Trump's SPAC attack

Home » Unlabelled » Trump's SPAC attack

Trump's SPAC attack

View in Browser

Dave in for Allison for one more day. It's been a pleasure serving as the Diet Coke version of your Nightcap this week. The Real Thing will return Monday.

By David Goldman

❌ CROSS-CHECK YOURSELF

Hope you're sitting down for this. It turns out Facebook has not been completely forthcoming about the innerworkings of its company. It not only kept the public in the dark about a controversial VIP program, but Facebook withheld information about the program from its own oversight board, too.

Cross-Check

Facebook has a program called Cross-Check, which was put in place to serve as a kind of gut-check when high-profile accounts broke Facebook's rules. Rather than just automatically banning the accounts, Facebook would review the violation to determine the next steps it would take. It pays to be rich, apparently even on a platform no one pays for.

But, in a report last month, the Wall Street Journal published internal company documents that showed Cross-Check has expanded to millions of accounts, allowing certain people to be immune from enforcement actions. For some VIPs, normal enforcement processes are thrown out the window, and their posts that violate the company's rules are not immediately removed. See: Brazilian soccer star Neymar responding to a rape accusation in 2019 by naming his accuser and posting nude photos of her on Facebook. The company left that post up for a day and chose not to ban him. (Neymar denied the accusation and he faced no charges.)

We're not done yet

So that's … not great. But wait, it gets worse: Facebook's Oversight Board said Thursday that it has been trying to investigate Cross-Check since the Wall Street Journal story came out, and Facebook has been less than forthcoming, my colleague Hanna Ziady reports.

"On some occasions, Facebook failed to provide relevant information to the Board, while in other instances, the information it did provide was incomplete," the Oversight Board said in a statement Thursday.

Cool, cool, cool.

Facebook is trying to rebuild public trust, but it can't seem to get out of its own way. What's increasingly clear is Facebook built a monster it can't control, and it's having a hard time admitting that truth.

🤝 SPONSOR CONTENT BY COMPARECARDS

Get Financially Fit with these Credit Cards

We've done the research on the top credit card offers. Check out which one is best for you!

#️⃣ NUMBER OF THE DAY

$1.2 billion

That's how much Spanx is worth after Blackstone took a big stake in the shapewear company. Not a bad haul for Spanx founder Sara Blakely, who founded Spanx in 2000 with $5,000 in savings. She'll be keeping a "significant" equity stake in the company after the Blackstone deal.

👷♀️ BRACING FOR THE FALLOUT

There's nothing riskier than putting your livelihood on the line. But Jennifer Bates felt like she had no choice, and that's why my colleague Sara O'Brien profiled Bates in the latest edition of CNN Business' Risk Takers series. It's a doozy.

Bates is a grandmother of seven and took a job at Amazon's warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. She found the 10-hour shifts to be "more strenuous" than the 12-hour days she pulled at a previous company. The amount of walking required to get around a warehouse the size of 14 football fields, including going up and down flights of stairs, hurt her knees and caused her legs to swell, she said.

Rather than quit (which, let's be honest, that's what most of us would have done), Bates helped lead a unionization push at the warehouse. That initially failed, although a legal battle has potentially given the campaign new life. But since then, she has felt alienated by some of her workers, who fear talking to her will risk punishment. And Amazon no longer allows her to train new employees after she testified before Congress.

So, yeah, it's a risky business. But Bates isn't shying away.

"We're not pushovers. There needs to be a change in this country and we're not stopping until there's a change," she said. "We're still moving. We're still on fire and we're not going to stop."

🌎 QUOTE OF THE DAY

Given the total addressable market and President Trump's large following, we believe the TMTG opportunity has the potential to create significant shareholder value.

Patrick Orlando, CEO of blank-check company Digital World Acquisition Corp., has merged with Trump Media & Technology Group, chaired by former President Donald Trump. Trump, whose companies have a long history of filing for bankruptcy, announced a deal Wednesday night to bring a new media company public through what's known as a SPAC, or a Special Purpose Acquisition Corporation. The company marks a return to Wall Street for Trump, who said the public company will launch a new social media platform that will "stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech."

WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON?

🚗 Tesla owners can buy the company's "full self-driving" software for $10,000, but they may have to pay with their privacy. As part of the wider rollout of Tesla's full self-driving option, which began earlier this month, drivers may forfeit some privacy protections around location sharing and in-car recordings that they previously had, according to Tesla owner's manuals and its website.

🥣 Because of widespread supply chain problems, instead of the usual 50, General Mills says its shipments have been delayed between 500 and 600 times a month on average.

💸 A fire-sale deal that would have eased a punishing cash crunch at Chinese real estate giant Evergrande has collapsed, pushing the troubled company closer to a potential collapse.