Tubular Labs, Cheddar had close to 500 million video views on Facebook in the past 90 days. One clip, featuring a demonstration of a clothes-folding product, has generated nearly 100 million views.

To Cheddar's credit, its main Facebook page has nearly 3 million followers, while its Twitter account has nearly 150,000.

But it's also easy to find individual Cheddar live clips on Facebook or Twitter that generate fewer than 50,000 views.

Then there's Cheddar's distribution on various so-called skinny bundles, which 4.6 million people had signed onto by the end of last year, according to an estimate by MoffettNathanson Research.

Targeting the 'skinny bundle' crowd

Steinberg said that while Cheddar initially focused on Facebook — and particularly on Facebook Live — the plan was always to go for the emerging "over the top" opportunity.

"We knew we wanted to get out of Facebook, because we knew Facebook was going to screw publishers," he said. "We needed some Park Avenue real estate."

His thinking: As media and tech giants like DirecTV, Hulu, PlayStation, and YouTube have readied these scaled-down cable-TV alternatives, there would be an opening for a cheaper option.

Whereas networks like CNBC and Fox are used to commanding high monthly carriage fees from cable distributors, Cheddar would come in cheap.

"If they are getting a dollar per subscription, we'd offer 25 cents," Steinberg said.

Instead, the skinny-bundle companies said they'd be happy to carry Cheddar — but weren't interested in paying for that right.

"So I was back in the advertising business," Steinberg said.

He says Cheddar will have distribution on every skinny bundle by the end of this year and will pull in $40 million to $50 million in ad revenue by next year.

Does a huge audience matter for a media company anymore?

What's striking about Cheddar's funding announcement is that it came at a time when companies like Refinery29, Mashable, Vice, and BuzzFeed are going through cutbacks.

And the news didn't contain any claims that Cheddar reaches hundreds of millions of unique users. It surely doesn't.

Instead, Steinberg says his bar is relatively low. He looks toward the financial-news category, where CNBC's daily live shows regularly attract fewer than 200,000 viewers and whose average audience age is much older than Cheddar's, Steinberg says.

"All I need is a quarter of that," he said. "That network pulls in close to a billion a year."

He has a point. Nielsen says CNBC's average daytime audience contains only about 30,000 viewers between the ages of 25 and 54. And according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, CNBC will pull in $778 million this year.

Is that enough to excite investors, who like to see fast scaling revenue and dream of big exits? What is it about Cheddar?

Some point to Cheddar's fandom.

According to CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned analytics tool, in February, Cheddar's videos generated more than 3 million interactions — more than CNBC, Bloomberg, and, yes, Business Insider. That kind of interaction (shares, comments, likes) is typically seen as a sign of audience devotion.

"Building a brand on the internet is hard," said Rich Greenfield, a media analyst. "Cheddar is trying to define the news category in video online. We all know the legacy ecosystem breaking down."

Greenfield cited other digital brands like Barstool Sports as a good example of a company with a far smaller audience than competitors (like, say, ESPN) but whose profile has been exploding.

"It's unclear if Cheddar can be a unicorn, but significant value can be created by the brand," Greenfield said. "They are a beachhead to build a multiplatform media business."

It's an advantage that Cheddar doesn't have legacy costs or infrastructure, said Farhad Massoudi, the founder and CEO of Tubi TV, an ad-supported video hub.

"I do think there's a business opportunity to produce news content and distribute it everywhere and not be locked into traditional news deals," he said. "They've also done a good job of managing to keep the production costs low."

"Cheddar is the leader in live digital news video and owns all its IP," said Simon Freer, the chief commercial officer of Liberty Global's content-investments arm, which participated in the most recent funding round. "We believe Cheddar can go global, and we are excited to collaborate with the company to make that a reality."

It's almost as if what matters to investors now is that Cheddar has built distribution, the ability to produce a large volume of content, and a name. Amassing a significant audience is a secondary concern.

Still, the Cheddar haters are out there

There's little question that Cheddar has become Cheddar in large part because of Steinberg's self-promotion, deal-making prowess, and connections in the media and ad worlds.

"He's a real hustler," said one digital-ad-industry veteran. "I've never seen somebody so transparently trying to sell a business. One thing he's got going for him is the dynamic of 'anybody will say anything if you stick a camera in their face.' But I don't know if 21-year-olds want to watch this."

Steinberg definitely has a showman side, which some love and some don't. He posts his workout videos on Instagram and wears funny hats while on Cheddar. He's known for putting together splashy press events, like an announcement on a yacht in Cannes a few years ago that he, WPP CEO Martin Sorrell, and Evan Spiegel, the founder of Snapchat, were launching a new social ad agency dubbed Truffle Pig.

Steinberg says he loves making deals. Sometimes that results in landing huge sponsors, but in other cases, it has meant bum deals. His spending $26 million to acquire Elite Daily while running Daily Mail's North American operations became a big money loser for Daily Mail's parent company, which eventually unloaded the property.

But Steinberg said he's not looking to sell Cheddar.

"I just raised $22 million," he said.

The other knock on Cheddar is that it is live during an era when young people want everything on demand.

"I don't think live TV makes any sense," one person told Business Insider. "That's dead."

So Cheddar is pushing into more non-newsy content. And its live footage can easily be turned into clips for the web.

Friends like these

Steinberg has surely used his connections to land guests such as Sorrell and the CEO of CBS, Les Moonves. But he bristled at the idea that Cheddar is just his Rolodex.

"These are not all my friends," he said. "We book 30 or 40 people a day. We had Drew Barrymore the other day; she's not my friend."

Cheddar even had Tim Kaine, the 2016 Democratic vice presidential nominee, as a guest.

Drew Barrymore on Cheddar. Cheddar

Going forward, Steinberg says that he'd welcome getting Cheddar on traditional cable packages and that he's interested in getting distribution via local broadcast stations.

He also sees an opening as some smaller local cable companies appear to shift their focus to becoming primarily broadband providers, given how high the profit margins are. His thinking is that perhaps Cheddar could provide video content for those services at a much lower cost, letting cable companies focus on broadband.

Steinberg acknowledges that big names and deals will take Cheddar only so far in the near term, as there's one group that will care about measuring Cheddar's audience: advertisers.

To ramp up ad revenue, Steinberg's talking to Google about testing "dynamic ads" that could be delivered automatically during breaks in Cheddar's livestreams. In the meantime, he's pushing hard for better third-party research to please ad buyers.

"We get very limited data from the skinny bundles and are prohibited from sharing," he said.

He says he's hired the research company Cogent (which CNBC also uses) to help track viewership on streaming services "at great cost to us."

According to Cogent, Cheddar viewership has already climbed to 10% among US millennials. In addition, upstart streaming web platforms like Pluto TV and Xumo add in about another million viewers, Steinberg says.

Cheddar says that, overall, "hundreds of thousands watch Cheddar live each day, and hundreds of millions watch Cheddar video clips on social media monthly."

But Steinberg seems to realize this hodgepodge of data won't be enough for big marketers in the long term. It's hard to plug these numbers into a chart and compare them with live-TV audiences.

So he's pushing for Nielsen to come up with a solution.

"It will probably cost me an arm and a leg," he said. "But I'm dying for it."

He added: "If I can get Nielsen to measure us, even if the average viewership they come up with is 5,000 people, I consider 5,000 viewers a victory, because CNBC only has 30,000 between the ages of 25-54 — our whole audience is in its 20s and 30s, and we are two years old."

"Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle." Sony

Things did not start off well for the sequel to "Jumanji."

Twenty years after the 1995 hit movie — which starred Robin Williams as a man who, after decades of being trapped inside a magical board game, is finally released to complete it with two kids — Sony announced in 2015 that it was going to dust off the property and reboot it.

The internet was not happy.

"It was like, 'You're ruining my childhood!'" Jake Kasdan, the director of "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle," recalled when Business Insider asked whether he was aware of the backlash.

Following the Sony announcement, social media was flooded with negative reactions, the consensus being that a "Jumanji" reboot would tarnish the original's legacy and that the sequel was just the latest example of Hollywood running out of new ideas:

And things didn't get any better for the movie when, after the screenwriter Chris McKenna ("Spider-Man: Homecoming") was tasked with coming up with a new take on the movie, three more screenwriters came on board to give it a crack. The release date was also changed three times, eventually settling on December 20, the Wednesday after "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" would hit theaters.

These are not good signs for a movie.

But in one of the most miraculous turnarounds for a movie in recent memory, "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle" didn't just hold its own against "The Last Jedi" in December (finishing in second place for the last week and a half of the year), it knocked the latest "Star Wars" movie off the top spot and went on an incredible three-week streak of topping the weekend domestic box office in January.

The movie went on to earn over $939 million worldwide, and over $400 million in North America — the second-best domestic performance ever for a Sony movie (just below the $403.7 million made by 2002's "Spider-Man"). All this came from just a $90 million budget.

And no one is more surprised by the movie's global success than Kasdan.

'I loved what this could be'

Known for R-rated comedies like "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story" and "Bad Teacher," Kasdan came out of nowhere to prove he could helm a PG-13 action-comedy with major stars like Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, Karen Gillan, and Nick Jonas.

Kasdan signed on to direct a few months after Sony made the official announcement, despite being fully aware of the hatred for the idea by those on the internet.

"On some level I think there's a deserved skepticism about bringing back titles," Kasdan told Business Insider while promoting the Blu-ray/DVD release of the movie (available Tuesday). "Whether it's a sequel, reboot, relaunch, I think we've done so much of it that understandably the audience is kind of, 'Why does everything have to be like this?' But I loved what this could be."

Dwayne Johnson in "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle." Sony What the haters online didn't know was that Kasdan and the screenwriters McKenna, Erik Sommers, Scott Rosenberg, and Jeff Pinkner all contributed to what can only be described as a unicorn in the movie business — a reboot that feels new while also paying homage to the original.

The major adjustment done for the "Jumanji" sequel was shifting the board-game element to better reflect the present gaming world.

At the end of the original "Jumanji," the two main characters toss the game into a river. The sequel starts years later in 1996, with the game being found on a beach. The boy who is given it ignores what he sees as a lame board game, so the game magically morphs into a more attractive video game, sucking him into it. Years later, more kids are sucked in and become avatars played by Johnson, Hart, Black, and Gillan.

That element opened incredible possibilities for the sequel's story, as it not only could bring the Jumanji game to life but also could deliver all types of gaming aspects to the movie — from the characters' three game "lives" apiece to the jokes about their avatar's strengths and weaknesses.

Kasdan said this was all pulled off not by one single screenwriter who finally figured out how to crack the story but by collectively using all of them, like a TV writers' room.

'It wasn't like someone was dismissed and never heard from again'

Traditionally, on a movie, when a screenwriter has handed in his or her draft and been told that another scribe has been hired, that usually means the director, producers, or studio executives (or all the above) didn't like the previous screenwriter's work. But that wasn't the case on "Welcome to the Jungle."

"What made this project unusual was I continued to work with a lot of the writers," Kasdan said. "It wasn't like someone was dismissed and never heard from again. Chris McKenna came up with the idea and wrote it with Erik Sommers, and then Scott Rosenberg and Jeff Pinkner came on, and I did some work on it as well. I just liked their work, so by the end it was this unique experience where they worked with me or each other. Everyone kept a foot in."

Though Kasdan thought they had made a worthy movie, he still had no idea how it would play in test screenings. So first, he decided to play the movie for his kids.

"My kids are like 7 and 5, which is sort of younger than we ever thought about our audience, but they loved it," he said. "That made me think that the movie had a larger possible audience than I had fully realized while we made the movie. They connected so strongly to the fantasy of it, it got me excited."

And the rest is history. The movie made just under $1 billion globally at the box office and solidified the star status of Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart. And Kasdan is still trying to take it all in.

"I've been doing this long enough to realize how extraordinary this is," he said. "It's kind of a dream."

But now it's back to the drawing board for a sequel. Kasdan, Rosenberg, and Pinkner are all set to return, along with the lead cast. But can a sequel that was praised for having its own identity pull off a successful encore? Can the video game storyline be used again? Is it right to bring back the same cast?

"We're just starting to figure that out," Kasdan said. "The honest answer is you could do all different kinds of things and we're trying to figure out what feels like the most organic and fun way to continue this."

More on 'Jumanji':

The Great Wall of China on February 20, 2018 in Huairou, China. Vincent Isore/IP3/Getty Images

It was 10.07 p.m. on a cool Vancouver evening when Shawn Zhang's phone rang. It was his mom.

Based in Wuyi, in the eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang just south of Shanghai, she had just received a call from the police. They were asking questions about a post her son, a law student in Canada, had put up on Weibo — they said it wasn't good and it would be better if Zhang deleted it.

Just a day earlier, China's legislature had voted — almost unanimously — to scrap presidential term limits, paving the way for President Xi Jinping to rule indefinitely. After weeks of extensive censorship, where everything from Xi's name to the words "immortality" and "lifelong" were banned, Zhang wanted to see if retweeting a picture would draw the ire of censors.

So that afternoon he set up an anonymous account on Weibo, posted a cartoon of Xi encased in glass and draped in a communist flag, and then retweeted it from his own account.

But before the post was censored or his account suspended, public-security police called his mum. All told, it took fewer than eight hours and four minutes.

"I didn't expect this picture would trigger the police's response. It is a parody picture, not a political statement," Zhang told Business Insider.

It is not the first time Zhang's posts have attracted scrutiny back home.

Earlier this year, he tweeted a picture of the Tibetan flag with the words "Free Tibet" after hotel chain Marriott controversially listed Tibet, as well as Hong Kong and Taiwan, as countries despite China's claims to those territories. And last year he gave an answer on the question-and-answer website, Quora, about the disputed Doklam territory which borders China, India, and Bhutan, which received 38,000 upvotes.

Both times, public-security police contacted his parents to try and convince Zhang to remove the posts.

"It's really disturbing that police called again and again," Zhang said.

But this time felt different.

"I also didn't expect police to respond so quickly. It suggests my social media account is probably under their close monitoring. They will read everything I say," Zhang said. "Last time I posted a Tibet flag, police responded because someone reported my posts to the police. But this time, the police's response seems more proactive. I am probably on their watch list."

Whether he is on a watch-list or not, Zhang is not alone in thinking censorship in China is rapidly changing.

The "Great Firewall" has gotten much taller under Xi

Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

In 2018, more than 600 million people will use social media in China — that's nearly one-quarter of all global users.

But these people will be faced with more censorship than ever before, according to a new report this month from human-rights organization PEN America, "Forbidden Feeds: Government Controls on Social Media in China."

While the term "Great Firewall" used to describe the large number of international websites blocked from China — Google, Facebook, Twitter — PEN says that censorship on local platforms has soared over the past six years.

"There has never been a particularly good time for internet freedom in China, or for free expression on social media in China specifically," the PEN report said. "Yet... the space for free expression online has been under increasing and unrelenting pressure by the government under the tenure of President Xi Jinping."

Xi Jinping. Lintao Zhang/Getty Images

In September 2015, censorship-monitoring site China Digital Times received a rare image of a censorship directive — usually editors receive tips verbally to minimize a paper trail, deputy editor Samuel Wade told PEN. This particular directive was numbered 320 and came from the Central Propaganda Department. Because this department is just one agency within the government and Communist Party that issues censorship orders, its fair to assume thousands of directives are ordered each year.

Advanced censorship technology combined with new laws, regulations, and increased enforcement are increasingly being used to "repress dissident voices and shape online conversation," according to PEN.

Just this month, a former prosecutor was arrested for making comments online about the removal of presidential term limits. The Globe and Mail also reported that around the same time a teenager, who posted a tool on Weibo allowing users to connect with people whose accounts were deleted, had his computer seized by the police who also took some of his blood to collect his DNA.

And as Zhang's case shows, China's attempts at censorship are no longer limited by geography or technology. Beijing is also trying to crackdown on overseas dissidents whose families are still in the mainland, despite the fact many posts are on platforms like Twitter that aren't accessible in China.

"Under Xi, the "Great Firewall" is getting taller," the PEN report said.

Fear of censorship has turned into a fear of arrest

ED JONES/AFP/Getty Images

The law, the courts, and the police have all become stricter in the last six years.

In 2013, the Supreme People's Court increased penalties for posts that are defamatory of contain "false information." If a post is forwarded more than 500 times or clicked on over 5,000 times, the author can go to jail for up to three years.

China is expected to block VPNs, which can get around the Great Firewall, at the end of March. Apple already removed VPNs from its App store in China last year at Beijing's request. GREG BAKER/AFP/Getty Images

Two years later it became illegal to post fabricated content about natural disasters, emergencies, or any reports of danger — encouraging netizens to closely stick to the government's narrative on major events.

Then last year, a new law made it illegal to endanger the "honor or interests of the State."

New regulations also urged social-media companies to begin rating users. Companies are encouraged to have a credit system for users, deducting points for disobeying regulations, and to grant the government access to the data.

"Before Xi Jinping we feared only that they would delete our posts. In the worst situation, they would delete [your account]," Qiao Mu, an academic told The Guardian in 2015. "But since Xi Jinping came to power this changed. They began to arrest people."

Chat groups are popular but their tendency to leak is dangerous

Groupthink. Wei Yongxian/VCG via Getty Images

In 2016, blogger Liu Yanli was charged with defamation and spent eight months in jail for copying a number of short posts critical of Chinese leaders, including Xi, into a private WeChat group.

The following year Wang Jiangfeng was sentenced to two years prison for using the satirical nickname "Steamed Bun Xi," also in a private WeChat group.

WeChat groups are popular in China, where there can be as many as 500 members in each group. And while there are numerous instances of the government appearing to have read private messages through some sort of back door, such large groups are, as PEN describes, "leaky by design" and can easily be infiltrated.

FRED DUFOUR/AFP/Getty Images

The problem isn't just limited to Chinese apps though. Despite WhatsApp's encrypted technology, Zhang Guanghong was charged last year with insulting the government for sharing an article that was critical of Xi in a group chat. According to The New York Times, this will be one of the first times conversation history from a non-Chinese app will be used as evidence.

Threats of prosecution pose risks for people who post content but also group creators. New regulations introduced in September last year hold group initiators criminally liable for content posted in any group they start.

The regulations also require the tech companies to monitor and keep records of chats for six months, and report any illegal activity to authorities. The companies have essentially been ordered to spy on their users.

Interestingly, group chats have more words censored than one-on-one chats, an indicator that China is focused more on dissent growing than it existing.

"China is more concerned about monitoring group opinion and preventing political mobilization than with censoring one-on-one discussions," the PEN report said.

Laws are intentionally vague and confusing so people will self-censor Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Aside from the new laws and regulations, since 2013 there have been seven "bottom lines" that social-media content shouldn't contravene: China's rules and laws, the socialist system, the country's national interests, the legitimate interests of citizens, public order, morality, and authentic information.

GREG BAKER/AFP/Getty Images

"The broad and vague nature of these lists provides authorities with unfettered discretion to crack down on anything they deem inappropriate," the PEN report said. "Additionally, it helps instill self-censorship among internet users, who are left with very little sense of what types of social media postings are appropriate."

Just this week, the values of the socialist system were interpreted to require an immediate crackdown on any and all parodies and spoofs.

"To be safe, a person must pull back in every respect, and moreover must become his or her own policeman," China scholar Perry Link wrote back in 2002.

For Zhang, he's already thinking about what posting online could mean for his family back in China.

"I was upset at that time because police harassed my family again," Zhang said. "I don't want them to be disturbed. Police calling gave them pressure. I have to think about my parents when I say something online."

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Stephen Lam/Reuters

Social media companies are under fire as regulators and users across the Atlantic raise new questions about their troves of personal data.

Reports over the weekend revealed that the data firm Cambridge Analytica harvested the personal data of 50 million Facebook profiles to target them with political ads ahead of the 2016 US election.

This kind of scrutiny is part of a broader trend pushing the needle closer to bursting the "data/platform bubble," according to Bilal Hafeez, Nomura's global head of G-10 foreign-exchange strategy.

"The bottom line is that trade wars, populism, income inequality can be looked at in isolation, but together they all point to a reaction against the growth of fluid intangible-intensive industries such as the data/platform companies," Hafeez said. "This means that these markets will come under increasing pressure on how they value data/platforms as the year unfolds."

Hafeez cites a political sea change against the sector as the core reason that the bubble is set to burst.

Since his campaign, President Donald Trump has focused on improving goods-producing sectors like manufacturing. Meanwhile, the services sector — a bigger contributor to the economy — continues to create the lion's share of US jobs.

Trump's approach has represented a departure from that of his immediate predecessor, Barack Obama, who embraced Silicon Valley and was the first to create executive positions for a chief technology officer and a chief data scientist.

It also doesn't help that data companies have helped widen income inequality by creating "winner-takes-all" dynamics, Hafeez said.

Hafeez also highlights "the cab driver" — people who aren't specialists but have become some of the biggest advocates of some technologies.

"A classic sign of the late stages of a boom is when non-specialists start to become the most vocal advocates for the boom," he wrote.

Bitcoin's explosion and subsequent rollover, which hurt many platforms created to profit from it, is probably the best recent example of a bandwagon that nonspecialists jumped on.

Finally, Hafeez says the rise of misinformation and fake news could also mean the end of the platform bubble.

"Today thanks to the increasing concerns that platforms and data-holders have been 'gamed' by corporations and foreign governments to manipulate consumers and voters, there is a growing backlash from individuals and governments on how these platforms can operate," he wrote. "For individuals, this could be resulting in a shift from 'crowd-sourced' information to 'reputation-based' information and opinion."

And the result for governments could be even more regulation — the final trigger, as companies move away from adhering to global standards to new regional rules.

"The EU is increasingly flexing its muscles on the rights of the consumer in relation to data/platform owners," Hafeez said. "That leaves the pioneering US companies with the most to lose as they have to retrench from these markets."

If you're looking for a trade recommendation that could profit from this, Hafeez advises that the Japanese yen "typically performs well in a volatile world."

Robin Marchant / Stringer / Getty Images

Chrissy Teigen, the 32-year-old model and host of the Paramount Network's "Lip Sync Battle," has become the latest celebrity to announce that she's quit photo messaging app Snapchat.

"I stopped using snap. The update, the constant complaints of people not being able to find me, plus the Rihanna poll...no bueno," Teigen wrote to her almost 10 million Twitter followers on Saturday morning.

The "Rihanna poll" she mentions is a reference to a huge controversy earlier this month, as Snapchat ad appeared to make light of Chris Brown's assault on the singer in 2009. "Shame on you," said Rihanna, as she slammed Snapchat for allowing the ad in the first place. Snap, the app's parent company, soon apologized, but shares of the company dipped 4% following her post.

As far as the complaints of people not being able to find Teigen on Snapchat, that's a reference to the widely-panned app redesign, which was intended to make it easier to use — but also made it harder to find photos and updates from celebrities and influencers, critics say.

Teigen is just the latest celebrity to quit the app. Back in February, Kylie Jenner announced she had quit Snapchat, too: "Sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore? Or is it just me... ugh this is so sad," she tweeted to her 24.5 million followers. Following Jenner's tweet, stock in Snap dipped 8%, giving its market cap a $1.3 billion haircut. However, Jenner did return to Snapchat some time after sending that tweet.

Snap stock is currently flat in after-hours trading.

Business Insider/Julie Bort

On Thursday, Oracle officially opened its massive new Austin, Texas, campus which houses about 5,000 employees today, but will eventually hold 10,000.

This campus is unique in that it includes a luxury on-site apartment building. The live-in campus was the brainchild of Oracle co-CEO Mark Hurd as part of his Class Of program.

Hurd was inspired to create the program by a dinner he had with his daughter and her friends a few years ago. They had just graduated from college, landed sales jobs and were rooming together. They were chattering about their lives which consisted of selling stuff and partying.

"They had this infectious enthusiasm and I thought we should do the same thing at Oracle," Hurd told Business Insider. People inside Oracle's legendary competitive salesforce were not happy with the idea at first. Hiring untrained college grads was a big change for the software giant who had "historically hired from competitors," he said.

Undeterred, in 2013, Hurd began to hire thousands of college graduates to sell Oracle's cloud. He had to figure out how to train them and support their career growth until they could handle territories and clients on their own.

Today, the grads spend a few weeks in training, are tasked with cold-calling, then they shadow sales people. It takes three years of graduated training and work to get their own territories.

Then he decided Class Of employees need state-of-the-art facilities and help with affordable housing.

So in 2015, the story of this Oracle campus began, when Hurd hopped on a plane with Oracle founder Larry Ellison to Austin, and they walked along the river in search of the spot for the live-in campus.

Take a look ...

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has billions of reasons to be happy with his new pay package. REUTERS/Stephen Lam

Maybe it's just me, but $106 billion seems like a lot of money.

Heck, for me, $106 million is a good chunk of change. I could be motivated to do a whole lot of stuff for a mere $106 million. I bet you could too.

The board of directors at Tesla, however, don't think like you and me — and neither, it turns out, do the company's shareholders.

You might have missed it amid all the uproar over the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal, but Tesla shareholders this week approved a new pay package for CEO Elon Musk. Even if you did hear about it, you probably didn't realize just how massive or outrageous the pay package is.

Long story short: Tesla's shareholders agreed with the company's board that $106 billion wasn't enough money to encourage Musk to take the company's valuation to new heights. They figured he needed another $55.8 billion, an amount that is itself equivalent to the annual gross domestic product of Bulgaria.

Musk's payday is emblematic of just how broken executive compensation is this country. But it also offers a window into how inequality in this country has gotten so bad and why it keeps getting worse.

Tesla set lofty goals for Musk — but promised even loftier compensation

The payday Tesla shareholders approved for Musk on Wednesday consists of 20.3 million stock options that are subject to certain performance targets. Using a complex formula, the company estimated the value of the options, which have a 10-year lifespan, at $2.6 billion. That amount would be generous enough — it amounts to $260 million a year, after all, a heady salary for most CEOs — but it vastly understates the potential value of the options.

Tesla divided the options into 12 different tranches of equal numbers of shares. Each tranche only vests if the company meets certain operating results and its market capitalization reaches certain levels. Each market capitalization milestone is separated by $50 billion. The first tranche of options can vest when Tesla's market capitalization reaches $100 billion, the second at $150 billion, the third at $200 billion, and so on.

Those targets will be tough to meet, no doubt. But the way Musk's pay package is structured, his windfall will increase exponentially with each market capitalization milestone the company hits.

Tesla estimated that if only two of Musk's group of options vest, and he doesn't sell them until after both of them do, he'll realize about $1.4 billion in value from them. If four of his tranches vest — and, again, he doesn't sell until all of his options are vested — Tesla estimated he'll see $6.3 billion in value from them. If all 12 tranches vest — and he doesn't sell before they do — the total value of his options would be $55.8 billion, according to the company.

Even dividing that by the 10-year life of the options, that would still amount to a jaw-dropping payday of $5.6 billion a year.

Musk's potential windfall amounts to a steep commission

Here's another way of looking at Musk's potential windfall. For his first two groups of options to vest, Tesla's valuation will have to hit $150 billion, up from about $51 billion today. His own windfall from that gain would amount to about 1% of that rise in valuation. But his share of the increase would go up with Tesla's market capitalization.

For all 12 tranches to vest, the company's market capitalization would have to hit $650 billion. Tesla investors, of course, would be ecstatic if it got that high. But Musk's windfall would amount to 9% of the total increase in Tesla's valuation. That's a pretty steep commission in my book — no matter how much of a gain investors would have seen.

Now, you can argue that if Musk is able to drive Tesla to the operating and valuation targets laid out in his pay package, it will be worth it to give him such an outsized portion of the company's stock gains. After all, it's a huge mountain that the company would have had to climb.

Tesla has struggled to meet its production targets for its new Model 3 sedan. Hollis Johnson/Business Insider Tesla has struggled for years with with profitability and production. It's currently producing only a small fraction of the number of its Model 3 car — the vehicle on which Musk has basically bet the company — than it expected. So its chances of achieving even half of the goals set out for Musk seem unlikely at best.

In a letter to shareholders explaining the award, Tesla's directors said they intentionally gave him a tough challenge.

"Our aspirations may appear ambitious to some, and impossible to others, and that is by design," the board members said in the letter. "We like setting challenging, hard-to-achieve goals for ourselves, and then focusing our efforts to make them happen. This is why we based this new award on stretch goals and why we gave Elon the ability to share in the upside in a way that is commensurate with the difficulty of achieving them."

The directors designed Musk's award to ensure his interests are aligned with shareholders, they said. After Musk received a similar structured grant in 2012, Tesla's market capitalization increased 17 times, they noted.

"We believe [Musk's] prior award was instrumental in helping Tesla achieve the objectives laid out in the original Tesla Master Plan and the tremendous stockholder value that was created as a result," they said.

The rationale for Musk's new pay package doesn't make sense

Let's set aside the question of whether the goals in Musk's new pay package are achievable — or whether they're even appropriate for him to focus on. The idea that Musk needs a $55.8 billion incentive to achieve all of them is laughable on its face.

The theory behind giving executives stock awards is to allow them to benefit from the company's success, and thereby align their interests with those of shareholders. The assumption is that the executives generally don't hold much in the way of the company's shares, so they wouldn't otherwise benefit from a rising stock price. We can argue about how well that theory holds up in practice, and the incentives it creates for executives, but that's the basic idea.

But that theory just doesn't apply to Musk. He already holds a huge stake in Tesla. As of the end of last year, he owned 33.6 million shares of the company's stock, and held another 4.2 million options that could be exercised within 60 days. All told, that amounted to nearly 22% of the company's outstanding shares.

Because of that stake, Musk was already going to benefit if Tesla's valuation went up. And not in a small way.

In fact, the value of that stake alone will go up by an $17.5 billion if Tesla's market capitalization hits $150 billion — the second milepost in his new pay package — taking into account the dilution the company expects. If Tesla's market capitalization goes all the way up to $650 billion, that stake would appreciate by $106 billion, again taking expected dilution into account.

In other words, Musk already had a $106 billion incentive to hit the top valuation target in his new pay package — even before being granted the new shares. Sure, he'd have to hold on to his current shares, but to see that $106 billion windfall he wouldn't even have to hit any of the operating targets set out in his new package. Maybe I'm naive, but I would think that $106 billion is more than enough of a reason to get him to drive Tesla to that valuation.

If it's not, then maybe Musk isn't the right guy to be running Tesla. I admire Musk and what he's trying to build with Tesla and SpaceX and all of his other projects. But I'm sure there are plenty of capable CEOs out there who would be more than willing to take on the challenge of leading Tesla to that kind of valuation for a lot less than $106 billion — much less the $161.8 billion, which is the total Musk stands to gain between his existing stake and his new pay package. For goodness sakes, it's a CEO's job to be driving longterm shareholder interest anyway — no matter how much the CEO is paid.

Musk's potential gain would come at the company's expense

In crafting this new pay package, Tesla board members said they actually did take into account Musk's current stake in the company. But they didn't explain why the expected appreciation of that stake alone wasn't enough to encourage him to achieve the goals they set out for him.

Investors have the most to lose from Musk's new pay package. If and as Tesla's stock appreciates, their share of the gains will get smaller and smaller.

But they'll lose out in other ways that are often not appreciated, especially since options and other stock awards are often treated as a trivial, non-cash expense that's more than accounted for by dilution.

Each share awarded to Musk represents an opportunity cost for the company. It's a share that the company itself could have sold to the public to raise money for its own treasury. That's not a small consideration for Tesla, given that it has has repeatedly had to raise money to fund its operations.

What's more, assuming Tesla is around long enough, it will almost certainly do what nearly every other company that hands out stock awards does — buy back those shares to soak up dilution and shore up its stock price. To do that, it will have to use actual cash that could have gone to other other, arguably better uses, whether that's paying other employees, expanding its operations, or paying out dividends.

One would have hoped that given such costs — and the ridiculous size of this award — Tesla investors would have put their collective foot down. But no. While investors representing 27% of the company's shares did vote against the pay package — a not insignificant amount — the vast majority of the rest backed it.

"We believe the final plan is well-aligned with shareholders' long-term interests," T. Rowe Price, a big mutual fund company told Bloomberg in an article Tesla's board sent to shareholders to encourage them to vote for the package.

Such support is not unexpected. The big mutual fund companies often rubber-stamp executive pay and other initiatives proposed by corporate boards. Most are happy to go-along to get-along, and many of those mutual funds are eager to stay on good terms with directors in hopes of winning their business elsewhere.

It's hard to have sympathy for such shareholders. They, after all, are the ones that approved Musk's pay package. They ought to reap both the benefits and consequences of that decision.

But others stand to lose from it too

Unfortunately, though, Tesla shareholders aren't the only ones who stand to lose from Musk's outrageous pay package.

Corporate boards and their advisors typically justify their executive pay decisions by looking at the pay given to executives at what they consider to be their peer companies. Because of what's been called the Lake Wobegone effect— where every company considers their executives to be above average — boards typically pay their managers above the average rate. With everyone looking at everyone else, executive pay gets ratcheted ever upward.

Thanks to that effect, you can expect corporate boards at other companies to look at Musk's pay package and figure they need to up the pay of their own executives to astronomical levels also. So, thanks to Tesla setting a new bar for executive pay, stakeholders at other companies are likely to lose out as well.

But the phenomenon of ever-increasing executive compensation does more than affect corporate investors and shareholders. It's also played a significant role in the growth in inequality in this country. Even as executive pay has soared over the last several decades, the pay of average workers has stagnated.

That's not just a coincidence. CEO pay has increased almost in inverse proportion to the decline in the power and membership of labor unions, one of the forces that had previously helped to keep it in check and tilt companies' economic spoils toward their employees.

Because so much of executives' pay these days comes in the form of shares of their companies, and share prices are tied in large part to companies' profits, executives see their pay rise as their companies' bottom line improves. And one sure way to better the bottom line is to hold down costs — most notably labor costs.

Tesla has fended off efforts to unionize its workers at its California factory. Benjamin Zhang/Business Insider Tesla is a case in point. Even as it was preparing its gargantuan pay package for Musk, the company was fighting off union efforts to organize its Bay Area factory workers, who reportedly get paid well below the industry average even while living in one of the most expensive regions in the United States.

Free market absolutists dismiss the danger of rising inequality, arguing that in a capitalist economy, you need to offer outsized gains to spur risk taking, innovation, and entrepreneurship. But the types of outsized gains Musk and other executives are seeing now are arguably way past what's needed to encourage such ends.

And on the flipside, rising inequality is antithetical to democracy. It's tied to a whole host of social ills. And it's linked to slow economic growth and financial and political instability. Indeed, the last time the United States saw this much inequality was right before the Great Depression.

But, hey, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Elon Musk really does need the lure of another $55.8 billion on top of the $106 billion he'd already see to give him the motivation to drive Tesla to new heights.

After all, shouldn't a CEO who's shooting for the stars have a payday that's equally lofty?

Raya COO Jared Morgenstern

If you are a VC and still don't get why Box and Dropbox are fundamentally different businesses, maybe stay away from SaaS. https://t.co/4O7Xks8Dbb

— Anshu Sharma (@anshublog) March 23, 2018