My morning train WFH reads:
• Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced boy king of crypto, explained: He was a billionaire who had quickly amassed political and philanthropic influence. What happened? (Vox)
• Electric Vehicles Start to Enter the Car-Buying Mainstream: While sales are still skewed toward affluent buyers, more people are choosing electric vehicles to save money. (New York Times) see also Toyota to Unveil New Prius as Hybrids Lose Luster to Battery EVs: Sales of the pioneering hybrid have fallen from a peak of 500,000 to around 86,000 last year. (Bloomberg)
• The ‘Next Warren Buffett’ Curse Isn’t Always Fatal: Eddie Lampert Jr., Chamath Palihapitiya, Guo Guangchang, Cathie Wood, Sam Bankman-Fried couldn’t survive the comparison. Others who actually invest somewhat like the Berkshire Hathaway chairman fare better. (Bloomberg)
• TikTok Builds Itself Into an Ads Juggernaut: The Chinese-owned video app’s ad business is thriving, even as a digital advertising slump hurts Meta, Snap and other rivals. (New York Times)
• The Secret Agent: Americans in Notting Hill: A seller laments his £15 million house offered at a “mid-range” price and demands the agent double it. (Bloomberg Wealth)
• Matt Levine Explains the World: A ‘Weird’ Walk in the Park With the Star Bloomberg Columnist From Elon’s follies to crypto’s “death-spiral convertibles,” the “Money Stuff” writer has become an indispensable translator of the complex, arcane and bizarre. (The Information)
• First Came the Crypto Crash. Now Comes the Taxman. Cryptocurrency investors may need to act within the next few weeks to reduce their tax bill—and get ahead of an increasingly aggressive IRS (Wall Street Journal)
• Policies for Adapting to the ‘New Normal’ of the Anthropocene: Two sets of value systems that underlie Western society trigger environmental problems. The first is a faith in market capitalism. This faith embraces a free market, property ownership, shareholder rights, limited regulation, and unlimited economic growth to produce socially optimal outcomes such as economic prosperity or a clean environment. This value set leads us to believe in the “win-win” solution to all our problems; that we can, for example, correct climate change by pursuing solutions that also make us money. (Behavioral Scientist)
• The Lonely Hearts Club Man: Men are losing friends and struggling to make new ones – and missing out on powerful health benefits in the process. Buddy, what’s going on? (BBC Science Focus)
• Eight Hours With Lindsay Lohan: In which the icon—and new Cosmo cover star—digs into her first Netflix project, surviving early-2000s paparazzi, her friendship with Al Pacino, married life in Dubai, and what comes next. (Cosmopolitan)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Marcus Shaw CEO of AltFinance, which seeks to increase diversity across alternative asset management. The firm was co-founded by Apollo, Ares, and Oaktree with a $90 Million seed funding for initiatives to recruit students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
FTX’s Leaked Balance Sheet
Source: Visual Capitalist
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