⏱Who isn't getting sued now?

Dec 23, 2020

Good morning everyone. We’ll be off from the 24th-27th, so this is the last newsletter of the week! We hope you all have a great holiday season.

Yesterday the Trump administration sued Walmart, alleging that they had played a role in the opioid epidemic by inadequately checking suspicious prescriptions despite whistleblowing from its own pharmacists. Rather, in an effort to drive profits, Walmart purposefully understaffed its pharmacies, and pressured employees to fill prescriptions quickly. Walmart responded to the allegations by saying that the lawsuit, “. . .is riddled with factual inaccuracies and cherry-picked documents taken out of context.”

According to documents filed in the court for the lawsuit, Google and Facebook formed a deal in September 2018 where they agreed to directly violate antitrust laws by not competing against each other in the advertising world. They utilized code names for this project, with Google’s being, “Star Wars” (we’re thinking Death Star would’ve been better), and also agreed to help each other out should they be sued by the government. This is getting dangerously close to violating Google’s code of conduct, which states, “Don’t be evil.”

The most popular app in China, WeChat, which has 1.2 billion monthly users, has recently become more transparently utilized as a surveillance tool by the government. In the last couple of weeks, authority figures have been using the app to issue threats, justify arrests, and monitor anti-government sentiments. Unfortunately for Chinese citizens, Zhang Qingfang put it best when he said, “There are many functions in WeChat that we just can’t live without.”

Today, tech conglomerate IAC announced that one of its holdings, Vimeo, will be going public in Q2 2021. This announcement comes off of a strong past nine months for Vimeo where they’ve added 30 million users, and held 3x as many live streams than in the past three years combined. This IPO would place it as the clear second place competitor against YouTube, but only time will tell if they can make a dent against the goliath.

And that’s Tesla, as Elon Musk told the world yesterday that he tried to sell Tesla to Apple during its early days when it was struggling, and got completely ignored.

Have a great rest of your day, and we’ll see you tomorrow bright and early!

-The 90 Second News Team

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