Here’s a profile of a 34-year-old social network, ECHO, run by a woman named Stacy Horn:
At its peak in the late ’90s, ECHO had 3,500 members. Among them: writers, artists, musicians, actors, therapists, and even, briefly, John F. Kennedy Jr.
Now it has just 43 users.
[MIT Technology Review]
TechCrunch did the math, and it couldn’t be more than $57.4 million, not the $100 million Musk has been claiming. OpenAI became a for-profit business after Musk stopped donating.
“For the first time in more than a decade, returns for venture funds were negative for three consecutive quarters last year,” The Wall Street Journal writes, citing PitchBook Data. “If you deployed a lot of money in 2021 at 2021 prices, that’s not going to feel good,” says Jay Ripley, the head of investments at Global Endowment Management.
Elon Musk has been subpoenaed by the US Virgin Islands because Epstein “may have referred or attempted to refer” him to JP Morgan. Though a subpoena was issued in April, lawyers have been unable to serve Musk with physical papers — and are seeking permission to serve him via email. They seek documents. Other billionaires, including Sergey Brin, have also been subpoenaed.
I have never in my life wanted anything more than the destruction of Intuit, a company that has lobbied to make taxes miserable for all of us for more than 20 years. Now the IRS is threatening to get into the disruption business and all I can say is yes... ha! ha! ha! YES:
A free filing system offered directly by the federal government could upset a commercial tax prep market estimated by research firm IBIS World to be worth $14.4 billion this year.
Turns out one reason movies are so hideously boring these days is that they are being “written” by VFX nerds. There are, of course, others — and I thought this little reflection on the casualties of the streaming wars was instructive.
Just in time for Bitcoin 2023, the WSJ took a look at the state of play of crypto in Miami. Here’s what it found:
An NFT conference had fewer participants, relocated to smaller space. “Most of crypto was a pyramid scheme.” The residences that marketed themselves as accepting crypto no longer accept crypto after the fall of FTX. MiamiCoin is in the shitter. Miami’s venture fundraising is about 25 percent of what it was in last year’s first quarter. “This is not a free-flowing funding environment as it was before.”
Carl Icahn, whose hardball tactics have pressured Dell and Apple, is well-known for buying stakes in companies and then going all activist investor on them. He is one of the most famous corporate raiders in the world — and shortsellers Hindenburg Research released a report saying he “has made a classic mistake of taking on too much leverage in the face of sustained losses.”
Anyway now the feds are poking around, according to the WSJ.