Elizabeth Lopatto

Once again, the US has fallen behind in transportation — call it the Bussí gap. A hole in our infrastructure, if you will.

Remember Helium, which was touted by The New York Times in an article entitled “Maybe There’s a Use for Crypto After All?” Not only was the company misleading people about who used it — Salesforce and Lime weren’t using it, despite what Helium said on its site — Helium disproportionately enriched insiders, Forbes reports.

Previously, Dimon has called Bitcoin “a fraud,” before deciding whoopsie, no, “The blockchain is real. You can have crypto yen and dollars and stuff like that.” Okay, babe, now please explain how the London Whale happened just one more time.

“Chance,” one of the people behind the Chancery Daily Twitter account explains why the Delaware court is special. “Every little thing is going to be fought over in a $44 billion transaction, right?” Chance says. “Every little blessed thing.” If you were wondering how the Twitter v Musk sausage is made in Delaware’s Chancery Court, this is the inside-baseball podcast for you.

And because crypto is a relatively “concentrated ecosystem,” there are systemic risks, S&P analyst Alex Birry tells Reuters. Which means the domino effect we saw this summer? That could absolutely happen again.

Last year, Elon Musk tweeted “Use Signal,” leading to a spike in new users. Twitter’s lawyers said in a footnote in a previous filing that Musk had been messaging with investor Marc Andreessen of a16z on Signal about a Twitter investment. The problem for Twitter’s discovery process is that Signal messages can be set to auto-delete; Musk’s lawyers maintain he doesn’t ordinarily use Signal for business. Now, there’s a sealed motion that.... contains Musk’s Signal tweet. 👀

So remember the craze for SPACs, an alternative way to take a company public? The times, they have a-changed: the SPAC King of Silicon Valley, Chamath Palihapitiya, couldn’t find acquisition targets for two of his piles of cash. One of them, Social Capital Hedosophia VI, is the largest-ever SPAC.

South Korean authorities have requested that Interpol tell international authorities to arrest Do Kwon, the co-founder of the company behind the Terra/Luna cryptocurrency debacle, The Financial Times reports. Kwon tweeted this weekend that he is not on the run, actually, and authorities are just mad that he tweeted that their size is not size. Posters gonna post, I guess.

Loved this meaty essay about trends in consumerism, what we mean by “culture,” and how DTC brands led to a new understanding of community and identity. “In the 2010s, supply chain innovation opened up lifestyle brands. In the 2020s, financial mechanism innovation is opening up the space for incentivized ideologies, networked publics, and co-owned faiths,” writes Toby Shorin. “The authenticity-driven culture of ironic detachment, so present in the early 2000s, has given way to a moment where people are genuinely open to being influenced, open to sincerely participating, even if it’s cringe.”