Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have donated $25 million through their foundation to a philanthropic effort organized by Bill Gates to explore new coronavirus treatments.
The Gates Foundation donated $50 million last week to what it’s calling the “COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator.” The initiative brings together life sciences companies to collaborate on the development of new vaccines, diagnostics, and treatments for COVID-19.
“The Therapeutics Accelerator will enable researchers to quickly determine whether or not existing drugs have a potential benefit against COVID-19,” Chan and Zuckerberg said in a press release. “We hope these coordinated efforts will help stop the spread of COVID-19 as well as provide shared, reusable strategies to respond to future pandemics.”
The two donations are the largest from tech billionaires since the coronavirus outbreak. Wellcome and Mastercard are supporting the effort as well.
The goal of the initiative is to either develop a new drug or adapt an existing treatment that it could help distribute alongside partnering pharmaceutical companies.
The 15 companies participating in the project kicked off the effort by sharing their proprietary libraries of molecular compounds that have some history of being tested with COVID-19.
The lineup includes big names in biotech such as Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Pfizer, Sanofi, and Bristol-Myers Squibb.
Mozilla is looking to capitalize on consumers' increased awareness of data privacy with new anti-tracking features built into the latest version of its Firefox browser. The new tools are part of Mozilla's commitment to giving "agency" back to the user, COO Denelle Dixon said Thursday in an interview on Cheddar.
The fast-paced push to bring autonomous vehicles to market is at sharp odds with an imperative to make the tech safe and trustworthy. Both new tech companies and legacy automakers are under pressure from investors to show off their advances in autonomous vehicle deployment ー or risk being cast aside as has-beens, unable to keep pace.
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Twitter shares are surging Thursday after the company smashed its third-quarter earnings report, posting a nearly 30 percent increase in year-over-year revenue and a nine percent increase in the all-important daily active user metric. The release did not disclose the actual number of DAUs.
Tesla shares surged in after-market trading on Wednesday after the company surprised investors with strong adjusted quarterly earnings of $2.90 a share, far exceeding expectations. "As a Tesla bull, this is the quarter we've all been waiting for," Galileo Russell, founder of HyperChange TV, told Cheddar. "This is proving that Tesla can make money, they're on their way to being the most profitable automaker in the entire world. This is justifying the company's valuation; this is all good news."
Snap has hired a new chief business officer and chief strategy officer. The news comes a day before the company's earnings release and as Cheddar's Alex Heath reports an internal survey suggests 40 percent of Snap employees don't plan to stay around very long.
After Trivago's latest earnings report on Wednesday, it can once again claim profitability, a milestone the CEO hopes will restore faith in the travel-booking platform.
"I think for us it was super important to get back to profitability, to really show what this company can achieve and to gain confidence and to show the markets, 'Hey, Trivago can be a profitable company,'" Rolf Schroemgens told Cheddar Wednesday.
Tesla shares are surging as investors prepare for the company to release quarterly earnings Wednesday after the markets close. President Trump criticized Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell (again) in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. And Kerry Bishé and Corey Stoll join Cheddar to talk about their roles on Amazon's new series 'The Romanoffs.'
Stocks declined sharply Wednesday afternoon, with the Nasdaq recording its biggest monthly drop in almost a decade, as bad housing news and global trade concerns added to another tumultuous day on Wall Street.
Apple CEO Tim Cook made his most forceful comments yet on the privacy concerns plaguing the tech industry, telling a conference in Brussels, Belgium that a "data-industrial complex" has led to eroding privacy rights around the world. Cook then called on the U.S. to adopt a landmark federal privacy law like the GDPR that went into effect earlier this year in the EU.
