Business

Thousands of people say they’ve collectively been locked out of more than $30 million due to the bankruptcy of fintech middle-man Synapse.

CNBC reports federal agencies like the FDIC don’t cover nonbanks like Synapse, and “the estate of Andreessen Horowitz-backed Synapse doesn’t have the money to hire an outside firm to perform a full reconciliation of its ledgers.”

After hopping on the live audio bandwagon in 2022, LinkedIn has decided to discontinue the feature in favor of its livestreaming platform, LinkedIn Live.

The controversial head of the SEC was targeted by Donald Trump during Trump’s presidential campaign. It is customary for the SEC chair to resign when a president from the other party is elected. That cheering you hear? It’s the crypto lobby.

During trial, prosecutors pressed Wang for creating code that allowed Alameda to have a negative balance in FTX’s database.

But the prosecution ultimately advocated for Wang during his sentencing on Wednesday, citing his cooperation in deciphering the FTX case, along with his work to create a tool to help the government to detect fraud, CNBC reports.

After previously relying on a third party to handle ad sales on its News app, Apple will now sell ads and sponsorships itself, according to a report from Axios. Apple already sells ads directly to advertisers on the App Store.

Dotdash Meredith, the publisher of People, Better Homes & Gardens, and InStyle, announced a licensing deal with OpenAI in May (as did The Verge's parent company, Vox Media). Now, AdWeek is reporting this $16 million minimum figure based on comments from a recent earnings call:

If you look at Q3 24, licensing revenue was up about $4.1 million year-over-year. The lion’s share of that would be driven by the OpenAI license...the variable components will be calculated and recognized in the future.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the $9.6 billion sale, expected to close in 2026, would see Verizon paying $38.50 a share and absorbing “about $10 billion” of Frontier’s debt. 63 percent of Frontier’s stockholders are for the all-cash transaction, while others are opposed, saying the offer is too low.

Frontier owns more than two million fiber connections across 25 states, including some in Texas, California, and Florida that it bought from Verizon in 2016.

Do not miss the photos of this huge Bay Area warehouse, jam-packed with the remnants of failed tech companies. Fancy office chairs, branded swag, weird new ideas about cubicles, endless rows of phone booths, and more. And most of it’s for sale! It’s like upscale, totally cursed Ikea in there.

Ben Horowitz has donated a minimum of $7.6 million to fund police purchases. a16z portfolio companies, —such as Skydio, Prepared911, and Flock Safety — benefited.

At the Jack Dorsey-owned Block, employees were given “stern warnings” not to speak of Jay-Z, according to Fortune. Employees reportedly weren’t told why they couldn’t mention the rapper, who is also on Block’s board.

Block, purchased a majority stake in Jay-Z’s music streaming app Tidal in 2021. Tidal laid off more staff last month, but that may not be the end of this year’s cuts, Fortune reports.

The Information reports that TikTok’s parent company ByteDance grew its overall revenue to $73 billion in the first half of 2024 — just shy of Meta’s $75.5 billion. The share of ByteDance’s revenue that comes from TikTok grew to 23 percent, meaning its operations outside of China are increasingly important for the company’s bottom line.

After cruising onto the scene in 2018, Yamaha told e-bike dealers that it’s ending its US e-bike business due to the “significant softening” and “oversupply” after the pandemic-fueled e-bike boom, reports Electrek.

The company said it will continue offering an up to 60 percent discount program for bikes “retailed and warranty registered” through June 30th, 2025.

The startup has received “tens of millions from investors in short-term loans“ to make sure it can cover election bets:

Like most brokerages, the company offers instant funding to new users. This means users can start trading right away, even though it may take two to three business days for the funds to be officially transferred from the customer’s bank account to Kalshi’s.

Forbes reports on “evidence of rampant wash trading on Polymarket,” a prediction market site backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. Wash trading is a form of market manipulation. “The suspicious activity on Polymarket raises questions about the accuracy of the site,” Forbes writes.

Court documents from the MrBeast Burger lawsuit revealed pitch decks prepared by his team for potential brand partners, and Business Insider went through them.

You get the sense that his team didn’t try very hard when putting decks together: slides have weird layouts, overlapping text, and are borderline unreadable. And maybe that’s the biggest takeaway here — the MrBeast brand sells itself.

Singh, now the fourth FTX executive to be sentenced after Sam Bankman-Fried, Caroline Ellison, and Ryan Salame, will receive three years of supervised release.

Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, who has presided over the cases, said that Mr. Singh provided crucial assistance to the government and that he had played a “much more limited” role in the scheme than his colleagues had.