The Making of the World's Greatest Investor; Child Abusers Run Rampant as Tech Companies Look the Other Way; New York State Writes Down Value of Tesla Plant in Buffalo
1) I just read and highly recommend this new book: The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution.
Here's a Bloomberg article about it: How Jim Simons Built the Best Hedge Fund Ever... And here's one from the Wall Street Journal: The Making of the World's Greatest Investor.
2) This cover story in yesterday's New York Times is one of the most upsetting I've read in some time...
I don't support the death penalty (for reasons columnist Nicholas Kristof articulates well here), but would happily pull the switch for the guys on the Zoom Video Communications (ZM) webinar described at the end of this article: Child Abusers Run Rampant as Tech Companies Look the Other Way. It's so horrifying that I can't include an excerpt of what happened – you'll have to read it for yourself.
What the hell is the matter with these tech companies and their executives – including Microsoft (MSFT), Apple (AAPL), Amazon (AMZN), Alphabet (GOOGL), Facebook (FB), Dropbox (DBX), Snap (SNAP), and Yahoo?! If I ran a company and had even the faintest hint that my product or service were being exploited by child sexual predators, combatting this would be my highest priority, profits and share price be damned... I suspect this article will shame the entire tech sector into taking action, underscoring the importance of good investigative journalism. Excerpt:
Horrific experiences like theirs are being recirculated across the internet because search engines, social networks and cloud storage are rife with opportunities for criminals to exploit.
The scope of the problem is only starting to be understood because the tech industry has been more diligent in recent years in identifying online child sexual abuse material, with a record 45 million photos and videos flagged last year.
But the same industry has consistently failed to take aggressive steps to shut it down, an investigation by The New York Times found. Approaches by tech companies are inconsistent, largely unilateral and pursued in secret, often leaving pedophiles and other criminals who traffic in the material with the upper hand.
The companies have the technical tools to stop the recirculation of abuse imagery by matching newly detected images against databases of the material. Yet the industry does not take full advantage of the tools.
Amazon, whose cloud storage services handle millions of uploads and downloads every second, does not even look for the imagery. Apple does not scan its cloud storage, according to federal authorities, and encrypts its messaging app, making detection virtually impossible. Dropbox, Google and Microsoft's consumer products scan for illegal images, but only when someone shares them, not when they are uploaded.
And other companies, including Snapchat and Yahoo, look for photos but not videos, even though illicit video content has been exploding for years. (When asked about its video scanning, a Dropbox spokeswoman in July said it was not a "top priority." On Thursday, the company said it had begun scanning some videos last month.)
The largest social network in the world, Facebook, thoroughly scans its platforms, accounting for over 90% of the imagery flagged by tech companies last year, but the company is not using all available databases to detect the material. And Facebook has announced that the main source of the imagery, Facebook Messenger, will eventually be encrypted, vastly limiting detection.
"Each company is coming up with their own balance of privacy versus safety, and they don't want to do so in public," said Alex Stamos, who served as chief of information security at both Facebook and Yahoo. "These decisions actually have a humongous impact on children's safety"...
"The first thing people need to understand is that any system that allows you to share photos and videos is absolutely infested with child sexual abuse," said Mr. Stamos, the former security chief at Facebook and Yahoo, who is now a professor at Stanford.
Criminals often discuss in online forums and chat groups how to exploit vulnerabilities in platforms, the criminal cases show. They carefully follow the prosecutions of people who have been found with explicit imagery and learn from them. There are even online manuals that explain in graphic detail how to produce the images and avoid getting caught...
"Over all, the tech companies are doing the minimal amount necessary to maintain public respect for their organizations," said Chad M.S. Steel, who teaches computer forensics at George Mason University and has assisted federal investigators in abuse-related cases. "But they're not doing nearly as much as they could based on the technologies available."
Tech companies have known for years that videos of children being sexually abused are shared on their platforms, according to former employees at Microsoft, Twitter, Tumblr, and other companies.
3) In the wake of Tesla's (TSLA) surprisingly strong third-quarter earnings report a couple weeks ago, I wrote: "I am neutral on the stock. I think it's a terrible long, but probably also not a good short right now, either."
Nevertheless, I continue to closely follow the company and its CEO, Elon Musk, because it's one of the most fascinating business/entrepreneurial/technological stories I've ever encountered – it's like catnip!
I have such mixed feelings. Tesla makes great cars – currently accounting for 77.7% of U.S. electric vehicle sales – and is changing the world for the better, so I'm rooting for the company. And as I've written previously, Musk is a brilliant innovator, engineer, and entrepreneur.
But he's also a malignant narcissist, pathological liar, bully, and con man. My long experience on Wall Street has taught me that the stocks of companies run by such men don't do well... (Some try to defend Musk by noting that Steve Jobs had some of these traits as well, but I've studied Jobs closely and reject the comparison.)
Here's the latest news of note: New York State has just taken a 92% write-down on the nearly $1 billion of taxpayer (my!) money that the state gave to Tesla for its solar panel factory in Buffalo. Musk promised (and continues to promise) large amounts of jobs and investment, but it has been a total bust.
Here are articles about it in the Wall Street Journal: New York State Writes Down Value of Tesla Plant in Buffalo... and the Buffalo News: Tesla's Buffalo plant gets $884 million write-down. Excerpt:
New York State spent $958.6 million to build Tesla Inc.'s solar panel factory in South Buffalo and buy a big chunk of the equipment inside.
Now, auditors are saying the building and all that equipment is worth just under $75 million – or just 8% of what the state put into the RiverBend factory...
The impact of the Tesla plant will be far less than what state officials initially promised. In a series of contract revisions, the state dropped the provision included in earlier agreements that mandated the creation of another 1,440 jobs at suppliers and service providers, effectively cutting the job impact from the state's $959 million investment in half. Hopes that the project would spur the creation of a solar energy research hub in Buffalo and Rochester also failed to pan out.
Here are a friend's comments on this:
Don't forget that it was Lawrence Fossi (who at the time went under the pseudonym "Montana Skeptic") who broke the corrupt story of Tesla's Buffalo plant in a series of articles in the Summer of 2017:
- Tesla: SolarCity's Buffalo Deal Has Lots of Crooked Bends in the River
- More Dark Corners of SolarCity's Buffalo Deal, And Some Tesla Topics, Too
- Tesla Has Stiffed New York State on the Riverbend Factory
Fossi's excellent work investigating the many ways in which NY State altered its contract with Tesla laid the groundwork for this $1 billion write-off. He took the time, and had the skill, to analyze the legal agreements between Tesla and the state, including the ways in which the contract was altered, all to Tesla's benefit, with nothing in return for the state. A $1 billion gift to a billionaire, all gone – or at least burned up in smoke on a combination of Elon Musk's private jets.
One of those private jets was of course used to grease Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, who conveniently also introduced a $5,000 Colorado state subsidy to anyone who buys a Tesla in Colorado (Ethics Report on Former Gov. John Hickenlooper Raises Questions).
All that's needed at this point is a reference to Jeffrey Epstein and Pablo Escobar – oh wait...
- The Day Jeffrey Epstein Told Me He Had Dirt on Powerful People (including Musk)
- Elon Musk is feuding with Pablo Escobar's brother about flamethrowers
Because Fossi's detective work unmasked the crooked deal, it angered Musk so much that someone (gee, I wonder who?) outed Fossi, leading Musk to call his boss, seeking to silence him. Sadly, it mostly worked: Tesla And Montana Skeptic: Our Response ("Following a call to his employer by Elon Musk, a Seeking Alpha contributor has been forced to stop contributing to our site.") Here's another article about this: Get a Load of This Ridiculous Story About How Elon Musk Called a Tesla Critic's Boss to Complain About Him.
Best regards,
Whitney