Amazon's 2019 was full of headline-grabbing moments — everything from political fights to new records for the company that have upended the way we shop.
The big picture: The tech giant's year started with a fight with New York City and ended with its biggest single sales day in history. And there were plenty of dramatic days in between.
Elon Musk tweeted late Friday that his startup Boring Co. will have a transportation tunnel it's building in Las Vegas "hopefully fully operational in 2020."
Why it matters: Per Axios' Joann Muller, Vegas is the first paying customer for Musk's hyperloop idea aimed at easing traffic woes in highly congested cities, which began as a joke tweet in 2016. The transit system would shorten what would be a 15-minute walk to a one-minute ride.
Hundreds of political Facebook accounts, groups and pages — and 72 Instagram accounts — have been purged after using fake, AI-generated profile photos to masquerade as Americans, the company announced.
Why it matters: This is the first time Facebook has seen “a systemic use" of AI-generated photos in profile pictures "to make accounts look more authentic," Facebook head of security policy Nathaniel Gleicher told the New York Times.
Netflix's 4,181% return from 2010 to the present makes it the S&P 500's best performer of the decade, CNBC reports.
The big picture: Netflix was the catalyst for the now-ubiquitous streaming wars that have overloaded dozens of major platforms with live and on-demand video.
French authorities have three years to test a new law allowing them to comb social media posts and find evidence of tax fraud or evasion, Bloomberg Tax reports.
Catch up quick: All personal data mined under the law must be public by the user and not password protected, per Bloomberg, and authorities cannot look for evidence that taxpayers have been warned for not filing a tax return.
