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Early this morning, Amazon announced a new $15 minimum wage for all 350,000 of its U.S. employees. The new pay threshold will go into effect Nov. 1 for all full-time, temporary and seasonal workers across the company’s U.S. warehouse and customer service teams as well as Whole Foods. The announcement comes as Amazon has faced increased criticism over its pay and treatment of warehouse workers, and as CEO Jeff Bezos’s place as the world’s wealthiest businessman has made his company a lightning rod for politicians like Sen. Bernie Sanders. “We listened to our critics, thought hard about what we wanted to do, and decided we want to lead,” Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos said in a statement.[Jason Del Rey / Recode]
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Meet Instagram’s new boss: Adam Mosseri, Instagram’s current VP of product and a former high-ranking product exec at Facebook, is taking over as “Head of Instagram,” as expected. The news comes a week after Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger unexpectedly revealed they were resigning from Facebook six years after selling their company to Mark Zuckerberg for $1 billion. Zuckerberg needs this transition to be successful, so it makes sense he’d hand the reins to a trusted deputy. [Kurt Wagner / Recode]
General Electric’s new CEO has a reputation for transforming companies: Larry Kulp ran the science and tech company Danaher, executed multiple mergers and acquisitions, and employed innovative manufacturing techniques — all things that should come in handy as he tries to turn around the sputtering industrial conglomerate, which abruptly removed John Flannery as chairman and CEO after only a year on the job. GE shares, which had fallen to a nine-year low last week, surged in reaction. [Thomas Black and Brandon Kochkodin / Bloomberg]
Provided you’re not a close associate of President Trump, there may never be a better time to be a tax cheat. The Internal Revenue Service pursues about 25 percent fewer cases of tax evasion than it did less than 10 years ago. The agency’s budget has been repeatedly cut since 2011, forcing it to reduce its enforcement staff by a third. And with fewer cases, experts fear that American taxpayers will get the message that it’s all right to break the law.[Jesse Eisinger and Paul Kiel / The New York Times]
California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a new law that bans bots from pretending to be real people in pursuit of selling products or influencing elections. With just about a month to go before the 2018 U.S. midterm elections, social media companies have pledged to crack down on foreign interference; a big part of that effort has been targeting bots that spread misinformation and divisive political rhetoric. Twitter said it took down 9.9 million “potentially spammy or automated accounts per week” in May. [Gili Malinsky / NBC News]
Yeah, you’ve seen that metallic-gold-on-pink wallpaper and four-poster bed somewhere before: Take a look inside a penthouse apartment in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood that rents for $15,000 a month — furnished by the online furniture company Wayfair, it was designed as a backdrop for Instagram stars, who have booked it through October and have already racked up tens of thousands of lucrative “Likes.” Photographs of the apartment, when viewed alongside the Instagram posts that resulted from photo shoots in the same space, give an idea of how the social media sausage is made. [Sapna Maheshwari / The New York Times]
Top stories from Recode
Gov. Jerry Brown signed the bill into law today, but it could face legal challenges from companies. [Shirin Ghaffary]
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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
