Tag: Huawei

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Supplier Report: 2/1/2019

Microsoft purchased an open source database company continuing a trend they started with the acquisition of GitHub. As the company embraces open source, the open source community is grumbling about what happens when large software companies get involved with open source (see Amazon’s use and then discarding of MongoDB).

Speaking of Amazon, the company is getting serious about advertising, and they have access to massive amounts of personalized purchasing habit information. The company not only sells products, makes products, tracks behavior – it will have the ability to market to you as well. That certainly feels… intrusive.

Acquisitions

  • Microsoft buys an open source database startup to give it an edge against Amazon Web Services

    On Thursday, Microsoft announced it has acquired Citus Data, an open source database startup. Citus Data was first founded in 2010, and raised a relatively meager $13.2 million in venture capital funding in that time.

    What Citus Data does is take PostgreSQL, a database management system that’s popular with developers, and transform it into databases that can be dispersed over multiple computers. That gives developers the ability to bring their databases to ever-larger scales, for even the most demanding apps.

    https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-acquires-open-source-postgresql-startup-citus-data-2019-1

Artificial Intelligence

  • One-quarter of jobs are at ‘high-risk’ of being automated

    Roles in transportation, food prep, production and office admin are among those at highest risk, with robotics and artificial intelligence threatening to automate in the neighborhood of 70 percent of tasks, according to the study. Activities involving processing, data collection and physical labor are, unsurprisingly, most at risk here.

    Automation is expected to have an outsized impact in certain regions in the country, and among less well educated workers. Likewise, it’s expect to impact different segments of the population in different ways.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/26/one-quarter-of-jobs-are-at-high-risk-of-being-automated/

  • Blue Prism to issue $130M in stock to raise new funds

    CEO Alastair Bathgate attempted to put the announcement in the best possible light. “The outcome of this placing, which builds on another year of significant progress for the company, highlights the meteoric growth opportunity with RPA and intelligent automation,” he said in a statement.

    While the company’s revenue more than doubled last fiscal year, from £24.5 million (approximately $32 million) in 2017 to £55.2 million (approximately $72 million) in 2018, losses also increased dramatically, from £10.1 million (approximately $13 million) in 2017 to £26.0 million (approximately $34 million), according to reports.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/24/blue-prism-to-issue-130m-in-stock-to-raise-new-funds/

Cloud

  • Amazon probed for potential conflict over $10B Pentagon contract

    Amazon Web Services (AWS) re-hired a former employee who left the company briefly to work at the Department of Defense, where he reportedly worked for the military’s cloud division Opens a New Window. and on the contract in question, as first reported by The Washington Post.

    A potential competitor for the bid, Oracle, has filed a lawsuit claiming the Pentagon needs to look into the role of the employee and whether the process is unfairly biased toward Amazon.

    While an official for the department previously said the employee’s work on the project did not impact the integrity of the procurement, the filing also noted that the agency is considering whether there is a conflict of interest now that AWS has submitted a bid for the contract.

    https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/amazons-bid-for-10b-pentagon-contract-under-review

  • IBM Smashes Analyst Estimates, But Can it Catch Cloud Rivals Amazon & Google?

    For the quarter, IBM pulled in $21.76 billion in revenue. While impressive, that figure is lower than what was reported for Q4 2017. Back then, IBM reported $22.54 billion in revenue.

    IBM’s cloud service offerings fall into its strategic imperatives group, which reaped almost $40 billion in revenue in 2018. Cloud revenue contributed about $19 billion of that, which was 12 percent higher than it was in 2017.

    https://www.ccn.com/ibm-smashes-analyst-estimates-but-can-it-catch-cloud-rivals-amazon-google/

Security

  • Google fined $57m by French regulator for breaching GDPR

    The regulator hit Google on two points: for making it difficult for users to see the detail on why and how they should give consent in order to be sent personalized ads, and for providing a pre-ticked option when requesting consent.

    CNIL has decided that essential information such as data processing purposes, the data storage periods or the categories of personal data used for sending personalized ads are “excessively disseminated” across several documents. This means users can only view the details after clicking through several pages.

    https://digiday.com/media/google-fined-57m-french-regulator-breaching-gdpr/

  • Amazon knows what you buy, and it’s built a $125-billion dollar ad business off it that’s a marketer’s dream

    But many ad agencies are particularly excited by another area of advertising that is less obvious to many consumers. The company has been steadily expanding its business of selling video or display ads — the square and rectangular ads on sites across the web — and gaining ground on the industry leaders, Google and Facebook.

    In addition to knowing what people buy, Amazon also knows where people live, because they provide delivery addresses, and which credit cards they use. It knows how old their children are from their baby registries, and who has a cold, right now, from cough syrup ordered for two-hour delivery. And the company has been expanding a self-service option for ad agencies and brands to take advantage of its data on shoppers.

    https://business.financialpost.com/news/retail-marketing/amazon-knows-what-you-buy-and-its-built-a-125-billion-dollar-ad-business-thats-a-marketers-dream

Software/SaaS

  • Zuckerberg Plans to Integrate WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger

    The services will continue to operate as stand-alone apps, but their underlying technical infrastructure will be unified, said four people involved in the effort. That will bring together three of the world’s largest messaging networks, which between them have more than 2.6 billion users, allowing people to communicate across the platforms for the first time.

    The move has the potential to redefine how billions of people use the apps to connect with one another while strengthening Facebook’s grip on users, raising antitrust, privacy and security questions. It also underscores how Mr. Zuckerberg is imposing his authority over units he once vowed to leave alone.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/technology/facebook-instagram-whatsapp-messenger.html

  • PNC, IBM, And Aetna Set To Explore Blockchain Technology For Medical Health Plans

    According to IBM, more members will join this network in the months to come. These members will come from the healthcare industry, technology industry and other startups. After the announcement, the general manager for payers at IBM Watson Health, Barbara Hayes said:

    “While IBM is among the founding members, it is not the only one with a stake. Every founding member involved has an equal stake. It is vital because you don’t have side by side competitors struggling for waste in the healthcare sector 40 to 50 cents on the dollar. In the healthcare sector, these inefficiencies are found in administrative and clinical areas. Sometimes, it may be just friction in the system that ripple into bad customer experience.”

    https://smartereum.com/46967/blockchain-technology-pnc-ibm-and-aetna-set-to-explore-blockchain-technology-for-medical-health-plans-blockchain-news-today/

    IBM is finally starting to realize that companies are not going to pay for unproven technology. It is a shame they weren’t open to partnering to this degree a few years ago.

Other

  • Oracle underpaid thousands of women, minorities, government charges

    The Department of Labor (DoL) accused Oracle of widespread discriminatory wage practices that resulted in the loss of more than $400 million in wages for female, black and Asian employees, according to a federal complaint filed on Tuesday.

    According to the filing, the Silicon Valley giant underpaid women in jobs in its product development, information technology and support job functions, resulting in pay disparities as high as 20 percent, affecting more than 5,000 women. The DoL also alleged that it underpaid black employees, with disparities as high as 7.5 percent, and Asian employees, with gaps as high as 8 percent.

    https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/oracle-deliberately-underpaid-thousands-of-women-minorities-lawsuit-says

    Oracle Could Lose $100 Million Annually in Federal Contracts Over Pay Discrimination Suit

    The situation threatens an estimated $100 million a year that Oracle gets in federal contracts. The original DOL complaint seeks “an order canceling all of Oracle’s federal government contracts and subcontracts.”

    http://fortune.com/2019/01/23/oracle-discrimination-lawsuit/

  • U.S. Believes It Doesn’t Need to Show ‘Proof’ Huawei Is a Spy Threat

    U.S. intelligence officials have suggested at times that their views on Huawei are informed by definitive examples of malfeasance, though they have so far refused to share such evidence publicly. When the House Intelligence Committee in 2012 published an unclassified report naming Huawei as a security risk, it spoke generally about a lack of trust lawmakers placed in China but steered clear of providing concrete examples of the company being caught engaging in nefarious activity.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-believes-it-doesnt-need-to-show-proof-huawei-is-a-spy-threat-11548288297?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

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Supplier Report: 1/18/2019

IBM had a week of making excuses: First CEO Ginni Rometty had to defend Watson medical after reports from oncologists that the system is incorrectly diagnosing medical issues. Then the company had to defend the lack of growth in blockchain by essentially saying companies need to invest first and hope to see results. Finally, the company is failing to meet their hiring targets in Baton Rouge and are having a job fair – but someone needs to question why the company has a consulting hub in Baton Rouge in the first place.

Acquisitions

  • Amazon Web Services Acquires CloudEndure – Confirmed

    “As an AWS Advanced Technology Partner since 2016, CloudEndure has long joined forces with AWS to help customers future-proof their businesses. This acquisition expands our ability to deliver innovative and flexible migration, backup, and disaster recovery solutions.”

    Israeli media outlets estimate the deal to be worth about $200 to $250 million Dollars.

    https://esellercafe.com/amazon-web-services-acquires-cloudendure-confirmed/

  • Alibaba acquires German big data startup Data Artisans for $103M

    Alibaba has paid €90 million ($103 million) to acquire Data Artisans, a Berlin-based startup that provides distributed systems and large-scale data streaming services for enterprises.

    Data Artisans was founded in 2014 by the team leading the development of Apache Flink, an open source large-scale data processing technology. The startup offers its own dA Platform, with open source Apache Flink and Application Manager, to enterprise customers that include Netflix, ING, Uber and Alibaba itself.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/08/alibaba-data-artisans/

Artificial Intelligence

  • IBM CEO: Watson has not failed

    “Watson for Oncology is doing very well — very well,” Ms. Rometty told STAT during a photo opportunity at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas where she delivered a keynote address. STAT has requested interviews with Ms. Rometty and other company executives for months with no success.

    In 2018, STAT reported several controversies involving IBM’s health division, including one of its physician customers calling Watson for Oncology a “piece of sh–,” and numerous employee layoffs. A key complaint about Watson for Oncology, which offers cancer treatment recommendations, is that it’s biased toward American treatment methods. However, IBM said it plans to add regional treatment guidelines to Watson for Oncology, as well as real-world data on patient outcomes, to boost user satisfaction.

    https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/artificial-intelligence/ibm-ceo-watson-has-not-failed.html

  • Microsoft Could Help Kroger Counter Amazon’s Growth

    Kroger recently partnered with Microsoft to test out two data-driven connected stores. The two renovated stores will use a smart retail system powered by Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and digital shelves, which display prices, promotions, and nutritional information on screens in front of products. Kroger introduced the shelves, which are already being used in nearly 100 stores, last year. The test stores will help guide shoppers through the aisles to the products they want to buy.

    All those devices will be tethered to Microsoft’s cloud platform Azure, which is already Kroger’s preferred cloud platform. Microsoft and Kroger will also jointly market a commercial retail as a service (RaaS) product to the grocer’s industry peers.

    https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/01/11/microsoft-could-help-kroger-counter-amazons-growth.aspx
    After Amazon-Whole Foods, Microsoft-Kroger: The Grocery Revolution Is Happening

    “The two outfitted Kroger locations, in Monroe, Ohio and Redmond, Wash., will feature digital shelving displays with real-time price updates and product information, as well as digital advertisements personalized to each shopper,” CNBC published on Monday.

    The news of the Microsoft-Kroger partnership dovetails with a report from RBC Capital Markets indicating that Amazon’s cashierless grocery stores take in 50% more revenue than conventional counterparts. Amazon has said it may open up as many as 3,000 Amazon Go stores by 2021, suggesting the possibility of a $4.5 billion business.

    https://streetfightmag.com/2019/01/09/after-amazon-whole-foods-microsoft-kroger-the-grocery-revolution-is-happening/

Cloud

  • Microsoft wins $1.76 billion defense contract: Pentagon

    Microsoft Corp has been awarded a five-year contract worth $1.76 billion for delivering enterprise services for the Defense Department, Coast Guard and intelligence services, the Pentagon said on Friday.

    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-defense/microsoft-wins-1-76-billion-defense-contract-pentagon-idUSKCN1P52HB

  • AWS gives open source the middle finger

    AWS argues that while MongoDB is great at what it does, its customers have found it hard to build fast and highly available applications on the open-source platform that can scale to multiple terabytes and hundreds of thousands of reads and writes per second. So what the company did was build its own document database, but made it compatible with the Apache 2.0 open source MongoDB 3.6 API.

    If you’ve been following the politics of open source over the last few months, you’ll understand that the optics of this aren’t great. It’s also no secret that AWS has long been accused of taking the best open-source projects and re-using and re-branding them without always giving back to those communities.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/09/aws-gives-open-source-the-middle-finger/

  • AWS, Coupa Expand IT Spend Visibility For Corporates

    Coupa users can link their accounts to Amazon Web Services to automatically have AWS invoices sent to the Coupa platform. The integration means companies using both Coupa and AWS can more quickly process those invoices, while gaining enhanced visibility into their spend with AWS services.

    The integration deploys Coupa’s InvoiceSmash solution, which accelerates invoice processing and payments for users, aimed at enabling companies to capture early payment discounts from their suppliers.

    https://www.pymnts.com/news/b2b-payments/2019/aws-coupa-it-spend-visibility-management/

Software/SaaS

  • Oracle inks stadium naming rights deal with San Francisco Giants

    The deal appears to be one of the richest of its kind in North American professional sports, which seemingly would trickle through to the Giants’ product on the field. The team already boasted the second-highest payroll in the majors last season at around $203 million.

    Kevin Bartram, principal of Bartram Partnerships, a brand sponsorship consultancy, told Bloomberg the $200 million to $350 million price tag “seems very fair.” He was one of the consultants who brokered the Pacific Telesis-Giants partnership, according to the news outlet.

    https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/01/09/oracle-inks-stadium-naming-rights-deal-with-san-francisco-giants/

    Is this the best use of Oracle’s money at the moment?

  • Why more people aren’t using blockchain, according to IBM

    “We believe that blockchain is a team sport. For a blockchain-based solution to work successfully, it requires multiple entities to come together in a symbiotic relationship and agree on common principles, operating model and governance,” Parzygnat says. “The very nature of blockchain-based solutions require the vision and leadership of a governing body to convene the ecosystem in a common blockchain-based network. Then it requires each enterprise member to acknowledge their core competencies and compete in the market by defending or enhancing them.”

    https://www.finder.com.au/why-more-people-arent-using-blockchain-according-to-ibm

    Translation: “Pay for the roads first, and maybe we will built them”

Other

  • Chinese Huawei Executive Is Charged With Espionage in Poland

    The Chinese national’s detention follows the December arrest of Huawei’s chief financial officer in Canada, at the U.S.’s request, on allegations the company violated U.S. sanctions on Iran. Unlike that case, the Polish charges relate directly to suspicions by Washington and other Western governments that China could use Huawei equipment, or its employees, to help it spy on foreign governments and companies.

    Polish officials said Huawei itself wasn’t charged with any wrongdoing. They didn’t detail the charges or say whether any sensitive information was compromised. Officials also arrested a Polish national on the same charge.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-huawei-executive-is-charged-with-espionage-in-poland-11547201100?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

  • Google Nears Win in Europe Over ‘Right to Be Forgotten’

    At issue in the case is the right, established by the court in 2014, for EU residents to demand that search engines remove links containing personal information—such as a home address—from searches for their names. Under the 2014 ruling, search engines must balance those requests against the public’s right to access a link associated with the searched-for name, taking into account, for instance, whether the person is a public figure.

    Maciej Szpunar, an advocate general for the court, argued in Thursday’s nonbinding opinion that if the EU orders removal of content from websites accessed outside the region, there is a danger that other jurisdictions would use their laws to block information from being accessible within the EU.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/eu-court-adviser-recommends-limited-scope-for-right-to-be-forgotten-11547112114

  • Apple’s trillion-dollar market cap was always a false idol

    It’s worth noting that Apple has hardly been in alone taking a huge hit on its stock price, especially tech stocks, which have been taking a beating since November on Wall Street. Want to talk a trillion dollars, how about the biggest names in tech losing a trillion (that’s with a T, folks) in value in one stretch in November. When Apple halted trading last week to announce lower than expected revenue, the stock dove even further, as it confirmed the worst fears of investors.

    Worse, Chinese consumers have driven iPhone sales just as the Chinese economy has hit a massive speed bump this year. In June, Reuters reported shockingly weak growth. In November, Bloomberg reported that the Chinese economy was slowing down long before the president started a trade war.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/07/apples-trillion-dollar-market-cap-was-always-a-false-idol/

  • IBM now heading to Lafayette to recruit workers for Baton Rouge hub

    The company will conduct a career fair Jan. 19 from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at South Louisiana Community College in the Devalcourt Building at 320 Devalcourt St., a news release from Louisiana Economic Development said. IBM is looking to fill 75 available positions in Baton Rouge, the release said.

    IBM fell short on its promise to create 800 jobs in Baton Rouge by 2017 in exchange for state incentives. The company reached an agreement with the state to meet that goal next year and will have to pay a penalty of $10,000 for each job below the threshold of 800.

    https://neworleanscitybusiness.com/blog/2019/01/11/ibm-now-heading-to-lafayette-to-recruit-workers-for-baton-rouge-hub/
    No offense to Louisiana – but it is an odd place to start a work hub. Yes, there are colleges (36 4-year schools), but it isn’t overflowing with students compared to other states, and it doesn’t seem like people want to stay there.
    IBM laying off more than 300 workers in RTP

    The jobs, which were part of an IBM subsidiary called Seterus, will be permanently terminated “no earlier than March 11,” according to the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification on Jan. 9.

    The 310 job cuts come a week after IBM agreed to sell Seterus to the mortgage services company the Mr. Cooper Group.

    https://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article224283465.html

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Supplier Report: 1/4/2019


This edition of Supplier Report is a bit more reflective than forward facing thanks to several end-of-year posts. This week we get some context on how Huawei grew and how Amazon is potentially hiding its growth. There is speculation about acquisitions and what some companies are doing with their excess cash.

And I can’t properly close out 2018 without some Larry Ellison news!

Acquisitions

  • Will Microsoft Acquire Oath (Verizon Media Group)?

    The business unit, Verizon Media Group, faces tough competition. Revenue for the division fell from $2.2 billion in the fourth quarter of 2017 to $1.8 billion in the third quarter of 2018.

    Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg, who joined the business in August 2018, set out to restructure the company. He told investors during the third quarter investors’ call that he doesn’t expect to meet the company’s “previous target of $10 billion of [annual] revenue [for Oath] by 2020.”

    Apparently, the company really just wants to build Oath’s technical capabilities such as artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and virtual reality into its other businesses across Verizon. But the company could license those patents from Microsoft, if they choose to sell the assets to the Redmond, Washington-based company.

    https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/329813/will-microsoft-acquire-oath-verizon-media-group.html

  • 3 Tech Companies That Are Spending Billions to Buy Back Their Own Stock

    Earlier this year, memory specialist Micron announced a share-repurchase program good for $10 billion. While that’s not quite in the same ballpark as Microsoft’s $40 billion buyback, let alone Apple’s enormous $100 billion share-repurchase authorization, the size of a buyback needs to be considered in the context of a company’s market capitalization. Microsoft’s and Apple’s market capitalizations are each north of $700 billion, while Micron’s is currently around $35 billion.

    https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/12/30/3-tech-companies-that-are-spending-billions-to-buy.aspx

Artificial Intelligence

  • The Verge 2018 tech report card: AI

    This reckoning has been most visible as a parade of negative headlines about algorithmic systems. This year saw the first deaths caused by self-driving cars; the Cambridge Analytica scandal; accusations that Facebook facilitated genocide in Myanmar; the revelation that Google helped the Pentagon train drone surveillance tools; and ethical questions over the tech giant’s human-sounding AI assistant. The research group AI Now described 2018 as a year of “cascading scandals” for the field, and it’s an accurate, if disheartening, summary.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/30/18137429/2018-tech-recap-artificial-intelligence-robot-machine-learning-facial-recognition

Cloud

  • What Amazon Isn’t Telling Investors About Its Revenue

    The rule doesn’t require companies to break down their revenue in any specific way. But if they discuss particular sources of revenue in earnings announcements or conference calls, or if they provide their top decision-makers with particular details about revenue, such as how individual products are selling, then they are supposed to consider breaking out the revenue on that basis for investors too.

    In Amazon’s case, the SEC noted in an August letter that the company said publicly it had topped 100 million paid Prime members globally and shipped more than five billion items with Prime world-wide in 2017. It asked Amazon to disclose its percentage of sales attributable to Prime members.

    Amazon declined, telling the SEC it didn’t believe sales to Prime customers was useful information and that Prime membership is “only one element” of its business. An Amazon spokeswoman declined to comment further.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-amazon-isnt-telling-investors-about-its-revenue-11545480000

Software/SaaS

  • How Facebook Keeps Messenger From Crashing on New Year’s Eve

    In addition to shifting loads, the Messenger team has developed other levers that it can pull “if things get really bad,” says Ahdout. Every new message sent to a server goes into a queue as part of a service called Iris. There, messages are assigned a timeout—a period of time after which, that message will drop out of the queue to make room for new messages. During a high-volume event, this allows the team to quickly discard certain types of messages, such as read receipts, to focus its resources on delivering ones that users have composed.

    “We set up our systems so that if it comes to that, they start shedding the lowest-priority traffic,” says Ahdout. “So if it came to it, Iris would rather deliver a message and drop the read receipt, rather than drop the message and deliver the read receipt.”

    https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/software/how-facebooks-software-engineers-prepare-messenger-for-new-years-eve

Datacenter/Hardware

  • Intel to get 700 million shekel grant for Israel expansion

    Israel will give Intel Corp (INTC.O) a 700 million shekel ($185 million) grant in return for a planned $5 billion expansion of its production operations in Israel.

    Intel is one of the biggest employers and exporters in Israel, where many of its new technologies are developed. Earlier this year it submitted plans to upgrade its Kiryat Gat manufacturing plant in southern Israel.

    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-intel-idUSKCN1OO0JD

  • 911 emergency services go down across the US after CenturyLink outage

    CenturyLink, one of the largest telecommunications providers in the U.S., provides internet and phone backbone services to major cell carriers, including AT&T and Verizon. Data center or fiber issues can have a knock-on effect to other companies, cutting out service and causing cell site blackouts.

    In this case, the outage affected only cellular calls to 911, and not landline calls.

    Several states sent emergency alerts to residents’ cell phones warning of the outage.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/28/911-service-outage-centurylink/

Other

  • How Huawei Took Over the World

    In its early days, Huawei was accused of stealing technology, including by Cisco Systems Inc. in a 2003 lawsuit, which Huawei settled without admitted wrongdoing. Now it has the biggest R&D budget of any tech company in China, pouring $13 billion last year into developing its own technologies, outpacing Intel Corp. and spending almost as much as Google parent Alphabet Inc. Huawei says that 80,000 people—45% of its employees—work on R&D. They make chips, design phones and work on 5G technology.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-huawei-took-over-the-world-11545735603

  • JD.com Tries to ‘Change the Narrative’ With Business Restructuring

    Investors have become increasingly worried about Mr. Liu’s unusually tight grip over his company. He controls nearly 80% of the company’s voting rights and the board can’t meet without him unless he recuses himself. His concentration of authority became a focus of concern among some analysts after Mr. Liu’s brief arrest in August and during the subsequent months when accusations against him were pending.

    JD.com’s American depositary receipts have fallen 49.1% in the past year, closing at $21.10 on Wednesday. While shares of the nation’s large tech firms have been beaten down by concerns about China’s slowing economy and government regulation, JD.com’s fall was especially dramatic. Some analysts attributed the swoon to the uncertainty surrounding a criminal prosecution.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/jd-com-to-change-the-narrative-with-business-restructuring-11545902638?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

  • Tesla adds Oracle founder Larry Ellison to board of directors

    Tesla is Ellison’s second-largest investment as of October, Ellison said then. Ellison owns 3 million shares in the company, according to the announcement. He also said that he and Musk are close friends. Wilson-Thompson spent 17 years as an executive at the Kellogg Company, and currently serves as the executive vice president and global chief human resources officer of the Walgreens Boots Alliance, the holding company that sits above Walgreens.

    Tesla was required to add two new independent board members as part of the settlement Elon Musk and the company signed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) earlier this year. The SEC had charged Musk with securities fraud in September over the “false and misleading” statements he made on Twitter in August, when he suddenly announced plans to turn Tesla back into a privately held company. He quickly settled with the agency two days after rejecting its initial offer.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/28/18158832/tesla-larry-ellison-board-of-directors-oracle-founder

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