30 Under 30 Doing 30

Good afternoon,

SBF is down to his last $100k, US Q3 GDP comes in at +2.9%, and Euro-zone inflation slows for the first time in 1.5 years. JPow speaks today, the Senate FTX hearing begins tomorrow, and Jim Cramer wants to see unemployment go higher now. Let’s dive in.

Bottom Line Up Front

• Co-founder of Alibaba, Jack Ma, has been found living in Tokyo for nearly six months after Beijing’s crackdown on the tech sector.

• Sam Bankman-Fried says he “isn't sure what happened” to his $100 million stake in Twitter, shortly after Elon Musk claimed the crypto mogul didn't have any shares.

• Nancy Pelosi’s chamber votes today on a bill aimed at ending the railroad labor conflict. Pelosi also filed FEC paperwork to run for re-election in 2024.

• As many as 500 Chinese businesses have quietly re-domiciled or registered in Singapore in the past 12 months as US-China relations deteriorate.

• Bank of America downgrades Carvana, citing stock could go to zero without a cash infusion.

But first, a quick note from The Information.

If you're looking for high quality tech / VC reporting beyond TechCrunch and The Verge, I highly recommend signing up for The Information, where they get a lot of exclusives on major VC fundraises, startup funding rounds, and layoffs. They also have detailed company org charts for those who are looking to breakdown major tech firm corporate structures. Sign up here.

Deep Dive: 30 Under 30 Doing 30

Everyone’s favorite opinion column-only news outlet, Forbes, dropped its annual shill list yesterday. Each year, the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, or at least the finance section, answers two key questions:

• What do middle managers do with their bonuses?

• Just how far can TikTok financial advisors go without disclosing they’re not providing financial advice?

We’re bullish anyone who can model out a convertible preferred equity investment structure, or review all the ways that intern couldn’t figure out a simple VLOOKUP, deserves to make the list. But if you don’t have time in the day to “network” with the right people, don’t sweat it. Here’s some of our favorite under 30s who should be doing 30. The first offender:

Martin Shkreli

Ad: “As an activist hedge fund manager specializing in healthcare stocks, torpedoed the proposed merger of Amag Pharmaceuticals and Allos Therapeutics by launching his own hostile bid. Antagonized Pfizer to remove former CEO William Steere from its board. His latest: founding a biotech focused on rare diseases.”

Actual: A pioneer of pricing strategy and financial advisor to SBF. In his spare time, Shkreli enjoyed innovating just how much margin he could make from crucial antiparasitic drugs, like when he raised Daraprim’s price up 5,455% (from $13.50 to $750 per pill). Shkreli’s previous experience includes being sentenced to seven years in federal prison and up to $7.4 million in fines.

Steve Jobs Elizabeth Holmes

Ad: Named the world's youngest self-made woman billionaire--worth $4.5 billion--in 2014, when she was 30 years old.

Actual: Holmes is now resigned to living a simpler life for the next eleven years. Not to worry, our sources tell us she will have ample security.

Will Heller

Within a year of being nominated in Social Impact, Heller went back to his job at Goldman Sachs as a commodities trader in oil and gas.

Victor Chen

Ad: “Chen has spent the past five years as an investor at CapitalG, the growth equity arm of Google parent Alphabet, where he has helped deploy $250 million of capital in tech companies …The former Goldman Sachs investment banker is a certified sommelier.”

Actual: Chen used an app to hire a person to pick up and deliver a Chipotle burrito to him every night for twenty-two consecutive nights.

Eleni Antoniadou

Ad: She worked on the world's first artificial trachea that was successfully transplanted to a patient.

Actual: She was a postgraduate student at UCL and was remotely involved with the surgery. The transplant ended with one of the biggest scandals in modern medicine. The patient died after his body did not accept the transplant. Long after his death, Ms Antoniadou gave interviews in Greece saying how she had saved the patient's life and how the patient was living a normal life.

Ad: She has been working for a number of years as a researcher at Nasa.

Actual: She attended a 10-week summer school there and took a lot of pictures around the US space agency's facilities wearing clothes with the Nasa logo. Nasa has denied she works directly for the agency, but has not excluded the possibility that she may be working as a sub-contractor.

Ad: She has called herself a PhD.

Actual: She holds two postgraduate Masters degrees.

Tim Harris

Started a Bay Area “summer camp” where exhausted tech bros can “unplug” for $2,000 a weekend. Where have we seen this before?

Rebecca Meyer

Since earning her M.F.A. in fiction from Columbia, Meyer has been at work writing her début novel in her sprawling Chinatown loft, which was paid for in full by her parents. She has written sixteen pages, and, per the New Yorker, “they’re not very good.”

Haley DiStefano

DiStefano is known for posting pictures of her $8,000 Cartier bracelets on Instagram, accompanied by the hashtag “#ManicureMonday.” A revolutionary in the space.

Oksana Iyovitch

Ad: “The Oxford grad had helped raise half a million dollars in funding and increased its teacher cohort ten fold, partly by getting major Ukrainian celebrities to promote the non-profit.”

Actual: Iyovitch purchased a Scottish Fold kitten after seeing a picture of one on the Twitter feed Cute Emergency. Tried to return the cat to the breeder when it “got too big.”

SBF

Ad: “Save for Mark Zuckerberg, no one in history has ever gotten so rich so young. The irony? Bankman-Fried’s not a crypto evangelist—he’s barely even a believer. He’s a mercenary.”

Actual: The SEC may let him off, but we’re not.

Yesterday, SBF admitted to Tiffany Fong to reopening withdrawals for local Bahamian citizens without authorization, as he didn’t want to be in a country “with a lot of angry people in it” (Cointelegraph). Oh, and he said that he "couldn't have built a back door" to access FTX funds illegally because "I don't even know how to code."

Congratulations to all the entrepreneurs who made the list on merit. Then again, if you are “making the world a better place” like you probably promised in your VC pitches, please do get in touch and let us know what you’re doing reading a finance memesletter.

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