The Airbnb logo is displayed on the Nasdaq digital billboard in Times Square in New York on December 10, 2020.
Kena Betancur | AFP | Getty Images
When prosecutors announcedthe plea deal late last week of Shamoon Rafiq, who ran a $10 million scheme that duped investors into buying into pre-IPO tech companies like Airbnb, theysaid the defendant was masquerading as a representative of a prominent family office.
The family office is not named in the complaint,but details from court filings and online records matchthose of Man Capital, the family office of the Mansour family. Man Capital was started in 2010 by billionaire Mohamed Mansour, one of three brothers behind Egypt’s second largest company, and his son, Loutfy Mansour.
Rafiq had no connection to Man Capital or parent companyMansour Group. The conglomeratewas founded in 1952 as a cotton exporter and has since grown to become one of the world’s biggest General Motors dealers and a major Caterpillar distributor.
A spokesman for Man Capital declined to comment to CNBC, as did the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office, which is prosecuting Rafiq.
Rafiq, 50, pleaded guilty Thursday to one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud and wire fraud. He faces a maximum possible sentence of five years in prison.
The U.S. attorney’s office said Rafiq, who was previously convicted in 2001 of a similar crime, ran a “brazen scheme” from Singapore in 2020, defrauding U.S. investors at a time when tech IPOs were hitting the market at record levels and peak valuations.
In the summer of that year, Rafiq allegedly created created fake domain names and email addresses masquerading as a senior executive at the family office.
Mohamed Mansour, president of Mansour Group, poses for a photograph following a Bloomberg Television interview in London, U.K., on Thursday, Feb. 11, 2016.
Simon Dawson | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Prosecutors say Rafiq pretended to be a close associate of the CEO of the family office, who was described as Victim-1, and impersonated another family office executive, identified as Victim-2.
CNBC was able to identify Man Capital as the unnamed family office through a series of details in the prosecutor’s complaint, including partial domain names and website details that exactly matched Man’s online presence.
Loutfy Mansour’s title and tenure also match the title and tenure of the unidentified Victim-1 in the complaint. The Mansour family publicly launched its family office in 2020, and disclosed its stakes in Airbnb and other technology companies.
Rafiq began methodically pitching boutique investment banks and institutional investors in 2020, a year that featured blockbuster IPOs from tech companies including Snowflake, Unity Software and DoorDash, in addition to Airbnb. Rafiq was claiming he had access to shares of pre-IPO companies, a potentially lucrative opportunity given how much stocks could pop when they hit the public market.
In July 2020, an unnamed boutique investment bank in New York was introduced to Rafiq through another business associate of a partner at the bank. Rafiq purported to be a close friend of the family office’s CEO, and was offering to sell $9 million worth of Airbnb Series C shares. The shares didn’t exist.
Airbnb had announced plans to go public in 2019, but the Covid pandemic delayed its debut. Shortly after Rafiq first spoke with the investment bank, in August 2020, reports surfaced of Airbnb’s plan to confidentially file for an IPO. Four days after those reports, the unnamed investment bank agreed to buy the fictitious shares and wired $9 million to an escrow account.
Airbnb ultimately held its IPO in December and saw its stock rocket 112% in its opening day.
Inner City Press, a news outlet that covers the Southern District of New York, first reported that Rafiq had been detained in January, following his extradition from Singapore.
“Shamoon Rafiq exploited investors’ fear of missing out on the potential gains to be earned from investing in companies before they go public, and solicited millions of dollars from investors through brazen lies and deception,” U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss said in a statement at the time of the 2021 charge.
The bank froze the $9 million in escrow funds and contacted the unnamed family office through a “trusted intermediary,” according to prosecutors. The family office’s legal counsel reported the scheme to law enforcement shortly after it was informed, according to the complaint.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attends a roundtable discussion at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 11, 2025.
Sarah Meyssonnier | Reuters
Nvidia announced Tuesday that it hopes to resume sales of its H20 general processing units to clients in China, saying that the U.S. government had assured the company would be granted licenses.
Nvidia’s sales of the H20 chips, which had been designed specifically to keep them out of export controls on China, were halted in April.
“The U.S. government has assured NVIDIA that licenses will be granted, and NVIDIA hopes to start deliveries soon,” the company said in a statement.
This comes against the backdrop of a preliminary trade deal between Washington and Beijing last month that sought China to resume rare earth exports and the U.S. to relax tech export controls.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in recent months has ramped up his lobbying against export controls, arguing that they inhibited American tech leadership. In May, Huang said chip restrictions had already cut Nvidia’s China market share nearly in half.
Huang also announced a new “fully compliant” GPU, NVIDIA RTX PRO, saying it was ideal for smart factories and logistics.
The potential change in U.S. stance follows a meeting between Huang and U.S. President Donald Trump last week.
In his meeting with Trump and U.S. policymakers, Huang had reaffirmed Nvidia’s support for the administration’s job creation and onshoring efforts, as well as the aim for America to lead in global AI, the company said.
Meanwhile, in Beijing, it was confirmed that Huang has met with government and industry officials to discuss the benefits of AI and ways for researchers to advance safe and secure AI for the benefit of all.
In this photo illustration, a man seen holding a smartphone with the logo of US artificial intelligence company Cognition AI Inc. in front of website.
Timon Schneider | SOPA Images | Sipa USA | AP
Artificial intelligence startup Cognition announced it’s acquiring Windsurf, the AI coding company that lost its CEO and several other senior employees to Google just days earlier.
Cognition said on Monday that it will purchase Windsurf’s intellectual property, product, trademark, brand and talent, but didn’t disclose terms of the deal. It’s the latest development in an AI talent war, as companies like Meta, Google and OpenAI fiercely compete for top engineers and researchers.
OpenAI had been in talks to acquire Windsurf for about $3 billion in April, but the deal fell apart, and Google said on Friday that it hired Windsurf’s co-founder and CEO Varun Mohan. Google is paying $2.4 billion in licensing fees and for compensation, as CNBC previously reported.
“Every new employee of Cognition will be treated the same way as existing employees: with transparency, fairness, and deep respect for their abilities and value,” Cognition CEO Scott Wu wrote in a memo to employees on Monday. “After today, our efforts will be as a united and aligned team. There’s only one boat and we’re all in it together.”
Cognition didn’t immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Windsurf directed CNBC to Cognition.
Cognition is best known for its AI coding agent named Devin, which is designed to help engineers build software faster. As of March, the startup had raised hundreds of millions of dollars at a valuation of close to $4 billion, according to a report from Bloomberg.
Both companies are backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. Other investors in Windsurf include Greenoaks, Kleiner Perkins and General Catalyst.
“I’m overwhelmed with excitement and optimism, but most of all, gratitude,” Jeff Wang, the interim CEO of Windsurf, wrote in a post on X on Monday. “Trying times reveal character, and I couldn’t be prouder of how every single person at Windsurf showed up these last three days for each other and for our users.”
Wu said that the acquisition ensures all Windsurf employees are “treated with respect and well taken care of in this transaction.” All employees will participate financially in the deal, have vesting cliffs waived for their work to date and receive fully accelerated vesting for their, according to the memo.
“There’s never been a more exciting time to build,” Wu wrote.
The Grok logo is being displayed on a smartphone with Xai visible in the background in this photo illustration on April 1, 2024.
Jonathan Raa | Nurphoto | Getty Images
The European Union on Monday called in representatives from Elon Musk‘s xAI after the company’s social network X, and chatbot Grok, generated and spread anti-semitic hate speech, including praise for Adolf Hitler, last week.
A spokesperson for the European Commission told CNBC via e-mail that a technical meeting will take place on Tuesday.
xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Sandro Gozi, a member of Italy’s parliament and member of the Renew Europe group, last week urged the Commission to hold a formal inquiry.
“The case raises serious concerns about compliance with the Digital Services Act (DSA) as well as the governance of generative AI in the Union’s digital space,” Gozi wrote.
X was already under a Commission probe for possible violations of the DSA.
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Grok also generated and spread offensive posts about political leaders in Poland and Turkey, including Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Turkish President Recep Erdogan.
Over the weekend, xAI posted a statement apologizing for the hateful content.
“First off, we deeply apologize for the horrific behavior that many experienced. … After careful investigation, we discovered the root cause was an update to a code path upstream of the @grok bot,” the company said in the statement.
Musk and his xAI team launched a new version of Grok Wednesday night amid the backlash. Musk called it “the smartest AI in the world.”
xAI works with other businesses run and largely owned by Musk, including Tesla, the publicly traded automaker, and SpaceX, the U.S. aerospace and defense contractor.
Despite Grok’s recent outburst of hate speech, the U.S. Department of Defense awarded xAI a $200 million contract to develop AI. Anthropic, Google and OpenAI also received AI contracts.