Elizabeth Holmes Tells Court She "Won't Be Reporting to Prison" ... For Now

Elizabeth Holmes delays going to prison with another appeal

Holmes’ lawyers on Wednesday informed U.S. District Judge Edward Davila that she won’t be reporting to prison as scheduled because she had filed an appeal of a decision that he issued earlier this month ordering her to begin her sentence on April 27.

The appeal, filed with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals late Tuesday, automatically delays her reporting date because she has been free on bail since a jury convicted her on four counts of fraud and conspiracy in January 2022. The verdict followed a four-month trial revolving around her downfall from a rising Silicon Valley star to an alleged scam artist chasing fame and fortune while fleecing investors and endangering the health of patients relying on Theranos’ flawed blood tests.

The tactic deployed by Holmes mirrored a move made last month by her former lover and subordinate, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, to avoid a prison reporting date of March 16. After the Ninth Circuit rejected his appeal three weeks later, Davila set a new reporting date of April 20.

PricewaterhouseCoopers to Pour $1 Billion Into Generative AI

PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP plans to invest $1 billion in generative artificial intelligence technology in its U.S. operations over the next three years, working with Microsoft Corp. and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI to automate aspects of its tax, audit and consulting services.

***

Once the models are fully trained and tested, Mr. Kande sees the technology being used to quickly write reports and prepare compliance documents, analyze and evaluate business strategies, identify inefficiencies in operations or create marketing materials and sales campaigns, among many other applications.

Private Unicorns Need Disclosure Boost, SEC’s Lizarraga Says

Unicorns should publicly disclose more about their businesses under SEC rules that have allowed big private companies to report little, if any, information, Democratic SEC Commissioner Jaime Lizarraga said Wednesday.

Unicorns, young private companies valued at $1 billion or more, should report their sizes, lines of business and other details that public companies must disclose, Lizarraga said. The Securities and Exchange Commission needs to update its private company regulations to account for unicorns that have the resources and abilities to make disclosures like big public companies make to investors, he said.

With U.S. Crypto Regulations on the Way, Please Enjoy the Final Crypto WinterAs we clear a path through the wreckage of the crypto winter, the same bright future is coming for the blockchain industry. Bad actors are going to jail. Rules are getting clearer. And, most importantly, the companies involved in this ecosystem are starting to build real products and have valuations based on revenue and profits. The result is that blockchain and crypto can become regular industries with regulated products and outputs that are widely accessible. As a regular industry we will still have ups and downs, but we’ll no longer have ridiculous booms and busts. So please enjoy this crypto winter. It’s the last one you’re getting.

Meanwhile in Crypto

…. “They understand crypto better than anyone,” says David Adler, a lawyer who represents a group of creditors in the Celsius case. “But the problem is translating that into the legal principles that the court has to apply.”

I insist that if you put your money in Celsius then you did not “understand crypto better than anyone”! The very most important thing to understand in finance and economics is that when a person says “either the bank is lying or I am lying,” you must not give him your money! If you spend your time learning cryptography and working through blockchain consensus mechanisms and comparing yields of different DeFi projects, and then some guy is like “hand over your money to me and I promise I’ll give it back with 18% interest, no risk, economic freedom!” and you believe him, then you wasted your time understanding all the other stuff. All financial complexity is a footnote to “don’t hand all your money to some random guy promising high returns.”

Though it will save you time now to understand that if you handed him your money and he lost it and went bankrupt, the bankruptcy court is not going to magically give you back your money. The money is gone! The judge doesn’t have it! It’s not the judge’s fault! What you have is a bankruptcy claim! That’s what happens when you trust random guys with your money! They lose it!

SEC Recordkeeping v. Privacy: Recent Opinion Stirs Debate

In 2018, an investment professional sued the firm he co-founded for wrongful termination and federal privacy law violations associated with the former employer’s remote accessing into a desktop computer it had purchased for him.

On March 24, 2023, after four-and-a-half years of litigation, a Southern District of New York court substantially eliminated all of the plaintiff’s claims. The one remaining claim, which was brought under the Stored Communications Act, survived because the court expressly rejected the claim of the former employer (a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)-registered investment adviser) that its regulatory recordkeeping obligations trumped a potential federal privacy law violation.

This opinion arrives during a seminal moment for the investment management industry, with several large fund managers facing an SEC Enforcement investigation associated with so-called “off-channel” communications—which is in part grounded in an assertion that registered (and perhaps all) investment advisers have a (perhaps absolute) obligation to capture all “business-related” written and electronic communications.