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Colonial Pipeline paid close to $5 million to foreign hackers in an effort to keep fuel flowing along the U.S. East Coast, Bloomberg News reported Thursday. The ransom paid in cryptocurrency was forked over almost a week ago—long before gas station lines started forming in multiple states like it was 1979 all over again. News of the payment contradicted earlier reports that the company had no intention of submitting to extortion. The Federal Bureau of Investigation generally frowns on such payoffs, in part because in cases like this, the tools criminals provide to fix a hack often don’t work. Once they got their ransom, the Colonial hackers (thought to be in Russia or Eastern Europe) sent over a decrypting tool to restore the pipeline’s disabled computer network. But alas, the tool was so slow that Colonial had to keep using its own backups to restore service. —David E. Rovella

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Here are today’s top stories  

SoftBank Group founder Masayoshi Son has blundered on WeWork, Greensill and Wirecard. But somehow, this ultimate startup financier has still managed to become one of the world’s greatest billionaire factories.

Binance Holdings is under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department and Internal Revenue Service, ensnaring the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange in the Biden administration’s effort to rein in the mostly unregulated market. Meanwhile, thanks to a few choice words from a certain Tesla co-founder, Bitcoin just tanked.

Wall Street can’t decide if inflation is good or bad for stocks. Here are the big issues underlying what’s shaping up to be the great economic debate of 2021—and how it might end before it really starts.

Former SAC Capital hedge fund boss and current New York Mets owner Steve Cohen is pointing his current company, Point72 Asset Management, toward cryptocurrency-related investments.

U.S. health officials announced that fully vaccinated Americans can forgo masks in most settings, even indoors or in large groups, as coronavirus infection rates fall in many places across the nation, perhaps cutting short a fourth wave that had been gathering. In India however, the news remains terrible, and a variant that originated there is now causing worry in the U.K. Here’s the latest on the pandemic.

Airbnb beat analysts’ estimates for bookings in the first quarter, reflecting pent-up demand for travel after a year of Covid-19 restrictions. But the lingering effects of the pandemic could still be seen as the company’s losses ballooned.

Russia’s richest man now faces one of the largest divorce fights U.K. courts have ever seen after London appeal judges cleared the way for his former wife to renew her claim against him. Some $6 billion is at stake.

What you’ll need to know tomorrow 

• The Big Take: King of SPACs does fine as the bubble starts to burst.
• Restaurants everywhere are paying a premium for waiters and cooks.
• Crypto fund Grayscale hopes becoming an ETF might break its fall.
• What crypto-insiders think of Elon Musk’s green U-turn on Bitcoin.
• Mark Cuban and the Winklevoss twins dismissed Musk’s concerns.
• But his crypto retreat could help ease a semiconductor shortage.
• CityLab: Working from home could threaten mass transit for all.

Rolls Royce Might Make a Plane With Boeing

Rolls-Royce is holding discussions with Boeing about a new aircraft program, making the engine-maker the first major supplier to confirm it’s involved in talks for an aircraft that would sit between Boeing’s smallest 787 Dreamliner wide-body jets and the largest iterations of its long-troubled, single-aisle 737 Max—which crashed twice, killing 346. The midsize-plane could be a new start for the embattled U.S. planemaker.

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