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One of the world's biggest oil-and-gas companies announced on Wednesday that it aims to reduce its total fossil-fuel emissions to net zero by 2050, and shift investment away from conventional fuel sources to renewable ones. Tesla CEO Elon Musk's name quickly came up.

"We are aiming to make absolute reductions to net zero of around 415 million tonnes of emissions — 55 million from our operations, 360 million from the carbon in our upstream production," Bernard Looney, who became CEO of 110-year-old British energy giant BP this month, said in a presentation.

"That is not far off the total emissions of the United Kingdom, the world's sixth largest economy and the second-biggest national economy so far, to set a net-zero aim," he continued.

Bloomberg TV anchor Alix Steel asked Looney how BP could overhaul its business without investors losing out.

"You have returns for oil-and-gas investments that can be plus 25%," she said. "For renewable investing, you're looking at 8% to 10%. You need the cash flow from the oil and gas to fund the transition."

"Why is this not better left to Google, Amazon, and Tesla?" she asked. Players outside of oil and gas can do "all the cool new energy things" and "at least in Tesla's case, have the ability to think out of the box in a particular way," she continued. They aren't "moving a company around that's 110 years old," she added.

"Why are you not Elon Musk?" Steel asked.

"I struggle enough with who I am," Looney replied. He redirected the question to Nick Boyle, the CEO of Lightsource Renewable Energy, a solar-energy specialist that BP bought a 50% stake in two years ago.

"He is Elon Musk," Looney joked.

"Thank you, Bernard," Boyle said. "No pressure."

Oil-and-gas companies should lead the clean-energy revolution because they specialize in delivering large engineering projects in remote places, know energy markets inside out, and boast the trading capability and financial resources to drive through renewable-energy initiatives, Boyle said.

Fossil-fuel giants like BP have "powered the world for the last 100 years" and are "in a perfect position to power the world the next 100 years," he added.

SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son wants the Japanese conglomerate to be viewed as an investment company, not an operating one. He used the rabbit-duck illusion, shown above, to make the case during his third-quarter earnings presentation on Wednesday.

"What do you see?" the boss of the $100 billion company asked the crowd of investors and analysts. "From your left, it looks like a duck. From your right — in the same picture, same slide — it looks like a rabbit."

The eccentric executive — who invested $20 million in Alibaba back in 2000 after noticing a "sparkle" in the eyes of founder Jack Ma — argued that SoftBank could be viewed two ways as well. He showed a slide that was split down the middle, with "EBIT" (earnings before interest and tax) on the left and "shareholder value" on the right.

"Looking from left, EBIT; looking from right, shareholder value," Son said. "If you want to know how SoftBank is performing, not from the left, you have to look at SoftBank from the right."

Son's view isn't surprising, given SoftBank's operating income nosedived 99% last quarter, from nearly $4 billion to less than $25 million. The decline stemmed from its Vision Fund, which posted a $2 billion loss after writing down the value of its investments in WeWork, Uber, and other businesses.

Instead of profits, Son urged the crowd to focus on SoftBank's shareholder value — the equity value of its holdings minus net debt — which swelled by 22% to $228 billion between the end of December and February 12. A key driver was Uber's stock rallying by more than a third this year.

"Like I said, from left, you see the face of a duck; from right, you see the face of a rabbit," Son concluded.

Given SoftBank is now an investment company rather than an operating company, its revenues and profits are "irrelevant," Son said in his presentation. "You can forget about those numbers."

A journalist asked Son if he was now an investor instead of a businessman. Son pointed to Warren Buffett, the billionaire investor and Berkshire Hathaway CEO, as an example of someone who's considered both.

"So you have changed from Bill Gates to Warren Buffett?" was the next question. 

The comparison was fair, "roughly speaking," Son replied. "Mr Buffett and myself are a little bit different," he continued. "I'm the one that's leading the information revolution."

The SoftBank chief added that he's not as conservative as the 89-year-old Buffett, who famously invests in proven, profitable companies.

"Mr Buffett is not an adventurous investor, he's a smart one," Son said. "But I'm still making some craziness."

Son, who visited Buffett three years ago to seek an investment in SoftBank-owned Sprint, has looked up to the investor for years.

"Warren Buffett in the technology industry, that is what I would like to become," he said in an earnings presentation in 2017.

SoftBank is the "Berkshire Hathaway of Internet," Son said in an earnings briefing in 2012.

Snapchat is testing a major redesign of its flagship app.

According to The Verge's Casey Newton, citing screenshots sent by anonymous sources, the company is carrying out two tests rolled out to a small percentage of Snapchat's user base.

One test is said to involve the introduction of breaking news headlines related to US and world news from selected news publications including NowThis, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.

In a section of the app called "Happening Now," these headlines are curated and can be tapped to bring up a full-screen news brief containing a photo and a short article.

The second is a redesign of the app's features and layout, including five screens rather than three, the relocation of its Snap Map, and the introduction of a navigation bar.

"We're exploring ways to streamline navigation across Snapchat, soliciting feedback from our community to inform future versions of our app," a Snap representative told Business Insider on Thursday. "This test's UI offers more space to innovate and increases the opportunity to engage with and discover even more of what Snapchat has to offer. This test is currently visible to a small percentage of our users."

The navigation bar's introduction is especially interesting, as it's a feature Snapchat has long resisted introducing despite the app's ease-of-use.

Indeed, the app's user unfriendliness was what drove Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel to launch its previous big redesign. This introduced a friends page that included both chat messages and ephemeral stories, and feed that prioritized posts from close friends, among other features.

Snapchat will have to be careful this time round, though, as that overhaul – which took place in 2017 – was not met well by users. The company said it lost 2% of its 191 million daily users as a result of the redesign, while over 1 million people signed a petition urging it to reconsider the changes.

From right to left: Vamsi Krishna, CEO and co-founder; Anand Prakash, co-founder; and Pulkit Jain, co-founder and head of product

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In recent years, the big tech companies have made dozens of acquisitions that have largely flown under the radar screen, because the firms they acquired were relatively small.

Those acquisitions are now on the radar screen of regulators, most notably the Federal Trade Commission, which announced on Tuesday that it was going to be examining smaller-scale purchases made in the past by Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Amazon. That's not a good sign for those companies. The FTC's study could result in much greater scrutiny of any future purchases of small startups that they make or in the agency forcing them to undo some of their past acquisitions.

"I think this is a first step that could lead to enforcement action. It could lead to new policies," said Doug Melamed, a professor of the practice of law at Stanford Law School.

US antitrust law — under the Hart Scott Rodino Act — requires larger companies that plan to make acquisitions over a certain size to notify antitrust authorities at the FTC and the Department of Justice. Regulatory authorities at those agencies often review those purchases and, in some cases — such as the attempt by the parent company of Schick razors to buy startup shaving company Harry's — they move to block them.

But companies have no duty to notify regulators about smaller acquisitions. The assumption is that such transactions don't generally affect competition in a significant way and that regulators should focus their time and resources on the bigger deals.

Some worry that small acquisitions could cause big problems

Some experts and market observers, though, have started to question that assumption. In the tech industry, there are relatively few large-scale deals that are subject to government review. But there are lots of smaller deals each year that go unreported to regulators. In a conference call with reporters, FTC chairman Joe Simons estimated that the number of purchases the big five companies have made over the last decade that weren't previously disclosed to his agency numbers in the hundreds.

At least some of those deals could have affected competition by allowing the dominant firms to extinguish nascent, would-be competitors. Just such concerns were raised when Facebook two years ago snapped up tbh, a fledgling social media app that was targeted at teens. Facebook shut down tbh less than a year after acquiring it.

"There's a huge question here of the shadow that the big-tech firms cast across Silicon Valley or across the startup world," Melamed said.

The study comes amid growing scrutiny of the tech giants. The European Union has already hit Alphabet with three fines of more than a billion dollars each for anti-competitive actions and has begun probes into Apple, Facebook, and Amazon. Meanwhile in the US, federal and state regulators have launched antitrust probes into those four companies. The FTC's action is likely a part of that broader inquiry into and reassessment of the power of the tech companies, legal experts told Business Insider. 

But the questions go beyond Silicon Valley. In a statement that accompanied the FTC's announcement of its study, the agency's two Democratic commissioners urged it to look at the impact smaller-scale acquisitions have had in industries beyond tech. The dialysis industry has consolidated into two major national players, and research indicates the two companies gain power through making numerous acquisitions that were below reporting thresholds.

"Similar patterns of 'stealth consolidation' have been observed in pharmaceutical and hospital markets," commissioners Christine Wilson and Rohit Chopra said in their statement. "We urge the Commission to consider similar ... studies across other industries to ensure that we have a more complete understanding about the competitive effects of non-reportable mergers writ large."

The FTC has plenty of power

While the study represents the agency's first broad look at small-scale mergers in the tech industry, it's not completely unprecedented. The FTC has wide-ranging authority under the Federal Trade Commission Act to conduct studies into how industries or businesses operate, and it has used that authority in the past to examine mergers and competition in particular industries.

There's good reason for the agency to conduct this particular study, the legal experts said. Not a lot is known about how all the small acquisitions made by the tech giants are affecting competition in the industry, they said.

While there's growing concern about that the big companies are quashing competition, "there hasn't been, as yet, great studies and great data to demonstrate something like that is going on," said Prasad Krishnamurthy, a professor at the University of California-Berkeley's law school. He continued: "There is a dearth of research on the topic."

It's too early to know what the study will find or how the agency or other policymakers will respond to it. But one potential outcome could be that the FTC forces the big tech firms to undo some of their previous small-scale mergers. Simons himself suggested on the call that the agency could head in that direction as part of its inquiry.

The agency has the authority to undo mergers and acquisitions after the fact — even ones that weren't required to be reported to it. It did just that late last year when it ordered the dissolution of a merger between two prosthetic knee companies, finding that their combination was anticompetitive. The merger had taken place two years earlier and had not been subject to Hart-Scott-Rodino reporting requirements.

Unwinding mergers after the fact is "not widely done, for obvious reasons, but it has been done
and they have the power to do it," said Donald Polden, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law.

The FTC could also step up its scrutiny over small-scale acquisitions in the future, whether by individual firms or across the board. The latter, though, likely would require Congress to update Hart-Scott-Rodino, Polden said.

Krishnamurthy is hopeful that one of the outcomes of the study will be that the big tech companies have to start notifying regulators even when they make these kinds of smaller acquisitions, because of the general worry about their impact on competition.

"This is not a concern that is going to go away," he said.

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It's been about nine months since Google Cloud announced it would acquire data analytics company Looker, the biggest acquisition by CEO Thomas Kurian. And to hear Kurian talk, it seems like he's not done shopping yet. 

At the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, Kurian described how vital acquisitions are to Google Cloud's overall strategy, which is focused squarely on catching up to larger rivals Microsoft and Amazon in the cloud market.

"We look at our ability to expand our reach through complementary products in the market segments we're in, and one of the benefits of scaling our direct and indirect distribution is when we acquire something, we now have a much more scaled distribution channel through which to inject the technology into market, thereby allowing us to accelerate things," Kurian said.

According to a recent filing by Google Cloud's parent company Alphabet, the $2.4 billion acquisition of Looker is almost through all of the regulatory hurdles and on track to close soon. Analysts have said the Looker acquisition is a shot at Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle, which all have competitive offerings. 

But Google Cloud has been busy making a string of smaller, less high-profile acquisitions on Kurian's watch too.

Besides Looker, Google Cloud also announced acquisitions of the data migration startup Alooma, Alphabet's cybersecurity company Chronicle, the file storage company Elastifile, and the VMware partner CloudSimple. Most recently, Google Cloud announced it will acquire AppSheet, which makes it easier for people to build mobile apps.

Last year the company completed a total of $1 billion worth of acquisitions according to Alphabet's most recent 10-K filing, a figure that includes deals made by Google Cloud as well as other business that are part of Alphabet.

When Kurian first took the reins as CEO, analysts said he was likely to make some large acquisitions because of his background at Oracle, which makes M&A a big part of its strategy. So far, he's lived up to expectations.

Still, Kurian said, Google Cloud is not completely relying on acquisitions

"We are very focused on executing our plan," Kurian told the audience. "We're not dependent on acquisitions to grow. We've obviously shown that, and we'll make acquisitions appropriately when the time is right."

Do you work at Google Cloud? Got a tip? Contact this reporter via email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., Signal at 646.376.6106, Telegram at @rosaliechan, or Twitter DM at @rosaliechan17. (PR pitches by email only, please.) Other types of secure messaging available upon request. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said he didn't think the United States should invest in Ericsson and Nokia which the Trump Administration has proposed as a way to counter China's 5G offensive.

Robbins was reacting to Attorney General William Barr's suggestion that the US should take an ownership stake in the European telecom giants to prevent China, particularly Cisco rival Huawei, from dominating the 5G wireless market.

Barr's comments last week sparked a rally in Nokia and Ericsson shares, and the issue came up during Cisco's fiscal second-quarter earnings call on Wednesday when an analyst asked Robbins "on this whole 5G investment commentary coming, you know, coming out of the government."

"I don't think the US government should make investments in these companies," Robbins responded, as he also suggested that the US had a strong position when it comes to 5G, the next generation superfast wireless technology that's expected to lead to dramatic changes in networks.

"I don't think the US government should make investments in these companies," Robbins told analysts on Cisco's fiscal second quarter earnings call. "I actually think the US is in fine shape. I think both from a carrier deployment perspective, I think we're in great shape. And I think we're in a good position with the technology."

Robbins said he has helped political leaders in Washington understand the US position in the 5G rollout.

"Obviously, they're very interested in having US companies participate in 5G and, frankly, lead in 5G," he said. "We've spent a lot of time helping them understand that and working to make sure that there's a recognition that there's a lot of technology that's been built and being built here in the United States that is leading in these 5G infrastructures."

Cisco shares shed 4% late Wednesday after the tech giant reported a dip revenue, although its results beat Wall Street estimates.

Cisco reported a profit of $2.9 billion, or 68 cents a share, compared to a profit of $2.8 billion or 63 cents a share for the year-ago quarter. Revenue slipped 4% to $12 billion. Adjusted profit was 77 cents a share. 

Analysts had expected the company to report a profit of 76 cents a share on revenue of $11.98 billion.

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Microsoft has touted the growing popularity of its workplace chat app, Teams, sharing in November that the app had reached 20 million users, putting it well ahead of its chat rival, Slack.

On Wednesday, Microsoft's head of marketing for its Microsoft 365 division, Jared Spataro, provided details about how the company measures Teams' daily active user numbers, pushing back against critics who say Microsoft's metrics aren't all that they seem to be.

"Daily active users for us is the maximum number of users who take an intentional action over a 24-hour period ... What we call passive actions do not count," Spataro said at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco.

He added that Microsoft doesn't count things like auto booting the app, minimizing a window, closing the app, or Skype towards its Teams daily active user count. 

His comments come as Teams has put competitive pressure on smaller rival Slack, which went public via direct listing last year. Slack's CEO Stewart Butterfield has previously criticized Team's user growth as inorganic saying that users of older Microsoft products are being forced to migrate to Teams. And the company has touted the value of its 12 million active users, by highlighting figures that show how engaged users are with the product. 

Teams is part of Microsoft 365, a bundle of business apps, what Microsoft introduced in 2017 and includes Office 365 – cloud-based versions of the company's flagship productivity applications such as Word and Excel – collaboration tools like OneDrive and SharePoint, the Microsoft Teams chat app, and even the Windows 10 operating system itself.

This bundling approach has come under scrutiny from Slack, with CEO Butterfield previously calling Microsoft a "surprisingly unsportsmanlike" competitor.

Spataro said to replicate what Teams can do it takes several competitors products. "If you're trying to do what Teams does, you're going to pull together Slack, Zoom, Dropbox and Google ... Against each of those competitors, we have strengths and we have gaps. And I would just say that we are super clear on what our gaps are against the leaders in those categories and we invest every day, every day, every day to close those gaps," he said.

The Microsoft exec ascribed the growth of Teams to the large numbers of companies in the process of modernizing their internal communications tools and their corporate cultures. 

"They're able to say, Hey, this is a new way of doing things. There's a 4-in-1 value prop there. There's chat, meet, call, collaborate, and they say, we're going to do certain business processes this way. So it has some kind of symbolic value to companies as they change," Spataro said. 

As Microsoft started to realize the demand for Teams, it upped the resources behind the product — adding more "customer success managers" or salespeople, and making sure that Teams can integrate well with the other productivity software Microsoft offers. 

Spataro said his strategy to appeal to customers is to highlight the integration that Teams has with other Microsoft office productivity tools, so it can be a central workspace hub for employees. That both makes the process of working easier he said and provides the same security tools for all the tools a company may be using for productivity. 

Teams does not have a set user limit as it relies on Azure Active Directory, a cloud identity service that can support an unlimited number of users, a Microsoft spokesperson told Business Insider. But while an unlimited number of people can be on a company's Team's platform, each workspace or "Team" it creates within that can hold up to 5,000 users and 200 channels, which is the channel scalability limitation Spataro refers to. 

Slack has previously said that its product is more attractive to large companies because it can support an unlimited number of channels and users. Slack's enterprise grid product, which is meant for large organizations, is currently able to hold up to 500,000 users, and a Slack spokesperson recently told Business Insider it would continue to expand that number if it had a customer who met that user limit. Slack allows unlimited workspaces in enterprise grid, 250,000 users per workspace, unlimited channels per workspace, and unlimited members per channel. 

Welcome to this week's edition of Trending, the newsletter where we highlight BI Prime's biggest tech stories. I'm Alexei Oreskovic, Business Insider's West Coast bureau chief and global tech editor.

If this is your first time here, this is how you can get Trending in your inbox every week.

This week: Facebook's space dreams have not been extinguished

Way back in 2014, Facebook announced a plan to bring the internet to the skies, and it formed an internal team called the Connectivity Lab to make it happen. The idea was to deploy a combination of different technologies, from drones to satellites, that could provide internet access from the heavens to grateful earthlings below. 

Since then, the rare updates we've heard about the project have not been promising. In 2016, a Facebook satellite literally exploded on the launchpad when the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that was supposed to carry it suffered a fatal "anomaly." Two years later, the social networking giant killed its Aquila drone project.

But as Rob Price reports, Facebook hasn't given up on its space dreams. Documents filed with the Federal Communications Commission in December show the company has quietly moved forward with plans to launch a low-earth-orbit satellite named Athena. There's no official word on when Facebook's bird will fly. However, as Rob notes, French aerospace company Arianespace has a rocket scheduled to launch as soon as next month, and it's exactly the kind of vehicle Facebook needs to transport its new satellite.

The Athena launch is likely the first of what will be many more by Facebook. As the company has noted in the past, to provide constant coverage, it will need to deploy a "constellation" of low-earth-orbit satellites. That means the skies could get very crowded. SpaceX's Starlink project and OneWeb have already launched hundreds of satellites combined in their own efforts to create very similar broadband internet services. And Amazon is working on Project Kuiper, which calls for putting 3,200 satellites into orbit.

The salvo of launches has already raised complaints from astronomers who say the new generation of satellites leave bright streaks in their telescopic images of the skies, as well as "radio chatter" that interferes with observations of deep space. And that's not to mention the other hazards posed by an orbit cluttered with satellites and space junk.

All this is to say that if Facebook does expand its operation into space, it will have to contend with both plenty of competition and some opposition. That sounds a lot like the situation on Earth.

Read the full story here:

Facebook's ambitious plan to build a constellation of satellites isn't dead — and it could launch the first one into space as soon as March 2020

What do Airbnb, Calm and Uber have in common?

They all use Swift, the programming language created by Apple for iPhone and iPad app developers. 

Apple has a reputation for secrecy and for doing things its own way, but with Swift, the company is behaving out of character. Swift is an open-source project, and as Rosalie Chan writes, it's left many Silicon Valley techies pleasantly surprised.

Winning the hearts and minds of developers is increasingly important for Apple. Sales are slowing in the saturated smartphone market  Meanwhile, the company has turned to services — its own and those that developers sell through its app store — to provide a new source of growth. 

As Rosalie writes, "to many developers, supporting Swift as open source is a positive sign that Apple, the company that controls the App Store on which they build their businesses, wants a friendly relationship."

Read the full story here:

Why Silicon Valley developers are betting on Apple's programming language Swift and calling it 'the future' of app development

Here are some of the latest tech highlights:

Here's why business experts think Uber's 'profitability' pledge is misleading and meaningless

A VC firm has hired Reddit's HR boss as a new partner, and it shows the importance of having a smart adviser on culture

Leaked emails show Amazon is stockpiling products made in China because of the risk that the coronavirus poses to its supply chain

Slack's IBM deal is a signal to big corporate customers that the chat app is ready to go toe-to-toe with Microsoft, say analysts

And more good reads from across the BI newsroom:

Meet Rebekah Neumann: Insiders describe the spiritual, strategic mastermind who was the driving force behind WeWork and her husband, Adam Neumann

Billionaire Citadel founder Ken Griffin explains why he modeled his firm after Goldman Sachs' analyst program — and says future leaders can't expect a 9-to-5 lifestyle and a 'great weekend'

31 hot logistics startups that are set to soar in 2020, according to VCs

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— Alexei 

Amazon Web Services started offering its cloud services in 2006, well ahead of its rivals Microsoft and Google Cloud – and the head start really pulled the company forward, says AWS CEO Andy Jassy.

At the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, Jassy said that because of its head start, AWS's biggest advantages over its competitors are that it has more functionality and a large partner network.

"I think that every major technology company either has or is trying to build some kind of replica of what AWS has built in the cloud computing infrastructure space," Jassy said onstage.

Still, Jassy says he never expected AWS to have the market to itself for such a long time.

"Of the many big surprises, and there have been lots of big surprises, probably the single biggest one for me is just how long it took for other large technology companies to build something that looked like what AWS was trying to do," Jassy said.

'No compression algorithm for experience'

Before AWS started, people thought of Amazon as "just a retailer," said Jassy. Because of that, the company knew how important it was to be the first to start selling cloud services and beat its Seattle rival Microsoft to it.

"We felt like if we didn't get to market first, it would be harder for us to be successful, and Seattle's a pretty small city," Jassy said. "We know a lot of people – or on the other side of the lake, and we were just trying to get the launch without anybody knowing. But we never imagined we'd have a six to seven year head start."

Jassy says that today, the maturity of different cloud platforms on the market right now are in "very different spots." In the early days, AWS had to take some major risks, which still impact how the company makes decisions today, he says.

Jassy brought up an internal motto people at AWS use. This motto is "There's no compression algorithm for experience," which means that a company can't learn certain lessons until "until you get to different levels of the curve and scale." He says AWS was able to learn those lessons at an earlier stage.

"What I always share when I get a chance to speak with customers about it is that, there really only two existing significant industries in which Amazon is disrupting," Jassy said. "One is retail, the other is technology infrastructure, and in both cases, they were models that were pretty antiquated, and customers weren't so happy with those models. Somebody was going to end up reinventing them, and in those cases, it turned out to be us."

'Folklore or mythology'

Microsoft and Google Cloud are racing to gain an even bigger slice of the market as they take on AWS.

Analysts say one disadvantage that AWS has, compared to Microsoft and Google, is that many companies fear the competition of Amazon. 

For example, retailers see Amazon as a major competitor, and Walmart decided to use Microsoft Azure. 

Likewise, technology companies that built their business on open source service also see Amazon as a threat. Redis Labs, Confluent, Cockroach Labs, and Sentry changed licenses on how their software can be used in response to AWS selling their software on its cloud, or the possibility of it. Likewise, MongoDB and Elastic also saw AWS make competitive moves.

Even so, Jassy dismissed the notion that Amazon will prevent other companies from flourishing as "folklore or mythology."

"I think also, sometimes people have this folklore or mythology around, if Amazon launches a business in a certain area, it means that all the other businesses in those areas are not going to be as successful," Jassy said. "I just haven't seen it ... And so it's because these segments are so large, they're not winner take all. There's room for several companies to be successful."

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Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez may have bought a home of their very own, according to new reports.

Bezos is the new owner of a 13,000-square-foot Beverly Hills mansion, The Wall Street Journal's Katy McLaughlin and Katherine Clarke reported. The home, which was originally designed for Warner Bros. Studios executive Jack Warner in the 1930s, features two guest houses, a tennis court, a swimming pool, and a nine-hole golf course, according to Architectural Digest. Bezos reportedly paid film producer David Geffen $165 million for the estate, which would make it the most expensive home ever sold in California.

Bezos and Sanchez's house-hunting was a hot topic among high-end Los Angeles real-estate brokers, The New York Post's Josh Kosman and Jennifer Gould Keil reported February 2.

LA's iconic Chartwell Estate — best known for being featured in the opening credits of "The Beverly Hillbillies" — was among the properties Bezos and Sanchez reportedly toured. The 26-room mansion features a 75-foot swimming pool, a five-bedroom guest house, a tennis court, a 12,000-bottle wine cellar, manicured gardens, a secret underground tunnel, and panoramic views of downtown Los Angeles and the Pacific Ocean.

That property has since been purchased by fellow billionaire Lachlan Murdoch, the son of NewsCorp founder Rupert Murdoch, Business Insider reported in December. Murdoch paid approximately $150 million for the estate, making it the most expensive home ever sold in Los Angeles, The LA Times reported.

A representative of Hilton & Hyland, the brokerage firm that represented the Chartwell Estate before the sale, did not respond to Business Insider's request for comment on Bezos's tour.

Bezos and his girlfriend are also rumored to have toured "Casa Encantada," a 40,000-square-foot estate in Bel-Air, The Post reported. That mansion features a guest house, a pool house, a basketball court, a tennis court, greenhouses, a rose garden, and koi ponds, all with restored 1930s finishings, Business Insider reported. Casa Encantada has an asking price of $225 million, making it the most expensive property currently on the market in the United States, according to The Times.

A representative of Casa Encantada did not respond to Business Insider's request for comment on Bezos' interest in the property.

Bezos was reportedly in the market for a new Los Angeles home for nearly a year. Last March, Bezos and Sanchez secretly toured a different Bel Air mansion, Page Six reported. Asking $88 million, that property features a rooftop deck, infinity pool, and panoramic views, according to a listing from Hilton & Hyland.

Despite having more money than any other person on Earth, Bezos apparently had limited options when it came to home-buying. There were less than ten properties for sale in the Los Angeles area that met the Amazon CEO's "needs," Los Angeles-based luxury real-estate broker Drew Gitlin of Berkshire Hathaway told The Post prior to Bezos's reported purchase of Geffen's home. Gitlin did not specify what Bezos's needs are, however.

Even if the Amazon CEO had struck out in Beverly Hills, he still has two other homes in Los Angeles where he and Sanchez could stay when they're in the city, Business Insider reported. Bezos's expansive real-estate portfolio also includes two homes in Medina, Washington; a 30,000-acre ranch in Texas; three adjacent New York City apartments worth about $80 million combined; and a Washington DC mansion, although it's unclear how these properties were divided in his 2019 divorce.

Traders at a flower auction in China were seen working while wearing masks to protect against the spread of the coronavirus, now officially called COVID-19, as the virus spreads throughout the country. 

The auction floor is in Kunming, Yunnan, a province in southern China that borders Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam. The city is about 973 miles (1566 kilometers) from Wuhan, Hubei province, where the virus spread from. 

While the traders in the photo are still working, the virus has caused many in China to stay home — a recent photo from Shanghai showed eerily empty streets in the normally crowded city. Another photo showed a food-delivery worker in China carrying mounds of food for people staying at home during the outbreak. 

In January, China deployed drones around the country to scold residents for being outside of their homes. 

The virus has killed more than 1,100 people and infected more than 45,000 around the world, spreading to at least 25 countries outside of China. 

The US has recorded 13 cases in six states, from California to Washington to Massachussetts.

 

Jeff Bezos has amassed a massive real-estate portfolio across the US, from his home state of Washington to New York City.

A 2017 Land Report named Bezos the country's 28th-largest landowner. In June 2019, the Amazon CEO dropped about $80 million on three adjacent New York City apartments in the priciest real-estate deal ever south of 42nd Street in New York, according to appraiser Jonathan Miller. But he had already owned four apartments in a historic building in the city for years. However, his most recent purchase was the Warner Estate in Beverly Hills: According to The Wall Street Journal, Bezos bought the nine-acre property for $165 million from billionaire David Geffen. It's the most expensive home ever sold in the Los Angeles area.

It's unknown how Bezos' properties were divided after his divorce from MacKenzie Bezos was finalized in July 2019. Everything acquired throughout the marriage from real estate to income is considered joint property in the Bezos' home state of Washington, as Business Insider's Tanza Loudenback previously reported. Amazon did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment on how the properties were divided after the divorce. 

Bezos remains the richest person in the world with an estimated net worth of $117 billion, while MacKenzie Bezos is now worth $38 billion, making her one of the richest women in the world.

From two neighboring Beverly Hills mansions to a sprawling estate in an exclusive Seattle suburb, here are all the residential properties Bezos is known to own in the US.

Caroline Cakebread contributed to an early version of this article.

Sports media founder Bill Simmons scored a massive payout from Spotify, who purchased Simmons' publication The Ringer for nearly $200 million.

According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday, Spotify could pay out nearly $200 million in cash over the next few years to acquire The Ringer, an online publication for sports and pop culture. Spotify disclosed it will between €130 million and €180 million: Part of that payment is deferred and based on some contingencies, one of which requires Simmons to stay at the company for an unknown period of time.

This is Spotify's latest move into the podcasting space in the past year, following nearly $400 million in recent acquisitions of podcast networks Gimlet Media, Parcast, and Anchor. The Ringer has nearly 40 podcast titles under its belt, including a number of popular sports shows featuring Simmons that Spotify will now own.

Spotify confirmed the acquisition last week after The Wall Street Journal reported on purchase rumors in January, but the deal price was not known at the time. Citing a source with knowledge of the deal, Bloomberg reported Tuesday that Spotify would pay an initial $200 million to acquire the company, with another $50 million to be paid later.

Spotify has not responded to Business Insider's request for comment.

The $200 million acquisition likely represents a huge payday for Simmons, specifically, who is the company's largest shareholder, though his exact stake isn't known. The entertainment company HBO also owns a 10% stake in The Ringer.

Simmons, a former ESPN journalist, founded The Ringer in 2016. As part of the acquisition, Simmons — as well as The Ringer's estimated 90 employees — will have jobs at Spotify. According to Bloomberg, the deal includes protections for Ringer employees to ensure much of the staff isn't cut.

Spotify has only started investing in podcasting recently, although the streaming service was founded in 2006. In a recent blog post, Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek said he had no idea at the beginning that "audio — not just music — would be the future of Spotify."

"What we really did with The Ringer, I think, is we bought the next ESPN," Ek said in a Spotify earnings call in early February.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos reportedly purchased a Beverly Hills mansion for $165 million, setting the record for the most expensive home sold in California.

According to a report from The Wall Street Journal's Katy McLaughlin and Katherine Clarke, Bezos bought the home of the media tycoon David Geffen, a sprawling estate that was originally built for the Warner Bros. executive Jack Warner. 

Last week, the New York Post reported that Bezos and his girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez, were house hunting in Los Angeles and touring mansions throughout the area. Bezos has been searching for a home for the past year, according to Page Six. 

A spokesperson for Amazon did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment on the purchase. 

The property, which has been described as a "party palace," was designed in the 1930s. It features a 13,000-square-foot mansion, two guesthouses, a tennis court, a swimming pool, and a nine-hole golf course. It also includes a "motor court" that has a garage and gas pumps, according to Architectural Digest.

Geffen bought the estate in 1990 for $47.5 million. Bezos' purchase eclipses the last record set in the Los Angeles area — the $150 million purchase of the Chartwell estate by Lachlan Murdoch last year.

Bezos and Geffen are known to be friendly: The Amazon CEO was spotted partying on board Geffen's megayacht with Sanchez, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, and model Karlie Kloss off the coast of Spain over the summer. 

Along with the Warner estate, Bezos' umbrella company, Bezos Expeditions, also purchased a plot of land in LA that belonged to the estate of Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, according to The Journal. The company paid $90 million for the land, The Journal said. 

Nearly all of China's 70,000 theaters are closed as the country reels from the coronavirus, and it has cost the local movie business over $1 billion.

Chinese ticket revenue is at just $3.9 million in the last 20 days, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Revenue hit $1.52 billion in the same timespan last year. The weekend of the Chinese New Year, which was in late January, is usually China's biggest time for moviegoing. It's also when major film releases were canceled and the theaters started to close.

Jimmy Wu, the CEO of Chinese cinema company Lumiere Pavilion, told THR that the Chinese government will have to take drastic measures to save the theater industry. They include offering emergency funding or a refund of the "film fee" from China's Film Bureau that is taken out of ticket revenue.

The coronavirus, which originated in the Chinese city of Wuhan and has spread to at least 25 more countries, has killed more than 1,100 people and infected more than 45,000.

Chinese regulations prevent Chinese movies from being released outside of the country before they've been released in mainland China. This has impacted theatrical releases outside of the region. For instance, Warner Bros. postponed the North American release of the Chinese-produced "Detective Chinatown 3" last month "in accordance with our partner's wishes and based on the current situation in China," a studio spokesperson said in a statement.

It's unknown how long China's theaters could be closed or how the canceled movies will be rescheduled.