TheChek News Flow

Musk’s money manager, Jared Birchall, reached out to potential investors this week, offering shares of Twitter at the same price, $54.20, that Musk paid to take the company private in October, according to the report.

Twitter and Musk did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comments.

Musk sold another $3.6 billion worth of shares in Tesla earlier this week, making it nearly $40 billion worth of shares in the electric-vehicle company sold this year.

The sale is the second big chunk of Tesla stock the billionaire has cashed out since his $44 billion purchase of Twitter in October, despite saying in April that he was done selling the electric-vehicle company’s shares.

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Meanwhile, Twitter has seen advertisers flee amid worries about Musk’s approach to policing tweets, hitting revenues and its ability to pay interest on the $13 billion debt that Musk took on to buy the social media company.

Ross Gerber, a Tesla investor who said he put less than $1 million in Musk’s original takeover of Twitter, confirmed that he was contacted Thursday evening about another funding round, Semafor reported.

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The real estate tycoon slipped down a stairwell while visiting friends in the French Riviera.

Russian real estate tycoon Dmitry Zelenov passed away earlier this month after tumbling down a flight of stairs while visiting friends in the French Riviera, according to a local outlet and an independent Russian outlet.

The French newspaper Var Matin reported Sunday that Zelenov, 50, had been dining with friends in Antibes on Dec. 9 when he suddenly became unwell, falling down a flight of stairs and suffering critical head injuries. He succumbed while receiving treatment at the Hospital Pasteur in Nice.

Baza, an independent news channel on Telegram, reported that Zelenov had toppled over a railing and hit his head. Authorities informed the oligarch’s friends around 7 a.m. the following morning that he’d died without regaining consciousness.

The channel also said it was “known” that Zelenov had previously undergone vascular surgery for unspecified heart problems.

The Antibes Police Department is currently investigating Zelenov’s cause of death, according to Var Matin.

The 50-year-old was the former owner of Russian developer Don-Stroy, which constructed the 61-story Triumph Palace Tower in Moscow, one of the tallest residential structures in Europe. Before the company fell under the control of Russia’s state-owned bank VTB after succumbing to the 2008 financial crisis, Zelenov’s net worth was estimated at $1.4 billion, landing him on the Forbes list of Russian billionaires.

Zelenov is the latest in a long line of top figures in the Russian oil, gas, technology, and financial sectors to meet suspicious and untimely ends—the most recent being Anatoly Gerashchenko.

The former head of Moscow’s Aviation Institute (MAI), Gerashchenko took a mysterious fall “from a great height” at the organization’s headquarters in September. The institute’s press office called the 73-year-old’s death “the result of an accident.”

A fortnight before Gerashchenko’s death, 39-year-old Ivan Pechorin, an executive appointed by Russian President Vladimir Putin to help oversee development in the Arctic, himself took a strange fall off a moving boat off the Russian coast. And two weeks before that, Ravil Maganov, the chairman of Russia’s second-largest oil company, died after purportedly falling out of a hospital window, plummeting six stories to the ground.

L Catterton is seeing more opportunity in the plus-size market.

The investment giant, which bills itself as the world’s largest fund focused on the consumer sector, has taken a stake in BloomChic, a digital-first fashion line for women wearing sizes 10 to 30.

The size of the investment was not disclosed, but the connection is intended to position BloomChic, founded in 2021, for the next stage of its growth.

Bill Hu, founder and chief executive officer of BloomChic, said, “L Catterton has an impressive track record of helping companies to build iconic brands, broaden product suites, enter new geographic markets and attract talent.”

BloomChic has offices across Greater China and California and is targeting shoppers in the U.S., Canada, Australia and Europe.

L Catterton, which has investments in Birkenstock, Savage x Fenty and many others, can lend its expertise in consumer insights and operations to help boost the brand, which is part of the broader trend toward body positivity.

Plus-size fashion has long been seen as an opportunity in fashion, but one that’s proven to be hard to tap into.

Scott Chen, a managing partner at L Catterton, said, “BloomChic’s product quality and range sets it apart from others in the plus-size womenswear market. Most brands that seek to tap this market simply offer enlarged versions of their existing offerings, with little consideration for body shapes, fit and comfort. Their products also do not cater for as wide a spectrum of customers as BloomChic’s.

“BloomChic’s community-building initiatives — especially the in-person events it organizes for customers to provide feedback — have also demonstrated that it believes the plus-size voice should be heard and valued,” he said. “This has resonated with the community as society increasingly embraces female empowerment, body positivity and social inclusion.”

The opportunity is significant.

L Catterton noted that about two-thirds of women in the U.S. wear size 14 and above, but that less than half of the apparel market is made up of larger looks, with only about 2 percent of women’s apparel stores focused on the category.

Globally, the plus-size women’s market was pegged at $186 billion in 2020, with the U.S. seen as about 45 percent of that and on track to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 3 to 5 percent, twice the pace of the country’s overall women’s apparel market.

BloomChic has what the company described as a “data-driven product development process” that finds trending colors, patterns and fabrics while taking different body shapes into consideration.

New looks are tested in small batches.

“There is a very real need for women of all sizes to be and feel seen, uplifted by fashion,” said Freya Hu, BloomChic’s chief product officer. “It is our mission to fulfill this need. We are only at the start of our journey and are incredibly excited about what’s to come.”

An array of products, activations and campaigns will unfurl throughout the first half of 2023.

Louis Vuitton is going dotty — on a global scale.

In its most extensive collaboration with a fine artist to date, the luxury giant is rolling out ready-to-wear, leather goods, accessories and even perfumes done in collaboration with Yayoi Kusama, along with dedicated campaigns and a host of high-profile activations.

Steven Meisel’s images of Gisele Bündchen, Liya Kebede, Devon Aoki, Christy Turlington, Anok Yai and other famous models break on Dec. 26 in Japanese fashion magazines. The first products drop on Jan. 1 in Japan and China, considered a pre-launch, and should be in all 460 Louis Vuitton boutiques worldwide on Jan. 6.

Delphine Arnault, who as Vuitton’s executive vice president supervises all of its product-related activities, described the collaboration as a meeting of two like-minded design studios and workshops obsessed with perfection in concept, execution and craft.

In an interview at Vuitton headquarters in Paris, with its staggering views of the Seine River, Arnault said the project was a year and a half in the making, conceived and realized in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic via Zoom and file-sharing technology linking the French capital and Tokyo, where the 93-year-old artist is based.

“One of the aspects of her work is happiness, and we thought it would be really refreshing after the pandemic to have the worlds of Vuitton and the world of Kusama meet again,” she said, alluding to an initial, successful first collaboration in 2012.

Vuitton began teasing the latest hookup last May, when Nicolas Ghesquière, the brand’s artistic director of women’s collections, accessorized some of his cruise 2023 outfits with polka-dot handbags.

The pace has quickened in recent weeks. A Tokyo takeover involved landmarks such as the Tokyo Tower, Zojoji Temple and Tokyo station with a mix of physical installations and augmented reality activations.

“The reaction was amazing,” Arnault enthused.

Indeed, an Instagram post of the anamorphic billboard Vuitton installed in Tokyo’s bustling Shinjuku district has racked up more than 10 million views. It depicts Kusama peering out from a decorated Vuitton trunk with some animated fruit friends.

Meanwhile, other posts on Instagram, where Vuitton counts more than 50 million followers, have shown Kusama handing spotted gourds to Dutch model Rianne Van Rompaey, one of the campaign faces, who also appears to be standing on top of the artist’s signature bright-red bob hairstyle.

Arnault hinted at other citywide takeovers in Paris, London and New York next year. “It’s really important to communicate globally, but also do work locally,” she said, promising “some surprises” in different parts of each city, along with pop-ups, pop-ins, augmented reality features and even a gaming app.

A second drop of products is scheduled for March 31, to be backed by another ad campaign still under wraps.

Kusama is best known for her obsession with polka dots, which she has painted since age 10 and applied to canvases, tree trunks, entire rooms and even people. She has also done collages, soft sculptures and performance art.

Known for her exacting approach — each dot in her “infinity” paintings is painstakingly placed — Kusama is a prolific artist who has had a hand in the conceptual, feminist, minimalist, surrealist, pop and abstract art movements since her first appearance on the scene in the 1950s.

Arnault lauded Kusama as one of the most famous female artists working today, and one of the most important artists to emerge from Japan.

“It’s a very inclusive art,” she said. “It speaks to everyone — it can speak to a child; it can speak to an intellectual. It’s not too hard to understand, although it’s very complex.”

Huge lines form whenever museums feature one of Kusama’s “Infinity Mirror Rooms,” which allow viewers to gaze upon endless reflections of colorful lights.

Arnault marveled that Kusama’s art has been so prescient of today’s appetite for immersive experiences, and works that are so irresistibly Instagrammable and shareable.

The Vuitton collaboration encompasses Kusama’s “infinity dots” and metal dots, first introduced in 1966, along with floral and pumpkin motifs.

Arnault pulled out a Capucine leather bag, one of the most expensive items in the range at 8,800 euros, and a petite Alma canvas bag, each of them covered with colorful, but irregular dots.

“We have a sense for perfection, for detail, for creativity, for innovation, and we felt that the studio of Mrs. Kusama was speaking the same language,” Arnault explained, a smile spreading over her face. “She has an obsession with the dot. And we have an obsession with the monogram.”

Vuitton’s repetitive design, with the LV initials interspersed with stylized flowers, first debuted on trunks in 1896 and has become one of its most potent, and popular, brand signifiers.

Arnault explained that Vuitton’s teams were tasked with reproducing the dots Kusama once hand-painted on a trunk. After countless trials, they achieved the desired effect: The dots seem to float on the leather goods, glistening here and there as if Kusama had just lifted her brush from each circle, the paint still wet.

“Everything was done with extreme precision,” she stressed. “What’s amazing about working with artists is that they really push the boundaries… It makes us even better and pushes also our boundaries.”

She motioned toward a photo on the wall of a wonky, top-handle Vuitton handbag by architect Frank Gehry, one of six “iconoclasts” tapped for a 2014 collaboration.

“There’s not one straight line on that bag, so for the atelier, that was a super big challenge,” she recalled.

Arnault described a massive, companywide effort to realize the Kusama project, which involved every product department and the company’s supply-chain, industrial, design, marketing, retail, communications and visual merchandising teams. Kusama’s dots will even invade the brand’s dot-com business, with a temporary makeover slated for its online store.

Artistic collaborations stretch back more than a century at Vuitton, to the founder’s grandson Gaston-Louis Vuitton, who conscripted artists and designers such as Pierre-Emile Legrain and Camille Cless-Brothier for products and windows in the ’20s and ’30s.

The pace picked up considerably during the Marc Jacobs era from 1997 to 2013, when he invited Stephen Sprouse, Takashi Murakami, Richard Prince — and Kusama — to collaborate on capsule collections. In 2013, the blockbuster Murakami collaboration — which featured colorful versions of the monogram, some interspersed with eyeballs — was said to generate one-tenth of the brand’s revenues that year.

When Kusama first met Jacobs, receiving him at her Tokyo studio in 2006, she presented the designer with a Vuitton Ellipse bag, whose monogram canvas she had painted over with dots. He invited her to collaborate on a line of clothes and accessories in 2012, some decorated with her tentacle-like “nerves” motif.

In recent years Vuitton has also collaborated with Sol LeWitt and Jeff Koons, also inviting hosts of emerging and established contemporary artists to take part every year in its Artycapucines project.

Vuitton’s “cultural dimension” reached another zenith with the opening in 2014 of the Louis Vuitton Foundation, a private museum that has exhibited works by Claude Monet, Vincent Van Gogh, Olafur Eliasson, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Cindy Sherman and Egon Shiele.

More recently, Vuitton figured as the only luxury brand to mount a booth at the inaugural edition of the Paris+ by Art Basel fair to highlight its long-standing relationships with artists.

“I think that Vuitton really has legitimacy in doing collaborations with artists, and it’s the brand most linked to culture,” Arnault asserted, characterizing them as a win-win.

While declining to discuss numbers, Arnault said its collections done with artists are “extremely successful” commercially. On the flip side, artists “want to do it because it gives them access to another public.”

“This collaboration is going to be in all our windows, it’s going to be in our advertising so it exposes their art to people who would not necessarily have been to a museum,” she explained.

Arnault noted that all of Vuitton’s artistic collaborations end up becoming highly collectible, often accruing greater value on the resale market. They attract art collectors and clients who might not be familiar with the artists, but become intrigued to learn more, she added.

For serious art aficionados, or partiers, 40 hard-sided Champagne trunks customized by Kusama’s studios are up for grabs at 400,000 euros each.

The print campaign, with its cast of models from various generations, is meant to reflect that Kusama’s art appeals to everyone. Its tagline, “Creating Infinity,” nods to a key subject in Kusama’s work, and to Vuitton’s travel roots, dreamy storytelling and seemingly endless growth trajectory.

The visuals will also appear as billboards, on street furniture, 3D screens and banners in cities including Paris; London; Munich; Dubai; New York; Los Angeles; Tokyo; Seoul; Taipei, Taiwan; and Shanghai, Chengdu and Shenzhen, China.

The Italian e-tailer is set to land at 1 Bond Street in NoHo.

MILAN — LuisaViaRoma is headed to the U.S. and likely with its first international door.

Leasing advisory firm Mona said Friday that the Italian e-tailer, part of private equity firm Style Capital’s portfolio, has inked a long-term lease for a 7,855-square-foot retail space at 1 Bond Street in Manhattan’s NoHo neighborhood.

The yearly rent rate stands at $3.2 million, the advisory firm said, and includes the lease of a 5,000-square-foot space on the building’s lower level.

Representatives for LuisaViaRoma did not immediately respond to request for comments.

Neighboring such retailers as Showfields and Kith and across the street from hip members club Zero Bond, the store would mark LuisaViaRoma’s second outpost globally, flanking the existing unit on Florence’s Via Roma which opened in 1929.

The retailer had already tested the brick-and-mortar waters in Manhattan, opening a pop-up store in 2018 in partnership with Spring Studios and Spring Place.

In 2021, Style Capital invested 130 million euros to acquire a 40 percent stake in the e-tailer aimed at supporting its growth. LuisaViaRoma had turnover of around 230 million euros in 2020.

Since the acquisition, Roberta Benaglia, chief executive officer at Style Capital, cited the expansion of the retailer’s international footprint as among her key priorities. A few months before the deal materialized, LuisaViaRoma had hired Kate Davidson Hudson to oversee its expanded content strategy and launch a magazine particularly geared at the U.S. market.

The e-tailer is helmed by CEO Alessandra Rossi, a Yoox Group (now YNAP) veteran. As part of the deal, Andrea Panconesi, whose grandmother Luisa Jaquin planted the seeds of the family company’s success and was the mastermind behind the retailer’s foray into e-commerce in 1999, serves as chairman.

Billions in customer funds transferred directly from Binance.US to offshore Binance exchange. Is this just a ploy to trick regulators?

In the final days of the FTX collapse, onlookers wondered about the solvency of FTX’s U.S.-based exchange, FTX.US. FTX.US was ostensibly held at arms length from the parent exchange. FTX leadership insisted that customers of the FTX.US division would be safe even if the parent company went under. However, when the end came for FTX, FTX.US met the same fate, freezing customer withdrawals and entering Chapter 11 with the rest of the FTX/Alameda network.

Despite being U.S.-regulated and theoretically walled off from FTX, FTX.US was in reality little more than an extension of its offshore owner. One might think that, perhaps, FTX.US was really just a ploy to trick U.S. regulators into focusing on the smaller American company instead of turning attention to the incoming financial hurricane in the Bahamas.

It turns out that FTX was not the only offshore exchange to create a U.S. based and regulated entity. Binance, the world’s largest exchange, created Binance.US in early 2019 in response to regulatory pressure. Binance.US was described as a separate entity from Binance that was merely licensing the name and certain features from the main company. Binance.US, based in Palo Alto, is licensed as a money services business in the United States. Note that it is not difficult to obtain these licenses, as we previously showed in our exposé of a network of fake crypto exchanges based in Colorado.

However, shortly after the creation of Binance.US, Forbes magazine published a report claiming that they had received a leaked document referred to as the “Tai Chi” document. According to this document, the Binance US exchange was a ploy to trick U.S. regulators into focusing on the compliant local exchange, while the parent exchange went free to do its own business. Binance responded by suing Forbes for defamation, only to drop the lawsuit a few months later. In February of this year Binance tried a different tack: they invested $200 million in Forbes’ parent company. If you can’t beat them, buy them!

However, this early reporting by Forbes was corroborated by a much more detailed report by Reuters in October 2022. With more sources and documents at their disposal, Reuters found essentially what the Forbes piece three years earlier suggested: Binance US was designed to trick regulators and U.S. customers:

It shows that in 2018, Zhao approved a plan by lieutenants to “insulate” Binance from scrutiny by U.S. authorities by setting up a new American exchange. The new exchange would draw regulators’ attention away from the main platform by serving as a “regulatory inquiry clearing house,” according to the proposal. Executives went on to set the plan in motion, company messages show.

In public, Zhao said the new U.S. exchange – called Binance.US – was a “fully independent entity.” In reality, Zhao controlled Binance.US, directing its management from abroad, according to regulatory filings from 2020, company messages and interviews with former team members. An adviser, in a message to Binance executives, described the U.S. exchange as a “de facto subsidiary.”

These problems, in addition to other legal issues at Binance, may explain Binance.US’s repeated trouble with their executive leadership. Binance.US’ first CEO, a young woman named Catherine Coley, led the firm from 2019 to June of 2021, when it was announced that the former Comptroller of the Currency Brian Brooks would be taking over as CEO.

Coley, a very public and vocal person during her time at Binance, seems to have disappeared after leaving Binance.US. While her social media accounts are still online, she does not appear to have made any posts since mid-2021. Her LinkedIn page has not been updated, with her last job listed as her role as Binance.US CEO. As far as we are aware, no one has ever publicly disclosed where Coley ended up after she left Binance.US.

Their second CEO, Mr. Brooks, lasted at the company for about four months before abruptly resigning.

These public issues have led many to wonder whether Binance and Binance.US are truly separate entities. We can now report that based on blockchain transfers, market data, and company disclosures, it appears that there is no meaningful separation between the two firms. In fact, we show that Binance.US both transfers customer deposits to Binance and pays customer withdrawals using transfers back from the offshore exchange’s wallets. Further, we demonstrate that trades allegedly happening on Binance.US’s exchange are likely being conducted directly on the main Binance exchange.

BAM appoints market makers, including Related Parties and market makers that are incorporated or otherwise operating outside of the United States, to promote liquidity and facilitate trading on the Platform…

https://bit.ly/3FwasZW