Former FTX chief executive Sam Bankman-Fried (C) arrives to enter a plea before US District Judge Lewis Kaplan in the Manhattan federal court, New York, January 3, 2023.
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Federal prosecutors seized nearly $700 million in cash and assets connected to Sam Bankman-Fried, primarily in the form of Robinhood shares that were owned by the FTX founder, a court filing revealed Friday.
John Ray, who replaced Bankman-Fried as CEO to guide FTX’s restructuring, is trying to rescue funds that were lost by the crypto company’s depositors when the firm spiraled into bankruptcy in November. Bankman-Fried was arrested on criminal fraud charges in December and is released on a $250 million bond as he awaits trial.
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The 55 million-plus Robinhood shares are at the heart of a contentious multi-party battle between Caribbean litigants, representatives of bankrupt crypto lender BlockFi, Bankman-Fried himself, and FTX’s bankruptcy leadership.
Federal prosecutors have alleged that the Robinhood shares were purchased using allegedly stolen customer funds. In May, Bankman-Fried revealed that he’d purchased a 7.6% stake in Robinhood and said at the time “we think it is an attractive investment.” The stock closed Friday at $9.52, valuing the recovered shares at over $526 million.
Bankman-Fried has denied misappropriating customer assets.
Three of the seized accounts were held at Silvergate Bank, in the name of FTX Digital Markets, holding over $6 million. Those assets, held in the name of a Bahamian subsidiary, were assumed by the government “on or about” Jan. 11. Silvergate recently disclosed that customer deposits plunged by nearly 70% in the fourth quarter of 2022.
Almost $50 million was custodied at Moonstone Bank, a U.S. financial institution with ties to FTX management, the court filing shows.
Federal prosecutors did not disclose the value of funds or assets in one Binance account and two Binance.US account numbers. Those three Binance accounts were the only seized assets that did not have values attached to them.
According to documents posted to NHTSA’s website on Thursday, the agency’s Office of Defects Investigation had “identified numerous incident reports” from Tesla concerning crashes that had “occurred several months or more before the dates of the reports” to the agency.
The delayed reports were likely “due to an issue with Tesla’s data collection, which, according to Tesla, has now been fixed,” according to NHTSA’s explanation for the probe.
Automakers must report on collisions that occurred on publicly accessible roads in the U.S. that involved the use of either partially or fully automated driving systems in their cars within five days of the companies becoming aware of any crash.
The agency will now conduct an “audit query” to figure out if Tesla is in compliance with its reporting requirements, and to “evaluate the cause of the potential delays in reporting, the scope of any such delays, and the mitigations that Tesla has developed to address them.”
NHTSA will also investigate whether Tesla neglected to report any prior relevant collisions, and whether its reports submitted to the safety regulator “include all of the required and available data.”
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Tesla stock was little changed Thursday.
The company sells electric vehicles equipped with a standard Autopilot system, or premium Full Self-Driving Supervised option, which is also known as FSD, in the U.S. Both require a driver at the wheel ready to steer or brake at any time.
A site that tracks Tesla-involved collisions drawing on news reports, police records and federal data, TeslaDeaths.com, has found at least 59 fatalities resulting from crashes where Tesla Autopilot or FSD were a factor.
The new NHTSA probe comes as Musk, Tesla’s CEO, is trying to persuade investors that the company can become a global leader in autonomous vehicles, and that its self-driving systems are safe enough to operate fleets of robotaxis on public roads in the U.S.
A manned Tesla Robotaxi service launched in Austin, Texas in June, and the company is running another manned car service in the San Francisco Bay Area in California. Riders can book trips via the company’s Tesla Robotaxi app.
Tesla has not begun driverless ride-hailing operations that would make it directly comparable to Alphabet-owned Waymo, or Baidu’s Apollo Go and other autonomous vehicle competitors yet.
The company is facing a sales and profit decline, due, in part, to a consumer backlash against Musk’s incendiary political rhetoric, his work to re-elect President Donald Trump, and his work leading the Department of Government Efficiency to slash federal spending and its workforce.
Still, many Wall Street analysts and shareholders remain optimistic about Musk’s vision.
“We think it is a positive that Tesla has begun robotaxi operations which puts it on the path to addressing a large market (we estimate that the US robotaxi market will be $7 bn in 2030 as discussed in our recent AV deep dive report),” Goldman Sachs autos industry analysts wrote in a note Wednesday.
Musk and Tesla have not given investors a sense of what they expect in terms of Robotaxi-related revenue or the technical performance of vehicles in its rideshare fleet, so a “debate on the pace of robotaxi growth will continue,” the research note said.
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Apple is taking a cue from some of its competitors.
The technology giant’s Apple TV+ monthly subscription is now $12.99, starting Thursday in the U.S. and other countries.
Apple said the new price will hit current subscribers 30 days after their next renewal date. The annual subscription price will not change.
For new subscribers, the $12.99 monthly price begins after a seven-day trial period.
The change marks Apple’s first price hike for its streaming service since 2023. At the time, Apple lifted its monthly price to about $9.99 from $6.99. The company raised the price in 2022 from $4.99.
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Apple TV+ is one of the company’s most popular services, but Apple does not release viewership numbers. A report from The Information earlier this year said the streaming service is losing more than $1 billion annually as subscriptions rocketed toward 45 million, citing people familiar with the matter.
Apple isn’t the only streaming company hiking prices this year to either fund new content or reap returns on their investments. Earlier this year, both Netflix and NBCUniversal’s Peacock boosted prices. Music streaming platform Spotify also raised prices in multiple markets.
Earlier this year, Apple introduced its streaming service to Android phones in a move that could open the company to more people worldwide.
The company is fresh off the release of its highest-grossing theatrical film, “F1: The Movie.”
Disclosure: Comcast owns NBCUniversal, the parent company of CNBC.
President Donald Trump‘s dealings with Intel and Nvidia amount to a “scattershot method of crony capitalism,” Walter Isaacson said Thursday.
“That state capitalism often evolves into crony capitalism, where you have favored companies and industries that pay tribute to the leader, and that is a recipe for not only disaster, but just sort of a corrupt sense of messiness,” he told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
The Tulane University professor, widely known for his recent Elon Musk biography, argued that this method won’t succeed in reviving American manufacturing.
Isaacson’s comments come as the Trump administration wades further into influencing the way companies operate in the U.S.
The White House is pushing for a stake in embattled chipmaker Intel after Trump called CEO Lip-Bu Tan “highly CONFLICTED” and said he should resign.
Earlier this month, both Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices agreed to pay 15% of their China revenues to the U.S. government for export licenses to sell certain chips there.
Isaacson said he’s always been “dubious” of public-private partnerships. He highlighted Trump’s push for Coca-Cola to use cane sugar in its namesake soda as another example of “crony capitalism.”