[HN Gopher] Binance is taking a $200M stake in Forbes
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Binance is taking a $200M stake in Forbes
Author : dkobia
Score : 142 points
Date : 2022-02-11 11:12 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnbc.com)
| lquist wrote:
| Seems like an especially smart investment. Tycoons purchasing
| storied media assets usually have to contend with journalistic
| integrity when trying to push their agenda. Binance will not have
| any such challenges with Forbes.
| ilamont wrote:
| Reminded me of Pando, started by a former TechCrunch editor 10
| years ago. At the top of the Pando investor: Marc Andreessen
| and Peter Thiel.
|
| https://gigaom.com/2012/01/16/sarah-lacys-pandodaily-launche...
|
| https://allthingsd.com/20120116/sarah-lacy-debuts-new-tech-s...
|
| It didn't last.
| cranberryturkey wrote:
| web3.0 is going to suck just like web 2.0 sucked.
| coding123 wrote:
| Crypto is buying good news now.
| skilled wrote:
| > Forbes
|
| > Good news
|
| pick one.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It doesn't have to be good for a whole bunch of people to
| _assume_ it 's good because it's a previously reputable(ish)
| physical magazine people have heard of.
|
| Their contributor network thing exists primarily because of
| the value of the branding confusion.
| vehemenz wrote:
| I think parent meant buying "good news", as in positive PR,
| not buying "good" "news".
| chomp wrote:
| I think GP meant "good news" as in, publicity.
| schmeckleberg wrote:
| fundus are safu
| Guest42 wrote:
| Crypto is constantly advertised as is. Incrementally, I can't see
| a 200m investment paying off. With interest rates rising,
| speculative investment is going to drop significantly.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I think Forbes makes money, so the 200m didn't go anywhere.
| rchaud wrote:
| Maybe they offered them a bonus, payable entirely in Binance
| USD stablecoin.
| fbn79 wrote:
| List of Forbes scams
|
| https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/02/an-incomplete-history-of-f...
| mgh2 wrote:
| Previous discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30281041
| mylons wrote:
| the 30 under 30, tho
| osrec wrote:
| I know of people who have paid to get on that list. That
| cheapened it for me, and made me see it for what it was...
|
| What was more alarming was that it wasn't even that much
| money (around 5k USD, I believe).
| kilroy123 wrote:
| So how do you do it?
| asadlionpk wrote:
| Hire a PR firm to do it for you.
| bsilvereagle wrote:
| I can't make any claims to the accuracy of this piece,
| but found it an interesting read after a colleague of
| mine was on the list:
|
| https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-get-forbes-30-under-
| hones...
| notfromhere wrote:
| So many of the people there haven't really done much
| either.
|
| It's hard to do anything meaningful career-wise before 30.
| skrtskrt wrote:
| I personally know people who have made it that just work
| in a some midlevel (but publicly visible) role at a big
| tech unicorn, the company just got them placed there as
| part of their general PR strategy
| osrec wrote:
| Haha, indeed. Many times they've just started a company,
| and that's it. No proper customers, no real revenue. Just
| a random, unproven lofty idea and a "brand". Very
| Theranos like, and similarly doomed to fail.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| $5K USD for a chance, I think it's probably closer to $50K
| for a sure thing, I know a number of people who made the
| list. Sometimes it comes as part of a VC investment package
| and is considered part of the marketing spend. Other times
| it's through (very) personal connections with powerful
| people. It's not too hard to find out who those powerful
| people are you just have to do a bit of hustling.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _it 's probably closer to $50K for a sure thing_
|
| Depends on the list. They print lists like they print
| names on them. Top 40 under 40 Southeast Asian fintech
| sales and stuff.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| Good point, my info is from the 30 under 30 back in
| 2013/2014 timeframe before the world split. I know
| someone who had $100K spent on her but that was a part of
| a bundle that included a glowing OZY write up and a bunch
| of other services.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Ah so what you're saying is there's some potential synergies.
| ghaff wrote:
| There's perhaps no better example of a publication selling its
| soul for pageviews than Forbes. While Malcolm Forbes was
| editor, it was my favorite business magazine. Today, they
| sometimes have decent articles if you can plow through all the
| popups etc. to read them, but there's a huge amount of content
| that has very little real editorial oversight.
| lifeplusplus wrote:
| no news is bad news to crypto cultists:
|
| crypto exchange reaches new volume = "they are very smart, true
| geniuses"
|
| fbi dismantles the same exchange = "great it helps crypto
| ecosystem and weans out fraud"
|
| country of billions of people bans crypto = "this is what crypto
| was built for"
|
| crypto prices skyrocket = "common people are getting into crypto"
|
| crypto prices crash = "great once in a lifetime opportunity, not
| a financial advice"
| rafale wrote:
| I have no idea where Forbes reputation comes from. Is it because
| they were the first to track the richest 100 people? Big brand
| name, little backing afaik.
| rchaud wrote:
| It used to be a proper business magazine, alongside Fortune,
| Barrons and BusinessWeek. At some point in the last 15 years it
| opened up a "contributor" program, which killed its reputation.
|
| As far as I know, there is still a Forbes print mag with
| editorial staff, but considering how few people subscribe to
| magazines now, their reputation rests almost entirely on the
| quality of the free contributor articles. Most of which are
| written by content marketers looking to build their brand.
| capableweb wrote:
| > Most of which are written by content marketers looking to
| build their brand.
|
| Or content marketers/founders/cryptocurrency hackers like
| Heather Morgan (https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanponciano
| /2022/02/08/fed...)
|
| > Heather Morgan was a ForbesWomen contributor from July 2017
| until Forbes ended the relationship in September 2021, and
| was never an employee.
| pessimizer wrote:
| That's all. Also, it was owned by a rich guy who would make
| objectivist pronouncements all the time, and provided an army
| of worthless pundits for news channels. Eventually baby Forbes
| was a vanity presidential candidate who did Saturday Night
| Live.
|
| It certainly wasn't the Huffington Post cesspool the internet
| turned it into, but like a lot of other print magazines it
| built its brand on the one big press release and special issue
| it put out at the same time every year.
| notfromhere wrote:
| Forbes used to have a lot of brand appeal, but I don't honestly
| know anyone who still takes them seriously. I feel like their
| contributor program really killed the brand for anyone under 40
| listenallyall wrote:
| Like Time or Sports Illustrated or Newsweek, it was a highly-
| respected, widely-read magazine for decades. And it was led by
| Malcolm Forbes, who was a minor celebrity for being wealthy,
| sort of like Richard Branson.
| htrp wrote:
| PR move
| ozten wrote:
| The video is worth watching. It seems like the Binance CEO is
| caught unprepared by the Heather Morgan question.
| mgh2 wrote:
| It makes sense, propaganda to drive crypto scams
| loceng wrote:
| Is there a term already coined that's in line with "regulatory
| capture" [of government and policies by for-profit industrial
| complexes lobbying to help insert politicians favourable of or
| inattentive to their industry] but for "brand capture" or
| "trust/reputation capture" or similar?
| jaywalk wrote:
| There'd have to be existing trust/reputation in order for it
| to be captured, and in the case of Forbes there isn't any.
| api wrote:
| Not among people who know something about business or
| finance, but in the general public the name is still
| associated with "rich people stuff."
|
| Sort of like the Trump brand...
| ATsch wrote:
| Even better, there's one specifically for the corporate
| capture of journalism:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model
| arcticbull wrote:
| I think this is closer to reputation laundering.
| mythrwy wrote:
| Then accuse non mainstream sources of "misinformation" when
| they try to expose the crypto scams.
|
| Fact Check: "No, Bitcoin is not a Ponzi scheme and is actually
| good for the environment!"
| krnlpnc wrote:
| Based on this comments section, all crypto is scams. Compared to
| what?
|
| Aren't we talking about the finance sector here? It's _all_ a
| scam, some currencies and markets just have more laws already
| written than others.
| BrissyCoder wrote:
| I'm sure xk of seeing this take. If you buy a stock (even
| Tesla!) There's generally an actual profit making company
| producing things behind it.
| Animats wrote:
| Did they pay in Tether?
| riccardomc wrote:
| Frankly, this is a genius move to wash crypto propaganda in a
| somewhat reputable aura...
|
| It worries me that it is actually going to work.
|
| A news source these days doesn't need to be accurate. It is
| sufficient to be well-known.
| boringg wrote:
| How bad of shape is Forbes in to take that money? I mean let's be
| real, Forbes is a pretty terrible outfit to begin with, this just
| solidifies it.
| mrkramer wrote:
| That's smart move by Forbes. Soon FBI might take 100% stake in
| Binance.
| ElonMuskrat wrote:
| I genuinely laughed.
|
| It seems like after every media, government, celebrity and
| politician, who can be bought, has been bought, and every
| sucker pilfered, then this thing will finally come to its
| horrible end.
|
| I did not think I would experience a bubble that rivals the Dot
| Com or Mississippi bubbles. But here we are.
| woah wrote:
| I'm very concerned that Forbes' role as a bastion of journalistic
| integrity is under threat
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| /s?
| boringg wrote:
| OP comment has to be sarcasm. No other way to read it.
| ChicagoBoy11 wrote:
| I feel like for them that ship has largely sailed a while ago,
| sadly. I have a friend of mine who was included in their 30
| under 30 list and knowing a bit about that process alone has
| generally made me really averse to anything else they put out.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I have a reflexive aversion to reading anything from Forbes. I
| absolutely hated that "Forbes Welcome" page and it was so
| difficult to get around in the past.
| bmarquez wrote:
| Same here, but I feel like Forbes' reputation is at the point
| where it might actually be improved by Binance's influence.
| boringg wrote:
| Forbes is about as a good as business insider. They are really
| bad journalism. Forbes is only known for its list of wealthy
| people which is not something I would want to hang my hat on.
| weego wrote:
| "Binance today has announced that that it knows lobbying has to
| happen in public opinion as well as back-room deal making"
| excitednumber wrote:
| cant make this shit up. wow.
| arcticbull wrote:
| This has big "Bernie Madoff when he was chairman of the NASDAQ"
| vibes. [1]
|
| [edit] For those following along at home, Binance was kicked out
| of - or saw significant regulatory pressure in - the UK, Japan,
| Lithuania, the Netherlands, Germany, Malaysia, Hong Kong, South
| Africa, Thailand, Ontario, Uganda, Malta ... and I think a few
| others?
|
| They're also under investigation by the _Cayman Islands Monetary
| Authority_. [2, 3] I am legitimately impressed, it 's not easy to
| get the attention of regulators in the Caymans.
|
| It seems Forbes was hot on their tail a while back when they
| wanted to create strategic bait-and-switch entities in various
| jurisdictions including the US ("Tai Chi Document"). [4] Binance
| then sued them for defamation - then voluntarily dropped the
| suit.
|
| I suspect such investigations will no longer be welcome.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Madoff
|
| [2] https://www.cima.ky/binance-not-regulated-by-cima
|
| [3] https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/110358/cayman-islands-
| in...
|
| [4]
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeldelcastillo/2020/10/29/l...
| crispyambulance wrote:
| Just goes to show that "money talks" regardless of how it's
| obtained.
|
| I feel bad for whoever is going to be left holding the bag when
| it all "pops" and the funny money can no longer be converted
| into real money. It's going to do real damage to those that,
| unlike Zhao, haven't been able to cash out.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| I've been waiting 10 years for the crypto bubble to finally
| pop. I have no idea how it still manages to be a going
| concern.
|
| I wish I knew what will finally spell the end of Bitcoin.
| viscanti wrote:
| I've been waiting over twice as long for the internet
| bubble to pop. Some of this stuff can stay irrational much
| longer than we'd expect.
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| I've been waiting a long time for "the cloud" bubble to
| pop but it might take a recession.
| arcticbull wrote:
| And since I brought up Madoff, he managed to run for 17
| years right under the nose of authorities. So I wouldn't
| count on their help any time soon either.
| u320 wrote:
| Rising rates. Will hurt stock markets too but sound
| businesses will always bounce back.
| [deleted]
| johnebgd wrote:
| At this point the lesson will be an expensive one for those
| still bag holding. It's the retail investors who have their
| $5k holdings that will be most hurt. Not the guys running the
| exchanges. They figured out how to sell picks and shovels.
| baq wrote:
| nonono. exchanges trade against their customers and have to
| change banks after their previous ones get so full of money
| they can't make room for any more.
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| Exactly. The first crypto billionaire became a billionaire
| by operating an exchange, not holding some random crypto
| arcticbull wrote:
| My biggest fear is a 1997 Albania situation but on a global
| scale. MLMs locked up 50% of their GDP, and it led to a civil
| war killing thousands. [1] It was all fun and games until war
| were declared. Then, well, war were declared.
| When the schemes collapsed, there was uncontained rioting,
| the government fell, and the country descended into anarchy
| and a near civil war in which some 2,000 people were killed.
|
| [1] https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2000/03/jarvis
| .ht...
| dvt wrote:
| I see you posting this kind of stuff on crypto threads
| regularly, and I'm no crypto bro, but I definitely think
| you're being hyperbolic. For context, the entire _market
| cap_ of crypto is a third less than $AAPL. The idea that a
| crypto crash (hell, even if it goes to zero) is going to
| lead to riots is bonkers. In the next ~10 years, it 's
| probably just going to get mildly regulated and stabilize
| as a (riskier) investment instrument.
| qeternity wrote:
| > For context, the entire market cap of crypto is less
| than a third of $AAPL.
|
| I agree with your comment but maybe you meant to say "a
| third less"? Crypto is ca. 70% of AAPL mcap.
| dvt wrote:
| Yep, fixed!
| arcticbull wrote:
| If it dropped off the face of the earth today, nobody at
| all would notice. Well, my Twitter timeline would clean
| up. But otherwise, nothing would happen. It's an issue of
| scale. If it continue to grow unabated, it's a real risk.
|
| This is sort of frog boiling. It's legal tender in one of
| the world's poorest countries, where there were _already_
| Bitcoin riots. The space has seen investments from the
| Quebec pension plan, and the Ontario teachers pension
| plan.
|
| If at each milestone we step back and say, well, it's not
| a systemic risk today so let's just ignore it - one day
| we turn around, and it's a systemic risk to the global
| financial system. Mortgage backed securities weren't a
| risk until one day they were. Albanian MLMs weren't a
| risk until one day they were.
|
| Just like Bitcoin's electricity usage. Hal Finney
| mentioned CO2 risk a decade ago. Now it consumes an
| entire country of power to do the work of a single
| Raspberry Pi. Each time the price goes up, so does its
| waste budget. However at every step along the way, folks
| continued to downplay. The longer we ignore it the more
| the cancer metastasizes. Until one day, pop.
|
| Forget where it's at now, assess it based on its
| incentives and its trajectory. It won't get regulated
| _unless_ people speak out. The sooner, the better.
| vmception wrote:
| On the financial observations, all of those systemic
| risks were due to leverage. If there was real leverage
| intertwined with the parallel financial system, bitcoin
| and crypto would have to be 50 times larger, 100 trillion
| market cap full of commercial paper, longer dated bonds,
| rebundled and collateralized, and then those further
| traded on leverage.
| arcticbull wrote:
| If you don't think the crypto space is leveraged to the
| tits and back in an ouroborosian orgy of rehypothecation
| I've got an NFT representing legal title to the Brooklyn
| bridge to sell you.
|
| But no, leverage isn't what took down the Albanians. It
| was investing 50% of their GDP in unproductive MLMs.
| vmception wrote:
| I think there is a lot of leverage in the crypto space, I
| don't think there is much contagion to the other
| financial system, yet.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Ah, I see, apologies if I misread because I agree with
| you.
| yread wrote:
| There was this research (phoning 1000 people who invest
| more than 10k with 50k income in the US) that 25% of
| Americans hold crypto:
|
| https://grayscale.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2021/12/Grayscale-2...
| secretsatan wrote:
| I often wonder how much all this hype is just amplified in
| the tech sphere but just doesn't have any realworld
| significance.
|
| Are just a few thousand crypto bros gonna lose billions of
| made up money or will it really have any impact on
| realworld finances?
| RC_ITR wrote:
| The saving grace of crypto ofc is that it is EXTREMELY top
| heavy, so even if there is $1tn tied up in crypto, probably
| under 100k people control 95%+ of it.
|
| And good luck leading the revolution, Winklevos twins...
| astoor wrote:
| It won't be the people at the top leading the revolt. It
| never is. They'll have creamed enough off to be safe
| whatever happens. It'll be the people at the bottom. They
| might not have large individual "investments", but it is
| large to them, and when one day all of that disappears,
| they won't be happy. And there will be a lot of them, the
| 99.999% who own a tiny percentage of the total wealth.
| Remember - strength in numbers...
| FredPret wrote:
| ...and I thought Amway was bad!
| dsco wrote:
| I don't think you feel bad, I think you feel good about
| shitting on crypto.
| EL_Loco wrote:
| There's a lot of schadenfreude on any crypto thread in HN.
| Lorin wrote:
| Malta stands out because they are the host country of many
| popular gambling websites. Hmm.
| bko wrote:
| I think you're overstating the relative importance and
| influence of Forbes.
|
| As a side note, I like Binance Smart Chain. It's an EVM
| compliant alternative to Ethereum except with proof of stake
| and much lower fees. It costs about $0.12 to call a smart
| contract. To someone like me who is interested in the
| technology of smart contracts and doesn't want to pay $40 to
| interact with a contract, this is a dream come true.
| magicjosh wrote:
| I was curious about the importance of Forbes. It's been
| linked over 1,000 times on Hacker News:
| https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Forbes
| steelstraw wrote:
| It is nicer to use in that respect, but isn't it really just
| a copy of Ethereum with less security?
| arcticbull wrote:
| > As a side note, I like Binance Smart Chain. It's an EVM
| compliant alternative to Ethereum except with proof of stake
| and much lower fees. It costs about $0.12 to call a smart
| contract. To someone like me who is interested in the
| technology of smart contracts and doesn't want to pay $40 to
| interact with a contract, this is a dream come true.
|
| Right, it's a centralized clone of ethereum operated by
| Binance. If you're ok with centralization just fire up an EC2
| instance. The free tier includes 750 hours per month.
| bko wrote:
| I don't think hosting your own node allows you to interact
| with contracts for free. I can (and have) played on the
| devnet, but you're limited there to interacting with
| contracts hosted on devnet. Can you elaborate what you
| mean?
| arcticbull wrote:
| My point was rather that if you're ok with
| centralization, ok without censorship resistance, and ok
| without meaningful absolute reliability guarantees - all
| of which is true on BSC - and you value low cost and low
| latency, what on earth are you doing using a blockchain?
|
| At $0.12 per execution that's one heck of an expensive
| AWS Lambda function, which are normally priced at
| $0.0000002 each and $0.0000133334 per GB-second of
| execution on ARM.
|
| Lambda is about 625,000 times cheaper per request than
| BSC while offering the same-or-dramatically-better
| guarantees. [1]
|
| [edit] Ah, I see the answer to my question is regulatory
| arbitrage. Gotcha. Along with crime and grift, regulatory
| arbitrage is one of the three big pillars of blockchain.
|
| [1] https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/pricing/
| bko wrote:
| I'm interested in finance and analytics. So I like to
| monitor and occasionally write bots to trade crypto
| currencies on decentralized exchanges in a real world
| environment. Could I do algo trading without blockchain?
| I guess but the transparency and tooling of EVM is
| unmatched, and I don't know the tax and legal
| consequences of doing it in proper exchanges. Blockchain
| is the wild west and for someone who is curious and likes
| to tinker, it's the environment I prefer.
|
| What's the self-hosted lambda alternative for what I want
| to do?
|
| > [edit] Ah, I see the answer to my question is
| regulatory arbitrage. Gotcha. Along with crime and grift,
| regulatory arbitrage is one of the three big pillars of
| blockchain.
|
| Can we stop with the moral panic? If I live in a state
| where its a crime to gamble (except for heavily
| advertised state run lottery that targets poor people),
| and I am of sound body and mind and want to legally
| gamble and learn something about probability, psychology
| and technology in the meantime, why is this a bad thing?
| Give me a break
| arcticbull wrote:
| No moral panic here, I've got nothing against gambling. I
| love to gamble. However, crypto is clearly utilized in
| this case for the trading of unregistered securities via
| regulatory arbitrage. That's just fact.
|
| Good luck out there, and I hope you win! You'll need it,
| though, it is after all a mob casino you're gambling in.
|
| This is the classic "I know it's a crooked casino but
| it's the only game in town" argument. The big issue there
| is you can't know the odds because the house is playing
| against you _and_ they can see your hand _and_ they can
| and do frequently turn the lights off if things start to
| move against them. This is of course _why_ we register
| securities and regulate brokerages.
|
| I'm pretty confident we'll recapitulate that in due time.
| repomies69 wrote:
| Gambling and unregistered securities are fundamentally
| very different things. Gambling is activity where usually
| house is guaranteed to win, and player is guaranteed to
| lose.
|
| Unregistered securities are just securities, but not
| government approved. Generally it is believed that
| unregulated securities are way more risky. However also
| government approved securities can be scams or bad
| investments.
| [deleted]
| vasco wrote:
| If you're willing to pay the centralisation price and you're
| just interested in the technology, you have better options -
| where at least if there's regulatory issues they haven't come
| up yet that I know off - with chains like Solana.
| bko wrote:
| I tried Solana and it wasn't nearly as open. Most contracts
| are closed source and even if you did get the source its
| difficult to confirm its correct due to a more complicated
| build process. And the devs don't really care that its
| closed. I wrote my thoughts about Solana block chain.
|
| I would love some other recommendations though. So far I
| found Binance Smart Chain to be the most open and easy to
| navigate.
|
| https://mleverything.substack.com/p/thoughts-on-the-
| solana-b...
| taylorbuley wrote:
| Weakening the separation between editorial and business
| interests is a classic mistake. Unless owners of media
| companies allow the journalists to be independent then they are
| ultimately damaging the value of their investment.
| captn3m0 wrote:
| India as well:
|
| -
| https://www.businessinsider.in/cryptocurrency/news/cryptocur...
|
| - https://qz.com/india/2108727/india-probes-binances-wazirx-
| cr...
| seibelj wrote:
| Every major news outlet gets purchased by some rich entity.
| WaPo by Bezos, Boston Globe by John Henry, Rupert Murdoch with
| WSJ... this is why it doesn't really matter if they are money-
| losing operations. Their value for pushing narrative vastly
| exceeds their P&L
| arcticbull wrote:
| I do agree, but this is particularly egregious. Like "Al
| Capone takes 20% stake in Chicago Tribune" egregious. Did
| they not notice the Sicilians when they were negotiating
| or...
| trimbo wrote:
| Murdoch actually made his money in media. What makes you
| think the WSJ would be money-losing?
| seibelj wrote:
| They don't necessarily have to be, but if I was rich and
| buying a news operation, profitability is important but I
| would also want it to push the news that I want.
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(page generated 2022-02-11 23:02 UTC)