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EXCLUSIVE: Trump launches new communications platform months after Twitter, Facebook ban

05/04/21 1:08 PM

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Mexico City train overpass collapse kills at least 13

05/03/21 10:39 PM

New story in Technology from Time: Bill and Melinda Gates Announce They Are Ending Their Marriage

SEATTLE — Bill and Melinda Gates announced Monday that they are divorcing.

The Microsoft co-founder and his wife, who launched the world’s largest charitable foundation, said they would continue to work together at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

In identical tweets, they said they had made the decision to end their marriage of 27 years.

“We have raised three incredible children and built a foundation that works all over the world to enable all people to lead healthy, productive lives,” they said in a statement. “We ask for space and privacy for our family as we begin to navigate this new life.”

In her 2019 memoir, “The Moment of Lift,” Melinda Gates wrote about her childhood, life and private struggles as the wife of a public icon and stay-at-home mom with three kids. She won Gates’ heart after meeting at a work dinner, sharing a mutual love of puzzles and beating him at a math game.

The couple’s sprawling Seattle-based foundation is easily the most influential private foundation in the world, with an endowment worth nearly $50 billion. It has focused on global health and development and U.S. education issues since incorporating in 2000.

The couple were married in 1994 in Hawaii. They met after she began working at Microsoft as a product manager in 1987.

Last year, Bill Gates, formerly the world’s richest person, said he was stepping down from Microsoft’s board to focus on philanthropy.

Gates was Microsoft’s CEO until 2000 and since then has gradually scaled back his involvement in the company he started with Paul Allen in 1975. He transitioned out of a day-to-day role in Microsoft in 2008 and served as chairman of the board until 2014.

The Gateses will be the second high-profile Seattle-area billionaire couple to end their marriage in recent years.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and MacKenzie Bezos finalized their divorce in 2019. MacKenzie Scott has since remarried and now focuses on her own philanthropy. She received a 4% stake in Amazon, worth more than $36 billion.

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Bill and Melinda Gates are calling it quits after 27 years of marriage.

05/03/21 1:50 PM

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Biden quadruples the number of refugees who can enter the US

05/03/21 1:39 PM

New story in Technology from Time: The Story Behind TIME and Beeple’s Future of Business Cover

For TIME’s cover story on the future of business and the digitization of everything—which accompanies our list of the 100 most influential companies—we turned the space over to an artist who’s been at the forefront of the digital art movement for more than a decade.

Artist Mike Winkelmann (aka Beeple) wanted to take our readers inside his “canvas” to depict the stratospheric acceleration of the digitization of our world by creating an image that focused on his artistic process. The cover image depicts his actual computer interface mid design, complete with a wireframe render of a figure interacting on the left and a more complete version on right. He created this digital world using Cinema 4D and OctaneRender software that is powered by nearly a dozen Nvidia graphics cards. (Nvidia was just named one of TIME’s 100 most influential companies.)

“With this artwork I wanted to show how everyone is becoming more digital as more and more of our interests and identity are moving online,” said the artist, who is based in Charleston, S.C. “People’s sense of self is quickly becoming a mix of real and virtual.”

The artist’s work often includes elements of dystopian and post-apocalyptic worlds featuring political leaders and current events.

Artwork by Beeple for TIME

Winkelmann, who spent more than a decade creating digital works of art every day and posting them online to his millions of social followers, famously sold a collection of those titled Everydays: 5000 Days for a record-setting $69 million as a non-fungible token (NFT) at auction house Christie’s on March 11. It was the third most expensive piece of art sold by a living artist, after Jeff Koons and David Hockney.

As writer Andrew R. Chow wrote in TIME this March: NFTs are best understood as computer files combined with proof of ownership and authenticity, like a deed. Like cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, they exist on a blockchain—a tamper-resistant digital public ledger. But like dollars, cryptocurrencies are “fungible,” meaning one bitcoin is always worth the same as any other bitcoin. By contrast, NFTs have unique valuations set by the highest bidder, just like a Rembrandt or a Picasso. Artists who want to sell their work as NFTs have to sign up with a marketplace, then “mint” digital tokens by uploading and validating their information on a blockchain (typically the Ethereum blockchain, a rival platform to Bitcoin). Doing so usually costs anywhere from $40 to $200. They can then list their piece for auction on an NFT marketplace, similar to eBay.

“People have been creating digital artwork for the last 20 years and it has just as much craft, message, intent, as anything made on a canvas and has just as much ability to affect people emotionally and intellectually,” Winklemann says. “It has been exciting through NFT’s to see people start to realize the value of this type of work and I think we’re just at the beginning of the next chapter of art history.”

In addition to his digital Everydays work, he has also created a variety of digital artwork including short films, Creative Commons VJ loops and virtual and augmented reality work. He has created concert visuals for Imagine Dragons, Justin Bieber, One Direction, Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj and Eminem. His commercial clients include Louis Vuitton, SpaceX, Apple, Samsung, Nike, Coca-Cola and Sony Pictures.

To follow up his Christie’s NFT drop, Winkelmann is releasing a Spring Collection on Friday, April 30 on the NFT site Nifty Gateway.

 

New story in Technology from Time: Every Company is a Tech Company Now. The Disruption is Just Beginning

In March 2020, as businesses across the world sent non-essential workers home to slow the spread of the coronavirus, a 2.6 million-sq.-ft. General Motors plant in Kokomo, Ind., sat idle. At the same time, ventilators—the breathing machines essential to keeping critically ill COVID-19 patients alive—were in frighteningly short supply. And so within a week of pausing the plant’s operations, GM CEO Mary Barra launched it back into action, quickly transforming a dormant engineering building into an assembly line that delivered 30,000 ventilators in five months.

Barra says that approach, incubated in the crisis of the pandemic, is now a permanent cultural shift that has already led to faster timetables for GM’s bet-the-company push to sell only electric vehicles by 2035. “Now as we approach different projects, we say, ‘You know, we’ve got to go at ventilator speed because we know we have the capability to do that,’” Barra says.

Amid the disruption, pain and loss of 2020, the global pandemic provided a rare window into the future of business as it unfolded in real time. As governments in the U.S. and elsewhere stumbled, business loomed larger than ever: developing vaccines at record speed; providing the technology that enabled remote school and work; and keeping millions of people fed, clothed, entertained and in touch with ramped-up digital services.

The scope and speed of change was unprecedented, accelerating digital adaptation by as much as five years in a 12-month period. Disruption ruled, as legacy companies imploded. Everything that could be digitized was, from education and exercise to currency and cars. Nearly every business has become a tech business, one reason stocks have soared even as the pandemic devastated lives and livelihoods across the globe. Meanwhile, inequality also soared: almost 1 in 8 American adults reported that their household didn’t have enough to eat as 2020 headed toward its close; 9 million U.S. small-business owners fear their companies will close by the end of 2021. This too tells a story about the future of business.

For nearly a century, TIME has been a barometer of influence, and it’s hard to recall a moment when the corporate world has had a greater influence on our lives than it does now. That’s why we’re launching TIME Business, devoted to covering the global impact of business and the ways it intersects with our public and personal lives. Our first major project: the TIME100 Most Influential Companies, a new list—and an expansion of our iconic TIME100 franchise—highlighting 100 companies that are shaping our collective future, as well as the leaders who steer them.

The mission of TIME Business is to help illuminate the path forward. We’re in the midst of a reset, one that is already transforming the economy and what employees, customers and our broader communities expect of companies. Remote work has fundamentally changed how many of us experience our jobs and even the kind of work we do, throwing into high relief the benefits, such as flexibility and less commuting, as well as alarming shortcomings in areas such as childcare and protections for the most vulnerable workers. Millions of workers are reevaluating their priorities. How much time do they want to spend in an office? Where do they want to live, if they can work from anywhere? What kind of company is attractive to them and provides meaning beyond the paycheck? Surveys suggest unusually large percentages of workers globally are considering leaving their jobs this year, with those figures even higher for women—millions of whom quit during quarantine because of the impossible juggle of work and home-schooling—and higher yet for women of color.

And employees increasingly expect their companies to become leaders in social causes. This is a wholesale redefinition of corporate leadership, which for decades has focused on shareholder return. “In certain respects there’s a greater social conscience in business than when I look across some of our elected officials,” says Ken Chenault, a former CEO of American Express, who co-founded Stop the Spread—a nonprofit devoted to pulling the private sector into the COVID-19 fight—and more recently helped organize a group of 72 Black executives calling on companies to take a stand against voting-rights restrictions now under consideration in nearly every state.

TIME100 Companies is a glimpse over the horizon. In talking with the leaders of these businesses—which are large and small, U.S. and international, public and private—it’s clear that this is only the beginning. Innovations in AI, 5G, nanotechnology and biotech have kick-started what World Economic Forum chair Klaus Schwab calls a fourth Industrial Revolution that will fuse the physical, digital and biological worlds.

“AI is a watershed moment,” says Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, a TIME100 company that over the past year has become the most valuable U.S. semiconductor company. Huang envisions a metaverse, a virtual world that is a digital twin of ours, a science-fiction concept that is just beginning to become reality. The metaverse, says Huang, whose company’s chips power some of the world’s mightiest supercomputers, “is where we will create the future … There will be a new New York City. There’ll be a new Shanghai. Every single factory and every single building will have a digital twin that will simulate and track the physical version of it.” (The digital artist Beeple, who created one of the covers for this issue, uses Nvidia technology “all running maxxed out” to create his canvases, adding, “I think we’re just at the beginning of the next chapter of art history.”)

For all of these worlds to prosper, we must preserve our global home: sustainability pledges are another powerful development marking the future of business, and a number of TIME’s most influential companies are singled out for actions on this front. While bad actors abound here, as do unsubstantiated “greenwashing” claims by major polluters, pressure to disclose, reduce and offset emissions is steadily growing, as are opportunities to do well by doing good. The revolutionary electric-car maker Tesla, for example, brought in $1.6 billion last year from regulatory credits it earned through selling zero-emission vehicles.

Ikea built its business on mass-produced and almost disposable furniture, but it is now working to bring about change with the goal of becoming climate positive, to reduce more greenhouse gases than it produces by 2030. “The only way we can exist as a business tomorrow … is by being sustainable,” says Jesper Brodin, CEO of Ikea parent Ingka Group. (Harvard Business School professor Rebecca Henderson, author of Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire, puts it more bluntly: “Business is screwed if we don’t fix climate change.”)

How we shop and pay for purchases is also in rapid transformation. A shift to digital payments was already under way, but as in so many industries, it was greatly accelerated by the need in the pandemic to reduce human contact. “People no longer want to handle cash,” says Dan Schulman, CEO of PayPal, which recently enabled customers to buy goods using their cryptocurrency on its platform. Fast-food giant Yum China, also on our list, is now using face-recognition software in some locations that allows customers to simply walk up, order and pay digitally, a sign of the possibilities but also the pitfalls of these new technologies for privacy and security.

Influence, of course, can be deployed for good or ill, and sometimes both at once. You will find on our list, and throughout our ongoing coverage, companies whose impact you admire and those whose impact you may not, even as they have reshaped entire sectors of the economy. DoorDash, along with other gig-economy companies, poured tens of millions of dollars into a California ballot initiative that would let it avoid classifying its drivers as employees under state law. Though Facebook strengthened its protections against foreign election interference to avoid a repeat of 2016, dangerous misinformation and even calls to violence continue to plague the platform. And for all its ubiquity, Amazon has faced a growing chorus of criticism, including reports of workers’ urinating in bottles to avoid being docked for bathroom breaks, a suit from New York State for allegedly putting employees’ safety at risk during the pandemic and a controversial fight against organizers of a unionization drive in Alabama.

Our aspiration is for TIME, in our company and in our coverage, to be among the ranks of businesses that drive positive action. When I started at TIME in 2013, our mission was often described as “explaining the world.” Today, we see it somewhat differently—it’s about telling stories about the people and ideas that shape the world, in hopes of doing our part to improve it.