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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Jaque Silva | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Oracle’s Federal Electronic Health Record experienced a nation-wide outage on Tuesday, the Department of Veterans Affairs confirmed to CNBC.
The agency said “all users” of the company’s Federal EHR, including the VA, the Department of Defense, the U.S. Coast Guard and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, were impacted. Six VA medical centers, 26 community clinics, and remote VA sites experienced disruptions, the agency said.
“Affected VA medical facilities followed standard contingency procedures during the outage to ensure continuity of care for Veterans,” a VA spokesperson said in a statement Thursday.
An electronic health record, or an EHR, is a digital version of a patient’s medical history that’s updated by doctors and nurses. It’s crucial software within the U.S. health-care system, and outages can cause serious disruptions to patient care.
Oracle is one of the largest EHR vendors thanks to it’s $28 billion acquisition of the medical records giant Cerner in 2022.
The company’s Federal EHR initially started experiencing issues at around 8:37 a.m. Eastern on Tuesday, the VA said. Users reported that the software froze and they were unable to access applications. Access was restored and cleared by 2:05 p.m. Eastern that day after Oracle restarted the system.
Oracle is carrying out an investigation to determine what caused the outage, the VA said. Oracle did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
The outage marks Oracle’s latest stumble in a thorny, years-long EHR rollout with the VA, which has been marred by patient safety concerns. The agency launched a strategic review of Cerner in 2021, before Oracle’s acquisition, and it temporarily paused deployment of the software in 2023.
Four VA facilities in Michigan are slated to deploy Oracle’s Federal EHR in 2026.
In October, Oracle unveiled a brand-new EHR equipped with fresh cloud and artificial intelligence capabilities. The early adopter program for the software begins this year, though it’s not clear if the VA has plans to utilize it.
Oracle is slated to report third-quarter fiscal 2025 earnings on Monday.
Watch: Oracle CEO Safra Catz: Being number one is very important
Broadcom CEO Hock Tan.
Lucas Jackson | Reuters
Broadcom reported first-quarter earnings on Thursday that topped analysts’ expectations, and the chipmaker offered strong guidance for the current quarter. The stock jumped 16% in extended trading.
Here’s how the company did versus LSEG consensus estimates:
- Earnings per share: $1.60 adjusted vs. $1.49 expected
- Revenue: $14.92 billion vs. $14.61 billion expected
Broadcom said it expects about $14.9 billion in second-quarter revenue, higher than the $14.76 billion forecast by Wall Street analysts. Revenue in the last quarter rose 25% from $11.96 billion a year earlier.
The company said net income increased to $5.5 billion, or $1.14 per share, from $1.33 billion, or 28 cents per share, in the same period last year.
Broadcom’s artificial intelligence business is at the center of the company’s recent boom, which saw its stock price more than double last year. The company is one of the primary data center infrastructure vendors for AI, working both on Google’s custom AI chips as well as providing essential components for networking thousands of other chips together to develop advanced AI software.
Prior to the after-hours pop, the stock was down about 23% so far in 2025, as investors rotate out of risk partly due to concern about President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
Broadcom said it recorded $4.1 billion in AI revenue during the first quarter, which is 77% higher on a year-over-year basis. Those sales are reported as part of Broadcom’s semiconductor solutions business, which grew 11% on an annual basis to $8.21 billion during the quarter.
Broadcom CEO Hock Tan said in a statement that the company expects “continued strength in AI semiconductor revenue,” reaching a projected $4.4 billion in the second quarter.
In December, Broadcom said it was developing custom AI chips with three large cloud customers. Tan said on Thursday that in addition to those customers, it had “deeply engaged” with two other hyperscalers, and are working with four other potential customers to develop their own custom AI chips.
Tan said that Broadcom closely chooses partners for developing custom AI chips who can deploy the resulting product in large quantities. “To put it bluntly, we don’t do it for startups,” Tan said.
The other major part of Broadcom’s revenue comes from its infrastructure software division, which includes software from the company’s acquisition of VMware in the fourth fiscal quarter of 2023. Broadcom said it saw $6.7 billion in software sales during the quarter, a 47% increase on an annual basis.
WATCH: Chip stocks see strong performance punished by markets
Antonio Neri, CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, speaks during an interview with CNBC on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City, October 20, 2023.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
Hewlett Packard Enterprise shares slid 19% in extended trading on Thursday as the data center equipment maker issued quarterly and full-year guidance that came in below consensus.
Here’s how the company did in the fiscal first quarter in comparison with LSEG consensus:
- Earnings per share: 49 cents adjusted vs. 49 cents expected
- Revenue: $7.85 billion vs. $7.82 billion expected
HPE’s revenue rose 16% year over year in the quarter ending on Jan. 31, according to a statement. The company was left with profit of $598 million, or 44 cents per share, up from $387 million, or 29 cents per share, in the same quarter a year earlier. The adjusted earnings per share excludes stock-based compensation.
“We could have executed better,” CEO Antonio Neri said on a conference call with analysts. The company had higher than normal inventory for artificial intelligence servers because of a shift to next-generation Blackwell graphics processing units from Nvidia.
The backlog for AI systems rose 29% quarter over quarter to $3.1 billion. Total server revenue totaled $4.29 billion.
HPE dealt with extensive discounting in the market while selling traditional servers during the quarter, finance chief Marie Myers said. As the quarter progressed, HPE moved to limit travel and discretionary spending, she said.
“We expect pricing adjustments may negatively impact top-line growth in the near term,” Myers said.
The company said it would implement a cost-cutting program involving layoffs over the next 18 months that will lead to $350 million in gross savings by the 2027 fiscal year. Around 2,500 employees will be affected, a spokesperson said, representing about 5% of the workforce when also factoring in expected attrition. At the end of October, HPE employed 61,000 people, according to its most recent annual report.
In January, the U.S. Justice Department filed in a federal district court to stop HPE from acquiring Juniper Networks. HPE announced the proposed $14 billion deal in January 2024. The court expects a trial to begin in July, according to the statement. The deal should close by October 2025, HPE said. In December, the company had said the transaction would be done in early 2025.
HPE called for 28 cents to 34 cents in adjusted earnings per share for the fiscal second quarter, with revenue coming in between $7.2 billion and $7.6 billion. Analysts surveyed by LSEG had looked for 50 cents per share on $7.93 billion in revenue.
For the 2025 fiscal year, HPE sees $1.70 to $1.90 in adjusted earnings per share. Analysts polled by LSEG had predicted $2.13 per share.
HPE expects to update its prices to reflect higher expenses from U.S. tariffs, Neri said, adding that he has not perceived any business deterioration from President Donald Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
As of Thursday’s close, HPE shares were up about 2% so far in 2025, while the S&P 500 index was down 2%.
WATCH: HPE shares fall more than 10% after mixed earnings, layoff plans
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