The day after Independence Day in the U.S., Jeff Bezos will give up the day-to-day reins of the now-colossal company he founded nearly three decades ago.

Bezos, speaking Wednesday at Amazon’s annual shareholder — his last as CEO — announced that he will step aside as chief exec on July 5, whereupon Andy Jassy, who is currently CEO of Amazon Web Services, will take over the role.

Amazon had previously announced the CEO transition plan. Bezos isn’t going to stray very far — he will remain involved in major decisions at the company as executive chairman.

“I’m very excited to move into the exec chair role where I will focus my energies and attention on new products and early initiatives,” Bezos said.

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Microsoft is finally retiring Internet Explorer next year, after more than 25 years. The aging web browser has largely been unused by most consumers for years, but Microsoft is putting the final nail in the Internet Explorer coffin on June 15th, 2022, by retiring it in favor of Microsoft Edge.

“We are announcing that the future of Internet Explorer on Windows 10 is in Microsoft Edge,” says Sean Lyndersay, a Microsoft Edge program manager. “The Internet Explorer 11 desktop application will be retired and go out of support on June 15, 2022, for certain versions of Windows 10.”

While the Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) of Windows 10 will still include Internet Explorer next year, all consumer versions will end support of the browser. Microsoft doesn’t make it clear (and we’re checking), but it’s likely that we’ll finally see the end of Internet Explorer being bundled in Windows either in June 2022 or soon after.

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(Bloomberg) — At the heart of the largest money fight that London’s divorce courts have ever known sits the Luna — a 115-meter (380-foot), nine-deck luxury motor yacht holed up at a berth in a dusty marina in Dubai.

The Luna is the largest and most expensive single asset held by companies linked to oil and gas tycoon Farkhad Akhmedov, who bought the vessel from his fellow billionaire Roman Abramovich. It is also the prized target for Tatiana Akhmedova, Farkhad’s former wife of 21 years. Worth about 250 million pounds ($353 million), seizing control of the yacht would go a long way toward satisfying a London court’s 450-million-pound divorce award in her favor.

But that, Tatiana is finding out, won’t be easy. With settlement talks with her former husband going nowhere, she has taken to fighting her battle in multiple jurisdictions, from Dubai and Liechtenstein to the Marshall Islands. What the money chase shows is that a ruling from a court in London may not be worth the paper it’s written on when pitted against someone who can move assets across the globe and is determined to frustrate the order.

Farkhad has said he will do everything to ensure that his former wife can’t get her hands on his fortune. The case sheds some light on how the world’s wealthy are able to protect assets through regulation arbitrage, playing one jurisdiction against another, creating opaque trusts and transferring ownership.

After the latest court ruling by a London judge last month — this time involving the couple’s 27-year-old son Temur, to whom Tatiana alleges his father transfered assets — Farkhad said the case “is beneath contempt and changes nothing.” The son was more conciliatory, with his spokesman saying he has never sought to take sides between his two parents.

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If you spent the pandemic holed up at home, dreaming of the day you can jet away on vacation using all those miles you’ve banked, you may want to wake up.

Airlines Are Under Heavy Pressure To Devalue Your Mileage Points

Five of America’s largest airlines collectively owe frequent fliers $27.5 billion worth of free air travel, or other products and services that can be paid for with the mileage points earned in their frequent flier programs.

That’s up a record $2.9 billion, or 11.6%, based on the annual reports of Delta, American, United, Southwest and JetBlue. In part that’s thanks to the near-total absence of frequent flier award trips during the Covid-19 pandemic, when few people have been traveling. In a normal year, those carriers’ frequent flier liability totals grow at rates below 4%. It’s also partly the result of frequent fliers still continuing to earn points in loyalty programs even though few people actually flew during the pandemic. In 2019 U.S. consumers earned $12.6 billion worth of mileage points. But instead of that number falling to near-zero mileage points earned, loyalty program members still earned $6.8 billion worth of mileage points in 2020, almost entirely by charging purchases to credit cards linked to their preferred carrier’s loyalty program.

But as odd as it may seem, that’s actually not a good thing for travel consumers. At least that’s what the experts on frequent flier programs are warning us about now.

You see, per General Accepted Accounting Practices airlines must disclose on their balance sheets how much free travel they owe the public should every frequent flier cash in every mile they’ve earned – all in one year. Of course, that’s never going to happen, but since the airlines owe that free travel to their frequent fliers every bit as much as they owe billions of dollars to the banks, other institutions and bond holders from whom they’ve borrowed money, it has to be publicly disclosed.

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