Hashtag Trending June 18 – Tesla price hike; Wealthsimple layoff; crypto GPU spending |

Tesla increases its vehicle prices, Wealthsimple lays off 13 per cent of its staff, and cryptominers spent $15 billion on graphics cards last year.

That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now, welcome to Hashtag Trending. It’s Monday, June 20, and I’m your host, Tom Li.

Tesla has increased the cost of its cars in the U.S. According to Business Insider, prices for the Tesla Model X and Model Y jumped by $6,000 and $3,000 respectively. Tesla has been incrementally increasing its vehicle prices, including its cheapest model, which was hiked by $10,000 last year. The company has been leaking a string of financial hardships, including staff cuts, stronger competition, and supply constraints. Additionally, the company CEO Elon Musk is still in the middle of the $44 billion Twitter acquisition, which has all but ground to a standstill.

Source: Business Insider

Canadian fintech company Wealthsimple is laying off 159 people, representing about 13 per cent of its workforce. The company grew rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic and was valued at $4 billion last year. However, its run seems to be slowing, as the company’s CEO now says the condition is unwinding. In an email to staff, the CEO said that Wealthsimple clients are living through a period of never before seen uncertainty. According to CTV News, Wealthsimple will now focus on its core businesses, such as investing and banking, and reduce investments in other areas like tax and merchant services.

Source: CTV News, TechCrunch

Cryptocurrency’s meteoric rise in price last year attracted an unprecedented number of miners. According to a report by Bitpro Consulting, Ethereum miners have spent $15 billion in graphics cards in the past one and a half years. The purchases accounted for roughly 10 per cent of the total GPU supply in the past two years. Their high demand was a key factor in pushing graphics card prices to multiple times that of the manufacturer’s suggested price. But that fervent trend has now cooled, it appears, as Ethereum value fell by 70 per cent this year.

Source: TechRadar

One South Korean engineer has erected a comical monument to remember the end of Internet Explorer. The venerable browser entered its retirement on June 15, sparking some messages of mourning on social media. But Jung Ki-Young went a step further and ordered a custom headstone for the browser. The epitaph read “He was a good tool to download other browsers,” taking a jab at the once ubiquitous browser one last time. After his joke went viral on social media, the engineer thanked Internet Explorer for allowing him to create a world-class joke.

Source: CNN

That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now. Hashtag Trending is a part of the ITWC Podcast network. Add us to your Alexa Flash briefings or your Google Home daily briefing. Make sure to sign up for our Daily IT Wire newsletter to get all the news that matters directly in your inbox every day. Also, catch the next episode of Hashtag Tendances, our weekly Hashtag Trending episode in French, which drops every Thursday morning. If you have a suggestion or a tip, drop us a line in the comments or via email. Thank you for listening, I’m Tom Li.