Twitter’s board of directors accepted Elon Musk’s offer to buy the social network for $54.2 a share in a $44 billion deal. One consequence will be that Twitter will be a private company again leaving the Wall Street Stock Exchange. In early April, Musk bought 9.2% of the social network but decided not to join its board. Now, his stated goal is to change Twitter to ensure free speech, which he sees as a bedrock of democracy.
Google announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire Mandiant Inc., a leader in the field of cybersecurity, paying $23 per share for a total of approximately $5.4 billion. The company will become part of Google Cloud adding Mandiant’s security services to increase customer protection at a time when cyberattacks are more numerous than ever. Recently, there were various acquisition rumors regarding the company founded by Kevin Mandia, also by Microsoft, but it eventually became part of the Google family.
The leading graphics processor company NVIDIA and the Japanese telecommunications holding SoftBank Group Corp. have reached an agreement to end the deal to acquire the British microprocessor company Arm Ltd. that was reached in September 2020. Negative or at least concerned opinions expressed repeatedly over time by the USA, UK, and EU antitrust authorities resulted in NVIDIA’s inability to proceed with the acquisition. Arm CEO Simon Segars resigned and was replaced by Rene Haas, who was already the company’s president. The new plan consists of an IPO for Arm, perhaps at the London stock exchange.
On August 25, 1991, Linus Torvalds (photo ©Krd) announced in a message on the comp.os.minix newsgroup the project of a new operating system that actually diverged considerably from Minix. Unhappy with the Minix license, Torvalds adopted a license from the GNU project, the GPL, which seemed to him free enough. After a few weeks, the first Linux kernel was released. The availability of various components released by the GNU project and the contributions of several people who joined the project helped to spread it. Thirty years later, Linux is being used by virtually everyone in one way or another, even if only a small minority realize it.
At the beginning of this week came the announcement of the re-establishment of the Dogecoin Foundation, which opened in 2014 and then effectively ceasing its activity after a couple of years. There’s a renewed intention to support the Dogecoin ecosystem and community and to promote the future of the Dogecoin Blockchain. A new manifesto was released and a group of advisors was assembled: Jared Birchall, who works for SpaceX and Tesla Motors and represents Elon Musk, Billy Markus, one of the founders of Dogecoin, developer Max Keller, and Ethereum co-creator Vitalik Buterin. The developments include legal protection of Dogecoin, also against other entities that would like to get their hands on the Dogecoin brand. According to the online magazine Decrypt, the Foundation intends to open its headquarters in Liechtenstein, a crypto-friendly state from which it would be easier to work to spread Dogecoin in Europe.
