For months, popular fighting game YouTubers have been under attack. Even the seemingly most cautious among them have been duped by sophisticated phishing attacks that hack their accounts to push cryptocurrency scams by convincingly appearing to offer legitimate sponsorships from established brands.
These scams often start with bad actors seemingly taking over verified accounts on X (formerly Twitter) with substantial followings and then using them to impersonate marketing managers at real brands who can be easily found on LinkedIn.
The fake X accounts go to great lengths to appear legitimate. They link to brands' actual websites and populate feeds with histories seemingly spanning decades by re-posting brands' authentic posts.
Jimmy Donaldson, known online as MrBeast, has a new competition show on Amazon Prime Video.
AaronP/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images
YouTube star MrBeast has a new competition show that will debut Thursday on Amazon Prime Video.
BI viewed a copy of a contestant release form and other documents for the preliminary "Beast Games" round.
An entertainment attorney said the documents were fairly standard but expansive in their terms.
Documents obtained by Business Insider reveal the terms that contestants of MrBeast's competition show, "Beast Games," were asked to agree to during a preliminary round.
The terms prohibit contestants from disclosing information about the show, which debuts Thursday on Amazon Prime Video. Contestants who break the agreement prior to the last episode airing must pay the producer and network $500,000 for each breach. After the last episode airs, each breach would cost contestants $100,000, the documents said.
The documents also ask contestants to agree that their portrayal in the program may be "disparaging, defamatory, embarrassing, or of an otherwise unfavorable nature," and may expose them to "public ridicule, humiliation, or condemnation."
Daniel J. Ain, an entertainment attorney at RPJ Law, said the terms are largely standard for a competition show, but some — like the threat of a $500,000 charge for each breach — are particularly expansive.
"The producers use every available tool to give them ultimate flexibility to make the show and protect themselves from liability," Ain told BI, calling the documents a "contestant agreement on steroids."
"Beast Games" is a 10-episode physical competition show in which contestants compete for a $5 million prize. YouTube's top star — whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson — is the host.
The show has attracted some controversy ahead of its release. A New York Times report in August cited "over a dozen" participants who said they didn't receive enough food or medical care during the preliminary round of competition in Las Vegas.
The documents obtained by Business Insider relate to the Las Vegas taping, where over 2,000 contestants participated in physical challenges designed to see who would make the show's official production round in Toronto.
The documents include information about the show, a contestant questionnaire form, and an outline of the show's official rules and protocols. By signing the form, contestants gave full consent to the use of hidden cameras and recording devices, gave producers full discretion to edit footage, and agreed to participate for no money. Potential prizes were the only form of compensation.
A person close to the production characterized the Las Vegas production as a "promo shoot" for the show and said Amazon wasn't involved. Amazon did not respond to a request for comment from BI.
Read 24 pages of the documents below:
Note: BI omitted some pages from the document that included the contestant's personal information and a few pages with minimal or repeated information.
A lot of YouTube videos have flashy, misleading titles and thumbnails, such as “BREAKING NEWS” or “The president steps down,” to bait the user into watching the video, which has non-related content. YouTube said Wednesday that it is now cracking down on such videos — especially if videos cover topics like breaking news or current […]
YouTube is partnering with the Creative Artists Agency (CAA) to help celebrities, athletes, and creators identify content that uses their AI-generated likeness on the platform. The tool, which YouTube will begin testing early next year, will let these professionals submit requests for the removal of their AI-generated likeness. YouTube will first make the tool available for […]
Generative AI tools have made it easier to create fake images, videos, and audio.
That sparked concern that this busy election year would be disrupted by realistic disinformation.
The barrage of AI deepfakes didn't happen. An AI researcher explains why and what's to come.
Oren Etzioni has studied artificial intelligence and worked on the technology for well over a decade, so when he saw the huge election cycle of 2024 coming, he got ready.
India, Indonesia, and the US were just some of the populous nations sending citizens to the ballot box. Generative AI had been unleashed upon the world about a year earlier, and there were major concerns about a potential wave of AI-powered disinformation disrupting the democratic process.
"We're going into the jungle without bug spray," Etzioni recalled thinking at the time.
He responded by starting TrueMedia.org, a nonprofit that uses AI-detection technologies to help people determine whether online videos, images, and audio are real or fake.
The group launched an early beta version of its service in April, so it was ready for a barrage of realistic AI deepfakes and other misleading online content.
In the end, the barrage never came.
"It really wasn't nearly as bad as we thought," Etzioni said. "That was good news, period."
He's still slightly mystified by this, although he has theories.
First, you don't need AI to lie during elections.
"Out-and-out lies and conspiracy theories were prevalent, but they weren't always accompanied by synthetic media," Etzioni said.
Second, he suspects that generative AI technology is not quite there yet, particularly when it comes to deepfake videos.
"Some of the most egregious videos that are truly realistic — those are still pretty hard to create," Etzioni said. "There's another lap to go before people can generate what they want easily and have it look the way they want. Awareness of how to do this may not have penetrated the dark corners of the internet yet."
One thing he's sure of: High-end AI video-generation capabilities will come. This might happen during the next major election cycle or the one after that, but it's coming.
With that in mind, Etzioni shared learnings from TrueMedia's first go-round this year:
Democracies are still not prepared for the worst-case scenario when it comes to AI deepfakes.
There's no purely technical solution for this looming problem, and AI will need regulation.
Social media has an important role to play.
TrueMedia achieves roughly 90% accuracy, although people asked for more. It will be impossible to be 100% accurate, so there's room for human analysts.
It's not always scalable to have humans at the end checking every decision, so humans only get involved in edge cases, such as when users question a decision made by TrueMedia's technology.
The group plans to publish research on its AI deepfake detection efforts, and it's working on potential licensing deals.
"There's a lot of interest in our AI models that have been tuned based on the flurry of uploads and deepfakes," Etzioni said. "We hope to license those to entities that are mission-oriented."
YouTube on Monday announced it will give creators more choice over how third parties can use their content to train their AI models. Starting today, creators and rights holders will be able to flag for YouTube if they’re permitting specific third-party AI companies to train models on the creator’s content. From a new setting within […]
YouTube is experimenting with a new way to engage fans by giving creators the ability to post voice notes and reply to comments on their videos, the company announced on Monday. The ability to post voice notes is limited to certain creators in the U.S. for the time being. YouTube says they’ll only be able […]
Nearly half of teens in the U.S. are online almost constantly, and the platform they’re using the most is YouTube, a new study from the Pew Research Center has found. The Center reports that 46% of teens say they’re online “almost constantly,” and 90% of teens it surveyed said they use the Google-owned video platform, […]
YouTube TV will cost close to $83 a month after a just-announced price hike.
That's a far cry from the $35 a month it was when it launched in 2017.
However, YouTube TV is arguably still attractive relative to some other pay-TV offerings.
The price of YouTube TV is going up again — and cord-cutters around the internet are up in arms.
Google announced Thursday that the cost of its popular pay-TV service is now $82.99 a month for new users, up from $72.99. Existing users will see the price hike start on January 13, so some might not pay more until February.
The last time the service raised prices was in March 2023.
YouTube TV is now roughly in line with a typical pay-TV bundle and will cost exactly as much as rival service Hulu + Live TV, which includes ad-supported versions of Hulu, Disney+, and ESPN+.
YouTube TV's price has grown dramatically in the nearly eight years since it launched, though that's largely because the service was underpriced at first relative to its offering.
Before this hike, YouTube TV was generally cheaper than many rival streaming TV packages from competitors such as Hulu + Live TV, Fubo TV, Spectrum, and DirecTV. (Many pay-TV services have a variety of plans, so it can be difficult to truly compare apples to apples, however.)
YouTube TV also has a slick interface that appeals to many cord-cutters.
Although YouTube TV's price growth has been eye-popping, the price of pay-TV services — from cable to satellite to streamers — has generally outpaced inflation, per data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. That includes the largest inflation surge in decades.
As the cable bundle became more expensive, millions of households cut the cord. TV networks make less money when pay-TV subscriptions fall, so to keep investors happy, they've increased the amount they charge TV providers, who then pass those costs on to customers.
In other words, when fewer people pay for TV, the remaining subscribers pay more. That has created a flywheel effect, with customers fleeing the bundle even faster in favor of streaming services, social media, or other forms of entertainment.
When asked for comment, a YouTube TV spokesperson issued a statement that acknowledged this dynamic: "To keep up with the rising cost of content and the investments we make in the quality of our service, we are increasing our Base Plan price for YouTube TV from $72.99/month to $82.99/month."
Google may also have raised YouTube TV prices to help cover its investment in NFL Sunday Ticket. The tech giant won the right to distribute the premium out-of-market package starting in 2023 and priced it at $379 per season for YouTube TV customers and $479 for others. Even at those prices, media analysts at Morgan Stanley don't think the service is profitable.
Still, despite the price increase, YouTube TV can often be one of the better deals in town for those who want a large bundle of channels. And it has another thing going for it: It's easy to cancel and resubscribe to.
"We give all members the flexibility to cancel their membership at any time," the YouTube TV spokesperson said in their statement.
YouTube announced on Tuesday that its auto-dubbing feature, which allows creators to generate translated audio tracks for their videos, is now rolling out to hundreds of thousands more channels. YouTube first introduced its AI-powered auto-dubbing tool at Vidcon last year, which was only being tested with a limited group of creators. This tool could help […]
On Monday, OpenAI released Sora, an AI video generator, in hopes of helping creators.
One such creative, Marques Brownlee, wants to know if his videos were used to train Sora.
"We don't know if it's too late to opt out," Brownlee said in his review of Sora.
On Monday, OpenAI released its Sora video generator to the public.
CEO Sam Altman showed off Sora's capabilities as part of "Shipmas," OpenAI's term for the 12 days of product launches and demos it's doing ahead of the holidays. The AI tool still has some quirks, but it can make videos of up to 20 seconds from a few words of instruction.
During the launch, Altman pitched Sora as an assistant for creators and said that helping them was important to OpenAI.
"There's a new kind of co-creative dynamic that we're seeing emerge between early testers that we think points to something interesting about AI creative tools and how people will use them," he said.
One such early tester was Marques Brownlee, whose tech reviews have garnered roughly 20 million subscribers on YouTube. One could say this is the kind of creator that OpenAI envisions "empowering," to borrow execs' term from the livestream.
But in his Sora review, posted on Monday, Brownlee didn't sugarcoat his skepticism, especially about how the model was trained. Were his own videos used without his knowledge?
This is a mystery, and a controversial one. OpenAI hasn't said much about how Sora is trained, though experts believe the startup downloaded vast quantities of YouTube videos as part of the model's training data. There's no legal precedent for this practice, but Brownlee said that to him, the lack of transparency was sketchy.
"We don't know if it's too late to opt out," Brownlee said.
In an email, an OpenAI spokesperson said Sora was trained using proprietary stock footage and videos available in the public domain, without commenting on Business Insider's specific questions.
In a blog post about some of Sora's technical development, OpenAI said the model was partly trained on "publicly available data, mostly collected from industry-standard machine learning datasets and web crawls."
Brownlee's big questions for OpenAI
Brownlee threw dozens of prompts at Sora, asking it to generate videos of pretty much anything he could think of, including a tech reviewer talking about a smartphone while sitting at a desk in front of two displays.
Sora's rendering was believable, down to the reviewer's gestures. But Brownlee noticed something curious: Sora added a small fake plant in the video that eerily matched Brownlee's own fake plant.
Sora included a fake plant in a video that was similar to Brownlee's own plant.
Marques Brownlee
The YouTuber showed all manner of "horrifying and inspiring" results from Sora, but this one seemed to stick with him. The plant looks generic, to be sure, but for Brownlee it's a reminder of the unknown behind these tools. The models don't create anything fundamentally novel; they're predicting frame after frame based on patterns they recognize from source material.
"Are my videos in that source material? Is this exact plant part of the source material? Is it just a coincidence?" Brownlee said. "I don't know." BI asked OpenAI about these specific questions, but the startup didn't address them.
Sora created a video of a tech reviewer with a phone.
Marques Brownlee
Brownlee discussed Sora's guardrails at some length. One feature, for example, can make videos from images that people upload, but it's pretty picky about weeding out copyrighted content.
A few commenters on Brownlee's video said they found it ironic that Sora was careful to steer clear of intellectual property — except for that of the people whose work was used to produce it.
"Somehow their rights dont matter one bit," one commenter said, "but uploading a Mickeymouse? You crook!"
In an email to BI, Brownlee said he was looking forward to seeing the conversation evolve.
Millions of people. All at once.
Overall, the YouTuber gave Sora a mixed review.
Outside of its inspiring features — it could help creatives find fresh starting points — Brownlee said he feared that Sora was a lot for humanity to digest right now.
Brownlee said the model did a good job of refusing to depict dangerous acts or use images of people without their consent. And though it's easy to crop out, it adds a watermark to the content it makes.
Sora's relative weaknesses might provide another layer of protection from misuse. In Brownlee's testing, the system struggled with object permanence and physics. Objects would pass through each other or disappear. Things might seem too slow, then suddenly too fast. Until the tech improves, at least, this could help people spot the difference between, for example, real and fake security footage.
But Brownlee said the videos would only get better.
"The craziest part of all of this is the fact that this tool, Sora, is going to be available to the public," he said, adding, "To millions of people. All at once."
He added, "It's still an extremely powerful tool that directly moves us further into the era of not being able to believe anything you see online."
YouTube is experimenting with multiplayer mini-games under its collection of lightweight, free games dubbed “Playables.” Currently, Ludo Club and Magic Tiles 3 support multiplayer mode. “We’re beginning to test a new multiplayer feature for a few select games on YouTube Playables. Multiplayer on Playables lets you play games in real-time with other users,” the company […]
Peter Thiel, left, and Elon Musk, are two members of the so-called "PayPal Mafia."
Associated Press
A group of early 2000s PayPal employees and founders came to be known as the "PayPal Mafia."
The members have all gone on to impact Silicon Valley by founding and developing major companies.
The group includes Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, and the founders of both YouTube and Yelp.
What do the founders of YouTube, Yelp, Tesla, and LinkedIn have in common?
Apart from creating some of the biggest companies in tech, they all share a common résumé line item: they've all worked at PayPal.
Many of PayPal's early employees went on to become major names in tech and the venture capital world, founding, funding, and otherwise developing successful companies. This elite group came to be known as the "PayPal Mafia," a nickname that gained popularity after Fortune used the term in a 2007 piece alongside a photo of some of the members dressed in gangster attire.
Members of the group include Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, and over a dozen others. Here's a rundown of the most prominent members of this exclusive group and what they're up to over two decades later.
Peter Thiel: PayPal's founder and the so-called "don" of the PayPal Mafia
Peter Thiel in 1999.
AP
Peter Thiel cofounded the company that would become Paypal — called Confinity — in 1999 alongside Max Levchin and Luke Nosek. Confinity was launched as a developer of security software for hand-held devices like the PalmPilot, but it later pivoted toward digital money transfers.
Thiel served as CEO of PayPal until October 2002, when eBay acquired the company for $1.5 billion. Thiel's 3.7% stake was worth a $55 million, according to SEC filings.
Thiel went on to cofound Founders Fund, a venture capital firm that has helped launch companies like SpaceX and Airbnb.
Thiel is now a billionaire.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Thiel, now a billionaire with a net worth of $15.9 billion, according to Bloomberg, cofounded the big data analysis firm Palantir in 2003. He was the first major outside investor in Facebook and contributed early funding to Yelp and LinkedIn, along with a number of other ventures launched by his PayPal peers. Thiel's also a partner of Founders Fund, a venture capital fund based in San Francisco.
Thiel has also drawn criticism in recent years for his support of President Donald Trump and for secretly funding Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against Gawker Media, which resulted in the company shutting down Gawker and selling the company's assets.
After facilitating talks between Trump and now Sen. JD Vance, Thiel gave a record-breaking $15 million to Vance's campaign, the largest donation ever given to a single senate candidate.
Thiel later told The Atlantic he was taking a break from politics. Business Insider later reported that he served as an FBI informant.
After PayPal was bought by eBay, Levchin founded a media-sharing service called Slide that was later bought by Google. He was also an early investor in Yelp — at one point he was the company's largest shareholder — and he served as chairman of Yelp from its founding in 2004 until July 2015.
He founded fintech company Affirm, which allows consumers to finance online purchases at the point of sale and pay for them over time. Affirm went public in 2021, raising $1.2 billion in its IPO. Levchin is also the chairman of Glow, a fertility-tracking app that helps users improve their odds of conceiving.
Ken Howery: PayPal cofounder and CFO from 1998 to 2002.
Howery served as PayPal's CFO.
Patrick McMullan/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images
After eBay bought PayPal, Howery stayed on as eBay's director of corporate development until 2003. After PayPal's acquisition, he served as cofounder and partner of Founders Fund alongside Peter Thiel.
Howery recently served as US ambassador to Sweden.
Princess Madeleine of Sweden and Ambassador Ken Howery.
Bennett Raglin/Getty Images for the World Childhood Foundation
He was appointed by former President Trump in January 2019 and confirmed in September of that year. He also donated $1 million earlier this year to America PAC, a pro-Trump super PAC created by fellow PayPal mafia member Elon Musk.
Howery is active in several nonprofits and serves as a founding advisor to Kiva, an organization that facilitates loans to low-income entrepreneurs. Kiva was founded in part by Premal Shah, PayPal's former product manager.
Elon Musk: founder of (the other) X.com, which merged with Thiel's Confinity to become PayPal
Elon Musk pictured in the early days of PayPal.
AP
In 1999, Elon Musk founded a payments company called X.com, which merged with Thiel's Confinity in 2000. He briefly served as CEO of PayPal before he was ousted by the board in September 2000 and replaced with Thiel. But as the company's largest shareholder, he still walked away from the PayPal sale to eBay with a cool $165 million.
Musk is currently the world's richest person.
Musk now juggles multiple companies, including Tesla, SpaceX, and X, formerly Twitter.
Patrick Fallon / Reuters
Perhaps the best-known of all the members of the PayPal mafia now, Musk's estimated net worth is $362 billion.
Musk, who has been a vocal supporter of Trump's 2024 presidential campaign and donated more than $200 million to Republican election efforts, will also co-lead the newly created Department of Government Efficiency alongside former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, Trump announced after winning the election.
Luke Nosek: PayPal cofounder and vice president of marketing and strategy.
Nosek was also a PayPal cofounder.
Thomson Reuters
Nosek was also reportedly the person who clued in Peter Thiel to cryogenic preservation, which Thiel has since invested in heavily.
Nosek explored angel investing.
Nosek is a SpaceX investor.
David M. Benett/Getty Images for Netflix
In 2005, Nosek joined Thiel and Howery as a partner at Founders Fund. In 2017, Nosek left Founders Fund to launch investment firm Gigafund, which helped raise money for SpaceX.
Nosek was also the first institutional investor in SpaceX and is a board member. He also joined the board of ResearchGate, a platform where scientists and researchers can ask questions, follow topics, and review one another's papers.
Roelof Botha: PayPal's director of corporate development, vice-president of finance, CFO
Botha started at PayPal as director of corporate development.
Paul Zimmerman/Getty Images for TechCrunch/AOL
Botha went to school to be an actuary. He said he never planned to get into tech, but when he saw the opportunity in Silicon Valley, his intuition told him it was where he needed to be.
He started as PayPal's director of corporate development, went on to become vice-president of finance, and later served as CFO.
Botha is now a partner at venture capital firm Sequoia Capital
Sequoia Capital has funded tech giants like Apple, Google, YouTube, and Instagram.
Botha as served on the board at more than a dozen companies, including Square, EventBrite, Weebly, Tumblr, Instagram, YouTube, as well as 23andMe, which he resigned alongside the rest of the board in September over CEO Anne Wojcicki's proposal to take the company private.
Reid Hoffman: board of directors at PayPal, COO
Hoffman started on PayPal's board of directors.
Tony Avelar/AP
LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman served on the board of directors when PayPal was founded.
He eventually joined the company full-time as PayPal's COO. In a New York Times interview, Peter Thiel referred to Hoffman as PayPal's "firefighter in chief," noting that there were many fires that needed putting out in the company's early days.
When PayPal was acquired by eBay, Hoffman was the company's executive vice president.
Hoffman cofounded LinkedIn and is one of Silicon Valley's most prolific angel investors.
Hoffman has coauthored several books on startups and professional development. He hosts the "Masters of Scale" podcast, on which he interviews founders about how they launched and scaled their companies, and is a partner at VC firm Greylock Partners. He was an early investor in OpenAI and used to serve on its board, and cofounded Inflection AI.
Hoffman has also recently criticized business leaders, including his fellow PayPal mafia members, for supporting Trump.
David Sacks: PayPal COO
Sacks served as PayPal's COO.
Owen Thomas, Business Insider
Like Hoffman, Sacks also served as COO at PayPal. Previously a management consultant for McKinsey & Company, David Sacks joined PayPal in 1999.
After PayPal was bought by eBay, Sacks produced and financed the box office hit "Thank You For Smoking," which would go on to be nominated for two Golden Globes. In 2006 he founded Geni.com, an online tool for building family trees.
Sacks founded several companies, became an angel investor, and was named Trump's AI and crypto 'czar'
Sacks is a serial entrepreneur and investor, with angel investments in Airbnb, Postmates, Slack, and many more.
He's also a member of Elon Musk's inner circle and, like the Tesla CEO, is an avid Trump supporter, hosting a fundraiser for the president-elect at his home. Sacks reportedly urged Trump personally to choose Vance as his running mate, whom he was introduced to by fellow Paypal mafia member Thiel.
Jawed Karim, Chad Hurley, and Steve Chen met at PayPal during its early days.
Steven Chen, left, and Chad Hurley.
Noah Berger/AP
Karim and Chen were engineers, while Hurley was a web designer.
In 2005, the trio launched the video-sharing platform YouTube. Karim uploaded the platform's very first video, "Me at the zoo," an 18-second clip of Karim in front of the San Diego Zoo's elephant exhibit. It's been viewed over 292 million times.
Today, Karim, Hurley, and Chen remain active entrepreneurs and investors with a hand in projects from finance to music.
The trio went on to become investors.
David Buchan/Getty Images
Karim launched venture fund YVentures in 2008, through which he invested in Palantir, Reddit, Eventbrite, and Airbnb.
Hurley stepped down as CEO of YouTube in 2010. Since then, he's backed education startup Uptime and invested in several sports teams.
Chen invested in actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt's musical collaboration platform HitRecord, which in February secured $6.4 million in Series A funding.
Andrew McCormack: assistant to Peter Thiel at PayPal
In 2003, McCormack started a restaurant group in San Francisco. In 2008, he joined Thiel Capital and worked there for 5 years.
McCormack went on to launch VC firm Valar Ventures
Peter Thiel.
Alex Wong/Getty Images
McCormack partnered up with Thiel again in 2010 to found Valar Ventures, a venture capital fund.
Valar Ventures has invested in technology startups well beyond Silicon Valley, including some in Europe and Canada. In August, Crunchbase reported the firm had closed on a $150 million funding round for a new venture capital fund, Valar Fund V.
McCormack continues to serve as a managing partner of the firm.
Keith Rabois: PayPal's executive vice president
Rabois served as PayPal's executive vice president.
Fortune Live Media via Flickr
Entrepreneur Keith Rabois served as PayPal's executive vice president from 2000 to 2002.
He would go on to join his PayPal colleague Reid Hoffman at LinkedIn as its vice president for business and corporate development from 2005 to 2007. He was an early investor in startups like Square, where he spent two-and-a-half years as COO.
Rabois joined Thiel, Howery, and Nosek as a partner at Founders Fund.
Rabois has invested in a number of major companies.
He was a general partner at Founder's Fund, where he cofounded OpenStore, before returning to Khosla Ventures in early 2024.
Russel Simmons and Jeremy Stoppelman: worked on technology at PayPal.
Eric Risberg/AP
Simmons was an engineer and Stoppelman was the vice president of technology after joining PayPal from X.com.
In 2004, the pair came up with the idea for a platform where users could leave recommendations about businesses in their area. They pitched the idea to Levchin, who provided an early investment of $1 million, and Yelp was born.
Simmons left his official role at Yelp in 2010, while Stoppelman continues to serve as Yelp's CEO.
In 2017, Selby was revealed to be the generous tipper behind "Tips for Jesus."
Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP
Selby later helped manage Thiel Capital, the Thiel's family office, and started his own venture capital fund, AZ-VC, where he serves as managing partner. He still serves as managing director at Thiel Capital.
Starting in 2013, Selby began anonymously leaving tips for unsuspecting waitstaff, ranging into the thousands, and signing them "Tips for Jesus." His identity was confirmed by a New York City bartender who served him prior to receiving a $5,000 tip.
Dave McClure: PayPal's director of marketing
McClure served PayPal's director of marketing.
Edward Wong/South China Morning Post via Getty Images
McClure served PayPal's director of marketing as for four years beginning in 2001.
According to McClure's LinkedIn, he began a program called the PayPal Developer Network, which consisted of about 300,000 developers that were using PayPal.
He's since become an investor and owner in a professional sports league for ultimate frisbee and cofounded Practical Venture Capital, according to his LinkedIn.
Several more former PayPal employees went on to have careers both in and out of tech.
Joe Lonsdale, who got his start as a finance intern at PayPal.
Brian Ach/Getty Images for TechCrunch
Yishan Wong was an engineering manager who later served as CEO of Reddit from 2011 to 2014. He then founded the reforestation company Terraformation in 2020, where he now serves as CEO.
Jason Portnoy worked in finance at PayPal, and went on to work at Clarium Capital and Palantir. He's now a partner at VC firm Oakhouse Partners.
Premal Shah was a product manager at PayPal beginning in 2000, then went on to work at technology nonprofit Kiva. He's now president at financial-services startup Branch.
David Gausebeck was a technical architect at PayPal. Now, he serves as chief scientist at 3D modeling company Matterport. He cofounded 3D modeling company Matterport, where he now serves as chief scientist.
Joe Lonsdale started his career as a finance intern at PayPal before moving into venture capital — he's worked at VC firms Clarium Capital, Formation 8, and 8VC. Lonsdale also cofounded Palantir, and has reportedly contributed to a Trump PAC.
Eric Jackson was director of marketing at PayPal and went on to write a book about the company called "The PayPal Wars." He's currently the CEO of CapLinked.
Connor Franta is accusing his business partners at Heard Well in a lawsuit of siphoning money from their company. The business partners deny it.
Jon Kopaloff/Getty Images for GLSEN
Connor Franta is suing his Heard Well business partners. He says they used the company as a "piggy bank."
Franta accuses them of embezzlement to the tune of more than $1 million.
Lawyers for all three defendants denied the allegations to Business Insider.
YouTube star Connor Franta is suing his business partners, alleging in a lawsuit that they embezzled more than $1 million from the company they cofounded in 2015.
In the suit, filed in California Superior Court this week, Franta — a 32-year-old YouTuber with 4.8 million subscribers — is suing his cofounders in Heard Well, a music label that works with influencers. He also names the company's business manager — who is the father of one of the cofounders — as a defendant, accusing him of turning a blind eye to the alleged theft.
The business partners and manager all denied the allegations in statements to Business Insider.
The suit alleges Heard Well cofounder Jeremy Wineberg used an American Express Black Card obtained in the company's name for personal expenses, including international travel, concert tickets, tattoos, groceries, and plastic surgery. The suit says Wineberg "systematically looted the company of essentially every penny," using Heard Well funds to pay the Amex balances.
Another cofounder, Franta's former CAA agent Andrew Graham, also "converted thousands of Heard Well dollars" for personal use, the suit alleges. The suit says Graham was not "the principal bad actor."
CAA is a leading Hollywood talent agency with a digital arm that represents influencers on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. The agency works with creators to monetize their followings through brand partnerships, consumer products, and other business ventures. CAA is not named as a defendant in the suit.
Wineberg, and to a lesser extent Graham, used the company's earnings as "a de facto personal piggy bank," the suit alleges.
Meanwhile, Franta, in the lawsuit, said Lindsay Wineberg & Associates — Heard Well's business manager and accountant, led by Jeremy Wineberg's father — acted negligently by turning the other cheek, "and in doing so negligently facilitated the draining of over $1 million of company monies into the personal pockets of Wineberg (and Graham)."
Bryan Sullivan, a lawyer for Jeremy Wineberg and Lindsay Wineberg & Associates, said the allegations aren't true.
"The lawsuit filed by Connor Franta is without merit," Sullivan told Business Insider in a statement. Sullivan said his clients never "engaged in any misconduct."
"We intend to pursue all of our rights and expect to be vindicated in Court," Sullivan said.
John Shenk, a lawyer for Graham, told BI in a statement that his client "denies the allegations of the complaint and looks forward to defending this case in court."
Graham told BI that he no longer represents Franta, nor does CAA.
Franta has been on YouTube for more than a decade and is also the author of the memoir "A Work in Progress." He cofounded Heard Well in 2015, with each of the cofounders contributing $2,000 to capitalize the startup, according to an operating agreement that was filed as part of the lawsuit.
Heard Well published dozens of albums, but Franta "hardly saw a dime of profit directed his way throughout the company's nearly 10-year lifespan," the suit says.
This spring, the suit says, Franta learned Heard Well had fallen behind on royalty payments after a YouTube video accused the company of scamming.
Heard Well's Instagram account was active as of Thursday, though Franta said in the suit that he's been blocked from the company's social media accounts.
"Acting with integrity and respect in all my professional endeavors — especially with fellow creators — has always been a top priority for me," Franta told BI in a statement.
He said that while the matter had only recently come to his attention, he'd taken action this week "to protect the company and to facilitate its pursuit of all necessary and appropriate legal remedies."
Brittany Broski leans into building community and trust with her audience wherever possible.
Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images
Brittany Broski focuses on community over follower count for lasting influence.
Broski rose to fame in 2019 with a viral kombucha video and now has millions of followers.
What she thinks will last in a crowded influencer market is authenticity and reliability.
Social media star Brittany Broski says she has always leaned into building her community over worrying about her follower count.
"What do numbers really determine when you can buy followers, when you can buy a check mark now?" Broski told Business Insider.
"I think the real power comes from community, the people that you can bring together."
Broski, whose real name is Brittany Tomlinson, rose to fame in 2019 following a mega-viral moment in which she tasted kombucha for the first time.
She now has 7.5 million TikTok followers and over 2 million subscribers on YouTube.
Broski, 27, now also has two podcasts: Royal Court, where she interviews celebrities in a free-flowing format, and The Broski Report, where she muses on whatever she is thinking about that week.
She thinks that influencers who are authentic and build loyal communities online will have more staying power, even if that means those communities are niche.
Others, however, see creators with small but mighty audiences thriving again in the near future.
Ultimately, algorithms change, and what is popular today may not be tomorrow.
Broski's advice for creators is to lean into what makes them different.
Broski felt she had been "pigeonholed as a meme" at the start of her internet career as the "kombucha girl," and she wanted to distance herself from this as soon as possible.
Instead, she strived to "build out an identifiable brand."
Community and connection
Community, both on and offline, has always been important to Broski. She told BI that's one reason she partnered with White Claw this holiday season in a campaign that focuses on making quality time with friends and family.
On Broski's shows, she also strives to "share a human moment with people" rather than repeat the same questions celebs receive at press junkets.
"More than anything, people just want to be heard and seen and felt like they're known," she said.
In Royal Court, Broski often asks her guests, including Saoirse Ronan and Daisy Edgar-Jones, to "prove their worth to earn a spot on Lady Broski's coveted small council" and has them dress up in medieval costumes.
"I really like leaning into this sort of silly nature of, I'm going to make you wear a cape and a hat, and you're going to like it," she said. "You get to see that person's personality more than just, let's talk about your work."
Brittany Broski has partnered with White Claw to promote spending time with friends and family.
Todd Westphal / White Claw
Broski thinks what is going to last is "authenticity and reliability."
"Those two words are so overused and so bastardized, but it doesn't take away from the core meaning," she said.
Her advice to creators is that people want to watch someone they relate to, Broski said — someone who makes them think, "She's just like me."
"That's all people want," she said. "So don't overthink it."
The audience also just wants the people they watch to be themselves.
"That seems so cliché, but what else can you do?" Broski said. "If you try to be anyone else, you're doomed to fail."
"Guinness just dropped off some of the world records we broke while filming Beast Games lol," MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, wrote on X on Wednesday. "IM SO EXCITED TO DROP THIS SHOW IN 22 DAYS 🥰"
Guinness just dropped off some of the world records we broke while filming Beast Games lol. IM SO EXCITED TO DROP THIS SHOW IN 22 DAYS 🥰 pic.twitter.com/I9m08olhD3
While he didn't reveal the full details of the records, he hinted at a few, including the largest cash prize in a game show, the most cables for a show, and the "largest island given away in a show."
It's not been smooth sailing
Donaldson, 26, is YouTube's biggest creator, with 332 million subscribers. He rose to fame with his ambitious stunts, including recreating Netflix's "Squid Game."
"Beast Games" is along the same vein, featuring at least 1,000 contestants.
Amazon has promoted it as "the world's largest live gameshow" with the "biggest single prize in the history of television and streaming" of $5 million.
Amazon announced the reality competition in March. It was supposed to kick-start Amazon's video ad sales efforts, attracting a wide audience and appealing to advertisers.
As well as complaints from contestants about inadequate living conditions, some have also said they were injured, not given access to hygiene products and medical care, and subjected to sexism in a New York Times report, and a class-action lawsuit five of them filed in September.
Amazon declined to comment on the lawsuit to BI. A spokesperson for Donaldson previously told BI that Amazon was not involved in the Las Vegas round of the show, where many of the allegations surfaced, which was "a promotional video shoot."
The spokesperson also said that this shoot was "unfortunately complicated by the CrowdStrike incident, extreme weather, and other unexpected logistical and communications issues."
Much of the rumors and allegations directed at Donaldson and the show went unanswered for months until Donaldson appeared on YouTube Oompaville's channel to address everything at once on November 23.
Donaldson said he could not address some of the allegations due to legal proceedings, but he described some of the claims about injuries on set as "disinformation."
Since then, Donaldson has also been more outspoken on his social media.
"We have tons of behind-the-scenes dropping when the show does to show how blown out of proportion these claims were," he wrote on X in response to a user who enquired about the "terrible conditions" on the show. "Just can't release it now because it would spoil the games."
None of the above has tempered production of "Beast Games," with Donaldson releasing a teaser on November 25, saying he had "poured everything I have into this show."
"I'll see you December 19th," he said, confirming the show's release date.
Here's a little teaser for Beast Games! I spent over a year creating this 10 episode competition series, breaking 40 world records, building the craziest sets in entertainment history, featuring 1,000 players, and a $5,000,000 grand prize! I poured everything I have into this… pic.twitter.com/cjStGESIcn
Donaldson previously revealed he'd "spent way more than $100 million" on "Beast Games." He didn't clarify if this was the budget for one season, but the show has only been commissioned for one so far.
The move lines up with Amazon's strategy of increasing spending on entertainment and sports content, which "Beast Games" was supposed to be a benchmark for.
Donaldson has largely shrugged off bad press over the years, but partnering with a giant like Amazon has put more eyes on him than ever.
Creator economy experts previously told BI that "Beast Games" would not be going anywhere despite the negative headlines. But they warned that the top YouTuber may find it harder to fund his next big project because of the headache it caused Amazon.
"They'll still do partnerships with him," Diana D'Angelo, the CEO of Breaking Creatives Agency, told BI. "But maybe they'll put a bigger check on what he's actually doing and how it's being done."
One year ago, I didn’t know how to bake bread. I just knew how to follow a recipe.
If everything went perfectly, I could turn out something plain but palatable. But should anything change—temperature, timing, flour, Mercury being in Scorpio—I’d turn out a partly poofy pancake. I presented my partly poofy pancakes to people, and they were polite, but those platters were not particularly palatable.
During a group vacation last year, a friend made fresh sourdough loaves every day, and we devoured it. He gladly shared his knowledge, his starter, and his go-to recipe. I took it home, tried it out, and made a naturally leavened, artisanal pancake.
Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. If you want this in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. It’s nearly Thanksgiving, and you know what that means: stuffing your face to the point of comatosis. Well, that and entertaining all the unsavory relatives you manage to keep at bay the rest of the year. […]
