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Executives and early investors sold shares worth $22 billion

The SPAC boom cost investors billions. Insiders in the companies that went public were on the other side of the trade.

Executives and early investors in companies that went public via SPACs sold shares worth $22 billion through well-timed trades, profiting before share prices collapsed.

Some of the biggest winners were Detroit Pistons owner Tom Gores’s investment firm Platinum Equity, British billionaire Richard Branson and convicted Nikola NKLA -4.18%decrease; red down pointing triangle founder Trevor Milton. They were among many insiders who got shares on the cheap and sold them as they rose in value, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of insider-trading disclosures associated with more than 200 companies that did SPAC deals.

Companies that went public this way have lost more than $100 billion in market value. At least 12 have filed for bankruptcy and more than 100 are running low on cash, battered by higher interest rates and rising costs.

Many executives claimed during the boom that SPAC mergers were a better way for companies to go public than traditional initial public offerings. “It’s easy to understand why executives at the companies went with this option,” said New York University Law School professor Michael Ohlrogge, who studies SPACs. “It wasn’t because it was a better financial technology—it was because it was just better for them.”

The Journal analyzed more than 460 companies that did SPAC deals and identified 232 with insider sales based on a review of Securities and Exchange Commission filings submitted through May 18. The analysis focused on disclosures made by investors who own more than 10% of a company and corporate officers and directors.

Of those with sales, insiders at 12 companies cumulatively sold shares worth at least $500 million. Insiders at about 80% of the 232 companies sold shares valued at less than $100 million, the Journal’s analysis shows. On average, insiders sold about $22 million of shares each.

One of the biggest paydays went to Platinum Equity. The private-equity firm sold shares of four companies that it had invested in before they went public via SPAC deals, generating some $2.3 billion in proceeds. Platinum Equity and Gores declined to comment.

Platinum’s biggest haul came from selling the stock of Vertiv Holdings VRT 6.65%increase; green up pointing triangle, a vendor of data-center infrastructure that was owned by Platinum before going public in 2020 through a $5.3 billion deal with a SPAC backed by Goldman Sachs.

As Platinum was selling stock in 2021 for between $20 and $25 a share, five pension funds were buying. In February 2022, Vertiv’s share price fell 37% on a single day, to $12.38, after the company announced disappointing financial results that one Deutsche Bank analyst described as “shockingly bad.” The pension funds collectively lost nearly $2.4 million.

Of those with sales, insiders at 12 companies cumulatively sold shares worth at least $500 million. Insiders at about 80% of the 232 companies sold shares valued at less than $100 million, the Journal’s analysis shows. On average, insiders sold about $22 million of shares each.

One of the biggest paydays went to Platinum Equity. The private-equity firm sold shares of four companies that it had invested in before they went public via SPAC deals, generating some $2.3 billion in proceeds. Platinum Equity and Gores declined to comment.

Platinum’s biggest haul came from selling the stock of Vertiv Holdings VRT 6.65%increase; green up pointing triangle, a vendor of data-center infrastructure that was owned by Platinum before going public in 2020 through a $5.3 billion deal with a SPAC backed by Goldman Sachs.

As Platinum was selling stock in 2021 for between $20 and $25 a share, five pension funds were buying. In February 2022, Vertiv’s share price fell 37% on a single day, to $12.38, after the company announced disappointing financial results that one Deutsche Bank analyst described as “shockingly bad.” The pension funds collectively lost nearly $2.4 million.

Branson, the company’s founder, sold nearly 75% of his shares for more than $1.4 billion before launch delays and high costs sent the stock down more than 90% from its all-time high and about 60% below the SPAC’s listing price. The proceeds of Branson’s sales were used to shore up his Virgin Group, whose travel and leisure businesses were battered by the pandemic, a spokeswoman said. Branson is still Virgin Galactic’s largest shareholder.

Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya, head of the SPAC that took Virgin Galactic public, made $310 million from selling shares of the company, filings show. He has also spent $144 million to purchase shares and exercise options.

The former Facebook executive became known as the “SPAC King” for the hundreds of millions he made during the boom across deals like Virgin Galactic and personal-finance app SoFi Technologies SOFI 3.84%increase; green up pointing triangle. A spokesman for Palihapitiya declined to comment. SPAC executives receive ultracheap shares for taking companies public that increase their returns.

Also called a blank-check company, a SPAC is a shell firm that lists publicly with the sole intent of merging with a private company to take it public. After regulators approve the deal, the company going public replaces the SPAC in the stock market.

Insiders made more than $200 million at many other startups that merged with SPACs, including fuel-cell truck upstart Nikola, self-driving car technology maker Luminar Technologies LAZR 1.67%increase; green up pointing triangle and online gaming company Skillz.

Much of Nikola’s roughly $450 million in share sales went to founder Trevor Milton, who resigned from the company amid allegations of fraud in September 2020. The next year, Milton sold about $374 million of stock for a weighted-average price of about $11. He was convicted of securities fraud last October. Shares have since dropped below $1. A Nikola spokeswoman declined to comment.

Luminar is led by 28-year-old chief executive Austin Russell, who recently led a bid to acquire business-media outlet Forbes. It went public through a SPAC backed by private-equity billionaire Alec Gores, the brother of Platinum Equity’s Tom Gores.

Russell took in $220 million selling some of his Luminar shares in July 2021 at a price of $21 a share, filings show. The sale was to institutional investors in a private placement, a spokeswoman said. On Friday, Luminar shares closed at $6.68. Russell also paid $31 million to buy shares in 2022 and 2023, at an average cost of $6.81 per share. Russell’s compensation is tied to the stock’s performance.

Two of Alec Gores’s SPACs took companies owned by his brother’s Platinum Equity public, and the Gores brothers recused themselves from negotiations. Insiders have made about $700 million in sales from one of those companies, Verra Mobility VRRM 0.23%increase; green up pointing triangle, a technology provider for fleet management. Tom Gores’s Platinum Equity accounted for most of those sales. Verra is another rare case where the stock has risen after its SPAC deal.

“These company owners were aware the valuation the SPAC was giving them was exceptionally generous,” Ohlrogge said. “It’s a no-brainer to take advantage of that.”

Can Centerview Partners become the next Goldman Sachs?

Centerview contemplates its next chapter

In the early days of Centerview Partners, talks with sought-after clients often ended in rejection. Despite its well-connected co-founders, hailing from Wall Street’s most powerful banks and law firms, the boutique advisory was little known outside of financial circles.

Robert Rubin, the former US Treasury secretary and longtime Goldman Sachs executive, said that when he joined Centerview as a senior counsellor in 2010, the company had to offer to complete projects for free to prove itself.

But that was then. After years of spectacular success, the firm — often compared to Lazard or Goldman before their respective IPOs — is on the cusp of greatness.

If it doesn’t get in its own way, that is.

Part of Centerview’s mystique comes from the fact that it has, until recently, largely avoided the kinds of internal rifts that have hamstrung Wall Street’s biggest players.

The 2008 financial crisis provided a lucrative opening for boutique operators like Centerview as corporations began to rethink getting their M&A advice from the same sprawling financial institutions peddling risky financial products.

Centerview emerged as a safer and more jovial alternative to big banks with potential ulterior motives or exposure to bad trades from other parts of the business. It also boasted a formidable roster of dealmakers under founding partners, Blair Effron and Robert Pruzan.

But a bitter legal battle between the pair and David Handler, who joined the New York-based boutique investment bank in 2008 as one of its first partners, has shown a rare rupture inside a firm best known on Wall Street for its collegial culture.

Handler resigned from the firm in August, before starting legal proceedings and announcing he was launching his own technology boutique Tidal Partners — taking nearly a dozen junior and senior Centerview bankers along with him in the process.

The feud, detailed in this Big Read by DD’s Sujeet Indap and James Fontanella-Khan, isn’t the only problem weighing on the firm.

Like many of its boutique investment banking peers, Centerview faces the ultimate question: to list, or not to list.

Large underwriters have repeatedly pitched Centerview on an IPO that could potentially value the group at more than $5bn. The founders have demurred so far, in part to protect the firm’s ethos.

Perhaps they’ve also seen what can happen when it goes wrong.

France’s Rothschild & Co decided this year to depart the public market amid a global slump in dealmaking. Investment banking pioneer Greenhill & Co is preparing to sell to Japan’s Mizuho Financial Group, meanwhile, rival Lazard is grappling with its laggard share price and steep lay-offs (more on that later.)

Nevertheless, Centerview leads the pack among boutique advisory peers in terms of dominating blockbuster deals.

But will it be enough? As one former partner put it to DD, Centerview is “too big now for what they were good at, but too small for what they want to be”.

As the dealmaking slump weighs on its larger publicly listed rivals, Centerview is for now better off under the control of its uber-connected circle of dealmakers.

So long as the internal power struggles end with Handler.

Accounting rules mean mergers would lead to assets being revalued at significantly lower levels

Rising interest rates have set back European bank mergers and acquisitions by at least two years, dealmakers warn, as a punitive feature of accounting rules means a long-awaited consolidation in the sector faces even higher hurdles.

Dealmakers had bet higher rates would provide more cash for acquisitions as banks benefited from better margins and a boost to their share prices as profitability improved.

Many had also hoped UBS’s state-sponsored rescue of Credit Suisse could spark similar deals between other national champions.

However, banks across the continent have vast stocks of corporate and consumer loans, as well as government debt, that were sold in a much lower-rate environment. As part of any acquisition, those assets would have to be marked to market and valued significantly lower than newer loans issued at more lucrative rates.

“Accounting rules and their impact on capital are a big hindrance for M&A at the moment,” said Dirk Lievens, head of the European financial institutions group at Goldman Sachs.

Under international accounting rules, once a takeover is complete, the acquired company’s assets and liabilities are reappraised at market rates under a process that is known as the purchase price allocation.

If a company is bought for less than the value of its assets — as most European banks are traded — the acquirer benefits from an accounting gain known as negative goodwill, or badwill. But that gain can be wiped out if the asset values drop as part of the purchase price allocation process.

“With rates rising, you have negative fair value adjustment when marking assets to market upon acquisition and part of the badwill evaporates,” said Lievens.

He added: “If you are buying a bank at a discount to book value and the purchase price allocation reduces that, what you thought was capital — ie badwill — is not capital any more. You would then have to top up the capital, which makes doing bank deals more complicated at the moment.”

The speed of the increases in the UK and Europe have also contributed to the accounting issues. A slower pace would have meant a higher proportion of the loans books would have been refinanced over time, easing the capital impact.

For more than a decade, almost every major European lender has traded at a discount to the book value of their assets as they struggle with high costs and low profitability.

Investors, regulators and politicians all called for consolidation in the fragmented industry with multiple combinations explored, from UniCredit buying Société Générale or Deutsche Bank absorbing its domestic rival Commerzbank.

But none made it over the line until UBS’s enforced takeover of Credit Suisse in March. That deal was subject to a $13bn fair value adjustment, reducing UBS’s badwill gain, the bank reported this month.

“The combination of rapidly rising rates and fair value accounting treatment has created a near-term obstacle to bank M&A,” said Andreas Lindh, co-head of the Emea financial institutions group at JPMorgan.

“Accounting rules stipulate that acquirers have to make fair value adjustments to targets’ assets and liabilities at the time of acquisition, an issue that is particularly pronounced for long-dated loans and hold to maturity securities written or acquired at significantly lower rates.

“The negative fair value adjustments creates an upfront capital headwind for the acquirer making the M&A maths less appealing.”

One of the few major deals that had been struck in Europe is foundering for this reason.

In June 2021 — when the ECB rate was zero — US private equity group Cerberus agreed to buy HSBC’s French consumer business for a token €1.

However, last month the bank warned Cerberus may pull out of the deal because “significant, unexpected” rate rises to 3.5 per cent meant “related fair value accounting treatment on acquisition . . . will significantly increase the amount of capital required”.

The major issue is long-dated consumer loans, particularly 30-year mortgages, that make up the bulk of the €21.5bn lending book, said a person familiar with the matter.

Cerberus would have to mark to market the mortgages that were issued with base rates at zero, leaving them valued considerably lower than those currently being issued at higher rates of interest.

Therefore in order to secure regulatory approval for the deal, it would have to inject more capital on day one. While over time the mortgage book would become more lucrative as it is refinanced and repriced, the steep initial impact could cause Cerberus to withdraw.

The two sides are in negotiations to see if there is some way to mitigate the capital impact for Cerberus with an alternate deal structure, but a person involved described the deal as “in the balance”.

While the logic for combinations remains the same, the rise in rates mean most executives are opting to use their excess capital not for deals, but to pay dividends and repurchase their own stock.

UniCredit chief executive Andrea Orcel — a career dealmaker who made his reputation facilitating huge mergers during the financial crisis 15 years ago — has eschewed several potential deals both domestically and internationally, saying that in the current environment “no deal makes sense”.

Instead, with UniCredit’s stock trading at a 40 per cent discount to its book value, Orcel has instead been repeatedly increasing a share buyback programme.

While a “deal would not derail UniCredit’s buyback capacity in the near-term given [its] strong starting position . . . [b]uybacks remain a low-risk way for UniCredit to deploy capital. Management’s disciplined approach to date provides comfort,” said Jefferies analyst Benjie Creelan-Sandford.

Connecting wind and solar farms to tomorrow’s electricity-hungry customers will require huge investment

How soon the world reaches net zero carbon emissions depends on how quickly it can put up solar panels and wind turbines, adopt electric vehicles, and install heat pumps. But there is another, often overlooked, piece of the puzzle: the power lines required to transport all the new renewable electricity from where it will be produced to where it will be consumed.

That is going to be a massive capital project. The global network of cables will need to double in length between now and 2050, say analysts at research provider BloombergNEF, to reach 152mn kilometres — roughly the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Achieving that will require some $21tn of investments by 2050.

Or, to put it another way, “the network will soak up 30 per cent of all the investment required by the energy transition”, according to Lord Adair Turner, chair of the Energy Transitions Commission, a business coalition pushing for net zero. 

Tomorrow’s network will need to be very different from the one we have today, in terms both of its size and its shape.

“The grid will have to evolve to carry a lot more electricity,” Turner says. “As we phase out fossil fuels and switch to EVs and heat pumps, electricity is going to account for almost 70 per cent of the global energy mix, up from 20 per cent today.”

In the UK, net zero scenarios see electricity consumption increasing from the current 300TWh to around 650TWh by 2050. In the EU, annual electricity demand is forecast to more than double from 3,000TWh today to 6,800TWh by 2050. Peak demand will rise by more, as the electricity system increasingly supplies winter heat.

The way electricity is generated will change, too. The network evolved to transport electricity from a few big coal or gas plants, located near big towns. In net zero economy, it will need to carry electricity from myriad smaller-scale renewable developments, located where there is a lot of sun or wind. For the UK, the North Sea will be a key producing area. In Italy, electricity will be generated in the sunnier south.

From an infrastructure perspective, that has two implications. The first is that the grid’s main trunk-lines will need to be reinforced, so that it can transfer additional electricity from, say, Scotland to London. And the second is that networks will need to build a lot of new connections to link smaller developments to the grid. Both objectives are challenging.

Big grid projects take a long time to build. The UK has managed to add some 4GW of new transfer capacity to the grid over the past decade. Over the next decade, it needs to build 17GW, according to energy research company Aurora. National Grid ESO, which runs Great Britain’s electricity system, reckons the country will need to invest at least £50bn in its electricity transmission network by 2030.

The whole cycle, from planning to permitting, through procurement and construction, lasts more than a decade. That may be compressible — for instance, by streamlining the permitting process. But there are those who believe that, to have any chance of the grid being ready on time, we need a radically different approach.

“Regulation has been looking out of the back window,” says Sir Dieter Helm, professor of economic policy at the University of Oxford. “Its main objective has been to minimise cost, which means it has only allowed the network operator to build where demand was already visible.”

Instead, the system operator should look at a map and come up with its own plan of how the network should evolve, Helm suggests. “We know where renewable electricity is going to be produced and where it is going to be consumed, and can start to make the required investments,” he says.

The downside is that the cost of infrastructure is spread across each unit of electricity consumed. If providers build ahead of new demand then, in the initial stages, existing consumers will pay the cost of the new infrastructure, too.

The second leg of the infrastructure challenge, connecting lots of small power generators to the grid, is also running late. Only 4 per cent of grid applications made from 2018 to 2021 have so far resulted in a connection, says Aurora.

This implies projects that might already be able to contribute to the country’s energy consumption are being held up. New projects applying today are being quoted connection times into the next decade. “We have a project in Durham where connection is scheduled for 2036,” says Greg Jackson, chief executive of power supplier Octopus Energy. “No one is going to wait 13 years.”

The snarl-up in connections to the UK network seems to be a largely self-inflicted problem. The queue operates on a first-come first-served basis, and there are limited penalties for not delivering projects. That means joining the queue is a free option. “It is the Hotel California of queues, where no one ever leaves,” says Dan Monzani, UK managing director of Aurora.

As a result, as of February 2023, the UK had 83GW of connected generation and a further 257GW of generation in the queue. That’s a lot of backlog, and more than the new generation capacity that the country actually needs. National Grid modelling suggests that the UK needs only 123-147GW of new generation to be connected to the grid by 2030 to be on the pathway for net zero power by 2035.

This has sparked debate on the governance of the queue. The grid has tried to make it easier for projects that are unlikely to be built to relinquish their place. Octopus Energy has also proposed that more advanced projects be allowed to queue-jump.

Such problems are not confined to the UK, though. Connections are a big problem in the US, where there are more than 2,000GW of projects — more than all of the existing power generation fleet — seeking to link up to the grid, according to the US energy department’s Lawrence Berkeley national laboratory.

In Germany, where wind power comes from the north of the country and big demand centres are located in the south, long planning and permitting times mean there is insufficient grid capacity connecting the two. That is already leading to some renewable power being curtailed.

“Unless the world’s networks evolve at pace, they risk being a major bottleneck for the energy transition,” Turner says.

Chip group’s boss unveils new platform to help tech groups build generative artificial intelligence models

Nvidia’s chief executive hailed a new era of computing in which “everyone is a programmer”, as the world’s most valuable semiconductor group unveiled a new supercomputer platform to stay at the forefront of the artificial intelligence revolution.

In his first in-person public address since the start of the pandemic Jensen Huang warned that the traditional tech industry would not keep pace with AI’s advancements, adding that the technology had dramatically lowered the barrier to entry to computer coding.

“Everyone is a programmer now. You just have to say something to the computer,” Huang said in Taiwan on Monday, describing the combination of accelerated computing and generative AI as “a reinvention from the ground up”.

He added: “We have reached the tipping point of a new computing era,” arguing that AI now enabled individuals to create programmes simply by plugging in commands.

ChatGPT can generate code, cutting the human labour required to create software, a development set to revolutionise programming.

Huang’s speech to the Computex conference in Taipei came days after Nvidia revealed forecasts of rapid sales growth, fuelling a share price surge that put it on course to become the world’s first trillion-dollar semiconductor stock.

The chipmaker’s share price has risen 172 per cent since the start of the year as the explosion of Open AI’s ChatGPT awakened investor enthusiasm for generative AI.

Demand has soared for Nvidia’s data centre chips, including the H100, an advanced graphics processor unit (GPU) that substantially cuts the time required to train so-called large language models such as ChatGPT. 

The vast amount of open-source software available online has also provided a fertile training ground for code-generating AI systems. OpenAI’s Codex system, trained partly on open-source software, gives software developers prompts with suggestions of which lines of code to write next.

GitHub, a Microsoft service for developers, which harnesses Codex, said the platform had halved the time it took to create new code, a huge leap in efficiency after a decade of largely ineffective efforts to bolster productivity.

Huang also announced a new AI supercomputer platform called DGX GH200 to assist tech companies in building generative AI models akin to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Meta, Microsoft and Google Cloud are among the first clients expected to access the supercomputer.

Taiwan-born Huang unveiled a new powerful GPU for gaming and an AI platform for developers to create games with online avatars that mimic players’ behaviours.

“This is the future of video games. AI will contribute to the rendering and synthesis of the environment, but it will also animate the characters,” he said. 

Nvidia also announced a tie-up with Japan’s SoftBank to bring its super chip to the tech group’s data centres in the country, as it seeks to embed data centre operators’ reliance on its products. 

Nvidia’s success in developing products to power advancements in AI has put it in the crosshairs of US export controls designed to curb Chinese technological progress.

Washington banned shipments of the A100 chip — the predecessor to the H100 — to China last October as it widened trade restrictions from specific blacklisted companies. 

The Financial Times reported that Chinese AI companies under sanctions had continued to access A100 chips through third-party data centres, underscoring the challenge of curtailing trade of critical components.

Huang was born in the southern Taiwanese city of Tainan before eventually moving to the US, where he co-founded Nvidia in 1993 after working as a microprocessor designer at Advanced Micro Devices.

An experimental treatment developed at Israel's Hadassah-University Medical Center has a 90% success rate at bringing patients with multiple myeloma into remission.

Hadassah-University Medical Center in Jerusalem’s Ein Kerem has announced an “unprecedented achievement” in the treatment of multiple myeloma cancer – the second-most-common hematological disease that accounts for one-tenth of all blood cancers and one percent of all types of malignancies.

The innovative treatment against the disease, which has long been considered incurable, was developed after a series of experiments carried out in the hospital’s bone marrow transplant and immunotherapy department in recent years that is headed by Prof. Polina Stepansky.

“We have a waiting list of over 200 patients from Israel and various parts of the world at any given time.”

Polina Stepansky

“Now, in light of the impressive results of CAR-T treatments, it seems that they have many more years to live – and with an excellent quality of life,” Stepansky said.

The treatment is based on genetic engineering technology, which is an effective and groundbreaking solution for patients whose life expectancy was only two years until a few years ago. They have used a genetic engineering technology called CAR-T – Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-Cell Therapy, which boosts the patient’s own immune system to destroy the cancer. Over 90% of the 74 patients treated at Hadassah went into complete remission, the oncologists said.

“We have a waiting list of over 200 patients from Israel and various parts of the world at any given time,” she continued. “Due to the complexity of the production and the complexity of the treatment itself, only one patient a week enters the treatment, which is still being conducted as an experiment.”

Asked to comment, Prof. (emeritus) Yechezkel Barenholz, a world leader in oncology research and head of membrane and liposome research lab at the Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School, said he believed the CAR-T technology is a major achievement that will make the diagnosis much easier and simpler and treatment possible.

The CAR-T cell treatment was developed and produced by Hadassah in collaboration with Prof. Cyrille Cohen, head of the immunology and immunotherapy laboratory at Bar-Ilan University (BIU) in Ramat Gan, achieves excellent results, with 90% of the patients treated so far “We have evidence of a very positive overall response rate with minimal side effects, and they are mild. These are dramatic results,” Stepansky maintained. “This is a huge hope for patients with a disease that has not yet had a cure.”

In the coming months, the experimental treatment will also be provided throughout the US.

What is the blood cancer known as multiple myeloma?

Multiple myeloma is a type of cancer of the bone marrow, which is the spongy tissue at the center of some bones that produces the body’s blood cells. The disease was named multiple myeloma because cancer often affects several areas of the body including the skull, pelvis, ribs and spine. Many times, it is suspected or diagnosed after a routine blood or urine test.

At first, it may not produce any symptoms, but as it develops, myeloma causes a wide variety of problems, including chronic bone pain; weakness, shortness of breath and fatigue resulting from anemia; high levels of calcium in the blood that can trigger symptoms including extreme thirst, stomach pain, needing to urinate frequently, confusion and constipation; weight loss, dizziness, blurred vision, or headaches; repeated infections, bruising and unusual bleeding; weak bones that fracture easily; and kidney problems.

The disease is more common in people over the age of 60; it is usually diagnosed over the age of 70 and rarely under 40; men more than women; and people with a family history of multiple myeloma

Stepansky said that the American company “Immix Bio has acquired a patent license and we are about to open a clinical trial in the US. The plan is to reach commercialization and FDA approval as a drug within a year.

The groundbreaking idea of using immune system cells to fight cancer cells was first born several decades ago at Rehovot’s Weizmann Institute of Science in Prof. Zelig Eshhar's immunology department. The development and promotion of CAR-T treatments whose function is to program the patient’s white blood cells by collecting healthy cells from the immune system has since been led by Stepansky. As part of the treatment, a process is performed to isolate the T cells, which are the active cells in the immune system that can fight tumors by themselves/

This is carried out with by apheresis, which takes donated blood components and separates the red and white blood cells. The process takes two to four hours and is similar to a regular blood donation. Later, the T cells are engineered in the Hadassah laboratory, which was built especially for this purpose according to the strictest international standards in clean rooms. In the next step, a genetic engineering procedure is performed by adding a virus along with a genetic segment that encodes a receptor against the cancer cells. Many engineered cells are then injected into the patient. In the end, the engineered T cells target the tumors and destroy the cancer.

Until now, this treatment has been available only in China and the US at a huge cost of nearly $400,000 per patient treatment, and it is very limited in its availability. Only 20% of those who need to receive it in these countries actually get it,” Stepansky said. “With the development led by the researchers at our Danny Cunniff Leukemia Research Laboratory, we were able to reduce the price dramatically and make the treatment affordable and accessible. Moreover, Hadassah developed a more sophisticated and advanced treatment than that offered in the world. As the first and only institution in Israel that develops, manufactures and delivers treatment Internal CAR-T, Hadassah is actually leading the field that will enable the development of future treatments with CAR T cells for the benefit of patients with other types of cancer,” she concluded.

Nucera has an early mover advantage

Being a legacy operator in a newly seductive sector is not an entirely comfortable experience. After decades spent in a sleepy backwater, one is suddenly surrounded by fleet-footed start-ups ready to snatch one’s territory. How big a moat does a longstanding record really provide?

That is the question investors will ask about Thyssenkrupp’s Nucera, reportedly gearing up for a long-delayed initial public offering. The business, a joint venture with Italy’s De Nora, makes electrolysers, key to the production of green hydrogen for the energy transition.

Green hydrogen could account for more than 10 per cent of the world’s energy needs in a net zero scenario. That will require a lot of electrolysers — about 5500GW by 2050, according to consultancy McKinsey.

Nucera has an early mover advantage. Consider its market position. It has 1GW of manufacturing capacity. The global is about 8GW. Yes, competitors have multiplied. Fellow German industrial conglomerate Siemens has its own electrolyser unit. Listed manufacturers include the UK’s ITM and Norway’s NE. There are also more than a hundred start-ups.

But industrialising electrolyser production is not easy, as ITM’s operational woes show. Its market value has shrunk by 90 per cent in just over three years. Meanwhile, Nucera could deliver the two largest hydrogen projects out there, Neom in Saudi Arabia and an Air Products plant in Texas.

Nucera deserves a valuation at the upper end of its peer group, which today trades between 2 and 5 times 2025 sales. At 4 times, Nucera’s €600mn to €700mn of forecast sales alone fetches about €2.6bn. Tack on the legacy business top line of €300mn for a total just shy of €3bn. That is only about half the original valuation touted for the group. But Thyssenkrupp’s two-thirds share would still be worth almost half of its market capitalisation.

The biggest question revolves around not the group’s competitive position, but the speed of the hydrogen ramp-up itself. Profits will not flow rapidly. In that event, having an established industrial backer will matter.

Le divorce très acrimonieux de Mylène et Dominique Romano, longtemps associés, notamment dans des placements boursiers et immobiliers, affecte le ban et l'arrière-ban du Paris de la finance, du droit et des affaires. Il vient de générer la pension alimentaire la plus élevée jamais attribuée en France.

Publié le 29/05/2023 à 6h20 Lecture 9 minutes Philippe Vasset

C'est une Samsonite noire de 20 kg qui, à force d'être roulée, d'audience en confrontation, dans les couloirs du tribunal de Nanterre, en est venue à symboliser le divorce le plus hors normes qu'ait eu à juger le pôle familial de l'instance. Au terme de quatre ans de procédure, le 20 février, les magistrats ont attribué à Mylène Romano, la propriétaire de la valise, une pension alimentaire de 100 000 € par mois, en attendant de statuer, plus tard dans l'année, sur le montant des prestations compensatoires que pourrait être amené à payer son mari Dominique Romano.

Que recèle le bagage pour avoir suscité une telle décision, qualifiée par les conseils de Dominique Romano de "jamais vue depuis le divorce de l'Aga Khan" en 2011 ? Une bibliothèque ambulante de près de 6 000 reçus, actes et documents divers, fruits de quatre années de recherche sur la fortune de son mari, l'un des multimillionnaires les plus discrets de France, à la fois business angel, magnat de l'immobilier à Paris et Tel Aviv et associé de l'animateur Arthur (pseudonyme de Jacques Essebag) et du financier Michaël Benabou (Financière Saint James). Eu égard à sa surface financière, ses investissements dans une vingtaine de start-ups et ses activités immobilières, son divorce mobilise le ban et l'arrière-ban du Paris des affaires, et révèle l'ampleur d'une fortune restée jusqu'à ce jour largement sous les radars.

150 millions ou 1 milliard d'euros ?

Pour éviter toute publicité intempestive, les millionnaires français préfèrent les séparations négociées. Les avocates spécialisées que sont Isabelle Copé-Bessis, qui a défendu Patricia Cahuzac, et Michèle Cahen, qui a négocié la séparation de Nicolas Sarkozy et Cécilia Sarkozy, pratiquent plus volontiers les réunions en salle capitonnée que les audiences dans les prétoires. Mais, pour s'asseoir autour d'une table, encore faut-il être prêt à discuter : entre Dominique et Mylène Romano, la séparation est tellement contestée qu'elle ne laisse aucune place à la médiation.

Depuis 2018, requêtes, contre-requêtes et constats d'huissier s'accumulent sous le regard médusé des greffiers de Nanterre. Avec, en ligne de mire, une seule question : celle de l'ampleur de la fortune de Dominique Romano, condition du montant de la pension alimentaire à laquelle peut prétendre sa femme. Lui-même évalue son patrimoine à 150 millions d'euros, mais pour son épouse et ex-associée, l'homme pèse plus d'un milliard d'euros.

"Délit d'initié en bande organisée"

A rebours de nombreux millionnaires français, actionnaires et souvent dirigeants de leurs entreprises, Dominique Romano s'est enrichi en jouant en bourse. Issus de plus-values de marchés, ses actifs sont d'autant plus difficiles à évaluer qu'ils sont éclatés entre plusieurs pays et structurés d'une manière particulièrement complexe. Une habitude prise au début des années 1990, lorsque l'Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF, alors dénommée Commission des opérations de bourse) le soupçonnait de pratiquer à grande échelle le délit d'initié. En décembre 2012, dans un long signalement au procureur de la République de Paris qu'a pu consulter La Lettre A, le secrétaire général de l'AMF Benoît de Juvigny listait pas moins de dix affaires dans lesquelles Dominique Romano était soupçonné d'avoir bénéficié de renseignement privilégié, pratique théoriquement interdite.

Dans ce courrier, le gendarme boursier expliquait que Dominique Romano opérait "en bande organisée". Il pointe également le fait qu'un de ses associés de l'époque, Cyril Krammer, fils de l'ancien directeur commercial de Technip, Georges Krammer, s'était même mis à l'abri de toute poursuite en obtenant un statut diplomatique à l'ambassade de Guinée-Bissau à Paris. Le régulateur évoque même l'usage d'un passeport ivoirien dont, selon les enquêtes de ses services, le duo Krammer-Romano aurait fait usage pour passer certains ordres de bourse. Au sein de l'AMF, deux responsables des enquêtes, Hervé Dallerac et Olivier Raynaud, ont ouvert plusieurs dizaines de dossiers d'enquête sur Domnique Romano.

Habitué à voir les équipes de Dallerac et Raynaud débarquer dans ses bureaux, dont les fenêtres dominent le parc Monceau, Dominique Romano s'est toujours défendu de tout délit de marché, arguant qu'il n'avait jamais été condamné. Ce qui n'est pas tout à fait exact : en 1999, il a dû s'acquitter d'une amende de 11 millions de francs à la suite d'une plainte pour "escroquerie" de la BNP.

Dix-sept ans plus tard, il a été contraint de verser 7,62 millions de dollars à la Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), l'équivalent américain de l'AMF, pour s'éviter des poursuites dans un dossier d'initié particulièrement rocambolesque. Il était soupçonné d'avoir eu accès, avant publication, grâce à des pirates informatiques ukrainiens, aux résultats financiers de toute une gamme de multinationales (Boeing, Netflix, Bank of America...) et d'avoir procédé à de fructueux achats anticipés d'actions. Le paiement d'une amende au régulateur américain n'a pas définitivement clos le dossier : en France, la Brigade financière s'en est saisie en 2018. Elle soupçonne Dominique Romano d'avoir blanchi les profits de ce gigantesque délit d'initié via une société enregistrée aux îles Samoa et un compte ouvert à l'UBS Monaco. La procédure est toujours en cours.

La success story d'un power couple

Son savoir-faire sur les marchés, Dominique Romano l'a en partie acquis auprès de son épouse. Lorsqu'ils se sont rencontrés au milieu des années 1980, Mylène Romano était l'une des quatre femmes à travailler au Palais Brongniart, où elle était "remisière", c'est-à-dire trader indépendante. Elle met le pied à l'étrier à Dominique Romano et a fondé avec lui une société de courtage, Louxor. A l'époque, la bourse était un monde de quinquagénaires aux doigts tachés par l'encre de la Cote Desfossés, le journal de la place, et à l'embonpoint entretenu par des déjeuners arrosés au bourgogne. Face à cet entre-soi vieillissant, le couple Romano a tranché, prospéré et s'est enrichi. Et lorsque, trente ans et cinq enfants plus tard, ils se sont séparés, chacun a retourné contre l'autre l'expertise financière acquise ensemble.

Non sans renforts. Pour le défendre, Dominique Romano s'appuie sur deux avocats proches du ministre de la justice Eric Dupond-Moretti : son ex-associé, Antoine Vey, et l'un de ses amis et ancien client, Pascal Wilhelm. En face, sa femme Mylène Romano a préféré aux ténors du barreau une magistrate en disponibilité, Shérazade Lahmeri, assistée d'analystes financiers et de détectives privés. Car depuis le premier jugement de non-conciliation, qui lui a alloué en 2018 une pension alimentaire mensuelle de 40 000 €, Mylène Romano s'évertue à démontrer que ce traitement provisoire que lui a accordé le tribunal en attendant la fixation de prestations compensatoires sous-évalue la fortune de son mari. Une démarche au départ peu appréciée des juges, bombardés de rapports financiers complexes et de demandes de réévaluation de pension qui tranchent avec les montants habituellement traités par le tribunal : dans l'une de ses requêtes, Mylène Romano exige une pension alimentaire de 400 000 euros par mois.

Gestion de fortune

Mais ses requêtes sont minutieusement étayées - Mylène Romano a été juge au tribunal de commerce - et les écarts qu'elle pointe entre la fortune déclarée de son mari et ses avoirs effectifs sont tellement conséquents que les juges du pôle familial de Nanterre ont fini, de mauvaise grâce, par prendre ses informations en compte. Depuis sa condamnation à la fin des années 1990, Dominique Romano a officiellement cessé de jouer en bourse pour se concentrer sur la gestion de son patrimoine via un family office appelée Guibor (guerrier en hébreu).

L'un de ses principaux faits d'armes est d'avoir acheté en 2001, et pour près de 100 000 €, 10 % du capital du site d'enchères en ligne Vente Privée, devenu Veepee, une participation revendue douze ans plus tard au Qatar pour une somme mille fois supérieure. Cette manne, Dominique Romano l'a réinvestie dans une trentaine de start-ups (dont Welcome to the Jungle, Cybergun et Mon Eclair) et d'immeubles de prix, parmi lesquels les murs des restaurants La Pérouse et Maison Russe (récemment rebaptisée Maison Revka) et des milliers de mètres carrés d'appartements haussmanniens. Ce sont notamment ces biens immobiliers parisiens, qui comptent un ensemble d'immeubles dénommé "cour Lafayette", que sa femme juge sous-évalués de quelque 280 millions d'euros. Une estimation qualifiée par les conseils de Dominique Romano de "fantaisiste" dans leurs écritures.

Palaces à Tel Aviv

Ces écarts de valorisation ne font qu'augmenter lorsqu'on sort de France. Dominique Romano a en effet largement investi en Géorgie (où il contrôle plusieurs immeubles du centre-ville de la capitale Tbilissi), au Tadjikistan (où il est associé au géant de l'aluminium Tajik Aluminum Co, Talco) et surtout en Israël. A Tel Aviv, il a rouvert en janvier l'un des hôtels historiques de la ville, l'Elkonin, et travaille à en installer un autre dans l'Eden, le premier cinéma du quartier huppé de Neve Tzedek. Gérées par un trustee vétéran du fisc de Tel Aviv, Ehud Barzilai, les sociétés israéliennes de Dominique Romano sont aussi propriétaires de murs de bureaux, de boutiques et de supermarchés dans le pays, et détiennent même un "kiosk", l'une de ces échoppes en planches qui servaient, dans les années 1920, de débit de boissons et qui sont aujourd'hui des cafés branchés.

Jusqu'en 2019, Dominique Romano possédait également un immeuble de 6 500 m2 sur le très convoité front de mer de Tel Aviv, qu'il a revendu plus de 50 millions d'euros au milliardaire russe Roman Abramovitch. En tout, le cabinet d'analyse financière AS Capital, mandaté par Mylène Romano, évalue ces actifs israéliens à près de 300 millions d'euros, quand Dominique Romano lui-même ne déclare, sur les mêmes biens, que 20 millions d'euros.

L'écheveau de son patrimoine est si embrouillé que quelques miettes de l'empire Romano ont échappé aux limiers de son épouse. C'est le cas d'un opulent éco-lodge situé dans une réserve sud-africaine ultraprivée. Le cadre est somptueux, et le voisinage choisi : la polémiste Caroline Fourest possède également une résidence dans cette gated community. Dominique Romano a largement contribué au budget de 4,8 millions d'euros de Sœurs d'armes, le film qu'a réalisé Fourest en 2019 sur les combattantes kurdes, et les armes utilisées par les acteurs dans le film sont des répliques fabriquées par Cybergun, l'une des start-ups qu'il détient. Avant d'approcher Dominique Romano, Caroline Fourest s'était d'ailleurs adressée à sa femme Mylène pour financer son film, avant de se raviser à l'annonce de la séparation du couple.

Un feuilleton communautaire

Le divorce des Romano est, non seulement, un bras de fer patrimonial et financier, mais aussi un tsunami communautaire. Jusqu'à leur rupture, Mylène et Dominique Romano étaient des piliers des organisations portant la voix des juifs de France. Comptant parmi les initiateurs, en 2005, de la Fondation France-Israël, Dominique Romano est également, depuis 2019, l'actionnaire majoritaire de Radio J et de Judaïques FM, ainsi que de l'hebdomadaire Actualité juive.

Membre du comité directeur du Conseil représentatif des institutions juives de France (CRIF), il a été l'un des rares financiers français à rencontrer le premier ministre israélien Benjamin Netanyahu lors de sa visite à Paris en février. Autant de responsabilités qui justifient, à ses yeux, la présence d'un garde du corps à ses côtés, ainsi que des investissements dans des sociétés de sécurité, parmi lesquelles Gray Security, fondée à l'origine pour prendre en charge la sécurité de l'escale parisienne de la compagnie israélienne El Al. Une ambition qui ne s'est, au final, jamais concrétisée.

Mais le cercle de Dominique Romano ne se limite pas aux politiques et aux responsables communautaires. Outre l'animateur Arthur et Michaël Benabou, il compte parmi ses proches Alain Madar et Jean Madar (Interparfums, Foncière du Rond Point), et Julien Sorbac (Veepee). Tous sont à la fois des partenaires d'affaires, souvent depuis ses débuts à la bourse de Paris, des co-investisseurs dans des start-ups ou des projets immobiliers, et des amis. Le réseau de Dominique Romano s'étend jusque dans le cinéma : il est remercié au générique de La Vérité si je mens 3, qui s'inspire pour partie de ses démêlés avec un douanier reconverti dans le délit d'initié, Laurent Pastor.

"Une opacité certaine"

A mesure que la séparation entre les époux Romano est devenue de plus en plus orageuse, les membres de ce cercle élargi ont choisi leur camp. Et c'est le plus souvent celui de Dominique Romano, qui a refait sa vie avec la décoratrice Adriana Schor, nièce du promoteur immobilier Ely-Michel Ruimy. Les deux hommes sont associés dans un projet hôtelier à Tel Aviv.

Au fil des années, Mylène Romano s'est trouvée de moins en moins conviée aux galas et fêtes qui rythment la vie de la communauté. Une mise à l'écart à laquelle le jugement du tribunal de Nanterre du 20 février n'a rien arrangé : pour justifier leur décision d'attribuer une pension alimentaire de 100 000 euros par mois avec effet rétroactif jusqu'en 2021 à Mylène Romano, les juges arguent que la situation financière de Dominique Romano est "bien au-delà de ce qu'il a pu déclarer lors de l'ordonnance de non-conciliation" et qu'il maintient "une opacité certaine sur sa situation financière réelle". Ils soulignent également que le financier déduit de ses impôts les sommes versées à son épouse, alors que celle-ci reverse au fisc 45 % des sommes reçues.

La contre-attaque ne s'est pas fait attendre : Dominique Romano a refusé d'exécuter le jugement et immédiatement fait appel. Ses avocats ont appelé à la rescousse les experts-comptables de Ricol Lasteyrie, qui ont estimé que leur client "ne disposait pas de la trésorerie nécessaire" pour s'acquitter de la pension attribuée à sa femme et qu'il devrait gagner 2 millions d'euros par mois pour faire face à cette obligation. Une affirmation largement relativisée par les derniers résultats financiers publiés de Guibor, qui montrent que le family office a accumulé 86 millions d'euros de dividendes en 2020, à ce jour non distribués.

Jensen Huang wants to bring generative AI to every data center, the Nvidia co-founder and CEO said during Computex in Taipei today. During the speech, Huang’s first public speech in almost four years he said, he made a slew of announcements, including chip release dates, its DGX GH200 super computer and partnerships with major companies. Here’s all the news from the two-hour-long keynote.

1. Nvidia’s GForce RTX 4080 Ti GPU for gamers is now in full production and being produced in “large quantities” with partners in Taiwan.

2. Huang announced the Nvidia Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) for Games, an customizable AI model foundry service with pre-trained models for game developers. It will give NPCs more character through AI-powered language interactions.

3. Nvidia Cuda computing model now serves four million developers and more than 3,000 applications. Cuda seen 40 million downloads, including 25 million just last year alone.

4. Full volume production of GPU server HGX H100 has begun and is being manufactured by “companies all over Taiwan,” Huang said. He added it is the world’s first computer that has a transformer engine in it.

5. Huang referred to Nvidia’s 2019 acquisition of supercomputer chipmaker Mellanox for $6.9 billion as “one of the greatest strategic decisions” it has ever made.

6. Production of the next generation of Hopper GPUs will start in August 2024, exactly two years after the first generation started manufacture.

7. Nvidia’s GH200 Grace Hopper is now in full production. The superchip boosts 4 PetaFIOPS TE, 72 Arm CPUs connected by chip-to-chip link, 96GB HBM3 and 576 GPU memory. Huang described as the world’s first accelerated computing processor that also has a giant memory: “this is a computer, not a chip.” It is designed for high-resilience data center applications.

8. If the Grace Hopper’s memory is not enough, Nvidia has the solution—the DGX GH200. It’s made by first connecting eight Grace Hoppers together with three NVLINK Switches, then connecting the pods together at 900GB together. Then finally, 32 are joined together, with another layer of switches, to connect a total of 256 Grace Hopper chips. The resulting ExaFLOPS Transformer Engine has 144 TB GPU memory and functions as a giant GPU. Huang said the Grace Hopper is so fast it can run the 5G stack in software. Google Cloud, Meta and Microsoft will be the first companies to have access to the DGX GH200 and will perform research into its capabilities.

9. Nvidia and SoftBank have entered into a partnership to introduce the Grace Hopper superchip into SoftBank’s new distributed data centers in Japan. They will be able to host generative AI and wireless applications in a multi-tenant common server platform, reducing costs and energy.

10. The SoftBank-Nvidia partnership will be based on Nvidia MGX reference architecture, which is currently being used in partnership with companies in Taiwan. It gives system manufacturers a modular reference architecture to help them build more than 100 server variations for AI, accelerated computing and omniverse uses. Companies in the partnership include ASRock Rack, Asus, Gigabyte, Pegatron, QCT and Supermicro.

11. Huang announced the Spectrum-X accelerated networking platform to increase the speed of Ethernet-based clouds. It includes the Spectrum 4 switch, which has 128 ports of 400GB per second and 51.2T per second. The switch is designed to enable a new type of Ethernet, Huang said, and was designed end-to-end to do adaptive routing, isolate performance and do in-fabric computing. It also includes the Bluefield 3 Smart Nic, which connects to the Spectrum 4 switch to perform congestion control.

12. WPP, the largest ad agency in the world, has partnered with Nvidia to develop a content engine based on Nvidia Omniverse. It will be capable of producing photos and video content to be used in advertising.

13. Robot platform Nvidia Isaac ARM is now available for anyone who wants to build robots, and is full-stack, from chips to sensors. Isaac ARM starts with a chip called Nova Orin and is the first robotics full-reference stack, said Huang.

Thanks in large to its importance in AI computing, Nvidia’s stock has soared over the past year, and it is currently has a market valuation of about $960 billion, making it one of the most valuable companies in the world (only Apple, Microsoft, Saudi Aramco, Alphabet and Amazon are ranked higher).

China’s AI firms are no doubt closely watching the state-of-the-art silicon Nvidia is bringing to the table. Meanwhile, they probably dread another round of U.S. chip bans that threaten to undermine their advancement in generative AI, which requires significantly more computing power and data than previous generations of AI

The U.S. government last year restricted Nvidia from selling its A100 and H100 graphic processing units to China. Both chips are used for training large language models like OpenAI’s GPT-4. H100, its latest generation chip based on the Nvidia Hopper GPU computing architecture with its built-in Transformer Engine, is seeing particularly strong demand. Compared to A100, H100 is able to offer 9x faster AI training and up to 30x faster AI inference on LLMs.

China is obviously too big a market to miss. The chip export ban would cost Nvidia an estimated $400 million in potential sales in the third quarter of last year alone. Nvidia thus resorted to selling China a slower chip that meets U.S. export control rules. But in the long term, China will probably look for more robust alternatives, and the ban serves as a poignant reminder for China to achieve self-reliance in key tech sectors.

As Huang recently said in an interview with the Financial Times: “If [China] can’t buy from … the United States, they’ll just build it themselves. So the US has to be careful. China is a very important market for the technology industry.”