Tuesday, January 21, 2020
Jeff Bezos's Phone Said to Have Been Hacked by Saudi Crown Prince
Report: Bezos phone uploaded GBs of personal data after getting Saudi prince’s WhatsApp message
It's like a plot from a bad thriller: a forensic analysis paid for by Jeff Bezos found that his cell phone coughed up massive amounts of personal information within hours of receiving a WhatsApp-attached video file sent by the future king of Saudi Arabia, the Guardian, and the Financial Times reported on Tuesday.
The text—the analysis is reported to say—comes on May 1, 2018. That's when Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman sent Bezos a text over WhatsApp weeks after the two had exchanged numbers. Their relationship started out cordially but became strained as The Washington Post reported that the Saudi government was behind the gruesome killing and subsequent dismemberment of veteran Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. He used to contribute a regular column in the Bezos-owned Washington Post criticizing Prince Mohammed's autocratic leadership. The FT report is here, and the report from the Guardian is here.
Massive and unauthorized exfiltration
Within hours of Bezos' receipt of the video, the analysis found, "a massive and unauthorized exfiltration of data from Bezos's phone began, continuing and escalating for months," the FT reported. That amount of data surreptitiously exfiltrated from the device "was in the dozens of gigabytes, compared to the few hundred kilobytes daily afterage in the months before the video file was sent.
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GM's Cruise unveils Origin, its first driverless vehicle with no steering wheel or pedals, says it will share more info about its production plans in the future (Andrew J. Hawkins/The Verge)
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Cruise unveils Origin, an electric driverless vehicle designed for sharing
Cruise unveiled Tuesday evening a “production ready” driverless vehicle called Origin, the product of a multi-year collaboration with parent company GM and investor Honda that is designed for a ride-sharing service.
The shuttle-like vehicle — branded with Cruise’s trademark orange and black colors — has no steering wheel or pedals and is designed to travel at highway speeds. The interior is roomy with seats that face each other. Each seat is meant to accommodate the needs of an individual with personal USB ports, CTO and co-founder Kyle Vogt noted during the presentation. Digital displays are located above, presumably to give travelers information about their rides.
The doors don’t hinge outward, Vogt added. Instead, he said, “they slide open, so bikers are safer.”
CEO Dan Ammann stressed that the vehicle is not a concept, but instead is a production vehicle that the company intends to use for a ride-sharing service. However, don’t expect the Origin to be on public roads anytime soon. The driverless vehicle doesn’t meet U.S. federal regulations known as FMVSS, which specify design, construction, performance and durability requirements for motor vehicles.
For now, the Origin will be used on private, closed environments such as GM facilities in Michigan or even Honda’s campus outside of the U.S, Ammann said in an interview after the presentation.
Cruise unveiled Tuesday Origin, a driverless shuttle designed for ride-sharing.
Ammann also emphasized the low cost of the vehicle, which he added is designed to operate 1 million miles.
“We’ve been just as obsessed with making the Origin experience as inexpensive as possible,” Ammann said while on stage. “Because if we’re really serious about improving life, and our cities, we need huge numbers of people to use the Cruise origin. And that won’t happen unless we deliver on a very simple proposition, a better experience at a lower price than what you pay to get around today.”
Goldman Sachs’s CEO just called WeWork’s pulled IPO — which Goldman was underwriting — proof that the market works
It’s hard to put a positive spin on terrible situation, but that didn’t stop Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon earlier today. Asked during a session at the World Economic Forum in Davos about WeWork’s yanked IPO in September, Solomon suggested it was proof that the listing process works, despite that the CFO of Goldman — one of the offering’s underwriters — disclosed last fall that the pulled deal cost the bank a whopping $80 million.
Reuters was on the scene, reporting that Solomon acknowledged the process was “not as pretty as everybody would like it to be,” while also eschewing any responsibility, telling those gathered that the “banks were not valuing [WeWork]. Banks give you a model. You say to the company, ‘Well, if you can prove to us that the model actually does what it does, then it’s possible that the company is worth this in the public markets,'” Solomon said.
Investment banks had reportedly courted WeWork’s business by discussing a variety of figures that led cofounder Adam Neumann to overestimate how it might be received by public market shareholders. According to the New York Times, in 2018, JPMorgan was telling Neumann that it could find buyers to value the company at more than $60 billion; while Goldman Sachs said $90 billion was a possibility, and Morgan Stanley — which has been assigned as lead underwriter of many of the buzziest tech offerings over the last decade — reportedly posited that even more than $100 billion was possible.
Ultimately, the IPO was canceled several weeks after Neumann was asked to resign and WeWork’s biggest investor, SoftBank — which itself nearly tripled the company’s private market valuation across funding rounds — stepped in to rescue its now $18.5 billion investment in the company.
Solomon isn’t the only one defending some of the frustrating logic of IPO pricing in recent years. This editor sat down in November with Morgan Stanley’s head tech banker Michael Grimes, who has been called “Wall Street’s Silicon Valley whisperer” for landing a seemingly endless string of coveted deals for the bank.
Because Morgan Stanley pulled out of the process of underwriting WeWork’s IPO (reportedly after WeWork rejected its pitch to be the company’s lead underwriter), we talked with Grimes instead about Uber, whose offering last year Morgan Stanley did lead. We asked how Uber could have been reportedly told by investment bankers that its valuation might be as high as $120 billion in an IPO when, as we now know, public market shareholders deemed it worth far less. (Its current market cap is roughly half that amount, at $64 billion.)
Grimes said matter-of-factly that price estimates can routinely be all over the place, explaining that “if you look at how companies are valued, at any given point of time right now, public companies with growth prospects and margins that are not yet at their mature margin, I think you’ll find on average price targets by either analysts who work at banks or buy-side investors that can be 100%, 200% and 300% different from low to high.”
He called that a “typical spread.”
The reason, he said, had to do with each bank’s or analyst’s guess at “penetration.”
“Let’s say, what, 100 million people or so [worldwide] have have been monthly active users of Uber,” said Grimes during our sit-down. “What percentage of the population is that? Less than 1% or something. Is that 1% going to be 2%, 3%, 6%, 10%, 20%? Half a percent, because people stop using it and turn instead to some flying [taxi]?
“So if you take all those variable, possible outcomes, you get huge variability in outcome. So it’s easy to say that everything should trade the same every day, but [look at what happened with Google]. You have some people saying maybe that is an outcome that can happen here for companies, or maybe it won’t. Maybe they’ll [hit their] saturation [point] or face new competitors.”
Grimes then turned the tables on reporters and others in the industry who wonder how banks could get the numbers so wrong, with Uber but also with a lot of other companies. “It’s really easy to be a pundit and say, ‘It should be higher’ or ‘It should be lower,’” Grimes said. “But investors are making decisions about that every day.”
Besides, he added, “We think our job is to be realistically optimistic” about where things will land. “If tech stops changing everything and software stops eating the world, there probably would be less of an optimistic bias.”
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The first project we remember working on together was drawing scenes from the picture books that our mom brought with her when she immigrate...
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