Walmart Tops the 2024 Fortune 500

Top companies are Walmart, Amazon and Apple. The threshold to make the 2024 list was $7.1 billion in revenue. The Fortune 500 makes up two thirds of US GDP. US GDP was 25 trillion in 2022.

Amazon Swallows MGM for $8.45bn

MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), the 97-year old Hollywood studio founded in 1924, and based in Beverly Hills, responsible for "Singin' in the Rain", and "Ben Hur" and owners of the James Bond and Rocky franchise, has been bought by Amazon, in its second-biggest acquisition to date.

Amazon's historically largest acquisition thus far has been the purchase of Whole Foods for $13.7bn in 2017. 

Kevin Ulrich, Chairman of the Board of Directors of MGM, and also CEO of New York based hedge fund Anchorage Capital, and former head of Goldman's distressed bank debt desk, stated it was "an inspiring combination".

Amazon Enters EdTech Market with Indian Test Prep App

The app which is in beta targets the IIT JEE or Joint Entrance Examination which is a prerequisite for entering the Indian Institutes of Technology (and is also used by other institutions such as Indian Institute to Science) has been launched by Amazon.

Amazon Contributes to $575m Investment in Deliveroo

Amazon has invested heavily in Deliveroo, having scrapped its own online food delivery service. Deliveroo will use the money for international expansion. Its model is not to employ riders directly but pay them per delivery.

Bob Swan Edges in as CEO of Intel in Semi-Con Rat Race

Bob Swan becomes CEO of Intel after seven months as interim CEO. His previous experience includes 15 years at General Electric and later CEO of Foster City-based online grocery business Webvan (which went bust in 2001 and was folded into Amazon.com).

Amazon Markets ACK to OEMS Targeting Home Automation

Amazon is marketing a board with chip and antenna to OEMs looking to integrate with Alexa in the home automation space. They call it the ACK. The cost of the chip will be only a few dollars. This puts Amazon in the driving seat of home automation, alongside the likes of Google (which purchased Nest Labs in 2014), Apple and Microsoft. Hamilton Beach and Proctor and Gamble are partnering with Amazon on this. The value of Amazon's offering is not in the chips themselves, but in binding consumers to their platform, and owning the data generated off of it.

AWS Lifts Amazon Q1 Earnings - Cloud Computing Proves Viable Second Stream To Ecommerce

For the last 12 months, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been a $9bn business. Bezos expects it to be a $10bn annual business.

Within the AWS offering, Amazon offers EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Customers include Netflix, Autodesk and Nasa/JPL. EC2 works in conjunction with VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) - which allows users to create their own virtual networking environment within AWS, including IP address ranges, subnets and so forth.