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Kris Marszalek, CEO of Crypto.com, speaking at a 2018 Bloomberg event in Hong Kong, China.

Paul Yeung | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Kris Marszalek wants everyone to know that his company, Crypto.com, is safe and in good hands. His TV appearances and tweets make that clear.

It’s an understandable approach. The crypto markets have been in freefall for much of the year, with high-profile names spiraling into bankruptcy. When FTX failed last month just after founder Sam Bankman-Fried said the crypto exchange’s assets were fine, trust across the industry evaporated.

Marszalek, who has operated out of South Asia for over a decade, subsequently assured clients that their funds belong to them and are readily available, in contrast to FTX, which used client money for all sorts of risky and allegedly fraudulent activities, according to court filings and legal experts. 

Bankman-Fried has denied knowing about any fraud. Regardless, FTX clients are now out billions of dollars with bankruptcy proceedings underway.

Crypto.com, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, may well be in fine health. After the FTX collapse, the company published its unaudited, partial proof of reserves. The release revealed that nearly 20% of customer funds were in a meme token called shiba inu, an amount eclipsed only by its bitcoin allocation. That percentage has dropped since the initial release to about 15%, according to Nansen Analytics. 

Marszalek said in a Nov. 14 livestream on YouTube that the wallet addresses were representative of customer holdings. 

On Friday, Crypto.com published an audited proof of reserves, attesting that customer assets were held on a one-to-one basis, meaning that all deposits are 100% backed by Crypto.com‘s reserves.  The audit was performed by the Mazars Group, the former accountant for the Trump Organization.

While no evidence has emerged of wrongdoing at Crypto.com, Marszalek’s business history is replete with red flags. Following the collapse of a prior company in 2009, a judge called Marszalek’s testimony unreliable. His business activities before 2016 — the year he founded what would become Crypto.com — involved a multimillion-dollar settlement over claims of defective products, corporate bankruptcy and an e-commerce company that failed shortly after a blowout marketing campaign left sellers unable to access their money.

Court records, public filings and offshore database leaks reveal a businessman who moved from industry to industry, rebooting quickly when a venture would fail. He started in manufacturing, producing data storage products for white label sale, then moved into e-commerce, and finally into crypto.

CNBC reached out to Crypto.com with information on Marszalek’s past and asked for an interview. The company declined to make Marszalek available and sent a statement indicating that there was “never a finding of wrongdoing under Kris’s leadership” at his prior ventures. 

After CNBC’s requests, Marszalek published a 16-tweet thread, beginning by telling his followers: “More FUD targeting Crypto.com is coming, this time about a business failure I had very early in my career. I have nothing to hide, and am proud of my battle scars, so here’s the unfiltered story.” FUD is short for fear, uncertainty and doubt and is a popular phrase among crypto executives.

In the tweets, Marszalek described his past personal bankruptcy and the abrupt closure of his e-commerce business as learning experiences, and added that “startups are hard,” and “you will fail over and over again.” 

‘Business failure’ — faulty flash drives

Marszalek founded a manufacturing firm called Starline in 2004, according to his LinkedIn profile. Based in Hong Kong, with a plant in mainland China, Starline built hardware products like solid state drives, hard drives, and USB flash drives. Marzsalek’s LinkedIn page says he grew the business into a 400-person company with $81 million in sales in three years.

There was much more to the story.

Marszalek owned 50% of the company, sharing ownership and control with another Hong-Kong based individual, who partnered with Marszalek in multiple ventures. 

In 2009, Marzsalek’s company settled with a client over a faulty shipment of flash drives. The $5 million settlement consisted of a $1 million upfront payment and a $4 million credit note to the client, Dexxon. The negotiations over the settlement began at some point after 2007.

CNBC was unable to locate Marszalek’s business partner.

Africa Bitcoin Conference kicks off as FTX collapse shakes confidence in crypto

Court documents don’t show whether Starline made good on either the $1 million “lump sum settlement fee” or the $4 million credit note. Starline was forced into bankruptcy proceedings by the end of 2009, court records from 2013 show.

Over the course of 2008 and 2009, Marszalek and his partner were transferred nearly $3 million in payments from Starline, according to the documents.

Over $1 million was paid out to Marszalek personally in what the court said were “impugned payments.” His partner took home nearly $1.9 million in similar payments.

“It appears that there was a concerted effort to strip the cash from Starline,” Judge Anthony Chan later wrote in a court filing. 

Some $300,000 was paid by Starline to a British Virgin Islands holding company called Tekram, the document says. That money went through Marszalek, and Tekram eventually returned it to Starline.

By 2009, Starline had collapsed. Marszalek’s representatives told CNBC in a statement that Starline went under because customers failed to pay back credit lines that the company had extended them during the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008. Starline borrowed that money from Standard Chartered Bank of Hong Kong (SCB).

“The bank then turned to Starline and the co-founders to repay the lines of credit and filed for liquidation of the company,” the statement said.

Starline owed $2.2 million to SCB. 

Marszalek said on Twitter that he had personally guaranteed the loans from the bank to Starline. As a result, when the bank forced Starline into liquidation, Marszalek and his partner were forced into bankruptcy as well.

The court found that the $300,000 transfer to Tekram was “in truth a payment” to Marszalek.

Marszalek said the money in the Tekram transfer was repayment of a debt Starline owed to Tekram. The judge described that claim as “inherently incredible.”

“There is no explanation why the repayment had to be channelled through him or why the money was later returned to the debtor,” the judge said. 

Riding the Groupon wave

Bankruptcy didn’t sever the ties between Marszalek and his partner or keep them out of business for long. At the same time Starline was shutting down, the pair set up an offshore holding company called Middle Kingdom Capital. 

Middle Kingdom was established in the Cayman Islands, a notorious hub for tax shelters. The connection between Middle Kingdom and Marszalek and his partner, who each held half of the firm, was exposed in the 2017 Paradise Papers leak. The Paradise Papers, along with the Panama Papers, contained documents about a web of offshore holdings in tax havens. They were published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

Middle Kingdom was the owner of Buy Together, which in turn owned BeeCrazy, an e-commerce venture that Marszalek had started pursuing. Similar to Groupon, retailers could use BeeCrazy to sell their products at steep discounts. BeeCrazy would process payments, take a commission on goods sold, and distribute funds to the retailers.

Sellers and buyers flocked to the site, drawn in by considerable discounts on everything from spa passes to USB power banks. Buy Together drew attention from an Australian conglomerate called iBuy, which was on the verge of an IPO and pursued an acquisition of BeeCrazy as part of a plan to build out a South Asian e-commerce empire.

Court filings and Australian disclosures show that to seal the deal, Marszalek and his partner had to remain employed by iBuy for three years and clear their individual bankruptcies in Hong Kong court. The partner’s uncle came forward in front of the court to help his nephew and Marszalek clear their names and debts, filings show.

While the judge called the uncle’s involvement “suspicious,” he allowed him to repay the debt. As a result, both Marszalek and his partner’s bankruptcies were annulled. A few months later, in October 2013, BeeCrazy was purchased by iBuy for $21 million in cash and stock, according to S&P Capital IQ. 

A month and a half after buying BeeCrazy, iBuy went public. Marszalek was required to remain until 2016. 

The company struggled after its IPO as competition picked up from bigger players like Alibaba. Marszalek was eventually promoted to CEO of iBuy in August 2014, according to filings with Australian regulators. 

Alibaba headquarters in Hangzhou, China.

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Marszalek renamed iBuy as Ensogo in an effort to retool the company. Ensogo continued to suffer, running up a loss in 2015 equal to over $50 million.

By the following year, Ensogo had already reportedly laid off half its staff. In June 2016, Ensogo closed down operations. The same day, Marszalek resigned.

After the sudden shuttering of Ensogo, sellers on the site told the South China Morning Press that they never received proceeds from items they’d already delivered as part of a final blowout sale. 

“[Many] sellers had already sold their goods but had yet to receive any money from the platform at that time, their money thus vanished altogether with the online shopping platform,” according to translated testimony from a representative for a group of sellers before Hong Kong’s Legislative Council.

One seller told Hong Kong’s The Standard that she lost more than $25,000 in the process. 

“It seems to us that they wanted to make huge business from us one last time before they closed down,” the seller told the publication.

Marszalek’s representative acknowledged to CNBC that “the shutdown angered many customers and consumers” and said that was “one of the reasons Kris was opposed to the decision.” 

Welcome to crypto

Marszalek moved quickly on to his next thing. The same month he resigned from Ensogo, Foris Limited was incorporated, marking Marszalek’s entry into the crypto market.

Foris’ first foray into crypto was with Monaco, an early exchange. 

With a leadership team composed entirely of former Ensogo employees, Monaco told prospective investors they could expect three million customers and $169 million in revenue within five years. 

Monaco rebranded as Crypto.com in 2018.

The exterior of Crypto.com Arena on January 26, 2022 in Los Angeles, California.

Rich Fury | Getty Images

By 2021, the company had smashed its own goals, crossing the 10 million user mark. Revenue for the year topped $1.2 billion, according to the Financial Times. That’s when crypto was soaring, with bitcoin climbing from about $7,300 at the beginning of 2020 to a peak of over $68,000 in November of 2021.  

The company inked a deal with Matt Damon for a Super Bowl commercial and spent a reported $700 million to put its name on the arena that’s home to the Los Angeles Lakers. It’s also a sponsor of the World Cup in Qatar.

The market’s plunge in 2022 has been disastrous for all the major players and goes well beyond the FTX collapse and the numerous hedge funds and lenders that have liquidated. Coinbase’s stock price is down 84%, and the company laid off 18% of its staff. Kraken recently cut 30% of its workforce. 

Crypto.com has laid off hundreds of employees in recent months, according to multiple reports. Questions percolated about the company in November after revelations that the prior month Crypto.com had sent more than 80% of its ether holdings, or about $400 million worth of the cryptocurrency, to Gate.io, another crypto exchange. The company only admitted the mistake after the transaction was exposed thanks to public blockchain data. Crypto.com said the funds were recovered.

Marszalek went on CNBC on Nov. 15, following the FTX failure, to try and reassure customers and the public that the company has plenty of money, that it doesn’t use leverage and that withdrawal demands had normalized after spiking.

Still, the market cap for Cronos, Crypto.com’s native token, has shrunk from over $3 billion on Nov. 8 to a little over $1.6 billion today, reflecting a loss of confidence among a key group of investors. During the crypto mania at this time last year, Cronos was worth over $22 billion.

Cronos has stabilized of late, hovering around six cents for the last three weeks. Bitcoin prices have been flat for about four weeks. 

Marszalek’s narrative is that he’s learned from past mistakes and that “early failures made me who I am today,” he wrote in his tweet thread. 

He’s asking customers to believe him.

“I’m proud of my scar tissue and the way I persevered in the face of adversity,” he tweeted. “Failure taught me humility, how to not overextend, and how to plan for the worst.”

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Tesla exec leading development of chip tech and Dojo supercomputer is leaving company

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Tesla exec leading development of chip tech and Dojo supercomputer is leaving company

Christina Locopo | CNBC

Tesla’s vice president of hardware design engineering, Pete Bannon, is leaving the company after first joining in 2016 from Apple, CNBC has confirmed.

Bannon was leading the development of Tesla’s Dojo supercomputer and reported directly to Musk. Bloomberg first reported on Bannon’s departure, and added that Musk ordered his team to shut down, with engineers in the group getting reassigned to other initiatives.

Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Since early last year, Musk has been trying to convince shareholders that Tesla, his only publicly traded business, is poised to become an an artificial intelligence and robotics powerhouse, and not just an electric vehicle company.

A centerpiece of the transformation was Dojo, a custom-built supercomputer designed to process and train AI models drawing on the large amounts of video and other data captured by Tesla vehicles.

Tesla’s focus on Dojo and another computing cluster called Cortex were meant to improve the company’s advanced driver assistance systems, and to enable Musk to finally deliver on his promise to turn existing Teslas into robotaxis.

On Tesla’s earnings call in July, Musk said the company expected its newest version of Dojo to be “operating at scale sometime next year, with scale being somewhere around 100,000 H-100 equivalents,” referring to a supercomputer built using Nvidia’s state of the art chips.

Tesla recently struck a $16.5 billion deal with Samsung to produce more of its own A16 chips with the company domestically.

Tesla is running a test Robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, and a related car service in San Francisco. In Austin, the company’s vehicles require a human safety supervisor in the front passenger seat ready to intervene if necessary. In San Francisco, the car service is operated by human drivers, though invited users can hail a ride through a “Tesla Robotaxi” app.

On the earnings call, Musk faced questions about how he sees Tesla and his AI company, xAI, keeping their distance given that they could be competing against one another for AI talent.

Musk said the companies “are doing different things.” He said, “xAI is doing like terabyte scale models and multi-terabyte scale models.” Tesla uses “100x smaller models,” he said, with the automaker focused on “real-world AI,” for its cars and robots and xAI focused on developing software that strives for “artificial super intelligence.”

Musk also said that some engineers wouldn’t join Tesla because “they wanted to work on AGI,” one reason he said he formed a new company.

Tesla has experienced an exodus of top talent this year due to a combination of job terminations and resignations. Milan Kovac, who was Tesla’s head of Optimus robotics engineering, departed, as did David Lau, a vice president of software engineering, and Omead Afshar, Musk’s former chief of staff.

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Omada Health beats on revenue in first earnings report since IPO

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Omada Health beats on revenue in first earnings report since IPO

The Omada Health logo is displayed on a smartphone screen.

Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Omada Health reported quarterly results for the first time since its IPO in June.

Here’s how the company did based on average analysts’ estimates compiled by LSEG:

  • Loss: Loss per share of 24 cents.
  • Revenue: $61 million vs. $55.2 million expected

The virtual care company’s revenue increased 49% in its second quarter from $41.21 million a year earlier. The company reported a net loss of $5.31 million, or a 24-cent loss per share, compared to a net loss of $10.69 million, or $1.40 loss per share, during the same period last year.

“We believe our Q2 performance reflects Omada’s ability to capture tailwinds in cardiometabolic care, to effectively commercialize our GLP-1 Care Track, and to leverage advances in artificial intelligence for the benefit of our members,” Omada CEO Sean Duffy said in a release.

Read more CNBC tech news

For its full year, Omada expects to report revenue between $235 million to $241 million, while analysts were expecting $222 million. The company said it expects to report an adjusted EBITDA loss of $9 million to $5 million for the full year, while analysts polled by FactSet expected a wider loss of $20.2 million.

Omada, founded in 2012, offers virtual care programs to support patients with chronic conditions like prediabetes, diabetes and hypertension. The company describes its approach as a “between-visit care model” that is complementary to the broader health-care ecosystem.

The stock opened at $23 in its debut on the Nasdaq in June. At market close on Thursday, shares closed at $19.46.

Omada said it finished its second quarter with 752,000 total members, up 52% year over year.

The company will discuss the results during its quarterly call with investors at 4:30 p.m. ET.

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How Tim Cook convinced Trump to drop made-in-USA iPhone — for now

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How Tim Cook convinced Trump to drop made-in-USA iPhone — for now

WASHINGTON, DC August 6: US President Donald Trump shakes hands with CEO of Apple Tim Cook during a meeting in the Oval Office of the White House on Wednesday August 6, 2025.

Demetrius Freeman | The Washington Post | Getty Images

President Donald Trump has made clear that he wants Apple to make iPhones in the U.S.

Apple CEO Tim Cook is doing what he can to appease the commander in chief, without making that ultimate concession.

Cook on Wednesday appeared at the White House with President Trump to announce plans to spend about $600 billion over four years in the U.S. Apple didn’t announce the made-in-USA iPhone that Trump wants, but Cook got to tout Apple’s position on U.S. production.

Some of Apple’s most valuable parts, such as its glass and facial recognition sensor, are made by U.S. companies that Apple has worked with for years. Final assembly is only a small, though very critical, part of iPhone production.

“The final assembly that you focus on, that will be elsewhere for a while,” Cook said Wednesday in the Oval Office.

Trump appeared happy enough, for now.

“He makes many of the components here, and we’ve been talking about it,” Trump said. “The whole thing is set up in other places, and it’s been there for a long time in terms of cost and all, but I think we may incentivize him enough that one day he’ll be bringing that back.”

Experts said Cook’s announcement seemed designed to get Apple out of Trump’s crosshairs with respect to tariffs. Trump announced during the public meeting that the administration planned to place a tariff on chips that would double their price, but Apple — which relies on hundreds of different chips for its devices — would be exempt.

“CEOs are realizing that they do have to do something, and what they’ve discovered is that if they give the president something to brag about without destroying their company, that the problem might go away for a certain amount of time,” said Peter Cohan, professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at Babson College who has written case studies on Apple.

The gambit worked. Apple stock rose 5% on Wednesday and another 3% on Thursday.

“What Tim Cook demonstrated in the first administration was a real savvy navigation of the treacherous waters,” said Nancy Tengler, CEO of Laffer Tengler Investments, which holds a position in Apple. “I thought this announcement was super-important symbolically, because the president is looking for headlines.”

What Apple announced

A gift given by Apple CEO Tim Cook to U.S. President Donald Trump stands on President Trump’s table, as they present Apple’s announcement of a $100 billion investment in U.S. manufacturing, in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., August 6, 2025.

Jonathan Ernst | Reuters

The centerpiece of Apple’s announcement was the so-called American Manufacturing Program, which Apple said was designed to incentivize other companies to make parts for computers in the U.S.

By Apple committing to purchase parts and expand its relationship with U.S. suppliers, it could give those companies the skills and capacity to expand their business. And it lets Apple take some credit for supporting the 450,000 total jobs at its suppliers.

A closer look at the members of the program shows that Apple is leaning on some of its longest-tenured partners. All together, Apple said that its U.S. suppliers are on track to make 19 billion chips for its products this year. That level of business doesn’t appear overnight.

For example, Apple said that all of its cover glass for iPhones and Apple Watches would be made by Corning, in Kentucky, and that it would spend $2.5 billion on that effort. It’s a powerful symbol — while the phone might be screwed together in China or India, the surface that users touch around the world will be made in the U.S.

But Apple has pointed to Corning as a critical American supplier in the past. The company’s glass has been used on the iPhone since its first version in 2007. While Apple typically doesn’t let its suppliers talk about their relationships, former COO Jeff Williams hailed Corning’s glass in 2017, when it got an “investment” from the Apple Advanced Manufacturing Fund. Apple followed that up with a $250 million commitment in 2019, and $45 million in 2021.

Analysts are skeptical that the partnership could substantially improve Corning’s revenue. Morgan Stanley analysts wrote on Thursday that Corning “already produces 100% of the cover glass for Apple’s phones and tablets,” adding that Corning’s glass business called Specialty Materials is worth about $2 billion per year.

Apple also highlighted its partnership with Coherent, a longtime supplier of lasers for Apple’s facial recognition hardware, which is made in Texas. Morgan Stanley pegged the business at about $100 million per year, and said Apple has options including Lumentum and Sony.

The iPhone maker said it expanded a partnership with Texas Instruments to make chips in Texas and Utah. Texas Instruments has long supplied chips for the iPhone, such as circuits to control USB interfaces or power displays. Apple said it would partner with Samsung, another key supplier of parts like iPhone displays, to launch an “innovative new technology for making chips,” without offering additional details.

Apple declared that it will partner directly with companies in the semiconductor chain, even if they typically sell services or goods to Apple suppliers. Other partnerships are with Applied Materials, a tooling company, GlobalFoundries, a chip foundry, and GlobalWafers America, which is suppling Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and Texas Instruments with made-in-USA wafers, the starting point for a batch of chips.

GlobalFoundries manufactures chips for Broadcom, which supplies wireless chips for iPhones. Both will work with Apple to develop and manufacture 5G components in the U.S.

Meanwhile, Apple will buy millions of advanced chips made by TSMC in Arizona, where it will be the factory’s largest customer. Cook joined former President Biden at the plant in 2022 and committed to buying chips from the factory.

Apple said it would invest in and become a customer at an Arizona Amkor facility, which packages and tests chips, the final stage before installation in a computer.

Apple also said it would expand existing data centers for artificial intelligence in North Carolina, Iowa, Nevada and Oregon. It’s highlighted these data centers in the past in spending commitments.

While Apple’s announcement sent partner stocks up, JPMorgan Chase analysts warned in a note on Thursday that “the new and expanded engagements might not be completely incremental to global revenues and outlook.”

Trump had a different take.

“Oh, I love that you’re doing this,” the president said, after reading a list of Apple’s commitments.

‘Cost of doing business’

Apple has little to worry about when it comes to who will hold the company accountable for its promises. The company doesn’t break out U.S. spending, and most of Apple’s suppliers are contractually required to keep the information secret. Apple doesn’t report how much its new campuses in Austin or North Carolina end up costing.

Additionally, the $600 billion headline number likely includes lots of regular expenses.

Apple said in February that its $500 billion commitment included payments to U.S. suppliers, direct employment, data centers for Apple Intelligence and corporate facilities, as well as spending on Apple TV+ productions in 20 states.

Apple started publicly announcing U.S. spending during Trump’s first administration in 2018, at a rate of about $70 billion per year. In February, the company committed to $125 billion per year. Wednesday’s announcement brings that figure to $150 billion annually.

That’s still a fraction of Apple’s total spending.

In Apple’s fiscal 2024, Apple spent $210 billion globally on cost of goods sold, $57.5 billion on operating expenses, and $9.45 billion in capital expenditures for nearly $275 billion in global spending during the period.

Teffler said she didn’t think the newly announced spending would be material to Apple’s profitability, especially since it already has relationships with the various companies such as Corning.

“They’re going to spend money somewhere,” Tegler said.

Wedbush analyst Dan Ives, who previously predicted a made-in-USA iPhone would cost billions to produce and would leave consumers paying $3,500, said the Wednesday announcements indicate a much different approach. He said it’s “the cost of doing business.”

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