Larry Page, the billionaire Google co-founder, has been granted residency in New Zealand and spent time in the country during the coronavirus pandemic, the New Zealand government confirmed to CNBC Friday.
Page, 48, applied for New Zealand residence in November 2020 via the nation’s “Investor Plus” residency visa but the application was unable to be processed because he was offshore at the time.
The visa, which requires applicants to have NZ$10 million ($7 million) to invest in New Zealand over a three-year period, was then processed after he landed in Auckland on Jan. 12, one day after the Page family filed an urgent application for the son to be evacuated from Fiji due to a medical emergency.
“Once Mr. Page entered New Zealand, his application was able to be processed and it was approved on 4 February 2021,” Immigration New Zealand said in a statement.
New Zealand health minister Andrew Little told Parliament on Thursday the nation gets roughly 100 medevac requests a year. “I’m advised all of the normal steps occurred in this case,” he said in response to a question about how Page had managed to enter New Zealand when the borders were shut to non-residents. Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, New Zealand has kept its infection rates low by refusing entry to overseas travelers.
“Immigration New Zealand can confirm Larry Page met relevant requirements to be approved entry to New Zealand,” a spokesperson told CNBC.
Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s prime minister, said before Parliament that she hadn’t been briefed on Page’s visit. “With all [medevac] cases, those are decisions for clinicians, and I absolutely trust our clinicians to make decision,” Ardern said.
Located in relative isolation from the largest population centers of the world, New Zealand has become a popular destination with high net worth individuals in recent years.
The sparsely populated country, home to around 5 million people, has been hailed as one of the best places in the world to ride out a societal collapse, as it’s relatively self-dependent in terms of food and energy. It also boasts a temperate climate and a stable political system.
The news of Page’s visit and his residency has reignited a longstanding debate over whether the super rich can essentially buy access the South Pacific county as and when they want. Billionaire Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and profited from an early bet on Facebook, was granted Kiwi citizenship in 2017 even though he’d only spent 12 days in New Zealand.
Thiel has invested in local start-up Xero and bought property across the country, as well as a 193-hectare estate in Wanaka on New Zealand’s rugged South Island. While he is yet to build anything on the site, he has been in contact with at least three architects.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told the New Yorker in 2016 that he and Thiel plan to get on a private jet and fly to one of Thiel’s properties in New Zealand in the event of some kind of systemic collapse event.
Microsoft‘s Outlook email service malfunctioned for several hours Wednesday and Thursday, prompting some people to post on social media about the inability to reach their virtual mailboxes.
The issue began at 6:20 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, according to a dashboard the software company maintains. It affected Outlook.com as well as Outlook mobile apps and desktop programs.
At 12:21 ET the Microsoft 365 Status account posted that it was rolling out a fix.
“Our configuration changes have effectively resolved impact in targeted infrastructure. We’re now deploying the changes worldwide to resolve impact for all users,” Microsoft said in an X post on Thursday afternoon.
The company’s status page said “most impacted users will experience relief within the next two hours,” and that it was continuing to monitor the service.
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On social media, some people reported that Outlook was functioning properly after hours of users posting about problems.
With hundreds of millions of active users, Outlook is important, although Apple and Google‘s email clients are more popular, according to data from analytics company Litmus.
A worker prepares orders at an Amazon.com Inc. fulfillment center.
Jason Alden | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Daphnee Poteau, a Haitian who came to the U.S in 2023, began working for Amazon last year at a returns center in Indianapolis. While packing up boxes, she met her husband Kristopher Vincent, who’s been at the site, known as IND8, since 2013.
Last month, Poteau was contacted by the Department of Homeland Security, after the Trump administrationcanceled humanitarian immigration programs that allowed participants to live and work legally in the U.S. for two years while applying for permanent status.
A notice from DHS told Poteau that her parole program was being terminated. Her last day at Amazon was June 28. She’s among a group of warehouse workers whose jobs have been eliminated since DHS revoked the parole program that was created during the Biden administration.
While Poteau tries to secure a spousal visa, her future in the U.S. is uncertain. She and Vincent, who’s from Indiana, said they’re concerned about being able to afford rent and costly immigration fees.
“We’re taking it one day at a time, but it does leave me stressed that they’re going to come and try to get her, even though she does have an asylum case pending in court,” Vincent said in an interview.
“Everything we’ve seen in the news shows they flagrantly no longer care what the laws say,” Vincent said.
Poteau and her terminated co-workers had been protected under programs that provided Haitians, Cubans, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans with temporary legal status in the U.S. Many of the employees at IND8 are Haitian, a large enough contingent that some of the morning staff meetings are translated into Creole, Vincent said.
Daphnee Poteau met her husband Kristopher Vincent while working at an Amazon warehouse in Indianapolis.
Kristopher Vincent
Amazon last month began asking staffers who came to the U.S. under the Biden-era program to provide updated work permits within a certain timeframe or they would be put on unpaid leave, according to documents viewed by CNBC.
Several workers who spoke to CNBC said they were dismissed by Amazon in late June after they couldn’t get new work authorizations.
Amazon declined to say how many employees were let go following the changes in immigration policy, but spokesperson Richard Rocha said the company prepared for potential staffing impacts due to changes in work authorization programs, and made adjustments to be in compliance with the law.
“We’re supporting employees impacted by the government’s recent changes in immigration policy,” Rocha said in a statement. “Over the past few months, we’ve been in regular communication with these employees about the changes and are ensuring they’re aware of all available resources.”
The company has provided impacted employees with information about where to find free or low-cost legal services, access to counseling support and other resources, Rocha said.
A DHS spokesperson pointed to the agency’s announcement terminating the humanitarian parole program.
Fired before Prime Day
As part of the Trump administration’s broad immigration crackdown, DHS has eliminated not just the humanitarian parole program. It’s also ended separate programs that provided temporary protected status to Venezuelans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Hondurans seeking refuge from their native countries, which have suffered from armed conflict and humanitarian crises. Last week, a federal judge ruled the Trump administration can’t revoke the temporary protected status, or TPS, of Haitian migrants. The White House said it will appeal the ruling.
Amazon is far from alone. Other companies including Walmart and Disney have been forced to fire employees or put them on leave in order to comply with shifting federal policies.
Among private employers in the U.S., only Walmart has a bigger workforce than Amazon. Most of the e-commerce giant’s 1.56 million employees globally are concentrated in its warehouse operations.
The terminations started just as Amazon was gearing up for its annual Prime Day discount blitz, which began on Tuesday and lasts four days. The event is typically one of the busiest periods of the year for Amazon warehouse and delivery employees, alongside the holiday shopping season.
Amazon has counted on immigrants to meet a big part of its staffing needs. In 2022, the company set a goal to hire 5,000 refugees and other forcibly displaced individuals by the end of 2024.
While Trump’s policies create a challenge for large employers like Amazon, the real devastation is being felt by the immigrant workers. Those who now find themselves unemployed and lacking documentation are at a higher risk of being targeted for deportation unless they can secure an alternative form of legal status.
Christopher Lubin, an Amazon warehouse worker in Delaware, lost his job at the company on June 27, a day before Poteau received her notice.
“We have done everything legally in this country,” said Lubin, 24, who is also from Haiti. “We haven’t committed fraud. We go to school, we work, and we pay taxes.”
DHS said it was revoking protections for Haitian nationals after a review by Secretary Kristi Noem determined “country conditions have improved to the point where Haitians can return home in safety.”
The U.S. granted TPS for Haitian nationals following a catastrophic earthquake in 2008 that destroyed much of the nation’s infrastructure. In 2024, the TPS designation was extended through February 2026, as the country faced “rapidly deteriorating security, human rights and humanitarian” conditions, according to the United Nations Human Rights Council.
Armed gangs control the majority of Port-au-Prince and violence has spread beyond the capital in recent months. About 10 individuals from Haiti lost their jobs at an Amazon warehouse in Spokane, Washington, after DHS revoked the TPS program, said Katia Jasmin, executive director of Creole Resources, which provides support to Haitian immigrants in the region.
Serge, who asked to have his full name withheld out of fear of being targeted for deportation, came to the U.S. from Haiti nearly two years ago and secured a job at the Spokane warehouse as a packer. The situation in Haiti was dire when he left and it remains unsafe today, Serge said.
“I witnessed violence and trauma, including the loss of family members who were killed,” Serge said. “Others were displaced from their homes and are now homeless. I genuinely feared for my life.”
In desperation, he said he sought a safer future and secured a sponsor that allowed him to come to the U.S. legally. It’s “unjust” that Haitians are now being ordered to return to their home country when it’s plagued with violence, Serge said.
“We’re not just recipients of economic support,” he said. “We’re also contributors who help drive the economy.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends an opening ceremony for Tesla China-made Model Y program in Shanghai, China, on Jan. 7, 2020.
Aly Song | Reuters
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the company is expanding its robotaxi service area and bringing xAI’s Grok to vehicles as it rolled out a new iteration of the artificial intelligence chatbot.
Shares gained about 3%.
Musk said on X that Grok, his AI chatbot that praised Adolf Hitler and posted a barrage of antisemitic comments recently, will be available in Tesla vehicles “next week at the latest.”
xAI officially launched the Grok 4 update overnight as the company continued to face backlash for the vitriol written by the chatbot.
In response to a user post on his social media platform X, Musk said the company is expanding its Austin, Texas robotaxi service area this weekend. He also said Tesla is awaiting regulatory approval for a launch in the Bay Area “probably in a month or two.”
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The expansion of robotaxi and Grok integration comes at a fraught time for Musk and his empire.
Tesla set its annual shareholder meeting for Nov. 6, a Thursday filing showed. A group of investors recently called on the electric vehicle company to schedule the meeting.
Its last shareholder meeting was in June 2024, as Musk established himself as a major backer of President Donald Trump‘s reelection campaign. Musk later led the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE.
After stepping down from DOGE at the end of May, Musk has openly feuded with Trump on social media over the major tax bill, with the president suggesting the government look at cutting contracts for Musk’s companies.
Shares have tanked from their post-election high over investor concerns that the public fight could hamper Tesla. Slowing sales and rising competition also stifled some investor appetite.
Tesla shares fell Monday, with the company losing $68 billion in value after Musk continued to blast Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” and said he was establishing his own political party, the “America Party.”
The world’s richest man suffered another blow Wednesday when Linda Yaccarino stepped down as CEO of his social media platform X, leaving the role after a turbulent two years for the company.