Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 11/24 – Apple’s Head Of Global Security Indicted On Bribery Charges

Starting point is 00:00:00 On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the TechMeme Right Home for Tuesday, November 24th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Apple's head of global security is indicted on bribery charges.

Starting point is 00:00:43 Facebook turned back the dial on divisive news stories after the election. Forget substack? Why OnlyFans might be the biggest story in terms of creator platforms right now. How Elon Musk became the second richest man in the world and why Werner Herzog is mad at him. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. So here's something really out of left. Apple's head of global security is a man named Thomas Moyer. Moir has been indicted around a bribery case involving the Sheriff's Office of Santa Clara, California, 200 iPads, and concealed firearms permits.

Starting point is 00:01:22 That's the tech headline. The main headline is a little more nuanced that several top brass in the Sheriff's Department of Santa Clara, California, were allegedly seeking bribes for gun permits, and Apple's Moyer is just one of many who were allegedly willing to pay up for such bribery, quoting Paulo Alto Online. A grand jury issued two indictments on Thursday, November 19th, against Under-Sheriff Rick Sung, 48, and Captain James Jensen, 43, who are accused of requesting bribes for concealed firearms licenses, also known as CCW licenses. Insurance broker Hapreet Chandra, 49, and Apple's chief security officer Thomas Moyer,

Starting point is 00:02:03 50 are accused of offering bribes to receive the permits, District Attorney Jeff Rosen said during a press conference on Monday morning. The two-year investigation by the District Attorney's Office found that Sung, who was allegedly aided by Jensen in one instance, held up the distribution of CCW licenses and refused to release them until the applicants gave something of value. Investigators determined some of the money was sent to Sheriff Smith's reelection campaign, Rosen said. Song has been indicted on three counts of asking or receiving a bribe by an executive officer, a felony for incidents dating between October 1, 2017, and April 30th, 2018, for allegedly asking for a bribe from Chandra and asking for a bribe from Moyer between December 7th, 2018, and February

Starting point is 00:02:45 14th, 2019, according to the redacted indictments. Jensen, who was previously indicted, is also now charged with asking for or receiving a bribe by an executive officer for the scheme involving Moyer. Sung and Jensen allegedly held up four gun licenses from Apple employees and extracted from Moyer a promise that Apple would donate iPads to the Sheriff's Office. A donation of 200 iPads worth nearly $70,000 was ended at the last minute after August 2, 2019, when Sung and Moyer learned that the District Attorney's Office had issued a search warrant, seizing all of the Sheriff's offices' CCW license records, end quote. So again, it's not that the Apple security head was actively bribing people. It was that he was solicited for a bribe, and he allegedly was going

Starting point is 00:03:29 to elect to pay that bribe. The iPads were never delivered, but the intent apparently was there. Paying a bribe is a crime, of course, and Moyer is the head of compliance at Apple, which is, you know, not a good look for your head of compliance. Quote, Tom Moyer is innocent of the charges filed against him. He did nothing wrong and has acted with the highest integrity throughout his career. We have no doubt he will be acquitted at trial. Moyer's lawyer, Ed Swanson said in a statement to CNBC, quote, we expect all our employees to conduct themselves with integrity. After learning of the allegations, we conducted a thorough internal investigation and found no wrongdoing, an Apple spokesperson said in a statement, end quote.

Starting point is 00:04:11 Sources are telling the New York Times that after the presidential election this year, Mark Zuckerberg himself agreed to temporarily tweak Facebook's algorithm to make authoritative news sources appear more prominently in people's news feeds. In the tense days after the presidential election, a team of Facebook employees presented the chief executive Mark Zuckerberg with an alarming finding. Election-related misinformation was going viral on the site. President Trump was already casting the election is rigged and stories from right-wing media outlets with false and misleading claims about discarded ballots, miscounted votes, and skewed tallies were among the most popular news stories on the platform. In response, the employees proposed an

Starting point is 00:04:49 emergency change to the site's news feed algorithm, which helps determine what more than two billion people see every day. It involved emphasizing the importance of what Facebook calls, quote, news ecosystem quality scores, or NEQ, a secret internal ranking it assigns to news publishers based on signals about the quality of their journalism. Typically, NEQ scores play a minor role in determining what appears on users' feeds, but several days after the election, Mr. Zuckerberg agreed to increase the weight that Facebook's algorithm gave to NECU scores to make sure authoritative news appeared more prominently, said three people with knowledge of the decision, who were not authorized to discuss internal deliberations. The change was part of the

Starting point is 00:05:28 break-glass plans, Facebook had spent months developing for the aftermath of a contested election. It resulted in a spike invisibility for big mainstream publishers like CNN, the New York Times, and NPR, while posts from highly engaged hyperpartisan pages such as Breitbart and Occupy Democrats became less visible, the employees said. It was a vision of what a calmer, less divisive Facebook might look like. Some employees argued the change should become permanent, even if it was unclear how that might affect the amount of time people spent on Facebook. In an employee meeting, the week after the election, workers asked whether the nicer news feed could stay, said two people who attended, end quote. So I guess this is just more fuel to conservative claims that tech platforms

Starting point is 00:06:08 silence them, except doesn't that also indicate that Facebook at least normally favors conservative voices and in just this one instance merely turned down the dial a bit? But that's not why I'm sharing this because I don't have an opinion on that debate. I'm sharing this because if this is true, it underlines something that Facebook critics have long-leveled at the company. Facebook does have the ability to adjust what gets amplified. There is a dial they can turn, which makes you wonder if they can turn the temperature down a bit here and there every so often, why don't they turn the temperature down all the time? In other words, if Facebook is choosing engagement because it's more profitable for them,

Starting point is 00:06:46 then doesn't it logically also follow that they are choosing divisiveness because it's more profitable for them. And at the bottom of that logic chain is, again, the conclusion that that is a choice. When Facebook throws their hands up and claims the problems are too massive on their platform to solve, that they really can't design their products to be less divisive at scale, that's nothing more than a convenient dodge. The information has a fascinating interview up with the founder of only fans, that shall we call it, adult social network slash Patreon sort of platform. The founder in question is British entrepreneur Tim Stokely. And given the numbers in this piece, the reason I'm sharing it is because I'm starting to wonder if OnlyFans is quietly the most

Starting point is 00:07:36 successful creator platform out there right now. Consider the following data points. OnlyFans was founded only back in 2016. And in that time, it is paid out already $2 billion to creators on its platform, which considering OnlyFans take is 20%. In place, $500 million in cumulative net revenue in less than five years. Over 100 creators have exceeded $1 million in earnings on the platform. OnlyFans has apparently taken zero outside money and is probably already profitable. Very impressive. Forget Substack, maybe get you an OnlyFans account, quote. OnlyFans is a subscription social media site that lets fans pay to get exclusive content from creators. The site is perhaps best known for its adult entertainment content, which likely would

Starting point is 00:08:24 make it difficult to raise venture capital anyway. Stokely, though, emphasizes that OnlyFans is for all types of entertainers, and he hopes to broaden into areas such as sports. In a rare interview, he notes that A-list celebrities, including Cardi B, have launched OnlyFans accounts. OnlyFans is a subscription social media site that lets fans pay to get exclusive content from creators. Indeed, creators on platforms like TikTok and Instagram regularly tell their followers to sign up for their OnlyFans page to get exclusive behind-the-scenes material. OnlyFans has become enough of a pop culture phenomenon for Beyonce to name drop it in a song. As Stokely sees it, OnlyFans allows creators to become the CEO of their own channels and make revenue by catering to their most ardent

Starting point is 00:09:04 fans. The company makes money by extracting a 20% fee from each transaction. That's often higher than what competitive services charge, like Patreon, which can take as little as 5%. Stokely's background certainly doesn't match up with that of your typical Silicon Valley Ivy League dropout who launches a startup. Before launching OnlyFans, he created a website called Custle. for you that let fans of adult entertainers request personal videos from them. OnlyFans came into prominence as a secure and reliable outlet in the often scuzzy world of online pornography where people can subscribe to get exclusive content from adult entertainers, end quote. In the interview, Stokely didn't break down what percentage of OnlyFans content continues to be

Starting point is 00:09:43 adult content, but he said that they're seeing huge growth among musicians right now, that they expect comedy and comedians to be next in terms of categories to explode, and he sees huge potential in sports, especially in Europe where fans still can't attend sports matches in person, especially lower-level soccer clubs in Europe are on the brink of bankruptcy because live gate receipts are so much a part of their revenue pie. So, you know, maybe an only fan's account to save Wigan Athletic. I sometimes copped to the criticism that on this show we tend to focus on the horse race between the big tech companies who's up, who's down, who, like Roblox might be a Godzilla of the future,

Starting point is 00:10:31 and who, like maybe Intel, seems to be sliding towards being an irrelevant dinosaur of the past. The way I like to think about it is that we're covering the evolution and creative destruction of capitalism in real time. Keeping score of who's the richest person in the world is probably less relevant to that task, but only obliquely. So for what it's worth, it's worth noting that Elon Musk has, has overtaken Bill Gates to become the world's second richest person behind Jeff Bezos, quoting The Verge. The Tesla CEO's net worth now sits at around $128 billion after increasing by $100 billion this year alone. There is a sizable gap between Musk and the number one spot, which is currently held by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who has a reported net worth of around $182 billion. In January,

Starting point is 00:11:17 Musk ranked 35th on the list, Bloomberg reports. Musk's rapid ascent up the list has mainly been driven by Tesla's share price. The car company currently has a market cap of almost $500 billion after starting the year at under $100 billion. The Guardian reports that Tesla has the highest market cap of any car company in the world despite producing a fraction of the cars of more established automakers. This year, it expects to produce 500,000 cars compared to around 10 million for a company like Toyota. Around three quarters of Musk's net worth consists of Tesla shares, according to Bloomberg. But Musk's other major venture, SpaceX, has a also seen recent success. Last week, the company transported four astronauts to the International

Starting point is 00:11:57 Space Station aboard its crewed dragon spacecraft. That follows the company's first crude flight to space in May of this year. Bill Gates sat atop the billionaire's index for years until he was overtaken by Jeff Bezos in 2017. Bloomberg notes that Gates would probably have a higher net wealth right now if he hadn't given so much money to charity, including the over $27 billion he's donated through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation since 2006. Gates and Musk have had some high-profile disagreements this year. In September, Musk said Gates had, quote, no clue about the viability of electric trucks after the Microsoft co-founder said that electric semi-trucks, along with electric cargo ships and passenger jets, will probably never be practical. Earlier this year, Gates told CNBC

Starting point is 00:12:37 that Musk should avoid making big predictions about areas he's not familiar with after the Tesla CEO downplayed the risk of the COVID-19 pandemic. Musk overtook Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg last week when he became the third richest person on the billionaire's index. Zuckerberg has since fallen to fifth in the rankings after he was overtaken by French businessman Bernard Arnault, end quote. But speaking of people having a beef with Elon Musk, finally today, this is not really a tech story, but I can't resist when my worlds collide like this. The great German filmmaker Werner Herzog has some stark words for Elon Musk. According to Herzog, Musk's plans to build a city on Mars are a mistake. Let me quote from inverse.com. SpaceX CEO Musk has a

Starting point is 00:13:25 plan to send the first humans to Mars in the mid-2020s using the underdevelopment starship rocket. Once they get there, Musk wants to build out a self-sustaining million-strong city on Mars by 2050. But famed film director Herzog tells Inverse there is a massive flaw in the latter half of Musk's plan. In a blistering criticism, Herzog describes the idea as an obscenity and says humans should not be like DeLocas. Herzog is not opposed to going to Mars at all. In fact, the German filmmaker would love to go to Mars with a camera and scientists, but the long-term vision of a Mars city is a, quote, mistake. Herzog's main concern is that humanity should rather look to keep our planet habitable instead of trying to colonize another one, quote, I think Elon Musk styles

Starting point is 00:14:12 himself as some sort of a technological visionary, Herzog says, because he has to sell his electric cars, wonderful that he does that. He has to sell his reusable rockets, wonderful that he is doing it. But I disagree with him when he postulates and preaches about colonizing Mars, Herzog says. And I have to tell not only Elon Musk, but everyone. And so I say it as straightforward as it can be. It is an obscenity. The thought alone is an obscenity, end quote. Herzog compares Musk's utopian vision to that of communism and fascism. Herzog says the 20th century was, in its entirety, a mistake, which brought the demise of great social utopias, like communism, as being the paradise on Earth. No, it failed, Herzog says.

Starting point is 00:14:59 Second failure? Fascism. Alien master race will dominate and improve our planet and really improve humanity. Thank God both those gigantic utopias were brought to an end, end quote. The same will happen to Musk's Mars city, Herzog predicts. Our century very quickly will bring to an end technological utopia like colonizing Mars. We will end this utopia very, very very quickly within this century, end quote. So I want you to know I really debated whether or not to attempt the Werner Herzog impression there. If you're disappointed by it, I guess just relisten to that segment imagining Paul F. Tompkins's canonical Herzog impression instead of mine. Trust me, he does it a lot better. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 11/24 – Apple’s Head Of Global Security Indicted On Bribery Charges

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