*By Chloe Aiello*
It's been quite the week for Facebook, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg, it seems, still has a fun streak.
The high-profile CEO stepped out with rapper Kanye West to kick back, relax, and sing a little karaoke. The star on Monday tweeted a blurry photo of the pair in a group, grasping microphones and apparently singing a throw-back hit from the Backstreet Boys.
"We sang Backstreet Boys I want it that way," [West wrote on Twitter](https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/1062892813975674881).
The tweet has since earned more than 72,000 likes, 9,000 retweets and 1,000 comments ー most of which were remarks on the unlikely pairing. And while there was no way of knowing what the two were up to, or even when they met, the photo provided some much needed comedic relief in a week of bad news for Facebook ($FB).
On Wednesday, a [New York Times investigation](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-russia-election-racism.html) raised questions about the leadership's response to recent scandals. In a press conference on Thursday, Zuckerberg pushed back against the report, bolstered by a rare statement Facebook's board issued in support of the CEO and his COO, Sheryl Sandberg.
The report comes as the company juggles slowing growth and backlash after a spate of controversies in the past year, including the Cambridge Analytica data breach and the company's response to Russian meddling on the platform.
Facebook's stock is down 18.5 percent year-to-date and 19.1 percent year-over-year.
Dan Ives, Managing Director and Senior Equity Analyst at Wedbush Securities dives deeper into a report by the International Data Corporation (IDC) that Apple has ended Samsung's 12-year reign as the world's largest smartphone seller.
Artificial intelligence is the biggest buzzword at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos. Advances in generative AI stunned the world last year, and the elite crowd is angling to take advantage of its promise and minimize its risks.
Smartphones could get much smarter this year as the next wave of artificial intelligence seeps into the devices that accompany people almost everywhere they go.
In an annual assessment of global inequalities, Oxfam International said the first trillionaire could emerge within the next decade — as the anti-poverty organization pointed to the growing wealth gap that skyrocketed globally during the pandemic.
The Biden administration proposed a cost drop for overdrawing bank accounts, which it says could particularly relieve Americans living paycheck to paycheck.
Americans stepped up their spending in December more than expected, closing out the holiday season and the year on an upbeat tone. The Commerce Department said retail sales rose 0.6% in December compared with a November’s 0.3% increase.
