There is a new venture fund in town. Swizzle Ventures, founded by Jessica Kamada, former COO of the marketing agency Bamboo, has raised just over $5 million for its Fund I, according to an SEC filing. There was no target raise amount. The firm, which quietly opened in 2023, is an early-stage firm looking to […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Lerer Hippeau, one of New York's most prolific and A-list VC firms, has filed to raise its ninth fund, according to an SEC filing made Wednesday.
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Cybersecurity experts, who work with human rights defenders and journalists, agree that Apple is doing the right thing by sending notifications to victims of mercenary spyware — and at the same time refusing to forensically analyze the devices.
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Amnesty said it found NoviSpy, an Android spyware linked to Serbian intelligence, on the phones of several members of Serbian civil society following police stops.
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Elon Musk has at least one more battle to wage against Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler, who will be leaving the agency when President-elect Trump takes over in January.
Musk yesterday posted a copy of a letter sent to Gensler by Musk's attorney, Alex Spiro. The letter dated December 12 says the SEC issued a settlement demand in its investigation into whether Musk violated federal securities laws in connection with 2022 purchases of Twitter stock, and that the SEC is investigating Neuralink. The Spiro letter said:
Yesterday the Commission Staff issued a settlement demand that required Mr. Musk agree within 48 hours to either accept a monetary payment or face charges on numerous counts. They indicated that this demand was the result of a directive from their superiors and that charges would be brought imminently unless Mr. Musk acquiesced. This demand follows a multi-year investigation and more than six years of harassment of Mr. Musk by the Commission and its Staff. More recently, the Staff subpoenaed me, Mr. Musk's attorney, for testimony and threatened to send a process server if I did not immediately cooperate. I categorically refused. This week, the Commission has also reopened an investigation into Neuralink.
Spiro accused the SEC of "an improperly motivated campaign" against Musk, his companies, and people associated with him. "We demand to know who directed these actions—whether it was you or the White House," Spiro wrote. "These tactics and misguided scheme will not intimidate us. We reserve all rights."
© Getty Images | Bloomberg
Allison Robbert/Getty Images
Elon Musk has revealed that Neuralink, his brain-chip implant company, is facing a probe from the Securities and Exchange Commission, with which he has long feuded.
Musk posted a letter on the subject to X Thursday, as well as a mocking, AI-generated image of SEC chair Gary Gensler. He called the SEC "just another weaponized institution doing political dirty work."
"Oh Gary, how could you do this to me?" Musk wrote in the post sharing the letter from his lawyer, Alex Spiro, to Gensler.
In the letter, which was said it was "in the matter of certain purchases, sales, and disclosures of Twitter shares," Spiro said the SEC "reopened" an investigation into Neuralink but didn't elaborate on why. It also said the SEC was preparing action against Musk over his 2022 acquisition of Twitter, now X.
Oh Gary, how could you do this to me? 🥹 pic.twitter.com/OoooQI77ZS
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 12, 2024
The billionaire later shared another post featuring an AI-generated image of a snail wearing a business suit and said it depicted Gensler.
Neuralink and the SEC didn't immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider, made outside normal working hours.
The SEC is investigating how Musk bought shares in Twitter ahead of his $44 billion acquisition of the social network.
Musk started buying shares in Twitter in 2022, and by the spring, he had a 9% stake in the company before he struck a deal to buy it outright later in the year.
Spiro, Musk's lawyer, also said in the letter that the SEC issued a "settlement demand" on Wednesday to agree within 48 hours to make a payment or face enforcement action.
Spiro wrote that this followed "a multi-year investigation and more than six years of harassment" of Musk by the SEC.
This is an apparent reference to the SEC suing Musk in 2018 over a tweet in which he claimed he had the funding to take Tesla private, which led to him being forced to step down as chairman.
Leaders in the cryptocurrency space are up in arms over documents that were recently uncovered showing the Biden administration instructed banks not to engage in cryptocurrency business.
The uncovered documents allegedly confirm suspicions that cryptocurrency tech founders were being "debanked" under a program known colloquially as "Operation Chokepoint 2.0."
Chris Lane, the former chief technical officer of Silvergate Bank, accused federal regulators of contributing to his bank's collapse after the documents were released Friday.
"Silvergate became what it was serving cryptocurrency clients," Lane wrote on social media. "[Crypto was a] strategic vertical we started focusing on in 2013. Regulators came in sometime in Spring 2023 and severely limited the amount of U.S. dollar deposits we could hold for digital asset clients. There went our entire business model."
Lane described the experience as the equivalent of being "shot in the back."
HOW DOES THE FUTURE OF CRYPTOCURRENCY CHANGE AFTER TRUMP'S ELECTION WIN?
Meanwhile, David Sacks, President-elect Donald Trump's new artificial intelligence and crypto czar, said Friday that there were "too many stories of people being hurt by Operation Choke Point 2.0," and that "It needs to be looked at."
Last week, Paul Grewal, the chief legal officer for Coinbase, considered one of the largest cryptocurrency exchange platforms, shared documents that he and his team had obtained following Freedom of Information Act requests that have paralleled a protracted legal battle between the company and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).
The documents showed that the Biden administration's FDIC sent numerous letters to banks, calling on them to "pause all crypto-asset related activity."
BIPARTISAN LAWMAKERS PUSH BIDEN TO INVESTIGATE HAMAS' CRYPTOCURRENCY FINANCING
"Law-abiding American businesses should be able to access banking services without government interference," Grewal said Friday in conjunction with his publication of the documents. "The incoming administration has the opportunity to reverse so many poor crypto policy decisions, chief among them politically motivated regulatory decisions like Operation Chokepoint 2.0."
Grewal pledged to continue fighting for transparency, including seeking to obtain copies of the documents without redactions.
Concerns over regulators stifling crypto from engaging with banks gained renewed traction during Thanksgiving week after tech investor Marc Andreessen said on Joe Rogan's podcast that more than 30 tech founders had been "debanked" for political reasons. Andreessen compared what was taking place to a similar Obama-era program known as "Operation Chokepoint," which sought to inhibit high-risk industries like payday lenders and gun dealers.
Fox News Digital reached out to the FDIC and SEC for comment but did not receive a response by press time.
Ukraine’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-UA) said in a report published over the weekend that a hacking group has been targeting the country’s defense and military companies with phishing attacks. The CERT identified the hacking group as UAC-0185 — also known as UNC4221 — without saying who was behind the group. Earlier this year, however, […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Late Wednesday, bitcoin hit $100,000—a major milestone for the cryptocurrency, which has been experiencing a massive upswing since Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election.
Trump is a shiny new crypto supporter, launching his own cryptocurrency on the campaign trail and hoping to woo crypto enthusiast voters by promising to slacken the Biden administration's heightened scrutiny of cryptocurrency.
According to CNN, bitcoin's latest record high came shortly after Trump announced his intentions to nominate Paul Atkins to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) once Gary Gensler—a noted crypto critic—resigns on Inauguration Day.
© koto_feja | E+
AP Photo/ Evan Vucci, File
President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Paul Atkins for chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Atkins was an SEC commissioner under President George W. Bush and is a well-known figure in Washington's conservative financial world. He's also an outspoken supporter of the crypto industry and cochairs the Chamber of Digital Commerce's Token Alliance, an industry-led initiative to represent the sector.
If confirmed, Atkins will replace Gary Gensler, who has drawn the ire of much of the crypto community and plans to step down as chair on January 20.
"Paul is a proven leader for common sense regulations," Trump said in a Truth Social post announcing the pick. He added that Atkins "recognizes that digital assets & other innovations are crucial to Making America Greater than Ever Before."
Atkin's nomination puts Trump a step closer to fulfilling his promise to create a more crypto-friendly regulatory regime. On the campaign trail, Trump promised to fire Gensler, who crypto players have criticized for stifling innovation and creating uncertainty with his approach to regulating the industry.
Bitcoin and ethereum both rose on the news and were up 3.3% and 7.7%, respectively, around 3:40 p.m. ET. Bitcoin is once again testing the key $100,000 threshold that it nearly cleared last week before reversing course.
During his tenure, Gensler led the SEC on a crackdown on crypto issuers for dealing in what the agency said were unregistered securities. Industry insiders soured on his stance, blaming Gensler for pushing crypto business out of the US.
Following last month's news that Gensler would resign when Trump takes office, crypto token XRP rallied sharply to become the third largest coin by market capitalization. The token had languished in recent years as the SEC targeted issuer Ripple Labs for violating securities law. The market expects the agency to drop that lawsuit and many other crypto suits under Trump.
The prolific hacking group broke into Caesars Entertainment, Coinbase, DoorDash, Mailchimp, Riot Games, Twilio (twice), and dozens more.
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Crusoe Energy, a startup building data centers reportedly to be leased to Oracle, Microsoft, and OpenAI, is in the process of raising $818 million, according to an SEC filing. The filing indicates that Crusoe has secured $686 million of the $818 million total that it hopes to raise. Seventy investors have contributed to the tranche […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The five alleged hackers are accused of stealing millions of dollars in crypto, and corporate data from several victims all over the world.
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
