TheChek News Flow

Kremlin-backed crypto coin moves $6bn despite US sanctions

A7A5 token enables Russian financial flows after Washington cracks down on related exchange

A Kremlin-backed cryptocurrency operation appears to have succeeded in circumventing US sanctions, moving at least $6bn since August when some of its entities were blacklisted — highlighting the limits of western efforts to curb Russia’s financial flows.

More than 80 per cent of A7A5, a stablecoin at the heart of Russia’s growing cross-border payments empire, was swiftly destroyed and recreated to be cleared of links to a crypto exchange that had been just sanctioned by Washington, according to a Financial Times analysis.

A7A5 is part of A7, a growing cross-border payments system built as an alternative to the US-led financial system, from which Russian lenders were cut off after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Washington added Grinex, a Kyrgyzstan-based exchange, to its sanctions list in August, the latest step in its attempt to curb Russia’s crypto infrastructure. Grinex is an alleged successor of Garantex, which US law enforcement took down in March for “hacking, ransomware, terrorism and drug trafficking”.

Grinex denies any connection to Garantex.

According to the FT analysis, starting the day after the August designation A7A5 administrators deleted the contents of two wallets connected to Grinex, which were carrying a total of 33.8bn tokens worth $405mn. That represents more than 80 per cent of the total number of A7A5 in circulation.

The wallets’ account balances were set to zero using an instruction called “destroyBlackFunds” that designates their tokens as “dirtyShares”.

But soon after, tokens worth the same amount were created in a new wallet, in effect moving the funds and giving them a clean slate.

Unlike a regular transfer, this method breaks the link between the old and new accounts, making it harder to establish a connection between the tokens that had been targeted by sanctions and the newly-minted ones.

This wallet, named TNpJj, was involved in $6.1bn worth of transactions since August, the FT found.

Activity on the new wallet mirrors patterns observed on its predecessors. The wallet has shared 11 counterparties and executed transfers during Moscow working hours. Activity peaks between 10am-12pm local time, with little movement overnight or on weekends.

A7A5’s chatbot offers customer support “weekdays from 10am to 8pm Moscow time”. Clients can also buy the token in cash at their “over-the-counter section of Grinex” housed in a Moscow skyscraper. Garantex shared the same address — Federation Tower, 14th floor.

Setting up the new wallet suggests the operators of A7A5, which trades on Tron and Ethereum blockchains, have drawn lessons from the takedown of Garantex. Back then, Tether, the issuer of the dollar-pegged stablecoin USDT, froze $28mn held in wallets linked to Garantex.

A7A5 is registered in Kyrgyzstan, a jurisdiction Moscow designates as “friendly”, unlike most western countries. The coin’s registered issuer is a Kyrgyz company called Old Vector, which was also blacklisted by the US in August.

Russian authorities last week granted A7A5 formal digital financial asset status. This allows exporters and importers to use it officially through a platform owned by Promsvyazbank, which backs each token with a rouble, according to the A7A5 issuer.

A Russian state-owned defence lender under western sanctions, Promsvyazbank also holds a 49 per cent stake in the A7 cross-border payments network that is rapidly expanding, including to Africa.

The bank’s chief executive Petr Fradkov last month told Russian President Vladimir Putin “we are creating a system of cross-border settlements based on A7”. The network has also received significant loans from Russia’s VEB, a state development bank which traditionally supports the Kremlin’s priority projects.

VEB and Promsvyazbank did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

A7 claims to have moved more than $86bn in 10 months, according to its majority owner and chief executive, Ilan Șor — a fugitive Moldovan oligarch living in Moscow.

Overall, A7 may now account for a large chunk of Russia’s cross-border payments market, two financial professionals involved in that market told the FT. In addition to crypto, the A7 network also offers more traditional services, including payments via promissory notes.

“A7 is expanding at rapid pace funded in large part by loans from Russian state institutions,” the Centre for Information Resilience (CIR), a London-based non-profit research group, noted in a report. Russia’s worsening war economy was likely to increase the “political significance” of the network in enabling exports, it added.

A7 and A7A5 did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In June, an A7A5 representative told the FT they had only “co-operated with the technical team of A7 at the early stage”, and then “decided to separate completely” in May.

“We’ve created a transparent and honest business: we pay taxes and operate openly,” A7 owner Șor told the Kommersant newspaper last month, noting other countries were showing interest in this “alternative payment system that is “beneficial” for the Russian state.

EU watchdog prepares to expand oversight of crypto and exchanges

Esma chair says move would help boost bloc’s capital markets by removing supervision from 27 separate authorities

Stock exchanges, cryptocurrency companies and clearing houses operating in the EU are set to come under the supervision of the bloc’s markets watchdog, according to its chair.

Verena Ross, chair of the European Securities and Markets Authority, told the Financial Times that under plans being drawn up by the European Commission, the regulation of several areas of EU financial markets is likely to be transferred from national authorities to Esma.

Such changes would provide a key impetus towards “having a capital market in Europe that is more integrated and globally competitive”, she said.

The plans, which are controversial among smaller EU countries such as Luxembourg and Malta, are designed to “ensure that we are addressing the continued fragmentation in markets and resolve that to create more of a single market for capital in Europe”, Ross added.

The EU initially proposed making Esma the main supervisor of crypto asset service providers — such as exchanges and custodians of digital currencies — when drawing up its landmark Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation, which came into force this year. 

But criticism of Esma’s ability to handle this meant oversight of the fast-growing crypto market was left in the hands of national authorities — a decision Ross said had created inefficiencies.

In July, Esma criticised Malta’s process for approving pan-EU licences for crypto companies, saying “some risks areas were not adequately assessed during the authorisation process” for one unnamed company.

“While we are doing a lot of work to try to make sure the implementation of MiCA is aligned, it clearly takes a lot of effort from us and the national supervisors to achieve that,” Ross said.

“It also means that people had to build up specific new resources and expertise 27 times in different national supervisors, which could have been done more efficiently once at a European level.”

Esma was established in 2011 to improve the harmonisation of rules across the EU. But many of the bloc’s financial market activities continue to be supervised by its 27 national authorities. 

“We have tried for quite some time with the capital markets union and other initiatives to build a more effective capital market,” said Ross. “The reality has been that it is not easy to do given we have very different market structures.”

Mario Draghi, the former European Central Bank president, in a landmark report last year identified the transformation of Esma into a single common regulator for all of the bloc’s securities markets — similar to the Securities and Exchange Commission in the US — as “a key pillar” in boosting Europe’s capital markets.

Some smaller EU countries, such as Luxembourg, Malta and Ireland, have opposed centralising powers at Esma, fearing it could undermine their thriving financial sectors. 

Claude Marx, head of Luxembourg’s financial watchdog, said recently that if Esma was made the main supervisor for all EU investment funds, this would create a “monster”.

However, the Esma chair said that the bloc’s need to find funding for its vast investment in defence, green energy and digitisation had given fresh impetus to the push for “breaking down the barriers and fragmentation that still exist”.

She added: “The demand for that is so high now given the need for finding private capital sources to support Europe’s strategic priorities, it has clearly gone up a level, not just at the EU level but also at member states.”

The Paris-based authority has already been given extra powers since the publication of Draghi’s report.

From next year, it will take over the supervision of new providers of consolidated tapes — a database of live stock information — for equity and bond prices, and also of agencies providing environmental, social and governance ratings.

Maria Luís Albuquerque, EU commissioner for financial services, said in a speech last month that it was “considering a proposal to transfer supervisory powers to Esma for the most significant cross-border entities” including stock exchanges, crypto companies and central counterparties. 

“All of this would imply changes to the governance and decision-making processes of Esma, and we have various models to consider based on other existing models of centralised supervision,” said Albuquerque.

French private equity firm joins rush to gain exposure to surging energy use by data centres

French investment firm Ardian has struck a deal to acquire one of Ireland’s largest energy utilities, in a major bet on one of the power providers expected to fuel the booming artificial intelligence sector.

Ardian will acquire Energia Group from its existing owner — infrastructure investment firm I Squared Capital — in a deal that values the Dublin-based firm at more than €2.5bn, according to people familiar with the deal.

Energia was acquired by I Squared in 2016, when the utility was known as Viridian, for about €1bn. The company provides power to more than 900,000 homes and business across the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. It owns a large portfolio of renewable energy operations, including 16 onshore wind farm sites, and has also entered into a partnership to develop and power a 165 megawatt data centre in Dublin.

Infrastructure funds are clamouring to get exposure to the AI sector’s rising energy demands. In the US, BlackRock-owned Global Infrastructure Partners is nearing a $38bn deal to buy utility group AES, in what would be one of the largest infrastructure takeovers of all time.

Ardian has been a big investor in infrastructure, including a transaction earlier this year that increased its stake in London’s Heathrow airport, in which it is the largest shareholder, and it has also invested in German utility EWE.

Energia represents Ardian’s first deal in Ireland, the group’s co-head of infrastructure Juan Angoitia said in a statement. He added that Energia “has ambitious plans to grow, driven by secured capital projects and increasing energy demand . . . We have been impressed by Energia’s strong growth and resilience in the context of a volatile energy market.”

Ardian managing director William Briggs said in an interview that the investment firm will “be supporting a multibillion-euros capital expenditure programme to build new renewables and improve the efficiency of flexible generation assets in Ireland.

“Energia is a pioneering example of how to unlock growth by a novel approach of co-development of data centres and renewables,” he added.

For I Squared, the deal offers a big windfall as its largest ever asset sale. The Miami-based specialist infrastructure investor, which manages more than $50bn in assets, is led by Sadek Wahba, a former World Bank economist who became a top executive at Morgan Stanley before founding the firm in 2012.

Under its near decade of ownership, the group has taken a €540mn dividend while investing in the company’s expansion and reducing its debt load. I Squared has invested in other European assets including acquiring the operator of London’s famous red buses in 2023.

Under I Squared’s ownership, Energia’s growth “was organic, predominantly around pushing the renewable agenda,” rather than acquisitions, said I Squared senior partner Mohamed El Gazzar in an interview.

“One of the big growth drivers will also be that data centre coming on that will even further increase the ebitda [earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation].”

Watchdog believes motorists mis-sold auto finance could get payouts totalling up to £18bn

The UK financial watchdog is overestimating the £9bn-18bn in compensation it forecasts consumers will receive for mis-sold car finance, according to the motor finance industry.

Adrian Dally, director of motor finance at the Financing and Leasing Association, said the Financial Conduct Authority would struggle to prove the true losses suffered by consumers were as large as it initially estimated in August.

“We still don’t know what was behind the [FCA’s] suggestion,” said Dally. “They haven’t shown the workings . . . We think it should be less than £9bn.”

The FCA is set to publish a consultation paper as early as this week, outlining details of what is expected to be its biggest ever redress scheme for consumers who were mis-sold motor finance over the past two decades. 

The FCA said: “We’ve engaged widely as we considered how any compensation scheme should work. We’ll consult on it shortly and set out the evidence we’ve gathered and our analysis.”

The watchdog has estimated the redress scheme will cost £9bn to £18bn for the 38 lenders it believes mis-sold as many as 14mn finance agreements on vehicle purchases between 2007 and 2021.

Many of the cases covered by the redress scheme will stem from discretionary commission agreements (DCAs) in which lenders allowed car dealerships to earn a bigger fee by pushing up the interest paid by a consumer on a loan.

Dally said that when the FCA banned DCAs in 2021, it estimated they had cost consumers £165mn a year. Even after adding interest at an expected rate of 3 per cent and administrative costs, the total would still be well below £9bn, he said.

The Financial Ombudsman Service has awarded compensation in DCA cases equal to the amount of extra interest a customer had to pay above the minimum rate a dealership could have set. 

“We would say that is incorrect, that is not loss, because in a world without DCAs the customer would not have got that rate because the dealer would not have had discretion to go to that rate,” Dally said.

He added that after the watchdog banned DCAs, the average cost of car finance did not decrease. “In a world without DCAs, what would the customer have got?” he said.

The FCA redress scheme would have been much bigger if the Supreme Court had not in August overturned much of an earlier Court of Appeal ruling that had threatened to cripple lenders with compensation costs of up to £44bn. 

However, the judges upheld one claim against the banks for “unfair treatment” of a customer whose car financing included a poorly disclosed commission paid to the dealership worth 55 per cent of his total interest costs. The FCA redress scheme will also include similar cases.

AstraZeneca’s humbling blow to London highlights the need for change in the UK and elsewhere in Europe

If two of the main benefits of hosting a big company’s UK stock market listing are the tax revenue it raises through stamp duty and the cachet of the listing itself, then drugs giant AstraZeneca has just delivered another humbling blow to London as a financial centre.

On top of the symbolic humiliation, the decision by Britain’s biggest listed company to move its share listing to New York and leave only depository interests trading on the London Stock Exchange, will cost the Treasury an estimated £200mn in lost stamp duty (depository interests, securities that represent rights to shares listed elsewhere, do not attract stamp duty).

The LSE is clinging to the hope that there may yet be a silver lining for London liquidity — without a stamp duty charge, Astra’s trading volume could theoretically increase. More likely, a full NYSE listing will pull more of the trading liquidity across the Atlantic.

The broader trend is no different. The fashion for moving listings from Europe, particularly London, to New York is accelerating. Money raised via new London listings is at a 30-year low.

It is instructive to consider the sometimes neglected third leg of AstraZeneca’s triumvirate of listings: the group retains a Swedish quotation on the Nasdaq Stockholm exchange. Though the volume of shares traded there is only a fraction of that passing through London or New York, the retention of the listing — a relic of the group’s part-Swedish heritage — is telling.

Writ large, the Stockholm exchange — and the broader Swedish approach to the country’s equity culture — has much to teach the UK. Over a period of 50 years, a succession of tax policies, pensions launches and investment product innovations has spurred a vibrant equity culture in the country. According to Fondbolagens förening, the local fund management association, fund investment is more popular in Sweden than anywhere else in the world, with eight in 10 Swedes invested in funds.

A thriving pensions market provides ready anchor investors for Swedish initial public offerings. Market liquidity is also underpinned by widespread direct retail investment, much of it channelled through the ISK tax-efficient investment vehicle — which includes a SEK150,000 (€14,000) annual tax-free investment allowance. It is a rough equivalent of Britain’s ISA, though without the option to save in cash. At the end of 2023, according to the OECD, there were 3.8mn unique dedicated investment savings account (ISK) holders, in a total population of 10.6mn.

Returns have been impressive, too, especially over the long term. In recent years the US market might have been a runaway winner versus the rest of the world, thanks to its dominance of global tech. But Nasdaq figures suggest that over the past half century or so, Swedish returns actually outstrip any other major market, delivering an 8.2 per cent total return, compared with 5.9 per cent for the US and 5.8 per cent for the UK.

None of this is news to UK and EU policymakers, who are painfully aware of the Swedish example. Mario Draghi’s landmark report on European competitiveness, published a year ago, urged the EU to incentivise stock market investment for households’ €1.4tn of annual savings, citing Sweden’s gold standard. For the general good, Europe must persuade its citizens to abandon their cash-under-the-mattress caution.

Sweden is not impervious to the lure of higher US valuations. Swedish “buy now, pay-later” lender Klarna opted for a New York listing only last month. Music streamer Spotify made the move back in 2018.

But the appeal of the Swedish market endures. Just ask Hellman & Friedman-owned Verisure, the Swiss/Swedish security group, which last week said it was targeting a market capitalisation of up to €13.9bn in a Stockholm listing, having seen off a listing pitch from the London Stock Exchange. Verisure is set to be Europe’s biggest market debut since Porsche in 2022.

London’s revenge may come early next year if rival private equity group HG presses ahead with plans to list Norwegian software group Visma in London rather than on the exchange of its Scandinavian neighbour. But in the meantime the UK must do far more to burnish its credentials — building on the mooted exemption of new IPOs from stamp duty to overhaul the whole antiquated stamp duty system and its penal treatment of UK company share purchases. ISA rules need tightening to give an added incentive for share investment over cash. Without resorting to unwelcome mandation, pension funds should be incentivised to invest in UK stocks.

When Britain’s biggest listed company sends the signal it did last week, everyone with an interest in the country’s future prosperity should take heed.

Cory Doctorow’s new book looks to offer comfort, and solutions, to the inescapable feeling that digital platforms have gotten worse.

Over the course of a nearly four-decade career, Cory Doctorow has written 15 novels, four graphic novels, dozens of short stories, six nonfiction books, approximately 60,000 blog posts and thousands of essays.

And yet for all the millions of words he’s published, these days the award-winning science fiction author and veteran internet activist is best known for just a single one: Enshittification.

The term, which Doctorow, 54, popularized in essays in 2022 and 2023, refers to the way that online platforms become worse to use over time, as the corporations that own them try to make more money. Though the coinage is cheeky, in Doctorow’s telling the phenomenon it describes is a specific, nearly scientific process that progresses according to discrete stages, like a disease.

Since then, the meaning has expanded to encompass a general vibe — a feeling far greater than frustration at Facebook, which long ago ceased being a good way to connect with friends, or Google, whose search is now baggy with SEO spam. Of late, the idea has been employed to describe everything from video games to television to American democracy itself.

“It’s frustrating. It’s demoralizing. It’s even terrifying,” Doctorow said in a 2024 speech.

On Tuesday, Farrar Straus & Giroux will release “Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It,” Doctorow’s book-length elaboration on his essays, complete with case studies (Uber, Twitter, Photoshop) and his prescriptions for change, which revolve around breaking up big tech companies and regulating them more robustly.

Still, given the thousands of words Doctorow has already, characteristically, written on the subject, the question arises: Why write a book at all?

Over an avocado malted and poached eggs at a Lower Manhattan diner, Doctorow used a nerdy simile — care of Nintendo’s “Legend of Zelda” series of games — to explain.

“The books are kind of like the save game point in a long ‘Zelda’ game,” Doctorow said. “The articles are like the individual missions, but the books are where I crystallize everything up to that point.”

And if it’s possible to crystallize such a prolific writing life into a single word, this one isn’t half bad.

“It might look like he’s all over the place because he does so many things, but they are all part of a coherent plan — his push to make a more humane and democratic, user-friendly, non-capitalist, non-exploitative internet,” ”said Kim Stanley Robinson, the eminent science fiction author and a friend of Doctorow’s.

Doctorow had arrived to the diner with custom-printed poop emoji stickers, a design that appears on the cover of the new book. He’d won favor with the owners on an earlier visit by explaining that their seltzer maker could be modified to fit a large carbon dioxide tank, rather than frequently replacing smaller, proprietary canisters.

Across Doctorow’s fiction and nonfiction is a central theme: That technology can be used either as a tool of human empowerment and creativity, or repression and control by the state or big corporations. In this vision, tinkering, customization, and individuality are good. Conformity, consolidation, and passive consumption are bad — even if it’s about something as seemingly small as seltzer.

“I am simultaneously extremely excited and hopeful and energized about the possibilities of what technology can do for us as people trying to thrive,” Doctorow said, “and terrified of how bad technology will be for that project if we get it wrong.”

If things feel bad on digital platforms at the moment — and feel worse with every Netflix price increase and A.I. slop video served by the Instagram algorithm — that’s because the pendulum has swung too far in the latter direction. Like any activist, Doctorow’s project is to convince the public that it doesn’t have to be this way. And unlike many of the people spending hour after worsening hour on the platforms he detests, he remembers a time when things were different.

‘Paradise Lost’

The son of two Marxist schoolteachers, Doctorow grew up in Toronto, in a house full of computers. In the 1970s, his father brought home a Teletype terminal from the University of Toronto, where he was a graduate student, and his mother borrowed paper towels from the kindergarten where she taught to feed the machine, then brought them back to school for her students to wipe their hands on the used sheets, covered in code.

At the alternative elementary school Doctorow attended, students from kindergarten through 8th grade all sat in the same classroom, where they were free to pursue their interests. For Doctorow these included communism, nuclear disarmament, Dungeons and Dragons, Mad Magazine, and most of all an Apple II, on which he spent countless hours learning to code with his friend Tim Wu, a legal scholar and antitrust advocate who served in the Biden Administration as a special assistant to the president for competition and tech policy.

“To us, they were machines of liberation and personal development,” said Wu in an interview. “We saw them in the most optimistic possible terms.”

Wu remembered Doctorow the schoolboy as a leader, but one with a temperamental streak who did not suffer fools, qualities that sometimes brought bullying from older students in the class. But these protean days of home computing — long before the slick, monetized surfaces of today’s digital world — represented for Doctorow and Wu a refuge, and a kind of prelapsarian ideal.

“The ‘Paradise Lost’ motive is big with Cory and with me too,” said Wu.

As an adolescent, Doctorow organized protests against the Persian Gulf war, and spent a year living in Mexico, where he composed stories on a Sears word processor. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he bounced off a series of attempts at college, where he found computer programming curricula tedious.

After stints working in a science fiction bookstore, coding for the pioneering CD-ROM company Voyager and developing a media start-up, Doctorow ended up in 2002 at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the digital rights group. There, he threw himself into the fight against digital rights management — a term most commonly associated at the time, the age of Napster, with attempts to prevent consumers from copying and distributing digital media.

“He’s an idea machine,” Cindy Cohn, the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said of Doctorow. “He’s the source of more ideas about how technology and people should interact than any single person.”

The notion that digital information could be controlled by a corporation even after a consumer bought it was anathema to the internet activists of Doctorow’s era.

Doctorow helped pull off attention-grabbing stunts like a parody of the “Mickey Mouse Club” theme song about the rapacity of Disney when it comes to intellectual property. (Sample lyric: “They sell us stuff/ It’s overpriced/ Then lock it up / And that’s not nice!”) He worked on wonky good-government projects, producing near real-time transcripts of World Intellectual Property Organization meetings.

At the same time as Doctorow did battle over copyright, his writing career took off. In 2001 he started as an editor at Boing Boing, whose mix of ephemera, tech news, retrofuturist aesthetics and left commentary made it one of the most popular blogs in the world.

In 2008, he published “Little Brother,” a novel about four Bay Area teenagers who use technology to fight back against an oppressive Department of Homeland Security. It was a New York Times best seller and a finalist for the prestigious Hugo Award. (As he did with all of us books until 2017, when his publisher stopped him, he made “Little Brother” available for free under a Creative Commons license.)

A proud didacticist, Doctorow sees his fiction and his activism as different expressions of the same set of concerns about technology. He speaks quickly and confidently, with the trace of a Canadian accent, giving the impression of a man who has been arguing in writing for years, and has already mapped most of the back roads those arguments can take.

“You can see his mind working when you’re talking to him,” said Rob Beschizza, the managing editor of Boing Boing. “The way it will move from agreement to skepticism. It’s very fortifying if you’re someone who enjoys that kind of back and forth.”

In 2010, when Forbes released its list of the top 25 “web celebs,” Doctorow was number 10. (Perez Hilton, the gossip blogger, was in first place.)

It was from this prominent perch that Doctorow watched the public’s relationship with computing turn much more mediated and passive. That same year he railed against Apple’s shiny new device, the iPad, as wasteful, infantilizing, and dumb, and quit Facebook over privacy concerns.

He’s spent years predicting Facebook’s demise: through the Cambridge Analytica scandal, through reports of ad fraud, through lurching changes to its video strategy and approach to news, and through younger generations who prefer Instagram and TikTok.

Then, in the fall of 2023, Doctorow postulated his theory.

‘Trapped in their carcasses’

Here’s the quick version.

First, a platform is good to its users. That may look like Facebook connecting you to all of your friends, or Amazon providing a giant, reliable marketplace for goods.

Then, when enough people have joined a platform that there aren’t any alternatives, the platforms start exploiting their own users to entice businesses. That may look like Facebook providing personal data about its customers to advertisers, or Google prioritizing paid ads over organic search.

Then, when those business customers are also stuck on one dominant platform, the platform puts the screws to them, too: Ad rates skyrocketing on Facebook amid reports of ad fraud, or Amazon sellers having to pay Amazon to be featured on Prime, just to appear high up in search results.

“All our tech businesses are turning awful,” Doctorow writes. “And they’re not dying. We remain trapped in their carcasses, unable to escape.”Credit...Todd Midler for The New York Times

In the end, according to Doctorow, no one is happy except the shareholders of the big platforms.

“All our tech businesses are turning awful,” Doctorow writes in the book. “And they’re not dying. We remain trapped in their carcasses, unable to escape.”

Doctorow said he manages his anxiety over the current state of affairs by writing — no surprise there — and consuming “too much brown liquor,” which he takes in a custom-built “pirate” bar in the backyard of his Burbank, Calif., home, where he lives with his wife. (He has a daughter in college.)

He’s needed it to unwind from what he called a period of “extreme fecundity,” even for him. This has come about, in part, due to the intellectual momentum behind a group of influential thinkers who share his concern with breaking up big tech firms.

Chief among the “neo-Brandeisians,” a group of politicians, lawyers, and activists inspired by the work of the early 20th century Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis, is Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission in the Biden Administration.

She is a Doctorow fan.

“He’s making real intellectual contributions in presenting a framework for how to think about what we experience as consumers,” Khan said in an interview. “I’ve always found him so lucid and astute and able to synthesize a lot of experiences that people were having and be able to distill them in a digestible way.”

While under Khan, the F.T.C. brought attention-grabbing suits against many tech powerhouses, and the second Trump Administration has sometimes taken an aggressive rhetorical posture toward Big Tech, a recent settlement with Amazon may be a sign that the fight to rein in the industry has limits.

Ultimately, Doctorow said he’s not overly concerned with semantics. That one infamous word, he knows, has entered the culture at large to refer to something broader than he has defined it. And as befits the longtime foe of overly aggressive copyright enforcement, Doctorow is comfortable with the concept of the remix.

As he writes in the new book, “I am giving you explicit permission to use this word in a loose sense.”

The services, which can cost more than $50,000 a year, make impossible dinner reservations and finagle special treatment. In certain circles, they’ve become a common luxury.

Imagine that you are skiing in the French Alps over Christmas when you are invited to a friend’s private island in the Maldives and wish to travel immediately. A private jet gets you there fine but there is a small wrinkle: Your beach wardrobe remains marooned in London and, because of the holidays, cannot be transferred for a week by conventional services. So you call upon an unconventional one. You call your private concierge.

Private concierges are what they sound like: an expensive team of dedicated assistants paid to do your bidding. And among the very wealthy, they’re a common luxury.

“I no longer have to explain what a personal concierge is to friends,” said Lauren Wilt, the C.E.O. of a concierge service called Quintessentially. “It’s a more well-known and understood category.”

For up to $75,000 per year these firms will book impossible-to-get dinner reservations, procure your child’s birthday present or personally courier your beach wardrobe from England to the Maldives over the holidays, as Stuart McNeill, the founder of Knightsbridge Circle, said he once did for a client.

“We fix problems,” said McNeill, who is based in London. The super rich, evidently, have a lot of problems: In the U.S., McNeill said his firm doubled its clientele in the past year and plans to open offices in Dallas, Singapore and Riyadh.

Concierge services vary by size and level of service. Knightsbridge Circle, a boutique firm that charges $50,000 a year plus an initiation fee, has only 120 members. But others, like Quintessentially and Velocity Black, have thousands. Banks like Wells Fargo, Capital One and Chase offer subscriptions to such services, either in-house or through third parties, as a perk to high-end customers. Some event hosts, like Art Basel, also subscribe, so they can pamper their V.I.P.s.

These firms congregate among the moneyed corners of the globe: Manhattan, Los Angeles, Dubai. They maintain contacts in well-to-do holiday destinations: buzzy restaurants and chefs in Nantucket, luxury goods dealers in St. Barts, architects and designers in Cozumel.

“It’s a very hard customer to win and a very expensive customer to lose,” said Sylvain Langrand, the C.E.O. of Velocity Black, a private concierge service that was acquired by Capital One in 2023. (Other elite credit cards, like the American Express Centurion and the Mastercard Black Card, offer private concierge services too.)

One such customer is Silver Kung, a Taiwanese hedge fund manager based in Hong Kong. He said he sampled a few firms before settling on two: Rosemarie Hospitality, a boutique firm, and Velocity Black. The latter is offered as a perk by R360, a social club he belongs to for people with a net worth of at least $100 million. He also has opened accounts for his two daughters.

Kung said he uses Velocity Black mostly for booking restaurants and sorting out travel logistics. Rosemarie is for bigger asks. Recently, the firm arranged an after-hours visit to the Louvre for his family.

“Velocity is like my Tesla that I drive every day,” said Kung. “Rosemarie is my special car, like a Maserati.”

Concierge firms compete in offering what Wilt called “hyper-personalization,” knowing and acting upon clients’ individual quirks, desires, tastes and bothers. “Say we’ve booked you at a restaurant and we know you are a sushi fanatic so there’s a tuna tartare waiting for you at the table when you arrive,” she said.

Services rendered can be comically mundane. McNeill recalled dispatching someone in Mykonos to wait in place of a client for their dinner table to free up. Wilt, who calls her agents “lifestyle managers,” recalls that, after a client’s child became enamored with “a specific breed of penguin,” Quintessentially arranged a private experience involving the breed at an Atlanta zoo.

Agents are different, said Wilt, from hotel concierges, who field “rapid-fire, transactional requests with a new set of clients every day, whereas our service is that we get to know you and build that relationship for many years.” Beyond hotels, the industry’s talent pool draws from personal assistants, celebrity and athlete managers and luxury sales professionals.

Firms make money through annual subscription fees: $12,000 to $44,000 for Quintessentially; $3,100 for Velocity Black plus a $900 initiation fee. They may also receive commissions through hotel and other travel bookings.

“We say that the membership fee keeps the lights on and then our profit is based on the activity of clients,” said McNeill.

Increasingly, firms partner with luxury brands like Sotheby’s, Formula One, and Aston Martin. In this way, they can offer members “exclusive” and “red carpet” access to events like the U.S. Open or New York Fashion Week or access to hard-to-acquire luxury products. “Part of the value in our service is to position ourselves with the C.E.O. of a brand, do some events, make informal introductions and then let our members build a relationship,” said McNeill, of Knightsbridge Circle. That relationship, it is hoped, will translate into ready access to products. Avoiding tackiness requires deft footing.

“We try to be very careful in every experience or access we give — we never want to try to be selling something,” said Langrand. “It’s about finding a way to do it in a very bespoke and meaningful way.”

Kung, the Hong Kong hedge fund manager, has used his private concierge to proffer only one product: a high-end golf putter that was not sold in Asia. His agent located a dealer in London and had it shipped.

“Of course, I can reach out myself,” he laughed. “But right now I’m spoiled.”

Paramount Skydance’s hiring of Makan Delrahim was the easy part.

Now the media giant’s CEO David Ellison is hoping his new super lawyer can entice David Zaslav to sell most if not all of Warner Bros. Discovery.

The Post has learned that since taking the job last week, Delrahim — who was the Justice Department’s antitrust chief during the first Trump administration — is fast at work plotting a strategy to get Zas to bite on a bid from Ellison.

The pitch goes something like this: If Zas doesn’t sell to Ellison, he may find himself with a Shari Redstone-like future.

Recall that Skydance just purchased Redstone’s media empire Paramount — which includes fading properties like CBS, Comedy Central, MTV and a mid-tier Hollywood studio — for a mere $8 billion because the heiress bit the bullet and sold only after it was too late.

His problem is that Zas also is no dummy. And Warner Bros. Discovery, known in media and Wall Street circles simply as WBD, isn’t Paramount.

Just before Ellison — backed by dad Larry Ellison, the Oracle tycoon who is now the second-richest person in the world — reportedly signaled that he wanted another trophy property in WBD, Zas hired bankers at Goldman Sachs to start shopping it.

There is interest and for good reason: While Zas has taken heat for a sluggish stock price and getting paid a lot of money, industry insiders are ­quietly recognizing the good things he’s done.

Solid box office

Warner Bros. studio has cranked out a host of big box-office draws; it’s the first studio to earn $4 billion at the box office so far this year, HBO Max is profitable and popular; its subscriber growth made it the third largest streamer.

Zas has been chipping away at the debt used to make the TimeWarner deal work.

He’s been separating cable channels like CNN from streaming and the studio, which would make things easier to sell, particularly the streaming and studio unit since it will have almost no debt.

People close to Zas say Goldman has received interest from some formidable new players — Netflix, Amazon and even Apple among them — for the streaming and studios part of the business and at levels above what the Ellisons have leaked.

“If the Ellisons want this, they better bring cash and a lot of it,” said one person who knows ­Zaslav well.

Zas scoffed at a leak to CNBC that Ellison is preparing $22 to $24 a share for all of WBD.

“Zaslav wants well north of that, somewhere in the $30 range and just for the streaming and studio,” this person added.

That’s where Delrahim comes in.

According to his pitch, apart from Paramount Skydance there are only two possible suitors for WBD: Netflix and Amazon.

Netflix is already the No. 1 streaming service; combining it with the No. 3 service will face hurdles even from the more deal-friendly Trump regulatory cops.

Consent decree

Ditto for Amazon, which bought MGM Studios in 2022.

It’s also ­under a consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission over allegations that it screwed consumers when they signed up for its Amazon Prime.

Delrahim believes — or will tell Zas he believes — the consent decree adds yet another stumbling block for an Amazon deal, with the FTC being the most hazardous.

(There’s also FCC, DOJ antitrust and God knows what else.)

And if Zas is banking on a bid from Apple, he shouldn’t hold his breath; the iPhone maker is looking for content but looking to build it organically.

This is why there’s near radio silence from the Ellisons.

Lots of meetings are taking place in ­Skydance land on just how to proceed with Zas.

(By the time you’re reading this, the bid may have already been made.)

As reported, Delrahim might ask John Malone — aka “The ­Cable Cowboy,” a mercurial dealmaker who is a major shareholder in WBD — to directly make the pitch.

Their problem: This ain’t Zas’s first rodeo — and Malone is among his mentors.

Zaslav was a also was a protégé of Jack Welch when General Electric owned NBCUniversal.

Zas knows balance sheets and he knows how to do deals. Otherwise, his relatively small Discovery Inc. wouldn’t have managed its 2022 mega-merger with TimeWarner to create WBD.

In other words, maybe it’s possible that he and Goldman can convince the Trump administration to greenlight deals for Netflix and Amazon, or Apple finally wants to buy something — and Ellison can kiss that $22-a-share bid goodbye.

The Supreme Court will likely agree with lower courts that ruled President Donald Trump can’t use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose broad tariffs, according experts surveyed by JPMorgan.

The bank hosted a conference in London last month, and in a note on Monday it summarized highlights from a session on Trump’s trade policies.

Trade and legal experts said the odds that the high court will rule against the Trump administration are 70%-80% and expect a decision by the end of the year, according to the note, which added that the justices may not follow traditional ideological divides.

“While the sitting three liberal justices are expected to oppose IEEPA tariffs, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Barrett—both with pro-business leanings—may also side against. Kavanaugh is considered the swing vote and has voted with the majority 90% of the time,” it said. “Legal experts point out that none of Trump’s three appointed justices is distinctively ‘Trumpy,’ and they have been less predictable than Republicans had hoped.”

Trump cited IEEPA when he imposed tariffs related to the fentanyl trade as well as his so-called reciprocal tariffs on U.S. trade partners around the world. But since then, a federal district court, the Court of International Trade, and a federal appeals court have said the tariffs are unconstitutional.

In the latest decision in August, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said its ruling won’t take effect until Oct. 14 to give the Trump administration time to appeal to the Supreme Court.

The court rulings represented severe blows to Trump’s trade policy as more than 80% of the tariffs he has announced so far in his second term were based on IEEPA.

The reciprocal tariffs also helped leverage a series of trade deals. That includes an agreement with the European Union, which pledged to invest $600 billion in the U.S. and buy $750 billion worth of U.S. energy products, with “vast amounts” of American weapons in the mix. Similarly, the U.S.-Japan trade deal entails $550 billion in investments from Tokyo.

While Trump’s other tariffs on various sectors like steel, aluminum and autos rely on a separate law and aren’t affected by the court rulings, a final defeat at the Supreme Court would mean the administration would have to pay back a big chunk of the $165 billion in tariff revenue it collected in the fiscal year through August. Trump’s overall tariff regime was expected to generate $300 billion-$400 billion on an annual basis, helping ease the bond market’s concerns about the U.S. budget deficit.

But even if the high court goes against Trump’s tariffs, that won’t put an end to his trade war as numerous other legal avenues are available to levy duties.

In fact, the administration has been rolling out other so-called sectoral tariffs in recent weeks, including on lumber and furniture.

But the alternate tariff routes don’t provide the same speed, scale or flexibility of IEEPA and would not fully recover the revenue lost, JPMorgan added.

“The potential loss of IEEPA tariffs does not end the tariff story, but fragments it,” the note said. “With more than 80% of announced tariffs relying on IEEPA, the administration would be forced to turn to narrower, more contested measures.”

But in a note last month, Capital Alpha’s James Lucier said there’s a “silver lining” in the federal appeals court’s 7-4 decision that struck down the IEEPA tariffs, pointing to a powerful argument from one of the dissenting judges.

Federal Circuit Judge Richard Taranto​made found that there are no limits the president’s ability to invoke tariffs by declaring an emergency under IEEPA.

“The dissenting opinion has opened a pathway by which informed legal commentators have assessed that the president now has a plausible pathway to a victory at the Supreme Court, despite his previous losses,” Lucier observed.

The all-or-nothing moonshot pay plan was a gambit so risky even Axon Enterprise CEO Rick Smith’s wife was against it.

But Smith had started getting antsy around 2016, as he was approaching three decades at the company, Axon compensation committee chair Hadi Partovi told Fortune. Smith was talking more seriously to the board about his succession plan, who was next to lead the company, and what he would do next. Partovi knew Smith could make a lot more money if he launched a startup than if he made Axon worth 10 times as much under his previous comp plan.

“This is when I realized we had a real problem,” said Partovi.

Smith thrives in high-risk, high-reward environments, so the Axon board granted Smith a near carbon copy of Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s moonshot pay plan but on a much smaller scale. The challenge to Smith was to grow the Taser stun gun and body-camera maker 10-fold over a 10-year performance period starting in 2018. From a base of $2.5 billion, Smith had to increase the company’s market cap by $1 billion to unlock each new tranche of stock options, for a total of 12 tranches and a market cap of $13.5 billion. In addition, Smith had to hit eight revenue-based operational or eight adjusted-Ebitda-based goals. During the decade he was supposed to work on achieving those goals, he would get almost nothing—no bonuses or other incentives, and his salary was about $31,000 a year.

“In full candor, my wife was against me taking on the challenge, as she saw it as just too risky,” Smith wrote in a letter to investors in 2023. But Smith blew through all the goals and each of the 12 tranches in five years—half the time the board gave him—making Smith the highest-paid CEO last year with compensation valued at $165 million. The stock price grew more than 600% between 2018 when the board offered him the moonshot and 2023. After he unlocked the 12th tranche, Smith negotiated an $88 million reduction on his next performance plan (which will keep him at Axon until at least 2030 with a goal of driving the stock to $943.75) and directed it be granted to the lowest-paid workers at Axon, showering them with surprise stock grants based on their years of tenure at the company.

“The best is yet to come,” Smith wrote to investors in his letter this year.

What is a moonshot pay package?

Smith shooting the moon—twice, potentially—represents a resurgent breed of executive compensation that has captured the imaginations of a growing number of CEOs. Moonshot wanderlust initially kicked into high gear after Elon Musk’s groundbreaking 2017 award from Tesla, once valued as high as $56 billion before it was twice rescinded owing to a legal challenge. Moonshot grants, not to be confused with an outsize stock grant known as a “mega grant” for its sheer size, tie CEO compensation almost entirely to aggressive, seemingly impossible performance targets, explained Eric Hoffmann, vice president and chief data officer at comp consulting firm Farient Advisors. CEOs don’t get the awards unless they hit specific valuation hurdles and operational goals, he said, and the performance periods are typically five, seven or 10 years, rather than the more standard three-year period.

“It should be difficult to get these awards,” said Hoffmann. “You have to create a lot of value in order to earn these kinds of awards.”

Traditional CEO pay packages include a base salary, an annual cash bonus, and a longer-term equity incentive award often based on time and performance goals. According to compensation data firm Equilar, median compensation among S&P 500 CEOs was $17.1 million in 2024, up nearly 10% over the year prior. Moonshot awards, however, upend the traditional compensation model while also bucking the trend of billionaire tech founders like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Larry Page, and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, who all held large equity stakes and focused on making them more valuable, noted Hoffmann. The key distinction is that those founders built wealth by focusing on increasing the value of their existing equity stakes, while taking minimal or no compensation, rather than seeking massive equity grants on top of their founder stakes, said Hoffmann. The moonshot model is a departure—seeking both founder equity upside plus additional compensation awards.

“This way of wealth building is different than what was used during the dotcom era,” he noted.

The upside to the moonshot is an enormous payout and a growing slice of company ownership if an executive can deliver transformational growth, but investors aren’t always wild about them, and moonshots don’t come without significant risk, said Todd Sirras, a managing director with consulting firm Semler Brossy who has advised clients on these deals. Companies are “willing to bet all of these ungodly amounts of money on one person thinking, ‘That’s the right machine we need for the factory,’” said Sirras. But there’s a fundamental flaw in this approach because people are unpredictable—unlike factory equipment.

“Human beings are terrible machines,” Sirras told Fortune. “They’re emotional. Their attention gets divided thinking about what airplane they’re going to buy. It’s more risky to invest in a human being than it is to invest in a machine because human beings break in different and unpredictable ways.”

Until now, the moonshot offers have been almost exclusive to founder-CEOs and almost always established pre-IPO, said Sirras. Semler Brossy’s database of about 80 moonshot awards includes dozens issued during the SPAC IPO boom of 2020 and 2021 that are now “dead in the water” because companies failed to meet their valuation targets, he added.

With fewer IPOs in recent years and fewer moonshots, there are about 16 that exist among large publicly traded companies—and even fewer CEOs who have achieved maximum payouts, including Smith and Musk, according to research from Claire Kamas, a senior data analyst at Farient Advisors. Other companies that have awarded the grants include Airbnb, DoorDash, Oracle, ServiceNow, and RH, formerly known as Restoration Hardware, Kamas found. But the high-profile nature of the awards and the eye-popping figures associated with them are pushing board-level compensation committees that negotiate CEO pay to prepare for conversations about similar packages.

Farient has gotten queries from compensation committee chairs who are already preparing for how they will address the situation when the CEO comes to them about a moonshot plan. In one case, the CEO isn’t a founder but a manager hired to run the company, Hoffmann noted. He isn’t a fan of moonshot awards, particularly in cases where CEOs already hold significant ownership stakes and control over their companies.

“From a firm perspective, it is our view that these plans are generally not in the best interests of the organizations, the stakeholders, and shareholders in these companies,” said Hoffmann. “To me, a lot of these feel like a lottery ticket, a winner-take-all.”

Despite the risk, Sirras sees these awards rising in popularity again, and he sees new trends emerging: Founders are granting moonshots to their “anointed successors,” he said. Real estate platform Opendoor Technologies this month granted a moonshot potentially worth $2.8 billion and an 11% slice of the company to new CEO Kaz Nejatian. Sirras said that award looks to be the first of its kind, and the board likely offered it to Nejatian because of a blessing from Opendoor’s cofounders, Eric Wu and Khosla Ventures’ Keith Rabois. Wu and Rabois returned to the board alongside Nejatian’s hiring and invested $40 million of equity capital into the company.

Sirras said the same trend seems to be occurring in private equity. For instance, when founders Henry Kravis and George Roberts of KKR stepped down, the firm in 2021 granted co-CEOs Joe Bae and Scott Nuttall 1.2 million shares of KKR Holdings, valued at about $75 million, as part of their promotions. That same year, Apollo Global Management granted copresidents Jim Zelter and Scott Kleinman the potential to earn more than $860 million in stock. Zelter was promoted to president in 2025, and Marc Rowan remains CEO.

In addition to controlling founders who are planning leadership transitions and “founder-anointed successors,” the new wave of awards will likely also go to leading-edge executives in scenarios in which founders are making investment decisions, said Sirras. The arms race for talent between OpenAI and Meta and the reported compensation packages Zuckerberg has offered come to mind, he added.

“From a design perspective, the magnitude is mind-boggling,” said Sirras. He compared it to the Jurassic Park film series. “Danger increases exponentially the closer these awards get to the general executive population,” Sirras wrote in an email. Alongside moonshots for founder-anointed successors and non-successors with a major capital investment he deems “inside the T. rex fence,” the rise of “awards in non-founder companies means the dinosaurs have escaped and are heading to the mainland,” Sirras wrote.

The awards can also prompt investors to revolt. Business payments company Corpay awarded CEO Ronald Clarke 850,000 performance-based stock options valued at $55.6 million in 2021. The award had stock price hurdles of $350 and $400 and Clarke got no long-term equity grants in 2020, 2022, and 2023. In 2024, the comp committee canceled 300,000 stock options subject to the $400 hurdle and modified the criterion for 550,000 stock options subject to the $350 hurdle to require that Corpay hit a closing stock price at or above $350 for at least three trading days by the end of 2024. Clarke achieved the modified hurdle on Oct. 23, 2024. Corpay told investors the change was meant to “align Mr. Clarke’s realized pay with that of shareholders who benefited from the increased stock level over $350 before the modification, but prior to the modification the stock had not closed above $350 for 10 consecutive days, which was the pre-modification hurdle.” In other words, the board made it simpler for Clarke to earn the stock options by reducing the target from 10 consecutive trading days above $350 to just three trading days, a hurdle he cleared shortly after the change.

The stock didn’t hit $400 until February 2025 and is currently trading at just under $300. The company’s 2025 Say-on-Pay vote—a thumbs-up, thumbs-down nonbinding vote on executive pay—only got support from 53.5% of votes cast. Over the past 14 years, the Russell 3000 index saw average support of about 91% for pay programs.

Corpay did not respond to a request for comment.

Axon Enterprise moonshot

At Axon, Smith’s moonshot deal differs from Musk’s in another key way: It’s open to Smith’s direct reports on down to line workers at Axon, making employees eligible for a version of Smith’s moonshot deal. Workers could give up some salary, put some of their pay at risk, and work to hit revenue targets. Plus, every employee in the U.S. got a grant of 60 performance stock units that vested according to the same milestones in Smith’s award—a move almost unheard of in corporate America. No one other than Smith was able to essentially give up all their pay, said Partovi, mostly because Smith was independently successful enough that if he didn’t cut it and got nothing, he had enough of a cushion. Roughly $75 million in employee compensation was locked up as at-risk pay so employees could take part in the moonshot.

“I really think that was a driver behind why the company grew so fast,” said Partovi. “Any element of infighting was gone—everybody was suddenly like, ‘We’re all in this together.’”

Smith’s 2023 award went through a significant negotiation process where Partovi heard directly from shareholders about everything they didn’t like about the first plan so he could debug it. The board also attempted to legal-proof it against the type of challenge that Musk’s moonshot faced, prompting one of the compensation committee members who had socialized with Smith to resign from the committee. The board also changed the vehicle type from performance options to restricted stock, added in speed brakes that would keep Smith at Axon, and made it more difficult for Smith to hit the last few tranches. Partovi said he addressed every question from shareholders about misalignment in the plan during the board’s negotiation process with Smith.

Ultimately, Partovi credits the moonshot deal with transforming the corporate culture around shared risk and high reward with a version of a high-stakes compensation plan rolled out to everyone at the company. In his view, it helped to eliminate dynamics where direct reports and general employees resent outsize pay for the chief executive, he said.

“The big thing is, the CEO is taking a risk in giving up his pay, and you don’t want it to turn out to be shareholders win and the CEO wins or shareholders lose and the CEO still wins,” said Partovi. “I don’t know if grants like Rick’s make sense for everybody, but they strongly make sense for Rick Smith at Axon.”