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(WASHINGTON) — Major retailers have increased the price of at-home COVID-19 tests now that an agreement with the White House to sell them at a fixed price has expired.
In September, Walmart, Kroger and Amazon agreed to sell the two-pack boxes of at-home rapid antigen tests for $14 for three months amid a surge in positive cases with the delta and omicron variants. The agreement has since expired, according to a White House official.
Walmart is now charging $19.88 per box, where available, and Kroger has raised the price to $23.99. The brand is currently unavailable on Amazon’s website.
Despite the price hike, the at-home tests remain sold out — both online and in stores across the country
When asked Wednesday whether the Biden administration is currently in talks with retailers to bring the price of the tests back down, White House press secretary Jen Psaki declined to say.
“I can’t give you an update on any conversations,” Psaki said.
Instead, she pointed to other steps the administration is taking to make tests more available, including purchasing 500 million tests to distribute to Americans for free and requiring insurance companies to reimburse Americans for the tests starting next week.
The government will begin to receive the tests later this month and will then distribute them free of charge, Psaki told reporters on Tuesday, adding that she does not “have an update” on how long it will take to send out all 500 million tests and whether the distribution will occur over a certain period of time.
ABC News’ Mike Hernandez and Elliot Rubin contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — Former President Trump’s eldest son and daughter have refused to comply with subpoenas issued by the New York State attorney general’s office as it conducts a civil investigation into the way the family real estate business valued its holdings.
“A dispute has arisen between the OAG and the Individual Trump Parties regarding the Subpoenas,” a document filed Monday said.
The document, filed jointly by New York Attorney General Letitia James and an attorney for the Trump Organization, said Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump will now be named as respondents in James’ ongoing inquiry, which parallels a criminal investigation by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office.
“As her investigation into financial dealing of the Trump Organization continues, Attorney General James is seeking interviews under oath of Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and Ivanka Trump,” a spokesperson for the AG’s office said. “Despite numerous attempts to delay our investigation by the Trump Organization, we are confident that our questions will be answered and the truth will be uncovered because no one is above the law.”
Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump sought to quash the subpoenas Monday evening in a motion.
Alan Futerfas, an attorney representing both Trump children, questioned James’ motives: her office is also involved in the criminal investigation of the Trump Organization.
“The goal of the subpoenas is all too clear: Attorney General James seeks to circumvent the entire grand jury process and nullify Moving Parties’ most fundamental constitutional and statutory rights by requesting that they provide non-immunized testimony to the OAG — when the OAG/DANY is jointly conducting a grand jury investigation,” Futerfas wrote in a motion to quash the subpoenas, which he said violate the rules of criminal procedure.
The former president and his company have denied wrongdoing and have attacked the investigation as political.
The ongoing criminal investigation has so far resulted in indictments against the Trump Organization and its longtime chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg on tax charges.
Prosecutors said the company had been paying Weisselberg’s rent, living expenses, private school tuition and car lease without proper reporting on tax returns. Both pleaded not guilty.
(SAN DIEGO) — A California mom is entering 2022 debt-free after paying off more than $70,000 in student loan and credit card debt.
Amanda Courtney, 36, of San Diego, said she began falling into debt as soon as she entered college, nearly two decades ago.
“There was no way for me to go to college without taking out student loans, so I knew as I was applying for colleges that I was going to have to take out loans,” Courtney told Good Morning America. “I was kind of like, well, everyone takes out student loans, right? It’s fine.”
Courtney said she took out $15,000 in loans for her freshman year of college, and then also got into credit card debt when, at 18, she got a credit card without learning about how to budget and make her payments.
Over the next few years, Courtney said she transferred to two different colleges, including at one point living back at home and attending a community college, to try to lower her student loan debt.
When she graduated from college in 2008, the U.S. was in the midst of a financial crisis and Courtney said she could not find a job. Without a job, she could also not afford to pay off her student loans, she said.
“I continued to enroll in school just so I could defer my student loans because I couldn’t afford to make the minimum payments, all while continuing to accrue more credit card debt,” she said. “And I just fell deeper and deeper into debt.”
At age 25, Courtney, who now works as an administrative assistant at a San Diego high school, got a job working in education that allowed her to start to pay off her debt, but only with the minimum payments each month. She said she quickly learned that though she had deferred making payments on her student loans by taking low-cost community college classes for several years, the interest on her debt had continued to add up.
“I was deferring my loans, but I wasn’t deferring the interest, so though I was deferring making those payments, I was adding to my balance,” she said. “I didn’t have the financial literacy to understand what I was doing and the full implications of what I was doing.”
Courtney said that because federal loans and grants did not cover her full college tuition, she got a loan through a private loan company that carried what she described as an “insane interest rate.”
In the United States, Americans owe nearly $1.8 trillion in student loans, according to the Federal Reserve.
Coming from a family that did not discuss finances or budgeting, Courtney said she “truly did not know” what she was getting herself into when she signed up for student loans.
“I didn’t understand the economics of it and the commitment of it,” she said. “I think I just had this false sense of security that I’m working and I’m going to get a degree and then I’m going to have a job that can pay off the debt so it won’t be a big problem.”
“Then reality hits and you realize that’s not how any of this works and my $15,000 in loans very quickly becomes $30,000,” she said.
Things started to change for Courtney when she started dating her now-husband and they had conversations about their finances.
“I, very innocently, early in our relationship, was like so, ‘How much debt do you have?,'” she recalled. “He looked at me very plainly and said, ‘I don’t have any debt. How much do you have?'”
Courtney said she made a decision in that moment to be honest about her financial woes, and her now-husband worked with her to build a budget, the first time Courtney had done that in her life.
“I truly lived with this mindset that everybody lives with debt. Everybody has student loan debt. Everybody has credit card debt,” she said. “Having had that conversation with my now-husband, I started to think of money differently.”
With that foundation in place, Courtney spent the next nearly eight years paying off $50,000 in student loan debt and $12,000 in credit card debt.
She made her final student loan payment in September 2021.
“It took that long because I did it while still living my life,” said Courtney, who got married and gave birth to her first child and was at one point the sole income earner for her family in those eight years. “We built things into the budget so I felt this freedom to still live my life.”
Here are Courtney’s three tips for paying off debt.
1. Create a budget that works for you.
“The first thing you have to do is you have to be honest with yourself,” said Courtney. “So for me, that meant pulling out all of my credit card statements and all of my student loan balances, and really looking at where I was at, and making a plan.”
Courtney works on what she calls a zero-balance budget, which means that she directs each dollar in her paycheck to a specific location.
“Every month, a week before payday, I can actually view my paycheck, so on that day, I rebuild my budget every single month,” she said. “I look at what I have coming in versus what I have going out and I tell every dollar where to go.”
Courtney said she made sure that even while she was focused on paying off her debt, she allowed herself to continue to live her life.
“I was honest with myself, and I made a plan, but I made a realistic plan,” she said. “You have to allow yourself to go to that lunch celebration with friends. You have to allow yourself to buy yourself a new top every now and again.”
Courtney loves to travel, for example, so she created a special travel savings account that she directed money to each month. She said this allowed her to still travel while being financially responsible.
“If I want to go somewhere, I look at do I have enough in that travel account to go,” she said. “If I don’t, then I don’t get to go.”
2. Consolidate your loans, if possible.
A few years into her debt-paying journey, Courtney said she was able to consolidate her loans into one payment, which made it easier for her to track and pay off the loans.
“That was so freeing,” she said.
The U.S. Department of Education offers a Direct Consolidation loan with no fee.
3. Plan ahead instead of trying to catch up.
Courtney said she kept herself within her budget by learning to plan ahead for major events, like birthdays and holidays and vacations, instead of putting those expenses on credit cards.
“Whereas I always wanted to treat the holidays as an emergency and put it on my credit card and just make it rain in various stores, all of a sudden it was like, ‘Oh, I should be putting away money every month to get there and then look at what I have at the end of the year and look at what I can afford to do for people,'” she said. “One of the years, during my debt payoff, I made all of my Christmas presents for my friends and family.”
“I still felt like I got to give gifts, but I did so within my means,” she said.
4. Focus on small benchmarks at first.
Courtney said she at first focused on paying off her credit card with the lowest balance as a way to feel like she was making progress.
“I continued to make minimum payments on my other [credit cards], but I really focused on that one because I wanted to feel accomplished,” she said. “And when I paid off that first credit card, I remember, it felt so good.”
“It started to feel like, oh, I can do this I can make headway,” Courtney recalled. “Just with every little benchmark, it felt so great and so exciting.”
(NEW YORK) — Another week, another chance to become a bigger multi-millionaire.
No one had the winning numbers for Saturday’s half-billion-dollar Powerball jackpot, and the purse has now grown to over $522 million, according to the lottery officials.
There have been 38 drawings in a row without a jackpot winner. The last time someone won the Powerball was in October, when a California player matched the winning numbers for a $699.8 million jackpot.
The next Powerball drawing will be Monday night.
Although no one matched Saturday’s five lottery numbers and Powerball number — 6, 12, 39, 48, 50 and 7 — a few players did come up lucky with some runner-up prizes that had a hefty purse.
One player in Maryland won a $2 million prize for matching the five numbers and using the Power Play multiplier, while three players in Arizona, Florida and California each won $1 million for matching the five numbers, according to Powerball officials.
(NEW YORK) — COVID-19 cases among airline staff plus poor weather conditions resulted in 2,581 nationwide flight cancellations as of 4 p.m. on Saturday, according to Flight Aware.
The news comes after a week of mass flight cancellations, pushing the total number of flight cancellations this week to over 12,000.
The number of flights canceled on Saturday was the largest in a single day this week.
Airlines, which have been canceling hundreds of flights every day since Christmas Eve, canceled the largest number of flights on Saturday. On New Year’s Eve, there were 1,625 flights canceled.
The Federal Aviation Administration issued a warning to travelers on Friday that flight cancellations will continue as it experiences staffing issues.
Southwest Airlines said it has canceled 473 New Year’s Day flights. The company announced it will suspend operations at its Chicago Midway hub on Saturday as of 1 p.m. CST due to weather.
“Our Planners proactively suspended operations at both Chicago airports as of 1pm CST today (we operate well more than 200 departures a day at Chicago Midway) anticipating the gusty winds and blowing snow that decades of our history operating in this airport show us will slow down the airspace and also make deicing and getting aircraft back into the air very challenging,” Southwest said to ABC News in a statement.
“No doubt, for passengers of all air carriers, Chicago travel will be tough today,” Southwest Airlines said.
Delta Airlines said it had canceled 196 flights on Saturday.
“A combination of issues, including but not limited to inclement weather in some areas of the country and the impact of the omicron variant, are driving cancellations,” the airline said on its website.
American Airlines said it canceled 207 flights on Saturday.
“The winter storm in Chicago is having an impact on our operations, accounting for a significant number of our mainline cancellations,” American said in a statement to ABC News. “t’s affecting both flights in and out of Chicago and other flight sequences for our crew. The number of COVID-related sick calls is consistent with what we have seen over the past few days. The vast majority of impacted flights were precanceled yesterday so we could proactively notify and accommodate our customers and avoid last-minute disruptions at the airport .”
American Airlines also said that it had “issued a travel notice to allow all customers whose travel plans are impacted by the Chicago storm to rebook without change fees. We apologize to our customers whose travel plans have been affected, and want thank to our team who have worked tirelessly to help us care for our customers.”
Skywest Airlines said it canceled 465 flights Saturday.
“We continue to experience the impact of weather and the omicron variant across several SkyWest hubs, and have proactively canceled a significant number of flights due to the weekend’s weather in Chicago, Denver, and Detroit,” Skywest Airlines said in a statement to ABC News.
Skywest also said that its teams “are working nonstop to minimize impact to customers and crew. Customers should check their carrier’s website or app for the latest information about their flight.”
(NEW YORK) — The travel chaos continues for an eighth consecutive day Friday, with almost 1,300 U.S. cancellations as of 11 a.m. ET. The airlines have been grappling with the one-two punch of bad winter weather and a surge in crew COVID cases that have left them short-staffed, and forced airlines to cancel nearly 10,000 flights since Christmas Eve.
Now the Federal Aviation Administration is warning of staffing issues of its own, such as sick air traffic controllers. In addition, the FAA warned on Thursday that weather, holiday traffic and COVID-19 “are likely to result in some travel delays in the coming days.”
“Like the rest of the U.S. population, an increased number of FAA employees have tested positive for COVID-19,” the FAA said in a statement. “To maintain safety, traffic volume at some facilities could be reduced, which might result in delays during busy periods.”
The travel turbulence couldn’t have come at a worse time as millions of Americans travel during what could be the busiest travel period since the start of the pandemic. Roughly 8.5 million fliers are expected to pass through U.S. airports from now until Jan.3, according to estimates from the Transportation Security Administration.
Seattle-Tacoma International Airport has been hit particularly hard this week — holding the No. 1 spot for the most cancellations in the world for three days in a row. Denver International took its place on Friday morning, topping the list with more than 250 cancellations.
Carriers are trying to proactively cancel flights to give travelers time to rebook.
JetBlue Airways, which has seen sick calls in some departments up 200-300% more than average, canceled more than 1,200 flights over the next few weeks.
“While the new CDC guidelines should help get crewmembers back to work sooner, and our schedule reduction and other efforts will further ease day-of cancellations, we expect the number of COVID cases in the northeast — where most of our crewmembers are based — to continue to surge for the next week or two,” the airline said in a statement. “This means there is a high likelihood of additional cancellations until case counts start to come down.”
Delta Air Lines is already planning to cancel 200 to 300 daily flights for the upcoming weekend, citing “increasing winter weather and the omicron variant.”
Thousands of travelers who have had to call the airlines to change their flights have been met with long wait times.
Alaska Airlines was reporting hold times of up to 20 hours on Thursday.
Delta and JetBlue are quoting hold times of one hour and 35 minutes and two hours and 16 minutes, respectively.
On Monday, airlines got their first sign of possible relief when the CDC shortened the isolation period for asymptomatic and fully vaccinated individuals who contract COVID-19 from 10 days to five.
JetBlue CEO Robin Hayes told CNBC Thursday that the new guidelines are definitely going to help, but that “the size of the problem really is just the number of people contracting it.”
“Things are likely to get worse before it gets better,” he said.
(NEW YORK) — The New Year’s Day Powerball jackpot rose to $500 million, up from $483 million. The new jackpot estimate has a cash equivalent of $355.9 million.
The jackpot was raised after no ticket matched all six numbers drawn in Wednesday’s drawing. There have been 37 drawings in a row without a jackpot winner.
“Ticket sales have been strong through the holidays, and we anticipate the majority of ticket purchases for the next drawing will happen on New Year’s Day,” said May Scheve Reardon, Powerball Product Group chair and Missouri Lottery executive director.
The Powerball jackpot was last hit on Oct. 4 in California when a single ticket won a $699.8 million grand prize. This was the fifth largest prize in Powerball history.
Game leaders urged players to check their tickets for one of the nine ways to win.
Wednesday’s drawing produced one winning Match 5 ticket worth $1 million in Georgia and two winning Double Play tickets, worth $500,000 each, sold in Michigan and Puerto Rico.
Powerball will also be holding a special $1 million drawing just after midnight, eastern time, on Jan. 1. The winner will be chosen from five finalists who entered the promotion through their local lottery.
The largest Powerball jackpot hit this year was on Jan. 20 for $731.1 million in Maryland.
(NEW YORK) — Jeep evangelists listen up: Your rugged adventure mobile is going silent.
The gas-guzzling SUVs that have rolled off Jeep’s assembly lines for 80 years will be recast as “green” vehicles that live up to the brand’s off-roading reputation, according to Christian Meunier, the global CEO of Jeep.
Meunier’s ultimate goal? For Jeep to become a “zero-emission freedom brand.”
First up: The Wrangler 4xe, a plug-in hybrid that went on sale this year and already accounts for nearly 25% of Jeep’s volume. The 4xe makes 375 horsepower and has an EPA fuel economy of 49 MPGe (miles per gasoline-gallon equivalent, including electricity). Drivers get 21 miles of electric-only driving range when the 14.0-kWh lithium-ion battery is charged. Under the hood is a 2.0-liter turbocharged inline four-cylinder engine.
The Wrangler 4xe outsold the Prius in the first-quarter of 2021 and is now the No. 1 PHEV in the country. The Grand Cherokee 4xe arrives next year.
“The 4xe could make Jeep die-hards change their mind about leaving [internal combustion engines],” Meunier told ABC News. “When you drive electric Jeeps you fall in love with them.”
He added, “A lot of torque is awesome for off-road driving. It’s cool to be green.”
Electrification may be Jeep’s future — with a few exceptions. EPA fuel economy estimates of the newly launched Rubicon 392, the most powerful Wrangler with a mighty 6.4-liter Hemi V8 engine that produces 470 hp and 470 lb.-ft. of torque, clock in at 13 mpg (city) and 17 mpg (highway).
“The 392 is more of a niche market — 3% of total Wrangler sales. So very limited in volume and very exclusive,” Meunier said.
Jeep also reintroduced its iconic Wagoneer and Grand Wagoneer to compete in the increasingly cutthroat luxury three-row SUV category. Moreover, Meunier and his team are aggressively targeting drivers in key markets — Europe, China and Latin America — to expand Jeep’s customer base. North America makes up two-thirds of Jeep’s global sales.
“There is a very big product offensive across the globe … [our] reliance on North America is getting less and less every day,” Meunier said.
Meunier spoke to ABC News about where the brand is headed and how to get more Americans to accept EVs. The interview below has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Christian, you want to make Jeep the greenest SUV brand in the world.
A: Our vision is really to be the zero-emission freedom brand and we have a plan to get there. It’s clearly a commitment to say we’re the greenest SUV brand in the world. Twenty-five percent of our sales in the U.S. are 4xe. I think next year it will be more. The 4xe is the most capable Wrangler. We’re pretty confident that we’re going to be the greenest, the most electrified SUV brand at a global level, which is a big departure from where Jeep was a few years ago.
When are we going to see an all-electric Jeep in the U.S.?
A: That’s a good question. The only thing I can tell you is that by 2025 we’ll have a BEV [battery electric vehicle] in every single segment and pretty much across the globe. And the first [all electric] Jeep will be launched at the end of next year.
We brought the Magneto [Jeep’s BEV concept] and 4xe to the Easter Jeep Safari in Moab. A lot of the hardcore off-roaders told us that the torque … of the Magneto and 4xe could make them change their mind about leaving ICE [vehicles].
Does Jeep feel extra pressure to produce an all-electric Wrangler to compete in the off-roading space? There is the Rivian R1T, GMC Hummer EV and upcoming Ford F-150 Lightning.
A: We will do it. The question is when and how. We’re full speed ahead on electrification. It’s an obvious thing for Jeep to accelerate the electrification for Wrangler and the other models.
Magneto was really a concept test … we wanted to have an impression from our community. We value enormously the community input and feedback. We have a lot of interaction with them.
How do you get Americans to buy EVs?
A: I think it will take a little bit of time. It takes product to prove that it’s equivalent or better and it doesn’t create annoyance. I think Americans enjoy their freedom and want to be able to use their cars whenever they want. And they want to drive as many miles as they want. When the technology is good they’ll jump on it. Americans are very open to [EVs] as long as it makes their lifestyle equal or better.
Which model in your opinion is the most important for the brand?
A: The two most iconic products that exist today when you talk about Jeep are Wrangler and Grand Cherokee. The Grand Cherokee is a wildly civilized machine. The best-selling Jeep in the U.S. is the Grand Cherokee with 250,000 units. Wrangler is No. 2, with 213,000 units. We’re off to a strong start with Wagoneer and Grand Wagoneer — a premium extension of what Jeep is about.
Ford and Land Rover are determined to steal market share from the Wrangler with the Bronco and Defender. Have Jeep owners defected from the company? How can the Wrangler keep ahead of the competition?
A: The Wrangler has never sold as quickly as right now. We have zero stock on the ground and dealer inventory. Competition is healthy — it creates more visibility to a segment and it puts Wrangler more on the radar as well. It forces us to become better, come up with new ideas, new technologies. We’re not afraid of competition, it’s good. Is there a little cross shopping? Maybe. We don’t see a lot of defection from the Jeepers to Ford or another brand.
What is the biggest challenge facing every automaker right now?
A: The biggest challenge is — I would say there are many of them. We have raw materials going through the roof. Steel prices. Precious metal. Inflation in the materials we use to build cars so that puts pressure on the cost side. We have the microchips shortage which is a challenge for everyone. It forces us to be innovative and engineer cars with alternative solutions. The cost of electrification is quite high. We cannot pass everything to the customer so that puts pressure on us. We’re working with a lot of economies of scale to mitigate these issues. A lot of headwinds on the cost side.
So does that mean Jeep will have to raise prices on all vehicles next year?
A: It’s not only about pricing. It’s also about making sure we’re more efficient in the way we build cars.
(NEW YORK) — Thursday marks a week of travel woes across the country with more than 8,000 flight cancellations nationwide since Christmas Eve. As millions of Americans travel during what could be the busiest travel period since the start of the pandemic, airlines have been slammed with both winter weather and rising COVID-19 cases among flight crews.
Now, at least one major U.S. airline, JetBlue Airways, is signaling this weeklong crush of cancellations may just be the beginning.
JetBlue said on Wednesday it is preemptively canceling more than 1,200 flights over the next two weeks in order to have enough crews available to run a reliable operation.
“While the new CDC guidelines should help get crewmembers back to work sooner, and our schedule reduction and other efforts will further ease day-of cancellations, we expect the number of COVID cases in the northeast — where most of our crewmembers are based — to continue to surge for the next week or two,” the airline said in a statement. “This means there is a high likelihood of additional cancellations until case counts start to come down.”
On Thursday, more than 1,100 flights were canceled in the U.S. as of 2:30 p.m. ET.
Seattle Tacoma International has been impacted the most, holding the top spot for the most cancellations in the world for a third day in a row with nearly a third of all flights grounded. The airport added, “Staffing issues may bring further delays in operations.”
Alaska Airlines, whose main hub is in Seattle, is reporting call hold times of more than 10 to 20 hours.
“We strongly urge flyers with non-essential travel scheduled before January 2, 2022, to consider changing their travel to a later date using our flexible travel policy,” the airline said in a statement Wednesday.
The disruptions come as airports brace for the more than 10.5 million fliers estimated to fly from now until Jan. 3. The busiest New Year travel days are still ahead with Hopper forecasting 2.5 million could fly on Jan. 2 and Jan. 3.
Delta Air Lines is already projecting 200 to 300 daily cancellations for the upcoming weekend as “teams across [their] system continue to do all possible to mitigate constraints from increasing winter weather and the omicron variant.”
Experts say the COVID-19-related cancellations should be a reminder to holiday fliers to protect yourself as much as you can during travel.
“These cancellations are reasons why it’s important for people to wear the masks, wash their hands frequently and reduce movement around the cabin when you’re on a plane,” aviation expert Henry Harteveldt said. “It’s just really important. All of these are part of layers of safety to keep everyone as healthy as possible while traveling for the holiday.”
(NEW YORK) — Over the past year, routine space tourism emerged from science fiction to reality, digital art you can’t even touch auctioned for millions at Christie’s, and malicious attacks emanating from cyberspace crippled real-world critical infrastructure in the U.S.
The technology industry unceasingly shaped the way Americans lived in 2021, embedding its brands and tools into intimate parts of daily life as the ongoing pandemic further normalized virtual work, school and socializing.
The promises of tech’s ability to make our lives easier and more efficient continued to drive U.S. economic growth in the shadow of the relentless health crisis, but also exposed new pitfalls as more Americans lived their lives in a digital world where misinformation on everything from elections to vaccines thrives. This manifested off-the-screen in ominous ways during 2021, including an unprecedented post-election riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 and an “anti-vax” movement that has prolonged the suffering wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The gatekeepers of Big Tech saw their net worth surge over the past year, but also endured a year of major shakeups: from Jeff Bezos stepping down as Amazon CEO, to a scandal-plagued Facebook rebranding as Meta, to Jack Dorsey resigning from Twitter. The mounting power of tech giants also came under renewed scrutiny — albeit accompanied by little action — from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
Despite the wild 12 months where Americans watched, seemingly in real time, as technology transformed society in good and bad ways, experts are holding onto hope that the lessons we’ve learned in 2021 can inform us going forward.
“I’m trying desperately to be optimistic,” Karen Kornbluh, the director of the Digital Innovation and Democracy Initiative at the German Marshall Fund, and a former U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development during the Obama administration, told ABC News of the tech industry’s past year. “This has been a learning year. We didn’t need another learning year — but I do think a lot of people learned a lot about how this all works and how entrenched it is and how dangerous it is.”
Still, Kornbluh argues that the tech sector is “so innovative and creative and allows people to do so many things we never could have imagined before.”
“We can’t lose our sense of wonder about it all, and because there are these new opportunities, I do think the industry is going to try to put a lot of these problems behind it before we move into this new era,” she said.
Here is a look at the year in tech, lessons the industry has learned and what to expect looking forward into 2022.
Jeff Bezos becomes an astronaut and routine space tourism blasts off
While it used to take the backing of entire nations to launch humans into space, that has all changed in the past year as the new billionaire-backed corporate space race officially blasted off to new heights.
A record-high 13 human spaceflights were launched in 2021, more than triple the number launched in 2020. Eight of them were launched with the backing of private industry and one more carried a Japanese millionaire tourist as a passenger.
Key players in the emerging space tourism sector — including Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic — all flexed their muscles over the past year in a series of launches that sought to prove humanity’s new capability of routine spaceflight.
The industry took heat from some as simply a new playground for the ultra-wealthy, as pandemic-battered Americans watched billionaires including Bezos and Branson blast off on back-to-back joyrides to the edge of space this past summer and initial seats sold for up to $28 million. While economic inequality and environmental concerns compounded animosity towards this new arena, experts have argued that private sector involvement in the new space race has saved money for NASA and driven new innovations that can improve everyday life back on Earth.
For Star Trek actor William Shatner, who became the oldest person to go to space this past October at the age of 90 on a Blue Origin flight, the new technology that allows humans to take a quick trip to the edge of space instilled a deep sense of awe.
“What you have given me is the most profound experience. I am so filled with emotion,” the actor, who spent his career pretending to cruise the cosmos, told Bezos immediately upon landing. “I hope that I can maintain what I feel now. I don’t want to lose it. I am overwhelmed.”
“Everybody in the world needs to do this,” Shatner added.
NFT craze goes mainstream, upending the art world and headlining Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade
Over the course of 2021, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) went from an obscure buzzword among blockchain insiders to an inescapable craze that even headlined the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.
NFTs, or one-of-a-kind digital artifacts that use blockchain technology (the same digital ledger system that supports cryptocurrency) to prove ownership and individuality, exploded in popularity over the past year in a craze that has left some scratching their heads.
In February, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey sold the first-ever tweet (a 2006 social media post that reads “just setting up my twttr”) as an NFT for some $2.9 million. In April, a collage made by digital artist Mike Winklemann (also known as Beeple) fetched a whopping $69 million when it was auctioned by Christie’s.
The sum at which Beeple’s art sold especially raised eyebrows for some. The artist has been known to upload his digital artwork for free on Instagram and his website, leading many to question what is driving the value of him now selling it in the form of an NFT. More perplexing for some, viral memes and gifs that were once sources of free and seemingly useless entertainment online are also fetching huge sums of cash when sold as NFTs. The so-called “nyan cat” meme, a digital image of a pixelated feline flying on a rainbow, racked in nearly $600,000 when it was sold as an NFT in February.
It’s estimated that total NFT sales are expected to generate a staggering $17.7 billion in 2021 alone, according to research compiled by crypto industry outlet Cointelegraph.
Despite some skeptics calling the craze a bubble, many experts don’t see demand for NFTs dwindling anytime soon — especially as the world increasingly shifts online and with the mainstream launch of the metaverse.
“They’re here to stay,” Christian Catalini, the founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Cryptoeconomics Lab, told ABC News of NFTs. “Because they do represent a fundamentally novel way to design all sorts of interactions.”
“I think we’re still in a very embryonic phase and I would assume as the space matures, that’s when actually these things will become more useful,” Catalini added.
“Often with technology, we tend to overestimate how quickly it can change our lives in the short term, or we also tend to underestimate how much it will change them in the long term,” Catalini said. “With all of these technologies, there’s a lot of potential in the long run, and there’s a lot of things that need to be figured out in the immediate term — and I think that’s all happening live, right now.”
The rise of ransomware
The widespread adoption of new technology also led to new threats emerging from the cyber world. A spate of high-profile cyberattacks, many involving ransomware, revealed new potential dangers for businesses and even critical infrastructure as attackers seemingly grew more brazen with their targets in 2021.
A cybersecurity attack in May on Colonial Pipeline, operators of one of the largest fuel conduits in the U.S., led to a multi-day shutdown of the pipeline that provides nearly half of all fuel used on the East Coast — by hospitals, schools, and much more. The company ended up paying the hackers some $4.4 million in cryptocurrency, some of which the Department of Justice eventually seized back. Just weeks later, the world’s largest meat processor, JBS, revealed it was also hit by a cyberattack involving ransomware.
Experts say use of this malicious technology surged over the past year due to a confluence of factors, including the rise of harder-to-trace cryptocurrency and a work-from-home boom that has resulted in novel IT vulnerabilities for many firms.
“Ransomware attacks are becoming more prevalent, and especially with more enterprises in a semi-remote environment,” tech industry analyst Dan Ives, managing director of equity research at Wedbush Securities, told ABC News, “and the ransomware attacks, we expect they could be up another 50%, going into 2022.”
“That’s really going to catalyze more spending for cybersecurity,” he added. “We think cybersecurity spend is going to skyrocket over the next year given the amount of threats facing enterprises, as well as governments, around the world.”
Tech fuels a ‘green tidal wave’ in autos
Also over the course of 2021, it became undeniable that the auto industry as a whole was reaching an inflection point and shifting away from the gasoline-burning combustion engines that have been used for generations and toward electrification.
Nearly every major car producer — from General Motors to Ford to Toyota — announced massive new investments into electrification of vehicles over the past year, and the Biden administration unveiled the goal of half of all new car sales in the U.S. to be electric vehicles by 2030.
“It’s really a green tidal wave that’s taken hold in terms of more consumers wanting to purchase electric vehicles,” Ives told ABC News. “Today, only 3% of automobiles in the world of EVs. We think that that goes to 6% by 2022 and 10% by 2025, and this green tidal wave we view as a $5 trillion market over the next decade.”
“You’re also seeing a blurring of lines between technology and autos” Ives said. “I think that’s going to be a big theme as companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon focus more and more on electric vehicles.”
In the shadow of scandal and scrutiny, Big Tech pivots toward the metaverse
In the wake of multiple scandals plaguing his beleaguered tech giant, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced this year that he was changing the company’s name from “Facebook” to “Meta” to reflect a shifting focus on the metaverse.
The three-dimensional digital world created by augmented and virtual reality products and services, will be “the successor to the mobile internet,” Zuckerberg said during his keynote at Facebook’s Connect conference in late October. The chief executive’s vision for the metaverse will be a place where people meet, socialize, work and shop — all via a digital avatar of themselves and VR hardware.
2021 marked the year the metaverse took “center stage of growth, as more investors realize this is not just about the gaming sector,” Ives told ABC News.
“It’s going to take time for the metaverse to ultimately form, to unleash the potential that many see for it today,” he added, but said ultimately, “the metaverse is going to be a trillion-dollar market over the next decade.”
It’s not just Facebook-turned-Meta that has its eyes on the new digital horizon either, Ives added, saying, “We believe Apple, Microsoft, Google and Facebook combined could spend $10 billion on the metaverse over the next two years.”
Public trust in tech giants to build a new digital world safely has dwindled over the past year, as whistleblower Frances Haugen accused Facebook of “choosing to prioritize its profits over people” in her opening statement while testifying before lawmakers in October. Haugen alleged blatant disregard from company executives for potential harms their services can cause to democracy and the well-being of young people.
Kornbluh, who has spent the past year working with policymakers and beyond on potential reforms for an industry that has been largely left unregulated, also testified alongside Haugen in front of a House panel at a separate hearing earlier this month.
“It’s been a year when sort of the collective ‘we,’ like the policymakers in general, came to a better understanding of the problem and solution set,” she told ABC News of the renewed focus out of Washington on Big Tech. Still, with partisan politics and a midterm election year, she said she’s skeptical we will end up seeing any actual law changes in the near-term.
“I think Congress has made a lot of progress in thinking about it, but I think it’s hard to imagine that they’ll come to some agreement in an election year,” she said of any new legislation.
Ives echoed her sentiments, saying that despite the new focus, investors don’t see law changes coming on the immediate horizon.
“It feels like there’s been a tipping point from a regulatory perspective, both in Brussels as well as the Beltway, focused on the antitrust, monopolistic nature of these businesses,” Ives told ABC News. “The lack of consensus within the Beltway continues to be the dividing issue to get law changes.”
Despite the apparent impasse, Kornbluh says with Facebook and tech giants “moving onto the metaverse, do they want to keep having all these same discussions about social media?”
“I think the platforms may want to move on, and realize it’s not going to fix itself,” she said, suggesting companies themselves have signaled they are more open to reforms related to internet regulation.
Despite the volatile past year, Kornbluh said she remains optimistic about the future of tech, and especially the metaverse.
“It’s going to open up all kinds of creativity and innovation and hopefully, because there are these new opportunities for new industry and new businesses, that that will clear up a lot of this underbrush that we learned about before we get there,” she said. “Hopefully this was like a run, and we’ll figure out what to do differently before we move on.”
