ZELENSKY "MAN OF THE PEOPLE" ...Nope it's all Political Theater

> He’s currently worth roughly $20 million, based on reporting by Forbes Ukraine.

> Additional reporting by Forbes US puts that number at less than $30 million

President Zelensky Is Not A Billionaire. So How Much Is He Worth?

Matt DurotForbes Staff  

Forbes | 2022-04-20

Despite social media reports claiming he’s a billionaire, Volodymyr Zelensky doesn’t come close to making Forbes’ global wealth rankings.

". . .The insinuation is clear. For Zelensky, a former comedian, to have accumulated a fortune of this size, there must be corruption involved. And while this claim has been parroted by its fair share of anonymous Twitter eggs, a number of blue checks have gotten in on the action. . .

Forbes’ answer: he’s not. The Russian invasion has hit Ukraine’s billionaires hard. According to Forbes’ 36th annual World’s Billionaires List, there are only seven left in the country and Zelensky is not one of them (nor is former president and chocolate magnate Petro Poroshenko, who dropped from the rankings this year).

But unlike his predecessor, Zelensky never was a billionaire.

> He’s currently worth roughly $20 million, based on reporting by Forbes Ukraine.

> Additional reporting by Forbes US puts that number at less than $30 million.

His main asset: an estimated 25% stake in Kvartal 95, a group of companies that produce humorous shows, which he transferred to his partners after being elected president, though he’ll likely regain his shares after leaving office.

Kvartal 95 produced and owns the Servant of the People series, a popular political comedy starring Zelensky as a Ukrainian high school teacher who is elected president.

> Netflix, which previously streamed the show between 2017 and 2021, snapped up the rights again in March. With estimated revenues of $30 million annually, Forbes Ukraine values Zelensky’s stake at $11 million.

While he does own a flat in one of Ukraine’s most expensive apartment buildings in the center of Kyiv, it’s relatively modest by Western standards.

> Forbes estimates Zelensky’s entire real estate portfolio is worth $4 million, including two more wholly owned apartments, two that he co-owns, a single commercial property and five parking spaces.

> Zelensky did own a $4.6 million villa in Forte dei Marmi, Italy as of December 2019, according to the most recent filing by his holding company. He apparently sold it during 2020 (it had shown up in his declarations for 2018 and 2019 but not 2020) along with a small plot of land and 5 hotel rooms in Georgia (popular upper-middle-class investments in Ukraine).

The cash from these sales was declared and is included in Forbes’ estimate, but because the sum is less than the estimated value of the real estate, it is possible Zelensky remains a de facto beneficiary or the cash is invested elsewhere. . .

> We estimate he and his wife Olena Zelenska share a bank account that holds roughly $2 million in cash and government bonds.

> Their other assets, consisting of two cars and some jewelry, are worth no more than $1 million.

Zelensky won’t be making Forbes’ billionaires list anytime soon. But he’s got much bigger things on his mind."

NOTE: This post was updated on April 21, 2022 to add reference to additional real estate identified by Forbes.

Reference >> https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdurot/2022/04/20/president-zelensky-is-not-a-billionaire-so-how-much-is-he-worth/

Tears For Fears - Everybody Wants To Rule The World (Live) 2022

From Bloomberg

Markets

Stocks Succumb to Bond-Market Rout as Fed Inflation Hawks Circle

• Rising rates, spike in commodities, war all causing volatility
• Meanwhile, investor tech darlings getting decimated: Gokhman

 

By Vildana Hajric and Katherine Grenfell
April 22, 2022, 8:16 PM UTC

A week that began brimming with economic optimism ended up caving in on stock bulls, who find themselves increasingly helpless in the face of determined Federal Reserve inflation fighters.

It was a stretch that may be remembered as the time bond investors reestablished themselves as rulers of the asset-market roost. Surging yields, whipped up by a belief Jerome Powell’s central bank will enact four half-point rate hikes by September, sent the S&P 500 to a third straight down week, only the second such stretch in 18 months.

BIRD ON-THE-VERGE WITH A VISION

Intro:

Business

Elon Musk has money to buy Twitter — now what?

A fart button?

(Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge)

 

By Elizabeth Lopatto@mslopatto Apr 22, 2022, 9:02am EDT

Elizabeth Lopatto says that she is ". . .little annoyed that Elon Musk actually raised his money for Twitter because I was so excited to say “Where’s the money, Lebowski?” a lot of times. But fine, he found the money, according to the documents he filed with the SEC.

So Musk is planning to pay $21 billion himself. The rest of the money, according to the letters of commitment, is coming from Morgan Stanley and assorted other banks. In one letter, the banks are offering $13 billion in loans to Twitter; the second offers a $12.5 billion personal loan against Musk’s Tesla stock, which I’m sure will just thrill Tesla shareholders. The dates on these letters are, you guessed it, April 20th or 4/20, blaze it, etc.

These letters give his bid more gravitas than before (when it was “idk I’ll find the money somewhere I guess but lol 420 is funny”) but the market still isn’t taking Musk’s offer of $54.20 a share seriously. Shares were $47.08 as of the close of trading on April 21st; that’s up from before the whole Musk saga started, but if investors thought this was real, we’d see trading closer to the offer price.

I do think it’s interesting that there’s no one else majorly involved in this financing deal — you’d think some private equity firms would belly up to the bar here. Reportedly, Apollo Global, a huge buyout firm, was looking at doing so. Private equity firm Thoma Bravo was also considering its options.

So, what gives?

There are a few potential things going on.

Thing one is that Musk said publicly that his Twitter bid was “not a way to make money.” Firms like Apollo Global and Thoma Bravo are very much about ways to make money. I imagine that may have scared off some funding for Musk. Whoopsie.

Thing two is that Twitter’s board seems to oppose Musk’s bid. The board, which includes Jack Dorsey, did deploy their poison pill after all. The poison pill, otherwise known as a “shareholder rights plan,” basically dilutes Musk’s shares by giving everyone else more shares. More Twitter shares make it harder to buy Twitter. The board hasn’t yet said anything about rejecting Musk’s offer but that poison pill seems like a hint. . .

Thing three: firms like Apollo Global and Thoma Bravo look at their options all the time. That’s their job! They think about deals, and then they make some of them! So maybe they looked and were like, “ha Bob Iger is right, the nastiness is extraordinary” and then went to go look at some other deals.

Now, if Musk buys Twitter, I feel like we all have a vague idea of how this goes. First, a lot of Twitter employees quit because Musk’s companies are notoriously miserable places to work. Second, Musk tweets about a bunch of shit and then does some of it — which may or may not include reinstating Donald Trump on Twitter, getting rid of all the spam bots, and adding a fart button. Third: uh, maybe profit?

[              ] Of course, one possible outcome is that no one buys Twitter, and this seems to be the outcome shareholders are betting on. The private equity firms sniff at Twitter, as others have before, and decide against buying it, as others have before. The board rejects Musk’s offer and he launches a tender offer and Twitter’s management poison-pills the thing. This all ends with Twitter still a public company, where it will have to deal with all the same problems it had before, except Agrawal maybe needs some therapy because, wow, this was a lot. What can I say? We love to have fun on Twitter dot com!"

Reference: https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/22/23036479/elon-musk-twitter-bid-private-equity 

RELATED

Technology

Deals

Musk Swayed Wall Street by Pitching His Vision for Twitter

• Lenders were given some details of how business could be run
• Financing package came together in days, over holiday weekend

Musk Lines Up $46.5 Billion for Twitter Bid

By Michelle F Davis, Crystal Tse, and Paula Seligson

April 22, 2022, 8:00 PM UTCUpdated onApril 22, 2022, 11:33 PM UTC

"Publicly, Elon Musk has said he doesn’t care about the economics of owning Twitter Inc.

But during a hectic, multi-day scramble to line up $46.5 billion of funds to buy the social media platform, the world’s richest person shared enough of a vision with a dozen banks to persuade them to pull out their checkbooks.

If our twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 21, 2022

But, maybe not! The deal as constructed includes $1 billion in debt servicing costs every year, Bloomberg’s Matt Levine points out. That’s an awful lot of money for a company that, ummm, lost money last year.

There are other potential corporate gymnastics at work. Musk has formed three holding companies for his Twitter bid, all named for an old idea of his: X.com, the original name for what became PayPal. This could offer Musk an opportunity to combine all his companies — Tesla, the Boring Company, Neuralink, and SpaceX — into one big company that, idk, shoots lasers out of its eyes.

AMERICAN STEWARDS OF LIBERTY: Spoiling Earth Day...A Who's Who of Climate-Change Deniers | HuffPost

Intro: The Billionaire-Ricketts based in Chicago have a western branch of the family tree

POLITICS

How Nebraska's Governor Became A General In A Right-Wing War Against Biden’s Conservation Goal

Internal emails reveal how a Texas-based property rights group worked behind the scenes to steer Gov. Pete Ricketts' crusade against the "30x30" initiative.

By Chris D'Angelo

Environment Reporter, HuffPost

Apr. 22, 2022, 05:45 AM EDT

". . .On Friday, which is Earth Day, American Stewards will sponsor a “STOP 30x30 Summit” in Lincoln, Nebraska — A release about the summit that went out last month boasted that it will “spoil environmentalist’s [sic] Earth Day” and “send the clear message that America’s landowners would not be ‘voluntarily’ surrendering their property rights to the environmental agenda.”

Ricketts is hosting the event and will share the stage with Byfield, Boebert, Trump-era Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, anti-federal land Utah state Rep. Ken Ivory (R) and other leading figures of the anti-30x30 movement.

The event’s sponsors include three of the nation’s fiercest proponents of climate change denialism — the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, The Heritage Foundation, and The Heartland Institute — and Protect the Harvest, a pro-agriculture, anti-animal rights group founded by oil tycoon Forrest Lucas.

> Lucas and Protect the Harvest played an outsized role in securing President Donald Trump’s pardons for Dwight Lincoln Hammond Jr. and Steven Hammond, the father-son Oregon ranchers whose arson conviction sparked the armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. . .

And American Stewards was selective about which media can attend the “most important conference” in its history: The organization denied HuffPost credentials to cover it.

Margaret Byfield, executive director of American Stewards of Liberty, speaks at an anti-30x30 information session in Lea County, New Mexico, in July 2021.

Her Texas-based nonprofit is leading the charge against the Biden administration's conservation target.

Blake Ovard/Hobbs News-Sun

30x30 And The Right’s Deceptive War

Biden’s 30x30 target is in line with a proposed United Nations framework for protecting biodiversity amid the deepening extinction and climate crises, and has growing support within the global scientific community.

A week after taking office, Biden followed through on a campaign promise and set 30x30 as a national goal. His executive order established a process for engaging with a broad range of stakeholders, from states and Native American tribes to farmers and anglers, to get input about how best to achieve the 30% target. (Approximately 12% of all U.S. lands are now permanently protected, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.)

There is absolutely nothing to suggest the plan, which the administration has since branded “America the Beautiful,” will involve confiscating property or deceptive tactics to gain control of private land. In an initial report outlining its vision for protecting and restoring 30% of lands and waters by the end of the decade, the Biden administration committed to “collaboration, support for voluntary and locally led conservation and honoring of Tribal sovereignty and private property rights.”

The overall lack of detail in Biden’s initial directive, however, allowed paranoia and conspiratorial thinking to permeate conservative circles. Almost immediately, American Stewards labeled 30x30 a “land grab” and warned its audience that the Biden initiative “hands the powers of the Federal regulatory agencies to a movement that has been working to abolish private property for decades.”

Within weeks, Ricketts would be a top soldier in the anti-30x30 movement.

> . . .Other rhetoric has been completely outlandish. At one of her anti-30x30 training sessions in South Dakota, Byfield promptly agreed when an attendee compared 30x30 to the Holodomor, a man-made famine that occurred in Ukraine during Soviet Union dictator Josef Stalin’s rule and resulted in the deaths of an estimated 3.9 million people.

. . .At that same event, Trent Loos, a Nebraska rancher and radio show host who served on former President Donald Trump’s agricultural advisory committee and now helps American Stewards with its campaign, compared 30x30 to Nazi Germany. . ."

More details >> https://www.huffpost.com/entry/pete-ricketts-nebraska-30x30-american-stewards_n_6261dcd5e4b0ea625c04f0fa

NETFLIX NIXES PASSWORD MOOCHERS...Not happening anytime soon

Intro: According to a report in Wired it is estimated there are more than 100 million users sharing passwords worldwide, including more than 30 million in the US and Canada, mooching off of paid accounts.

Netflix Can Cut Off Moochers Without a Password-Sharing Crackdown

There's a simple way to limit Netflix freeloaders—give users the ability to easily boot unknown devices linked to their accounts.

Lily Hay Newman

Wired

"Netflix has been trying to crack down on password sharing for more than a decade. But in the last year, and more strongly this week, the company has given serious signs that the party is almost over. Rather than indiscriminately curtailing this beloved latitude, though, Netflix could make some basic tweaks to cut down on freeloaders without snubbing longtime customers who just want to help out a friend. 

In a letter to shareholders on Tuesday, the streaming giant said it had a net loss of about 200,000 subscribers this quarter, from 221,840,000 down to 221,640,000. And Netflix is projecting that those numbers will keep sliding down to roughly 219,640,000 people in the second quarter of 2022. The company estimates that there are more than 100 million additional households, including more than 30 million in the US and Canada, mooching off of paid accounts.

Netflix's stock plunged on Wednesday morning, and the company is clearly in triage mode. . .

The shareholder letter says that Netflix's “relatively high household penetration—when including the large number of households sharing accounts—combined with competition, is creating revenue growth headwinds” and that it plans to get back on track  “through improvements to our service and more effective monetization of multi-household sharing.”

One basic thing Netflix could do to curb the number of people using shared accounts is to add a list in Settings of all the devices an account is active on, with the ability to select which to keep and which to cut. That way, the owner of the account could easily prune the list—logging out devices they don't recognize and the Roku at the Airbnb they stayed at last year. Currently, Netflix only provides a log of devices that have recently used the account and the option to log out every device at once. 

Sure, disconnecting every device linked to your Netflix account is a great way to purge and start fresh. It's also a pain to deal with, and unlikely to be an appealing option for most Netflix users. That's why giving users the ability to choose which devices remain connected is a simple way to whittle down the 100 million moochers to something more reasonable. . .

Asking customers to pay a bit more to share their passwords sounds like an obvious and reasonable approach. But given that Netflix's Standard service already costs more than $15 per month and $20 for Premium (the top end of the range for comparable video streaming services), adding additional per-user fees may not solve Netflix's customer-bleed problem.

Netflix password sharing has always been a security issue for a few reasons. If your Netflix password is also the password for some of your other accounts, you're exposing multiple services through the simple gesture of sharing movies with a friend. And even if you don't reuse your Netflix password on other accounts, easy-to-share passwords are fundamentally flawed. It's trivial for password-cracking tools to guess “lolnetflixpassw0rd.” And because it's so easy to share, there's nothing to stop your sister from sharing it with her girlfriend, who then shares it with everyone on her team at work. Then one of her colleagues gets phished, and surprise! Now your password is being sold on a dark-web forum.

Whatever Netflix does next, it's unlikely to happen widely anytime soon. “It’ll take a while to work this out and get that balance right,” COO Greg Peters reportedly said during Tuesday's earnings call. “My belief is that we will go through a year or so of iterating, and then deploying that.” And that's good news all around.

“In security, it doesn't work well when you slap a new control in place that impacts all users,” TrustedSec's Kennedy says. “What works more effectively is subtle changes, giving users information, and explaining what's acceptable and what's not over time.”

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