Is everyone ready to cry into their beer?

Justin Bieber's Bored Ape NFT has gone from $1,290,000 to $56,000 in apparent value.

It's a good thing he's worth around $300mil or we might have to start a GoFundMe campaign for poor Justin!

You're sad for him, right?

Or like me, rolling on the floor laughing and endlessly amused?

A lot of people have bought into this idiotic NFT craze and lost a lot of money. But here is the question: did Bieber actually drop $1.3 x 10^6 on an NFT?

Asdie from Justin, people like Paris Hilton and other celebs bought into the Bored Ape NFT craze and hyped them to the end of the earth. Conan O'Brien was another celeb "purchaser". It's now being alleged that they did not buy these - that the company was using them as compensated promoters. The problem is that in addition to not paying for the NFTs, they also did not state that these are compensate endorsements!

THAT is something that the Securities and Exchange Commission takes a very dim view of!

Several celebs have been busted for doing compensated endorsements of NFTs and cryptocurrency and not making it plain that they're getting paid for it, and have had to pay some whopping fines. You'd think that they or their agent/people would know better. But apparently they're surrounded by a bunch of stupid and greedy people who like being investigated by the Federal Government.

https://gizmodo.com/justin-bieber-bored-ape-price-collapse-million-dollars-1850606250

We all need a little Twitter news in our lives, don't we?

This is soooo lovely and not in the least surprising.

Back when Elongated bought the company and sacked people left and right, he was facing a heck of a number of lawsuits. He went to court and forced all of these people into arbitration.

And now Twitter won't go to arbitration!

It seems that to go to arbitration, the person with the complaint must pay a filing fee, then the organization - presumably with deeper pockets - has to pay a $2,000 fee and is then on the hook for 13% professional fees. With as many people as they've forced to go from individual and class-action lawsuits into arbitration, they could be looking at millions of dollars in fees.

Compared to millions of dollars in individual and class-action lawsuits and attorney fees and settlement fees.

They are proceeding with arbitration in a few states, including California, presumably those states have harsh penalties for bad-faith arbitration.

Now, here's the lovely bit: if Twitter fails to engage in arbitration in good faith, there's a real risk that the cases could go right back to court! And good luck to getting them sent back to arbitration a second time after you've demonstrated that you had no intention of resolving these cases in good faith.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/07/twitter-refuses-to-pay-for-arbitration-it-forced-on-891-ex-employees-suit-says/