💰Bonus bonanza
  Tonight: Car hacking is a new thing to make me anxious about the future. Plus: It's a bonus bonanza on Wall Street. Let's get into it. 🚘 ANOTHER TESLA BUG  Here at Nightcap, we try not to be luddites. I was ready for my flying car that runs on old coffee grounds yesterday. But every time a hacker finds some new vulnerability in some cool new product, I start buying canned goods and thinking of running off into the woods to live apart from the robots.
The hacker, 19-year-old David Colombo, said that he could even track the location of Tesla vehicles as their owners went about their day. Colombo leads a cybersecurity company, and says he reported the issue to Tesla. (Neither Tesla nor the third-party app responded to requests to comment.)
Add this to the litany of safety issues Tesla is grappling with. ICYMI: Just yesterday, Tesla recalled nearly 54,000 vehicles over a "rolling stop" feature that turns out to be sensible in theory — after all, most people roll slowly through stops rather fully braking — but it's actually illegal.
BIG PICTURE Cars, including Teslas, have been hacked before, my colleague Matt McFarland writes. But cybersecurity experts say this is the first time a vehicle has been hacked through an app that has been granted direct access to some vehicle controls and data.
Automakers need to consider "self-defending cars before self-driving cars," says Srinivas Kumar, a vice president at the cybersecurity company DigiCert. "If a car can't defend itself from an attack, do you trust it to be self-driving?"
I sure don't! Read Matt's full story here. #️⃣ NUMBER OF THE DAY 301,000 Once again, Covid-19 threw a wrench into the economy and caught analysts off guard. Most expected that the economy would have gained around 207,000 private sector jobs in January. Instead, we lost 301,000, according to Wednesday's ADP Employment Report. The ADP report relies on private payrolls, unlike the government's jobs report that counts all workers. That closely watched report comes out this Friday.
💸 GET PAID  Wall Street work is notoriously tough. All the horror stories you hear about long, stressful hours are legit, according to bankers I've talked to, and I'm grateful that I have the privilege chronicling from a safe distance the ups and downs of the markets and the heavy rollers who shape them. I'm like Jeff Goldblum's character in Jurassic Park — just here to ask questions and make snarky comments while the animals do their thing.
And then stories like this come along…
Bonuses at big banks are expected to hit their highest level in over a decade.
And suddenly I'm questioning all my life choices.
Take Goldman Sachs: The bank, known as the Vampire Squid of Wall Street, set aside nearly $18 billion for compensation expenses last year, an increase of 33% from 2020. That works out to an average of about $404,000 for the firm's 43,900 workers.
And if you make it to the C-suite, it's a whole other ballgame.
Goldman's CEO David Solomon, a man who has a musical alter ego called DJ D-Sol, took home a $33 million bonus — yes, bonus — on top of his $2 million base salary.
Across town, you've got Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman, who also received a $35 million pay package. And JPMorgan Chase's Jamie Dimon got a $3 million raise — to $34.5 million — in 2021.
Why the surge this year? The market finished last year near all-time highs, and bank stocks were among the market leaders, my colleague Paul R. La Monica writes. Any time companies list their shares on public markets or merge with other companies, the banks that facilitate those deals get a big cut. And 2021 was a very, very busy year.
A little too busy, some might say. Last spring, I wrote a story about a group of first-year bankers at Goldman who'd revealed that they were so burned out and abused in their jobs their mental health was suffering and they were contemplating quitting. They were at their breaking point after less than a year on the job. Although their anecdotes were horrible, the response from many veteran bankers at the time was little more than a shrug — welcome to Wall Street, kiddos.
And so, back I go to my tap tap tapping on my dumb little keyboard.
WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON? 📺 CNN President Jeff Zucker resigned Wednesday after failing to disclose a consensual relationship with a senior executive at the network.
📉 Shares of Facebook parent Meta plunged 20% after posting a surprise decline in profit for the most recent quarter.
☕ Starbucks is planning more price hikes this year in response to inflation and growing labor costs.
👀 Within ABC news, staffers have been divided over Whoopi Goldberg's controversial comments, apology and subsequent two-week suspension. GIF OF THE DAY When it's Wednesday and everyone's like, "hey, that charming little rodent saw his shadow so four more weeks of winter..."
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