Elon Musk overtakes Bill Gates to become the world’s second-richest person behind Jeff Bezos, Snapchat takes aim at TikTok, Comcast will impose a data cap.
It’s all the tech news that’s popular right now. Welcome to Hashtag Trending! It’s Wednesday, November 25, and I’m your host Baneet Braich.
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Elon Musk is on a roll. The Tesla CEO has passed Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates to become the world’s second-richest person, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Musk’s net worth is now at $128 billion. His revenue has mainly been driven by Tesla share prices. A recent report from the Guardian says Tesla has the highest market cap of any car company in the world. Musk’s other projects like SpaceX has also seen much success. Last week SpaceX, together with NASA, sent four astronauts to the International Space Station.
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Snapchat is taking aim at TikTok by launching Spotlight, which is a new section of Snapchat where users can share vertical videos. Snapchat says it will even offer $1 million award per day near the end of 2020 to its most popular users. An article in Mashable calls this is a “philosophical change” that will catch on with the trend of short video content creation that Instagram has been part of with Reels. [LinkedIn]
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And finally, Comcast will impose a data cap of 1.2 TB in more than a dozen US states next year. According to the Verge, in January and February, Comcast will give its Xfinity customers not on an unlimited plan a “credit” for any data usage charges over 1.2TB during those months to ease users to use them into the new limits. Then, in March, non-unlimited customers who exceed 1.2TB in a month will be charged $10 per 50GB of data, for a maximum of $100. Comcast says, that 95 per cent of its customers don’t use up that much data with the median being 308GB. But as the pandemic gets more people working from home the strain on the internet has increased. Thousands of people have taken to social media to voice their displeasure.
That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now. Hashtag Trending is a part of the ITWC Podcast network. Add us to your Alexa Flash Briefing or your Google Home daily briefing. I’m Baneet Braich, thanks for listening.