In mid-March, Virgin Orbit went into an "operational pause" and put most of its 750 employees in an unpaid leave due to financial issues. Reports have come out that the satellite launch company was in talks with potential new investors since then, but it sounds like it has yet to clinch a deal that would fund its operations going forward. According to CNBC and Reuters, Virgin Orbit CEO Dan Hart has told employees via email that the company will extend unpaid furlough for majority of its workforce. 

"Our investment discussions have been very dynamic over the past few days, they are ongoing, and not yet at a stage where we can provide a fulsome update," he reportedly wrote. Sources told the news organizations that Virgin Orbit's late-stage discussions with Texas-based investor Matthew Brown broke down and was officially called off late last week. 

Brown was going to put in $200 million into the company, which would've given the investor a controlling stake. Talks with a different potential buyer, CNBC said, also came to a halt on Sunday night. CNBC's Investing in Space newsletter recently reported that Sir Richard Branson, which currently has the largest stake in the company at 75 percent, doesn't want to own the business anymore. Branson's Virgin Group has apparently been rushing to find funding for the company in an effort to avoid bankruptcy. 

A small team of Virgin Orbit employees already returned to work last week as part of its expected "incremental resumption of operations." While the company's future remains unclear, it has to start preparing for its next planned rocket launches. One of the missions it's aiming to accomplish this year is its second orbital launch attempt from UK soil. If you'll recall, what was supposed to be Virgin Orbit's first orbital UK launch took off from Spaceport Cornwall on January 9th, but it failed to reach orbit due to a dislodged fuel filter.

More than a decade into its life, Lyft is bringing on a new chief executive officer. On Monday afternoon, the company announced current CEO and co-founder Logan Green would hand day-to-day operations of Lyft to David Risher, a former Amazon executive, on April 17th. That same day, Green will take over as chair of Lyft’s board of directors. The announcement is part of a larger executive shuffle that will also see Lyft president and co-founder John Zimmer move to the company’s board where he will serve as its vice chair. Zimmer’s last day as president will be June 30th.

Green and Zimmer founded Lyft in 2012 and successfully took the company public in 2019. Since its IPO, however, the value of Lyft’s stock has dropped dramatically. Following an initial high of $78.29 per share in 2019, the stock hit a record low of $9.60 per share earlier today. On February 9th, the day Lyft announced its Q4 2022 results, the stock shed 36 percent of its value after Green delivered what was widely considered one of the worst earnings calls in recent memory, telling investors the company would need to increase spending to stay competitive with Uber. To say Lyft’s new CEO has his work cut out for him would be an understatement. The company has never reported a profit, and, barring a surprise breakthrough in autonomous driving, it has a difficult path ahead due to the economics of ride-sharing. Still, Risher is definitely qualified to turn Lyft around having previously served as Amazon’s first head of product and head of US retail.

Add Binance to the list of crypto heavyweights facing serious legal trouble. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has charged Binance, founder Changpeng Zhao and former compliance chief Samuel Lim with allegedly violating both the agency's regulations and the Commodity Exchange Act. The company supposedly offered unregistered crypto derivatives, didn't ask users for mandatory identity verification, structured itself to avoid US regulation and even told customers how to dodge its own compliance system for US-based customers.

Zhao directed much of the rulebreaking himself, the CFTC claims, and there are reportedly chats and emails as evidence. Lim, who left Binance in 2022, is accused of knowingly aiding in the scheme. Among other things, he purportedly encouraged American users to mask trades through a VPN and even create new accounts through shell companies. The activity indicates that Binance's compliance mechanisms "have been a sham," CFTC chief counsel Gretchen Lowe says.

The Commission hopes to permanently ban Binance's registration and trading. It also hopes to levy fines and make the firm disgorge its gains. There's no estimated financial penalty.

We've asked Binance for comment and will let you know if we hear back. The company has historically defended itself against accusations. Zhao's brand is also facing a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigation over its BNB token, and a long-running probe has looked into possible insider trading. Senator Elizabeth Warren recently sent Zhao a letter accusing him of creating a "hotbed of illegal financial activity" that enables crooks and sanction-dodgers.

The charges come in the wake of multiple scandals rocking the crypto industry. The fraud charges levelled against FTX and its founder Sam Bankman-Fried are the most notable examples, but there are also allegations and investigations targeting Celsius' former CEO, Coinbase and Terraform Labs, among others. Binance is the largest crypto exchange left, and a US ban could significantly affect the industry as customers are forced to move to smaller outfits.

The CFTC is also staking out territory with this move. Both it and the SEC have argued that they should regulate crypto in the absence of laws outlining their roles. With these charges, the CFTC is signalling that it wants to be the de facto regulator for crypto trading. House and Senate members may limit the Commission's authority if they pass legislation, but the agency clearly isn't willing to wait before cracking down.

Elon Musk values Twitter at about $20 billion, according to an email seen by The Information and The New York Times. Musk shared the valuation, a significant drop from the $44 billion he paid to buy the company last fall, in a memo he sent to Twitter employees on Friday announcing a new stock compensation program. The billionaire reportedly warned Twitter’s significantly diminished workforce that the website was still in a precarious financial position. “Twitter is being reshaped rapidly,” he wrote, adding the company had, at one point, been four months away from running out of cash.

According to Platformer’s Zoë Schiffer, Musk additionally told employees he sees a “clear but difficult path” to a $250 billion valuation, a hypothetical outcome that would make the company’s current stock grants worth 10 times as much in the future. Musk said Twitter would allow staff to sell stock every six months, a policy similar to one in place at SpaceX. According to Musk, the program would give employees “liquid stock” while shielding them from the “price chaos” that comes with equity at a publicly traded company.

To put Musk’s valuation in context, at $20 billion, Twitter would be worth more than Snapchat creator Snap, a company with nearly 140 million more daily active users. It’s also worth noting that the estimate likely reflects the difficulties Twitter has faced as a direct result of Musk’s decisions. At the start of 2023, the company’s daily revenue was reportedly down 40 percent from a year ago after more than 500 of its top advertising partners had paused spending on the platform. Many of those companies left following the firm’s messy relaunch of Twitter Blue, which saw verified trolls abuse the service to impersonate brands. Based on recent reporting from The Information, there were only about 180,000 Twitter Blue subscribers in the US at the beginning of February, suggesting the service is nowhere close to making up for the financial downturn Twitter has experienced since Musk’s takeover.

OpenAI was forced to take its wildly-popular ChatGPT bot offline for emergency maintenance on Tuesday after a user was able to exploit a bug in the system to recall the titles from other users' chat histories. On Friday the company announced its initial findings from the incident.

In Tuesday's incident, users posted screenshots on Reddit that their ChatGPT sidebars featured previous chat histories from other users. Only the title of the conversation, not the text itself, were visible. OpenAI, in response, took the bot offline for nearly 10 hours to investigate. The results of that investigation revealed a deeper security issue: the chat history bug may have also potentially revealed personal data from 1.2 percent of ChatGPT Plus subscribers (a $20/month enhanced access package). 

"In the hours before we took ChatGPT offline on Monday, it was possible for some users to see another active user’s first and last name, email address, payment address, the last four digits (only) of a credit card number, and credit card expiration date. Full credit card numbers were not exposed at any time," the OpenAI team wrote Friday. The issue has since been patched for the faulty library which OpenAI identified as the Redis client open-source library, redis-py.

The company has downplayed the likelihood of such a breach occurring, arguing that either of the following criteria would have to be met to place a user at risk:

- Open a subscription confirmation email sent on Monday, March 20, between 1 a.m. and 10 a.m. Pacific time. Due to the bug, some subscription confirmation emails generated during that window were sent to the wrong users. These emails contained the last four digits of another user’s credit card number, but full credit card numbers did not appear. It’s possible that a small number of subscription confirmation emails might have been incorrectly addressed prior to March 20, although we have not confirmed any instances of this.

- In ChatGPT, click on “My account,” then “Manage my subscription” between 1 a.m. and 10 a.m. Pacific time on Monday, March 20. During this window, another active ChatGPT Plus user’s first and last name, email address, payment address, the last four digits (only) of a credit card number, and credit card expiration date might have been visible. It’s possible that this also could have occurred prior to March 20, although we have not confirmed any instances of this. 

The company has taken additional steps to prevent this from happening again in the future including adding redundant checks to library calls, "programatically examined our logs to make sure that all messages are only available to the correct user," and "improved logging to identify when this is happening and fully confirm it has stopped." The company says that it has also reached out to alert affected users of the issue.

This news follows a costly public faux pas committed by Google's rival Bard AI in February when it incorrectly assured Twitter that the JWST was the first telescope to image an exoplanet, as well as revelations that CNET had surreptitiously used generative AI to write financial explainer posts (a week before laying off a sizable chunk of its editorial department). Whether OpenAI will suffer the same market-based repercussions as its competitors remains to be seen. 

Volkswagen pinned its future on electric vehicles and announced its plans to put 30 new EVs on the road shortly after its $18.2 billion emissions scandal. Now, the automaker has revealed that it plans to spend $193 billion on different areas of its electrification efforts over the next five years. According to The New York Times, Volkswagen chief executive Oliver Blume said at a press event that two-thirds of that budget will go towards manufacturing batteries, developing software and sourcing critical and raw materials for its vehicles. 

Blume's revelation comes after the automaker's announcements that its subsidiary PowerCo will build its first North American battery cell factory in Canada and that it will build electric pickups and SUVs in South Carolina. The company is already producing its ID.4 electric vehicles in the US after repurposing its Chattanooga, Tennessee factory in 2022. But Volkswagen's electrification efforts are still behind its biggest competitors', and it's aiming to establish a stronger foothold in North America, as well to become more competitive in China. The company considers those regions as its two most important markets — ones it will have to conquer if it wants to reach its goals. Volkswagen previously said that it wants electric vehicles to account for about 55 percent of its sales in the US by 2030. 

For now, the automaker will continue making gas vehicles while it's working to expand its EV offerings with more models, including affordable ones that cost around $26,000. Arno Antlitz, Volkswagen’s chief financial and operating officer, talked about the path the company has to take going forward, though: "We must transform ourselves into a technology and mobility services group. We need to focus on our platforms, such as our hardware for battery-powered electric vehicles, a unified software stack, batteries, mobility, autonomous driving."

US regulators have announced that they're taking action to "fully" protect all deposits at Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), CNBC has reported. The institution is home to a large number of startups and established companies like Roku and Etsy, which will have full access to their funds as of today. At the same time, officials said there will be "no bailouts" and that shareholders and unsecured creditors won't be protected. 

"Today we are taking decisive actions to protect the U.S. economy by strengthening public confidence in our banking system," the FDIC, Treasury Department and Federal Reserve said in a joint statement. "Depositors will have access to all of their money starting Monday, March 13. No losses associated with the resolution of Silicon Valley Bank will be borne by the taxpayer."

The FDIC took over SVB on Friday following the largest US bank collapse in nearly 15 years. There were concerns that numerous tech startups and companies wouldn't be able to make their payrolls, and Etsy said yesterday that payments to merchants may be delayed. On Friday, Roku announced that it could lose as much as 26 percent of its cash reserves, or more than $487 million, due to the collapse.

On top of SVB, Signature Banks was closed by regulators on the weekend. It's one of the largest banks used by cryptocurrency companies, as the Coinbase exchange, for one, had $240 million in deposits at the bank. In the same joint statement, federal regulators said that "all depositors of this institution will [also] be made whole."

Silvergate, another institution popular with crypto exchanges (and known for purchasing Diem, the ambitious crypto project funded by Facebook), collapsed on March 8th. That marks a run of three key banks with ties to technology firms closing in the space of a week. 

To reassure depositors no doubt nervous over these events, the government said that it will make additional funding available to other eligible institutions. The new program will allow banks to put up treasuries and other safe government securities as collateral in return for central bank loans of up to one year. It's designed to fix a key issue that led to SVB’s failure: unrealized losses on government securities caused by rapidly rising interest rates.

"The U.S. banking system remains resilient and on a solid foundation, in large part due to reforms that were made after the financial crisis that ensured better safeguards for the banking industry," the joint statement reads. "Those reforms combined with today's actions demonstrate our commitment to take the necessary steps to ensure that depositors' savings remain safe."

Cerebral, a telehealth startup that gained popularity during the early days of the pandemic, disclosed this week that it shared the personal data of more than 3.1 million US patients with social media companies and advertisers, including Google, Meta and TikTok. As first reported by TechCrunch (via The Verge), a recently uploaded notice on Cerebral’s website reveals the company had been using “pixels,” tracking scripts companies like Meta offer to third-party developers for advertising purposes, to collect user data since it began operating in October 2019.

Following a recent review of its software, Cerebral “determined that it had disclosed certain information that may be regulated as protected health information under [the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act].” Among the data Cerebral shared are names, phone numbers, birth dates and insurance information. In some instances, the company may have also exposed information it collected through the mental health self-assessment patients completed to schedule counseling appointments and access other services. According to Cerebral, it did not disclose social security numbers, bank information or credit card numbers.

After learning of the oversight, Cerebral says it “disabled, reconfigured, and/or removed” the tracking pixels that caused the data exposure. “In addition, we have enhanced our information security practices and technology vetting processes to further mitigate the risk of sharing such information in the future.” The US Department of Health and Human Services is investigating Cerebral. News of the data exposure comes after the Federal Trade Commission fined discount drug app GoodRx $1.5 million for sharing patient information with Meta and Google. Earlier this month, the agency announced a $7.8 million settlement with online counseling company BetterHelp and said it was seeking to ban the company from sharing health data for ad targeting.

Following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, Etsy is warning sellers it may take longer than usual for the company to process some payments. “We wanted to let you know that there is a delay with your deposit that was scheduled for today,” Etsy told affected merchants on Friday in an email the company shared with NBC News. “Please know that our teams are working hard to resolve this issue and send you your funds as quickly as possible.”

An Etsy spokesperson attributed the delay to “the unexpected collapse of Silicon Valley Bank,” noting the company used the bank to facilitate payments to some merchants. They added Etsy is working with other payment partners to facilitate deposits. The company expects to pay affected sellers “within the next several business days.” More than 7.5 million merchants use Etsy to sell their wares online.

Federal regulators took over SVB on Friday amid the largest bank collapse since the 2008 financial crisis. With its close ties to Silicon Valley, SVB’s failure has created knock-on effects throughout the tech industry. On Friday, Roku said it could lose as much as 26 percent of its cash reserves, or more than $487 million, due to the collapse. One day later, the value of USD Coin, a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar, fell to a low of $0.87 after Circle, the firm that manages the currency, disclosed it had $3.3 billion stuck at the bank. While USD Coin’s value has mostly recovered, the news nonetheless sparked fears of a possible financial contagion within the cryptocurrency industry.

More importantly, there are many people whose next paycheck won’t come on time. That includes employees at early-stage startups and small business owners who depend on Etsy for their livelihood. One seller, Owen McKinney, told NBC News the deposit delay could have a “catastrophic" effect on his business.

What comes next is hard to say. On Sunday, US Treasury Secretary Janey Yellen told CBS’s Face the Nation the federal government would not bail out SVB and would instead focus on assisting depositors. “Let me be clear that during the financial crisis, there were investors and owners of systemic large banks that were bailed out… and the reforms that have been put in place means we are not going to do that again,” Yellen said. “But we are concerned about depositors and are focused on trying to meet their needs.”

The abrupt collapse of Silicon Valley Bank has affected the value of the world’s fifth-largest cryptocurrency, increasing fears of a possible ripple effect among Web3 companies. On Saturday morning, USD Coin fell to a record low of $0.87 after Circle, the company that manages the stablecoin, disclosed that $3.3 billion of the approximately $10 billion cash reserves backing USDC was held by SVB.

As The Guardian notes, the drop is unprecedented. As a stablecoin, the value of USDC is supposed to remain stable thanks to its peg to the US dollar. According to data from CoinGecko, USDC’s previous all-time low was about $0.97 in 2018. More recently, the currency fell to $0.99 following the collapse of Three Arrows Capital. As of the writing of this article, USDC is valued at approximately $0.95 cents.

Web3 is Going Just Great creator Molly White suggests the effect from a sustained USDC drop would be “enormous.” A handful of other stablecoins, including FRAX and DAI, use USDC as collateral. On Friday, Circle said it would “continue to operate normally” while it waits for more information on what will happen to SVB’s clients. "As of Thursday, we had initiated transfers of these funds to other banking partners. Though these transfers had not yet been settled as of close of business Friday, we remain confident in the FDIC’s management of the SVB situation and stand ready to receive these funds," Circle said on Saturday, adding $5.4 billion of its cash assets are held by BNY Mellon, "one of the largest and most stable financial institutions in the world."