Has Apple Lost Its Mojo? + BlackRock’s $23B Bet on the Panama Canal
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Why is Aspiration's founder under arrest?
Today's number, $145 million. The co-founder of fintech startup Aspiration was arrested last week for allegedly conspiring to defraud his investors of $145 million. By the way, we call bullshit on this company. Four years ago. Speaking of climate change, Ed, what do climate change deniers and pedophiles have in common? What's that? They're both fucking the next generation. Ah, that's good. Great joke. Yeah, the pedophile stuff never gets old. What's going on with you? What are you up to?
I'm doing very well. I'm in New York. I'm excited for South by Southwest. We're going to be heading over this weekend. Of course, this episode will be out by the time we're there, but I think it's going to be great. You know what I'm really excited for, though, is the flight back. Why is that? Flying with you. Oh, I'm sorry. I meant to tell you that there's just not enough... Not enough seats. There's only seven seats on the plane. How many seats are on the plane?
I don't know. I haven't counted. I can't go here. There's no way I don't come across as the world's biggest douchebag talking about the number of seats.
You're right. I'm setting you up for failure. How about let's set you up for success here and just talk about this aspiration situation. Because you wrote about this... four years ago. This is, by the way, one of my first jobs at Prof G Media, was you were talking about this company, Aspiration, and it was my job to go in and do the research because you had this feeling that this company, which was selling credit cards, but also positioned itself as helping with climate change, you said, this is definitely a bullshit company. You had the team look into it. I looked into it and we determined, yes, this company is fake. We have a clip from what you said about this company on the Prof G pod.
One example, one example of reaching too far into the barrel, Aspiration, a finance firm that claims its products can, open quote, change climate change, end quote. In August, the company announced it was going public via SPAC at a $2.3 billion valuation. Change climate change. That would be awesome. Except there's a catch. This is a fucking debit card. He's so good.
Banger. And now the guy's been arrested for fraud. By the way, it never went public because I think investors eventually caught on to this. But he's now been arrested. You called it.
It was such an attempt to drape yourself in social justice while offering something pretty borderline fraudulent. They were saying that we take a portion of your credit card fees and invest in sustainable companies. And if you read their website, and we got some financial information, we dug in, this was a shitty little credit card company charging onerous fees, claiming to do something they weren't doing and saying, oh, but we're a new economy company. And they had famous investors, they had actors. A friend of mine, it ends up, was an investor and called me and sort of, I don't want to say put pressure on me, that said, do you want to speak to management? I think you got this wrong. I said to him, I said, we'll just call him Bob. I'm like, Bob, this is a fucking fraud. This is WeWork with a climate change veneer smeared over it.
I thought that was going to get more attention than the WeWork post because I thought it was even more obvious a fraud.
Few people actually knew what Aspiration was, which I think is why it was so prescient of you to point it out. I just want to point out what some of the red flags we found with this company were. So the first... The first red flag was that they were trying to SPAC, and there were just a bunch of kind of bullshit companies that were SPACing. They did have a giant celebrity investor list.
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