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Good morning. David Meyer here in Berlin, filling in for Alan.
Elon Musk has announced people in the U.S. can now buy Tesla’s electric cars using bitcoin—the option will become available elsewhere later this year.
The “Technoking” tweeted a few hours ago that Tesla will not convert the bitcoin it receives into fiat currency. The company bought $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin last month, saying at the time that it would enable bitcoin-based sales at some point.
So, leaving aside the significant issue of a clean-energy company diving into the environmentally devastating cryptocurrency scene, here comes the big question for Tesla and for the wider virtual-coin community: Who would hand over what is chiefly a speculative asset in exchange for a rapidly depreciating asset? Guess we’ll all learn the answer to that one soon.
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Separately, I had a chat yesterday with Chad Engelgau, the CEO of marketing-data giant Acxiom, about the privacy changes being rolled out by Google and Apple. In case you’ve not been following this stuff, Google will phase out support for third-party tracking cookies in Chrome, and says it is also forsaking the identification of web users for marketing purposes in any browser. Meanwhile, Apple will no longer let iOS apps track users without their explicit consent.
Of those two, Engelgau said he is most bothered by Google’s moves. Acxiom and others are backing a new tracking technology called Unified ID 2.0 that will identify people based on their email addresses, rather than using the cookies that Google will soon block, and he claims such techniques “will keep an open internet and will allow for free services to be continued to be delivered to consumers.” (Google, though, has warned the likes of Acxiom that they risk falling foul of data-protection laws.)
Crucially, Engelgau called out both Google and Apple for creating “walled gardens” where advertisers will be more dependent than ever on those tech giants, for reaching users.
This is the argument that ad-tech firms and some media companies have been advancing in Europe, where they have complained to competition regulators. So far, that argument has failed to sway French regulators regarding Apple’s behavior, but the U.K. antitrust watchdog has also opened a probe into Google’s moves—Engelgau said Acxiom is not involved in the mysterious coalition that made that complaint.
“We need fair and equitable practices so that we can have more businesses available than a few very large companies in the world,” he told me. “The big players and the smaller players, including us, should work towards a level playing field and an open internet.”
More news below.
David Meyer
@superglaze
david.meyer@fortune.com
Correction: Yesterday, Alan mistakenly said Bill Kennard is the only Black man serving as independent chair of a Fortune 500 company. John Thompson, independent chair of Microsoft, also fits the bill, and has been in that position since 2014.
TOP NEWS
Suez blocker
Desert winds blew a giant container ship into an awkward position in the Suez Canal, blocking the whole waterway—through which 12% of the world's trade volume passes—for what could be days. The Ever Given was heading to Rotterdam. Tankers are now piling up on both sides, and there could be an impact on oil and gas flows. CNN
Microsoft and Discord
Microsoft is reportedly in talks to buy Discord, a communication platform that's popular with the gaming community. As Fortune's Lucinda Shen explains, the potential acquisition demonstrates Microsoft's weighty ambitions in the gaming space, as well as the fact that it's keen to buy businesses with strong online communities (see also: Github). Fortune
Vaccine hitch
Hong Kong has suspended the rollout of the COVID vaccines being distributed by Fosun, BioNTech's Chinese partner, due to a packaging flaw in a particular batch. The vial cap defect is now being investigated to see if it poses any risk, but in the meantime Fosun's shares dropped as much as 5%. CNBC
AWS CEO
With Andy Jassy taking over from Jeff Bezos as Amazon CEO later this year, who will replace Jassy at the helm of Amazon's AWS cloud division? Adam Selipsky, the Tableau CEO who used to be Jassy's chief lieutenant at AWS. Fortune
AROUND THE WATER COOLER
USPS plan
U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has revealed his plan to save the U.S. Postal Service: allow for longer delivery times, reduce post office opening times, and hike rates. The plan also asks Congress to remove the USPS's obligation to pay in advance for retirees' health care benefits. Fortune
Vaccine exports
The European Commission is about to propose new rules that would allow vaccine exports to be blocked if the receiving country itself refuses to export vaccines, or the raw materials used in their manufacture. While existing rules have been used to block an AstraZeneca shipment (due to the company's delivery shortfalls within the EU), the new ones could also be used to stop EU-made BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna doses being sent to the U.K. Financial Times
Vaccine greed
Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson yesterday risked inflaming tensions with the EU by telling some lawmakers in his Conservative Party that the U.K.'s successful vaccine rollout was "because of capitalism, because of greed my friends." He then repeatedly asked the MPs to "forget I said that." No such luck! The Sun
AstraZeneca blunders
Fortune's Jeremy Kahn examines the many blunders AstraZeneca has made in its COVID vaccine drive, the latest of which could threaten approval in the U.S.: "While the circumstances of each of the company’s vaccine missteps has varied, a common thread has run through them all: a perception that the company has been less than fully transparent. The widening credibility chasm facing the AstraZeneca vaccine has severely eroded confidence in a vaccine that much of the world is still depending on to help end the pandemic." Fortune
This edition of CEO Daily was edited by David Meyer.
