Elated by this NYT review of our book!!
"I guzzled Brown and Farrell’s “The Cult of We” the way Neumann might gulp bottled water after smoking so much pot on a private jet that flight attendants would reach for their air masks. (This actually happened)"
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Eliot Brown
@eliotwb
Reporter for WSJ covering finance from London / co-author of THE CULT OF WE, reviews such as "marmalade-dropper" -The Times; cultofwe.com
London, UKJoined May 2009
Eliot Brown’s Tweets
"The International Monetary Fund said this week it expects the U.K. economy to contract this year and perform worse than that of sanctions-hit Russia."
things are dandy
wsj.com/articles/u-k-h
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Bitcoin rises on ... hedge funds betting bitcoin will rise
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here's our earlier piece on SBF's payment/share purchase from Makhat
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per this story, the extortion was over an allegation (denied by Makhat) over " the transfer of crypto mining farms from Kairat Satybady, former President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s nephew, to companies connected to President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev’s nephew"
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In Kazakhstan, a blogger was convicted of extorting businessman Rashit Makhat and sentenced to 9 years in prison
Makhat is a cofounder of bitcoin miner Genesis Digital; FTX's SBF paid Makhat hundreds of millions of dollars for his shares in January 2022
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"An amateur pilot himself, in 2008 he crashed a plane into his neighbor’s garden after attempting to land on a private landing strip at his wife’s home"
Great read on Tether's owners. Also included: an online gambling attorney & two electronics importers
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"The exact address leads to an accounting firm in a converted barn on the corner of a quiet housing estate. A woman who answered the door said that Transactive uses the building as a "registered office" but isn't based there."
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Great read on a company that is a payment processor for crypto firm Nexo
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The FCA gave an electronic-money license to a tiny company in London, despite top employees' troubled pasts and a key investor's role in a $1b fraud. It became an industry powerhouse - but is now accused of serious wrongdoing. Latest via @BloombergUK.
bloomberg.com/news/articles/
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This is massive - Rechler to hand over the keys to a chunk of his buildings to his lenders; estimates that about 10% of his properties are "Kodak film," i.e. obsolete (via )
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Scoop: Tiger Global cut its fundraising target in a chilled market for startups w/
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Also, Tiger's three largest positions as of June 30: Bytedance, Shein, Stripe:
-Bytedance announced a stock buyback at $300 B/ below Tiger's 2021 investment
-Shein and Stripe both raising at amounts >30% less than last private rounds
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Tiger Global: become synonymous with the overheated startup market by increasing investing at absolute peak/deals within hours
Also Tiger Global: Struggle to raise a new fund
Target size keeps falling, from ~$12 B, to $6 B, to now $5 B
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1000 employees!
"Urban Alchemy — a relatively new organization — primarily employs people of color coming out of prison and last year topped 1,000 employees.
Since 2019, the organization has won $62 m in city contracts mostly to run homeless shelters, with $35 m remaining"
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Pretty fascinating, relatively un-covered, policy change in SF in the past few years as SF has outsourced a lot of homelessness / safety policy to a nonprofit, Urban Alchemy
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"Investors include Animal Capital (fitting!), In-Q-Tel (CIA), and Animoca Brands, "a leader in digital entertainment, blockchain, and gamification""
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"the world’s first de-extinction company, has today announced an oversubscribed $150M Series B financing"
Oh
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"If you think I’m selling, I’m not selling," said CEO who was definitely selling and cashed out $68 M
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In the Celsius examiner's report, a fascinating dive into the fight over whether to keep paying high yields on deposits
"We are not trying to be the largest, we are trying to be the most profitable. Those 2 things don’t equate" says guy who lost argument
cases.stretto.com/public/x191/11
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👀👀
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Wow. Celsius used investor/customer funds to prop up the price of its own CEL token, helping employees including CEO Alex Mashinsky sell, according to the Examiner.
Mashinsky cashed out $68.7mn.
Employees said what they were doing was “very ponzi like”.
cases.stretto.com/public/x191/11
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Fintech comps are down 60%-plus from peak. Stripe, which missed investor targets last year, raising $3 b (!) at 40% discount to peak round
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"Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal used to splurge on cars after every round of funding"
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I’m shocked, just shocked by this behavior. economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/pana
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Interesting case in Kazakhstan: The trial of a Telegram journalist accused of extorting Kazakh businessman Rashit Makhat
... Makhat is a cofounder of Genesis Digital, to whom Sam Bankman-Fried paid multiple hundred million dollars for GDA shares
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Lol: "Twitter pundits coined a new verb—Scholzing—to denote hesitance and indecisiveness."
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The Panzer Chancellor: For days, Germany's @OlafScholz was derided as a ditherer. In the end, he managed to persuade Biden to send US tanks as part of one of the boldest moves by the West to support Ukraine´. But he'll get little credit wsj.com/articles/germa via @WSJ
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2021: crypto-specific VC funds
2023: AI-specific VC funds
2024: ???
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(insert joke about metaphor for SF/venture capital's waning influence in the US zeitgeist)
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Philz Coffee is exiting the D.C. market bizjournals.com/washington/new via @WBJonline
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"But actual growth this year looks set to be 31%"
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Tesla's sticking with its 50% growth target*
*see fine print
bloomberg.com/opinion/articl via @opinion $TSLA
Jonathan Gray, president of Blackstone, said in an interview with the Financial Times that it was “a little early” to say redemption requests were slowing at the fund, called Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust, or Breit.
via
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Musk would like investors to put $3 B more into the company in at the original Twitter investment valuation of $44 B ...
...Another social media co, Snap, is down over 60% since. And twitter's lost a lot of advertisers.
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Scoop - Elon Musk has explored raising up to $3 billion to pay off the highest interest debt on Twitter
speaks to the strains Musk is facing to rid himself of a debt burden that becomes more and more expensive the longer he waits to pay it off
wsj.com/articles/elon-
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*bankrupt crypto firm Genesis, that is
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Also of note: Marcelo Claure's Claure Group is one of bankruptcy crypto firm Genesis' top 50 creditors.
Claure is owed $46 M
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Marcelo Claure, formerly of SoftBank, may be getting back into telco
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One of the things about office leases is (generally) you ... still have to pay the rent.
It's not like an apartment where you often can end up walking away and you just lose your deposit and annoy your landlord. Your company is often on the hook for the full term (5-10 years)
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Twitter sued by landlord at SF HQ after alleged nonpayment of $6.8 million in rent: sfchronicle.com/tech/article/T The company was also sued by the Crown Estate, which manages properties for King Charles III, for alleged unpaid rent in a London office.
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the ole 'sue for defamation to deny the true links between a mercenary and his mercenary group'
😑😑
ft.com/content/8c8b05
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throwback to '19: "I think the most profound thing is that if you buy a Tesla today, I believe you are buying an appreciating asset – not a depreciating asset.”
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"FT Alphaville’s very rough back of the envelope calculations indicate that this means that the famous Tiger cubs probably lost investors about $60bn last year...a quarter of LCH’s estimate for the global hedge fund industry’s overall $208bn loss in 2022."
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Every moment in this piece on how got duped into buying a fake student aid company is delicious, from the founder’s lawyer’s double-take response to Ron’s unanswered q to JPM: Did anyone on this deal ever have a student loan?
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