Doggone it — the now iconic picture of a smirking Shiba Inu just became the most expensive meme to sell as a non-fungible token, or NFT. The dog meme known as “doge” was sold in an auction Friday for approximately $4 million to an unidentified buyer with the Twitter handle @PleasrDAO. The bidder, in an...Read More

Congressional lawmakers are targeting tech giants over antitrust concerns — and the proposed legislation could force them to overhaul or even break up their increasingly dominant business empires. The package of five antitrust bills introduced by a bipartisan group in Congress on Friday — aimed at Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google’s parent Alphabet — would...Read More

Royal Caribbean and Carnival will push ahead with a return to cruises this summer despite two guests testing positive for COVID-19 onboard a test run for Royal Caribbean’s Celebrity Millennium ship. A year after several cruise ships were host to major coronavirus outbreaks and with large numbers of Americans now vaccinated, cruise lines have been striving to get business going. Shares...Read More

McDonald’s said Friday that a data breach in South Korea and Taiwan has exposed some customer and employee information, making it the latest global company to be targeted by cybercriminals. The attackers accessed emails, phone numbers and delivery addresses, but the breach did not include customer payment information, the company said. The details of the...Read More

Bitcoin is red-hot in El Salvador — and the country says it plans to use power from its volcanoes to mine it. El Salvador President Nayib Bukele — just hours after the country’s legislature approved the “Bitcoin Law,” making it the first to accept Bitcoin as legal tender — revealed Wednesday that the nation’s state-owned...Read More

Vacation rental giants Airbnb and Vrbo are cracking down on properties that frequently host raucous parties, the companies said Friday. The companies are co-developing a “community integrity program” to identify problem properties — and share the information with each other, they said in a release. “The information will be available for each company to take...Read More

Demand for oil will surpass pre-pandemic levels by the end of next year as the global economy recovers, the International Energy Agency said on Friday, rejecting analysts’ predictions that the world’s oil usage has already peaked.  “Global oil demand is set to return to pre-pandemic levels by the end of 2022,” the IEA said in...Read More

AMC board members sold close to $4 million in shares this week, cashing in on the company’s latest monster rally fueled by its “meme stock” status.  Three members of AMC’s board of directors each sold-off shares worth more than $800,000, while two more members sold shares worth more than $700,000 per director, according to Securities...Read More

Deferred payments app Klarna soared to a valuation of $45.6 billion in its latest fundraising round — buoyed by an investment from Japan’s SoftBank.  The “buy-now-pay-later” firm, which raised $639 million Thursday, is now Europe’s most valuable privately-held financial technology company. Like competitors Afterpay and Affirm, Stockholm-based Klarna lets consumers take home items then pay...Read More

The bidding battle for a seat on Jeff Bezos’ spacecraft has reached new heights. Pre-auction bidding for a slot on Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos’ July 20 Blue Origin flight closed Thursday at nearly $5 million, according to the space company’s website.   The live auction for the seat launches this Saturday at 12:45...Read More