Golden Goose sneakers are having a comeback thanks to Gen Z.
Jeremy Moeller/Getty Images
Gen Z is reviving Golden Goose sneakers, valued for their shabby chic design.
Critics question the appeal of the distressed look, but fans love their comfort and style.
Golden Goose's popularity is rising, with the company valued at €3.3 billion ahead of its IPO.
Golden Goose sneakers were condemned as "cheugy" a few years ago. But Gen Z is bringing them back.
Young people have developed a taste for the shabby chic design of purposefully dirty-looking Golden Goose shoes, which can set them back $500 or more.
On Net-A-Porter, the most expensive Golden Goose shoe costs just over $1,000, while the cheapest is $420.
On Golden Goose's official site, prices go up to $2,350, though customers on social media have reported even higher sums when they go for custom designs.
The brand was founded in 2000 by Italian designers Francesca Rinaldo and Alessandro Gallo. They launched their sneakers in 2007 with the Super-Star model.
Interest in Golden Goose sneakers was bubbling among Zoomers last summer and seems to have boomed in 2024.
Other brands, including Balenciaga, Gucci, and Adidas, have dabbled in the distressed sneaker trend, though Golden Goose seems to have cornered the market with hundreds of designs and achieved mass appeal in a way that others haven't.
On TikTok, Golden Gooses are trending, with young consumers loving the aesthetic. Enthusiasts say they are the comfiest shoes they've ever worn, with some describing an addiction to the brand they just can't shake.
Critics say buying Golden Goose sneakers must be a "social experiment" because they can't understand a desire to buy anything that's so dirty and beaten up.
But those who get it just "get it," fans say in response — once a devotee, always a devotee.
Business Insider reported that Taylor Swift, Selena Gomez, and Hilary Duff are among the shoes' fans. This could factor into investor estimates of the company's valuation being 11 times this year's forecasted earnings.
In December, Golden Goose's CEO, Silvio Campara, told the Financial Times that the company's customers were largely young people and that 80% could be defined as Gen Z or millennials.
Parents aren't as thrilled, though. In one recent TikTok, posted by content creator Sydney Schiffer, she recorded her dad calling her "insane" when he learned how much her Golden Gooses had cost.
"The youth of today," he exclaimed. "It boggles my friggin' mind, there's a company that literally makes sneakers look old and worn?"
When Schiffer's mom noted ripped jeans are in style too, her father asked: "Why don't you just buy my old sneakers?"
Schiffer explained herself in a follow-up video, saying she agreed her love of Golden Goose shoes was irrational because she thought they were "ugly for the longest time."
"Especially for the price, the price is like, makes me want to throw up," she said.
However, when she saw one particular pair, she fell in love.
Schiffer showed off her new sneakers, which were characteristically scuffed and a nude-ish grey color — akin to old sneakers that have been stuffed into multiple suitcases and trudged through dirt over years' worth of vacations.
But, she said, they were the most comfortable shoes she'd ever worn, and they go with every outfit.
"They come dirty, so I don't care when I get them dirty," she said. "These last a lifetime. You don't have to clean them because as they get dirty, they just look more and more like a Golden Goose sneaker."
For this reason, they are good value and she will get her money's worth, Schiffer added.
"Especially by the time I'm 50, and I'm still wearing these."
Nicholas Jarzabek, who also goes by the stage name Nick Diver, now plans to countersue his landlord Nikeeta Sriram, accusing her of libel, among other claims.
"I am not a nightmare tenant. I have never been a nightmare tenant," Jarzabek said in a letter provided to Business Insider by email.
In the letter, he claimed not only that Sriram had stained his reputation, but also that he sublet the property with her knowledge.
The Los Angeles Times reported on a lawsuit filed by 31-year-old Nikeeta Sriram, seeking to kick out Jarzabek and take back the home.
In an interview with the newspaper she called Jarzabek a "nightmare," the term he rejected in his email.
Sriram said she rented her Mid-Wilshire property to Jarzabek in March 2022. It consists of a main house and a separate one-bedroom house in the yard.
According to the lawsuit, reviewed by the Times, Jarzabek initially paid his rent on time and made no repair requests.
However, The Times reported that in December 2023, Sriram discovered her home listed on Airbnb, which she claimed violated the terms of their lease.
As part of the lawsuit, Sriram subpoenaed Airbnb records, which showed that over 16 months between 2022 and 2023, the listing generated $215,954, about $13,500 a month, according to the Times.
Sriram filed for eviction through the Los Angeles Superior Court and sent a cease-and-desist letter to Jarzabek's attorney, the outlet reported.
Jarzabek showed BI a draft of a civil lawsuit where he counters Sriram's claims. He said he plans to file it this week.
In the document, he alleges that Sriram only initiated eviction proceedings when she asked him to leave early and he refused.
He denied breaching the lease's terms, claiming he paid rent on time every month up until eviction proceedings began.
In a letter provided to Business Insider, Jarzabek claimed that earlier in the lease Sriram "didn't care what I did with the properties as long as I paid the rent."
He stated that Sriram knew he was single and had rented him two separate houses, seeming to imply it was obvious he would do something else with the excess space.
"Sriram knew I had guests and knew I sublet," he said. He also claimed she had not expressed any concerns for a year and a half until she wanted to break the lease, which he says was due to continue to September 2024.
Jarzabek's draft lawsuit claims Sriram made "false, misleading, nonfactual, and unfounded" statements about him in the Times article.
He claims the article led to "public hatred, contempt, and ridicule," including threats by people to beat up and kill him and says he is seeking damages of $14,000.
Sriram did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI.
Yet, stumping up the cash for one may still be worth it financially if it results in significantly higher earnings. That's especially true for public universities that charge in-state tuition: their average alumnus only has to make $50,000 a year during the decade after graduation to make a positive return on their investment, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing new research from Strada Education Foundation.
Alternatively, graduates who can amass $500,000 before taxes over 10 years typically come out ahead and can repay their student loans. The finding holds for state-school graduates across sectors, The Journal said.
"As long as you're above that $50,000, even in the most expensive states, you'll still have that positive return on investment," Nichole Torpey-Saboe, Strada's vice president of research, told the newspaper.
It costs more to live in states like New York and California, but recent graduates can still outearn their peers because of the superior job markets in those states, which often provide better access to internships and entry-level roles.
Strada found that around 80% of state-school graduates in those states scored a return on their college investment, compared to 60% in West Virginia and just over 50% in Idaho, The Journal said.
The nonprofit also revealed that community college doesn't provide as big an earnings bump, and private nonprofit universities tend to be more expensive at $8,000 a year and another $11,000 for room and board.
Taking out a student loan and getting a four-year degree can be daunting for many people, as student loans can haunt borrowers for decades, and college campuses have become a hotspot for protests and political clashes. The prices of food, fuel, and housing have all soared, and monthly payments on credit cards, cars, and mortgages have jumped.
But an affordable degree that bolsters someone's earnings potential and career prospects without breaking the bank can still pay off nicely.
Shells used in Ukraine at the workshop of the "Forges de Tarbes" in Tarbes, southwestern France.
LIONEL BONAVENTURE via Getty Images
Russia is producing shells 3 times faster than Ukraine's allies, a report said.
The report said Russia was also producing shells more cheaply.
Ukraine is being outgunned by Russia.
Russia is producing artillery shells faster and at a lower price than Ukraine's NATO allies, a report found.
According to an analysis by consulting firm Bain & Company, reported by Sky News, Russia's armaments industry is expected to make or refurbish 4.5 million artillery shells this year.
By comparison, the US, the UK, and other European allies are expected to produce 1.3 million this year.
It said that while the 155mm shells typically produced by Western countries for Ukraine cost around $4,000 to make, the 152mm shells Russia uses cost around $1,000.
Bain & Co. reportedly used open-source data in producing the analysis. Business Insider could not independently verify the data.
Ukraine's military has been experiencing artillery shortages for months as it battles to prevent Russia from breaking through its defensive lines in east Ukraine.
The conflict has developed into a war of attrition, with both sides firing thousands of rounds a day to break down each other's defensive lines.
But while Ukraine's Western allies have struggled to keep up with the relentless demand for shells, Russia has placed its economy on a war footing, ramping up its production of shells and other military equipment.
Images obtained by The Wall St Journal on Monday showed a drone production factory where Russia is aiming to step up its production of the devices.
The recent release of a $61 billion US aid bill by Congress is expected to help Ukraine fend off Russia's attacks, but reports say that Ukraine is still being outgunned on key parts of the front line.
Stacie Pettyjohn, a military analyst at the Center for a New American Security, told BI recently that the Ukraine conflict had exposed serious problems in the US capacity to produce weapons, ammunition, and artillery.
Analysts believe that Russia is gearing up for a war of attrition against Ukraine, in the belief that Western resolve and support for Kyiv will begin to tail off.
A family was removed from a flight over their daughter's peanut allergy.
Cabin crew refused to ask other passengers not to eat nuts, so the family made their own announcement.
Airlines refusing to make nut allergy announcements is a common problem that frustrates many.
A family was kicked off a flight for orchestrating an announcement over their daughter's peanut allergy, according to multiple reports.
Georgie Palmer was flying along with her husband and two daughters from London to Dalaman, Turkey, with SunExpress on May 21, when the dispute broke out, according to the MailOnline.
Palmer's daughter, Rosie, has a severe peanut allergy that can result in a potentially fatal anaphylactic reaction, she told the outlet.
But airline staff refused to make a standard announcement asking other passengers not to eat peanuts. According to an Instagram post seen by the Mail, Palmer took matters into her own hands.
"We gently asked the passengers at the front of the plane to share our request," she wrote. "Row by row, as swift as a carefully crafted toppling domino trail, all the passengers turned back to kindly ask the row behind to please not eat nuts on the flight."
None of the passengers minded at all, she said.
But, she told the Mail, it enraged the pilot. She said he began to yell at them and ultimately ordered them to leave. As a result, the family spent around $6,400 booking alternative flights and hotels, she said.
In a statement to the Mail, a spokesperson for SunExpress said the airline does not make announcements like this as it "cannot guarantee an allergen-free environment on our flights."
Passengers have to notify the airline of special requirements 48 hours in advance, the spokesperson told Business Insider in a statement. They said Palmer didn't do that.
Palmer, in response, told the BBC that she had tried to make contact but could not reach anyone.
The airline also told the Mail that Palmer's husband, Nick Sollom, was "aggressive" to the crew and "tried to gain access to the cockpit."
Palmer told the BBCthat claim was "absolute nonsense."
Speaking to the Mail, Sollom said that he knocked on the cockpit door to discuss the situation with the pilot but denied being aggressive.
In response to these denials, the airline's spokesperson told BI that it "stands by what it has said about this."
The incident highlights the amount of planning frequent flyers with allergies need to undertake, with only a handful of major airlines — including British Airways, Air Canada, Southwest, Delta, and JetBlue making accommodations like this a standard part of their policies.
An advocate for people with serious allergies said SunExpress was at fault.
Nadim Ednan-Laperouse, the co-founder of the Natasha Allergy Research Foundation, said in a post to Facebook that SunExpress should "immediately" revisit its policies.
"'Food allergies are an illness not a lifestyle choice, and the experience of this family on board a plane is shocking and unacceptable," he said.
"Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident."
It's true — SunExpress is far from the only airline that has refused to make the potentially life-saving announcement about allergies.
Passengers of United and Lufthansa have described unpleasant encounters over the issue.
A flight attendant broke her back on a short domestic flight in Turkey after the plane hit turbulence.
The incident is the third case this week of mid-flight turbulence causing injuries and even death.
The three incidents are not linked, but turbulence is getting worse, a 2023 study showed.
A Turkish Airlines flight attendant has broken her back after the plane she was on hit turbulence, local media reported.
The crew member was working on a short 50-minute domestic flight from Turkey's biggest city, Istanbul, to Izmir, in the west of the country.
Shortly after the pilot warned passengers to fasten their seat belts, the Airbus A321 suddenly dropped midair in response to turbulence, Hurriyet, Turkey's biggest newspaper, reported.
The woman, who had only been in the job for two months, was thrown up toward the ceiling and then fell down to the floor of the plane, Hurriyet added.
She was taken to a hospital in Izmir upon landing, where medical staff confirmed that she had a broken vertebra.
The incident is the third case of turbulence causing injuries to passengers widely reported this week.
Over the weekend, 12 people were injured by mid-flight turbulence on a Qatar Airways flight from Doha to Dublin. The turbulence hit while the plane was flying over Turkey, Dublin Airport told Business Insider.
Upon landing, the flight was met by airport police and emergency services. Eight people were taken to hospital.
It isn't clear if the patch of turbulence hit by the Qatar plane was the same as that which impacted the Turkish Airlines flight.
The weekend's incidents followed one of the worst cases of injuries through turbulence in recent years.
One man died, and more than 100 passengers were injured on board a Singapore Airlines flight last Tuesday after the plane dropped hundreds of feet before stabilizing midair.
Images from the diverted flight show debris strewn across the cabin and blood on the ceiling. 73-year-old Geoff Kitchen, who had an existing heart condition, died on board the flight.
Severe turbulence dislodged oxygen masks and caused injuries to dozens of passengers on Singapore Airlines flight SQ321.
Reuters/Stringer
Several passengers suffered traumatic injuries, including paralysis, skull and back trauma, and brain injuries, The Associated Press reported.
34 passengers from the flight remain in hospital, the airline said in a statement on Monday.
Though they have occurred in close proximity, the three dramatic cases of turbulence do not appear to be connected. Instances of severe injuries linked to turbulence remain rare, with around a dozen people a year badly hurt due to turbulence in the US, according to the FAA.
Turbulence, which refers to sharp changes to airflow, is common at high altitudes but is believed to be becoming more severe due to climate change.
In a 2023 study, researchers at the UK's University of Reading found that in 1979, there were around 17.7 hours of severe turbulence over an average point above the Atlantic Ocean. By 2020, this had jumped to 27.4 hours, an increase of 55%.
Some turbulence is easy to spot, as it is linked to storms or heavy clouds. But rising temperatures are causing more "clear air turbulence," which hits suddenly and is harder to avoid.
The only way it can currently be detected is if another flight hits it first and warns others.
Fifteen airlines are working on a solution to better monitor clear air turbulence, the FT reported.
Last week, pilot Emma Henderson told BI that, even though the Singapore Airlines flight was an extreme case, it is a good idea always to wear a seatbelt, even if the sign is off, to protect against turbulence.
Turkish Airlines did not immediately respond to BI's request for comment.
Andrew Halter, left, in partnership with the St. Bonaventure Indian Mission, delivers thousands of gallons of water per month to the Navajo Nation.
Andrew Halter
Andrew Halter delivers water 1,200 miles by rail to the Navajo Nation from Mississippi.
Navajo Nation residents struggle with water scarcity, with 30% lacking reliable drinking water.
Halter hopes water-by-rail can be a solution for other Western communities and in natural disasters.
Andrew Halter had been in the railroad business for 25 years, mostly in middle management roles. It was his dream job and all he ever wanted to do.
But when the world shut down in 2020, and he got laid off, he needed to figure something else out.
"It came to me one day like a clap of thunder," Hatler, who is based in Pennsylvania, told Business Insider.
Halter and his brother had long talked about the possibility of using rail to help alleviate the water crisis in the Navajo Nation. His brother, Chris Halter, runs the St. Bonaventure Indian Mission and School, located on the southeastern edge of the reservation, which spans more than 27,000 square miles across parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah.
Nearly a third of Navajo Nation residents do not have access to reliable, clean drinking water, according to the tribe. The estimated population was over 165,000 in 2020, according to census data.
The mission was already delivering water via trucks to 250 families, a small portion of the Navajo who are water-scarce. The families receive about 40 gallons of water a day, far less than the 300 gallons the average American family uses. The mission has relied on a local well to get the water, but if something happened to it, all those families would be without any water virtually overnight.
"To be honest, it was always the thing that would wake me up in the middle of the night," Chris Halter told BI. "If that well shuts down for some reason, what would I do next?"
Now, Halter's company, Jacob's Well, in partnership with the mission, delivers thousands of gallons of water each month from Mississippi to the Navajo Nation via the BNSF Railway. The water-by-rail served as a lifeline in 2022 when the well had to undergo repairs that lasted months.
The operation has grown quickly, and Halter is focused on expanding, both to provide more water to the Navajo Nation but also potentially to other places in the West, where dried up rivers and reservoirs are leaving communities increasingly desperate for solutions.
Jacob's Well tank cars can carry 21,000 gallons of water.
Andrew Halter
Some thought the water-by-rail idea was crazy
When Halter first started calling railroads about transporting drinkable water, some thought the idea was crazy.
He finally got in touch with Eunice Sun at BNSF, who currently serves as the business development manager of emerging markets.
"We haven't moved potable water prior to this opportunity, really, because the economics don't necessarily pencil out in order to pay for that water and pay for the transport," Sun told BI. But when Halter came to her, she said he did a great job communicating his vision and business plan.
Halter said right now they can transport water, depending on fuel prices and other fluctuating costs, for around 38 cents a gallon. Currently, those costs are covered almost entirely by private donations to the mission. However, as the operation scales up and he transports more tank cars of water, those costs could come down.
Getting a public utility to sell him hundreds of thousands of gallons of water per month was another story. "A lot of times, they think you're crazy," Halter said. Still, they were able to work out a deal with the water department of Helena, Mississippi, where Jacob's Well collects its water before it travels 1,200 miles by rail to the southwest.
Once it arrives, the Navajo families can pick up water from the mission or have it delivered to their homes, just as the well water is.
Originally, Halter said he couldn't even find information about how the water would travel, and it took a lot of testing before and after transport to ensure the supply stayed safe to drink.
"We've kind of had to wing it and make up our own rules as we go along and figure some things out the hard way, which we did," he said.
It took around eight months from when Halter first contacted BNSF for the first shipment to go out, and the operation has only grown since. Halter said they currently average around two tank cars a month, which each hold 21,000 gallons of water,but the operation is capable of delivering 200,000 gallons a month if needed.
They sent half a million gallons of water total in 2023. He's hoping to reach 2 million this year.
St. Bonaventure Indian Mission and School provides more than 250 Navajo Nation families with water.
Andrew Halter
Emergency water supply and the water crisis
It's unclear at this point how scalable or economically feasible water-by-rail will be in other places, but those involved are hopeful.
Chris Halter said he's currently conducting a study that he hopes will show the project has had a sound return on investment so that he can show tribal, local, and state governments that his is a feasible option.
Sun said expanding Jacob's Well wouldn't come without growing pains, but that BNSF is happy to help support the project's growth. "It tugs at your heartstrings," she said, adding that it's not often she gets to work on a project that has such a direct positive impact on a local community.
Halter sees water-by-rail as something that could fill a serious need in all sorts of situations, from communities whose wells run dry to natural disasters. He's already been in touch with the state of New Mexico and FEMA. He's hopeful that rail will be among the solutions that help alleviate the broader water crisis.
After getting a severe case of COVID-19, Halter lost the use of his right hand and was not able to go back to work on the railroad, so he now runs Jacob's Well full time.
"It's become a driving mission to give these people water," he said. "I want to be able to provide people with water at the lowest cost possible, and I want it to make enough money to support itself, but I don't need to get wealthy on it."
For now the operation is run on donations, but they're hoping they can get grant money or other public funds to help support it in the future.
"Water is a human right," Halter said. "And they should be able to have it."
Musk's xAI is reportedly vying with Meta to partner with Character.AI, an Andreessen Horowitz-backed startup that allows users to create AI-generated characters that act as chatbots, individuals with knowledge of the situation told the Financial Times.
According to the report, both companies have held exploratory talks with Character.AI about working together on initiatives, including pre-training and developing AI models, although no deal has been struck with either.
Zuckerberg has vowed to spend "aggressively" on AI and said that the company's mission is now to build AGI, a level of AI that will outperform humans.
The two billionaires have clashed over AI before. In 2017, Zuckerberg branded Musk's views on AI as "irresponsible" after Musk questioned whether AI could be a threat to humanity.
"With AI especially, I'm really optimistic, and I think that people who are naysayers and try to drum up these doomsday scenarios … I don't understand it. It's really negative, and in some ways, I actually think it's pretty irresponsible," Zuckerberg said.
Musk fired back that the Meta boss had a "limited" understanding of the subject.
Meta, Elon Musk, and Character.AI did not immediately respond to a request for comment made outside normal working hours.
Elon Musk runs X, SpaceX, The Boring Company, Tesla, and xAI.
As of May 2024, Musk is the world's third richest person with a net worth of $191 billion.
Musk has been divorced three times, dated celebrities, and has 10 children with three women.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk is the cofounder of other major companies, including SpaceX.
He was born in 1971 in South Africa. Musk's parents are Maye and Errol, who divorced in 1979. In the 1990s, he founded his first startup, Zip2, with his brother, Kimbal, and began a decadeslong career in tech.
Musk's second venture, online banking company X.com, merged with a startup of Peter Thiel's to form PayPal. When PayPal sold to eBay in 2002, Musk made $165 million.
Musk is the third richest person in the world. He's frequently trading places with other billionaires in the ranks, but as of May 2024, Musk's net worth stands at $191 billion, putting him behind Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and French luxury tycoon Bernard Arnault. His estimated fortune peaked at around $340 billion in November 2021 as Tesla shares soared.
X, formerly known as Twitter
Elon Musk started buying shares in Twitter, now called X, in January 2022 and initiated an acquisition in April that year.
By the time Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022, he had actually spent months trying to back out of the agreement. At the start of July, he sent a letter to Twitter purporting to terminate the acquisition. Twitter promptly sued him.
When the sale went through, Musk immediately ousted a number of Twitter executives, including its CEO, CFO, and chief legal officer. In November, Musk issued an ultimatum: work at an "extremely hardcore" rate or accept a three-month severance package. He would go on to lay off around 80% of Twitter's staff.
Musk's Twitter verification changes were announced on November 1. He tweeted that Twitter's "current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn't have a blue checkmark is bullshit." He added, "Power to the people! Blue for $8/month."
In May 2023, Musk named Linda Yaccarino as Twitter's new CEO. "Looking forward to working with Linda to transform this platform into X, the everything app," Musk said in a tweet.
In July 2023, Twitter was rebranded to X.
SpaceX
Musk founded SpaceX in 2002, investing $100 million he made from the sale of PayPal.
The company nearly failed. After three unsuccessful launches between 2006 and 2008, funding was running out. Then, on September 28, 2008, SpaceX became the first private company to achieve a successful orbital launch. That same year, SpaceX received a $1.5 billion NASA contract.
"Fate liked us that day," Musk told CNBC when reflecting on the events nine years later.
SpaceX launches now happen on a fairly regular basis. The company publishes a SpaceX launch schedule on its website. Launches typically take place at Cape Canaveral Space Force Base or the Kennedy Space Center, which are both in Florida.
SpaceX runs the Starlink satellite internet system. Its satellites operate in Earth's lower orbit, decreasing the lag between when the data is transferred to the receiver, according to the company. Musk said he plans to eventually create a constellation of up to 42,000 satellites.
The company launched its first batch of Starlink satellites in 2019 and has more than 4,000 of its satellites in orbit today.
The SpaceX Falcon 9, a partially reusable two-stage rocket, is often used for launches. The Falcon 9 family of rockets is a first-of-its-kind and a key asset for NASA in servicing the International Space Station since the retirement of the Space Shuttle program in 2011. Apart from the Space Shuttles, the majority of spacefaring equipment was previously single-use.
SpaceX is valued at almost $140 billion under Musk's unique leadership style. Because it's a private company, SpaceX stock is not easy to purchase for members of the general public.
The company is not currently publicly planning an IPO. Musk has said that SpaceX won't file for an initial public offering until what he calls the "Mars Colonial Transporter" is flying regularly.
SpaceX's long-term goal is to make colonizing Mars affordable.
The Boring Company
Musk's The Boring Company was created as a subsidiary of SpaceX and later became its own entity. Inspired by LA traffic gridlock, the tunneling venture has several ongoing projects on the West Coast.
In April 2022, The Boring Company completed Series C funding of $675 million, which was valued at $5.675 billion, according to a Boring Company news release. Boring Company stock is not currently publicly traded.
In 2018, Musk sold 20,000 Boring Company flamethrowers in just five days. The product, called "Not-A-Flamethrower," has been off the market for years. However, it's acquired something of a cult status among the tech mogul's fans, and some people have been paying hundreds of dollars to snap them up on eBay.
Among Musk's other innovative products is a 5'8" humanoid Tesla robot named Optimus, announced in 2021. The robot is designed to help reduce the labor shortage, according to Musk, and keep workers safer. This could very well be groundbreaking, but it still has a long way to go before it is ready for production and available for purchase.
Neuralink
Musk's brain-chip company Neuralink has begun implanting its devices in human skulls — and like many of Musk's ventures, the new technology has been met with both fanfare and skepticism.
Neuralink's current priority is to treat patients with neurological conditions, such as paralysis and blindness. Initially, in the first human trial, Neuralink's goal is to help patients with paralyzed limbs control devices like a computer mouse or keyboard with only their thoughts.
But Musk has said he wants Neuralink to ultimately help humans achieve "symbiosis" with artificial intelligence so that they don't get "left behind" as AI evolves over time.
xAI
Musk founded startup xAI in March 2023, which has since launched a chatbot called Grok. In May 2024, xAI announced it had raised $6 billion in a Series B funding round.
The billionaire wants xAI to build a supercomputer and have it running by fall 2025, The Information reported. It will be powered by Nvidia's GPUs.
Elon Musk's wives and kids
Musk's spouses are Justine Musk, who he met at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada, and Talulah Riley, whom he married in 2010. He met Riley at a bar in London, and the couple divorced and remarried before splitting again.
Five of Musk's children were born during his eight-year marriage with his ex-wife, Justine.
It is unclear if Musk is dating anyone presently. Musk reportedly split in 2022 with actor Natasha Bassett, who is believed to be his last public girlfriend.
Before that, Musk briefly dated actor Amber Heard in 2017 amid her divorce from actor Johnny Depp. The two first connected on the red carpet of the 2016 Met Gala, which Depp was expected to attend but didn't.
He and the musician Grimes started dating in 2018. Since then, they've broken up and gotten back together a few times. Now, they appear to just be co-parents of a boy and a girl named X Æ A-Xii and Y.
Musk quietly had twins in November 2021 with one of his top executives, Shivon Zilis.
Crypto.com is balancing between notability and infamy. It's walking softly but carrying a big ad budget.
iStock; Rebecca Zisser/BI
Crypto.com is everywhere. Its name is plastered on the home of arguably the most famous NBA franchise, the Los Angeles Lakers. It's sponsoring Formula 1 races and UFC matches. It's ads are back on the airwaves, with Eminem declaring during the NBA playoffs that "fortune favors the brave."
Crypto.com is also nowhere. It doesn't have a flashy CEO like FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried (who is currently in prison) or Binance's CZ (who is headed to prison). Unlike with Coinbase, regulators don't seem to be sniffing around. Sure, the company has high-profile marketing efforts, but day to day, Crypto.com doesn't really come up much at all.
Crypto.com is one of those things I've long placed in my "I wonder what the deal is" column, along with Jojo Siwa, bird flu, and the difference between F1 and NASCAR. It seems impossible to watch a sporting event without seeing its name somewhere, and yet I rarely chat with someone who uses it or come across its name in headlines. Part of the issue is that I live in New York, where its services aren't allowed. (That's not a knock on the company — for a lot of crypto exchanges, the Empire State is a tough nut to crack.) But it's also a rather nebulous entity in the American market. It says it's got 100 million users globally, but it still seems to fly a little under the radar.
Often, when I mention Crypto.com to someone who works in the crypto industry, they tell me they know about it, of course. When I ask exactly what they know about it, they come up pretty empty. Maybe it's mainly popular abroad, they speculate, or only for novices. Google data indicates that while a good chunk of the search interest does come from America, more comes from outside the US, notably from Singapore, Nigeria, and Bulgaria.
"Huh, I guess bigger than I thought," one crypto evangelist remarked after looking up its trading volume.
"They own the Lakers' arena? I've always been so confused on how they did that," another crypto entrepreneur said. (To be fair, the company doesn't own the arena; it just bought the naming rights.) He'd set up a Crypto.com account during the 2021-2022 market cycle to do a specific maneuver not allowed on Coinbase at the time, but he hasn't really used it since then.
When I asked Nic Carter, a general partner at Castle Island Ventures, about the company, he replied in an email, "It's kind of a mystery, yes."He added that, like me, he doesn't know anyone who uses it. "But I think that reflects the user base — it's not necessarily crypto-natives but rather retail that wants a casual and accessible experience (is my understanding)," he said.
Crypto.com is positioning itself as the new face of crypto, even as it remains rather faceless itself. It might prove to be a smart move — it's boosting its brand and, in turn, its consumer base while avoiding much of the scrutiny other exchanges have faced. For the time being, Crypto.com is balancing between notability and infamy. It's walking softly but carrying a big ad budget.
While Crypto.com only really burst onto the American scene over the past four years or so, it's been around for a while. Originally named Monaco, the exchange was founded in 2016 in Hong Kong by Kris Marszalek, a Polish-born entrepreneur with a colorful past, and a handful of others. Amid the 2017 crypto run, it raised money from the public via an initial coin offering — creating and selling a digital token of its own, similar to a stock-market IPO. In 2018, the company landed the coveted Crypto.com domain name, purchasing it for an undisclosed amount from an academic who had long refused to sell it. (Even more confusingly, Crypto.com is technically operated by Foris DAX Asia, which, according to a scan of Reddit, can befuddle many users when their tax paperwork comes in. It's also the name Crypto.com lobbies under.) Crypto.com's primary business is its cryptocurrency exchange, which works as a middleman for people buying and selling crypto, but it also offers other products, including crypto Visa cards.
The 2021-22 market cycle is when Crypto.com, now headquartered in Singapore, made its big splash. In late 2021, it bought the naming rights to what was then the Staples Center in Los Angeles as part of a 20-year, $700 million deal. It signed sponsorship deals with UFC and F1 while also rolling its "fortune favors the brave" ad campaign, which originally featured Matt Damon. Crypto.com was seeking brand awareness, and it was willing to spend millions upon millions for it.
"This is one brick in a bigger wall of introducing Crypto.com as a brand to the world and communicating what our core values are," Steven Kalifowitz, Crypto.com's chief marketing officer, told Business Insider at the time.
A lot of crypto's mini-emperors turned out to have no clothes.
In the moment, it all sort of made sense. FTX was flying high and had paid $135 million to slap its name on the Miami Heat's stadium. Its founder, SBF, was running around with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair in the Bahamas and suggesting he'd spend $1 billion on the 2024 election. Binance's CZ was talking about investing $200 million in Forbes, saying it would push media companies toward adopting crypto and lead to the decentralization of the industry. But we know how the story ends: FTX imploded, along with some other high-profile crypto projects, and crypto winter set in. A lot of crypto's mini-emperors turned out to have no clothes.
Crypto.com, however, managed to weather the storm, though not perfectly. The company accidentally sent some $400 million to the wrong account in November 2022, prompting some users to pull their money out of the platform. At the start of 2023, it laid off 20% of its workforce, blaming economic headwinds and FTX's collapse. The Financial Times reported last June that Crypto.com was operating internal proprietary trading teams, which US regulators had dinged Binance for, even though Crypto.com insisted it was fine. The regulatory environment in the US appears to have made the company a little nervous — it shut down its American institutional exchange in the middle of last year.
In the US, Crypto.com has managed to avoid much of the blowback its competitors have faced. (This isn't the case in other countries — in the Netherlands, for example, it was fined for operating without registration.) While the Securities and Exchange Commission has gone after Coinbase and Kraken for operating unregistered securities exchanges, it hasn't made a peep about Crypto.com. Crypto.com has so far ducked notice, even though it's running a lot of the same playbook. In April, the company's chief operating officer acknowledged in an interview with Decrypt that its big-budget marketing efforts could put a target on its back but said the trade-off was worth it.
Crypto.com's determination to push ahead, both loudly and quietly, has set it up to try to capitalize on the market's recent run. Bitcoin is once again on the up and up, and so too is Crypto.com. The company is hiring again, it's advertising aggressively again, and it's talking a big game about its business prospects — its CEO, Marszalek, told Bloomberg in April that it was looking to triple its number of registered users.
Data from the marketing-intelligence firm Sensor Tower indicates crypto advertisers' digital spending in the US increased by 185% year over year in the first quarter of 2024. Crypto.com spent eight times as much as Coinbase on digital advertising during that period. (It's worth noting that back in the first quarter of 2022, Crypto.com actually outspent FTX on digital ads by a bit.)
But the thing about all Crypto.com's advertising dollars is that they seem to be only effective-ish. Data compiled by CCData shows that Crypto.com has a 2.3% market share by trading volumes on the spot market globally, which is about half of Coinbase, which has 4%, and only slightly above Kraken, which has 1.4%. (Globally, Binance is still dominant.) According to Sensor Tower, Crypto.com saw a 140% increase in downloads in March from the prior month, though it fell slightly behind Coinbase, which had a 160% increase.
All that buying of stadiums and renaming stuff, it's just kind of viewed as lame by most people in crypto.
Crypto.com didn't respond to multiple requests for interviews or comments for this story. Most of the people I did speak to gave the verbal equivalent of a shrug when I asked what they thought of the company.
One crypto executive said part of the issue was that Crypto.com, being an upstart from Asia, is a little outside Silicon Valley's mainstream crypto circles. Similar to the clubby "PayPal Mafia" that dominated software in the 2010s, a sort of Coinbase crew has its hold on the crypto industry of the 2020s. The exec wasn't too keen on Crypto.com's flashy advertising either, describing it as "decadent" and irresponsible.
"All that buying of stadiums and renaming stuff, it's just kind of viewed as lame by most people in crypto," they said. "I think the tackiest thing and frankly irresponsible thing to do is to roll out FOMO ads. 'Buy crypto or get left behind' is a really irresponsible message. JPMorgan doesn't do that."
And despite the company's ability to dodge serious regulatory scrutiny, it hasn't engendered a lot of goodwill among some crypto evangelists.
"I'm supportive of bitcoin, but I think Crypto.com is overall a big negative for the American public. It's very confusing. It's a casino," said Alex Gladstein, who as the chief strategy officer at the Human Rights Foundation has argued that bitcoin is important for advancing human rights and freedom. "When you go to the website, they encourage you to try and bet on these coins that go to zero. I don't think it's anything to do with financial empowerment for people or any sort of alternative wealth building."
Crypto.com is embedded in our culture, and it isn't. It's sort of taken on the FTX mantle but with a more anonymous bent. For the company, it's a pretty savvy space in which to operate: ubiquitous but relatively anonymous. For everyone else, mileage may vary on how you feel about the whole thing. It's a good reminder that, whatever the company, it's better to use exchanges only for trading your crypto assets, not for storing them.
Maybe Eminem won't come to regret voicing those ads like Matt Damon did. Or maybe in five years we'll be looking back at this moment and saying: "Remember that one crypto company? Is it still where the Lakers play? Or is it now something else?"
Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.