Sramana Mitra: What do you need in terms of metrics? Let’s talk about B2B SaaS. Are you looking for a million dollar ARR? Are you looking for paying customers but not yet velocity? What is the...
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Original author: Sramana Mitra
56 Hits
Sep
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Sep
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Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Suresh Shanmugham was recorded in May 2018. Suresh...
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Original author: Sramana Mitra
56 Hits
Sep
28
To keep up with the growing sizes of early-stage funding rounds, Y Combinator announced this morning that it will increase the size of its investments to $150,000 for 7 percent equity starting with its winter 2019 batch.
Based in Mountain View, Calif., YC funds and mentors hundreds of startups per year through its 12-week program that culminates in a demo day, where founders pitch their companies to an audience of Silicon Valley’s top investors. Airbnb, Dropbox and Instacart are among its greatest successes.
Since 2014, YC has invested $120,000 for 7 percent equity in its companies. It has increased the size of its investment before — in 2007, a YC “standard deal” was just $20,000 — but the amount of equity the accelerator takes in exchange for the capital has been consistent.
“We thought a $30K increase was necessary to help companies stay focused on building their product without worrying about fundraising too soon,” Y Combinator chief executive officer Michael Seibel wrote in a blog post this morning. “Capital for startups has never been more abundant, and we’ll continue to focus on the things that remain hard to come by — community, simplicity, advice that’s systematic and personal, and above all, a great founder experience.”
Seibel was named CEO in 2016. Co-founder Sam Altman serves as YC’s president.
YC is also changing the way it crafts its investments. It will now invest in startups on a post-money safe basis rather than on a pre-money safe. YC invented the fundraising mechanism, safe, in 2013. A safe, or a simple agreement for future equity, means an investor makes an investment in a company and receives the company stock at a later date — an alternative to a convertible note. A safe is a quicker and simpler way to get early money into a company and the idea was, according to YC, that holders of those safes would be early investors in the startup’s Series A or later priced equity rounds.
In recent years, YC noticed that startups were raising much larger seed rounds than before and those safes were “really better considered as wholly separate financings, rather than ‘bridges’ into later priced rounds.” Founders, in the meantime, were struggling to determine how much they were being diluted.
YC’s latest change, in short, will make it easier for founders to know exactly how much of their company they are selling off and will make capitalization table math, which can be extremely grueling for founders, a whole lot easier.
The pre-money safe has been criticized by founders and investors alike.
Last year, a pair of venture capitalists who’d worked with YC companies, Dolby Family Partners’ Pascal Levensohn and Andrew Krowne, wrote that the safe method was screwing over founders.
“Entrepreneurs who don’t do the capitalization table math end up owning less of their company’s equity than they thought they did. And when an equity round is inevitably priced, entrepreneurs don’t like the founder dilution numbers at all. But they can’t blame the VC, they can’t blame the angels, so that means they can only blame… oops!”
A transition to a post-money safe will eliminate that cap table math headache while still being simple and efficient. The trade-off, YC says, “is that each incremental dollar raised on post-money safes dilutes just the current stockholders, which is often the founders and early employees.” So it’s not perfect, but it’s an improvement.
Recent YC grad Deepak Chhugani, the founder of The Lobby, which announced a $1.2 million investment this week, had a positive response to the changes and said either way, most of the resources provided by YC are priceless to a first-time founder, like himself.
“I think given rising costs in the Bay Area and most startup hubs, the new YC deal is going to be great for founders, regardless of whether they stay in the Bay Area afterward or not,” Chhugani told TechCrunch.
YC is also tweaking its policy around pro-rata follow-ons. You can read about that here.
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Sramana Mitra: That’s very good to hear that kind of alternative investment thesis because with 700 plus micro-VCs in the industry, there is no way we’re going to get 2,500 unicorns. Unicorns are...
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Original author: Sramana Mitra
58 Hits
Jun
27
Blok.Party, the company that built the upcoming PlayTable game console, announced today it raised $10 million in new funding. It’s also unveiling a big content partnership, where Blok.Party will create its own version of the popular board game Settlers of Catan.
I first wrote about Blok.Party and PlayTable earlier this year, when co-founder and CEO Jimmy Chen first laid out his vision to use blockchain technology to build a console that can recognize real-world objects (like figurines and cards), creating a hybrid between tabletop and video gaming.
The idea may have sounded a little abstract at the time, but it got a lot clearer when Chen dropped by the TechCrunch New York office to play a couple rounds of Catan with me.
I’ll admit that I hadn’t played in a while, but it was clear from the start that PlayTable saved us some setup time — instead of putting all the pieces of the physical board together, you play on a digital representation of the board. Most of the pieces are digitized too, and we used and traded our cards using smartphones. But there is a physical “robber” piece, because Chen said this allows the robber’s movement to remain “a very visceral experience … that a digital version can’t ever capture.”
It may not be too long before you get to try this out for yourself, at least if you’re among the 10,000 pre-orders Blok.Party has received so far. Chen said the company will start shipping its first devices this fall.
He added that Catan, like many of the other games built for PlayTable, will be priced at around $20.
“For us, it’s not about trying to compete based on price,” Chen said. “We’re trying to compete based on experience.”
The new funding comes from crypto fund JRR Capital and other investors. Chen said the company will use the money to continue scaling the product, including further software development and building out the library of games.
At the same time, he emphasized that although Blok.Party is manufacturing the initial devices, his vision is to achieve real scale through partnerships with hardware manufacturers, who will build their own PlayTable consoles. Apparently, some of those discussions are already underway.
“Our strategy is to always have [our own] hardware program running to continually do research,” Chen said. “What I’ve discovered is that keeping a hardware program running is not that expensive. The expensive part is when you try to scale the program.”
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In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:
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Original author: Maureen Kelly
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Sep
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Sramana Mitra: Two of my favorite unicorn companies are Veeva and Fortinet. These are multi-billion dollar market cap companies. Veeva, in its entire history, raised $7 million in capital of which $4...
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Original author: Sramana Mitra
29 Hits
Sep
28
Gartner estimates the worldwide enterprise security spending to grow 8% this year to $96.3 billion. As the US gets ready for midterm elections this year, there is growing concern regarding election...
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Original author: MitraSramana
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Sep
28
Entrepreneurs are invited to the 417th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, October 4, 2018, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur, register...
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Original author: Maureen Kelly
102 Hits
Sep
28
Ryan Fyfe: The biggest learning there was, if you’re going to scale to new channels, be mindful of how you view your metrics. For a long time, we blended all of our metrics. This sounds silly in...
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Original author: Sramana Mitra
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Sep
28
What do you do when one of the most mercurial CEOs ever to live calls your work "dog s--t"?
That's the conundrum Apple software engineer Ken Kocienda faced when he was helping develop the iPhone 4 during his 16 years at the trillion-dollar tech giant.
In an op-ed for The Wall Street Journa l, Kocienda recalled working on a new font to bring the best out of the iPhone 4's new retina display. He prepared eight different routes all based around the old iPhone Helvetica font, but there were problems with each, which made them look "smudgy rather than sharp."
Here's how Kocienda remembers Jobs reacting to options:
"Steve looked at each phone screen, pulled his round-rim glasses up so they rested on his forehead, stared again closely, then put his glasses back down and returned each phone to the table in front of him. Then he expressed himself. I was left wishing I had a plastic bag in my pocket to clean up my work."
Ken Kocienda. Ken Kocienda
Kocienda eventually found a solution using Helvetica Neue, which Jobs approved. But the former engineer said he learnt two valuable lessons from the experience:
Jobs' abrupt feedback was often very helpful. "Criticism can be effective even if it's not constructive. Steve had no problem issuing a rejection without explanation," Kocienda explained. Brand new work is "frequently no good." He said rounds of iteration are often required to produce a polished final result.Reflecting on Jobs' management style, Kocienda added: "Steve could be unpredictable and moody, and luckily, I was never on the receiving end of one of his full-on harangues.
"But let's be honest: Most of us swear. The key to making harsh words count is to have a trusting environment where everyone knows that comments are about your work and not about you."
Original author: Jake Kanter
185 Hits
Sep
28
One of Facebook's most senior executives spent Thursday watching Brett Kavanaugh's dramatic testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Joel Kaplan, vice president for US public policy at Facebook, sat prominently among the onlookers throughout Kavanaugh's testimony, as the judge sought to dispel accusations he sexually assaulted Christine Blasey Ford.
New York Times reporter Mike Isaac was among those who spotted Kaplan, who was said to be there in a personal capacity and not on Facebook duty. He declined to comment when approached by Business Insider reporter Joe Perticone following the hearing.
The exact reason he was in the gallery is not clear, but the pair do have history. Kaplan served as deputy chief of staff for policy under President George W. Bush between 2006 and 2009.
He was in the front row when Kavanaugh was sworn in as judge to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in June 2016. Kaplan is sat second from the right in the Getty image embedded below.
Original author: Jake Kanter and Rob Price
88 Hits
Sep
28
Elon Musk agreed on a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), but walked away from the deal at the eleventh hour last week.
That's according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, which said the SEC was on the brink of filing the settlement, only for Musk to blow it up at the last minute.
That chain of events led to the SEC announcing on Thursday that it was suing Musk on charges he made "false and misleading statements" in tweets claiming he could take the company private.
The Journal said the SEC had "crafted" the settlement with Musk. It was preparing to file the agreement on Thursday last week, but then Musk's lawyers called to spike the deal. The SEC then hastily pulled together a lawsuit.
The SEC is suing the Tesla CEO for his now infamous "funding secured" tweet from August 7, which purported he was taking Tesla private at $420 a share. The SEC said Musk knew such a deal was never on the table. He announced on August 25 that Tesla would remain public.
In its claims for relief, the SEC recommended that Musk pay a penalty and that he be "prohibited from acting as an officer or director" of a public company.
Musk said he was "deeply saddened" by the lawsuit. In a statement, the Tesla CEO said: "The unjustified action from the SEC leaves me deeply saddened and disappointed. I have always taken action in the best interest of the truth, transparency and investors. Integrity is the most important value in my life and the facts show I have never compromised this in any way."
Business Insider contacted the SEC for comment. A Tesla spokeswoman said: "Tesla and the board of directors are fully confident in Elon, his integrity, and his leadership of the company, which has resulted in the most successful US auto company in over a century. Our focus remains on the continued ramp of Model 3 production and delivering for our customers, shareholders and employees."
The SEC lawsuit caused Tesla's stock to dip by as much as 11% in after-hours trading.
Original author: Isobel Asher Hamilton
80 Hits
Sep
28
Musk's marijuana joke might prove expensive. Joe Rogan Experience/YouTube
Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Friday.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission is suing Tesla chief executive Elon Musk for making "false and misleading statements." Specifically, the SEC said Musk didn't truly have a deal to take Tesla private, as he claimed in an August tweet. Current and former Facebookers piled into the debate about how the company treats acquisitions, after WhatsApp cofounder Brian Acton dunked on the firm in a tell-all interview. Several entrepreneurs whose firms were acquired by Facebook were unsympathetic to Acton, suggesting he had sold out. Masayoshi Son, CEO of SoftBank, has said the company plans to raise another $100 billion fund to invest in startups every few years. He told Bloomberg he plans to spend around $50 billion a year betting on startups. WikiLeaks has appointed a new editor-in-chief because the incumbent, Julian Assange, is incommunicado in the Ecuadorean embassy in London. WikiLeaks announced that Kristinn Hrafnsson will be the new editor-in-chief of the organization. Social media analysis shows that Russian Twitter accounts pushed an online boycott against Nike products, after the sportswear firm revealed its Colin Kaepernick advert. According to Wired, some of the tweets, which received widespread media coverage, showed people burning or destroying Nike products. Chinese startup Bytedance is reportedly raising new funding at a mega valuation of $75 billion. The deal, thought to be led by backers including SoftBank, would make the firm one of the most valuable startups in the world. LG's Korean YouTube channel and press site released a video and a press release on Thursday teasing the LG V40 ThinQ: a smartphone that comes with a total of five cameras, compared to the usual two or three. The video doesn't reveal the function of each lens. Tesla's share price cratered after news that the SEC plans to sue CEO Elon Musk. Telsa shares sank by as much as 11% in after-hours trading on the news. There's a new season of the hit game "Fortnite" out, titled "Darkness Rises." The season 6 update adds new locations to the map, including a floating island, a haunted castle, corrupted areas, and corn fields. Some people are saying Apple's new iPhone selfie camera automatically smooths their skin in photos, and they're calling it 'beautygate.' According to iPhone XS owners, the phone's front camera smooths out their skin much like cameras on Asian phones.Have an Amazon Alexa device? Now you can hear 10 Things in Tech each morning. Just search for "Business Insider" in your Alexa's flash briefing settings.
Original author: Shona Ghosh
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Sep
28
Urban-X, the urban-tech startup accelerator backed by MINI and early-stage urban-tech fund Urban.Us, hosted at its Brooklyn HQ a demo day today for its fourth cohort of companies. The seven presenting companies offered solutions to issues plaguing modern cities, including toll-road pricing, energy and construction management and even the inefficiencies of modern cycling helmets.
In a day that offered an impressive display of entrepreneurial talent, here are three of the companies that really stood out to us.
Rentlogic
In hopes of improving landlord transparency, Rentlogic uses years of city government data to create objective algorithmic letter ratings for apartment buildings. As CEO Yale Fox pointed out, despite city-dwellers spending half our paychecks on rent, urban housing hasn’t seen the same rating systems that we use to guide decisions on where we eat, what car we buy or what shows we binge. Rentlogic allows apartment hunters to screen buildings before signing a lease and avoid committing to unhealthy conditions or an absentee landlord.
Rentlogic partners with landlords looking to obtain a stamp of quality for potential renters, offering an added inspection feature that allows them to hang a letter rating outside their building. The company’s roster of customers already includes Blackstone and Phipps Houses, the largest for-profit and nonprofit landlords in the world, respectively.
What stands out with Rentlogic is its ability to scale. Though currently only in New York City, the same data used in New York presumably exists across all major U.S. markets, and Rentlogic has minimized the cost of entering new cities by building out the back-end infrastructure required to ingest and analyze the data. From a demand perspective, as renters defer to Rentlogic for quality assurance and more competitors hang “A” ratings outside their buildings, landlords will face more pressure to maintain the same offering.
The idea hit home for a born-and-bred New Yorker with my own set of landlord horror stories, and the first thing I did when I left was look up my building on Rentlogic.
Campsyte
Most companies wish they had mega-campuses or “motherships” where they could offer employees access to sprawling outdoor working areas. For companies based in urban areas, offering outdoor space can be tough, with many parks often privatized, far from city centers or void of the amenities needed to be productive.
Campsyte transforms underutilized urban outdoor spaces into productive and fun spaces that customers can book for co-working purposes, corporate off-sites or events. Similar to WeWork’s approach with buildings, Campsyte takes a parking lot and adds value by filling it with greenery, furniture, electricity, Wi-Fi and other services. With its services driving nearly 10x the annual revenue per square foot seen by traditional parking lots, the value proposition for lot owners is convincing.
Given the competition companies are facing when it comes to attracting and retaining talent, providing the same amenities as competitors based outside city centers seems invaluable, with Campsyte boasting an extremely impressive roster of partner companies, including LinkedIn, PayPal, Salesforce and Airbnb.
ODN (Open Data Nation)
As anyone who has driven in a city knows, car crashes or accidents can often be caused by the built environment around you. Yet insurers, which focus on personal characteristics like credit scores when underwriting a policy, lack the measurement tools to assess the risk of someone’s external environment.
Founded by an MIT-trained city planner, ODN builds risk models using machine learning and public data records to help insurers evaluate risk and mitigate accidents. The resulting analytics eases the selection process for insurers, allowing them to drive more sales with less cost and risk. ODN is already partnered up with some of the world’s largest insurers, including Zurich, Travelers and Hanover Insurance.
The potential use cases for ODN’s technology go far beyond the massive existing insurance market, with the eventual rollout of autonomous cars forcing insurers to ask how they construct policies when human behavior plays no role in accidents. ODN is working with carriers to help answer this question while helping create a more efficient and fair underwriting process today.
Other members of Urban-X Cohort 4 included:
Avvir: “Avvir automates quality assurance for the construction industry, providing real-time insights into the progress and potential defects on a project.”
ClearRoad: “ClearRoad helps government agencies automate toll road pricing for any section of road without the need for traditional proprietary hardware infrastructure.”
Park & Diamond: “Park & Diamond makes biking better by reinventing the bike helmet, using next-generation materials to build a safer, more portable helmet that can roll up into the shape of a water bottle for easier carrying, while looking like a regular hat, cap, or beanie.”
Sapient Industries: “Sapient Industries has developed an autonomous energy management system that senses and learns human behavior in order to eliminate wasted energy in buildings.”
63 Hits
Jun
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Facebook has never been a paragon for protecting privacy â quite the opposite, in fact.
But we just got another revealing glimpse at how far it's willing to go to glean information about you that it and its advertising partners can use to target you with ads. And, yet again â for the umpteenth time â the company comes across looking sleazy.
It turns out that Facebook has turned some security features into data-grabbing, ad-selling opportunities. The company takes phone numbers provided by customers for its two-factor authentication system and for sending customers alerts about new log-ins to their account and uses them to target users with ads, as Gizmodo reported this week.
In other words, Facebook is engaged in a bait-and-switch. It's taking information that users provide it for the purpose of helping make their accounts more secure and using it to violate their privacy â without being entirely clear to users what it's doing.
"Users may naturally provide this data with only security purposes in mind; if used for advertising, this may significantly violate a user's privacy expectations," a group of professors, three of which hail from Northeastern University, said in their understated way in the research paper on which Gizmodo based its report.
Facebook also targets users based on data they can't control
But that's not the only way that Facebook is garnering information about users surreptitiously and using it for advertising purposes, according to the professors' report. Facebook also targets users with ads based on personal contact information even when they themselves don't provide that information, according to the paper. That happens when their phone numbers or email addresses are included in the address books uploaded by other users.
Chris Wylie blew the whistle on Cambridge Analytica's collection and use of data harvested from up to 87 million Facebook users. Neil P. Mockford/Getty Images Those contact details could be ones that users purposefully didn't share with Facebook. What's worse, Facebook keeps hidden from users who provided that information or what it is â or bar its use. Additionally, the company was able to target users with ads using such information even when users had their privacy settings configured to the highest level.
"The target user in this scenario was provided no information about or control over how this phone number was used to target them with ads," the professors wrote in their report.
Facebook representatives did not return an email seeking comment. But the company did not dispute the paper's findings, Gizmodo reported.
"We use the information people provide to offer a more personalized experience, including showing more relevant ads," a company spokeswoman told Facebook.
The spokeswoman added that in the case of two-factor authentication, users can now configure it without using their phone number. The reason the company bars people from seeing and controlling information shared about them by other users is because it considers that information to be owned by those other users.
"People own their address books," the spokeswoman told Gizmodo.
Facebook has a poor history when it comes to users' privacy
That's a very convenient answer for Facebook. It means that even if users are trying to protect their private information from the company or advertisers, that information can be exposed without their say or knowledge. That's great for Facebook and its advertisers, but bad for users' privacy.
But at this point, we should probably expect such practices from Facebook. The company's business, after all, revolves around collecting as much data as possible from users and using that information to target them with advertisements. It's repeatedly pushed users to share more and more personal information and frequently hasn't been completely upfront about what it's collecting or what's being done with that information.
Don't just trust me on that. That's what the Federal Trade Commission found when it issued a consent decree against the company in 2012. Thanks to the Cambridge Analytica scandal this spring, the company is now under investigation for violating that decree.
In the wake of that scandal, Facebook made an effort to demonstrate that it's now serious â really serious â about protecting users' privacy. It's made a big show about giving users more tools to control who can see their private information and clamping down on developers who previously had access to that data.
But these latest revelations indicate that these efforts are largely just that â a show. Facebook is what it's always been, a data harvesting, ad targeting machine. And its post-Cambridge Analytica privacy epiphany hasn't changed that.
Original author: Troy Wolverton
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Jun
29
The Securities and Exchange Commission is suing Elon Musk for fraud. If he loses the lawsuit, he could be out as Tesla's CEO.
Tesla shares tanked over 10% on the news in after-hours trading, after finishing the day down slightly and up about 7% for the week thus far.
Friday is likely to bring carnage. If the stock dips below $250, look out below.
In a statement provided to Business Insider's Mark Matousek, Musk pushed back against the charge he delivered false statements and harmed investors when he tweeted earlier this year that he had the funding in place to take Tesla private at $420 per share.
"Integrity is the most important value in my life and the facts will show I never compromised this in any way," he said.
Turn the clock back to May
Musk is also CEO of SpaceX. John Raoux/AP Images
The SEC allegations are the culmination of a summer of near-constant insanity around Tesla. The company was already under a lot of pressure â and being investigated by the SEC for other statements and claims â back in May when it reported a predictable, yet smaller, loss than analysts expected.
Shares actually traded up briefly in after-hours action, until Musk flipped out in response to questions from two analysts on a conference call. The stock was immediately crushed.
In 2017, Tesla shares had pushed toward $400, but in 2018 they'd been sliding in the first quarter. Absent Musk's comments, however, it looked as if the markets might take a wait-and-see attitude toward the company in the second and third quarters, as the carmaker worked out its May production issues with its Model 3 sedan.
But that did happen, and Q1 earnings were simply round one.
Round two arrived with second-quarter earnings in early August. Another big loss, but Tesla's revenues were starting to look like they might be poised for a takeoff; shares gained strength.
Then came the now-infamous and perhaps ruinous "take private" tweet, about a week later. The stock took off, but then declined again as it became apparent that Musk's goal to enlist the Saudi sovereign wealth fund and existing Tesla investors in the plan lacked substance. The whole thing was subsequently called off after Musk consulted with the Tesla board.
Musk also accused a diver involved with the Thai cave rescue of a youth soccer team of being a pedophile and he smoked pot on a podcast.
Tesla's summer of discontent
SpaceX's Falcon Heavy launch. Joe Raedle/Getty Images
If you weren't exhausted by this point, you should have been. Meanwhile, before Thursday's SEC lawsuit news broke, Tesla's stock price was roughly back where it began in May, before the hot summer of madness broke out.
Arguably, if Musk and Tesla had done nothing but make and sell cars all summer, shares could have a been a bit higher.
But obviously Musk didn't do nothing, and now the SEC could ban him from ever being a public company CEO again.
I emphasize could because the SEC has at this point just charged Musk and detailed the relief it's seeking. We're also dealing with tweets here, and as far as I know, this is the first instance of the SEC using the platform as a key part of a fraud allegation.
But Musk's CEO status matters because in addition to Tesla, he's CEO of SpaceX, which pre-IPO could be worth as much, or more than, Tesla.
I haven't even gotten to the earliest part of year and SpaceX's successful launch of the Falcon Heavy rocket, with Musk's own Tesla Roadster as the payload. That was February, and all those months ago Musk looked like the most visionary businessperson in human history.
An investment in Tesla has always been an investment in Musk, so the SEC allegations are serious. He doesn't run the company so much as chart its destiny â and until Thursday, that destiny had become worth $50 billion. Musk's own skin in the game is 20%.
The rest of the year is going be a rough ride for Tesla and Musk. That's unfortunate, as the third quarter could have lived up to Musk's promises to be the company's best ever, in terms of vehicle deliveries.
Did all of this have to happen? Clearly not. But it did. And Musk has himself to blame.
Original author: Matthew DeBord
72 Hits
Sep
27
The former SEC chairman Harvey Pitt told Business Insider in August that Tesla CEO Elon Musk could be banned from serving as an officer or director of a public company after reports that the agency was investigating his comments about taking Tesla private.
The SEC filed a lawsuit against Musk on Thursday, alleging that his comments were "false and misleading." The agency also said in the lawsuit that it seeks to bar Musk from being an officer or director of a public company.
On August 7, Musk said that he had "funding secured" to convert Tesla into a private company at $420 per share and only needed a shareholder vote to confirm a go-private deal. In its lawsuit, the SEC alleges that Musk had not acquired the necessary funding or even discussed the terms he mentioned with any potential funding sources.
According to Pitt, mentioning the possibility of taking Tesla private on Twitter, while ill-advised, would not trouble regulators. Instead, it was the tweet's final two words, "funding secured," that had the potential to create problems.
"'Funding secured' is a very strong term, and it has legal consequences," Pitt said.
But the SEC's lawsuit is not the only potential threat to Musk. Bloomberg reported earlier this month that the Department of Justice has opened an inquiry into Tesla, an action that could ultimately result in a prison sentence for Musk. For Musk to serve jail time, it would have to be proven that he committed a crime beyond a reasonable doubt, Pitt said.
Pitt reiterated the risks Musk faces on Thursday in an interview with CNBC's Closing Bell.
"He can face a number of penalties ... he can have fines imposed against him, he can effectively be barred for a period of time or permanently from serving as a principal officer or a director of a public company," he said.
Have a Tesla news tip? Contact this reporter at
Original author: Mark Matousek
101 Hits
Sep
27
Rapper Azealia Banks wants to make the soundtrack for Elon Musk's SEC investigation.
On Thursday, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit against Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk. The suit accuses Musk of false or misleading statements about taking Tesla private at $420 per share.
Since August, Banks has been an unexpectedly linked to Musk as the Tesla CEO has come under public scrutiny. Now, Banks wants to create the soundtrack to the investigation with Grimes, Musk's one-time girlfriend, as a new twist emerges.
"Grimes and I need to finish our song and make the soundtrack to this investigation," Banks said in a direct message on Twitter to Business Insider. "Music is powerful and the songs we started on were clutch."
In mid-August, Musk set off a dramatic sequence of events for Tesla when he tweeted that he was taking the company private. In the complaint filed on Thursday, the SEC said that these tweets sparked an investigation into Musk making misleading statements.
Soon after Musk's tweets about taking Tesla public, Banks stayed at one of Musk's Los Angeles properties for a weekend, after Grimes invited her to collaborate on music.
Banks told Business Insider she saw Musk "scrounging for investors," despite the CEO claiming he had funding secured to take Tesla private. She also provided texts between herself and Grimes, in which the singer said: "he got into weed cuz of me and he's super entertained by 420 so when he decided to take the stock private he calculated it was worth 419$ so he rounded up to 420 for a laugh and now the sec is investigating him for fraud."
The texts are echoed by the SEC complaint, which states: "Musk stated that he rounded the price up to $420 because he had recently learned about the number's significance in marijuana culture and thought his girlfriend 'would find it funny, which admittedly is not a great reason to pick a price.'"
After Banks' social media claims gained widespread media attention, Musk deleted his Instagram and unfollowed Grimes on Twitter. Musk refollowed Grimes in mid-September, but as of Thursday, he does not follow the singer on Twitter.
Grimes' representatives did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.
Musk said in a statement that the SEC's actions have left him "deeply saddened and disappointed."
"I have always taken action in the best interests of truth, transparency and investors," Musk said. "Integrity is the most important value in my life and the facts will show I never compromised this in any way."
If you have a story to share about Tesla or Elon Musk, email
Original author: Kate Taylor
72 Hits
Sep
27
During this week’s roundtable, we had a lot of attendees from Oracle. The Fall 2018 Oracle-1Mby1M Intrapreneurship Challenge launched this week. To all those getting excited about applying, please...
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Original author: Sramana Mitra
70 Hits
