Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, May 31

• Uber Fires Former Google Engineer at Heart of Self-Driving Dispute: Uber said Tuesday that it had fired Anthony Levandowski, a star engineer brought in to lead the company’s self-driving automobile efforts who was accused of stealing trade secrets when he left a job at Google. What Mr. Levandowski did when he quit Google to start his own company, Otto, which was acquired by Uber for nearly $700 million last year, is the key question in a closely watched lawsuit that pits one of the world’s most powerful companies against Uber, a richly financed up-and-comer. The stakes are enormous for both businesses. Google was a pioneer in autonomous car technology and has spent nearly a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars on its effort, which is now run through Waymo, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet. And Travis Kalanick, Uber’s chief executive, has said the future of his ride-hailing company, privately valued at nearly $70 billion, hinges on work being done to create cars that can drive themselves. The dismissal of one of Uber’s most prized technical talents also points to the risks of the star engineering culture that has emerged in Silicon Valley in recent years, leading to giant paydays for a small group of employees.

• Amazon Shares Hit $1,000, Showing E-Commerce, Cloud Prowess: Amazon.com Inc.’s shares rose briefly just above $1,000 for the first time Tuesday, marking a new milestone for a company wooing investors by dominating online commerce and cloud computing. Amazon hit an intraday high of $1,001.20 in New York before ending the day little changed at $996.70. The stock is up almost 40 percent from a year ago and more than double the 15 percent gain of the S&P 500 Index in the same period. Investors are thinking about how much further Amazon can grow as it tries to replicate its U.S. success abroad. The Seattle company’s $478 billion market value is double that of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. even though the world’s biggest retailer will have sales three times larger than Amazon’s this year. Investors put more value in Amazon’s web traffic and delivery network than they do in Wal-Mart’s vast store presence because online spending will grow more than four times faster than overall retail spending this year as shoppers continue to shift from stores to websites, according to EMarketer Inc. The world’s largest online retailer is dominating e-commerce with its $99-a-year Amazon Prime subscription, which includes delivery discounts, music and video streaming and photo storage that keep shoppers engaged with the website. Another Amazon advantage is its profitable and fast-growing cloud-computing division Amazon Web Services, which maintains a global network of data centers and rents out storage space and computing functions to clients in a variety of industries, including Netflix Inc. and Airbnb Inc. as well as Capital One Financial Corp. and the federal government.