This was a big week for huge corporate profits. Microsoft and Nintendo reported healthy business growth to start off the latest earnings season. Amazon announced that it will be bumping the subscription cost for Prime by 20 percent. And a knockoff Mark Zuckerberg separated a number of fools from their hard earned money. Numbers, because how else are you supposed to calculate your net worth, acts of altruism?
32 percent: Looks like the computer-buying public is finally fed up with Apple’s recent spate of hardware “upgrades,” given that Microsoft announced its third-quarter earnings, totaling $ 1.1 billion in revenue. That’s a huge jump over last year’s paltry figure of just $ 831 million.
$ 120: Amazon Prime subscribers are in for a rude awakening come May. The company announced this week that it will be increasing the price of its annual subscription by 20 percent, from $ 100 to $ 120, for its US customers. Sounds like Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is gearing up to finally start shopping at Whole Foods.
25 percent: Out of the more than 200 fake Zuckerberg Facebook and Instagram accounts that The New York Times discovered during a recent expose, 51 of them were running lottery scams. To be fair though, its your own fault if you fell for one of these. Zuck doesn’t want your money, he wants your data.
17.79 million units: Nintendo seemed to be on the ropes for a while there, its Wii game system getting absolutely pummeled by console heavyweights Microsoft and Sony. But with a spectacular reversal, Nintendo is fighting back. The company announced this week that it had sold 2.93 million Switch consoles in the first three months of 2018, down from the 7.23 million it sold in the previous three but still more than the Wii did during its entire production run.
$ 15: Got an online grievance but are short on cash? Fear not, for less than the cost of a night at the movies you too can hire a 19-year-old Serbian guy to DDoS your internet rival back to the stone age. Or at least you could up until the point that he got nabbed by the cops.
$ 155,000: No, seriously, that’s what Volvo actually expects you to spend for its upcoming luxury hybrid named after a stripper, the Polestar 1, through its new subscription service.
$ 61 million: We really are living in the Upside Down. Twitter announced this week that it turned a profit last quarter, the second time in a row that’s happened.
