Crypto startup MoonPay hires Time president to lead its enterprise business
Keith Grossman, Time president
TIMEPieces Artist Jeremy Cowart
Time president Keith Grossman is leaving the legacy publisher to take on a new role as the president of enterprise at crypto startup MoonPay, effective December 31.
Grossman joined Time in 2019, a year after Meredith Corporation sold the flagship magazine brand to Salesforce founder Marc Benioff and his wife Lynne for $190 million.
During his tenure at Time, Grossman has become a staunch advocate of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, pioneering the media company’s NFT business, TIMEPieces, and generating more than $10 million in profit along the way.
“I’ve spent the past year operationalizing it,” Grossman told CNBC in an exclusive interview. “I think that the transition will be scary in one sense, because it’s something new and different, but at the same time stable in another sense because we’ve consistently said that TIMEPieces was a community led by stewards, not founders.”
Before his three-plus years at Time, Grossman had held leadership posts at major publishers including Bloomberg and Condé Nast-owned Wired.
Maya Draisin, Time’s chief brand officer, will lead TIMEPieces. Grossman began transitioning out of his role as president in January to focus on the publisher’s NFT business when Ian Orefice was named president and chief operating officer, according to a Time spokesperson.
Earlier this month, Time CEO Edward Felsenthal announced he was stepping down from that role, though he retains his editor-in-chief position and is taking on the additional role of executive chairman. Jessica Sibley, who was most recently the chief operating officer at Forbes, is now Time CEO.
Facing the FTX fallout
MoonPay’s pitch to investors is that it offers a “gateway” to digital assets. For now, that includes bitcoin, ether, and other digital tokens like NFTs. But the collapse of FTX and its ongoing ripple effect throughout the industry, coupled with this year’s market volatility and risk-off investor environment, hasn’t been kind to crypto trading.
“I think it’s important to separate a bad actor from an industry,” Grossman said of the FTX fallout. “If you look at the energy industry you had Enron; if you look at the health industry you had Theranos; if you look at the financial industry, you had Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, so it’s not surprising that the crypto industry will have its bad actors as well,” he said. “But some of the positives that come out of it will probably be some responsible regulation that will provide clarity for large companies that want to get into the space.”
MoonPay co-founder and CEO Ivan Soto-Wright said that his company has no meaningful exposure to FTX, though he added that this is an inflection point for the industry with an impact on all the players.
Before filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection amid allegations of misuse of customer assets, FTX offered trading on its exchange by storing digital assets in what are called custodial wallets, which allowed it to serve as a middleman holding customer funds. Soto-Wright says that MoonPay’s platform is non-custodial and that it does not hold onto customer funds as part of its business model. But he added that comes with its own set of challenges.
“We’re starting to see some really great advancements around MPC (multi-party computation) technology to make that safer,” Soto-Wright said. “But ultimately, if you are an actor in the space that’s going to be holding onto client funds, you should fall under regulation.”
MPC technology has become vital to securing digital assets like crypto, because it ensures that no one person has access to an individual’s data by splitting it into multiple pieces.
Crypto’s confidence crisis
In the 12 months since bitcoin topped out at over $68,000, the crypto industry, once valued at roughly $3 trillion, has fallen to around $900 billion.
NFT sales have plummeted in lockstep, declining every month since April, according to data from CryptoSlam. While the downturn has signaled to many that NFTs are a passing fad, Grossman is among a small cohort of evangelists who remain bullish on what’s been dubbed “Web3” — a hypothetical, future version of the internet based on blockchain technology.
“It’s incredibly timely to bring Keith on board,” Soto-Wright said. “Every single week you hear of another major brand announcing that they’re dipping their toes into Web3 and trying to implement a strategy.”
As MoonPay was researching the reasons behind brand adoption of the concept and early use cases, “Keith’s name would come up a lot around what he was able to accomplish with TIMEPieces,” Soto-Wright said.
“He was able to offer a better experience for some of the most loyal customers and fans of the Time brand,” Soto-Wright added. “As we start to speak to more and more big brands, they want to see how it actually works … while we have the infrastructure to make it happen, there’s still a strategy piece and I think Keith will unlock a lot of those conversations as we go into the new year.”
Grossman will report directly to Soto-Wright.
Those still buying NFTs are doing so out of the belief that their ability to prove ownership of virtual items, vis-à-vis the digital ledger that blockchain powers, will ultimately appreciate in value as adoption of decentralized technology grows.
Enterprise adoption has been fueling this belief, with companies including Nike, McDonald’s, Adidas and Starbucks launching their own NFT collections. By-and-large, these initiatives have been deployed through loyalty programs struggling to offset increasing customer acquisition costs due to rising interest rates and record-high inflation.
In June, MoonPay partnered with Universal Pictures, Fox Corporation and Snoop Dogg’s Death Row Records, among other brands, to launch HyperMint — a platform that allows enterprises and legacy brands like Universal, Fox or even Time, to mint hundreds of millions of NFTs a day.
MoonPay ranked No. 44 on this year’s CNBC Disruptor 50 list, and its services are used by more than 10 million customers in 160 countries.
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The Hims app arranged on a smartphone in New York on Feb. 12, 2025.
Gabby Jones | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Hims & Hers Health shares closed up 5% on Tuesday after the company announced patients can access Eli Lilly‘s weight loss medication Zepbound and diabetes drug Mounjaro, as well as the generic injection liraglutide, through its platform.
Zepbound, Mounjaro and liraglutide are part of the class of weight loss medications called GLP-1s, which have exploded in popularity in recent years. Hims & Hers launched a weight loss program in late 2023, but its GLP-1 offerings have evolved as the company has contended with a volatile supply and regulatory environment.
Lilly’s weekly injections Zepbound and Mounjaro will cost patients $1,899 a month, according to the Hims & Hers website. The generic liraglutide will cost $299 a month, but it requires a daily injection and can be less effective than other GLP-1 medications.
“As we look ahead, we plan to continue to expand our weight loss offering to deliver an even more holistic, personalized experience,” Dr. Craig Primack, senior vice president of weight loss at Hims & Hers, wrote in a blog post.
A Lilly spokesperson said in a statement that the company has “no affiliation” with Hims & Hers and noted that Zepbound is available at lower costs for people who are insured for the product or for those who buy directly from the company.
In May, Hims & Hers started prescribing compounded semaglutide, the active ingredient in Novo Nordisk‘s GLP-1 weight loss medications Ozempic and Wegovy. The offering was immensely popular and helped generate more than $225 million in revenue for the company in 2024.
But compounded drugs can traditionally only be mass produced when the branded medications treatments are in shortage. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced in February that the shortage of semaglutide injections products had been resolved.
That meant Hims & Hers had to largely stop offering the compounded medications, though some consumers may still be able to access personalized doses if it’s clinically applicable.
During the company’s quarterly call with investors in February, Hims & Hers said its weight loss offerings will primarily consist of its oral medications and liraglutide. The company said it expects its weight loss offerings to generate at least $725 million in annual revenue, excluding contributions from compounded semaglutide.
But the company is still lobbying for compounded medications. A pop up on Hims & Hers’ website, which was viewed by CNBC, encourages users to “use your voice” and urge Congress and the FDA to preserve access to compounded treatments.
With Tuesday’s rally, Hims and Hers shares are up about 27% in 2025 after soaring 172% last year.
WATCH: Hims & Hers shares tumble over concerns around weight-loss business
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg holds a smartphone as he makes a keynote speech at the Meta Connect annual event at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, on Sept. 25, 2024.
Manuel Orbegozo | Reuters
Meta’s head of artificial intelligence research announced Tuesday that she will be leaving the company.
Joelle Pineau, the company’s vice president of AI research, announced her departure in a LinkedIn post, saying her last day at the social media company will be May 30.
Her departure comes at a challenging time for Meta. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made AI a top priority, investing billions of dollars in an effort to become the market leader ahead of rivals like OpenAI and Google.
Zuckerberg has said that it is his goal for Meta to build an AI assistant with more than 1 billion users and artificial general intelligence, which is a term used to describe computers that can think and take actions comparable to humans.
“As the world undergoes significant change, as the race for AI accelerates, and as Meta prepares for its next chapter, it is time to create space for others to pursue the work,” Pineau wrote. “I will be cheering from the sidelines, knowing that you have all the ingredients needed to build the best AI systems in the world, and to responsibly bring them into the lives of billions of people.”
Vice President of AI Research and Head of FAIR at Meta Joelle Pineau attends a technology demonstration at the META research laboratory in Paris on February 7, 2025.
Stephane De Sakutin | AFP | Getty Images
Pineau was one of Meta’s top AI researchers and led the company’s fundamental AI research unit, or FAIR, since 2023. There, she oversaw the company’s cutting-edge computer science-related studies, some of which are eventually incorporated into the company’s core apps.
She joined the company in 2017 to lead Meta’s Montreal AI research lab. Pineau is also a computer science professor at McGill University, where she is a co-director of its reasoning and learning lab.
Some of the projects Pineau helped oversee include Meta’s open-source Llama family of AI models and other technologies like the PyTorch software for AI developers.
Pineau’s departure announcement comes a few weeks ahead of Meta’s LlamaCon AI conference on April 29. There, the company is expected to detail its latest version of Llama. Meta Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, to whom Pineau reported to, said in March that Llama 4 will help power AI agents, the latest craze in generative AI. The company is also expected to announce a standalone app for its Meta AI chatbot, CNBC reported in February.
“We thank Joelle for her leadership of FAIR,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement. “She’s been an important voice for Open Source and helped push breakthroughs to advance our products and the science behind them.”
Pineau did not reveal her next role but said she “will be taking some time to observe and to reflect, before jumping into a new adventure.”
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