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When it was announced in recent weeks that Lauren Sanchez would be the cover star of Vogue's July digital issue, many fashion industry figures responded with skepticism, noting the cover's poor fit with the style associated with Anna Wintour. However, it soon emerged that Wintour herself personally selected Sanchez's wedding dress, designed by Dolce & Gabbana, making the story even more peculiar.

Rumors about the connection between Bezos and Vogue gained momentum in recent months, but subsided somewhat against the backdrop of the couple's lavish and talked-about wedding in Venice and the announcement of Wintour's resignation from her position as editor-in-chief of the magazine's American edition after 37 years.

Behind this apparent coincidence, there appears to be a significant connecting thread. According to rumors reported by the Daily Mail, Jeff Bezos is allegedly planning to acquire Condé Nast as a wedding gift for Sanchez, with the corporation's magazines including Vogue, Teen Vogue, Vanity Fair, Glamour, The New Yorker, GQ, and others. British tabloids emphasized that Bezos's possibility of acquiring the publishing giant has become a central topic in Vogue's offices.

Despite official denials from the Newhouse family, which has owned Condé Nast since 1959 through Advance Publications, several internal sources are convinced otherwise. Certain signs suggest the company may already be preparing the ground for a potential sale, including a wave of global layoffs that recently affected Condé Nast's Italian division in recent months.

Bezos, after all, is no stranger to the publishing world – in 2013, he acquired The Washington Post for $250 million. Even then, the acquisition sparked considerable controversy and concern among journalists and employees, who feared potential interference from an owner with strong commercial interests.

Earlier this year, tensions at The Washington Post escalated further after Bezos announced a significant change, declaring that the newspaper's opinion section would focus almost exclusively on individual freedoms and free markets.

According to reports, Condé Nast corporation is undergoing a streamlining process these days, which is exactly what businesses do before a sale. Lauren was featured on the cover because Anna is supposedly the one conducting negotiations on the deal. Anna has much to gain from a sale because she holds shares in the company, according to a report.

Condé Nast is worth $5 billion, according to The Hollywood Reporter, suggesting Bezos would need to pay a significant sum to close the deal. However, a source close to Jeff Bezos claimed the rumor that he is considering acquiring Condé Nast is "completely untrue," according to a Daily Mail report.

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The city of Venice, which is usually accustomed to concerts and romantic cruises, experienced an invasion of a different kind as private jets (no fewer than 90) landed at Marco Polo Airport. Names like Oprah Winfrey, Leonardo DiCaprio, Bill Gates, Ivanka Trump, the Kardashian-Jenner family, and even Queen Rania of Jordan turned the event into an international VIP festival.

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According to reports published Saturday in Forbes Australia, despite the recent plunge in Tesla stock, the company's CEO, Elon Musk, is still the richest person in the world today. Musk has held this title continuously since May 2024.

Jeff Bezos, founder and chairman of Amazon, who was still in second place at the end of February, dropped to third place on the list this month, with his position taken by none other than Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and founder of Meta.

Eight out of the 10 richest people in the world are Americans, the other two citizens are French Bernard Arnault and Spanish Amancio Ortega, and half of the people on the list are Jewish. All ten of the world's richest people as of March 1, 2025, are men. Each of their fortunes is estimated at approximately $118 billion or more.

Alongside these, Microsoft founder Bill Gates has fallen off the list since October 2024 after information that reached Forbes revealed a significant reduction in his wealth. In his place, Amancio Ortega, founder and chairman of Inditex Group and owner of the Zara store chain, entered the list in ninth place.

The 10 richest people in the world as of today:

1. Elon Musk (owner of X network, CEO of Tesla)
2. Mark Zuckerberg (Jewish-American, CEO and founder of Meta)
3. Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon)
4. Larry Ellison (Jewish-American billionaire, Chief Technology Officer at Oracle Corporation)
5. Bernard Arnault (French owner of LVMH corporation)
6. Warren Buffett (Chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway investment firm)
7. Larry Page (Jewish-American entrepreneur, co-founded Google with Brin)
8. Sergey Brin (Jewish-American entrepreneur, co-founded Google with Page)
9. Amancio Ortega (founder and chairman of global Inditex Group)
10. Steve Ballmer (Jewish-American, former CEO of Microsoft)

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Jeff Bezos, the founder and former CEO of Amazon, plans to sell around 25 million Amazon shares valued at approximately $5 billion.

The proposed sale would reduce Bezos' stake in Amazon to around 8.8% or 950 million shares, which is approximately 10% of the company.

The potential sale comes after Amazon's stock rallied 32% in 2024, driven by the success of its cloud services and AI market, reaching a record high of $200 per share and a market value of over $2 trillion.

Bezos is expected to remain the world's second-richest person with a net worth of around $214.4 billion, trailing behind Bernard Arnault.

Potential reasons for Bezos' stock sale include raising cash for other ventures like Blue Origin, a potential NFL team purchase, or personal reasons.

Sources: Business Insider, Reuters, Fox Business, MarketWatch, Benzinga, Tiempo, Tech Times, Business Times.

This article was written in collaboration with Generative AI news company Alchemiq.

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A fully autonomous Blue Origin rocketship lifted off on Wednesday from a launch site in rural West Texas on a planned suborbital flight that made "Star Trek" actor William Shatner the oldest person ever in space.

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Shatner, at age 90, became the oldest person ever in space during a flight that lasted about 11 minutes. Blue Origin said the four astronauts experienced about three to four minutes of weightlessness and travel above the internationally recognized boundary of space known as the Karman Line, about 62 miles (100 km) above Earth. The crew capsule returned to the Texas desert under parachutes.

Winds were light and skies were clear for the launch, which was conducted after two delays totaling roughly 45 minutes.

Joining Shatner – who embodied the promise of space travel in the classic 1960s TV series "Star Trek" and seven subsequent films – in the all-civilian crew were former NASA engineer Chris Boshuizen, clinical research entrepreneur Glen de Vries and Blue Origin vice president and engineer Audrey Powers.

It marked the second space tourism flight for Blue Origin, billionaire US businessman Jeff Bezos's company founded two decades ago.

Shatner, who turned 90 in March, has been acting since the 1950s and remains busy with entertainment projects and fan conventions. He is best known for starring as Captain James T. Kirk of the starship Enterprise on the classic 1960s TV series "Star Trek" and seven subsequent films about fictional adventures in outer space.

Shatner said there is both irony and symmetry to his space trip, having played a space explorer for decades and now actually becoming one.

"Having played the role of Captain Kirk... assigns me the knowledge that a futuristic astronaut would have, but I've always been consumed with curiosity," said Shatner in a Blue Origin video.

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Amazon has unveiled a new household, canine-like robot called "Astro" and a deal with Walt Disney Co. to imbue its voice-controlled tech in resort hotels, striving to make its virtual aide Alexa a bigger part of consumers' lives.

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The home robot is designed to take up tasks such as home monitoring, setting up routines and reminders, and can play music and TV shows while rolling around the house.

The device, which has digital eyes on a rotating screen mounted on wheels, is available at an introductory invite-only price of $999.99 and a regular price of $1,449.99.

Among other launches in its latest lineup were a smart thermostat, smart display Echo Show 15, and a new health-tracking band called Halo View.

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Jeff Bezos, the world's richest man, soared about 66.5 miles above the Texas desert aboard his company Blue Origin's New Shepard spacecraft on Tuesday and returned safely to Earth, a historic suborbital flight that begins a new era of private commercial space tourism.

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"Best day ever," Bezos said after the space capsule touched down, kicking up a cloud of dust on the desert floor.

The 57-year-old American billionaire was joined by his brother Mark, a private equity executive for a trip lasting 10 minutes and 10 seconds. The two brothers were accompanied by 18-year old Oliver Daemen, Blue Origin's first paying customer, and the youngest person to go to space. His father, who heads investment management firm Somerset Capital Partners, was on site to watch his son fly. Bezos also invited 82-year-old Wally Funk, who was one of 13 women of the so-called Mercury 13 group who trained to become NASA astronauts in the early 1960s but were passed over because of their gender.

After landing and exiting the space capsule, Bezos and the other crew members exchanged hugs and popped champagne.

The fully autonomous 60-foot-tall white spacecraft, with a blue feather design on its side, ignited its BE-3 engines for liftoff from Blue Origin's Launch Site One facility about 20 miles outside the rural town of Van Horn.

The flight came nine days after Briton Richard Branson was aboard his competing space tourism company Virgin Galactic's successful inaugural suborbital flight from New Mexico. The two flights give credibility and inject enthusiasm into the fledgling space tourism industry that the Swiss bank UBS estimates will be worth $3 billion annually in a decade.

"Well done," Branson wrote on Twitter, congratulating Bezos and his crewmates.

Bezos founded Blue Origin two decades ago. This was its first crewed space flight.

New Shepard hurtled at speeds reaching 2,233 miles per hour, exceeding the so-called Karman line – 62 miles – set by an international aeronautics body to define the boundary between Earth's atmosphere and space.

After the capsule separated from the booster, the crew unbuckled to experience weightlessness. The capsule returned to Earth under parachutes, using a retro-thrust system that expelled a "pillow of air" for a soft landing.

Branson got to space first, but Bezos flew higher - Virgin Galactic managed an altitude of 53 miles – in what experts called the world's first unpiloted space flight with an all-civilian crew.

The flight came on the anniversary of Americans Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin becoming the first humans to walk on the moon, on July 20, 1969. New Shepard is named for Alan Shepard, who in 1961 became the first American in space.

New Shepard is a rocket-and-capsule combo that cannot be piloted from inside the spacecraft. It is completely computer-flown and had none of Blue Origin's staff astronauts or trained personnel onboard. Virgin Galactic used a space plane with a pair of pilots onboard.

The reusable Blue Origin booster had previously flown twice to space.

The launch represented another step in the fiercely competitive race to establish a space tourism sector. Another billionaire tech mogul, Elon Musk, plans to send an all-civilian crew on a several-day orbital mission on his Crew Dragon capsule in September.

On Twitter, Musk wished Blue Origins crew "best of luck" before the launch.

Blue Origin aims for the first of two more passenger flights this year to happen in September or October.

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The probe was underway by 2017, when Federal Bureau of Investigation officials were trying to learn whether NSO obtained from American hackers any of the code it needed to infect smartphones, said one person interviewed by the FBI then and again last year.

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NSO said it sells its spy software and technical support exclusively to governments and that those tools are to be used to pursue suspected terrorists and other criminals. NSO has long maintained that its products cannot target US phone numbers, though some cybersecurity experts have disputed that.

The FBI conducted more interviews with technology industry experts after Facebook filed a lawsuit in October accusing NSO itself of exploiting a flaw in Facebook's WhatsApp messaging service to hack 1,400 users, according to two people who spoke with agents or Justice Department officials.

NSO said it was not aware of any inquiry.

"We have not been contacted by any US law enforcement at all about any such matters," NSO said in a statement provided by Mercury Public Affairs strategy firm. NSO did not answer additional questions about its employees' conduct but previously said government customers are the ones who do the hacking.

A spokeswoman for the FBI said the agency "adheres to DOJ's policy of neither confirming nor denying the existence of any investigation, so we wouldn't be able to provide any further comment."

Reuters could not determine which suspected hacking targets are the top concerns for investigators or what phase the probe is in. But the NSO is a focus, and a key issue is how involved it has been in specific hacks, the sources said.

Part of the FBI probe has been aimed at understanding NSO's business operations and the technical assistance it offers customers, according to two sources familiar with the inquiry.

Suppliers of hacking tools could be prosecuted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act or the Wiretap Act, if they had enough knowledge of or involvement in improper use, said James Baker, general counsel at the FBI until January 2018.

The CFAA criminalizes unauthorized access to a computer or computer network, and the Wiretap Act prohibits use of a tool to intercept calls, texts or emails.

NSO is known in the cybersecurity world for its "Pegasus" software and other tools that can be delivered in several ways. The software can capture everything on a phone, including the plain text of encrypted messages, and commandeer it to record audio.

A business strategy firm retained on behalf of Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos, FTI Consulting, said this month that NSO could have supplied the software it said Saudi Arabia used to hack Bezos' iPhone.

The phone began sending out more data hours after it received a video from a WhatsApp account associated with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, FTI said. Saudi Arabia called the FTI allegation "absurd," and NSO said it was not involved. Other security experts said the data was inconclusive.

The FBI is investigating and has met with Bezos, a member of his team told Reuters. A Bezos spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

FBI leaders have indicated that they are taking a hard line on spyware vendors.

At a briefing at FBI Washington headquarters in November, a senior cybersecurity official said that if Americans were being hacked, investigators would not distinguish between criminals and security companies working on behalf of government clients.

"Whether you do that as a company or you do that as an individual, it's an illegal activity," the official said.

In the counterintelligence aspect of the probe, the FBI is trying to learn if any US or allied government officials have been hacked with NSO tools and which nations were behind those attacks, according to a Western official briefed on the investigation.

Outside of government, journalists, human rights activists and dissidents in several countries have been victims of attacks using NSO spyware, according to the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab researchers.

In the past, NSO has denied involvement in some of those instances and declined to discuss others, citing client confidentiality requirements.

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According to the report, while Israeli retailers are hoping that the site will be up and running to allow shoppers to take advantage of Amazon's Prime Day, which falls in mid-July, a more realistic date for the Israeli site launch is in August, ahead of the start of the 2019-2020 school year and before the High Holidays.

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In May, Amazon was contacting Israeli suppliers on its platform to offer them to be among the first to sell locally to customers through its Fulfillment By Merchant (FBM) sales method.

"Dear friend, We are pleased to invite you to be part of a group of selected sellers and to participate in the Local Delivery program in Israel," wrote Amazon co-founder and CEO Jeff Bezos in the Hebrew-language invitation, according to The Jerusalem Post.

FBM means that sellers list their products on Amazon but ship them to buyers themselves, rather than via the online giant's distribution service.

FBM can be a stepping stone before the online giant establishes its own warehouses.

The move to begin local operations comes after Amazon briefly provided free shipping for goods exceeding $75 to Israel at the end of last summer.

In 2017, Amazon announced that it would set up a couple of research and development centers in Haifa and Tel Aviv.

Parts of this article were originally published by i24NEWS.

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