Hello!

Welcome to the cloud edition of Slate Money,

your guide to the business and finance news of the week.

I'm Felix Salmon of Axios. I'm here with

Emily Peck of Huffpost. Hi. I'm here with Anna Shemanski of Breaking Views. Hello. And we are coming

to you from some podcast hosting service in the cloud.

There was a very good chance that you are streaming this podcast as I speak.

And we are going to talk all about these cloud services this week.

The news hook is the Salesforce,

the company that more or less invented this whole concept of cloud

services, has bought Slack, which if you use it, you probably use every day all the time.

We are also going to talk about the NASDAQ, the stock exchange, which has a big board diversity

push going. We are going to talk about Amazon and its massive hiring spree,

and we also have a Slate Plus segment about movies

and whether we are ever going to go back to movie theaters.

All that coming up on Slate Money.

I feel like I have spent most of this pandemic on Slack in one way or another. It has

become my life. Emily, you're nodding. You are all over Slack all day, all night. It's just

consumed you in the way that it has many of us. Yeah, Slack has always been a big part of my

work life and definitely in the pandemic that has doubled because all the little incidental conversations and office gossip and random complaining that I typically do has moved completely over to Slack from in-person communication.

And I suspect that's the same for most workers who are using Slack. You're just

using it a lot more. And you, Anna, is breaking views on Slack? Nope. Are you on Microsoft? Are you on

...