10 things in tech you need to know today
Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Wednesday.
- WeWork board members are suing SoftBank for backing out of a plan to buy $3 billion of shares. The committee wants to force SoftBank to complete the tender offer or to give the committee money to compensate for their loss.
- Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is putting $1 billion of his own wealth into a fund for coronavirus relief and other aid efforts. Dorsey estimated it amounts to about 28% of his total wealth.
- Zoom CEO Eric Yuan has joined Forbes' annual billionaires list for the first time. Yuan currently has a net worth of around $5.5 billion, according to Forbes.
- WhatsApp has limited mass message-forwarding to try and stop the wild spread of coronavirus misinformation. WhatsApp said "frequently forwarded" messages, which have already been forwarded on five times, will be limited so users can only forward them to one chat at a time.
- Buzzy unicorn luggage startup has furloughed about half of its workforce and laid off another 60 corporate employees. Travel has been hit particularly hard amid the coronavirus crisis, and Away's sales have plummeted 90% over the last few weeks.
- Tesla will be temporarily reducing employees' salaries and will furlough non-essential workers. In an email sent out to employees and published by CNBC, Tesla told employees that some jobs would be impacted as it continues to keep "only minimum critical operations running."
- Two workers at an Amazon fulfillment center in Middletown, Delaware, have come down with COVID-19, the company told Business Insider. Another two have fallen sick at Amazon facilities outside Cleveland, Ohio.
- Airbnb will pay more than 10% in interest on the additional funding it secured from Silver Lake and Sixth Street Partners, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. The investors were also offered warrants that can convert into stock based on a valuation of $18 billion, a significant drop from Airbnb's previous valuation of $31 billion.
- Toast, a $5 billion Boston-based startup that makes software for restaurants, cut 50% of its workforce through layoffs and furloughs on Tuesday.
- The Taiwanese government has banned all official use of Zoom, dealing yet another blow to the videoconferencing service. It comes just days after Zoom admitted "mistakenly" routing some data through China.
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