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| Tom Brady |
Think twice before plugging a product… Tom Brady, Steph Curry, Shaquille O’Neal, and Larry David are defendants in a class action suit lodged against cryptocurrency exchange company FTX Group, which went bust.
Their legal entanglement stems from their starring roles in TV ads that encouraged viewers to invest in the FTX exchange.
From the lawsuit: “Although the defendants disclosed their partnership with FTX Entities, they have never disclosed the nature, scope, and amount of compensation they personally received in exchange for the promotion of the deceptive FTX platform, which the SEC has explained that a failure to disclose this information would be a violation of the anti-touting provisions of the federal securities laws.”
The suit alleges that the celebs failed to do any due diligence before agreeing to pitch FTX’s products.
Celebrity endorsers should do their homework before agreeing to plug a product or service.
Pay no attention to Sam. In a Nov. 17 bankruptcy court filing, FTX Group CEO John Ray declared that former chief Sam Bankman-Fried is no longer employed by the debtors and does not speak for them.
It reads:
“Mr. Bankman-Fried, currently in the Bahamas, continues to make erratic and misleading public statements.
"Mr. Bankman-Fried, whose connections and financial holdings in the Bahamas remain unclear to me, recently stated to a reporter on Twitter: “F***regulators they make everything worse” and suggested the next step for him was to “win a jurisdictional battle vs. Delaware.”
Ray, who has 40 years of legal and restructuring experience, says he never saw such a financial mess as FTX.
That’s a tough statement coming from a guy who handled the Enron reorganization.
Fall of FTX deals blow to “effective altruism.” Bankman-Fried was a leading player in the EA or “earning to give” movement.
Prior to the November 17 collapse of FTX, the media profiled Bankman-Fried’s plan to donate billions to charity. His personal wealth topped the $15B mark in early November.
His do-gooder image may have deflected “the kind of scrutiny that might otherwise greet an executive who got rich quick in an unregulated offshore industry,” according to the Washington Post.
William MacAskill, a founder of EA, tweeted that the community has “emphasized the importance of integrity, honesty, and the respect of common-sense moral constraints.”
If FTX funds were misused, MacAskill frets that Bankman-Fried thought he was above the EA tenets.
“I had put my trust in Sam, and if he lied and misused customer funds, he betrayed me, just as he betrayed his customers, his employees, his investors and the communities he was a part of,” tweeted MacAskill.
EA has taken a big PR hit.
Rat City…. The Economist has dubbed mayor Eric Adams "New York's Pied Piper" for his war on rats
The magazine says the rat is as much as a quintessential image of the Big Apple as the Statue of Liberty and Empire State Building.
Reports of rat sightings to the 311 hotline are up 70 percent during the first nine months of 2022.
The focus on New York is good news for Chicago, which the Orkin pest-control company has called America’s “rattiest city” for eight consecutive years.
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