United States of America eSeries: Bezos' big trip 🚀

Bezos' big trip 🚀

Posted by :

Welcome to that first full week right after a holiday week that always feels like an eternity. Stay strong. Hydrate. Let's get into it.

By Allison Morrow

🚀 ROCKET MAN

Some people take up golf when they retire, or learn to sail, or start a vegetable garden. But when Jeff Bezos steps down as CEO of Amazon next month, he's got no plans to kick back and read spy novels while lounging on the deck of his shiny new superyacht.

His retirement hobby: suborbital flight.

Bezos will be on board for the first crewed flight of the New Shepard, the rocket made by his space company, Blue Origin, CNN Business' Jackie Wattles reports. The six-seater capsule and 59-foot rocket will soar toward the edge of space on a 11-minute flight that'll reach more than 60 miles above Earth.

The flight is scheduled for July 20 — just 15 days after he is set to resign as CEO of Amazon.

If all goes according to plan, Bezos will be the first billionaire rocket company founder to actually participate first-hand in the technology he's funded.

So, your move, Elon…

MY TWO CENTS

Does this matter? Ehh.

Bezos, the richest person on the planet, wasn't using his vast wealth to fix global hunger or anything before he decided to live out his boyhood dream of space flight. But it is pretty fun for us common folk to gawk at this tycoon's display of wealth, ego and remarkable ability to quite literally disassociate from Earth.

🇫🇷 NUMBER OF THE DAY

$270 million

Google settled a major antitrust lawsuit with French regulators, agreeing to pay a $270 million fine and make changes to its online advertising business. The penalty comes as the company faces multiple US suits over anticompetitive behavior and could lead to similar agreements with officials elsewhere.

🐔 CHICKEN WARS

We're only a week into Pride month and already brands are co-opting the moment to scare up a bit of publicity and make it about selling something. In this case, sandwiches.

In a tweet late last week, Burger King issued a not-so-subtle dig at rival Chick-fil-A, a chain with a fraught history with the LGBTQ+ community.

BK said it would donate 40 cents to the Human Rights Campaign — America's largest LGBTQ civil rights organization — for every "Ch'King" chicken sandwich sold in June. It will make those donations "even on Sunday," the company said. That's a pretty transparent knock on Chick-fil-A, which, because of its devout Christian ownership, closes its restaurants on Sundays (and for the same reason the chain has historically been less than supportive of the LGBTQ+ community.)

WHAT DOES CHICKEN HAVE TO DO WITH PRIDE?

Not a thing. But in fast food, as in politics, you never miss an opportunity to dunk on your rival.

The snarky tweet is gentle nudge, a dog whistle signaling that Burger King is the nicer, more progressive, more inclusive sandwich purveyor. Which is silly (BK is still, after all, a massive chain owned by the Orwellian-sounding Restaurant Brands International), but in the fiercely competitive, zero-loyalty, low-margin world of fast food, any leg up helps.

WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON?

📈 A half-dozen AMC insiders unloaded more than $8 million worth of shares last week as the value of the stock soared more than 80%.

🍏 Apple kicked off its annual developers conference Monday, unveiling changes to FaceTime video calls and digital keys in Apple Wallet that aim to help people as we emerge from lockdown.

🔌 Elon Musk is pulling the plug on his promised Tesla Model S Plaid+ super car about a year before it was expected to go on sale.

💰US investigators recovered millions of dollars in cryptocurrency paid in ransom to hackers whose attack prompted the shutdown of the Colonial Pipeline last month, according to people briefed on the matter.

💊 The FDA approved the use of an experimental drug for early phases of Alzheimer's disease, despite questions about the effectiveness of the treatment.