What it’s like using the Owl car security camera

While it’s easy to tell people things, it’s much more powerful to learn things. And, as I get older, I see the same lessons being learned by subsequent generations. While this isn’t a post that says “everything is the same as it was before”, there are foundational lessons in life that play out over and over again.

I spent the weekend with a friend from the last 1990s who was the lead banker on the Interliant IPO (I was a co-founder and co-chairman.) Last night, at the Aspen Entrepreneurs event, I was asked to describe several failures and I rolled out my story about Interliant, which, for a period of time (1999 – 2000) appeared to be hugely successful before going bankrupt in 2002. If you like to read IPO prospectuses, here’s the final S-1 filing after INIT went effective and started trading on July 8, 1999.

A few days ago, Fred Wilson wrote a post titled Capitulation? In the middle, he’s got a sentence about the theme of the post.

“Now, the crypto markets are in the eighth month of a long and painful bear market and we are starting to see some signs of capitulation, particularly in the assets that went up the most last year.”

On January 16, 2018 (almost seven months ago) I wrote a post titled It Can All Go To Zero. While I included a lesson from the Interliant experience, I highlighted the top 10 crypto prices, which had already fallen 30% – 50% from their high points a few weeks earlier.

Compare those to the prices right now.

Bitcoin is down another 50% (from 12,001 to 6,157). Ethereum is down over 75% (from 1,118 to 264). XRP, holding strong as the third most valuable cryptocurrency, is down 81% (from 1.37 to 0.26). Stellar, which rallied from #9 to #5, is only down 55% (0.49 to 0.22).

My guess is there are a lot of people who wish they sold their XRP at 1.37. Or, maybe around its all time high of 3.83 on January 4, 2018.

Capitulation in markets is one of those endless lessons that gets learned over and over and over again. My first moment with this was Black Monday in 1987. But that’s not when I learned the lesson. My foundational moment, where I really learned the lesson, happened during the collapse of the Internet bubble in 2000 and 2001.

It’ll be interesting to see if this is the crypto generation’s capitulation lesson moment.

Also published on Medium.

Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook and other US tech titans are facing major hurdles on selling online in India, thanks to a new ecommerce bill which prioritises homegrown firms.

According to The Wall Street Journal, which has seen a draft of the bill, the new rules would create a hostile environment for foreign tech giants, despite India being relatively open to outside competition. The Economic Times also reported on the proposals at the end of July.

Here are the most drastic changes being proposed in the draft bill:

It isn't clear when the draft policy might become law, and local media reports suggest it has been widely criticised and is still under review by government officials.

India's ecommerce market will be worth $32 billion in 2018, according to statistics from eMarketer. This is still small compared to the US, where eMarketer estimates Amazon alone will clear $258.22 billion in revenue, but the important number to look at is growth. India's ecommerce sales will rise 31% year on year this year, putting it behind only China and Indonesia. Adobe stats peg US ecommerce growth this year at around 18% year on year so far.

That makes India an extremely important focal point for US companies seeing their home markets slowly level off, and looking for future growth. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said in 2016 that the company would funnel $5 billion into its Indian ecommerce operation. The company doesn't break out Indian revenue in its financials, but its overseas operating losses show that the company is willing to lose money in order to beat local players.

Flipkart's Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Kalyan Krishnamurthy. Reuters/Saumya Khandelwal

It's that attitude which appears to have the Indian government alarmed.

China, another potential source of major growth, has created safeguards for its homegrown firms. As a result, the likes of Tencent, Alibaba, and Meituan dominate their home market and are worth billions — while foreign US firms struggle to achieve the same market share.

In India, major ecommerce firm Flipkart was acquired by Walmart for $16 billion.

And Vijay Shekhar Sharma, India's youngest billionaire and founder of ecommerce payments firm Paytm, hit out at foreign rivals in February. He wrote that India "must not let them colonise our Internet."

Concerns over Apple's elaborate efforts to reduce its tax bill are nothing new. The company — which hit a historic $1 trillion valuation this month— was punished in 2016 for a tax deal in Ireland, which the EU said amounted to illegal state aid.

But a newly discovered tactic has reignited the debate about the company's tax contributions. The San Francisco Chronicle reported over the weekend that Apple is "aggressive in opposing tax assessors," public officials who determine the value of property for tax reasons.

Apple may be the biggest taxpayer in Santa Clara County, where its Cupertino headquarters is based, but the Chronicle said it has 489 open tax appeals in the area, disputing $8.5 billion ($6.6 billion) in property value.

In a 2015 appeal, Apple claimed that a "cluster of properties" around Apple Park was worth $200, rather than the $1 billion figure alighted on by Santa Clara County's tax assessor. In another, Apple said a property, valued at $384 million by local officials, was also worth $200, the Chronicle said.

"These are major cases, and publicly, they kind of go under the radar screen," said Santa Clara County Assessor Larry Stone. He added that companies are prepared to spend millions of dollars on lawyers to appeal tax rulings, "but there's millions at stake."

Business Insider has contacted Apple for comment. The company declined to comment when approached by the Chronicle. Apple CEO Tim Cook has always said the firm pays its taxes properly. "In every country where we operate, Apple follows the law and we pay all the taxes we owe," Cook said in an open letter in 2016.

Facebook is still trying to train people to purposefully head to the social network for video.

And more recently it's been trying to teach them that ads are part of the deal — while gradually helping publishers make a few bucks.

A year into launching Facebook Watch — the dedicated video tab that contains entertainment and news shows — Facebook is leaning heavily on publishers by funding content for the platform. Those shows run the gamut from a vertical-oriented version of Anderson Cooper's CNN news show to "Ball in the Family," a reality show that follows Los Angeles Lakers point guard Lonzo Ball and his family.

"When people come to the tab, they're regularly coming back" said Kate Orseth, Facebook's media monetization product marketing director. "That stickiness behavior is really important to make sure that [Watch] is driving loyalty behavior."

Now, some publishers say that they're beginning to see real — albeit small in the realm of total digital ad dollars— money-making potential from Watch as Facebook is testing more pre-roll ads while also adding more video to run ads alongside.

That's potentially providing a much needed boost to media companies producing video for Facebook.

At the same time, video inventory is critical for Facebook as it looks beyond its massive newsfeed to make money, which Facebook execs stressed to investors during its recent earnings call.

"There's diversification within Facebook as a platform that I think is exciting and offers new opportunities to connect with audiences in different ways," said Ken Blom, VP of branded distribution at BuzzFeed.

"Ball in the Family." Facebook Watch

Facebook is intentionally easing into Watch advertising

BuzzFeed is part of a small test of publishers experimenting with selling some of its own Facebook video inventory. In most cases, Facebook fills the inventory programmatically and uses a tool that can automatically detect the best place for an ad break within a video.

With Watch, publishers make money from pre-roll and mid-roll ads that run either before or during a video. Facebook also offers a "non-interruptive" ad format with cards that pop up on the screen while a video plays.

All three formats fit under Facebook's ad breaks initiative, which is a revenue-share program that lets publishers keep 55% of ad revenue while Facebook keeps the other 45%.

In recent months, Facebook has steadily upped the number of ad breaks served to videos. To qualify for ad breaks, videos must be at least three minutes long and a mid-roll ad cannot run until the one-minute mark.

However, Blom and other publishing execs stress that Facebook is not going crazy with stuffing ads into videos. Unlike Facebook's newsfeed, where publishers rack up millions of video views instantly, Watch generates significantly smaller audiences. BuzzFeed's main page for Tasty, for example, has more than 94 million followers while its show Tasty Presents has 1.7 million followers.

"It's not an insane ad load to where it would drive users away but if you've watched two or three minutes of video, we hope in the Watch environment that you're going to stay on what's next," Blom said. "Facebook will talk about 'intentionality' as the metric that they think about for Watch."

Oren Katzeff, head of programming at Tastemade, called the rollout of ads "methodical" and stressed that its slate of Watch shows appeals to a different set of users than those who scroll through the newsfeed quickly.

"Over time, as the demand does increase and the audience does increase, we'll be perfectly positioned," Katzeff said about the publisher's weekly rotation of shows.

Publishers see pre-roll as an important step for Watch

Facebook has long eschewed pre-roll ads in its news feed. The company has resisted hijacking that scrolling experience with autoplay ads.

Pre-roll ads are viewed as more acceptable in Watch, where people are likely choosing to watch video.

To be sure, the current test with pre-roll ads is small and is limited to videos that consumers find by searching for specific shows or Pages.

According to Katzeff, opening up pre-roll suggests that Facebook is serious about working with publishers to create high-quality video content. Unlike mid-roll ads that often jarringly interrupt video content, pre-roll is easier to design programming around — as long as consumers are willing to sit through an ad first.

"For the most part, the mid-roll experience was positive but it's much harder to create content that has a very natural mid-roll point," Katzeff said. "With pre-roll, we've started to step up our efforts now that we've seen it kick in."

Facebook needs Watch to work as a new revenue stream

Still, getting people to shift from scrolling through the newsfeed to seeking out videos is a tough challenge and is part of Facebook's move to make money outside of the newsfeed, which also includes ads in Stories, Messenger and WhatsApp.

Non-newsfeed ad placements aren't as lucrative as the newsfeed for Facebook. According to another exec at a large publisher, video ads within Stories generate a $8 cost per thousand impressions (CPM) while newsfeed ads generate roughly a $16 CPM.

"It is critically important for Facebook to get this right and by the day it gets more difficult," said the exec.

Plus, Facebook has a well-documented and rocky history when it comes to working with publishers, which could make its relationships with media companies difficult. Tension between publishers and Facebook has existed in everything from changes to Facebook's direction in its content strategy to algorithm switches over the years.

With Watch, publishers are leaning on personality-driven programs but some efforts have proved to be more successful than others.

Execs point to programs like "Red Table Talk" and "Ball in the Family" as successful programs that rack up engagement and views. For example, "Red Table Talk" — a talk show hosted by Jada Pinkett Smith, Willow Smith and Adrienne Banfield-Norris — has three million followers and regularly accumulates millions of views per episode. "Red Table Talk" also uses polls, hosts a Facebook Live each week to answer questions about the show and has a Facebook Group to engage with fans.

Meanwhile, "Loosely Exactly Nicole" — a program hosted by comedian Nicole Byer that Facebook picked up from MTV — was cancelled after two seasons aired on Watch.

According to the exec, it's unclear how much money Facebook is making back on its Watch investments — partly because its budget for original content is significantly smaller than Netflix, Hulu and others that shell out billions for content. Netflix is expected to spend more than $8 billion this year while Facebook will reportedly pay between $1 billion and $2 billion.

"You cannot do this on the cheap," the exec said.

LONDON — Cryptocurrencies are in the red on Tuesday, with bitcoin leading the market lower after falling below $6,000 per token.

Bitcoin is down 4.5% to $5,975.21 at 8.18 a.m. BST (3.18 a.m. ET). Other major cryptocurrencies are suffering similar drops at the same time:

The entire cryptocurrency market has been under pressure since late June when the US Securities and Exchange Commission delayed a decision on whether to approve a bitcoin ETF, a move that bitcoin bulls believe would have greatly increased the size of the market.

The current sell-off began on Monday, with ethereum falling to an 11-month low on the day. That slump comes as startups that raised funding in ethereum through so-called initial coin offerings cash out their holdings into traditional fiat money they can spend on development.

Hussein Sayed, the chief market strategist at FXTM, said in an email on Tuesday morning: "Cryptocurrency bulls also suffered a steep selloff yesterday with bitcoin falling below $6,000 for the first time since late June.

"The blame for this falls on the SEC as the U.S. regulator delayed a decision to create the first Bitcoin ETF. If an ETF doesn't see the light in the coming weeks expect to see a further selloff, as it suggests regulators will continue to fight against bringing cryptocurrencies into the mainstream. A break below $5,770 will intensify selling pressure as it's the only major support still standing."

The value of the entire cryptocurrency market has fallen by around 10% over the last 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap.com.

The slump comes as emerging market currencies are selling off, spooked by last week's collapse of the lira against the dollar. Neil Wilson, the chief market analyst at Markets.com, said in an email that this coincidence "puts paid to the notion of cryptos as a safe haven play."

"Ultimately USD and US Treasury notes are the only real safe harbour," Wilson said.

Facebook has hired the team behind Vidpresso, an interactive video company that was late in complying with data rules put in place by the social network in 2015.

Vidpresso announced it was joining Facebook in a blog on its website, while Facebook confirmed to TechCrunch that it has acqui-hired the firm, poaching its seven-strong team and its technology but not the company itself.

Vidpresso, which was founded in Utah in 2012, works with broadcasters and publishers to overlay their Facebook or YouTube videos with interactive elements, including polls, graphics, and comments. Its clients include BuzzFeed, BMW, MTV, and Fox Sports.

"By joining Facebook we'll be able to offer our tools to a much broader audience than just our A-list publishing partners," Vidpresso said. "Eventually, it'll allow us to put these tools in the hands of creators, so they can focus on their content, and have it look great, without spending lots of time or money to do so."

Business Insider has contacted Facebook for comment.

Facebook has had dealings with Vidpresso before. The interactive video firm was one of 61 companies given a special extension after it was late in complying with data rules.

In April 2014, Facebook introduced a new, more restricted API, or application program interface, requiring that new apps go through a review-and-approval process and preventing new apps from accessing friends' data without review.

Most apps on the platform had until May 2015 to comply with these changes, but Vidpresso was among those given until November. Facebook revealed this in written evidence to US Congress last month, but did not explain why the 61 firms received special dispensation.

There's no suggestion Vidpresso did anything wrong, but the news comes at a time when Facebook's use of data is under particular scrutiny following the Cambridge Analytica scandal in March.

Vidpresso's team joined up with Facebook on Monday and, according to TechCrunch, staff will be based in Menlo Park, London, and LA.

Noah Berger / AP Photo

Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Tuesday.

1. Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed new details about taking the car company private, saying that he thought tweeting the announcement was 'the right and fair thing to do.' In a blog post on Tesla's website posted on Monday, Musk said he used the phrase "funding secured" because he believed there was "no question" Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund would provide funding for a deal to convert Tesla into a private company.

2. Experts have slammed Elon Musk's confusing defense of why he tweeted 'funding secured' about taking Tesla private. One expert told Business Insider that: "It was, at best, hasty and naive, and, at worst, manipulative."

3. An Associated Press investigation found that many Google services on Android devices and iPhones store users' location data even when users have explicitly switched that off in privacy settings. AP found that some Google apps automatically store time-stamped location data without asking.

4. Apple is strongly encouraging developers to transition to a subscription, software-as-a-service model, and held an invitation-only meeting in the spring of 2017 to convince developers to lean in to the new business model. Developers, Apple said, needed to realize the business model of apps was changing and that successful apps tended to focus on long-term engagement instead of upfront cost.

5. Google's artificial intelligence company DeepMind published "really significant" research showing its algorithm can identify around 50 eye diseases by looking at retinal eye scans. The company plans to hand the technology over for free to NHS hospitals for five years, provided it passes the next phase of research.

6. British driverless car startup FiveAI is about to start the next major phase in its push to bring autonomous vehicles to London by putting human-controlled data-gathering cars on the streets to record information about traffic flow and road layout. FiveAI CEO Stan Boland thinks his startup has a strong chance of beating US firms like Waymo and Uber in Europe.

7. Facebook vehemently denied a report that its head of news told publishers that without its help, 'I'll be holding your hands with your dying ­business like in a hospice'. A report from The Australian alleged that Campbell Brown made the remarks in a recent off-the-record meeting with media executives.

8. Congress is likely to grill the FCC's chairman for falsely claiming his agency was hit with a cyberattack. Ajit Pai will testify before a Senate oversight committee and will almost certainly have to answer questions about false statements he and others made about the FCC's computer systems getting overwhelmed.

9. A major Wall Street effort to dethrone Bloomberg's trading terminals, called Symphony, has taken almost $300 million in investment but may not be achieving its goal. A Business Insider investigation found that some partners are unhappy, and that people aren't using the features that would generate revenue.

10. MoviePass is enrolling some subscribers who had previously canceled the service into its new plan, which is expected to be implemented this week. Some subscribers received an email that they had "confirmed" their new MoviePass plan, even after canceling, with a note at the bottom of the email that said their "opt-in to the new plan will take priority" over the cancellation.

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.

Anyone walking around the South London suburbs of Bromley and Croydon this week might spot a bright new addition to the roads: A futuristic sky-blue Ford Fusion laden with sensors.

FiveAI, a British driverless car startup, is putting five of these vehicles on UK roads to gather data to train its autonomous vehicles. The cars will collect information for the next 10 months to understand real-world road layouts, traffic flow, and the behaviour of other road users.

Part of the reason the cars look so lurid is so that the public knows who's gathering data. FiveAI said it is gathering information in a way that is compliant with Europe's strict privacy regulation, the GDPR, and no individual would be identifiable from the images it captures through its cameras.

FiveAI

While these cars will be driven by humans at all times, the training data they gather will eventually inform FiveAI's efforts to bring shared, driverless taxis to London in 2019. The company said in May that it will begin trialling driverless cars on public roads before the end of 2018.

FiveAI has raised $18 million to become Europe's major driverless car startup

FiveAI

FiveAI hopes to be Europe's answer to Uber or Google's driverless car efforts, and wants to create a shared, autonomous taxi service in the UK before it is beaten by a rich American or Chinese firm.

It has raised $18 million (£14 million) in Series A funding to date, but has to fend off behemoths that are worth billions of dollars. Uber has raised more than $1 billion and is the most valuable startup in the world. Google is sitting on around $100 billion in cash.

Stan Boland, FiveAI's chief executive, has a historian's theory on why it can beat foreign competition.

"If I were [US companies] Waymo, Uber or Aurora... and I was trying to solve the problem of safer driving, I would choose to do it somewhere where it's an easier problem," he said.

"In Europe, our cities are medieval and complicated, density is much higher, human behaviours are different. Our cities were built from villages... I think a European city is much harder than a US city."

Google Waymo's driverless car. Waymo

In other words, Google's driverless car tech might find it easier to learn in the expanses of the Nevada desert than it would in windy London roads, originally designed for driving cattle.

Still, he acknowledged that "Europe is late" and puts this down to two reasons: US companies benefited from research pioneered by DARPA, America's military research agency, and because it has never been in the European car industry's interest to upend its existing business model. "Europe has been a bit asleep at the wheel," Boland said.

He said it's important that European governments recognise this and clear a path for local companies, rather than being "dazzled" by similar offerings from Silicon Valley giants. "It's very easy for governments to be pushed around by big companies and to be dazzled by [for example] Google's first step... It's quite important we recognise the fact we need to build some big companies out of Europe," he explained.

How FiveAI's driverless cars work

While FiveAI's sky-blue cars are cruising around London's streets gathering data, their autonomous counterparts are still being fine-tuned at a testing ground north of London. The goal is to build a fully fledged driverless car system that can be integrated into different vehicles — perhaps with an eye to licensing that technology out to carmakers.

Boland said in May that FiveAI would be ready to conduct a public trial of its driverless cars later this year. Like other driverless car projects, FiveAI's autonomous vehicles rely on being able to "see" and understand what is around them, and react accordingly.

FiveAI's system is a little different from that being tested out by Google. It is aiming to create a software and hardware stack that would allow vehicles to navigate complex environments with simple maps, rather than highly detailed, precise 3D maps.

Laser detectors on an Apple self-driving car.MacCallister Higgins

That requires a huge number of sensors and computing power, Boland told Business Insider.

The company has fitted eight Ford Fusions with a large number of sensors, and is testing them out at Millbrook Proving Ground in Bedfordshire.

Those sensors comprise 14 cameras, three laser detectors, six radars, a GPS, and the additional computing power. There is so much computing power that the hardware is not only housed in a roofbox, but under the bumper and in the trunk. There's also 100kg of battery in the car, Boland said.

The cameras, organised in stereo pairs, do the "seeing", processing raw data feeds and using these to build up an image of their surroundings, and to identify individual objects. Then a deep neural network tries to make sense of the objects in the picture in real time. Even accounting for delays in processing, Boland said, the system "thinks" faster than a human.

"It should be possible for us to build a system that is at least as safe as a human, hopefully safer," he said.

Investors are confident in FiveAI

Though FiveAI's funding is small, Boland said investors are confident.

He described FiveAI's fundraising process last year: "Quite often after half an hour, investors would say 'I should probably do this, will you please let me write a cheque?', and so we could have raised about $100 million last summer when we were raising our Series A but we only raised $18 million."

Boland has previously said publicly that FiveAI has raised a modest sum because it's still building its tech platform. FiveAI will need the big capital raise in future when it wants to buy lots of cars to load its system onto. That may be some point after 2021, according to his previous comments.

Part of the reason for investors wanting to throw money at FiveAI is because Stan Boland is who he is.

John Lusty, the former Oculus engineer who joined FiveAI this year. FiveAI

Dharmash Mistry, a partner at FiveAI's latest lead investor Lakestar, pointed to Boland's history as a UK tech veteran. Boland was once chief executive of iconic British computing company Acorn Computers, and also founded and sold wireless technology firm Icera to Nvidia. Acorn was cofounded by Hermann Hauser, director at another FiveAI investor, Amadeus Capital Partners.

"He's able to recruit super talent because of who he is," Mistry said. Boland managed to poach a senior engineer from Facebook's Oculus division to run FiveAI's simulation team in London. "You're pulling people out of very well-paid jobs, the £200,000 jobs that the Facebooks, Googles, and others offer."

Elon Musk said via Twitter Monday evening that he was working Goldman Sachs and Silver Lake as financial advisors on a proposal to take Tesla private.

Musk also said that he was working with the law firms Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz and Munger and Tolles & Olson as legal advisors.

Goldman Sachs declined to comment. Silver Lake and both law firms did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Goldman Sachs has long been a key adviser to Tesla, but the involvement of Silver Lake, best known as a private equity firm specializing in tech investments, is striking. Reuters reported after the tweet that Silver Lake was not discussing participating as an investor in the deal and "was offering its assistance to Musk without compensation and had not been hired as a financial adviser in an official capacity," citing a source.

It started with a tweet

On August 7, Musk tweeted: "Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured."

Since Musk's announcement last week, details about such a deal have been sparse.

In a statement published on the company's website Monday, Musk said that after a July 31 meeting with the managing director of Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund he was confident that the fund would back a deal to take Tesla private.

"During the meeting, the Managing Director of the fund expressed regret that I had not moved forward previously on a going private transaction with them, and he strongly expressed his support for funding a going private transaction for Tesla at this time," Musk said in his statement. "I understood from him that no other decision makers were needed and that they were eager to proceed.

"I left the July 31st meeting with no question that a deal with the Saudi sovereign fund could be closed, and that it was just a matter of getting the process moving. This is why I referred to 'funding secured' in the August 7th announcement."

Musk said in his statement that he is still in talks with the Saudi fund, but that he is also having discussions with other investors because he wants to "continue to have a broad investor base."

He said:

"I will now continue to talk with investors, and I have engaged advisors to investigate a range of potential structures and options. Among other things, this will allow me to obtain a more precise understanding of how many of Tesla's existing public shareholders would remain shareholders if we became private."

Full details regarding the source of funding would be provided before anyone would be asked to decide on going private but that it was "premature" to share such information, Musk said.

Read more about Tesla possibly going private:

Elon Musk's decision to tweet that he was considering taking Tesla private reportedly caught some of the company's own board directors off guard, The New York Times reported on Monday.

Citing two people familiar with the internal response to Musk's August 7 tweet, The Times said the Tesla CEO had sent that tweet "with little forethought."

The decision to announce the plan, which Musk has since expanded upon, via Twitter "had not been cleared ahead of time with the company's board," The Times wrote.

The reported added that "some members of the board had been totally blindsided by Mr. Musk's decision to air his plan on Twitter."

According to two unnamed people familiar with the fallout who talked to The Times about Musk's online musings, the Tesla CEO allegedly told an informal adviser that he posted on Twitter "impulsively," and said he was "not the kind of person who could hold things in," and admitted he "was angry at the company's critics."

The Securities and Exchange Commission has inquired about Musk's claims, which, if found to be untrue, could cause greater problems for Tesla chief executive.

A tweet from a self-described parody account "paying tribute" to Peter Strzok, the former FBI agent who was removed from the Russia investigation, went viral after Strzok was fired from the law-enforcement agency.

"I have been fired for expressing my personal opinion in private texts about a dictator that history will soon deem not only a Russian asset but an unhinged madman threatening the sovereignty of the United States of America," the parody account "@notpeterstrzok" tweeted on Monday afternoon.

The tweet has since received over tens of thousands of likes and retweets as of Monday evening.

An hour later, the parody account tweeted again and railed against President Donald Trump, who had accused Strzok of being biased in multiple tweets and speeches.

"We currently live in a country where an FBI agent lost his job for sending anti Trump text messages, yet Trump is still the President despite his campaign having 75 contacts & 25 meetings with Russian operatives WHILE Russia attacked America," the tweet from the parody account read.

Strzok was fired on Friday, following a long investigation into his conduct that stemmed in part from text messages he sent disparaging Donald Trump during the 2016 election.

In a statement, the FBI said Strzok "was subject to the standard FBI review and disciplinary process after conduct highlighted in the IG report was referred to the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility."

Strzok's attorney, Aitan Goelman, disputed the firing and called it "a departure from typical Bureau practice."

In the text messages sent between Strzok and Lisa Page, an attorney for special counsel Robert Mueller, the two, who were romantically involved, reportedly described Trump's election victory as "f-----g terrifying" and said "we'll stop" Trump from becoming president.

After the text messages were brought to light, Strzok was removed from Mueller's team and was placed in the bureau's human resources department. Page completed her detail before the allegations surfaced.

On Monday, Strzok said he was "deeply saddened" by the FBI's decision and that it was "an honor to serve my country and work with the fine men and women of the FBI."

Ajit Pai is going to be in the hot seat this week — as well he should be.

The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission is set to testify Thursday in front of a Senate oversight committee. He's certain to have to respond to questions while there about false statements he and some of his subordinates made to lawmakers about an incident last year in which the agency's computer systems got overwhelmed during the comment period for its then-ongoing net-neutrality proceeding.

Pai has tried to distance himself from those false statements, blaming them on the agency's former chief information officer, David Bray. But lawmakers are sure to want to know when Pai knew the statements were false and why he didn't retract them earlier.

Perhaps more importantly, lawmakers may well try to delve into the role the incident played in Pai's effort to overturn the FCC's net-neutrality rules. And the incident and Pai's answers about it could factor into ongoing court battle over his repeal of those rules.

Pai's expected grilling comes as a result of his and his agency's response to the FCC's server outage last year. At the time, the FCC was soliciting public comments for Pai's proposal to repeal the agency's net-neutrality rules.

Net neutrality is at the heart of the current controversy

As you probably know by now, net neutrality is the principle that all data on the internet should be treated the same. The FCC's rules barred internet service providers from blocking, slowing, or speeding access to particular sites and services.

The FCC's servers were overwhelmed after comedian John Oliver focused on the net-neutrality debate in an episode of "Last Week Tonight." HBO While widely popular with the public, the rules were vehemently opposed by the big telecommunications companies and by some anti-regulatory Republicans — most notably Pai, who vowed to repeal them even before becoming the chairman of the FCC. He launched that effort soon after taking over as head of the agency under President Donald Trump.

After proposing his repeal last year, Pai followed agency protocol and opened up his proposal to public comment. In May of last year, comedian John Oliver made the repeal effort the focus of one of the episodes of his show, "Last Week Tonight." Oliver supports net neutrality and explained in the episode why viewers should too. At the end of the episode, he encouraged viewers to tell the FCC to abandon its effort to repeal its rules and provided a custom web site address that would redirect them to the agency's comment page.

Immediately after the episode aired, the FCC's comment system saw a spike in traffic, with the site unavailable to many users in the wake. To outside observers, it seemed clear that the site's unavailability was likely a result of "Last Week Tonight" directing its viewers to the FCC's site for the purpose of registering their objections to the net-neutrality repeal effort.

The FCC blamed the outage on a cyberattack

But that's not how the FCC portrayed things. The day after the episode aired, the agency issued a statement attributed to David Bray, its CIO, that blamed the system problems on "deliberate attempts by external actors to bombard the FCC's comment system." Bray said the effort came in the form of "multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks," better known as DDoS attacks.

The charge was a loaded one. DDoS attacks have become a fairly routine way for hackers to make a website appear offline and unavailable to its users. But launching one against a US government server is a federal crime. So by alleging that a DDoS attack had brought down the FCC's server, Bray triggered an investigation by the agency's inspector general, working in coordination with the FBI.

The DDoS charge also helped to distract attention from the popular outrage against the repeal effort. Instead of everyone talking about all the comments flooding into the FCC site opposing the repeal, the headlines focused on how the FCC site was the victim of an alleged cyberattack.

"This certainly was a potential distraction, and it certainly cast a shadow over what was a really enormous response from the public in support of net neutrality," said Harold Feld, a senior vice president at Public Knowledge, an advocacy group that opposed the repeal effort.

Despite the FCC's assertion, consumer groups and reporters who cover the agency quickly challenged its story, and Democratic senators pressed it for more details. Even though critics argued that the incident had none of the telltale signs of a DDoS attack, the agency under Pai stuck to its guns — and attempted to undermine the naysayers.

In public, it lambasted critics who reported that it didn't have any documentation of the attack. Meanwhile, Gizmodo reports that behind the scenes, the agency worked with friendly reporters to get out the notion that the FCC had seen a similar attack in 2014 when it was considering the net neutrality rules Pai was now trying to overturn.

The investigation showed otherwise

It turns out, though, that the FCC wasn't hit with a DDoS attack last year and likely wasn't affected by one in 2014. Released last week, the inspector general's report makes clear its investigation found no evidence of a such an attack last year, and the agency has released no evidence for one in 2014.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, is among the lawmakers who have scrutinized the FCC's claim that the outage was caused by a cyberattack. Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images But the situation is worse than that for Pai and his agency. The investigation found that FCC officials had little basis for making their statements that there had been such an attack. Contrary to the officials' assertions to members of Congress that their analysis had led them to that conclusion, the investigation found they had done no "substantive" analysis at all.

In fact, the paucity of evidence for the attack was so clear so early on, that the investigation quickly swiveled from being an inquiry into a cyberattack into an examination of whether and why FCC officials misled Congress. In January, the inspector general's was concerned enough that a crime had occurred that it referred the matter to the Department of Justice. The DOJ later declined to prosecute.

But all of this raises questions about Pai's role in promulgating and promoting — and waiting more than a year to recant — the now discredited DDoS story.

The incident makes Pai look incompetent — or worse

At best, Pai comes across as being incompetent. The inspector general's office was able to knock down the DDoS story by just pressing the FCC's technology administrators for more details about the outage and finding that they had no evidence to support their claim.

When Bray made a similar claim about an outage in 2014, the FCC at the time didn't broadcast his conclusion. Why? Because agency officials at the time actually examined his assertion and concluded he didn't have any evidence for it, as Gigi Sohn, a counselor to then-FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, recounted to Gizmodo.

But lawmakers this week are likely to wonder much more than why Pai didn't push Bray and his staff for more details about the outage. They're also likely to press him for more information about when he himself realized that his previous statements to Congress about the incident were false and why he didn't alert legislators earlier. If the inspector general's office had reason to believe back in January that false statements were made, there's a good chance Pai knew back then too. He didn't say anything to correct the record until last week — a day before the report was released.

In his statement, Pai blamed Bray and, in turn, the Obama administration, which hired Bray. He also gave an excuse for not speaking earlier about the misstatements — the inspector general had asked that he not say anything about the investigation while it was ongoing.

"It's almost like has a placard on his desk that says, 'the buck doesn't stop here unless I want it to,'" said Matt Wood, a policy director at Free Press, an advocacy group that also opposed the net-neutrality repeal effort.

It remains to be seen whether Pai's excuses will wash with Congress. For his part, Feld doesn't buy them, particularly when it comes to renouncing the assertion about the DDoS attack. There were plenty of ways and an ample amount of time for Pai to do that without jeopardizing the investigation, he said.

"He had a responsibility to inform the Congress as soon as he had doubts," said Feld. "He had a responsibility to inform Congress and to inform the public."

"Instead," Feld continued, "he kept quiet."

The incident could play a role not just in Congress, but the courts

The false statements about the DDoS attack and Pai's delay in retracting them could linger long past Thursday's hearing. For one thing, should the Democrats recapture one or more houses of Congress this fall, they're likely to subject Pai to much more critical scrutiny going forward than have their Republican colleagues. It also might make them more likely to press forward with legislation that would effectively overturn his repeal.

But the whole incident over the server outage could also play a role in the legal battle over the repeal. Free Press, Public Knowledge, and other groups have sued the FCC to try to overturn the new rules, which the agency passed in December and which basically remove all net-neutrality protections.

When considering new rules, the FCC is required by law to take public comments into account. As part of the case the groups are making against the rules, they plan to argue that the agency didn't, in fact, make a good-faith effort to do that. Instead, they plan to argue that it failed in its duty to seriously gather and consider the public's comments.

The groups will point at numerous examples of this, but one of the examples will be the agency's inability to handle the comments coming in from "Last Week Tonight" viewers and falsely ascribing that inability to a DDoS attack.

"If that were only thing, it wouldn't be fatal on its own," said Feld. "But it's part of a general pattern of the FCC failing to conduct the process in an above-board way that adequately gave the public a genuine opportunity to be heard."

That's why this is unlikely to be the last you hear about this incident. Although, after Thursday, Aji Pai may wish he'd never heard about it in the first place.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk released a statement on Monday in which he shed light on some of the questions raised last week by his statements about taking the company private. But Musk's explanation is incomplete and raises new questions, experts told Business Insider.

Last week, Musk said he was considering taking Tesla private for $420 a share and implied that he had the funding to do so "secured," pending a shareholder vote. But, at the time, he didn't explain where that funding would come from.

Musk said on Monday that he used the phrase "funding secured" in a tweet last week because he believed there was "no question" Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund would provide financing for a deal to convert Tesla into a private company after a July 31 meeting with the fund's managing director.

Musk may have contradicted himself

But his attempt to provide clarity to investors and observers raises new problems, said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, the senior associate dean for leadership studies at the Yale School of Management.

"It was, at best, hasty and naive, and, at worst, manipulative," he told Business Insider.

(Have a Tesla news tip? Contact this reporter at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

While Musk expressed confidence in Monday's statement that the Saudi sovereign wealth fund was interested in helping Tesla go private, he didn't mention any legally-binding agreements that were in place at the time he sent his now-controversial tweet. And Musk said he is currently in discussions with the Saudi fund and other investors, which suggests some sources of funding may not be settled.

"He did not have the firm commitment that he said he did," Sonnenfeld said.

"While he's in talks, there's nothing certain until it's certain, and 'funding secured' and having productive talks are two different things," said James Rosener, a partner at the law firm Pepper Hamilton who specializes in private equity and corporate financing.

Tesla did not respond to a request for comment about the potential disparity between Musk's "funding secured" tweet and his statement from Monday.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that the US Securities and Exchange Commission had made an inquiry into Tesla about whether one of Musk's tweets regarding the possibility of taking the company private was truthful. And on Thursday, Bloomberg reported that the agency was "intensifying" its inquiry.

According to Sonnenfeld, Monday's statement doesn't lessen the chance that Musk receives some form of punishment from the SEC, in addition to lawsuits from shareholders, some of which have already been filed.

"It would be hard to imagine he isn't sanctioned, fined, reprimanded in some way for this misconduct," he said.

Musk's statement raises new questions

While the statement appeared to be damage control, according to Gregory Sichenzia, a founding partner at the law firm Sichenzia Ross Ference Kesner, it includes at least one statement that could open Musk to further scrutiny.

At one point, Musk estimates that about two-thirds of the shares owned by current Tesla shareholders would roll over into shares of a private Tesla, were a take-private deal to go through, reducing the total amount of money he would have to raise.

But Musk doesn't explain how he arrived at that estimate.

"How does he know that? How does anyone know that," Sichenzia said. "There's no way to know that, so why would you say it?"

Musk's statements may contradict the reason he wants to take the company private, Akshay Anand, an executive analyst for Kelley Blue Book, said. Last week, Musk said he wanted to take Tesla private in part because the pressures of being a public company have created distractions. But the questions raised by his conduct over the past week may create yet another distraction.

"Musk already has his hands completely full. He doesn't need distractions. The employees don't need distractions. Investors don't need distractions, and this has the potential to turn into one," Anand said.