Black Friday online sales on track to hit record high: What are people buying?
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(NEW YORK) — People haven’t only been filling their plates this Thanksgiving weekend — it also seems they’ve been filling their online shopping carts.
Black Friday online shopping this year is on pace to break a record with between $10.7 billion and $11 billion in sales, according to Adobe Analytics, which tracks U.S. e-commerce data.
As of Friday evening, spending on online shopping was up more than 8% compared to last year, according to Adobe.
The record pace of Black Friday buying follows record-setting online shopping on Thanksgiving itself, the analytics firm said. Consumers spent a record $6.1 billion online on Turkey Day — up nearly 9% compared to a year ago, according to Adobe.
What are people buying this Black Friday?
Adobe said deep discounts are likely fueling the online spending spree, including discounts on toys of more than 27% off the listed price. Toys have seen a 178% boost in online Black Friday sales so far, compared to an average day in October.
Other popular items on Black Friday include makeup and skin care sets, LEGO sets, “Wicked” toys, Bluetooth speakers, TVs, patio heaters and air fryers, according to Adobe.
Increasingly, online shopping is happening on smaller screens. More than half of all online sales on Black Friday — 57.6% — were on mobile screens, according to Adobe. That’s up from 55.5% last year.
(NEW YORK) — In a letter to shareholders, Warren Buffett revealed that he would be donating more than $1.1 billion of Berkshire Hathaway stock to four of his family’s foundations. In addition, he detailed plans for distributing his wealth after his death.
Buffett, the CEO and Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, reflected in the letter released Monday on his life and how long he has lived.
“Father time always wins. But he can be fickle – indeed unfair and even cruel – sometimes ending life at birth or soon thereafter while, at other times, waiting a century or so before paying a visit,” Buffett said. “To date, I’ve been very lucky, but, before long, he will get around to me.”
Buffet, 94, said he and his late wife, Susan Buffett, always expected she would outlive him and be the one to distribute his fortune.
But when Susan died in 2004, with a fortune of $3 billion and 96% of that going to the foundation, she left $10 million to each of their three children.
That was the largest gift they had given them, Buffet said.
Buffett believes that parents should support their children but do so in a meaningful way.
“Our belief that hugely wealthy parents should leave their children enough so they can do anything but not enough that they can do nothing,” Buffett wrote in his letter to shareholders.
Buffett explains that he “never wished to create a dynasty or pursue any plan that extended beyond the children.” He also admits that while he and Susan encouraged the children to get involved in philanthropy, that the children weren’t ready to handle the wealth Berkshire stocks had generated in light of their mother’s death.
Since the 2006 lifetime pledge Buffett made and later expanded, the children have dramatically increased their philanthropic activities, Buffet said. And now Buffett is entrusting them fully.
“The children have now more than justified our hopes and, upon my death, will have full responsibility for gradually distributing all of my Berkshire holdings,” Buffet said. “These now account for 99 1⁄2% of my wealth.”
Buffett has described his wealth and age as “lucky” but he also sees a downside to it, he said.
“There is, however, a downside to my good fortune in avoiding his notice. The expected life span of my children has materially diminished since the 2006 pledge. They are now 71, 69 and 66.”
With his children getting older, the family has also designated three potential successors, Buffett said.
“Each is well known to my children and makes sense to all of us. They are also somewhat younger than my children,” Buffett said.
Buffett also reflects on his “lucky streak” dating back to 1930 when he was born as white male in the United States. He mentions his two sisters being promised by the 19th Amendment to be treated equally with males. And he admits to growing in a country that has not yet fulfilled its promises elsewhere.
“In 1930, however, I emerged in a country that hadn’t yet gotten around to fulfilling its earlier aspirations,” Buffett said. “Aided by Billie Jean King, Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and countless others, things began changing in the 1970s.”
Favored by male status, Buffet said he had confidence he would become rich one day. But he never expected it to be the way it is, he said.
“But in no way did I, or anyone else, dream of the fortunes that have become attainable in America during the last few decades,” Buffett said. “Billions became the new millions.”
(NEW YORK) — Facebook plans to replace its fact-checkers with “community notes,” a move that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said would allow the social network to return “to our roots around free expression.”
“We’re replacing fact checkers with Community Notes, simplifying our policies and focusing on reducing mistakes,” Zuckerberg said on Tuesday. “Looking forward to this next chapter.”
The changes, which will also be in place for Instagram and Threads, will lift restrictions “on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse” and will focus the company’s “enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations,” Joel Kaplan, chief global affairs officer, said in a blog post.
Meta executives sought in their statements to tie the update to what they described as a sea change in public discourse accompanying the rise of President-elect Donald Trump’s brand of politics.
Fact-checkers who were put in place in the wake of Trump’s 2016 election have proven to be “too politically biased” and have destroyed “more trust than they’ve created,” particularly in the United States, Zuckerberg said.
“The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech,” Zuckerberg said.
The decision also follows Zuckerberg recent meeting with Trump at the president-elect’s private Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. And Meta is donating to Trump’s presidential inaugural committee, marking a first for the company.
The shift in policy mirrors a series of updates that Elon Musk — a Trump ally — made after purchasing rival social network Twitter, which he’s since rebranded as X.
Kaplan on Tuesday praised the approach Musk has taken, saying X under its new owner has empowered its “community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context.”
“We think this could be a better way of achieving our original intention of providing people with information about what they’re seeing — and one that’s less prone to bias,” Kaplan said.
As the company’s fact-checking capabilities have grown, they have expanded “to the point where we are making too many mistakes,” which in turn has frustrated many of the social networks’ users, Kaplan said.
“Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in ‘Facebook jail,’ and we are often too slow to respond when they do,” he said.
ABC News’ Michael Kreisel, Zunaira Zaki and Chris Donovan contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — The price of bitcoin surpassed $100,000 for the first time on Wednesday, soaring to a fresh high as the world’s largest cryptocurrency extended a rally set off by the election of former President Donald Trump.
Bitcoin has climbed more than 40% since Election Day, when voters opted for a candidate viewed as friendly toward digital currency.
Those gains have far outpaced the stock market. The S&P 500 has increased about 2.4% over that period, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq has jumped 2.6%.
On the campaign trail, Trump vowed to bolster the cryptocurrency sector and ease regulations enforced by the Biden administration. Trump also promised to establish the federal government’s first National Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.
Trump said he would replace Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler, whom many crypto proponents dislike for what they perceive as a robust approach to crypto regulation.
Gensler announced that he plans to resign on Jan. 20, 2025, the date of Trump’s inauguration.
The post-election euphoria has lifted other parts of the crypto sector. Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency, has climbed 27%. Lesser-known dogecoin has skyrocketed about 140%, while litecoin has surged 35%.
Shares of Coinbase, a top crypto trading platform, have increased more than 70% since Trump’s reelection.
The growth in recent weeks extends a remarkable turnabout for the once-beleaguered crypto industry. The sector entered this year bruised after a series of high-profile collapses and company scandals.
FTX, a multibillion-dollar cryptocurrency exchange co-founded by Sam Bankman-Fried, collapsed in November 2022. The implosion set off a 17-month legal saga that resulted in the conviction of Bankman-Fried for fraud. In April, Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
Changpeng Zhao, the founder and former CEO of major cryptocurrency exchange Binance, was sentenced to four months in prison in April after pleading guilty to charges that his platform had enabled illicit financial activity.
The reelection of Trump marks the latest in a series of positive developments that have buoyed cryptocurrency this year.
Those gains have been propelled, in part, by U.S. approval in January of bitcoin ETFs, or exchange-traded funds. Bitcoin ETFs allow investors to buy into an asset that tracks the price movement of bitcoin, while avoiding the inconvenience and risk of purchasing the crypto coin itself.
Last month, options on BlackRock’s popular iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT) were made available for trading on the Nasdaq. The options, which provide a new avenue for bitcoin investors, allow individuals to commit to buy or sell the ETF at a given price by a specific date. While such investments typically come with additional risk, they can also make large payouts.
IBIT inched upward 1% on Friday, reaching a record high of about $56.
Bryan Armour, the director of passive strategies research at financial firm Morningstar, attributed the recent crypto surge to investors’ anticipation of friendly policy under Trump, as well as the newly available options trading for bitcoin ETFs.
Still, the performance of cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, has proven volatile, Armour added. The price of bitcoin could fall, especially if Trump encounters difficulty following through on his campaign commitments, he said.
“As long as the narrative stays positive, there’s always room to grow,” Armour told ABC News before bitcoin reached $100,000. “I also think campaign promises don’t always come to fruition.”
“It’s still a highly volatile asset,” Armour added.
