From our wallets to the courtroom, it's been a wild ride for investors, employees and everyone who uses technology in 2022.
Stock market
The story that affected the most people was the fall of tech stocks.
Amazon lost a trillion dollars in value from pandemic highs. Meta lost more than half its value trying to build out the metaverse, then laid off more than 10,000 employees.
Netflix, Intel and Salesforce were also hit hard by Wall Street and among the companies laying people off.
One stock that jumped this year was Twitter, thanks to a $44 billion buyout by the -- at the time -- richest man in the world, Elon Musk. Shortly after walking into Twitter headquarters, Musk laid off thousands of employees, then led the social networking site on a wild and controversial ride, ending the year by promising to step down after polling users, possibly because the company that made him so wealthy, Tesla, lost $800 billion in stock market value this year.
Local
Elizabeth Holmes
It was a year of tech on trial, and the spotlight was brightest on Elizabeth Holmes. The Stanford dropout ran the doomed blood testing company Theranos. Earlier this year, she was found guilty on four counts of investor fraud and sentenced to 11 years in prison.
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Her ex-boyfriend and former Theranos COO Sunny Balwani was found guilty on 12 fraud counts and sentenced to 13 years.
FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried
Crypto crashed this year.
Last year saw a single bitcoin go for $68,000. It ends 2022 worth less than $17,000.
The crypto story will also be big in the coming year, with Palo Alto native Sam Bankman-Fried awaiting trial. His cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, lost $32 billion of investor value in what's shaping up to be one of America's biggest fraud cases in history.
AI
Artificial intelligence had its moment this year, both visually and with something called ChatGPT, a way to get a computer to write for you. It already has teachers wondering what's being created by humans and what comes from the inner workings of a computer.
