Business/Markets/Stocks/Economics Random, Random

[Suliso]

Airbus a220 is actually pretty good plane in the smaller segment. I probably have flown Embraer, but not recently and thus can't comment. Maybe they're more common in SA.

[ti-amie]

SEC Twitter/X gets hacked, saying all Bitcoin ETFs are approved

1/9/2024

Chair Gary Gensler clarified on Twitter that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Committee's official account was hacked, following a misleading tweet about the approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs. He stated, “The @SECGov twitter account was compromised, and an unauthorized tweet was posted. The SEC has not approved the listing and trading of spot bitcoin exchange-traded products.”

The financial world has been eagerly anticipating the SEC's decision on spot Bitcoin ETFs, a development that would allow American investors to trade this popular cryptocurrency as shares on major stock exchanges. Despite expectations for an approval announcement at Wednesday's market close, a surprise tweet from the SEC's official account erroneously signaled its approval.

However, Gary Gensler promptly issued a correction on Twitter, emphasizing that the SEC had not yet approved the listing and trading of these much-awaited products.

This incident adds to the ongoing drama surrounding the SEC's historical resistance to sanctioning such investment vehicles, often citing risks of market manipulation. The situation shifted following a significant win in August by Grayscale, a potential issuer for the Bitcoin ETF, in its lawsuit against the SEC. Since then, the agency has been reconsidering applications, now involving major firms like BlackRock.


https://unusualwhales.com/news/sec-twit ... e-approved

[ponchi101]

Airbus a220 is actually pretty good plane in the smaller segment. I probably have flown Embraer, but not recently and thus can't comment. Maybe they're more common in SA.

Actually, I flew an EA195 in United Airlines. Very comfy plane, even though UA usually tries to cram 200 people in a space designed for a lavatory. That is the reason I say it is a good plane. If not even UA was able to make it suck, it says a lot.

[ti-amie]

Judge Voids Musk’s $56 Billion Tesla Pay, Citing ‘Deeply Flawed’ Award Process
After the news, Tesla shares fell in after hours trading on Tuesday
Published 01/30/24 05:09 PM ET|Updated 53 min ago
Lily Meier

Tesla shares fell in after hours trading after a judge said that the $56 billion pay package awarded by Tesla's board to Elon Musk to lead the company was extravagant.

Tesla shareholders sued in Delaware Chancery Court to void the compensation plan, which would have been the largest ever to a CEO by a public company, claiming it breached the board's fiduciary duty.

In a 201-page opinion, Judge Kathaleen St. J. McCormick of Delaware Chancery court concluded Tesla's board had failed to prove the compensation plan was fair, and noted that Tesla's proxy statement to shareholders failed to disclose relationships between Musk and members of the board's compensation committee.

"There was no well-functioning committee of independent directors here," the judge said. "Musk launched a self-driving process, recalibrating the speed and direction along the way as he saw fit. The process arrived at an unfair price. And through this litigation, the plaintiff requests a recall."

After the ruling was released, Musk posted a statement on his social network X saying: “Never incorporate your company in the state of Delaware.”

The next-closest package to the one proposed for Musk was his own previous plan, which was still 33 times smaller than the $56 billion he was awarded under the terms of the new deal, the suit alleged. The board, the shareholders claimed, did not take adequate measures to ensure Musk’s funding was fair.

“The plaintiff thus forces the question: Does Musk control Tesla?,” the judge wrote in the post trial opinion, adding that “the process leading to the approval of Musk’s compensation plan was deeply flawed.”

Some of those involved in the decision-making process had connections with Musk, the judge added, including the board's compensation committee chair, Ira Ehrenpreis, and another member on the working group, Antonio Gracias, who was allegedly known to vacation with Musk. Ehrenpreis and Gracias were also named as defendants in the suit.

Musk, and other defendants, claimed the deliberation process, which took nine months and happened across ten meetings, was “thorough.”

Musk's proposed pay package was nearly four times the amount of Tesla's company-wide earnings for the last full year. Musk owns around 13% of the company’s stock, after selling billions of dollars in shares in order to purchase X.

Earlier this month, Musk threatened to withdraw AI development projects from Tesla and move them to a new company, on the basis of not having sufficient voting control over Tesla's stock. Though his stated justification was that he needed to ensure AI development was managed appropriately, the move was widely seen as an effort to justify, and cement, his proposed compensation plan.

On Tuesday, before news of the decision hit the markets, Musk regained his spot as the richest person in the world with a net worth of around $210 billion, after the carmaker’s shares went up, Forbes reported.

https://themessenger.com/business/judge ... ay-package

[ti-amie]

He's also proposing putting a chip in peoples's brains. He being Elmo of course.

[ti-amie]

The Mystery of the $400 Million FTX Heist May Have Been Solved
An indictment against three Americans suggests that at least some of the culprits behind the theft of an FTX crypto fortune may be in custody.

When more than $400 million worth of crypto was mysteriously pulled out of the coffers of what was once the world's biggest cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, on the very day that it declared bankruptcy in November of 2022, many initially suspected insiders at the company—including, potentially, then CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, now convicted of fraud. But clues left across blockchains over the past year suggested instead that external thieves had chosen a particularly inconvenient moment during FTX's meltdown to pull off an enormous heist.

Now, new clues revealed in a US Department of Justice indictment suggest something even more surprising: Some of those suspected thieves appear to have been in the United States and have now been arrested.

An indictment filed last week details charges against three people—Robert Powell, Carter Rohn, and Emily Hernandez—who are accused of running a massive cybercriminal theft ring. The group, which authorities say was known as the “Powell SIM Swapping Crew,” allegedly used SIM swaps—tricking phone companies into switching a user's mobile phone registration to the thieves' SIM card so that they can gain access to authentication codes sent to the victim's phone—to steal hundreds of millions of dollars from victims' accounts.

Most notably, the gang is accused of siphoning $400 million in virtual currency from the accounts of a company—named in the indictment only as Victim Company-1—on the night of November 11, 2022, continuing into November 12. As first spotted by cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs, that is also the exact timing of FTX's theft, which the company itself has pegged at between $415 million and $432 million in stolen crypto.

The blockchain analysis firm Elliptic corroborated Krebs' inference that the $400 million theft described in the report is almost certainly the FTX heist. “We are not aware of any other thefts from crypto businesses on this scale, on these dates,” Elliptic wrote in a blog post. “It therefore appears likely that FTX is the ‘Victim Company-1’ named in the indictment.”

FTX didn't immediately respond to WIRED's request for comment on whether it is the SIM-swapping victim described in the indictment.

If the indictment does, in fact, describe the FTX theft—and given the relative rarity of nine-figure crypto thefts and the exact timing of this one—then the charging document reveals key details about how the FTX heist was pulled off. It describes how Powell allegedly asked Hernandez to target a specific phone number for SIM-swapping. According to prosecutors, Hernandez then obtained a fake ID with her photo but the name of her victim—potentially an FTX staffer—and presented it at an AT&T retail store in Texas to prove her identity as she requested that the staffer's account be transferred to her own phone.

That allowed the group to hijack messages intended for the victim, including authentication codes for his or her account, according to the indictment. Given that those codes usually represent a second-factor authentication mechanism required after a user enters their username and password, it’s not clear how those other credentials might have been stolen, though cybercriminals typically obtain them through phishing, credential-stealing malware, or trying credentials leaked in other database dumps and potentially reused across accounts.

The possibility that the FTX thieves have been identified as Americans, within reach of US law enforcement, comes as a surprise following Elliptic’s discovery in October of last year that the crypto stolen from FTX had moved across blockchains and through cryptocurrency swapping services in a way that suggested Russia-linked money launderers. Portions of the funds, for instance, moved through mixing services—which take in users’ funds and return others to muddy the trail of any blockchain tracing—that are popular with Russian cybercriminals, such as ChipMixer and Sinbad.

Both mixers, in fact, have been sanctioned by the US Treasury Department for their illicit use, including by Russian ransomware gangs. “It’s looking increasingly likely that the perpetrator has links to Russia,” Elliptic’s chief scientist and cofounder Tom Robison told WIRED in October. “We can’t attribute this to a Russian actor, but it’s an indication it might be.”

If the money is FTX's, those blockchain footprints suggest that the $400 million that the hackers allegedly stole is long gone, moved into the hands of international money launderers. “It is therefore not clear whether any of the stolen assets are under their control, and might be recovered,” Elliptic wrote in its blog post today. Nonetheless, if the alleged hackers were paid a portion of that sum in exchange for their work to steal it, that money might still be seized and repaid as restitution to FTX’s many creditors.

Either way, it suggests that another mystery in the story of FTX’s implosion and the billions of dollars in missing funds that disappeared with it may be at least partially solved. If so, it would seem this FTX-related crime, at least, can’t be blamed on Sam Bankman-Fried.


https://www.wired.com/story/ftx-heist-s ... ndictment/

[ponchi101]

"I feel like stealing something"
"Like what?"
"Cryptocurrencies"
"Cryptocurrencies are a figment of somebody's imagination"
...
"Should be easy, no?"

[ti-amie]

AT&T Says Service Is Restored After Widespread Cellular Outage
White House officials said the incident was under investigation, but it did not appear to be a cyberattack. Verizon and T-Mobile said their networks were operating normally.


By Jenny Gross and David McCabe
Jenny Gross reported from London and David McCabe reported from Washington.

Feb. 22, 2024
Updated 3:53 p.m. ET
AT&T said on Thursday that it had fully restored service to its wireless network after a widespread outage temporarily cut off connections for users across the United States for many hours, the cause of which was still under investigation.

The outage, which affected people in cities including Atlanta, Los Angeles and New York, was first reported around 3:30 a.m. Eastern time, according to Downdetector.com, which tracks user reports of telecommunication and internet disruptions. At its peak, the site listed around 70,000 reports of disrupted service for the wireless carrier.

Multiple government agencies said they were looking into the incident, although the Biden administration told reporters that AT&T said there was no reason to think it was a cyberattack.

AT&T did not disclose the scope of the outage, nor the reason for it. When the outage first began on Thursday morning, the company listed the cause as “maintenance activity.”

Jim Greer, an AT&T spokesman, apologized in a statement confirming service was restored and said the company was “taking steps to ensure our customers do not experience this again in the future.”

The outage underscored the importance of connectivity to daily life as individuals and businesses were cut off from communications and the ability to use mobile apps. AT&T advised consumers they could make calls over Wi-Fi and sought to respond to angry customers online. Many phones showed an “SOS” symbol on their screen, signaling they could only make emergency calls, while local governments offered alternate ways to reach 911.

Reports of outages on Downdetector began to fall midmorning, and at one point AT&T’s website showed that outages were limited to users in California, though users in other states were still reporting issues. Cricket, which is owned by AT&T, also reported that its users were experiencing wireless service interruptions and said it was working to restore service.

Reports also surfaced early Thursday that FirstNet, the network AT&T maintains for emergency services personnel, had experienced outages, but AT&T said around 10:30 a.m. that the network was fully operational.

Verizon experienced 3,000 reports of outages at one point on Thursday and T-Mobile about half that. Both companies said in statements that their networks were operating normally.

“Some customers experienced issues this morning when calling or texting with customers served by another carrier,” Verizon said. “We are continuing to monitor the situation.”

In an email, T-Mobile said that it did not experience an outage. “Downdetector is likely reflecting challenges our customers were having attempting to connect to users on other networks.”

Officials in Washington said they were working to understand the cause of the outage. A spokesman for the Federal Communications Commission said its inquiry was being handled by its Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau, which was in touch with AT&T as well as other providers.

John Kirby, a National Security Council spokesman, said on a call with reporters on Thursday that the Biden administration was told “that AT&T has no reason to think this was a cybersecurity incident,” although he added that they would not be certain until an investigation had been completed.

Mr. Kirby said that, in addition to the F.C.C., the Department of Homeland Security and the F.B.I. were collaborating with technology companies to investigate the outage.

The F.B.I. said in a statement it was in touch with AT&T and would respond accordingly if any malicious activity was found.

Throughout the day, cities urged residents to find alternate ways of reaching emergency or municipal services, like landlines or phones connected to Wi-Fi. The City of Upper Arlington, Ohio, said the fire department might not be notified of fire alarms because of the outage. It urged that any fire alarm be followed up with a 911 call.

The San Francisco Fire Department said on social media that it was aware of an issue affecting AT&T users who were trying to call 911. “We are actively engaged and monitoring this,” the fire department said. “If you are an AT&T customer and cannot get through to 911, then please try calling from a landline.”

The Massachusetts State Police said on social media on Thursday morning that 911 call centers across the state had been flooded with calls from people checking to see if the emergency service worked from their phones. “Please do not do this,” the police said. “If you can successfully place a non-emergency call to another number via your cell service then your 911 service will also work.”

Even in less extreme circumstances, the outage complicated the many elements of life that have come to rely on a reliable connection to the internet.

Staff at the First Watch restaurant in Dania Beach, Fla. had to turn away breakfast customers for a time while the outage prevented them from processing payments.

Debra Maddow, who lives in southwest Houston, said that she first noticed something was off after 7 a.m., when she went to check traffic and Google Maps was offline. Later, she visited a Starbucks to make an urgent call through its free Wi-Fi, she said.

“I’m really frustrated that they’re not telling us anything,” Ms. Maddow said in a phone interview over Wi-Fi. She said she tried to call AT&T for an update, but after a long time on hold, the call was dropped.

Victor Mather, John Keefe, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Adam Goldman contributed reporting.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/22/busi ... utage.html

[ti-amie]

I worked this side of telecom for many years. If it wasn't a cyber attack the public will never know the true cause. I'd like to be wrong.

[ponchi101]

But wait.
AT&T went out. Do you IMMEDIATELY think it is a Russian/Korean/Chinese cyberattack?
Or that it is AT&T?
(I mean, their service is... )

[ti-amie]

Soft paywall.

Elon Musk Flees To Billionaires’ New Court
Burned by legal decisions, Elon Musk is relocating his rocket company to Texas — where he’ll enjoy a new, separate justice system controlled by his ally, Gov. Greg Abbott.


Elon Musk’s lawsuit-plagued SpaceX rocket company is departing Delaware for a new legal home base in Texas just as the Lone Star State rolls out a new, separate court system for businesses that will allow Republican Texas Governor — and longtime Musk ally — Greg Abbott to handpick judges.

Texas’s oil and gas industries, alongside a host of other corporate interests, lobbied hard last year for the state’s new business court system, which will begin hearing cases this September. The fierce support from Big Oil, Texas’s largest industry, was evidence, critics charged, that business interests in Texas were effectively trying to buy their own courts.

Despite pushback, businesses succeeded. After lawmakers brought the bill to his desk, Abbott signed the proposal into law in June. Texas has now created what critics argue is a two-tiered system of justice, where cases involving massive corporations are funneled into separate courts and heard by judges appointed personally by the governor.

https://www.levernews.com/elon-musk-fle ... new-court/

[ponchi101]

Secede? I think it is actually time to kick them off.

[ti-amie]

Mexico if they secede

[ti-amie]

Trump Media stock plunges as 2023 Truth Social loss put at $58 million
The new figures highlight the huge gap between Trump Media’s hyped market debut and his social network’s revenue

By Drew Harwell
Updated April 1, 2024 at 4:21 p.m. EDT|Published April 1, 2024 at 10:35 a.m. EDT

Former president Donald Trump’s social media company said Monday it lost more than $58 million last year, sending its stock plunging more than 21 percent only days after a highflying public debut set the company’s value at more than $8 billion.

Trump Media and Technology Group, which owns Truth Social, said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that the company generated just over $4 million in revenue last year, including less than $1 million in the last quarter.

The nosediving share price of the company — which uses the stock ticker DJT, for Trump’s initials — fell to its lowest level since Trump Media went public last week and shaved more than a fifth of its market value in a single day. It also slashed the value of Trump’s 57 percent ownership in the company by roughly $1 billion, to $3.8 billion.

The new financial figures throw into stark relief the gap between Trump Media’s highly hyped investor-driven valuation on the public stock market and the reality of its business performance.

They also raise questions about the possibility that Trump could use the company as a financial lifeline. Trump cannot sell his shares or use them as collateral for a loan for six months because of a provision in the company’s merger agreement, known as a lockup.

The company’s board could vote to waive that requirement but has yet to do so, the filings state. Cashing out early could sink the stock price further by flooding the market with shares and undermining investor confidence in Trump’s commitment to the brand, financial analysts said.

Trump, who invested no money in Trump Media, was given 78 million shares of the company last week and stands to earn tens of millions more over the next three years if the stock stays above $12 to $17, a filing shows.

Trump Media said in a filing that it expects to incur more “operating losses and negative cash flows” as it works to expand its user base but that it expects its growth will come from Truth Social’s “overall appeal.”

The company said in a filing that its management had “substantial doubt” as of the end of last year that it would have enough money to pay its debts as they come due. The company paid nearly $40 million in interest expenses last year and racked up about $16 million in operating losses.

Trump’s company unlocked nearly $300 million in investor funds last week when it finalized a merger deal with Digital World Acquisition, a special purpose acquisition company that helped take Trump Media public.

Trump Media said in a filing that it aimed to spend some of that money toward “strategic investments” in marketing, advertising sales and other technology. About $18 million of it was also paid toward an SEC settlement announced last year.

The company has declined to share performance indicators like those common across the tech industry, such as its number of active users, and said it may continue to withhold such figures. Focusing on those numbers, the company said, “might not align with the best interests” of Trump Media or its shareholders.

Trump Media’s wild booms and busts over the last week have driven some observers to regard it as a “meme stock,” whose value is derived less from its fundamentals and more from investors’ personal feelings about its namesake brand.

That separation of stock value from the company’s ability to make money could hurt it in the long run, said Jay Ritter, a University of Florida finance professor who predicted the share price would continue to decline.

“The stock will almost certainly remain extremely volatile, with both some big upswings and downswings on a daily basis,” he said. But “the long-term trend will be down.”

Trump Media, which makes money through advertising on Truth Social, has struggled to gain a broad audience after two years of operation, according to estimates from the online analytics firm SimilarWeb. On the company’s first day of public trading last week, Truth Social’s website saw its highest-traffic day of the month, with roughly 277,000 U.S. visitors, the estimates show.

That is a small fraction of most online platforms: On that same day, the discussion-board service Reddit saw more than 32 million U.S. visitors, the estimates show. Reddit, which went public a few days before Trump Media and is trading at a similar stock price, generated $800 million in revenue last year, or more than 200 times Trump Media’s 2023 revenue.

Trump’s company said it has begun testing a “state-of-the-art technology that supports video streaming and provides a ‘home’ for canceled content creators,” which it “aims to acquire and incorporate into its product offerings and/or services as soon as practicable.” The company did not respond to a request for comment seeking further details.

The Trump Media board includes Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr.; Robert E. Lighthizer, Trump’s former trade representative; Linda McMahon, his former administrator of the Small Business Administration; and Kash Patel, who served on Trump’s National Security Council and was paid $130,000 by Trump Media last year through a consulting agreement.

Trump Media’s chief executive, the former Republican congressman Devin Nunes, was given 115,000 shares, a stake worth more than $5 million today. He and other board members are bound by the same lockup agreement.

Nunes is paid a $750,000 salary that is subject to increase to $1 million within two years, filings show. The company chief financial officer, Phillip Juhan, and chief operating officer, Andrew Northwall, are each paid about $350,000. Nunes, Juhan and Northwall will also each receive $600,000 “retention bonuses” this month.

Dan Scavino Jr., Trump’s White House social media director and an adviser to his 2024 presidential campaign, was also paid $240,000 last year through a consulting agreement that listed him as an independent contractor, a filing shows. He, too, will be given a $600,000 retention bonus.

Trump himself could receive 36 million more shares in the coming weeks as long as the stock price stays above $17.50 for “20 out of any 30 trading days,” according to a company “earnout” provision.

The company’s filings Monday note that five lawsuits have been filed in recent weeks involving Trump Media, Digital World, Trump Media’s co-founders Andy Litinsky and Wes Moss, and Digital World’s former chief Patrick Orlando.

Digital World dropped one lawsuit last week after its biggest founding investor — Arc Global Investments II, which is managed by Orlando — voted in favor of the merger. But the other cases are still active, and they include claims from Litinsky, Moss and Orlando that the company had worked to improperly dilute their shares.

Trump Media said in a Monday filing that one ongoing lawsuit, jointly filed by Trump Media and Digital World against Orlando and Arc, could prove “costly and time consuming” and have an adverse effect on Trump Media’s reputation.

In the newest lawsuit, filed last week in a Florida circuit court, Trump Media alleged that Moss and Litinsky had mismanaged the company but that Truth Social had since become “among the fastest growing social media platforms in history.”

CORRECTION
A previous version of this article misstated the position of a member of Trump Media's executive team due to a misstatement in the company's filing. Andrew Northwall is the company's chief operating officer, not its chief financial officer. The article has been corrected.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technolo ... a-results/

[ti-amie]

I guess no one was paying attention to the reason NYS sued him. He just makes s**t up. The only discussion should be if this is a pump and dump, money laundering scheme, or a Ponzi scheme of some kind.