By Michelle Chapman
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.
The Trump administration has issued its first warnings to online services that offer unofficial versions of popular drugs like the blockbuster obesity treatment Wegovy.
Parents of teenagers who died by suicide after interacting with AI chatbots are set to testify before Congress.
Albania's Prime Minister Edi Rama says his new Cabinet will include an artificial intelligence “minister” in charge of fighting corruption. The AI, named Diella, will oversee public funding projects and combat corruption in public tenders. Diella was launched earlier this year as a virtual assistant on the government's public service platform. Corruption has been a persistent issue in Albania since 1990. Rama's Socialist Party won a fourth consecutive term in May. It aims to deliver EU membership for Albania in five years, but the opposition Democratic Party remains skeptical.
The Federal Trade Commission has launched an inquiry into several social media and artificial intelligence companies about the potential harms to children and teenagers who use their AI chatbots as companions.
Swedish buy now, pay later company Klarna is making its highly anticipated public debut on the New York Stock Exchange Wednesday, the latest in a run of high-profile initial public offerings this year. The offering priced at $40 Tuesday, above the forecasted range of $35 to $37 a share, valuing the company at more than $15 billion. The valuation easily makes Klarna one of the biggest IPOs so far in 2025, which has been one of the busier years for companies going public. Other popular IPOs so far this year include the design software company Figma and Circle Internet Group, which issues the USDC stablecoin..
Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison wrested the title of the world’s richest man from longtime holder Elon Musk early Wednesday as stock in his software giant rocketed more than a third in a stunning few minutes of trading. That is according to wealth tracker Bloomberg. A college dropout, the 81-year-old Ellison is now worth $393 billion, Bloomberg says, several billion more than Musk, who had been the world’s richest for four years. The switch in the ranking came after a blockbuster earnings report from Oracle. Forbes still has Musk as the richest, however, valuing his private businesses much higher.
