🦑 💸 📉 The anonymous hackers behind a Squid Game-themed cryptocurrency have made off with £2.5m in investor deposits after it turned out to be a scam. Hopeful investors piled in after mainstream media outlets, from the BBC to Fortune magazine, uncritically covered Squid’s meteoric rise. Its price surged by more than 230,000% in a week to a high of $2,861.80, only to plunge to $0 on Monday.
This is not the first apparently silly crypto asset to tempt risk-hungry investors: Dogecoin, which started as a joke in 2013, has risen 10,000% in the past year; and Shiba Inu, created just last year, has soared by more than 90,000,000%. In the case of Squid, no one who spent real money buying the coin was able to sell it.
Will Elon Musk feed the world?
🚀 🥦 👩🏻⚕️ Elon Musk, currently the world’s richest man, with an estimated $315bn fortune, has offered to sell $6bn worth of Tesla stock to solve world hunger if the UN can prove it would work. He was challenging comments by David Beasley, director of the UN’s World Food Programme, who called on billionaires like Musk to “step up now, on a one-time basis”, claiming $6bn could keep 42 million people from dying.
Musk called Beasley’s bluff, writing on Twitter: “If WFP can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6B will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it.” If he followed through, he would still be more than $100bn richer than Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. After a few mealy-mouthed replies offering to meet “anywhere – earth or space”, Beasley has since sent a detailed proposal. No word yet on whether Musk has sold the stock.
It’s official: women are better with money
👩🏼💼 💭 📈 Women make better investors than men. Investment firm Fidelity offered up the latest evidence this month: over a 10-year period, its female customers earned an average of 0.4% more each year than their male counterparts. That may not sound like a lot, says Ron Lieber in The New York Times, but over a few decades it can easily add up to tens of thousands of dollars.
The source of women’s superior returns is the way they trade. Or, rather, says Lieber, “how they don’t”. Female Fidelity customers bought and sold half as much as male customers, preferring to leave most of their accounts well alone. “Invest like a woman is what you learn from this,” said Lorna Kapusta, head of women investors and customer engagement at Fidelity.