Budget 2018-19

  The combined net worth of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos approached $500 billion on Wednesday The combined net worth of  Elon Musk  and Jeff Bezos approached $500 billion on Wednesday, fueled by the unrelenting rally in Tesla Inc. shares and a broad surge in tech stocks that sent the Nasdaq 100 to an intraday record. The value of the two fortunes — a sum bigger than the market value of Johnson & Johnson and about equal to that of America’s biggest bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co. — is yet another watershed moment in what’s shaping up to be a historic week for billionaires. A groundbreaking proposal from Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden to tax billionaires on unrealized gains was released in detailed form Wednesday morning only to be dropped in negotiations hours later. Wyden insists the billionaires’ tax plan isn’t dead, but talks have instead moved on to a possible 3% surcharge — on top of the highest income tax rate — for those earning more than $10 million. The combined ne...

  Billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Elon Musk and George Soros benefit from a complex web of loopholes in tax code. The 25 richest Americans, including Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg and Elon Musk, paid relatively little — and sometimes nothing — in federal income taxes between 2014 and 2018, according to an analysis from the news organization ProPublica that was based on a trove of Internal Revenue Service tax data. The analysis showed that the nation’s richest executives paid just a fraction of their wealth in taxes — $13.6 billion in federal income taxes during a time period when their collective net worth increased by $401 billion, according to a tabulation by Forbes. The documents reveal the stark inequity in the American tax system, as plutocrats like Mr. Bezos, Mr. Bloomberg,  Warren Buffett , Mr. Musk and George Soros were able to benefit from a complex web of loopholes in the tax code and the fact that the United States puts its emphasis on taxing labor inc...

  The space race between the world’s two richest men went into hyperdrive on Tuesday after Tesla chief Elon Musk took a swipe at Jeff Bezos’ attempt to challenge a major NASA contract (Reuters) -The space race between the world’s two richest men went into hyperdrive on Tuesday after Tesla chief Elon Musk took a swipe at Jeff Bezos’ attempt to challenge a major NASA contract. The two billionaires, who have been trying to launch long-range orbital rockets, were competing for a coveted contract from the government to build a spaceship to deliver astronauts to the moon as early as 2024. Musk won. Bezos was not happy. Bezos’ Blue Origin on Monday filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office (GAO), accusing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) of moving the goalposts for contract bidders at the last minute. Musk, who also leads  SpaceX , fired back with a tweet that said: “Can’t get it up (to orbit) lol.” ( https://bit.ly/3npEc0Z ) He did not elabora...

  The world’s largest retailer is permeating the complex tapestry of the only billion-people-plus market open to it If it wasn’t for last year’s extraordinary events, there would be nothing even remotely remarkable about Jayshri Hodkar’s struggle to survive as a single mother of two on the earnings of her tailoring shop, a single machine in one room of a rented house. It’s one of those tens of millions of tiny businesses you see everywhere in India. Most are so nondescript it’s hard to imagine that together they supply the wheels on which the $2.7 trillion economy runs. Their value only became clear when the wheels came off. This week last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a sudden, complete lockdown. And that’s when the Mahi tailoring center in Indore, a historic city of 3 million in central India, become important to one of the world’s richest men — 7,000 miles away in Seattle. With no customers coming to get blouses stitched, Hodkar came to a conclusion: Her shop coul...

  A New Delhi court this week dealt a blow to the U.S. firm by revoking a previous court decision that effectively blocked the deal Amazon.com Inc has mounted a legal challenge against its partner Future Group’s $3.4 billion retail assets sale in India’s Supreme Court, three sources told Reuters on Thursday, marking the US firm’s latest effort to block the deal. Amazon, locked in legal disputes with Future, alleges the Indian firm violated contracts by agreeing to sell its retail assets to Reliance Industries last year. Future denies any wrongdoing. A New Delhi court this week dealt a blow to the US firm by revoking a previous court decision that effectively blocked the deal, and Amazon has filed an appeal against it in the Supreme Court in the capital city, the three sources said. Amazon and Future did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The legal fight over Future’s assets has embroiled two of the world’s richest men –  Amazon ‘s Jeff Bezos and Reliance’s Mukesh...

  health ministry signed a contract Monday for 400,000 doses of Sputnik V that will arrive this month. That is still a tiny amount for Mexico”s 126 million people Mexico approved the Russian coronavirus vaccine Sputnik V for use Tuesday, just hours after the publication of early results of an advanced study saying it is about 91 per cent effective. Assistant Health Secretary Hugo Lpez-Gatell, the government’s pandemic spokesman, said the health ministry signed a contract Monday for 400,000 doses of Sputnik V that will arrive this month. That is still a tiny amount for Mexico’s 126 million people. It couldn’t come a moment too soon. Mexico has been hit so hard that hospitals in the capital were 87% full, and ambulance drivers waited hours to find an open bed for patients. Mexico has reported about 159,500 test-confirmed deaths related to  COVID-19 , but excess-death estimates place the real toll at well over 195,000. Unfortunately, because of the saturation of the hospitals and...

  The announcement ends a long-running question about who would succeed the world’s second- richest person at the company’s helm Amazon.com Inc on Tuesday said founder Jeff Bezos would step down as CEO and become executive chairman, as the company reported a third consecutive record profit and quarterly sales above $100 billion for the first time. This summer, Bezos, 57, will hand the keys of the world’s largest online retailer to Andy Jassy, head of its cloud computing division. The announcement ends a long-running question about who would succeed the world’s second-richest person at the company’s helm. Jassy, 53, joined Amazon in 1997 after Harvard Business School, founding Amazon Web Services (AWS) and growing it to a cloud platform used by millions, the company’s website said. He had been a clear contender for the top job since  Amazon  created two CEO roles reporting to Bezos, the other held by recently retired consumer CEO Jeff Wilke. Tom Johnson, chief transformati...

  The world’s largest online retailer has an agreement with a healthcare provider to administer vaccines at its facilities, Dave Clark, chief executive of Amazon’s worldwide consumer business said Amazon.com Inc on Wednesday offered to help with the United States’ efforts involving the Covid-19 vaccine, according to a letter addressed to President Joe Biden, seen by Reuters. The world’s largest online retailer has an agreement with a healthcare provider to administer vaccines at its facilities, Dave Clark, chief executive of Amazon’s worldwide consumer business, said in the letter. He added, “We are prepared to leverage our operations, information technology, and communications capabilities and expertise to assist your administration’s vaccination efforts.”..

  By seeking to stall Ambani’s purchase of Future, Bezos may be signaling that he would rather remain a rival A vanilla commercial dispute is setting the stage for a clash between the world’s No. 1 and No. 6 richest men. But the legal wrangling is a sideshow. What Jeff Bezos and Mukesh Ambani are really fighting over is pole position in the only billion-plus-people consumer market available to both of them: India. The ostensible battleground is a $3.4 billion deal Indian tycoon Ambani’s Reliance Industries Ltd. stitched up in August to acquire assets of debt-laden local retailer Future Group. Bezos’s Amazon.com Inc. is trying to block the transaction. That, in itself, is a bit of a dampener. Expectations were building for the two billionaires to work together. In September, Bloomberg News reported that Ambani had given  Amazon  an option to buy as much as 40% of Reliance Retail Ventures Ltd., seeking to repeat the success he had earlier this year in bringing in Facebook I...