Fortune Brainstorm
WeWork Cos. co-founder Adam Neumann
Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Monday.
- Business Insider talked to 20 recent and former WeWork employees, executives, and business partners about life inside one the most controversial and fastest-growing startups of all time. Under cofounder and now-ousted CEO Adam Neumann, they described an atmosphere where the boundary between work and play did not exist.
- Elon Musk unveiled SpaceX's audacious new plan to build cities on Mars with giant Starship rockets. Starship is a roughly 40-storey rocket, designed to send up to 100 people to the surface of Mars.
- Google is facing yet more antitrust scrutiny over its plans to introduce a new internet protocol, the Wall Street Journal reports. Investigators are reportedly concerned the new protocol would make it harder for other companies to access consumer data.
- Tech companies discovered 45 million instances of child sexual abuse last year, the New York Times reports. This represents more than double the amount they found last year.
- Influencer Caroline Calloway took the stage at a Brooklyn podcast taping to "spill the tea" on her ghostwriter controversy. Calloway disputed a viral tell-all essay written by her former friend Natalie Beach, which accused Calloway of being a manipulative friend.
- Researchers studying information ahead of the 2020 election say they don't have enough access to data from Facebook. According to The New York Times, Facebook has struggled to share data for research while maintaining user privacy.
- The US is zeroing in on marijuana vapes as it investigates a spate of mysterious illnesses and deaths tied to vaping. The Center for Disease Control said that of about 500 people who experienced an illness linked to vaping, about 77% reported having used products containing THC, the main psychoactive compound in cannabis.
- Amazon may soon be able to track your phone's location even if you don't use any of its products or services. Amazon's new mesh network could enable the company to track your phone's location, even if you don't use its WiFi or products.
- A California judge ruled Friday that Tesla and Elon Musk broke federal labor law with union-busting activity, the Washington Post reports. One of the violations included a tweet from Musk arguing that employees didn't need a union.
- Facebook is testing hiding users' "likes" in Australia, CNN reports. The company has toyed with eliminating like counts in the past, the idea to get rid of the element of social media one-upmanship between users.
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