*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.
An independent watchdog within the IRS reports that while taxpayer services have vastly improved, the agency is still too slow to resolve identity theft cases. And National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins says those delays are “unconscionable.” Erin M. Collins said in the report released Wednesday that overall the 2024 filing season went smoothly, though IRS delays in resolving identity theft victim assistance cases are worsening. It took nearly 19 months to resolve self-reported identity theft cases as of January, and Wednesday's report states that now it takes 22 months to resolve these cases.
Amazon.com Inc. surpassed $2 trillion in market value for the first time in afternoon trading on Wednesday. The push higher for Amazon’s stock market valuation comes a little more than a week after Nvidia hit $3 trillion and briefly became the most valuable company on Wall Street. Nvidia’s chips are used to power many AI application and its valuation has soared as a result. Amazon has also been making big investments in AI as global interest has grown in the technology. Most of the company’s focus has been on business-focused products.
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