Up 1,000 ARM employees in the US and the UK will be laid off, according The Telegraph and Bloomberg. Chief Executive Officer Rene Haas reportedly told staff in a memo that the Softbank-owned chipmaker is cutting between 12 to 15 percent of its workforce, with 1,000 being the high end of that range, as part of its efforts to curb spending. The company said in a statement:

"Like any business, ARM is continually reviewing its business plan to ensure the company has the right balance between opportunities and cost discipline. Unfortunately, this process includes proposed redundancies across Arm’s global workforce."

Softbank was supposed to sell ARM to NVIDIA for a massive deal that was worth $40 billion based on the latter's stock prices in 2020. If the acquisition had gone through, it would've been the largest in the chip sector yet and would've been worth around $60 to $80 billion today. The deal collapsed completely in February, however, due to strong opposition by regulators around the world. Industry players, including ARM customers Qualcomm and Microsoft, also voiced their opposition against the deal, citing concerns that NVIDIA might prevent ARM from licensing its chip designs. 

NVIDIA will pay Softbank a break fee of $1.25 billion for the failed purchase, and the Japanese conglomerate will proceed with its backup plan of taking ARM public. Neither of those is enough to keep things running as is, if the UK-based chipmaker is cutting jobs. Bloomberg says, though, that most of the job cuts won't affect the company's engineers. Despite the failed acquisition, NVIDIA plans to continue working closely with ARM and will continue to support the company as a licensee. 

While streaming is the music industry's cash cow these days, CDs aren’t dead yet. According to the Recording Industry Association of America's annual sales report, revenue from CDs grew by 21 percent to $584 million in 2021. That marked the first annual increase in CD revenue in the US since 2004. The RIAA notes that many record stores opened back up and artists sold music at shows again after COVID-19 put everything on hold in 2020.

As has been the case for the last 15 years, vinyl sales are continuing to grow too. Revenue rose by a whopping 61 percent in 2021 to $1 billion. It's the first time vinyl sales have reached that milestone since 1986. Including other formats, physical music sales totaled $1.66 billion in the US last year.

The RIAA notes that the only major recorded music format to see a revenue decline last year was digital downloads. Sales dropped by 12 percent to $587 million — only $3 million more than CD revenue for 2021.

Streaming revenue, unsurprisingly, is still soaring. Including platforms like digital radio, total revenue rose by 23.8 percent to $12.4 billion last year. Paid subscriptions accounted for $9.5 billion of that (an increase of 23 percent from 2020). The RIAA said the number of paid subscriptions jumped up by 11 percent to 84 million on average. Figures can vary throughout the year as people cancel and sign up for memberships.

Even though artists have long been demanding higher per-play payouts from platforms, streaming is easily the most important moneymaker for the music industry, accounting for 83 percent of overall revenue. Despite that, the rise in physical media sales is encouraging for fans of that format, and should give artists some assurances they can still make money by selling CDs. Record stores are going to stick around for a while yet.

Bumble has joined a growing list of American companies pulling out of Russia amid the country’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. On Tuesday, the company announced it was discontinuing operations in Russia and removing its family of dating apps from the Apple and Google app stores in Russia and Belarus.

What’s notable about Bumble’s announcement is that the company details how the decision will affect its business. In addition to Bumble, it owns and operates two other dating apps, Badoo and Fruitz. Those two are popular in Europe and they’re where Bumble anticipates it will see the most impact from its decision.

In 2021, approximately 2.8 percent of Badoo’s revenue came from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. By contrast, users from those three countries contributed to less than 0.1 percent of the revenue Bumble earned through its main app that same year. The company anticipates it will lose about $20 million in fiscal 2022 due to the conflict. To put that in perspective, the company recorded $208.2 million in revenue in fiscal 2021. 

Google has todayannounced that it has signed an agreement to buy Mandiant, a notable cybersecurity company, for $5.4 billion. The unit, once acquired, will be folded into Google’s Cloud team to ensure that it can offer an “end-to-end security operations suite” for its business customers. Mandiant CEO Kevin Mandia says that the deal will enable “organizations [to] effectively, efficiently and continuously manage and configure their complex mix of security products.” Google's cloud platform is used by a number of major companies, and an outage towards the end of 2021 briefly knocked out Spotify, Snapchat, Etsy and Discord, amongst others.

Mandiant isn’t likely to be a name on everyone’s lips, but it’s one of those companies who gets called in whenever bad things go down. It discovered the SolarWinds hack, and it was hired by Equifax to look into its security practices after its massive security snafu in 2017, and T-Mobile entered into partnership with the company after its 2021 breach. It also works with major banks and governments to work on high-profile attacks involving state actors. Mandiant was previously a part of FireEye after being acquired in 2013, but the company was spun back out last year.

The news comes just a month after Bloomberg reported that Microsoft might be interested in acquiring the company. It said that any deal would enable its new buyer to offer “unparalleled cybersecurity knowledge,” although Microsoft — obviously — subsequently pulled out of negotiations. But Google clearly feels that the deal is worth it, and is the second most expensive purchase the company has ever made, after its $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola.

Microsoft has closed its $19.7 billion takeover of speech-tech company Nuance Communications. It announced the acquisition last April and cleared the final regulatory barrier this week when the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority signed off on the deal. Regulators in the EU, US and Australia rubber stamped the buyout last year.

Mark Benjamin will remain as Nuance CEO, though he now reports to Microsoft Cloud and AI executive vice president Scott Guthrie. The duo wrote in a blog post that Microsoft and Nuance will build on "AI, digital and cloud advancements to create solutions that transform how we – as global citizens – work, shop, bank, engage and receive care." Healthcare will be a major focus of their work.

Microsoft has another massive deal in the works: its proposed $68.7 billion takeover of Activision Blizzard. It expects the deal to be completed by mid-2023 if regulators give the thumbs up.

Hyundai plans to release 17 full electric vehicle models by 2030 as part of its efforts to strengthen its lineup and to catch up to rival automakers. The company's CEO Jaehoon Chang has made the announcement when he unveiled Hyundai's electrification roadmap in an investor presentation. Out of 17, 11 models will be under the main Hyundai brand, while 6 will be released under its Genesis luxury brand. 

The automaker announced last year that Genesis will switch to electric powertrains completely by 2025, though at the time, it said that it expects to have eight EV models available for sale in 2030. Chang's latest announcement includes more concrete details about Hyundai's electrification plans. He said the company is investing 19.4 trillion won ($16.08 billion) in its EV-related endeavors, including setting up more manufacturing plants with the capability to produce EVs. The automaker is also aiming to capture a 7 percent market share in the global EV market and to sell 1.87 million electric vehicle units per year by 2030.

The company has yet to reveal the exact models it's releasing within the next eight years, but it did say that three of them are sedans, six are SUVs, one is a light commercial vehicle, while the last one is a new vehicle type. The first release will most likely be the IONIQ 6, an all-electric sedan that will be available for purchase this year. In 2024, Hyundai will be releasing the IONIQ 7, as well. 

While $16.08 billion is a considerable investment, analysts told Reuters that it's in in no way "aggressive" when compared to the commitments made by some rival companies. Toyota, for instance, plans to invest 8 trillion yen ($70 billion) for its electrification projects by 2030, while GM had earmarked $35 billion for its EV and automated vehicle investments from 2020 through 2025.

General Motors has sold its stake in struggling electric pickup maker Lordstown Motors, TechCrunch has reported. It reportedly unloaded its 5 percent investment (worth $75 million originally) in the fourth quarter of 2021, as originally disclosed by The Detroit Free Press and confirmed by GM.

Lordstown recently reported a loss of $81.2 million for the fourth quarter, and said in an earnings call earlier this week that it planned to sell only 3,000 of its Endurance electric trucks through 2023 — a far cry from the 32,000 it predicted when it went public via a SPAC deal back in 2020. It aims to build 500 of those this year, but it will need to raise an additional $250 million to do so. 

Last year, Lordstown warned that it didn't have enough cash to produce its electric trucks. Later in 2021, the SEC announced that it was investigating the firm, and then-CEO Steve Burns was subsequently pushed out after he was found to have lied about the number of Endurance pre-orders. 

GM got involved with Lordstown Motors after closing its Lordstown, Ohio plan in 2019, and selling it to EV manufacturer Workhorse, founded by Burns. Burns subsequently started Lordstown Motors with the aim building electric pickups at the plant, and obtained $75 million in investment from GM. The idea was to follow the path of Rivian and build electric pickups for businesses, but it's now in competing in a tougher market against giants like Ford, which recently launched the F-150 Lightning pickup. 

Lordstown Motors recently revealed that it didn't have enough cash to last through to 2023, so it subsequently agreed to sell the Lordstown plant to Foxconn for $230 million and rent space in it. However, Lordstown said that the deal is not as far along as they'd anticipated, a situation that's compounding the company's problems.

SEC officials do not know the whereabouts of Satish Kumbhani, the founder of crypto trading platform BitConnect, who was charged last week with defrauding investors of $2.4 billion in a Ponzi scheme. This puts the SEC in quite a bind, since they have to serve the 36-year old entrepreneur with his court papers. In a court filing from Monday, the SEC stated that they did not have an address for Kumbhani, an Indian citizen, and suspected that he likely fled to another country. 

The DOJ is charging Kumbhani with a number of offenses, including conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit commodity price manipulation and conspiracy to commit international money laundering.

“Kumbhani’s location remains unknown, and the Commission remains unable to state when its efforts to locate him will be successful, if at all," wrote the SEC in its filing.

In order to buy some time, the SEC is asking the US District Court for the Southern District of New York for an extension of 90 days. Since BitConnect is an unincorporated entity and not a formal corporation, all court papers have to be served to Kumbhani himself.

First founded in 2016, BitConnect attracted a lot of attention on social media for its “Lending Program” which allowed users to lend their Bitcoin in exchange for a propriety Bitconnect cryptocoin. The program claimed it could guarantee returns by using investors’ money to trade on the volatility of the cryptocurrency markets." 

“Under this program, Kumbhani and his co-conspirators touted BitConnect’s purported proprietary technology, known as the 'BitConnect Trading Bot' and 'Volatility Software', as being able to generate substantial profits and guaranteed returns by using investors’ money to trade on the volatility of cryptocurrency exchange markets. As alleged in the indictment, however, BitConnect operated as a Ponzi scheme by paying earlier BitConnect investors with money from later investors,” wrote the DOJ’s Office of Public Affairs in a press release.

After years of crypto existing in a legally murky universe, U.S. government officials are cracking down on cryptocurrency fraud and scams at an increasing rate. Last year, the DOJ launched a national cryptocurrency enforcement team to handle complex cryptocurrency investigations, and recently appointed veteran cybersecurity prosecutor Eun Young Choi as its director.

BitConnect is just one of many cryptocurrency schemes that law enforcement has pinned down in recent months. The founders of BitMex, a crypto derivatives exchange, plead guilty to skirting anti-laundering laws in the US and were ordered to pay $20 million in fines. Earlier this month, the DOJ arrested Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan, two entrepreneurs who allegedly attempted to launder more than 25,000 Bitcoins stolen from the 2016 Bitfinex hack.

Taxpayers can now delete any selfies they submitted to ID.me, the company tasked by the IRS to verify identities. Following uproar from privacy advocates, civil liberties groups and Congress, the federal agency last month axed a new requirement that taxpayers who want to access certain online services must comply with ID.me's facial recognition tool. Users were asked to verify their identity by uploading a selfie and government-issued ID onto ID.me’s portal, which uses automated facial recognition to vet the images. Beginning today, any ID.me account holders who wish to delete their presence on the site can do so by simply visiting account.id.me. Don’t worry if you don’t get around to it. ID.me will automatically delete all facial recognition data from taxpayers on March 11th.

Not all taxpayers were required to use ID.me (only users seeking to look up past tax returns or child tax credit refunds online, and this is only if you don't have a current online IRS account). Unfortunately, if you fall into those two groups, you’ll still need to jump through some extra hoops on ID.me's website. Users will need to schedule a video interview with an IRS agent, as well as submit a photo ID such as a driver’s license, passport or state ID. While a video call may be less of a privacy invasion than facial recognition, you may be in for a long wait. While some users connect to a video agent in a matter of minutes, some have reported wait times of a few hours or more. Automated facial recognition is still an option for those who can’t stand the wait time. The company announced that starting on March 11th, it will begin automatically deleting photos submitted by users within 24 hours. 

Luckily for those who already have an IRS online account, they can skip ID.me altogether. The IRS has promised to roll out a new authentication tool by next tax season that won’t require ID.me, but hasn’t detailed what it is. Tax-related identity theft surged during the pandemic, with many thieves filing fraudulent claims for unemployment benefits. The agency advises taxpayers to file early, and to be on the lookout for any letters from the IRS about potential identity fraud. Taxpayers can also file for an Identity Protection Pin (IP Pin), a special six-digit number issued by the IRS that provides another layer of security in case your social security number is compromised.

Nikola is "laser-focused on delivering vehicles and generating revenue," according to CEO Mark Russell. To help it reach those goals, the embattled company is preparing to ramp up production of the battery-electric Tre semi-truck. Russell said Nikola expects to start "series production of the Tre BEV on March 21." The company plans to deliver up to 500 production Tre BEVs this year, starting in the second quarter.

It delivered the first two Tre BEVs to a port trucking company in California in December as part of a three-month pilot. It says the trucks have logged more than 4,500 miles between them and hauled multiple loads per day. One completed a 204-mile trip on a single charge. Anheuser-Busch, meanwhile, is testing two fuel-cell electric variants of the Tre.

Nikola says its Coolidge, Arizona plant currently has a production capacity of 2,500 trucks per year. Work is underway on an expansion that would increase the capacity to up to 20,000 trucks per annum. Work on Phase 2 of the facility should be completed in early 2023. Meanwhile, Nikola's plant in Ulm, Germany is currently capable of producing 2,000 trucks per year, though that figure is expandable to 10,000 trucks.

In its latest earnings report, the company touched on some of the controversies that have plagued it over the last few years. It reached an agreement with the Securities and Exchange Commission in December to settle civil charges that it defrauded investors. The company is paying a $125 million civil penalty over two years. Nikola is seeking reimbursement from founder Trevor Milton for costs and damages it incurred in connection with government and regulatory investigations.

A grand jury indicted Milton on fraud charges last year. Nikola's former CEO and executive chairman allegedly lied to investors about “nearly all aspects of the business” in attempts to increase Nikola's share price. Milton, who has denied the charges against him, is set to go on trial in April.