Monday, January 10, 2022

BIZARRE BANNON LOAN (Exclusive from The Daily Beast)

Whoa! So many dots and loose threads to tie together: seeking a loan on a Connecticut property from a Kansas bank branch located in Phoenix...

Steve Bannon Sought Bizarre Loan as His Jan. 6 Woes Spiraled

"Ex-White House strategist Steve Bannon appears to have recently sought a loan against a Connecticut property linked to one of his troubled nonprofits, documents reviewed by The Daily Beast show, even though the charitable organization no longer owns the home.

The materials, addressed directly to Bannon at the $1.5 million stone estate in the plush suburban town of Wilton, do not reveal the amount of money sought, nor what Bannon sought it for. They do, however, date the loan application to Dec. 2, 2021, roughly three weeks after a grand jury indicted Bannon for refusing to testify before the House committee probing the Jan. 6 riot and around two weeks following his initial appearances in federal court.

> They also indicate Bannon attempted to borrow the dough from a Phoenix branch of KS Statebank, a Kansas-based lender, via a Delaware limited liability company named for the home’s address.

Neither a spokesperson for Bannon nor his powerhouse attorneys responded to repeated requests for comment, and calls and emails to the bank and its employees went unanswered. It is unclear if the money ever came through, because the bank signaled in the documents it might want an appraisal of the five-acre compound, with its in-ground pool and guest house—and Bannon in fact does not own the home or any stake in it.

Rather, public records and private communications The Daily Beast uncovered show that the property briefly belonged to the Rule of Law Society, a nonprofit Bannon founded in 2018 with fugitive Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui. Property records show that a separate limited liability company helmed by two of that nonprofit’s officers, including its attorney Daniel Podhaskie, bought the home from controversial right-wing psychiatrist Jeffrey Satinover in early August 2020. Efforts to reach Podhaskie and Satinover for comment for this story proved unsuccessful."

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THE LEGEND RETURNS: Electric Retro Re-Incarnation of Iconic VW Microbus | The Verge

Intro: "Nearly five years after it first revealed its ID Buzz concept at the Detroit auto show, Volkswagen is finally ready to show off a production-ready version of the beloved vehicle.
VW CEO Herbert Diess tweeted that the “legend returns” on March 9th, along with a gif of the automaker’s iconic Microbus."

VW sets a date for the reveal of its production-ready electric Microbus

"The automaker says the ‘legend returns’ on March 9th.

A staple of coastal California’s towns, the VW Microbus’ reincarnated as an electric vehicle was never a foregone conclusion. It wasn’t until an outpouring of positive feedback that VW decided to greenlight the concept for production. And even then, it won’t be road-ready until 2023.

The vehicle is a clear homage to the iconic vehicle that the company sold in North America between 1950 and 1980. The production version of the concept is expected to deviate little from the blunt-faced original because all of the batteries will be mounted under the floor. . .

> We’ve already been treated to images of the ID Buzz draped in high-tech sensors and hardware in its role as an autonomous test vehicle in Germany.

> VW has said the autonomous Microbus will serve as a platform for its full-scale commercial ride-hailing and delivery operation that it plans on launching in Germany in 2025.

We do know that the Microbus will stop atop VW’s mass-manufactured modular electric vehicle platform, or “MEB.”

It will join other MEB vehicles, including the ID 3 hatchback, ID 4 crossover SUV, and the upcoming ID 5 sporty SUV.

VW may have lost confidence from consumers after the diesel emission scandal; the electric reincarnation of the iconic Microbus may be the best thing to smooth over some of that skepticism."

Reference/source: https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/6/22870273/vw-microbus-electric-id-buzz-date-reveal 

Saturday, January 08, 2022

SpaceX Employee JUST LEAKED New Information About The $3.2B Space Factory!

Will There Be A Stock Market Crash In 2022?

TikTok's highest-paid celebrities collectively hauled in $55.5 million in 2021, a 200% increase from a year earlier.

Intro

Daily Cover|

Top-Earning TikTok-ers 2022: Charli And Dixie D’Amelio And Addison Rae Expand Fame—And Paydays

Movies, TV shows, clothing lines—a Madison Square Garden performance.

"Over the last year, the biggest TikTok stars’ earnings have surged, driven partly by their efforts to broaden their fame beyond the platform that first turned them into celebrities. This is certainly the case for the sisters atop our list of the highest-earning TikTok-ers, Charli and Dixie D’Amelio. Drawing plenty of comparisons to the Kardashian sisters, they now have their own Hulu series, The D’Amelio Show. It premiered in September and was renewed for another season two months later. Then, in December, Dixie performed at the Garden and nine other venues for the Jingle Ball concert series alongside Ed Sheeran and the Jonas Brothers. And together, the sisters have a lucrative brand, Social Tourist, a joint venture with Hollister sold at roughly 500 of the retailer’s stores. All this has helped push their earnings up to a combined $27.5 million, from less than $7 million a year earlier.

Meanwhile, Addison Rae has starred in one Netflix movie, He’s All That, and signed a new multifilm deal with the streamer. Josh Richards has also appeared in a Netflix movie, Under the Stadium Lights, and started his own production company, CrossCheck Studios, a joint venture with Mark Wahlberg’s production outfit.

Altogether, the highest-paid TikTok stars collectively earned $55.5 million in 2021, up 200% from the last time we counted up their paychecks, in 2020. And while they’ve focused their attention away from TikTok, they still earn much of their money—typically 30% to 50%–from sponsored content, where a corporation pays for a post advertising their goods on a star’s social media account. As TikTok has grown to over a billion users worldwide, businesses like Amazon, Louis Vuitton and McDonald’s have bought such ads. The TikTok stars can charge as much as a half million dollars for a single post, though most generally earn an average of between $100,000 to $250,00 per post, more than double the rates from that previous list in 2020.

The TikTok-ers understand the audience these advertisers want to reach because they themselves are about the same age. All of these top earners are under 25. Another universal truth about TikTok: There, stardom and money can come and go quickly, as evidenced by three newcomers to this list, Bella Poarch, Avani Gregg and Kris Collins. 

No one is bigger than Charli, who has the app’s largest following (133 million subscribe to her videos) and a ballooning amount of business interests. She’s got the basics covered—advertising sponsorships from Invisalign, Morphe cosmetics and a newer one with Dunkin’ Donuts —and then considerably more. In early 2021, Hollister launched its joint venture with Charli and her sister Dixie, Social Tourist. (Teens seem to like the stuff. Fran Horowitz, the CEO of Hollister’s parent company, has pointed to Social Tourist as a major contributor to Hollister’s nearly 10% sales increase through September 2021.) Along with the Hulu series, Charli and Dixie debuted a show on Snap, too, in November. Charli vs. Dixie features 10 mini-TV episodes. In those, the pair compete over something—baking in one, board games in another—continuing to live even life’s simpler moments in front of a camera.

Dixie may be the older sister, but much of her fame and earnings, including the Hollister, Hulu and Snap deals, still intertwine with her more popular sister Charli. (Dixie has 57 million followers, Charli 133 million.) For some distance, Dixie has sought to carve out her own career as a pop singer, a deliberate effort to counter the squeaky-clean girls-next-door vibe powering the D’Amelio marketing machine. In 2021, she released two songs, “Psycho,” which featured rapper Rubi Rose and hit No. 25 on Billboard’s U.S. pop chart, and “F—kBoy,” borrowing a Gen Z term for a philandering young man . . .From home, she has given her fans access not only to her family life but her love life, too, plastering her Twitter with lovey-dovey exchanges between herself and her boyfriend Noah Beck, another high-profile TikTok star, who seems poised to become another sponsorship partner.

[...]

Methodology

We look at the top-earning stars whose fame originated first on TikTok. This leaves out other celebrities active on the app, like Will Smith and Jason DeRulo. From there, our numbers estimate what the TikTokers earned from January 1, 2021, through December 31, 2021. This is different from our debut list in 2020, which calculated earnings from July 2019 through July 2020. Another difference: That initial ranking was a snapshot of who we thought had earned a million dollars from TikTok during those 12 months. With sponsored content rates up, a million isn’t hard to do anymore, which is why this new Top 5 list requires a minimum of $4.75 million in earnings, a point several times greater than our original roll’s cutoff."

GET INTO IT ALL MORE : https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2022/01/07/top-earning-tiktokers-charli-dixie-damelio-addison-rae-bella-poarch-josh-richards/

Russia ANNOUNCED Most POWERFUL Submarine

Gaetz: We Will 'Get the Truth Out' About January 6