FTX’s Sam Bankman Fried.
ILLUSTRATION BY STEPHANIE JONES FOR FORBES; PHOTOS BY GUERIN BLASK FOR FORBES; RICHARD ROSS/GETTY
The collapse of crypto exchange FTX is posing challenges for nonprofits that Sam Bankman-Fried has pledged to fund. Foreign government officials spent more than $750,000 at former President Trump’s Washington hotel within a few months of his tenure. Plus, forbes spoke to a veteran engineer on Twitter who Elon Musk abruptly fired via the social media platform.
Sign up here to get the Forbes Daily Dozen morning newsletter straight to your inbox.
In the news today
- Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the fourth richest person in the world, wants that donating most of his $124 billion fortune to philanthropy his whole life. It’s the first time he’s committed to it after years of criticism that his donations paled in comparison to many other members of the Three Comma Club – including his ex-wife Mackenzie Scott, who just revealed that she has donated $2 billion in the last seven months alone.
- President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan remains on hold for now, after a federal appeals court ruled Monday to continue preventing the administration from distributing aid to millions of borrowers, siding with Republican-led states stopping the initiative.
Top take aways
Sam Bankman-Fried has pledged millions of dollars to nonprofits, but crypto exchanges FTX collapse is a headache for the promised grants from its inception as some say they never received the money. His demise also cut off a major source of funding for a philanthropic movement called Effective Altruism and its Oxford University supporters.
Facebook is thriving Black market for fraudulent advertising accounts, passports and driver’s licenses, per new research from the Tech Transparency Project. Scammers claim their merchandise allows shoppers to run Facebook ads — including political ads in countries other than their own — without meeting the company’s verification requirements.
forbes surveyed billionaires about their favorite social media apps and found the one that is her favorite. Note: It’s not Twitter — and that was before Elon Musk’s messy takeover of the platform. It suggests a greater apathy towards social media among the world’s richest; Almost half of those surveyed said they had no social media accounts at all.
Google will pay $391.5 million to settle lawsuits in 40 states about its location-tracking practices in what is believed to be the largest consumer protection settlement ever conducted by attorney generals. The tech giant was found to have been collecting users’ location data after leading them to believe they had disabled this tracking. Going forward, the Company will need to display additional information when enabling or disabling a location-based account setting.
While former President Donald Trump was in office, his Washington hotel collapsed more than $750,000 in just a few months from officials from six foreign governments– including China, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – sought to influence the billionaire’s foreign policy decisions, new documents show. The House Oversight Committee estimates that foreign officials spent $3.75 million on the property over a three-year period.
Amazon and Homeland Security Investigations are investigating what the FBI says a global drug organization that ships meth via the e-commerce giant while the packets are disguised as decorative garden stones. At least five vendor accounts using the company’s services to smuggle the drug have been identified worldwide.
Today’s must read
“The Devil in the Nerd Dress”: How Sam Bankman-Fried’s Cult of Genius Fooled Everyone
Crypto insiders paint a picture of a charismatic tech founder who has become the darling of high-profile investors despite speaking out shamelessly about his cryptocurrency exchange’s shaky business model and keeping the books closed save for a few confidants.
In case you missed it
After a public back-and-forth on Twitter over the international functionality of the platform’s Android app, Elon Musk fired veteran engineer Eric Frohnhoefer with a single tweet on Monday morning. By the time forbes spoke to Frohnhoefer in the afternoon, the fired employee had not yet received a formal notice from the company of his firing but was locked out of his Twitter-issued laptop.
Tips you can trust
- With President Joe Biden’s sweeping student loan forgiveness plan stalled in a federal court, pressure is mounting on the administration extend the pause in loan repayments again which currently expires at the end of the year. Here’s what it might look like, plus a look at some of the unanswered questions that linger around student loan cancellations.
- Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover was messy from the start, and the billionaire has largely fueled the fire, stoking uncertainty about the platform’s future, slapping integral staff members and opting for a tone of sneer and bombast over transparency and calm. From inadequately justifying the sweeping changes he’s made at the company to a lack of communication with workers, here’s what’s happening how Musk is only contributing to the company’s crisis.
Must watch video
How America screwed up the legalization of cannabis
Extreme taxation, regulation, and state bans mean the legal marijuana industry’s profits have gone up in smoke. In California alone, even five years after recreational cannabis got the green light, the price per pound has collapsed 52%, leaving 95% of licensed cannabis growers operating at a loss in 2021. forbes Staff writer Will Yakowicz traveled to Northern California’s Emerald Triangle, the heart of cannabis country, to speak with farmers, entrepreneurs, and other key players in the industry to find out “how America screwed up the greatest child’s game in the history of capitalism.”
A Forbes subscription illuminates, informs and inspires. Join today to get unlimited access to all our journals and a front row seat to exclusive subscriber-only events.
