Bezos sells more than $3 billion of Amazon shares, Department of Justice files antitrust lawsuit against Visa’s acquisition of Plaid, WordPress 5.6 may break websites, Bitcoin price soars past $15,000, and more

According to a report filed with the SEC, the eCommerce giant’s CEO has offloaded more than $3 billion worth of shares in his company this week. With this cash-out, Bezos has sold more than $10.2 billion in 2020, which is more than double what he sold in 2019 at $2.8 billion worth of shares. Even with this latest sale, Bezos still owns more than 53 million Amazon shares worth roughly $170 billion.

In the past, Bezos has claimed that he sells roughly $1 billion in Amazon stock per year to fund his rocket start-up, Blue Origin. Back in February, Bezos also pledged $10 billion to his Earth Fund, which focuses on combatting the effects of climate change. The recipients of that fund have not yet been named.

Department of Justice files antitrust lawsuit against Visa’s acquisition of Plaid

The US Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit to block Visa’s $5.3 billion acquisition of fintech startup Plaid. The DOJ alleges that the acquisition would limit competition within the payments industry. “By acquiring Plaid, Visa would eliminate a nascent competitive threat that would likely result in substantial savings and more innovative online debit services for merchants and consumers,” the Justice Department said in the complaint filed in a Northern California federal court.

Plaid is a fintech startup that utilizes APIs to connect consumer bank accounts to finance apps such as Venmo or Robinhood. According to the complaint filed by the DOJ, Plaid has been developing a product that could replace Visa’s debit services. “This action reflects a lack of understanding of Plaid’s business and the highly competitive payments landscape in which Visa operates,” Visa released in a statement.

WordPress 5.6 may break websites

WordPress version 5.6 coming in December 2020 might have similar issues to 5.5 which rolled out in August of this year. According to WordPress developers behind the jQuery Migrate Plugin, the plugin will become “useless” when 5.6 rolls out, and anyone depending on the plugin will experience the same site issues that occurred with 5.5. WordPress 5.5 aimed to modernize WordPress by forcing the WordPress ecosystem to update code and use the latest version of jQuery. This caused millions of websites to break and some owners were left unable to access their sites.

To fix that jQuery issue, WordPress released a jQuery Migrate plugin which resolved things, but with the introduction of 5.6, the same problem may happen all over again. If you are using the Enable jQuery Migrate plugin, check your WordPress admin panel to see if you have any error issues when WordPress updates to version 5.6.

Bitcoin price soars past $15,000

The world’s most well-known cryptocurrency has been on a run in 2020, trading at almost double its value year-to-date. On Thursday, Bitcoin reached over $15,000, hitting a level it has not seen since January of 2018. The rise in price can be attributed to the unprecedented stimulus from global governments and central banks during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some industry insiders speculate that this has made the virtual currency more attractive than currencies such as the dollar. “Bitcoin’s creation was in part due to fears that increased fiscal stimulus is devaluing currencies globally,” explains Simon Peters, cryptoasset analyst at investment platform eToro. “As a result, when central banks announce extensive plans to pump money into economies, many investors in the crypto-community take this as a major bitcoin buy signal.”

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