Tag: Securities and Exchange Commission

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Nikola Chairman Trevor Milton Resigns Amid Fraud Claims

The new chairman, Mr. Girsky, has played a critical role in Nikola’s rise to prominence. After leaving the G.M. board in 2016, he started an investment company, VectoIQ, to provide strategic and financial help to automotive technology start-ups. He also created a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, that owned nothing but cash and a stock listing. When VectoIQ’s SPAC merged with Nikola in June, Nikola became a publicly traded company and Mr. Girsky joined its board.Mr. Girsky was also a catalyst for G.M.’s partnership with Nikola. In the past he has said he called …

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Robinhood Reveals Rising Revenue and a $1.4 Billion Loss

The company’s shareholders, however, stuck with it. Within a week, it raised two rounds of emergency funding totaling $4.4 billion to meet lending requirements for stock trades and to continue making trades. That funding resulted in Robinhood’s outsize loss in the first three months of the year.Robinhood attracted scrutiny from regulators long before the GameStop frenzy drew the national spotlight. In 2018, it announced that it would offer checking and savings accounts, claiming it was already backed by the Securities Investor Protection Corporation, a consumer protection group that oversees brokerages. After the group said it did not insure checking …

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John McAfee Dies in Spanish Prison

By 2015, he was back in the United States and, after an arrest in Tennessee on gun and drunken-driving charges, ran for president as a Libertarian, with his campaign video declaring, “Here’s to the crazy ones.”Let Us Help You Protect Your Digital LifeLast October, the Securities and Exchange Commission accused Mr. McAfee of promoting initial coin offerings — deals for cryptocurrencies — on Twitter without disclosing that he had been paid to do so. The S.E.C. said Mr. McAfee had pretended to be independent and impartial but had received more than $23 million for stirring up interest in the offerings. …

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Gary Gensler, Wall Street’s New Watchdog, Has a Full Plate

Mr. Gelzinis said Mr. Gensler would probably draw on his familiarity with the subject matter — he taught classes on blockchain technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — to approach regulation around digital currencies more strategically. That would be a departure from his predecessor Jay Clayton, who favored enforcement actions against initial coin offerings without providing much regulatory guidance, he added.Today in BusinessUpdated April 21, 2021, 12:05 p.m. ETPaul Grewal, chief counsel of Coinbase, the cryptocurrency exchange that went public last week, said the industry was “hopeful” about Mr. Gensler, noting that he is fluent in its language. Mr. Grewal said the …

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‘The Market Seems Crazy’: Start-Ups Wrestle With Flood of Offers

The frenzy has already led to trouble. The stock of Nikola, an electric car start-up that went public via a SPAC in June, has plunged more than 80 percent after Hindenburg Research, an investment fund, accused the company in September of lying about its technology, overstating business deals and deceptively rolling a truck down a hill in a product video. Trevor Milton, Nikola’s founder and chairman, resigned, and the Securities and Exchange Commission and Justice Department have started investigating the company.The S.E.C. has also opened inquiries into Clover Health, a health insurance start-up, and Lordstown Motors, an …

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Tesla’s Bitcoin investment could be bad for the company’s climate reputation and its bottom line

Tesla’s $1.5 billion investment in Bitcoin may be good for Elon Musk, but it’s definitely risky for the company that made him the world’s richest man, according to investors, analysts and money managers at some of the country’s largest banks.
As a standard bearer for the consumer electric vehicle industry and the broader climate tech movement rallying around it, Tesla’s bet to go all in on crypto could damage its climate bonafides and its reputation with customers even as other automakers pour in to the EV market.

Given Bitcoin’s current environmental footprint, the deal flies …

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Wall Street’s Most Reviled Investors Worry About Their Fate

If the price falls, the short seller buys the now-cheaper shares back, returns them to the broker and pockets the difference. But the strategy can be risky. If shares climb — either because other investors make the opposite bet, as in GameStop’s case, or simply because the short seller got it wrong — short sellers lose. In the past year, as the stock market soared more than 16 percent, hedge funds that were mainly shorting stocks lost nearly 47 percent, according to a Hedge Fund Research index that tracks industry performance. “Short sellers have been beaten up and left for dead on the …

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The Silicon Valley Start-Up That Caused Wall Street Chaos

The online trading app Robinhood became a cultural phenomenon and a Silicon Valley darling with a promise to wrest the stock market away from Wall Street’s traditional gatekeepers and “let the people trade” — making it as easy to put millions of dollars at risk as it is to summon an Uber.This past week, in the middle of a market frenzy pitting amateur traders against hedge fund bigwigs, that veneer began to chip. As it turned out, Robinhood was at the mercy of the very industry it had vowed to upend.The frenzy morphed into a crisis when legions …

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Gary Gensler Is Picked to Lead S.E.C.

The Biden administration said on Monday that it is tapping two financial regulators from the Obama administration to oversee key departments that had loosened their grip of the industry under President Trump.Gary Gensler, who led the Commodity Futures Trading Commission during the Obama administration from 2009 to 2014, will be President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s nominee to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission, these people said. Also, Rohit Chopra, the former assistant director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has been chosen to run that agency.“These tireless public servants will be a key part of our agenda to build …

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Looking to decarbonize the metal industry, Bill Gates-backed Boston Metal raises $50 million

Steel production accounts for roughly 8% of the emissions that contribute to global climate change. It is one of the industries that sits at the foundation of the modern economy and is one of the most resistant to decarbonization.
As nations around the world race to reduce their environmental footprint and embrace more sustainable methods of production, finding a way to remove carbon from the metals business will be one of the most important contributions to that effort.
One startup that’s developing a new technology to address the issue is Boston Metal. Previously backed by the Bill Gates-financed Breakthrough Energy …

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