Kazi Najib Ashraf: May you live

“May you live in interesting times”. This Chinese curse - reserved for their most notable adversaries from ancient times - seems to have dawned for the current inhabitants of the blue planet. A bouquet of interesting events has been unleashed for the past three months with the pace not subsiding anytime soon.

There is so much on the plate to discuss, hence I thought of a monologue for what might come to us in the world of tech.

But first let us check the international happenings in the world of business, that we underlined in our most important headlines from the last issue. Zoom had a windfall with the sudden episode of the pandemic, taking its valuation to unimaginable heights. However, in a flurry of confusion, investors jumped on trading the stock of Zoom Technologies, a worthless penny stock rather than the one for the original company called Zoom Video Communications that had a super successful IPO. Zoom Technologies’ ticker symbol is ZOOM while the one for Zoom Video Communications uses ZM. A simple mistake in the frenzy of the time and a simple oversight, that took the ZOOM stock up by 5,400%. Other interesting events such as a -36$ futures oil trade in business was another such incident that would make the time memorable for generations to come in business vocabulary.

Elon Musk, the Prince of California, seems to be high on something strange, as he has been unleashing tweet storms plunging his company shares to all time lows. Basically telling him that his job was about to be obsolete, Musk confessed to a US Airforce official that Fighter Air-crafts would be replaced totally by drones in a few years, also predicting that language would also disappear by 2025. The weird factor in Silicon Valley is not subsiding and almost on a daily basis there are sure shot and mind-boggling news. Before I forget, Musk also opened the Tesla factory defying the lockdown by threatening to move the factory elsewhere, so much for privilege. By the way, did you get to hear about X Æ A-12 Musk? No, that’s not a new Space X Project, but the name of Elon Musk’s son born during the great pandemic of 2020! While people are still struggling to learn how to pronounce it, I totally emphasize with the guy when he will go and face his friends at school. Lockdown - we must admit - did effect people after all.