The 2021 Big Business Quiz

Since January 2021, Elon Musk, Bernard Arnaul, and Jeff Bezos have been switching places at the lead on Forbes' real-time tracker of the world's wealthiest people. In January 2021, Bloomberg reported Elon Musk edged past Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to grab the world's richest person. After briefly dropping to No. 2, Bezos regained the No.1 spot for about four months, from mid-January until May. Musk, meanwhile, was overtaken by Arnault and dropped down to third place for months beginning in April. In May, Louis Vitton owner Arnault first became the world's richest person after acquiring jeweler Tiffany & Co. By October, Musk returned to lead the table with an estimated $199.8 billion net worth. As of June 2022, Musk's net worth is valued at $224 billion.

Chinese billionaire Jack Ma appeared Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2021, in a 50-second video, congratulating teachers in an online ceremony of the annual Rural Teacher Initiative event, thus ending a two and a half month absence from public view. In October 2020, after billionaire Jack Ma criticized China’s banking rules, Chinese regulators began cracking down on Ma’s business empire. Ma has rarely been seen publicly since then.

In 2021 Ben & Jerry's started marketing Doggie Desserts in two flavors: Pontch's Mix made with peanut butter and pretzel pieces, and Rosie's batch is a pumpkin-flavored frozen dessert with mini cookies. Even humans like it.

LIBOR stands for London Interbank Offered Rate. It is the primary benchmark, along with Euribor, for short-term interest rates around the world.

Libor 2021 fact:

On Friday, Mars 5, 2021, Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) called a formal end to nearly all Libor rates on December 31. The Libor is being replaced by rates compiled by central banks after lenders were fined billions of dollars for trying to rig what was once “the world’s most important number” used for pricing home loans and credit cards across the world

San Francisco-based retailer Gap also owns Old Navy, Banana Republic, and Athleta.

GAP and Kanye West 2021 Fact

Kanye West and Gap signed a 10-year agreement to design and sell clothes for men, women, and kids under the Yeezy Gap label. The arrangement excludes footwear, as Yeezy’s partnership with Adidas lasts until 2026. West’s sneaker and apparel business with Adidas and Gap is valued at $3.2 billion to $4.7 billion by UBS Group AG, according to a private document exposed by Bloomberg on Mar 17, 2021.

The Robinhood app offers commission-free trades of stocks and exchange-traded funds. It launched in 2015.

Robinhood 2021 Fact:

Robinhood did not report a specific type of stock trade it executed for customers last year to a public data feed, according to regulatory data analyzed by Reuters and published April 8, 2021. According to the report, Robinhood launched its fractional share service in December 2019 but only began publicly reporting trade executions the week of January 25, 2021.

What are fractional shares?

Fractional shares let investors buy a slice of a share, so rather than paying thousands of Dollars on a share of Amazon.com Inc, an investor can buy as little as $1 worth.

Why does it matter?

Brokerages are required to report all their trades to trade execution facilities (TRFs). It matters because when stocks trade on exchanges, everyone can see the activity. But when stocks trade over-the-counter, as is the case with Robinhood, investors rely on brokers to report the TRF trades. The information helps determine share prices.

Fastly is an American cloud computing services provider with a popular content-delivery network, or CDN.

So how did Fastly cause a global internet glitch?

On the morning of Tuesday, June 8, 2021, some of the most significant websites on the internet simultaneously went offline, including Amazon, The New York Times, CNN, and Reddit. That evening, CDN provider Fastly's senior vice president of engineering and infrastructure explained in a post that a bug unknowingly introduced in a software update from last month caused the website outages when a single Fastly customer reconfigured his internet connection, triggering the bug. According to the Fastly website post, 95 percent of the websites affected by the bug were back online with 49 minutes of downtime.

Square Inc is Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s digital payments firm.

Square Inc News Fact

Square Inc announced in Aug. 2021 it is buying out Afterpay - a buy now pay later app - for $29 billion, its biggest-ever acquisition. The takeover, also the biggest buyout of an Australian firm, creates a global transactions giant. The Melbourne-based Afterpay signed up millions of users in the United States during the past year.

According to Technomic data and reported by Restaurant Business, In 2020, Wendy surpassed Burger King to become the US No. 2 burger chain by sales. Wendy's system sales increased by 4.8% last year to $10.2 billion. At the same time, Burger King's sales dropped by 5.4% to $9.6 billion.

What's new?

For the first time in 21 years, Wendy's is returning to the UK. The chain, known for its square-shaped burgers,  opened its first UK restaurant in Reading on June 2, followed by four more locations later in 2021.

What's different about Wendy's British menu?

Wendy's British menu will include items aimed at the UK market, such as more vegetarian options. It will also have its breakfast Baconators, towering triple-stacked beef burgers, and Chocolate Frosty desserts.

American phone giant Verizon owned internet pioneer AOL since 2015 and 90s internet index Yahoo since 2017.

What’s new?

The New York Times reported on Sunday, May 2, 2021, that Verizon is near a deal to sell Yahoo and AOL to the private equity firm Apollo Global Management. The sale was completed on Sept. 1 for $5 billion and includes Verizon’s advertising technology business. The agreement is one sign that Verizon has given up on its media business.

Procter & Gamble owns Oral B, Crest, Gillette, Pampers, Always, Tampax, Ariel, Tide, Head & Shoulders, Herbal Essence, and Pantene, to name but a few.

Procter & Gamble 2021 Royal Fact

Photo; Northern Ireland Office, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, and her husband Prince Harry's Archewell Foundation announced a long-term partnership with American multinational consumer goods company Procter & Gamble on Tuesday, May 11, 2021.

What's the focus of Meghan and Harry's partnership with P&G?

According to the foundation, the partnership will focus on gender equality, inclusive online spaces, resilience, and impact through sport.

Extra fact:

As an 11-year-old, Meghan had written to Procter & Gamble to complain about a sexist TV advert that included the line: "Mothers around America are fighting greasy pots and pans." A TV interview later, the company changed it into "people all over America."

AT&T owns CNN, HBO, and Cartoon Network by acquiring Time Warner Inc., which the phone giant completed in 2018.

WarnerMedia Discovery 2021 Merger:

According to May 16, 2021, Bloomberg report, AT&T Inc. is preparing to spin off its media business and merge it with Discovery Inc. - which indicates a surprise reversal for a company that spent $85 billion to acquire the assets less than three years ago. The idea is to combine Discovery’s reality-TV empire with AT&T’s vast media holdings, building a business that would be a formidable competitor to Netflix Inc. and Walt Disney Co.

Red Ventures, which owns Lonely Planet, CNET, TV Guide, Metacritic, and GameSpot, is arguably the most prominent digital publisher in America, according to the New York Times, with 4,500 employees and roughly $2 billion in annual revenues, and an average of 751 million visits a month.

Fox Corp. has completed its acquisition of TMZ, the company behind the daily syndicated TV shows “TMZ” and “TMZ Live,” from WarnerMedia at a price tag estimated at around $50 million. The September 2021 deal includes TMZ’s assets, including the TMZ Sports digital site and its TooFab celebrity unit that houses the hugely popular TMZ.com.

A trillion is a million million, or ten to the twelfth power, which means it’s written 1 and 12 zeros.

Facebook's Trillion 2021 fact:

As of June 28, 2021, Facebook's value went over the $1-trillion-mark for the first time in its history.

As of January 3, 2022, Apple Inc is worth $3 trillion, and Microsoft is closely trailing behind, Amazon and Alphabet Inc. are worth over $1.5 trillion each, and Facebook is worth around $1 trillion.

Andy Jassy replaced Jeff Bezos as president and CEO of Amazon on July 5, 2021, as Bezos became executive chairman, precisely 27 years since founding the company on July 5th, 1994.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos wanted to say thanks to the people who made his trip into space Tuesday, July 20, 2021, possible. “I want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all this,” the 57-year-old Bezos said during a news conference after becoming the second billionaire in just over a week to ride in his spacecraft.

How does Jeff Bezos finance Blue Origin?

Bezos said in April 2017 that he finances the rocket company by selling $1 billion in Amazon stock each year.

Virgin Galactic told the Wall Street Journal Elon Musk had bought a ticket for his own space ride with Richard Branson's space-tourism company. It is unclear how far up the waiting list Musk is for a seat. In a preflight interview by London's Sunday Times, Branson said: "Elon's a friend, and maybe I'll travel on one of his ships one day." Sunday morning, July 11, 2021, Branson tweeted a photo of himself and Musk: "Great to start the morning with a friend."

According to a notice from the Chinese National Press and Publication Administration, China is banning minors from playing online games for more than three hours a week, allowing online games between 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Fridays, weekends, and on public holidays starting Sept. 1, 2021. The gaming restrictions are part of China’s continuing crackdown on tech companies.

Brexit and the coronavirus pandemic sparked a supply chain crisis in the United Kingdom during 2021, leading to scarcities of goods, including McDonald’s milkshakes, Nando’s chicken, and the Marmite breakfast spread.

UK Beer Shortage News

Some pubs in the UK are experiencing “supply problems,” as a spokesman for pub chain Wetherspoon said Tuesday, Aug. 31, 2021. The beer shortage has been attributed to the ongoing lack of 100,000 truck drivers around the country to transport goods, a problem sparked by Britain’s decision to leave the European Union. On Sept. 25, the British Department for Transport said that 5,000 fuel tanker and food truck drivers would be allowed to work in the country for three months before Christmas to provide relief for the industry.