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Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) is paying $1.15B cash to buy the former Lord & Taylor flagship store in Manhattan, the New York Post reports.
That 660,000-square-foot building was set to be headquarters for WeWork (WE) before that company’s scandal-plagued fall.
Now, Amazon will pick up $750M in construction loans that had been taken out for remodeling, with some $350M in equity left for building owners. WeWork waives economic interest in the building in exchange for getting out of its lease.
It will become Amazon’s NYC headquarters, housing about 4,000 employees who will move in in about 18 months, according to the report.
Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) and Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) have acted to remove accounts they say are backed by Russia and intended to interfere in United States issues.
“In collaboration with law enforcement, industry peers, journalists, and expert researchers, we recently suspended a small network of accounts largely Tweeting in English and that presented themselves as based in the United States,” Twitter says.
The 71 accounts operated out of Ghana and Nigeria, and they can be “reliably” associated with Russia, Twitter says. Those accounts tried to “sow discord by engaging in conversations about social issues, like race and civil rights.”
Meanwhile, Facebook says it removed 49 Facebook accounts, 69 Pages and 85 Instagram accounts for foreign interference (“coordinated inauthentic behavior on behalf of a foreign actor”).
“This network was in the early stages of building an audience and was operated by local nationals — some wittingly and some unwittingly — in Ghana and Nigeria on behalf of individuals in Russia. It targeted primarily the United States,” Facebook says.
Airbnb (AIRB) bookings fell 96% in Beijing between March 1 and March 7 compared to January 5-11, according to analytics firm AirDNA via WSJ.
Bookings in Seoul and Rome fell more than 40% in the period, which came before Italy’s quarantine.
New York bookings dropped 21%.
Airbnb plans to go public this year. The WSJ previously reported the listing wouldn’t happen any earlier than Q3, but that timeline could get bumped back due to the coronavirus pandemic.
YouTube (GOOG, GOOGL) will discontinue classifying COVID-19 content as a “sensitive event,” enabling ads on some videos discussing coronavirus, according to CEO Susan Wojcicki.
“It’s becoming clear this issue is now an ongoing and important part of everyday conversation, and we want to make sure news organizations and creators can continue producing quality videos in a sustainable way,” reads a blog post.
YouTube previously did not allow monetization if a video includes more than “a passing mention” of the coronavirus.
MKM Partners’ look at mega-cap technology and Internet stocks shows “significantly diversified” businesses that are better able to weather uncertainty than in the past – but of those, Facebook (FB -4.3%) has the least downside risk, it says.
The diversification of Facebook, Amazon (AMZN -4.7%) and Alphabet (GOOG -5.8%, GOOGL -5.6%) points to “greater resilience and likely a greater ability to endure dramatic body blows,” Rohit Kulkarni writes.
But Facebook screens at the least downside risk among those, followed by Amazon and then Alphabet, Kulkarni writes.
Google has the highest likelihood of a downward revision to estimates with its heavy exposure to travel-related ads.
