Leading up to his debut Saturday Night Live performance on Saturday, Elon Musk has spent weeks plugging Dogecoin, the joke cryptocurrency named for a meme about a talking dog with bad grammar, in an apparent bid to boost the coin’s popularity. But early Friday morning, Musk pivoted from promotion to circumspection. In a tweet sent at 12:24 a.m., the Tesla CEO quote tweeted a TMZ video […]
Tarpley Hitt
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Vitalik Buterin, the Russian-Canadian founder of Ethereum and vocal proponent of a wealth tax, became the world’s youngest billionaire this week, after a bull run pushed the cryptocurrency’s price up to nearly 350 percent its value at the beginning of the year. The 27-year-old’s fortune is held in Ether, the Ethereum blockchain’s native token, rather than dollars or another currency. Buterin owns approximately 334,000 Ether, which […]
Since mid-April, the United Metro Energy facility in Brooklyn has had a squadron of oil workers stationed outside—alternating shifts so that men are there 24 hours, seven days a week—striking for better pay and benefits from the company’s owner: grocery store billionaire, twice-failed mayoral candidate, and right-wing shock jock John Catsimatidis. The workers, a coalition of mechanics, terminal operators, and service technicians, elected to go on […]
The mountain hamlet of Crested Butte, Colorado, covers less than a square mile and, at an elevation of nearly 9,000 feet, it is taller than it is wide. So when a Chicago-based billionaire began quietly buying up its historic buildings, residents took note. “I was alarmed that someone would come in and buy up so much commercial property in the community,” former Gunnison County Commissioner Jim […]
Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan have nearly doubled their controversial land holdings in Hawaii, after buying almost 600 acres on Kauai from a non-profit for $53 million. The deal, which closed on March 19, according to deeds first reported by Pacific Business News, comprises three parcels, including the remote northern waterfront known as Larsen’s Beach. The road to the beach was not included in the sale, […]
In advance of his controversial hosting gig on Saturday Night Live, Elon Musk has combined show promotion with a crypto plug for one of his favorite investments—the meme currency Dogecoin—which immediately shot up. At about 2:20 a.m. Wednesday morning, Elon Musk tweeted about the episode he will host next week: “The Dogefather,” he wrote. “SNL May 8.” Within minutes, the price of Dogecoin, which Musk has […]
In the two years since the Food and Drug Administration approved the first synthetic ketamine treatment, drug developers, VC investors, and rich guys who like Burning Man have been scheming for ways to convert psychedelics from a stoner pastime into a private enterprise. On Tuesday, New York-based company MindMed will start trading on the Nasdaq, becoming the second psychedelic company ever to go public on a […]
German investor Christian Angermayer—a 42-year-old billionaire who bears a not-negligible resemblance to Jared Leto in Blade Runner 2049—has made a fortune betting on a host of sci-fi-sounding finance fads. Among them: space travel, crypto, psychedelics, movies, weed, SPACs, and “life extension.” Those ventures have done pretty well for him. In the past year alone, seven companies Angermayer’s family office funded went public, raising a combined $1 […]
On the eve of Oscar weekend, a picket line formed outside the Chateau Marmont, the prominent after-party locale where Jay-Z and Beyoncé held post-Oscars bashes for years, to host an alternate awards show. The group stood around a long red carpet, decked out with balloons, to nominate the classic Hollywood hangout for “worst performance.” It won—there were no other nominees. The Friday night ceremony marked more […]
Fox News host and right-wing hanger-on Sean Hannity shelled out $5.3 million for a beachfront house on the south end of Palm Beach—less than three miles from Mar-a-Lago, property records show. The buy makes Hannity the latest in a long line of conservative media figures to set up shop in the wealthy south Florida town, sometimes called Billionaire’s Row. After Joe Biden’s inauguration in January, Donald […]
After private equity billionaire Robert Smith admitted to a 15-year tax fraud scheme to hide $225 million from the Internal Revenue Service, he signed a rare non-prosecution agreement with law enforcement, allowing him to avoid any charges and return to civilian life. But while Smith attends birthday parties and New York Times conferences, the man he hired to help execute the fraud faces federal charges and […]
It’s been a grueling year on Wall Street—working from home for six-figure salaries, as millions entered unemployment or poverty—and the boutique investment firm, Houlihan Lokey, is thanking its entire financial staff with a very special perk: an all-expenses-paid “global getaway.” The vacations, announced by the company internally and leaked on Instagram and Twitter by the finance meme account Litquidity, make for a fairly steep step-up from […]
For his upcoming movie, The House of Gucci, director Ridley Scott secured some of the best known names in Hollywood—Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, Jared Leto, and Al Pacino—to play members of the notorious fashion family. But some descendants of the $15 billion brand’s founder have their silk-lined lingerie in a twist. In an interview with the Associated Press, Guccio Gucci’s great-granddaughter, Patrizia Gucci raged that paparazzi […]
A new book on the Sackler family—the secretive billionaires who kept America in steady supply of OxyContin—contains private emails that show the heirs complaining about how hard their lives were as they tried to downplay and shift blame for the deadly opioid crisis that left nearly half a million Americans dead. The messages, along with other revelations in Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe, shed […]
As mid-March approached, colleges and coastal cities braced for the inevitable: swarms of students fresh out of Zoom school looking to do keg stands in a global pandemic. In Florida, Palm Beach extended its 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. curfew to deter would-be Spring Breakers. In Texas, a county judge reminded residents of last year, when beer-chugging kids caused several superspreader events. The University of California […]
The frenzy over celebrity-endorsed investment vehicles known as SPACs has prompted the Securities and Exchange Commission to warn amateur investors not to turn fandom into a financial disaster. High-profile sponsors from NBA legend Shaquille O’Neal to tennis star Serena Williams to ex-Trump adviser Gary Cohn have loaned their star power to “special purpose acquisition companies”—which has regulators worried. “Celebrities, like anyone else, can be lured into […]
American billionaire Stan Kroenke—the real estate and sports mogul who owns more than 2 million acres of ranching land across North America— has just won a decade-long legal battle in Canada to keep the public from two lakes that can only be reached through his property. Kroenke, who is married to Walmart heiress Anne Walton, owns the largest ranch in Canada—a hulking mass larger than the […]
Last year, the vast majority of online child exploitation reports were found on Facebook, according to new data from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s (NCMEC) CyberTipline. The study identified over 20.3 million reported incidents related to child pornography or trafficking (classified as “child sexual abuse material”) on the social media site. By contrast, Google cited 546,704 incidents, Twitter had 65,062, Snapchat reported 144,095, […]
The documentary 17 Blocks, from director and FOUND Magazine creator Davy Rothbart, was filmed over the course of two decades, beginning at the turn of the millennium. The movie follows the Sanford-Durants, a family by whom Rothbart was “adopted,” as the mother puts it, living in a southeast D.C. neighborhood situated just 17 blocks from the White House. The timescale of the movie recalls Richard Linklater’s […]
In what seemed to be the first dystopian shots of the annual Super Bowl ad arms race, Dolly Parton announced last week that she had rewritten her working-class anthem “9 to 5” as “5 to 9” for a Squarespace commercial about, as Variety put it, “office workers getting their entrepreneurial side hustles going after hours.” (Sleeping is out; the gig economy is in!) To this, Coors […]
At around 6:30 a.m. on Christmas Day, country singer JP Harris woke up to an explosion. A 63-year-old man had parked an RV next to an AT&T network hub in downtown Nashville and blown the vehicle up, killing himself, injuring eight others, and flattening several buildings. Cell service was knocked out for days. When federal investigators looked into the Nashville bomber, they found letters he’d written […]
Flee, the animated documentary that premiered at Sundance last week, opens with Amin Nawabi, an Afghan refugee in Denmark, lying on a patterned cloth, talking to someone off-screen. It sounds something like therapy. He’s speaking to Jonas Poher Rasmussen, the director of the film and Nawabi’s old friend, who encourages him to recall his earliest memories. Two and a half decades prior, Nawabi had appeared at […]
On New Year’s Eve of 2015, the government of Adjara, an administrative region in the southwest corner of Georgia, issued a decree granting a company called Zimo Ltd. permission to unearth two swamp cypresses and a 650-ton, 135-year-old tulip tree from the Black Sea coast. For a fee of 6,200 Lari (about $1,875), the company could haul the trees onto boats and ship them 25 miles […]
As vaccine rollouts ramp up—or in some cases, stumble ahead—in countries across the world, the SARS-CoV-2 strain has rolled out some new features of its own, primarily in the form of rapid genetic mutations. Some evidence indicates variants of recent months have made the virus more infectious, or in one case, possibly more deadly. Virus variants are inevitable and often benign. The new coronavirus has likely […]
In the final days of 2020, very few people can look back and say they’ve had a good time. (Dua Lipa, maybe… or soap wholesalers). One member of that fairly selective club is Nathan Apodaca, the TikToker known as @420doggface208 or just doggface208, who shot to viral fame over a video of him skateboarding, drinking cranberry juice, and listening to to Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams.” Through TikTok’s […]
Forty women identified only as “Jane Doe” have sued MindGeek, alleging the Montreal-based internet porn company knowingly profited from the sex-trafficking operation GirlsDoPorn. The suit, which was filed Tuesday afternoon in the Southern District of California, seeks punitive and compensatory damages of more than $80 million. “Plaintiffs have suffered damages including, but not limited to, severe emotional distress, significant trauma, attempted suicide, and social and familial […]
The avant-pop artist FKA Twigs has sued actor Shia LaBeouf for what she described as “relentless” abuse during their nearly one-year relationship in 2018. The lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court and first reported by The New York Times, accuses the Transformers actor of sexual battery, assault, infliction of emotional distress, and knowingly infecting the singer with a sexually transmitted disease. At the center of […]
Four days before Thanksgiving, as the U.S. braced for a second wave of the illness that has killed over 270,000 people and forced most of the world into isolation, CEO Nicholas Duro launched his app for upscale live events and group travel. He called it “Private Island.” To celebrate the debut, Duro flew 19 people—including 12 TikTok influencers and a Nickelodeon star—to Hawaii for a nine-day […]
The guy on the phone is trying to buy a piano. He’s a 55-year-old Staten Island man calling about an ad for a vintage grand. On the call, he’s energetic, gregarious, and prone to laughter–which is good, because the salesman, prank-caller Johnny Brennan of the Jerky Boys, has veered off-topic, away from thousand-dollar instruments and onto what he calls his “Terminal Groove” class: a hybrid of […]
On Nov. 2, police received a call from a local jewelry salesman, Jay Brett Rind, reporting an accidental shooting at his apartment in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. According to an affidavit filed in court on Nov. 5, Rind told dispatchers that he’d met an old friend, 21-year fire department veteran James Gilliard, for dinner to offer him the “deal of a lifetime.” Rind planned to move […]
A Los Angeles judge granted a restraining order against Diplo Wednesday afternoon, filed by a woman who alleged the EDM DJ had leaked “revenge porn” of her on Twitter. “We are pleased to announce that by an order dated November 16, 2020, the Court ordered our requests ‘all granted’ and the restraining order issued,” attorney Lisa Bloom who represents the petitioner, wrote in a statement about […]
A Los Angeles woman has filed a restraining order against Diplo, or Thomas Wesley Pentz, county court records show. Attorney Lisa Bloom, who represents the plaintiff, said she sought “to block Diplo from distributing revenge porn” allegedly “designed to humiliate her and to scare other women out of coming forward.” “I am representing [redacted] regarding her claims against Diplo,” Bloom said. (The Daily Beast is withholding […]
Two years ago, filmmaker Raquel Cepeda started looking for tapes. Specifically, she was searching for leftover footage from 80 Blocks from Tiffany’s, a 1979 documentary about two gangs in the South Bronx: the Savage Nomads and the Savage Skulls. Cepeda was researching the life of the Skulls’ former “First Lady” Lorine Padilla. But the movie had long been MIA—never released commercially, it wasn’t available on DVD […]
Carl Lentz, the pastor credited with bringing the Instagram-friendly Australian megachurch Hillsong to the U.S. and baptizing Justin Bieber, was fired this week from the New York franchise he helped found. Hillsong founder Brian Houston announced the news in an email to Hillsong East Coast members on Nov. 5. “God will use Carl in another way outside of Hillsong Church,” Houston wrote. “This action has been […]
At first glance, the small group assembled outside Pornhub’s L.A. office might have looked like employees. They surrounded the building in black T-shirts with white script, framed by the adult site’s signature orange box. Instead of the standard logo, however, the tees read “Traffickinghub.” The sparse and socially distant protest, which happens every week, had been organized by the West Coast arm of Knock Out Abuse, […]
President Trump was being treated in the hospital for COVID-19 on Saturday, and at least nine of his party’s top officials had contracted the virus—but it made no difference to many GOP officials and campaign aides who continued to flout social distancing guidelines and host maskless, indoor events. On Saturday, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), who tested positive for COVID-19 late Friday night, doubled down on his […]
For 32 years, Glynndana Shevlin worked at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim, California, and through 29 of them, her spot was a concierge club called the E-Ticket Lounge. From 2 p.m. to 10:30 at night, Shevlin hosted guests on the 11th floor of a wing known as the Adventure Tower, serving continental breakfasts, chips and salsa, appetizers, and drinks. As a sommelier, she specialized in wine. […]
Aracely Diaz was at home with her husband and kids when the email arrived, announcing that Disney would lay off 28,000 workers. Diaz has worked as a housekeeper at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim, California for 19 years. So had her husband, Micael Diaz. The next morning, the couple woke up at 6:30 in the morning, got in their car, and sped north on the I-5 […]
In early July, the Walt Disney Company reopened parts of two amusement parks: Disney World near Orlando, Florida, and Disneyland in Anaheim, California. The former reopened to house the tightly controlled 13-week experiment known as the NBA Bubble, in which staff, players, coaches, and personnel adhered to strict social distancing guidelines and isolation requirements, paired with regular on-site testing. The latter welcomed back its workers with […]
On Saturday morning, protesters showed up to the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street in Los Angeles, carrying signs. To passing drivers, the scene looked pretty typical. There have been protests in Los Angeles nearly every day since the civil uprising in June over police brutality, and the signs’ language resembled slogans popularized by the Black Lives Matter movement. One woman scrawled “CARE NOW” on […]
Thursday afternoon, Marla Maples, the television personality best known as Donald Trump’s second wife, shared an Instagram photo from notorious anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates cracking up like a cartoon villain. “We get rid of cash and coins,” the overlaid text reads. “We give you a chip. We put all your money in your chip. If you refuse a vaccine, we […]
For more than nine months, five of them during a global pandemic, a 26-year-old woman named Chelsea Becker has been sitting in Kings County Jail, under a $2 million bail, for giving birth to a stillborn baby. Becker has been there since November, when police arrested her and prosecutors charged her with murder. The District Attorney argued that Becker’s methamphetamine addiction had caused the stillbirth, citing […]
The Chainsmokers’ drive-in concert in tony Southampton, New York, an allegedly distant charity festival held on Saturday night, violated the terms of their permit and will likely face citations and fines from multiple city departments, according to Southampton Town Supervisor Jay Schneiderman. Over 3,000 residents paid up to $25,000 to hear the EDM duo, featuring the subprime sounds of Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon’s DJ alter […]
On Saturday, two days into the MLB’s skeletal 2020 season, Fox Sports debuted a feature few asked for: virtual fans. Facing a schedule that dropped from 162 games to just 60, held in stadiums without crowds to boo, applaud, or smooch on the jumbotron, Fox announced via tweet that they had just the fix: a partnership with SportsMEDIA Technology and Silver Spoon Animation to insert the […]
“I’m in Eastern Ontario. Thousand Islands. Great Lakes. Doing what everyone else is doing in North America—trying to stay inside as much as possible,” Dan Aykroyd said on a phone call in April. Technically, he was outside at that moment. Aykroyd was walking around his family’s farm in Canada, which has the luxury of space and the drawbacks of weak cell service and several unfortunate incidents […]
Early Saturday morning, two people were shot—one fatally—inside the section of Seattle known as the Capitol Hill Organized Protest Area (CHOP), a police-free zone that sprung up in the wake of anti-racism protests following the death of George Floyd in Minnesota. The gunshots that rang out between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m., killing a 19-year-old man and leaving another in critical condition, marked the first report […]
For the past decade, Chris D’Elia, one of the country’s top club comedians who packs theatres hundreds of times a year, has enjoyed the special status afforded to a few middle-aged comics who grasp and expertly deploy devices of the Gen-Z internet. The 40-year-old stand-up, who has three Netflix specials and a Comedy Central special called White Male. Black Comic, has maintained massive followings across social […]
Wednesday morning, a Change.org petition circled the internet calling to “Have TikTok remove any content involving the ‘George Floyd challenge!!’” The page featured a disturbing layout collage, cropped to reveal only the bottom two photos. In each, two white guys mugged for the camera, as one knelt on the other’s neck—both mocking the murder of George Floyd, who died after a Minneapolis cop knelt on his […]
Monday afternoon, America’s most manic snitch sat down in a stairwell at his new undisclosed address to upload an Instagram video about the music industry’s supposed latest mega-scam. “So listen, I want the world to know that Billboard is a lie,” said Tekashi 6ix9ine, or Daniel Hernandez, who was recently released from federal custody, where he was serving out a sentence for nine charges including conspiracy […]
One of the peculiarities of online dream analysis, at least for those of us without advanced psychiatry degrees, is its tendency to get specific. On a dream interpreter like Dream-Meaning.net, where users can search imagery for its precise meaning, ambiguity is an afterthought. The image of a diaper, for example, broadly symbolizes “childish or dependent attitudes.” But the entry also breaks down into 14 subgenres, such […]
On Thursday, the Professional Beauty Federation of California published a press release to the “Hot Topics” section of their website. It was titled: “Time to Sue Governor Newsom.” The release came in response to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s announcement that the following morning, California would officially enter “Phase Two” of the “Safer at Home” order. Select businesses, from florists to clothing retailers to toy stores, would be […]
On October 10, 2019, federal investigators [******]unsealed an indictment charging the owners and two employees of the websites Girls Do Porn and Girls Do Toys with sex trafficking and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion. They arrested three of the four defendants. They named the fourth, a New Zealander named Michael Pratt who had already fled the country, a fugitive. The indictment […]