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☆ When Brian Chesky co-founded Airbnb, his mom said, 'You're not an entrepreneur, you're unemployed'—now he's worth $9.3 billion
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-03 | by ( Megan Sauer | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +3 min

That's according to Chesky, who told the story at a recent Stanford Graduate School of Business event. Months before Airbnb's scheduled initial public offering, business dropped 80% in eight weeks during Covid-19 lockdowns, Chesky told Stanford students. Today, Airbnb's market cap is $75.49 billion, and Chesky's net worth is $9.3 billion, according to Forbes. "I never focused on trying to make a lot of money," Chesky said. DON'T MISS: Want to be smarter and more successful with your money, work & life?

☆ Reid Hoffman's new AI startup Inflection launches ChatGPT-like chatbot
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-02 | by ( Krystal Hu | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

May 2 (Reuters) - Inflection AI, the AI startup founded by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and former Deepmind (GOOGL.O) researcher Mustafa Suleyman, has released its first AI chatbot product, the company said on Tuesday. Similar to the viral chatbot ChatGPT, Inflection's AI chatbot, named Pi, uses generative AI technology to interact with users through conversations, in which people can ask questions and share interests. Inflection AI said it developed the technology in-house and its Pi chatbot is built on prioritizing human conversations with a high level of emotional intelligence. Pi uses user data, including conversational content, to train its AI systems, according to its terms of service. Chatbot powered by generative AI technology has become a crowded field since OpenAI's ChatGPT burst into the scene last November.

☆ Joe Biden to attend $25,000 per person fundraiser during NYC campaign cash blitz
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-02 | by ( Brian Schwartz | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +3 min

US President Joe Biden speaks about the creation of new manufacturing jobs at the Washington Hilton in Washington, DC, April 25, 2023. A Biden campaign spokesman declined to comment. An NBC News poll shows 46% of the Republican primary voters support Trump over other declared and potential rivals, including former Florida Gov. The majority of those surveyed said they would prefer that neither Biden nor Trump run for president. Trump and Biden combined to raise almost $2 billion during the 2020 election cycle, according to data from OpenSecrets.

NEW YORK, May 1 (Reuters) - E. Jean Carroll returned to the witness stand in her rape and defamation civil case against Donald Trump, after the judge denied a defense request for a mistrial. Trump's lawyer Joe Tacopina began cross-examining Carroll for a second day, hoping to show jurors inconsistencies or holes in her claims against the former U.S. president. In seeking a mistrial, Tacopina wrote an 18-page letter early on Monday accusing U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan of bias against Trump. Trump's lawyer also challenged Kaplan's statement that Trump might be "sailing in harm's way" after his son Eric Trump discussed on Twitter how LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman was helping fund Carroll's case. TRUMP NOT ATTENDING TRIALA businessman-turned-politician, Trump has not attended Carroll's trial, and on Monday was in Scotland for a short trip to visit his golf courses there and eventually in Ireland.

☆ Explosions Rock Kyiv After Russian Strike: Live Updates
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-01 | by ( Marc Santora | Malachy Browne | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Image Emergency workers at the scene of a Russian missile strike on a residential building in Uman, Ukraine, on Friday. A flurry of missiles fired by both sides this weekend appears to mark the next phase of the conflict. Credit... Brendan Hoffman for The New York TimesExplosions echoed across the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, on Monday as Ukrainian officials warned of a large-scale Russian missile attack. Air defences intercepted 15 of 18 cruise missiles that Russia aimed at Ukraine, according to the military. The explosions in Kyiv on Monday were a few hours after Russia attacked Pavlograd in central Ukraine, sparking a massive fire that lit up the night sky.

☆ Ambitious genome project shows how humans fit with other mammals
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-27 | by ( Will Dunham | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +4 min

The findings in the ambitious Zoonomia Project identified parts of the genome functionally important in people and other mammals and showed how certain mutations can cause disease. The project revealed the genetics of uncommon mammalian traits like hibernation and showed how the sense of smell varies widely. The researchers said the findings on hibernation genetics could inform human therapeutics, critical care and long-distance space flight. The most primitive species was the venomous burrowing insect-eater Hispaniola solenodon, closely related to mammals alive during the dinosaur age. In terms of human differences from other mammals, the study pointed to regions associated with developmental and neurological genes.

LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman contributed money to a nonprofit funding E. Jean Carroll's rape lawsuit against Trump. The judge said Wednesday that jurors couldn't hear evidence related to his funding of the case. The issue of whether billionaire LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman contributed money towards E. Jean Carroll's lawsuit against the former president, US District Judge Lewis Kaplan said, "would be prejudicial" because it has no bearing on Carroll's allegations. "The whole subject of litigation funding is precluded," the judge said Wednesday afternoon in a downtown Manhattan courtroom. The funding issue had no bearing on the merits of Carroll's claims, Kaplan said earlier.

☆ Billionaire LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman reveals 2 Buddhist principles that shape his worldview and help him navigate failure
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-26 | by ( Lakshmi Varanasi | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

In an interview with The Generalist, Hoffman said he's been most influenced by Buddha. Hoffman also said in the interview that Aristotle initially inspired him to study philosophy. Hoffman, who cofounded LinkedIn, announced he was stepping down from the board of OpenAI last month. Hoffman holds a master's degree in philosophy from Oxford and planned to go into academia at one point. Hoffman, who calls himself an "accidental technologist," credits his philosophical instincts as the reason he is in the industry.

☆ The $30 billion reason for Wall Street to save First Republic ASAP
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-26 | by ( Matt Turner | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

The bank is seeking to sell assets and raise fresh capital to keep itself going. That's part of the reason the stock is trading down so heavily, with the bank currently valued at a little more than $1 billion. The pitch, according to Hugh Son at CNBC, is essentially this: If First Republic is seized by the FDIC, those same banks will face a bill of $30 billion. Liz Hoffman at Semafor notes that private equity could step in also, taking on some of First Republic's problem assets, with banks taking on the rest. First Republic would then seek to sell shares to replenish its capital.

"I'm here because Trump raped me," Carroll testified. Trump's posts mentioned two issues that Judge Lewis Kaplan had warned parties in the trial not to mention to jurors. Carroll alleges Trump assaulted her in a dressing room at the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan in or around 1996. In his first Truth Social post on Wednesday, Trump wrote, "The E. Jean Carroll case, Ms. Bergdorf Goodman, is a made up SCAM. "Just look at her CNN interview before & after the commercial break - Like a different person," Trump wrote, referring to an interview Carroll gave CNN about the lawsuit.

☆ Big money donors rally behind Biden as he launches his reelection bid
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-26 | by ( Brian Schwartz | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +7 min

Big donors in the business world started rallying around President Joe Biden soon after he announced Tuesday that he's running for reelection next year. A Biden campaign spokesperson didn't return a request for comment before publication. Katzenberg told CNBC in an exclusive interview Tuesday night that he believes the Biden campaign will raise more this time around than in 2020. Biden's campaign raised over $400 million from donors that gave under $200 during his last run for president, according to OpenSecrets. Venture capitalist Ron Conway has told friends he will help the president's campaign, according to a person close to him.

☆ Trump's rape trial brought by E. Jean Carroll starts Tuesday in Manhattan. The case centers around accusations from the 1990s
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-24 | by ( Ashley Collman | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +7 min

Carroll has accused Trump of raping her in a Bergdorf Goodman changing room in the mid-1990s. Carroll is asking for Trump to retract his statements and for a jury to award her unspecified compensatory and punitive damages. Carroll says their encounter started off playful, with Trump asking Carroll to help him pick out a gift for a female friend. Eva Deitch for The Washington Post via Getty ImagesTrump's lawyers are likely to try and paint Carroll's lawsuit as a political witch hunt. Trump's lawyers asked to delay the trial a month so that they could probe Hoffman's involvement more, but that request was denied, though Kaplan allowed Trump's legal team to conduct another deposition with Carroll before the trial starts.

☆ Inside the Wild World of Celebrity Keynote Speakers: Drugs, Alcohol
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-23 | by ( David Kushner | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +31 min

"I never saw myself as a speaker, let alone a motivational speaker," Leonard tells me while his assistant irons his jeans. 'When I ramble," Hunter told me, "hit me in the leg!" Every plane had been grounded, including the one stuck on the tarmac with an increasingly inebriated Hunter Thompson trapped inside. But by far the most all-consuming task was booking gigs for Hunter Thompson. Just before a debate with G. Gordon Liddy at Brown University, Hunter demanded that Betsy Berg, whom I now worked alongside at GTN, score him some crystal meth.

☆ Why Michael Bloomberg is the keeper of the keys on Wall Street
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-21 | by ( Dan Defrancesco | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

Bloomberg deals in data — via its ubiquitous terminal — which serves as the lifeblood of Wall Street. (A funny nugget from the FT story: Bloomberg is not part of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. In many ways, the Bloomberg terminal is the cockroach of Wall Street. Tiger Global's down bad. Here's more on Tiger Global's unique approach to investing in startups and why it backfired.

☆ Judge seals filings over whether billionaire Democratic donor is bankrolling E. Jean Carroll's rape lawsuit against Trump
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-21 | by ( Jacob Shamsian | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

E. Jean Carroll's rape lawsuit against former President Donald Trump goes to trial next week. A federal judge sealed documents related to whether billionaire Reid Hoffman funded Carroll's suit. Alina Habba, an attorney representing Trump in the lawsuit, told Insider she would oppose the decision. On April 13, Habba asked Judge Kaplan (who is not related to Carroll's lawyer) again to delay the trial and reopen the discovery process in the case. Trump's attorneys haven't yet said whether the former president will attend the trial, and Judge Kaplan isn't forcing him to.

☆ Ball Doctoring: A History of Excuses, Denials and Knowing Winks
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-21 | by ( Benjamin Hoffman | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

For nearly as long as baseball has existed, pitchers have been using various methods, legal and otherwise, to doctor the ball. Some want the ball to spin more, some want it to spin less. Some are looking for more movement, and others are looking for more control. In this case, Scherzer, who was ejected from Wednesday’s win over the Los Angeles Dodgers, insists he was using rosin — which is legal — and nothing more. Scherzer made little in the way of excuses or denials about the stickiness of his hands when asked about his decision to drop his appeal and serve a 10-game suspension.

☆ Twitter users including Justin Bieber, Bill Gates, and Kim Kardashian are seeing their blue checkmarks disappear as Elon Musk charges $8 a month for verified accounts
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-20 | by ( Kate Duffy | Sarah Jackson | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Twitter appeared to start removing legacy blue checkmarks from many accounts on Thursday. Some Twitter users are watching their legacy blue checkmarks disappear from their accounts as Elon Musk implements an $8 monthly subscription program. Notable business figures including Bill Gates, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, and "Shark Tank" star Barbara Corcoran no longer showed blue checkmarks on their Twitter accounts Thursday afternoon. The only way users can keep their blue checkmarks is to sign up to Twitter Blue, a subscription program that costs $8 a month. Twitter Blue has sparked controversy since it was rolled out.

☆ The Fight Over a Drug That Is Great for Horses but Horrific for Humans
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-20 | by ( Jan Hoffman | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, where the Philadelphia neighborhood of Kensington is ground zero for tranq dope, announced that his administration was doing so. Since then, it has been used for procedures on sheep, deer, elk and even cats and dogs, as well as on horses and cattle. Earlier trials in humans had been shut down because the drug led to respiratory depression, so manufacturers never sought approval for human use. And unlike the protocols for opioids, those for reversing tranq dope withdrawal or managing rehabilitation have not been standardized. Schedule III includes buprenorphine and the anticonvulsant drug gabapentin.

☆ Oakland Athletics Say They Will Move to Las Vegas by 2027
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-20 | by ( Benjamin Hoffman | Andrew Das | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The Oakland Athletics have reached an agreement to acquire land near the Las Vegas Strip and said Wednesday that they hoped to be playing games in a new, billion-dollar retractable roof stadium on the site by 2027. The agreement on the 49-acre site in Nevada, which the team’s president, Dave Kaval, confirmed to The Las Vegas Review-Journal on Wednesday night, will seemingly end years of tense negotiations for a new stadium in the Bay Area, an investment the team said it needed to remain financially viable and competitive with its peers in Major League Baseball. “It’s obviously a very big milestone for us,” Kaval said of the potential move to Las Vegas, which would be the first relocation of a major league franchise in two decades. “We spent almost two years working in Las Vegas to try to determine a location that works for a long-term home. To identify a site and have a purchase agreement is a big step.”

CompaniesCompanies Law Firms Grail Inc FollowIllumina Inc Follow(Reuters) - A U.S. appeals court on Tuesday said it will accelerate reviewing Illumina Inc's challenge to a federal agency order requiring the biotechnology company to divest cancer diagnostic test maker Grail LLC. The agency said Illumina had not shown why the appeals court needed to speed up its consideration of the antitrust dispute. San Diego-based Illumina, which specializes in gene sequencing, is appealing an April 3 FTC order that said the company's $7.1 billion acquisition of Grail will curb competition in the cancer-testing market. The FTC in 2021 sued Illumina over its bid for Grail, a former subsidiary of the company. The case is Illumina Inc and Grail Inc v. Federal Trade Commission, 5th U.S.

As a result, farmers in Poland, Hungary and other nations have seen their incomes plummet. measures,” his country would follow Poland in restricting Ukrainian grain imports until the end of June, according to Hungarian news reports. The announcement came after Warsaw reached a deal with Kyiv on Friday to strictly limit and, for a time, halt Ukrainian grain deliveries to Poland. Image Ukrainian grain being loaded onto a cargo ship near Odesa, Ukraine, in August. Image A Ukrainian soldier loading shells inside an American-made M109 Paladin self-propelled howitzer to be fired toward Russian positions in Bakhmut, Ukraine, on Friday.

☆ A judge blamed Trump for the 'media frenzy' he used as an excuse to try to delay his rape trial
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-17 | by ( Ashley Collman | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

A judge denied Donald Trump's bid to delay E. Jean Carroll's rape trial because of his indictment. Judge Lewis A. Kaplan expressed concern the request was "another delay tactic" by the former president. US District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan said some of the so-called media frenzy had been caused by Trump himself. The judge allowed a brief reopening of discovery but denied Trump's request to delay the trial. Carroll "is now over 79 years of age and is entitled to her day in court just as both parties are entitled to a fair trial," Kaplan wrote.

☆ I've been building popular tech products like Tome since I became my family's breadwinner at 15 years old. I've learned you never know how people are going to use your creation.
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-15 | by ( Lakshmi Varanasi | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

Keith Peiris is the co-founder of Tome, a storytelling tool that uses generative AI models like GPT-4 and Dall-E-2. At the same time, I also learned that no one uses your tools the way you envisioned. The truth is that everyone uses tools differently, so you need to build them in a permissive way. When we started building Tome in the early days of the pandemic, my cofounder, Henri Liriani, and I thought we were building for someone we knew. Now, they're using Tome, which is a use case I had never even thought about.

They said the involvement of Hoffman, a prominent Democratic donor, raised the question of whether Carroll sued Trump, a Republican, to advance a political agenda. They had called Trump's request irrelevant to the defamation claim, and said Trump waived the argument by earlier raising and then dropping a similar request. She also has a still-pending defamation lawsuit filed in November 2019 against Trump over his denial five months earlier that the rape took place. The case is Carroll v Trump, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York Editing by Chris ReeseOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

☆ OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: Letter from Elon Musk, others calling for AI development pause 'lacked technical nuance'
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-14 | by ( Aaron Mcdade | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded to the open letter calling for a pause on AI for one of the first times Thursday. Speaking at MIT, Altman said safety is important to OpenAI, and the letter "lacked technical nuance." The letter called for a six-month pause on AI development, and was signed by tech leaders like Elon Musk. In one of his only public responses to the open letter signed by Elon Musk and hundreds of others in the tech industry about concerns over AI, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said it "lacked technical nuance about where we need the pause." The OpenAI CEO also said his company will continue to be as honest as possible about its developments with AI.

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