Jeff Bezos will be aboard for Blue Origin's first human space flight next month.
In an Instagram post early Monday, Bezos said he, his brother, and the winner of an ongoing auction, will be aboard Blue Origin's New Shepard spacecraft during its scheduled launch on July 20.
July 20 is the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The trip will be a brief hop to space from Texas.
Bezos said in early February that he was stepping down as CEO of Amazon to spend more time, among other things, focused on Blue Origin.
“To see the Earth from space, it changes you, changes your relationship with this planet. It’s one Earth,” Bezos said in the Instagram post. “I want to go on this flight because it’s a thing I’ve wanted to do all my life. It’s an adventure. It’s a big deal for me.”
The auction for an open seat on New Shepard ends Saturday. The winning bid right now stands at $2.8 million, with almost 6,000 participants from 143 countries. The winning bid amount will be donated to Blue Origin’s foundation, Club for the Future, whose mission is to inspire future generations to pursue careers in STEM and to help invent the future of life in space.
OpenAI has appointed Slack CEO Denise Dresser as its first chief of revenue. Dresser will oversee global revenue strategy and help businesses integrate AI into daily operations. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently emphasized improving ChatGPT, which now has over 800 million weekly users. Despite its success, OpenAI faces competition from companies like Google and concerns about profitability. The company earns money from premium ChatGPT subscriptions but hasn't ventured into advertising. Altman had recently announced delays in developing new products like AI agents and a personal assistant.
President Donald Trump says he will allow Nvidia to sell its H200 computer chip used in the development of artificial intelligence to “approved customers” in China. Trump said Monday on his social media site that he had informed China’s leader Xi Jinping and “President Xi responded positively!” There had been concerns about allowing advanced computer chips into China as it could help them to compete against the U.S. in building out AI capabilities. But there has also been a desire to develop the AI ecosystem with American companies such as chipmaker Nvidia.
The end of 2025 is almost upon us. And it’s time to unpack Spotify Wrapped. On Wednesday, the music streaming giant delivered its annual recap — giving its hundreds of millions of users worldwide a look at the top songs, artists, podcasts and other audio they listened to over the past year. Spotify isn’t the only platform to roll out a yearly glimpse of data collected from consumers’ online lives. But since its launch about a decade ago, Wrapped has become one of the most anticipated. And Spotify is billing the 2025 edition to be the biggest yet, with a host of new features it hopes may also address some disappointments users had last year.
Elon Musk’s X unveiled a feature that lets users see where an account is based. Online sleuths and experts quickly found that many popular accounts, often posting in support of the U.S. MAGA movement with thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers, are based outside the U.S. This raises concerns about foreign influence in U.S. politics.
