Amazon

Google and Walmart on Tuesday announced a partnership that would make the retailer’s products available on the internet giant’s online shopping mall.

The two companies said that next month Google would start offering Walmart products to people who shop on Google Express, the company’s online shopping mall. It’s the first time the world’s biggest retailer has made its products available online in the United States outside of its own website.

Jeff Bezos on Thursday briefly topped Bill Gates as the world’s richest man following a spike in Amazon, according to data crunched by Forbes. But if Bill Browder’s numbers are correct, the massive fortunes of both tech giants combined still wouldn’t stack up to the real richest man in the world.

US-based Hermitage Capital Management Founder Bill Browder believes the Russian leader is the richest man in the world.

Amazon’s second-quarter report fell well short of Wall Street’s expectations. The company’s earnings missed analysts’ forecasts by more than a dollar a share. It also offered a disappointing outlook for the third quarter.

The Seattle tech giant posted net income of $197 million in the second quarter, or 40 cents per diluted share, on revenue of $38 billion. A year prior, the company reported earnings of $1.78 per share on revenue of $30.4 billion.

Wall Street was looking for earnings of $1.42 per share on revenue of $37.2 billion. "Our teams remain heads-down and focused on customers," CEO Jeff Bezos said in a statement.

In late May, Amazon engineer Mike Roberts unveiled Stockstream – an experiment in letting viewers of his Twitch livestream play the stock market with $US50,000 of his own money. Twitch is a live streaming video platform primarily used to stream video game play. It was acquired by Amazon for $970 million in 2014.

A month later, and the experiment is still going strong. Over the course of 2,125 trades, Stockstream players have voted to pick out a diversified portfolio that now includes a handful of shares in Ford, Costco, Apple, and GE, among many others.

Nike, the world’s largest footwear maker, said on Thursday it would launch a pilot program with Amazon.com to sell a limited product assortment on its website.

In a call with analysts Thursday, Nike CEO Mark Parker said that Amazon would carry "a limited Nike product assortment" of footwear, apparel, and accessories, and that Nike was seeking to improve its presence on the e-commerce site. "We’re in the early stages, but we really look forward to evaluating the results of the pilot," Mr. Parker said.

The financial markets have become, to use David Stockman`s phrase, one huge gambling casino. The size of the derivative market, which is now an impressive $639 trillion, dwarfs the trivial Forex daily turnover of only $5 trillion. What is disturbing is that volatility has recently hovered at 10 or even below except for a slight blip a few weeks ago.

Online retail giant Amazon on Thursday opened its first brick and mortar bookstore in New York, selling a limited range of its highest-rated books and letting customers browse products as in times gone by.

Amazon, which launched as an online bookseller in 1995 but which now sells everything from designer clothes to groceries, bided its time before venturing into the US cultural capital. It launched brick and mortar bookstores in six other cities first, starting in its hometown Seattle in 2015.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has become the world’s second-richest man adding $1.5 billion to his fortune after Amazon gained $9 billion in market value during trading on Wednesday.

The 53-year-old has a net worth of $75.6 billion on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, and surpassed Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffet ($75.5 billion) and Inditex fashion group chairman Amancio Ortega ($74.1 billion) for the second spot.