Car manufacturers are facing some of the biggest changes their sector has seen, with the shift to electric vehicles, the development of self-driving cars and a potential threat from electric air taxis that may one day replace some of today's car journeys across congested cities. Partnerships with startups are a good way for carmakers to make sure they can get expertise in these emerging areas, and Sifted was interested in looking at how the different car brands compare in their willingness to invest in startups in strategic areas. What emerges is a picture of European carmakers at the middle to bottom of the pack in terms of the number of startups they have invested in. The one exception is Mercedes-Benz, which has a portfolio of 42 startup investments, second only to Hyundai. Mercedez-Benz's investments are across the board, from a holding in delivery robot company Starship to flying taxi company Volocopter, which looks like it may be one of the first to get passenger services up and running, starting with demo flights at the Paris Olympics in 2024. One area where there is no notable startup investment from Daimler is hydrogen-fuelled vehicles.

Editor's note: This is an excerpt of Planet Money's newsletter. You can sign up here. In late March, the scooter-sharing company Bird invited about a third of its employees to attend a thirty-minute "COVID-19 update" via Zoom. The meeting only lasted about two minutes, and it wasn't really an update. With what one employee later described as a "robotic-sounding, disembodied voice," an executive told the 406 employees they were fired.

In another huge setback to Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka's strategy to strengthen the company's new digital and innovation capabilities, Yusuf Bashir, MD of the $500-million Infosys Innovation Fund, has resigned. The MIT-alumnus had worked closely with Sikka at SAP as VP of new products before joining Infosys in March 2015. Together with another former SAP executive, Ritika Suri, Bashir was to help Infosys take a leap into the new digital world that has become important to global clients. Bashir, based in Palo Alto, had the mandate to identify and invest in early-stage companies doing cutting-edge work in areas including AI, machine learning, big data, cloud and analytics. Acquisitions has been a key strategy used by Accenture, for instance, to build the new digital capabilities.