Amazon’s first employee, Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife, and one of the world’s richest women is rewriting the philanthropy playbook

While Jeff Bezos was building Amazon from a garage into one of the most powerful companies on earth and becoming the richest businessmen of this age, the world knew very little about his wife, MacKenzie, a novelist and a mother of four who helped start Amazon from that garage. …

“The rapid drop in mortgage rates this year, driven by the Fed’s response to the crisis — along with a shortage of properties — has turned the city’s western suburbs into the hottest seller’s market she has seen in three decades in the business.”

— Shawn Donnan, Two Cleveland Houses Tell a Story of America’s Unequal Recovery

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Investments in climate technology have grown fast over the past few years — but not fast enough

Five times: That’s how much cheaper solar energy has gotten over the past nine years, according to data from the research nonprofit Our World in Data, which shows that the average cost per unit of energy for photovoltaic solar energy declined from 38 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2010 to seven cents per kilowatt-hour in 2019.

Y Combinator founder Paul Graham pointed out on Twitter that while this technological progress hasn’t been quite as rapid as Moore’s law — which states that computer processing power doubles about every two years—it still represents a qualitative shift that could open up many unexpected opportunities. …

The hottest accessory for fall? The outdoor heater. If you can find one, that is. As Bloomberg reports, they are now sold out in New York City, where restaurants are desperately clinging onto al fresco dining to keep their businesses afloat, even into the colder months. Writer Zara Stone predicted the heater shortage in Marker back in August, when retailers were seeing up to 400% jumps in sales, year over year. “Every flavor of heater has been going fast,” she wrote, “wall-mounted heaters powered by Bluetooth apps, freestanding heaters reminiscent of CB2 lamps, tabletop fire pit heaters with a hidden propane-tank base, heaters hidden within bistro table legs, and heaters nestled inside outdoor parasols.”

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How Gen Z’s favorite app sent a Boomer song rocketing up the charts

8.47 million: That’s how many on-demand streams the 1977 Fleetwood Mac song “Dreams” garnered in the week ending October 1, according to Billboard. The song shot up the music charts — including the number one spot on iTunes — thanks to a viral TikTok of a man lip-syncing to the song while longboarding and drinking from a bottle of Ocean Spray. (Fleetwood Mac drummer Mick Fleetwood then did his own recreation of the viral video on TikTok.)

TikTok’s future in the United States remains in limbo after a federal judge put the White House’s attempt to ban the app on hold last week, adding confusion to an already murky plan to sell the company’s U.S. operations to Oracle and Walmart. But TikTok’s ability to send a Fleetwood Mac song rocketing ahead of Harry Styles’ latest on the charts points to the continued popularity and influence that TikTok has among American youth. Perhaps it’s only fitting that TikTok has given a 43-year-old song a boost at the same time that Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and President Donald Trump, a couple of seventysomethings, attempt to wrest control of the company from its Chinese owners. …

Logology

The soda giant’s latest imitation project is a relaxation drink that deploys all the millennial branding tricks

As if LaCroix, Liquid Death, and Topo Chico weren’t enough to keep the beverage aisle exciting, there’s a new water upstart slated to make its way onto supermarket shelves in the first quarter of 2021. And it comes from none other than PepsiCo.

In September, Pepsi announced it would launch a new product called Driftwell, an “enhanced” non-carbonated water beverage containing L-theanine and magnesium that is supposed to aid with sleep, although the company cannot legally make that claim and is left to drop vague hints about “relaxation.” Pepsi’s development of Driftwell stemmed from an internal pitch competition called “The Next Big Idea,” an initiative started last year by chairman and CEO Ramon Laguarta to encourage employees and associates to come up with new product concepts and innovations. …

Companies like Coinbase say employees should leave politics at home. Here’s why that’s impossible.

Co-authored with Liz Fosslien

“The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits,” declared economist Milton Freidman in a 1970 essay for the New York Times. Decades later, look where Friedman’s advice has left us: Social media businesses have accelerated the reach and rise of extremist groups, our collective mental health is on a steep decline, and, for the first time, today’s earners will likely be worse off than their parents. As Ford CEO Jim Hackett astutely pointed out, Friedman’s philosophy has “fomented the unsustainable inequalities that plague America today.”

But many corporate leaders still cling to Friedman’s harmful belief. The contentious political climate has even spurred some companies to publicly clamp down on any related discussion. As they see it, talking politics — or simply acknowledging what’s happening beyond the boundaries of the office — distracts people from their work, causes unnecessary internal friction, and, of course, hurts the organization’s ability to increase its profits. “We don’t engage [in broader societal issues] when issues are unrelated to our core mission because we believe impact only comes with focus,” wrote Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, in a recent controversial blog post. Doing so, he said, has “the potential to destroy a lot of value at most companies, both by being a distraction and by creating internal division.” Following the post’s publication, Armstrong gave employees a week to decide whether they agreed with him and wanted to stay on at the company or take a severance package to leave. …

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Good news, future Nobel laureates, you’re getting a pay bump!

$110,000: That’s roughly how much more prize money winners of the Nobel Prize will take home this year, per Reuters. That’s right, expectant Nobel recipients, you’re getting a raise! Technically, the award is priced in Swedish krona, and the bump is from 9 million to 10 million krona (about $1.2 million). And it turns out this is actually just a return to an earlier baseline: According to Reuters, while the prize’s monetary component steadily rose from 1 million krona to 10 million krona between 1981 and 2001, it was dialed back following the 2008 financial crisis as the Nobel Foundation sought to “get its finances in order.” …