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Jack Ma Missing
Business Insider reported that Alibaba’s CEO, billionaire Jack Ma, has been absent from public appearances for more than two months now, which of course creates speculation.

His last appearance was in late October 2020, on a public forum in Shanghai where he blasted China’s business regulations. That put him on a collision course with government officials and ended up with the suspension of the $37 billion IPO of Alibaba’s fintech arm, Ant Group.

Despite there are no charges against him yet, the truth is that other Chinese businessmen and critics of the government, like lawyers and professors have been arrested or gone missing, after speaking against government policies.

A chairman of a Beijing tech consultancy said that he thinks Ma has been advised to lay low.

Facebook Sued by the US Government
The Facebook empire saw a bump in engagement numbers thanks to the pandemic, and they recently shared a short summary of usage stats for New Year’s Eve.

The most impressive numbers were from Whatsapp. On New Year’s Eve, more than 1.4 billion voice and video calls were made on the platform. That’s an increase of more than 50% compared to the same day last year, and it’s the most calls in a single day on the app, ever.

That’s all very nice, but Facebook also has pressing issues going on. The company may have to break up Whatsapp and Instagram to deconstruct its social media monopoly, if federal regulations come to fruition.

The FTC and several states have sued the company yet again, for allegedly absorbing the competition and incurring in ilegal monopolistic practices. In a nutshell, these lawsuits pretend to stop mega-corporations from acquiring emerging competitors and forming monopolies.


Alphabet Union
Let’s move to Google, who’s been on fire too, dealing with antitrust lawsuits of its own. But now the company is seeing employees getting organized and fighting for justice within the company.

Tech giants like Google or Amazon are no new to employee outcry, and they have historically managed to extinguish all efforts of worker organization. High executives seem to believe that tech companies are more innovative without bureaucratic institutions like unions.

But the Alphabet Workers Union hopes to change that for good. That is the recently formed union of Google employees, and they are formalizing years of struggles with issues like racism, sexual misconduct, payment inequality, and other unfair practices. Workers claim that the company dismisses their interests and retaliates against those who speak up.

On January 4, official members of the union, published an article in the New York Times, stating that they already count 226 signed members with the CW (Communications Workers of America). That’s not much, but it’s the first step in getting legal validation. In the article, they state:

“We are the workers who built Alphabet (...) a powerful company, responsible for vast swaths of the internet. It is used by billions of people across the world (...) It has a responsibility to its thousands of workers and billions of users to make the world a better place. As Alphabet workers, we can help build that world”.


Slack Rocky 2021 Start
Just bought for a whopping $27B by Salesforce (we made a video about it), it forced us to turn to more unorthodox messaging alternatives like LinkedIn or just good old email.

Companies like the project management platform, Click-up, didn’t miss the chance to promote their in-app chatting feature, which is probably not very useful whenever Slack is working. By the way, I feel ClickUp is crushing Monday.com- would you agree?

Anyway, the memes did not wait to immortalize the moment and make us laugh about the first bump of 2021 if you want to call it that. Slack apologized and life went on.