Bloomberg Alyssa McKay used to work part-time at a frozen yogurt store in Portland, Oregon, making minimum wage to cover her college tuition. Now the 22-year-old earns more than $100,000 a year on the short-video platform TikTok. Brands like Coach, Netflix and Amazon Prime Video pay up to reach her 9 million followers, mostly teenage and pre-teen girls who ...

  Bloomberg Instagram, under fire from safety advocates to keep children off the app and prevent teens from seeing harmful content, is testing new ways to verify users’ age. Among them: running users’ video selfies through an artificial intelligence (AI) that can determine if they are adults. The Meta Platforms Inc-owned app recently started requiring users to submit their birthdate ...

  Bloomberg Volkswagen AG is sticking to a plan to list its iconic Porsche sports-car maker later this year as Europe’s biggest carmaker looks to finance a costly shift toward electric vehicles. VW is going ahead with the initial public offering in the fourth quarter because the unit has proven resilient over the years to market disruptions including the recent ...

  Bloomberg General Motors Co’s Cruise LLC plans to expand its robotaxi business to all of San Francisco this year and move into other cities beginning in 2023, a growth push that comes on the heels of its first self-driving vehicle rides to carry paying customers. The company started charging fares for rides covering one-third of the city between 10 ...

Bloomberg Oil jumped after a reading on US consumer inflation expectations was revised lower, adding optimism to crude’s demand outlook. West Texas Intermediate traded above $108 a barrel, erasing much of this week’s loss. Friday’s rally comes as the University of Michigan’s final June reading of longer-term consumer inflation expectations settled back from an initially reported 14-year high, potentially reducing ...

  Bloomberg A group of oil and gas producers including Equinor ASA, Shell Plc and TotalEnergies SE are considering building what would be the world’s largest floating wind farm off Norway to power their fossil-fuel activities. The companies are looking at options to build a 1-gigawatt wind farm to power operations in the Troll and Oseberg oil and gas fields, ...

  Bloomberg European power prices surged to the highest level since December after Germany took a step closer to rationing natural gas supplies amid cuts to flows from Russia. Rising gas prices have been pushing up the cost of electricity across Europe, fuelling inflation and increasing the economic burden on businesses and households still recovering from the pandemic. German power ...

  Bloomberg BHP group u-turned on its plan to exit from thermal coal, after surging prices made the assets more valuable and a shift in investor attitudes has reduced pressure on the company to stop mining the dirtiest fuel. The world’s biggest resources companies and their shareholders have been grappling for years with the question of whether to get out ...

  Bloomberg The UK’s development finance agency will invest about $200 million in African hydroelectricity projects to boost the continent’s renewable energy portfolio. British International Investment Plc, formerly CDC Group, will invest into a joint venture between Norway’s Norfund AS and Scatec ASA to deliver about 675 megawatts, its largest backing for water-generated power, the fund said. Norfund plans to ...

  Bloomberg Italy may trigger its emergency gas plan as soon as next week if Russia continues to curb supplies, a move that may involve a bigger reliance on the dirtier fuels. If Gazprom PJSC doesn’t restore its gas supplies to Italy by mid-week, the government may initiate an emergency phase for its market, according to people familiar with the ...