What the Biden Vaccine Mandate Means For You

When red flags don’t stop big deals

The fraud trial of Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos, has laid bare many things, including how her blood-testing company’s claims fell far short of what was promised. And as The Times’s Erin Griffith reports, the trial has also revealed how careless investors were in chasing the opportunity to get a piece of the action.

Due diligence often took a back seat, even for sophisticated executives. Some examples:

• Wade Miquelon, the former C.F.O. of Walgreens, admitted he didn’t know whether the company had tested any Theranos devices before striking up a partnership.

• Lisa Peterson, a representative for the billion-dollar DeVos family, conceded that she didn’t visit Theranos testing centers or speak to outside experts before investing $100 million.

• Christopher Lucas of Black Diamond Ventures said that he didn’t examine Theranos’s financial records before investing $7 million, accepting Holmes’s argument that doing so would risk a leak that could help rivals.

“If we did too much, we wouldn’t be invited back to invest,” Peterson testified, underscoring the mania for investors to buy into the next big thing at all costs. This lax attitude on due diligence has become too prevalent in venture capital, one investor told Erin, warning: “If something happens to the economy, then everyone is going to be toast.”

NYC ❤️ BTC

The next mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, is competing with the newly re-elected mayor of Miami, Francis Suarez, to attract cryptocurrency businesses by pledging allegiance to Bitcoin. This mirrors the broader rivalry between the cities to attract finance and tech businesses, with Miami drawing many firms away from New York during the pandemic.

Adams said that he would take his first three paychecks as mayor in Bitcoin, tweeting in response to Suarez, who had pledged to take his next paycheck in the cryptocurrency. “NYC is going to be the center of the cryptocurrency industry and other fast-growing, innovative industries,” Adams wrote. “I look forward to the friendly competition in making our respective cities a crypto capital,” Suarez wrote back.

Responses were mixed:

• “We’re doomed” said Paul Krugman, the Nobel-winning economist and Times Opinion columnist, who has criticized the “technobabble” of crypto supporters.

• Bitcoin “is hope for New York,” said Michael Saylor, the C.E.O. of MicroStrategy, the software company that holds well over $6 billion worth of Bitcoin on its balance sheet.

• “There’s the symbolic element and the practical element,” Sina Kian, who heads strategy at the private blockchain platform Aleo, told DealBook. Adams’s willingness to engage with crypto is something that Kian believes more policymakers should have, but the practicalities of getting paid in crypto are unclear.

Is that even possible? Neither Adams’s campaign nor the New York City’s mayor’s office responded to requests for comment on the feasibility of paying the mayor in Bitcoin. Suarez proposed that Miami offer a Bitcoin option for municipal salaries and paying taxes early this year, but is still working on a legal framework.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/05/business/dealbook/biden-vaccine-mandate.html