Financial Testimony

The long awaited trial of Elizabeth Holmes and her blood testing startup Theranos is here. Alyssa and Hayden give their take on what is going to make or break this case for Elizabeth. On trial for defrauding investors and patients, Elizabeth Holmes was once a huge name in Silicon Valley for her a myriad of reasons. She was the next Steve Jobs, she achieved a huge valuation for her startup as a female founder, her (presumed) ground breaking science would change blood testing forever, and she was respected as one of the youngest self-made billionaires to name a few previous accolades she used to hold. Now she is one of the biggest names appearing in court this year. 

Back in January of 2021 when GameStop was all the buzz, trading platform Robinhood disabled the buying of GameStop and many other companies that frequented the WallStreetBets subreddit. This led to dramatic decreases in the stock because the many buyers of those stocks could not purchase them and only sell them. Vlad Tenev of Robinhood and Ken Griffin of Citadel later were at a hearing where their statements contradicted internal communication at Robinhood recently released when it came to the story of why they actually halted purchases on Robinhood's app. 

Bill Ackman is an interesting hedge fund manager on Wall Street currently under some scrutiny, well that never changes just the reasons do, for his SPAC that he has yet to use for its "Special Purpose". Ackman is known by many on Wall Street, and very few in the realm where he shines the most, acting. 

SPACs or Special Purpose Acquisition Companies were a hot trend in the start of 2021. It became a trend so popular that "celebrities" became big time investors in the scene more than they previously were, personally Hayden is not a fan of the celebrities who abuse their personal life and monetize their entire family for personal gain. Needless to say, the SPAC market was overloaded with inexperienced "business professionals" and had created a frenzy of buy outs and unique IPO activity. 

Pressure to decide what you want to do in life career wise starts so early, and that means you have to make your first decision early on in life and of course many more as you continue. We talk about the decisions we made to either continue education or not to continue education after our undergrad, and why we made those decisions. 

Facebook the social media behemoth, is still changing its platforms to keep its user base engaged, as all companies should, but what does that look like moving forward? We talk about our ideas of what that may look like for Facebook and Instagram, the two platforms that derive just about all of Facebook's revenue.

California's Proposition 22 was recently ruled unconstitutional in a Superior Court a few days ago, it previously allowed Uber and other app based work companies to have people who work on their app be treated as contractors rather than employees. Now that this proposition is facing some opposition Uber and their competitors are rallying to resolve this issue before they pay serious taxes to the government. 

People love feedback on what they are doing, it guides them to continue, pivot, or completely stop what they are doing. On the other hand, criticism can be beneficial when both parties understand the sentiment around it but a detriment when the perception of the criticism is misunderstood. Criticism can turn bad habits into good ones or lead to over corrections into more bad habits, but it is all about how both parties are communicating with one another about the feedback being given. 

It is a hot *legal* topic to discuss vaccination records lately and our resident law student has some words for the matter. The other host, with no aspirations to study law, has a much more simple approach, be honest and move on. While we both talk a bit about Covid we get down to another concern, the perception of information and the lack of faith in the current distribution methods. 

Trevor Milton was the founder and former chairman of Nikola Corporation, a direct EV competitor to Tesla only in name. It used to be thought that Nikola was going to create insanely powerful and green cars with their hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, however after General Motors spotlighted the truth behind the tech, their presumed EV dominance faded.