Unifor reaches tentative agreements with casinos in Pickering and Ajax

TORONTO, Aug. 4, 2022 /CNW/ - The strike at two Great Canadian Gaming Corporation (GCGC) casinos in Ontario could soon be over after tentative agreements were signed today.

Unifor member on the picket line at Pickering Casino Resort. (CNW Group/Unifor)

"My sincere congratulations to the Local 1090 members who took on a powerful employer to fight for what was fair," said Lana Payne, Unifor National Secretary-Treasurer.

Unifor members at Pickering Casino Resort and Casino Ajax have been on strike since July 29, 2022. Details of the tentative agreement will be released following the membership ratification votes to be held on August 5.

"These were tough negotiations and we were able to get to a tentative agreement because members took a principled stand for better working conditions," said Corey Dalton, President of Local 1090. "Gaming sector workers deserve fairness during these uncertain economic times."

A coordinated bargaining table for Unifor members at GCGC properties met in July 2022 seeking improvements to wages, benefits, and pensions. Unifor negotiators were also trying to reduce the employer's reliance on precarious part-time jobs.

On July 23, 2022 Unifor negotiators signed agreements for GCGC sites Great Blue Heron Casino, Casino Woodbine, Shorelines Casino Thousand Islands, and Shorelines Casino Peterborough, Elements Casino Mohawk, and Elements Casino Brantford.

Unifor is Canada's largest union in the private sector, representing 315,000 workers in every major area of the economy. The union advocates for all working people and their rights, fights for equality and social justice in Canada and abroad, and strives to create progressive change for a better future.

SOURCE Unifor

Cision

View original content to download multimedia: http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/August2022/04/c6761.html

Meta mum on US election misinformation efforts as midterms loom

Fri, August 5, 2022 


WASHINGTON (AP) — Facebook owner Meta is quietly curtailing some of the safeguards designed to thwart voting misinformation or foreign interference in U.S. elections as the November midterm vote approaches.

It's a sharp departure from the social media giant's multibillion-dollar efforts to enhance the accuracy of posts about U.S. elections and regain trust from lawmakers and the public after their outrage over learning the company had exploited people’s data and allowed falsehoods to overrun its site during the 2016 campaign.

The pivot is raising alarm about Meta’s priorities and about how some might exploit the world’s most popular social media platforms to spread misleading claims, launch fake accounts and rile up partisan extremists.

“They're not talking about it," said former Facebook policy director Katie Harbath, now the CEO of the tech and policy firm Anchor Change. “Best case scenario: They're still doing a lot behind the scenes. Worst case scenario: They pull back, and we don't know how that's going to manifest itself for the midterms on the platforms."

Since last year, Meta has shut down an examination into how falsehoods are amplified in political ads on Facebook by indefinitely banishing the researchers from the site.

CrowdTangle, the online tool that the company offered to hundreds of newsrooms and researchers so they could identify trending posts and misinformation across Facebook or Instagram, is now inoperable on some days.

Public communication about the company's response to election misinformation has gone decidedly quiet. Between 2018 and 2020, the company released more than 30 statements that laid out specifics about how it would stifle U.S. election misinformation, prevent foreign adversaries from running ads or posts around the vote and subdue divisive hate speech.

Top executives hosted question and answer sessions with reporters about new policies. CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote Facebook posts promising to take down false voting information and authored opinion articles calling for more regulations to tackle foreign interference in U.S. elections via social media.

But this year Meta has only released a one-page document outlining plans for the fall elections, even as potential threats to the vote remain clear. Several Republican candidates are pushing false claims about the U.S. election across social media. In addition, Russia and China continue to wage aggressive social media propaganda campaigns aimed at further political divides among American audiences.

Meta says that elections remain a priority and that policies developed in recent years around election misinformation or foreign interference are now hard-wired into company operations.

“With every election, we incorporate what we’ve learned into new processes and have established channels to share information with the government and our industry partners,” Meta spokesman Tom Reynolds said.

He declined to say how many employees would be on the project to protect U.S. elections full time this year.

During the 2018 election cycle, the company offered tours and photos and produced head counts for its election response war room. But The New York Times reported the number of Meta employees working on this year's election had been cut from 300 to 60, a figure Meta disputes.

Reynolds said Meta will pull hundreds of employees who work across 40 of the company's other teams to monitor the upcoming vote alongside the election team, with its unspecified number of workers.

The company is continuing many initiatives it developed to limit election misinformation, such as a fact-checking program started in 2016 that enlists the help of news outlets to investigate the veracity of popular falsehoods spreading on Facebook or Instagram. The Associated Press is part of Meta's fact-checking program.

This month, Meta also rolled out a new feature for political ads that allows the public to search for details about how advertisers target people based on their interests across Facebook and Instagram.

Yet, Meta has stifled other efforts to identify election misinformation on its sites.

It has stopped making improvements to CrowdTangle, a website it offered to newsrooms around the world that provides insights about trending social media posts. Journalists, fact-checkers and researchers used the website to analyze Facebook content, including tracing popular misinformation and who is responsible for it.

That tool is now “dying,” former CrowdTangle CEO Brandon Silverman, who left Meta last year, told the Senate Judiciary Committee this spring.

Silverman told the AP that CrowdTangle had been working on upgrades that would make it easier to search the text of internet memes, which can often be used to spread half-truths and escape the oversight of fact-checkers, for example.

“There’s no real shortage of ways you can organize this data to make it useful for a lot of different parts of the fact-checking community, newsrooms and broader civil society,” Silverman said.

Not everyone at Meta agreed with that transparent approach, Silverman said. The company has not rolled out any new updates or features to CrowdTangle in more than a year, and it has experienced hourslong outages in recent months.

Meta also shut down efforts to investigate how misinformation travels through political ads.

The company indefinitely revoked access to Facebook for a pair of New York University researchers who they said collected unauthorized data from the platform. The move came hours after NYU professor Laura Edelson said she shared plans with the company to investigate the spread of disinformation on the platform around the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, which is now the subject of a House investigation.

“What we found, when we looked closely, is that their systems were probably dangerous for a lot of their users,” Edelson said.

Privately, former and current Meta employees say exposing those dangers around the American elections have created public and political backlash for the company.

Republicans routinely accuse Facebook of unfairly censoring conservatives, some of whom have been kicked off for breaking the company’s rules. Democrats, meanwhile, regularly complain the tech company hasn’t gone far enough to curb disinformation.

“It’s something that’s so politically fraught, they’re more trying to shy away from it than jump in head first.” said Harbath, the former Facebook policy director. “They just see it as a big old pile of headaches.”

Meanwhile, the possibility of regulation in the U.S. no longer looms over the company, with lawmakers failing to reach any consensus over what oversight the multibillion-dollar company should be subjected to.

Free from that threat, Meta's leaders have devoted the company's time, money and resources to a new project in recent months.

Zuckerberg dived into this massive rebranding and reorganization of Facebook last October, when he changed the company’s name to Meta Platforms Inc. He plans to spend years and billions of dollars evolving his social media platforms into a nascent virtual reality construct called the “metaverse” — sort of like the internet brought to life, rendered in 3D.

His public Facebook page posts now focus on product announcements, hailing artificial intelligence, and photos of him enjoying life. News about election preparedness is announced in company blog posts not written by him.

In one of Zuckerberg's posts last October, after an ex-Facebook employee leaked internal documents showing how the platform magnifies hate and misinformation, he defended the company. He also reminded his followers that he had pushed Congress to modernize regulations around elections for the digital age.

“I know it’s frustrating to see the good work we do get mischaracterized, especially for those of you who are making important contributions across safety, integrity, research and product,” he wrote on Oct. 5. "But I believe that over the long term if we keep trying to do what’s right and delivering experiences that improve people’s lives, it will be better for our community and our business.”

It was the last time he discussed the Menlo Park, California-based company’s election work in a public Facebook post.

___

Associated Press technology writer Barbara Ortutay contributed to this report.

___

Follow AP's coverage of misinformation at https://apnews.com/hub/misinformation.

Amanda Seitz, The Associated Press

Dutch government, farmers in talks on emission cut targets

Fri, August 5, 2022 


THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — Representatives of Dutch farmers were meeting Friday with Prime Minister Mark Rutte and other Cabinet ministers to discuss the government's nitrogen emissions reduction goals that have sparked disruptive protests in recent weeks.

But the prospect of success appeared slim, with two main activist farmers' organizations demanding concessions and not attending because they have no trust in the veteran politician appointed to act as intermediary. They say the mediator, Johan Remkes, is not independent.

Rutte did not comment to reporters as he entered the meeting in the central city of Utrecht.

Farmers angry at the target of slashing nitrogen emissions 50% by 2030 have blockaded supermarket distribution centers, parked tractors on highways and dumped garbage including manure and asbestos on roads in recent weeks.

Rutte has criticized what he said are small groups of farmers who he says have endangered others with the nature of their protests. “Willfully endangering others, damaging our infrastructure and threatening people who help clean up is beyond all limits," he wrote on Twitter last week.

The government has been forced to act after courts in recent years began blocking permits for infrastructure and housing projects because the country was missing its emissions targets.

The government has earmarked an extra 24.3 billion euros ($25.6 billion) to finance agricultural reforms that will likely make many farmers drastically reduce their number of livestock or get rid of them altogether. Provincial authorities have been given a year to formulate plans to cut emissions.

Sjaak van der Tak, chairman of the main farmers' lobby group LTO, said the talks were vital. LTO represents some 30,000 farms in the Netherlands.

"It is of enormous importance that we, together with the other agricultural parties, really expect something from this Cabinet,” Van der Tak said on his way into the talks.

LTO says there are nearly 54,000 agricultural businesses in the Netherlands with exports totaling 94.5 billion euros in 2019.

The Dutch minister responsible for nitrogen, Christianne van der Wal, said she had no expectations heading into the talks.

“First, listen,” she said.

The Associated Press

The Democrats have taken aim at the stock market's safety net by taxing buybacks - potentially creating another headwind for investors

Harry Robertson
Fri, August 5, 2022 

Senator Kyrsten Sinema (second from right) agreed to move forward with Joe Biden's bill on Thursday.Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

The Democrats plan to put a 1% tax on share buybacks, as part of a deal to rescue Joe Biden's agenda.

Stock buybacks have supported the market in recent years, with companies spending huge amounts on their own shares.

Analysts said the tax could be a new headwind, but said companies would likely increase spending on dividends.

The Democrats have agreed to introduce a 1% tax on share buybacks as part of President Joe Biden's climate and tax bill, in a move analysts said could create another headwind for equity investors.

Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema, a moderate Democrat and former hold-out, agreed to move forward with what the party is calling the Inflation Reduction Act on Thursday night.

To gain her approval, Democrats dropped a provision that would have reduced tax breaks on the profits of hedge funds and private equity firms, known as "carried interest." Instead, they inserted a 1% excise tax on the controversial practice of stock buybacks, a person familiar with the matter told Insider.

Analysts said the new tax will not be welcomed by investors, just as they're grappling with rampant inflation and interest-rate hikes. They said buybacks have supported stock markets this year.

"Anything that touches buybacks is always a concern," Ben Laidler, global markets strategist at eToro, told Insider. "I think it's going to generate a lot of nervousness, just because buybacks are a big deal."

However, Laidler said the tax is likely to push companies to increase their dividends as they reduce buybacks. He said that may be preferable to many retail investors, who prefer a steady income stream.

A buyback is when a company repurchases its own shares in the marketplace. The practice returns money to investors by boosting the share price. It's also likely to reduce the number of shares outstanding, thereby boosting key performance metrics such as earnings per share.

US companies have been spending colossal amounts buying back their own shares over the last couple of years, after periods of strong profits left them with spare cash. S&P 500 companies are likely to spend in the region of $1 trillion on buybacks this year, analysts say, after purchasing a record $882 billion in 2021.

Derren Nathan, head of equity research at broker Hargreaves Lansdown, told Insider the Democrats' proposed 1% tax will impact companies' thinking.

"This move may cause board members to think twice about pulling that lever," he said. "1% might not seem huge, but with buyback programs often in the billions of dollars, the cash and earnings impact is not to be underestimated."

A person familiar with the matter told Insider that the 1% buyback tax would raise considerably more money than the now-removed carried interest provision, which was expected to generate around $14 billion.

The buyback tax is aimed at limiting a practice which many politicians and analysts have criticized. Opponents say buybacks enrich company shareholders and executives and discourage investments for the future in workers and machinery.

Tech companies, whose stock prices have been battered in 2022 after a surge during the pandemic, are some of the biggest practitioners of buybacks. Apple announced a whopping $90 billion buyback scheme earlier this year, and Microsoft unveiled a $60 billion plan in September last year.

Laidler said that although the 1% levy will not be welcomed by investors, companies are still likely to pay the same amount of money out by increasing dividends.

"I think the impact here is going to be more about how we cut the shareholder returns pie, rather than does it make any big changes to company investment," he said.

Stock market investors and company boards have bigger concerns right now, he said. Not least surging inflation, Federal Reserve rate hikes, and the threat of recession. US markets were little changed on Friday morning, with S&P 500 futures slightly in the green.

THE EIGHTIES RETURN; THE MULLET
Meet the number-crunching price 'nerds' responsible for calculating Canada's ghastly inflation rate


Joe O'Connor
Fri, August 5, 2022 


A cashier at a west end Toronto grocery store peered intently at a customer’s bill on a late July morning. She was looking for something specific — not an error, but proof that the price of an item had increased to the point where she was having misgivings about purchasing it again herself.

“It costs $4.99 for four pieces of corn now,” she said, stating fact. “That’s unbelievable.”

And that is Canada, in a historic, inflationary moment, the likes of which consumers — at least those who were old enough to be spending their hard-earned bucks on groceries, couches, cars, hotels, rent, booze and more — have not experienced since January 1983.

Year-over-year consumer inflation rang in at 8.1 per cent in June, after ringing in at 7.7 per cent in May, and this after a 6.8 per cent April gain. Yes, it is ugly out there on the consumer frontier, and it has been for several months.

The drumbeat of grim, inflation statistics doesn’t simply materialize out of thin air to wreak havoc upon household budgets. There are actual humans behind this monthly horror show, who collect, fret over, analyze, aggregate, verify, scrutinize, calculate, quality assure and closely guard the Consumer Price Index, the country’s primary measure of inflation, calculated by comparing the cost, over time, of a fixed basket of consumer goods and services. The inflation numbers, without fail, get released the third week of each month at 8:30 a.m. on the appointed day, thanks to the team of bureaucrats who toil away at them inside Statistics Canada’s Consumer Price Division — that is, the CPD.

We are wonks, we are nerds, and we really love this stuff,
Andrew Barclay, an economist with the CPD

“We are wonks, we are nerds, and we really love this stuff,” said Andrew Barclay, an economist with the CPD. He wasn’t alive in 1983 and, on a personal level, he isn’t overly thrilled with the price of just about anything these days. One of the more unique aspects about working full time on the CPI, as 50 or so staffers do, is that upon leaving the office the inflation calculators get smacked in the wallet by the work they do, just like any other Canadian consumer.

“We are working on something that is so relatable to ourselves,” said Elizabeth Abraham, the division chief.

On that note, the chief has postponed home repairs, due to the cost of materials, and put off buying a new car. Barclay has been more strategic about driving places, and is trying his utmost not to indulge a weakness for luxury cheeses, while Chris Li, an assistant director with the CPD, is now walking and biking to more activities, and seeking out whatever deals she can find at the grocery store.

Year-over-year consumer inflation rang in at 8.1 per cent in June.

But that’s not to say the team can’t find a certain beauty in the numbers, painful as they are, and the stories they tell, such as how a war in Ukraine, and decreased global oil supply, leads to higher prices at the pumps; how higher fuel prices have a knock-on effect on every sector of the consumer economy tied to transportation; how a semi-conductor shortage is pushing up the price of cars, new and used; and how travel-starved Canadians are shelling out buckets of dough for ho-hum accommodations.

“It is a very interesting time right now, but it has always kind of been an interesting time,” Barclay said. He is clearly not the only nerd who feels this way. Abraham radiates enthusiasm, and an obvious sense of pride — and duty — when she speaks of the CPD’s statistical “rigour,” while Li intones, with painstaking seriousness, that “regardless of what happens in the economy — this number must go out, because so many programs rely on it.”

The three colleagues were initially confused by the Financial Post’s request to write a profile of the individual — and it turned out there isn’t just one — responsible for generating the monthly number that has been causing so much national angst.

“We don’t necessarily see ourselves as individuals,” Barclay said. “We see ourselves as being behind the number.”

So, about that number, and how it gets calculated: pre-pandemic, Joe Blow Statistics Canada contract worker, in North Vancouver, say, would go to the grocery store with a scanner, walk the aisles and scan everything from produce to name-brand cereals. Nowadays, some grocery stores provide the number crunchers in Ottawa with weekly scanner data straight from their registers. Food prices are also collected using store websites or flyers to account for outlets that don’t provide data.

The CPI might be a bunch of numbers, but it is also constantly evolving to reflect the times, and consumer tastes

Collection teams that used to head out into the field now generally occupy desks and use web-scraping software to pull prices from retailer and service-provider sites, for just about anything and everything one could think a Canadian consumer might buy, including, lately, recreational cannabis.

The CPI might be a bunch of numbers, but it is also constantly evolving to reflect the times, and consumer tastes. So, weed is in, while dinosaurs, like that old DVD player you have tucked in the basement, get dropped. Streaming services, smart watches, ride-sharing services, all are relative new additions to the index. The immense, macro price numbers, ultimately get boiled down to 100,000 representative data points, and weighted, such that the apples you buy, which may have increased in price by 10 per cent year over year, aren’t afforded the same statistical heft in determining the final inflation number as the $2,500 a month you are now paying in rent.

Prices for various cannabis products are shown at a store in Regina. Marijuana is now included in the consumer price index.

Here’s a scoop: The crew at the CPD already have a pretty clear idea of what July’s inflation number is going to be, a number that will be finalized by Aug. 8, eight days before the big 8:30 a.m. reveal at Statistics Canada headquarters in Ottawa. Whatever the number is — trust me, don’t bother asking — it is treated as top secret.

“Our families have been trained not to ask questions,” Abraham said.

That means no sweet, inflation-related whispers between spouses over a glass of wine, and no blabbing to the kindly old pensioner next door. Not even Bank of Canada governor Tiff Macklem gets tipped off prior to release day, and this despite being the guy responsible for jacking interest rates in attempt to stuff the 8.1-per-cent-inflation genie back in the bottle.

The team always has a case of butterflies the morning of the release. Having a hint of self-doubt is human nature, Barclay said, especially when the stakes are so high. There are no do-overs, no begging off sick, and no asking the boss for an extension, no matter how ghastly the final inflation number is for the public, politicians, and monetary policy folk to digest.

“CPI is not revisable, and so I often use the joke that, ‘We get one chance to get it right,’” Abraham said.

Back at the west end Toronto grocery store, the cashier with the keen interest, and dismay, over the price of corn, sprayed the register’s conveyor belt with a cleaning solution, gave it a thorough wipe and stood at the ready.

“Next,” she said.

Trapped H2O Investors Inherit Stake in Troubled Taxi App

Lucca de Paoli and Luca Casiraghi
Fri, August 5, 2022 



(Bloomberg) -- Investors who have been trying for two years to reclaim money trapped in H2O Asset Management have had a new problematic investment dumped on their books: a ride-hailing app whose valuation has tumbled 75%.

German entrepreneur Lars Windhorst -- as part of an ongoing attempt to repay money owed to the money manager -- in January agreed to hand over notes linked to London-based hailing app Gett, according to a letter published on the firm’s website last week. H2O clients are owed about 1 billion euros ($1 billion) from assets that were frozen by the French regulator.

Back in January the Gett notes, which pay out if the company goes public, were valued at $106 million because the company was about to list through an already announced deal with a Special Purpose Acquisition Company, or SPAC. But that deal has since been shelved and the company’s valuation slashed to around $250 million from more than $1 billion.

The note adds to complications for investors still waiting for H2O’s outsize bet on Windhorst to come good. In 2019 the money manager saw billions leave its suite of funds after a Financial Times article detailed the scale of investments in companies linked to the entrepreneur. A year later the money manager was forced to freeze the funds by the French Market Regulator, reopening them only after sidepocketing the Windhorst notes.

A spokesperson for Windhorst’s investment firm Tennor Holding declined to comment. An H2O spokesperson confirmed broad details of the Gett investment and said the firm has been fully engaged, with the help of advisers, in the search for solutions to dispose of the assets held within the sidepocketed funds.

Russia Exposure

Gett has expanded rapidly since it was founded by Moscow-born Israeli entrepeneur Dave Waiser in 2011. It drew backing from Volkswagen AG and billionaire Len Blavatnik’s investment firm Access Industries. Windhorst took an undisclosed minority stake in the business when he contributed to a funding round, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The aborted SPAC deal, backed by Rosecliff Venture Management LLC, would have valued the company at around $1 billion. The firm was initially set up as a ride-hailing app, but now offers an aggregation service using existing ground transportation platforms.

In March this year the firm announced it was not going to follow through on the SPAC deal and that it would exit its Russian business, one of its three main markets. Waiser, who had been chief executive officer, moved on and was replaced by Matteo De Renzi.

A spokesperson for Access declined to comment. Representatives for Gett and VNV didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Evergreen

Windhorst had initially attempted to pay back H2O through a company called Evergreen. To help fund the potential deal, Evergreen issued a bond, sold in part to high-profile German investors, including fashion retail magnate Friedrich Knapp and health care entrepreneur Ulrich Marseille.

The buy back, which was intended to take place in several steps, stumbled as the French regulator ordered H2O to freeze redemptions from some of its funds because of valuation difficulties, while Windhorst was also unable to arrange sufficient financing.

Read more: H2O’s Crastes Faces Solo Future for London Fund Manager He Built

Tennor then reached another deal with H2O to restructure the outstanding bonds instead of buying them back. The new transaction includes the issuance of 1.45 billion euros of notes due next year to retire debt linked to companies owned by Tennor, according to a statement from Windhorst to business partners and clients last year.

Tennor was declared insolvent in the Netherlands in 2021, a ruling later reversed on appeal. At the end of 2021 H2O wrote down those notes by around 40% and acknowledged how little had been paid back so far and the Dutch court decision. H2O is aiming to begin repaying clients inside the sidepockets later this year, according to the letter sent to clients last week.

(Updates with additional comment from H2O in fifth and last paragraph)

France Forms Crisis Unit to Face Worst Drought on Record

Samy Adghirni
Fri, August 5, 2022 



(Bloomberg) -- The French government activated a crisis unit to deal with the worst drought on record, and warned conditions could get worse.

The inter-ministerial task force will coordinate water supply to areas most affected and track the drought’s impact on energy production and agriculture, the office of Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne said Friday. Borne’s office also urged people to conserve water and said restrictions will continue to be put in place where necessary to prioritize health needs, security and drinking water supply.

The situation, which follows a hot, dry spring, has led the government to enforce water restrictions in 93 out of the 96 administrative regions known as departments. More than 100 towns are without drinking water, a government minister said Friday. Water-saving measures include a ban on irrigation for farmland.

“This drought is the worst ever recorded in our country,” Borne’s office said in a statement. “The lack of rain is aggravated by the accumulation of successive heat waves which reinforce evaporation and water needs.”

France is trucking in water to the towns where the supply has dried up, Ecological Transition Minister Christophe Bechu said Friday during a visit to a lavender farm in Provence, according to Agence France-Presse.

France’s corn crop probably will drop 19% this year because of the hot, dry weather, the Agriculture Ministry said Friday.

The crisis is “a tragedy for our farmers, our ecosystems and for biodiversity,” according to the prime minister’s statement. Weather forecasts suggest the drought could last another two weeks and become “even more concerning,” Borne’s office said. The country just had its driest July in decades.

'Robinhoodies' knew about pending layoffs weeks before the company decided to cull more staff

Aaron Weinman
Fri, August 5, 2022 

Hi. Aaron Weinman here. Robinhood cut about 23% of its staff earlier this week, following a first round of cuts in April. The pandemic darling has come back down to Earth, and today we learn that some of the axed 'Robinhoodies' knew what was coming.

Vlad Tenev
Vlad Tenev, co-founder and co-CEO of investing app Robinhood.Noam Galai/Stringer/Getty Images


1. 'Robinhoodies' were tipped off to layoffs weeks ago. The company said it was shrinking office space and some managers warned of an impending "reorganization," Insider has learned.

The trading app laid off 23% of its staff on Tuesday, following a first round of cuts in April.

And the morale is grim. Former employees described a company laser focused on cutting costs, and a workforce with little clarity on their future with Robinhood.

"The company is hemorrhaging money," one ex-employee told Insider. "I believe in the mission itself, but people cannot trust us ever since GameStop."

Robinhood effectively brought stock-trading to everyone from your local barista to Wall Street's most trusted money managers. When we were cooped up at home in the early stages of the pandemic, Robinhood became a go-to app for folks with extra time and stimulus checks.

Now, a year after going public, Robinhood Chief Executive Vlad Tenev admitted the company added too much staff too quickly. His mea culpa also included an admission that Robinhood was not prepared for weaknesses in the economy.

Insider's Bianca Chan, Carter Johnson, and Asia Martin spoke with laid-off "Robinhoodies" about how they saw the writing on the wall.

And ICYMI - check out these stories the team at Insider have done on Robinhood's recent woes:

Robinhood employees' internal messages to each other at the height of the GameStop trading frenzy.


Robinhood has big crypto ambitions, but employees claim product delays, a cautious legal team, and turnover in leadership.


Robinhood's founders were 'visibly shaken' in announcing layoffs, but there was not enough work and too many people.


Talk of a Robinhood acquisition elicits visceral reactions from analysts and investors.


GENERATION ROBINHOOD: How the trading app conditioned its inexperienced users to obsessively play the market.

Virgin Galactic Tumbles After Delaying Commercial Service Again

Todd Shields
Fri, August 5, 2022 


(Bloomberg) -- Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc. shares dropped after the space tourism company again delayed its commercial service, calling for a launch in the second quarter of 2023.

The startup had previously disappointed investors by pushing back the launch, once planned for the third, then fourth quarter of 2022. In May, Virgin Galactic delayed it to the first quarter of 2023.

Virgin Galactic shares fell 14% in premarket trading Friday to $7.08 as of 7:58 a.m. in New York. The stock dropped about 39% this year through Thursday’s close.

Analysts warned in research notes after Virgin reported second quarter earnings Thursday that its cash burn rate is accelerating and it will likely need to raise more cash through equity, which could further weigh on the shares.

The company posted a net loss of $110 million for the quarter and said its cash and cash equivalents totaled $329.9 million, down 40% from a year ago.

On a conference call to discuss those results, Chief Executive Officer Michael Colglazier cited supply-chain disruptions and labor constraints as pressures on its operations.

The company, founded by entrepreneur Richard Branson, last month said it was contracting with Boeing Co.’s Aurora Flight Sciences to design and build two motherships. The twin-hulled aircraft carry its passenger spaceships to about 50,000 feet and release them to travel into space.

Virgin Galactic again delays commercial space flight to second quarter of 2023

Thu, August 4, 2022 

Virgin Galactic's carrier airplane WhiteKnightTwo carrying a space tourism rocket plane SpaceShipTwo, takes off takes off from Mojave Air and Space Port in Mojave

(Reuters) - Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc on Thursday again delayed the commercial launch of its space flight to the second quarter of 2023 from the first quarter, sending the shares of the space tourism firm 6% lower after the bell.

The company founded by billionaire Richard Branson had in May cited supply-chain crisis and labor shortage to put off the launch to the first quarter of 2023. Before that, it had delayed flights to the fourth quarter of 2022.

"While our short-term plans now call for commercial service to launch in the second quarter of 2023, progress on our future fleet continues," Chief Executive Michael Colglazier said.

Virgin Galactic had in February re-opened ticket sales to the public for space travel, setting prices at $450,000 per person with an initial deposit of $150,000.

The company also reported a bigger net loss of $110.7 million in the second quarter compared to $94 million a year earlier.

Last month, it entered into a pact with Boeing Co subsidiary Aurora Flight Sciences to build its new twin-fuselage carrier plane that will ferry its next-generation spaceship to space.

(Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Arun Koyyur)

Elon Musk says Tesla would continue to do very well even if he was kidnapped by aliens or 'went back to my home planet'

Stephen Jones
Fri, August 5, 2022 

Elon Musk said that Tesla would continue to do well even if he was kidnapped by aliens.

However, he intends to stay as long as he can be useful, he said at Tesla's 2022 Cyber Roundup.

Musk was responding to a question from a stock owner regarding the company's succession plans.

Elon Musk has no plans of leaving Tesla but thinks that the company would continue to perform well without him.

"We have a very talented team here. So I think Tesla, you know, would continue to do very well even if I was kidnapped by aliens, or went back to my home planet," the Tesla CEO said at the firm's 2022 Cyber roundup meeting of stock owners.

He was responding to a question from stockholder Gary Black, a managing partner of the Future Fund, concerning how Tesla's board would potentially handle his succession.

Musk is embroiled in an ongoing legal battle following his decision to pull out of a $44 billion deal to buy Twitter, Black wanted to know how he would split his time should a judge rule that he has to take over the social media giant.

Musk said Tesla is gathering a lot of momentum and has a "very exciting" product roadmap that will last a long time.

"I intend to stay with Tesla as long as I can be useful," Musk said, adding that he thought that he could be most useful with product design and manufacturing parts of the business.

During the more than two-hour-long presentation, Musk revealed the firm had manufactured its three millionth car and suggested that the firm could eventually build between 10 and 12 Gigafactories as it expands.

He said that thanks to the hard work of the Tesla team, the company had reached a production run rate of 1.5 million vehicles already this year, and was on track for 2 million by the close of 2022. Musk has ambitions to build 20 million cars a year by 2030.

"I'm very excited about the future of the company and I think it's got a very bright future, even without me," Musk said. "I'm not leaving, to be clear."

The world's richest man, who was born in South Africa, has previously joked that Mars is his home planet. He's regularly talked about his ambition for humanity to eventually be a multiplanetary species. He hopes that SpaceX, the rocket company he founded, can play an important part in that.

Despite Tesla's continued growth, Musk has been involved in multiple controversies. Tesla is facing multiple lawsuits brought by African-American former and current employees regarding accusations of racial harassment in its factories.

Documents obtained by Insider's Julia Black, recently revealed that Musk secretly fathered twins with a senior executive at Neuralink.

Elon Musk said he and the 'whole of SpaceX' had to be drug tested for a year after he smoked weed on Joe Rogan's podcast

Grace Dean,Huileng Tan
Fri, August 5, 2022 at 6:17 a.m.·3 min read




"I don't even know how to smoke a joint," Elon Musk told the hosts of the Full Send podcast

.Theo Wargo/WireImage

Elon Musk said he had to take drug tests for a year after smoking weed on Joe Rogan's podcast in 2018.

Both him and the "whole of SpaceX" were subjected to random drugs tests by the government, he said.


"I don't even know how to smoke a joint," the tech billionaire told the Full Send podcast Thursday.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the federal government required that he was drug tested for a year after he smoked weed on Joe Rogan's podcast in 2018, adding that the "whole of SpaceX" was impacted.

Speaking about the incident during an appearance on the Full Send podcast, released Thursday night, Musk said that he got "a lot of backlash," including from SpaceX competitors, because weed isn't legalized on a federal level and because SpaceX has federal government contracts.

"The consequences for me and for SpaceX were actually not good," the tech billionaire said, adding that he hadn't expected so much criticism. The interview — which went viral at the time — took place in California, where marijuana is legal for both medical and recreational use.

"I had to have like random drug tests and stuff after that, to prove that I'm not like a drug addict," Musk said, adding that the tests were required by the federal government. "They drug tested me for everything, and randomly. It wasn't like 'pick a day.' I had like a whole year of random drug tests."

"Unfortunately it wasn't just me but the whole company, the whole of SpaceX, had to have random drug tests," Musk continued. It's unclear exactly how many workers this affected, but SpaceX had around 6,000 employees in early 2019.

Under the Drug-free Workplace Act of 1988, workers at any companies that receive a federal contract of $100,000 or more are prohibited from using or distributing drugs in the workplace and the firm must have a drug-free workplace policy.

During the interview with Full Send, Musk also discussed attitudes towards drugs, including President Joe Biden's efforts to release basketball player Brittney Griner from custody in Russia after officials said they discovered vape cartridges containing hashish oil in her luggage.

"If there are people in jail in America for the same stuff, shouldn't we free them too?" Musk said. "My opinion is that people should not be in jail for nonviolent drug crimes." Musk has previously criticized how the US persecutes weed-related crimes.

"Some people are still pretty uptight about these things," he added.

Musk didn't comment on how often he smokes weed, but said he has little skill at it.

"I don't even know how to smoke a joint, obviously, I mean look at me, I have no joint-smoking skills," he said.

Musk reiterated previous comments he made that weed is "not that good for productivity," but said that psychedelics can be helpful for some mental-health conditions.

During the three-hour interview with Full Send, Elon Musk also confirmed that he had nine children, dismissed theories that aliens could exist, and said that he'd moved to a $45,000 property in South Texas.

News reports: Musk countersuit accuses Twitter of fraud


Fri, August 5, 2022 

Elon Musk accused Twitter of fraud in a countersuit over his aborted $44 billion deal for the social media company, which he said held back necessary information and misled his team about its true user base, according to media reports.

According to The Washington Post, the countersuit filed by the billionaire and Tesla CEO filed Thursday alleges that Twitter committed fraud, breach of contract and violation of the Texas Securities Act.

Musk's counterclaims were filed confidentially last week and unsealed in a filing late Thursday at the Delaware Chancery Court, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Musk had offered to buy the company earlier this year, then tried to back out of the deal by claiming the social platform was infested with much larger numbers of “spam bots” and fake accounts than Twitter had disclosed.

Twitter sued to force him to complete the acquisition. Musk responded by filing his countersuit.

Musk's attorneys argued that Twitter’s own disclosures revealed that it has 65 million fewer “monetizable daily active users,” who can be shown digital ads, than the 238 million that Twitter claims, the Post and the Journal reported.

The filing also said most of Twitter's ads are shown only to a sliver of the company's user base, the Post said.

In an unexpected twist, Twitter filed its response denying Musk's accusations before Musk’s own counterclaims surfaced.

Twitter called Musk’s reasoning “a story, imagined in an effort to escape a merger agreement that Musk no longer found attractive.”

The case is scheduled to go to trial on October 17.

Associated Press, The Associated Press