The AudioBook Guide

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German payments company Wirecard was the darling of the nation's fintech industry. Then came the admission that almost $2 billion of the company’s funds had gone missing. The scandal led to the sudden disappearance of its chief operating officer, Jan Marsalek. With his mysterious links to the Austrian secret service and Russian mercenaries, Bloomberg investigates the role Marsalek allegedly played in one of Germany’s biggest accounting scandals.

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Each bitcoin is basically a computer file which is stored in a digital wallet app on a smartphone or computer. People can send Bitcoins to your digital wallet, and you can send Bitcoins to other people. Every single transaction is recorded in a public list called the blockchain. This makes it possible to trace the history of Bitcoins to stop people from spending coins they do not own, making copies or undo-ing transactions. 

In order for the Bitcoin system to work, people can make their computer process transactions for everybody.

The computers are made to work out incredibly difficult sums. Occasionally they are rewarded with a Bitcoin for the owner to keep.

People set up powerful computers just to try and get Bitcoins. This is called mining.

But the sums are becoming more and more difficult to stop too many Bitcoins being generated.

If you started mining now it could be years before you got a single Bitcoin.

You could end up spending more money on electricity for your computer than the Bitcoin would be worth.

There are lots of things other than money which we consider valuable like gold and diamonds. The Aztecs used cocoa beans as money!

Bitcoins are valuable because people are willing to exchange them for real goods and services, and even cash. 

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Human history has been a journey toward insignificance.

As we’ve gained more knowledge, we’ve had our planet downgraded from the center of the universe to a chunk of rock orbiting an average star in a galaxy that is one among billions.

So it only makes sense that many physicists now believe that even our universe might be just a small piece of a greater whole. In fact, there may be infinitely many universes, bubbling into existence and growing exponentially. It’s a theory known as the multiverse.

One of the best pieces of evidence for the multiverse was first discovered in 1998, when physicists realized that the universe was expanding at ever increasing speed. They dubbed the force behind this acceleration dark energy. The value of its energy density, also known as the cosmological constant, is bizarrely tiny: 120 orders of magnitude smaller than theory says it should be.

For decades, physicists have sought an explanation for this disparity. The best one they’ve come up with so far, says Yasunori Nomura, a theoretical physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, is that it’s only small in our universe. There may be other universes where the number takes a different value, and it is only here that the rate of expansion is just right to form galaxies and stars and planets where people like us can observe it. “Only if this vacuum energy stayed to a very special value will we exist,” Nomura says. “There are no good other theories to understand why we observe this specific value.”

For further evidence of a multiverse, just look to string theory, which posits that the fundamental laws of physics have their own phases, just like matter can exist as a solid, liquid or gas. If that’s correct, there should be other universes where the laws are in different phases from our own—which would affect seemingly fundamental values that we observe here in our universe, like the cosmological constant. “In that situation you’ll have a patchwork of regions, some in this phase, some in others,” says Matthew Kleban, a theoretical physicist at New York University.

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Kuaishou Technology, the operator of China's most popular short-video service ByteDance Ltd's Douyin, jumped 162% in its Hong Kong debut after a $5.4 billion initial public offering that attracted hundreds of billions of dollar of orders. 

The shares closed at HK$300 after rising to as high as HK$345, compared with the IPO price of HK$115, valuing the Tencent Holdings Ltd.-backed firm at $159 billion. The company sold shares at the top of its price range in a deal that ranks as the world’s biggest internet IPO since Uber Technologies Inc.’s $8.1 billion U.S. share sale in May 2019.

That spectacular rise confers on Kuaishou a price tag nearing TikTok’s parent ByteDance -- which last sought funds at a $182 billion valuation -- and ushers the nine-year-old video app into the ranks of China’s largest tech corporations. Once known for peddling quirky depictions of rural Chinese life, Kuaishou cements its place among a generation of mega-startups like food delivery giant Meituan and ride-hailing leader Didi Chuxing that grew up in the years after Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent.

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Amid social, economic, and political chaos, regulators and antitrust lawyers on both sides of the Atlantic are circling Big Tech, with the aim of bringing Facebook, Google, and Appel to heel. But Amazon is a special target of some of the Neo-antitrust movement's best minds, a proving ground that laggard monopoly law can be modernised to tame today's biggest companies. And if it confronts a future of being fractured into pieces, Bezos's original dream-an "everything store" that shocked literally anything anyone might desire-would be over. Not that Bezos would suffer financially: Even if Amazon is broken up, Bezos would still probably be the largest shareholder of every piece of it. 

The question which I have always pondered is what kind of insatiable impulse would drive anyone to create something like what Amazon has become?

In 1994, Bezos launched Amazon as a simple, pioneering online seller of books. Today, with a fortune of about $190 billion, he is the world’s second-richest man, despite his ex-wife MacKenzie receiving $38 billion of the family assets in their 2019 divorce. Perhaps no one except Bezos himself could see what could be next after books — dominance in surveillance technologies like Alexa and Ring, cloud computing, every kind of retail, groceries, health, entertainment, and more.

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The global economy has changed significantly over the past few decades, in the way that it is organised and governed by collaborating nations. These changes have repercussions that not only affect the flow of goods and services between countries, but also the movement of people. As we've seen on occasions over the last century, too great a fluctuations in this international economic system can lead to a global economic crisis. 

Many people think that the global economy is controlled by governments of the largest economies in the world, but this is a common misconception. Although governments do hold power over countries economies, it is the big banks and large corporations that control and essentially fund these governments. This means that the global economy is dominated by large financial institutions. 

According to the world economic news, US banks participate in many traditional government business like power production, oil refining and distribution, and also the operating of public assets such as airport and train stations. This was proven when certain members of the US Congress sent a letter to the Federal Reserver Chairman Ben Bernake. Here’s an excerpt from the letter:

“Here are a few examples. Morgan Stanley imported 4 million barrels of oil and petroleum products into the United States in June, 2012. Goldman Sachs stores aluminium in vast warehouses in Detroit as well as serving as a commodities derivatives dealer. This “bank” is also expanding into the ownership and operation of airports, toll roads, and ports. JP Morgan markets electricity in California.

In other words, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley are no longer just banks – they have effectively become oil companies, port and airport operators, commodities dealers, and electric utilities as well.”

The functioning of the global economy can be explained through one word —transactions. International transactions taking place between top economies in the world help in the continuance of the global economy. These transactions mainly comprise trade taking place between different countries. International trade includes the exchange of a variety of products between countries. It ranges all the way from fruits and foods, to natural oil and weapons. Such transactions have a number of benefits including:

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The Reddit fuelled GameStop insanity was far from Game Over on Friday, as the retailers stock price resumed its market rollercoaster ride, the mastermind behind the Wall Street attack spot publicly and one of the tzars of short selling admitted defeat at the hands of the mob. 

The struggling brick and mortar video game retailer goat a boost Friday after Robinhood lifted its trading freeze and shares rose by as much as 114 percent to $413.98 at the opening ball. That price was down to $300 by 1:34pm. 

Now, the man behind the madness is revealed after rallying an army of average investors in the Reddit forum WallStreetBets under the name "DeepFakingValue". “I didn’t expect this,” Keith Gill, 34, a dad of two from Boston who recently worked for a life insurance company, told the Wall Street Journal.

WallStreetBets, launched in 2012, now boasts 6.2 million users.

The GameStop frenzy — which has pitted amateur investors against deep-pocketed hedge funds — prompted a rare statement from the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday, which said the agency is working with regulators and US stock exchanges “to identify and pursue potential wrongdoing.”

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SpaceX might not rely on legs to land its next-generation booster rockets. Elon Musk has revealed that his company will try to catch the future Super Heavy Booster using the launch tower arm, with the grid fins shouldering the load. This process would effectively hook the rocket using the tower arm before its reaches the ground. 

This would require very precise positioning, and there's still a long way to go when Super Heavy flight testing might not start until a few years from now at the earliest. If successful, thought, the catch method could save SpaceX from adding bulky legs to its rockets. A truly precise manoeuvring system might even reduce turnaround time by letting SpaceX relaunch the rocket without having to move it from its landing position. 

That could be crucial to SpaceX's goals. Musk and company ultimately want a more reusable rocket system than the Falcon series, as that would help Startship launch on the rapid schedules desired for a range of mission, including trips to the Moon and Mars. A booster that doesn't require much more than refilling could help accomplish that feat. 

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A meteoric rise in the share price of GameStop has trained the eyes of stock market watchers on a fast-growing Reddit discussion board called Wallstreetbets, where it appears that 20-somethings armed with cheap and easy stock-traiding apps like Robinhood, MooMoo and TradeStation are targeting stocks to soar and hedge funds for takedowns.

The drama sent GameStop shares up nearly 2,000% at one point in less than a month. On Wednesday, the stock price of the troubled retailer of video games soared yet again, this time up more than $200, to surpass $350 a share. GameStop's stock price fell a bit closer to earth on Thursday, dropping by about a third, or about $115, to $235. But that's still up from the mere $14 a share GameStop had commanded in December.

While GameStop shares have been a favorite of Wallstreetbets members, it's a money-losing company that has been closing stores amid years of slumping sales and been a target of hedge funds and so-called short-sellers who wager that the shares of particular companies will fall.

Adding to the interest: fantastic claims of overnight riches. One prominent Wallstreetbets member said he turned a $50,000 investment in GameStop into $22 million, mostly in the past few weeks, and that his GameStop fortune had soared to a mind-boggling $48 million as of Wednesday night. Kevin Roose, a New York Times reporter, tweeted on Monday about a chat on Wallstreetbets that included a "prepubescent kid" saying he had made $15,000 on GameStop that day by trading on his brother's investment app.

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Jack Ma, the multibillionaire founder of tech companies Alibaba and Ant Group, went missing after criticizing China’s financial system by calling for changes and reforms. Since he’s made these comments, Ma has not been seen in public for about two months.

Ma is one of the wealthiest people in China. His net worth, according to Forbes, is $58.4 billion. The 56-year-old grew up under humble circumstances in Communist China. Ma famously told people how he twice failed his university-entrance exams and was rejected from every job he applied to after college, including the fast-food chain, KFC.

Ma is the quintessential rags-to-riches story. After many early setbacks, he, along with a scrappy team of 18 people and $60,000, cofounded Alibaba in the city of Hangzhou in 1999. About 20 years later, Alibaba became one of the world's largest retail and e-commerce companies—boasting over 100,000 employees.

Ma was seen as a breath of fresh air in the traditionally conservative Chinese business culture. He cultivated the persona as an irreverent ambassador for the company. Ma embraced over-the-top stunts, including a Michael Jackson-inspired dance at an Alibaba anniversary party and acted in his own kung fu film, Gong Shou Dao.

He “retired” from Alibaba in September 2019. There was speculation at the time that Ma's retirement was due to tension with the Chinese Communist Party. It was believed that the leaders of the Party were leery of his outsized power and influence.