Google boss earns $ 226 million and Elon Musk risks lawsuits

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Jobs are being happily cut at Google this year: 12,000 employees are to lose their jobs worldwide, Google’s parent company Alphabet announced in January. Against this background, many employees should now feel alienated. The reason: Alphabet boss Sundar Pichai earned a total of 226 million dollars in 2022 alone. This emerges from a corresponding message to the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The compensation consists largely of stock allocations, reports the Handelsblatt.

The CEO made about 800 times as much money as an average employee at Google. Pichai had prescribed a strict austerity course for the group. In addition to the mass layoffs, 500 million dollars are to be saved by reducing office space.

Last week, Elon Musk had the blue tick removed from all Twitter accounts as a sign of authentication. From now on, this is only available if you take out a paid Twitter Blue subscription. But apparently not many have done so so far: within the first two days after removing the tick, there were said to have been just 28 new subscriptions. This was the result of analyzes by researcher Travis Brown. Research by Similarweb, on the other hand, shows that Twitter could still complete several thousand Twitter Blue subscriptions per day.

Musk has now given Blue status to all Twitter users with over a million followers – including dead ones, such as Michael Jackson. In doing so, however, he risks lawsuits, as this could be viewed as deliberate deception – and that is punishable in the USA.

The Amazon program Shopper Panel is now also starting in Germany. Amazon pays money for user data, such as scanned receipts, participation in surveys or the complete monitoring of data traffic on the smartphone. The US group would like to find out in the USA and Great Britain, among other things, how well ads booked via Amazon’s advertising network work on the Internet.

Amazon is now bringing the Shopper Panel to Germany, but according to its own statements, it is not “collecting bonuses by sharing receipts for purchases outside of Amazon.de”. Participation in the Amazon Shopper Panel is limited and by invitation only. The first users in Germany are said to have already received corresponding invitations.

Battery manufacturer Northvolt and truck builder Scania have produced a particularly durable truck battery. According to the two Swedish companies, the performance of the lithium-ion cells is sufficient for at least 1.5 million kilometers driven. That would correspond to the lifetime of a Scania truck. “The future of heavy transport is electric,” emphasized Scania CEO Christian Levin. The battery should be particularly light and still be able to store a lot of energy.

A 2022 study by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research showed how important this development could be for the entire road transport industry. It turned out that the use of electric trucks could save half of the emissions caused by the use of diesel vehicles.

Your e-mail inboxes are already being overwhelmed by spam? This could get a lot worse in the future. Experts warn of a new wave of spam that could flood our mailboxes with AI-generated content – ​​and as such, of a different, higher quality.

There is a lot of money to be made from spam. Gizmodo reports that a spam wave can bring in $1,000 in just a few hours. An online pharmaceutical spam campaign is said to generate around $7,000 a day. The European police authority Europol also warns that criminals could use artificial intelligence for their crimes. With programs like ChatGPT, correctly formulated phishing emails can be generated, which then become even more difficult to detect, she said.

That’s it for today’s t3n daily. You can find much more about all aspects of digital life, working life and the future around the clock at t3n.de.