Twitter CEO Elon Musk has become the first human being in history to lose a mammoth $200 billion in net worth, Bloomberg reported.
It wasn’t too long ago that Musk became the second individual ever to amass a personal fortune of more than $200 billion. That happened in January 2021, just months after Amazon founder Jeff Bezos accomplished the same feat.
Much of Musk’s lost billions have been swallowed up by the plummeting value of his shares in Tesla, the electric vehicle company of which he is CEO. That value has dropped 65% this year, and dove 11% last Tuesday alone, as Bloomberg noted Friday.
Musk’s fortune to date peaked in November 2021 at $340 billion, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. He’s now worth a not-too-shabby $137 billion, per Bloomberg, but that’s still a steep dive from 2021.
Musk was the world’s richest person until earlier this month, when he was surpassed by European fashion scion Bernard Arnault, the powerhouse behind LVMH.
Musk’s challenges include huge controversies over his hands-on management of a struggling Twitter, for which he paid $44 billion. The self-described “free speech absolutist” has repeatedly come under fire for arbitrarily booting journalists over actions he disapproves of, while allowing previously banned neo-Nazis back on the social media platform.
The billionaire has described the financially challenged Twitter as “basically … a plane that is headed toward the ground at high speed with the engines on fire and the controls don’t work.”
The company is apparently so strapped for cash that Musk recently shut down the servers supporting a Twitter data center in Sacramento. He has also fired janitors at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters, reportedly forcing some staffers to bring in their own toilet paper.
Tesla investors fear Musk’s over-involvement in Twitter is distracting him from responding to serious issues at Tesla amid mounting competition.
In a dramatic move, Tesla has been offering American consumers a $7,500 discount on certain car models before the end of the year. The company is also reportedly reducing production at its Shanghai plant.
The world’s billionaires collectively lost nearly $2 trillion in 2022, Forbes reported earlier this month. American billionaires lost a combined $660 billion, more than in any other country, Forbes noted, and Musk lost the most of all.
(The loss occurred, however, after the world’s billionaires added $5 trillion to their collective wealth between March 2020 and November 2021.)
Forbes attributed the losses in America to a dive in tech stock value, rising interest rates, inflation and a weakening economy.
Twitter on Wednesday permanently suspended an account that tracked the location of Elon Musk’s private jet, despite the social media company’s owner last month vowing, “My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk.”
The @ElonJet account, which had amassed more than 500,000 followers, was removed as the company posted a new set of edicts that appeared to be designed specifically to justify the removal of the jet-tracking account. The move comes after Musk has reinstated previous Twitter rule-breakers and stopped enforcing the platform’s policies prohibiting Covid-19 misinformation.
The @ElonJet account, run by Jack Sweeney, a 20-year-old Florida college student, used publicly available flight tracking information to build a Twitter bot that tweeted every time Musk’s Gulfstream took off and landed at an airport. The last post from the account prior to the suspension showed Musk’s jet taking off from Oakland, California, on Monday and landing in Los Angeles 48 minutes later.
Sweeney woke up Wednesday morning to a message from Twitter informing him @ElonJet had been permanently suspended. Later in the day his personal account and other jet-tracking accounts he ran were also shut down by the company.
The account had long been a thorn in Musk’s side. According to screenshots Sweeney shared with CNN, Musk reached out to him last December through a Twitter private message asking, “Can you take this down? It is a security risk.”
Sweeney, a student at the University of Central Florida, recalled his surprise receiving the message in an interview with CNN Wednesday.
“I was about to go to sleep, and I was in a normal college dorm and I remember telling my roommate, ‘Hey, Elon Musk just direct messaged me.”
The billionaire then offered Sweeney $5,000 to shut down the account. Sweeney countered the offer, raising it to $50,000, writing, “It would be great support in college and would possibly allow me to get a car maybe even a [Tesla] Model 3.” After some back and forth, Musk responded, “Doesn’t feel right to pay to shut this down.”
Sweeney said he setup @ElonJet initially because he was a Musk fan. “It gives you just another view that a lot of people don’t know about where [Musk] is going and might give you clues into what new business is going on,” he said.
The enterprising student believes he was tipped off Saturday that his account was being targeted by the social media company’s management.
Sweeney said he received an email from an anonymous person purporting to be a Twitter employee that included a screenshot showing an internal company message from Ella Irwin, Twitter’s new head of trust and safety, asking staff to “apple heavy VF to @elonjet immediately.”
In Twitter parlance, “VF” means “visibility filtering” which throttles the reach of certain accounts.
CNN has attempted to reach Irwin and Twitter for comment.
As part of its new policy announced Wednesday, Twitter said it will “prohibit sharing someone else’s live location in most cases.”
“You can still share your own live location on Twitter,” it said. “Tweets that share someone else’s historical (not same-day) location information are also not prohibited by this policy.”
Musk also posted his justification for the new policy. “Any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation. This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info. Posting locations someone traveled to on a slightly delayed basis isn’t a safety problem, so is ok,” he wrote.
The restrictions around location sharing were not part of Twitter’s existing policies until this week.
Data from the Internet Archive shows the company updated its “private information and media policy” to add a clause that prohibited the sharing of live location data, ” we will remove any tweets or accounts that share someone’s live location,” it read.
Asked if he planned to comply with the new policy, Sweeney told CNN he would begin delaying posting the whereabouts of Musk’s jet for 24 hours, “but just on Twitter.”
Nov 10 (Reuters) – (This story contains language some readers may find offensive in paragraph 2)
On Tuesday morning, Sam Bankman-Fried, owner of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, caught his employees off-guard with a somber message.
“I’m sorry,” he told them. “I fucked up.”
The reason for the mea culpa: His announcement half an hour earlier that FTX’s arch-rival, Binance, planned to mount a shock takeover of its main trading platform to save it from a “liquidity crunch.” Binance founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, whom the billionaire had accused of sabotage, would now be his White Knight.
The seeds of FTX’s downfall were sown months earlier, stemming from mistakes Bankman-Fried made after he stepped in to save other crypto firms as the crypto market collapsed amid rising interest rates, according to interviews with several people close to Bankman-Fried and communications from both companies that have not been previously reported.
Some of those deals involving Bankman-Fried’s trading firm, Alameda Research, led to a series of losses that eventually became his undoing, according to three people familiar with the company’s operations.
The interviews and messages also shine new light on the bitter rivalry between the two billionaires, who in recent months competed for market share and publicly accused each other of seeking to hurt the one another’s businesses. It culminated on Wednesday, with Binance pulling out of its deal and throwing FTX’s future into uncertainty.
Stuck without a buyer, Bankman-Fried was now searching for alternative backers, two people close to him said. After Binance pulled out, he told FTX staff in a message that Binance had not previously told them of any reservations about the deal and he was “exploring all options.”
Neither Binance nor FTX responded to requests for comment. Bankman-Fried told Reuters on Tuesday that “I’ll probably be too swamped” to do interviews. He didn’t respond to further messages.
Binance earlier said it decided to pull out of the deal as a result of its due diligence on FTX and news reports about U.S. investigations into the company.
Zhao’s unveiling of the planned takeover capped a stunning reversal for Bankman-Fried. The 30-year-old had set up Bahamas-based FTX in 2019 and led it to become one of the largest exchanges, accumulating a near $17 billion fortune.
News of the liquidity crunch at FTX – valued in January at $32 billion with investors including SoftBank and BlackRock – sent reverberations through the crypto world.
The price of major coins plummeted, with bitcoin slumping to its lowest in almost two years, heaping further pain on a sector whose value has fallen about two-thirds this year as central banks tightened credit.
By ditching the deal, Binance had also avoided the regulatory scrutiny that would likely have accompanied the takeover, which Zhao had flagged as a likelihood in a memo to employees that he posted on Twitter.
Financial regulators around the world have issued warnings about Binance for operating without a license or violating money laundering laws. The U.S. Justice Department is investigating Binance for possible money laundering and criminal sanctions violations. Reuters reported last month that Binance had helped Iranian firms trade $8 billion since 2018 despite U.S. sanctions, part of a series of articles this year by the news agency on the exchange’s financial crime compliance.
RELATIONSHIP SOURS
Zhao and Bankman-Fried’s relationship began in 2019. Six months after FTX’s launch, Zhao bought 20% of the exchange for about $100 million, a person with direct knowledge of the deal said. At the time, Binance said the investment was “aimed to grow the crypto economy together.”
Within 18 months, however, their relationship had soured.
FTX had grown rapidly and Zhao now viewed it as a genuine competitor with global aspirations, former Binance employees said.
When FTX in May 2021 applied for a license in Gibraltar for a subsidiary, it had to submit information about its major shareholders, but Binance stonewalled FTX’s requests for help, according to messages and emails between the exchanges seen by Reuters.
Between May and July, FTX lawyers and advisors wrote to Binance at least 20 times for details on Zhao’s sources of wealth, banking relationships, and ownership of Binance, the messages show.
In June 2021, however, an FTX lawyer told Binance’s chief financial officer that Binance wasn’t “engaging with us properly” and they risked “severely disrupting an important project for us.” A Binance legal officer responded to FTX to say she was trying to get a response from Zhao’s personal assistant, but the requested information was “too general” and they may not provide everything.
By July of that year, Bankman-Fried had tired of waiting. He bought back Zhao’s stake in FTX for about $2 billion, the person with direct knowledge of the deal said. Two months later, with Binance no longer involved, Gibraltar’s regulator granted FTX a license.
That sum was paid to Binance, in part, in FTX’s own coin, FTT, Zhao said last Sunday – a holding he would later order Binance to sell, precipitating the crisis at FTX.
Reuters Graphics
“TRYING TO GO AFTER US”
This May and June, Bankman-Fried’s trading firm, Alameda Research, suffered a series of losses from deals, according to three people familiar with its operations. These included a $500-million loan agreement with failed crypto lender Voyager Digital, two of the people said. Voyager filed for bankruptcy protection the following month, with FTX’s U.S. arm paying $1.4 billion for its assets in a September auction. Reuters could not determine the full extent of losses Alameda suffered.
Seeking to prop up Alameda, which held almost $15 billion in assets, Bankman-Fried transferred at least $4 billion in FTX funds, secured by assets including FTT and shares in trading platform Robinhood Markets Inc, the people said. Alameda had disclosed a 7.6% share in Robinhood that May.
A portion of these FTX funds were customer deposits, two of the people said, though Reuters could not determine their value.
Bankman-Fried did not tell other FTX executives about the move to prop up Alameda, the people said, adding he was afraid that it could leak.
On Nov. 2, however, a report by news outlet CoinDesk detailed a leaked balance sheet that allegedly showed that much of Alameda’s $14.6 billion in assets were held in FTT. Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison tweeted that the balance sheet was merely for a “subset of our corporate entities,” with over $10 billion of assets not reflected. Ellison did not return requests for comment.
That failed to douse growing speculation over what Alameda’s financial health might mean for FTX.
Then Zhao said Binance would sell its entire share in the token, FTT, worth at least $580 million, “due to recent revelations that have come to light.” The token’s price collapsed 80% over the next two days and a torrent of outflows from the exchange gathered pace, blockchain data show.
WITHDRAWAL SURGE
In his message to staff this week, Bankman-Fried said the firm saw a “giant withdrawal surge” as users rushed to withdraw $6 billion in crypto tokens from FTX in just 72 hours. Daily withdrawals normally totaled tens of millions of dollars, Bankman-Fried told his employees.
After Zhao’s tweet that Binance would sell its FTT holding, Bankman-Fried projected confidence that FTX would weather its rival’s attacks. He told staff on Slack that withdrawals were “not shockingly, way up,” but they were able to process the requests.
“We’re chugging along,” he wrote. “Obviously, Binance is trying to go after us. So be it.”
But by Monday the situation became dire. Unable to quickly find a backer, or sell other illiquid assets short-notice, Bankman-Fried contacted Zhao, according to a person familiar with the call. Zhao later confirmed that Bankman-Fried had called him.
Bankman-Fried signed a non-binding letter of intent for Binance to buy FTX’s non-U.S. assets. This valued FTX at several billion dollars, two people familiar with the letter said – enough for the exchange to cover all withdrawal requests but a fraction of its January valuation.
Zhao announced the potential deal several hours later, with Bankman-Fried tweeting “a huge thank you to CZ.”
“Let’s live to fight another day,” Bankman-Fried told staff on Slack.
His employees were shocked. Even executives had been in the dark about the Alameda shortfall and takeover plan until Bankman-Fried informed them that morning, two people working with him said. Both people said they had been unaware that the withdrawal situation was so serious.
Then came Binance’s announcement on Wednesday scrapping the takeover. “The issues are beyond our control or ability to help,” Binance said. Zhao tweeted “Sad day. Tried,” with a crying emoji.
Reporting by Angus Berwick in New York and Tom Wilson in London; additional reporting by Hannah Lang in Washington and Elizabeth Howcroft in London; Editing by Paritosh Bansal and Chris Sanders
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Wedbush Securities managing director Dan Ives discusses if Elon Musk can turn Twitter into a money-making business on ‘The Claman Countdown.’
Liberals with verified Twitter accounts flooded the social media platform to take issue with the idea of billionaires purchasing social media companies, prompting their conservative critics to point out that many Democrats have been silent about similar billionaire purchases in the past.
“Elon Musk buying twitter is bad,” former Democratic congressional candidate Nina Turner tweeted this week. “Billionaires owning media outlets is bad. Billionaires buying politicians is bad. We wonder why ‘the rich get richer while the poor get poorer’ remains true?”
“When multi-billionaires take control of our most vital platforms for communication, it’s not a win for free speech. It’s a win for oligarchy,” former Clinton administration labor secretary Robert Reich posted on Thursday.
Conservatives on social media responded to the tweets by pointing out that Democrats have supported the Washington Post being owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos and have been less critical about the wealth of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.
TRUMP TO STAY ON HIS TRUTH SOCIAL AMID ELON MUSK TWITTER TAKEOVER
Elon Musk attends the 2022 Met Gala at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 2, 2022, in New York City. (Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue / Getty Images)
“Translation: Leftists liked the old billionaire more than the new billionaire, because the former billionaire silenced everyone who disagreed with Leftists,” Republican Sen. Ted Cruz tweeted in response to Reich.
“Stop attacking Bezos Zuckerberg and Dorsey you know your guys,” CPAC Chair Matt Schlapp tweeted.
WHAT I WOULD DO IF I WERE ELON MUSK TAKING OVER TWITTER: LET FREEDOM REIGN
Tesla CEO Elon Musk smiles as he addresses guests at the Offshore Northern Seas 2022 (ONS) meeting in Stavanger, Norway ((Photo by Carina Johansen / NTB / AFP/ Getty Images / Getty Images)
Musk finalized his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter on Thursday and posted a letter to advertisers outlining his vision for the company.
“The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence,” Musk posted on Twitter. “There is currently great danger that social media will splinter into far right wing and far left wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ON FOX BUSINESS
The Twitter logo is seen on a sign on the exterior of Twitter headquarters in San Francisco, California, on October 28, 2022. – After months of controversy, Elon Musk is now at the head of one of the most influential social networks on the planet, wh (Photo by Constanza Hevia/AFP via Getty Images / Getty Images)
Musk added that the social media platform “cannot become a free-for-all hellscape” and that he will focus on adhering to the “laws of the land” while also fostering an environment that is “warm and welcoming to all.”
At the start of last week, Activated Indium farming was one of the simplest ways to make big money in No Man’s Sky. Players would find a deposit, plop down a ton of drills, and surround it with storage containers. The sci-fi ore poured in. All they had to do was exchange it at a terminal for nearly 1,000 units a piece. But no more. The latest Waypoint update nerfed the cash crop into oblivion, and No Man’s Sky’s robber barons are pouring one out for their now-useless monuments to interstellar capitalist excess.
“I spent a lot of time building AI mines that could give me completely unnecessarily large levels of income,” a player named TheOneGingerman wrote on the No Man’s Sky subreddit. “This update has slashed the amount of income they generate, but honestly I’m fine with that. The mines I built were more an exercise in what could I generate than what I needed to generate.”
No Man’s Sky is a beautiful space sim that lets you explore millions of different worlds at your leisure. You can build bases, explore, fight pirates, and even form galactic councils. While some players go to space to escape the shackles of the modern marketplace, others venture out there to embrace it. Some established lucrative trade routes. Others looted rival frigates. And more than a few turned to farming some of the galaxy’s most profitable materials.
For a long time, Activated Indium was one of those reliable moneymakers. It could only be found on planets orbiting blue stars. It could be refined into a crating material or sold as a commodity on the open market for a whopping 949 units. No Man’s Sky’s economy had unlimited demand, so players met it with near limitless supply, and shared images of their massive farming projects on social media. They built everything from nuclear reactor-shaped rigs to giant floating space bridges.
G/O Media may get a commission
Up to $470 Off
Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4 + Galaxy Z Fold 4
Flex, pose, post In the face of stern competition from rival Apple, Samsung has really upped its game for Amazon’s Early Access Sales event. Right now you can nab two of the hottest new smartphones on the market: The Z Flip 4 and the Z Fold 4, for up to almost 25% off the usual asking price. This is a hell of a deal, considering both phones have been available for less than two months. If you’ve been waiting on an upgrade, now’s the time.
“[This is] my first fairly large activated indium farm,” ItSmellsLikeJim wrote on the subreddit last month, sharing screenshots that showed massive stacks of mineral extractors that were connected to a series of large buildings and associated infrastructure. “20,000hr/120,000 storage. Overhead supply line runs. Like performing surgery running them, no diminished returns. Have some if you wish.” Players were drowning in Activated Indium, so they were generous, gifting it to random strangers. These new players could then use the startup funds to upgrade their ship, travel the galaxy, or build their own farms. Some farms produced millions of units every day. Others made billions.
A player who goes by nmskibbles constructed his “Fallout Farm” over two years ago on an “extremely radiated” and “brutal” planet. That’s usually where the good stuff is, he told Kotaku. No Man’s Sky didn’t have cross-play at the time, so he constructed the same exact farm on PS4 so players there could benefit as well. How long did it take? “About 10 hours of wire glitching,” he wrote on Reddit at the time.
This all changed when the “Waypoint” update streamlined much of the game on October 7. Players soon discovered that the price of Indium had dropped to just 165 units a piece. Even more dire, maker Hello Games also reduced the efficiency of drilling. Where players were previously able to stack hundreds of extractors on top of each other, they now suffered diminishing returns for each additional facility built over the same deposit. Some players have estimated their farming operations are now taking 50 percent longer to gather the same amount of Indium.
“Really disappointing as I’ve worked insanely hard to make some absolutely massive AI farms that I guess are now just worthless?” GalaxyGalavanter wrote on the subreddit. “Unfortunately I built a activated indium farm a day before the 4.0 release which nerfed it so I’m only getting like eight million units every 26 hrs which isn’t that great considering I can get eight million units from storm crystals in under 25 minutes,” wrote Actual_Material_5915.
Drewcifer0
Some of No Man’s Sky’s biggest entrepreneurs are effectively treating the latest market crash like a massive reset. While some are mourning their now all-but-useless Indium farms, many are also relieved to have new worlds to conquer. “Activated Indium prices being nerfed after the update actually made other ways of making units interesting again,” now-former farmer KashKaroon told Kotaku. “I’m now back to old-school methods like collecting storm crystals and ancient bones, also getting back into growing plants for crafting items like circuit boards, living glass, and liquid explosives. I used to enjoy these aspects a lot before Activated Indium made them kind of redundant. Glad they’ve been given some purpose again.”
Money never sleeps though, even in No Man’s Sky. A bunch of players who hit it big in the Indium boom are already scrambling to find a new market to dump their billions into. While some are leaning hard into crystal, others are pursuing stasis devices and chlorine. “You should do the chlorine scam,” Important-Position93 suggested on the subreddit. “Set up a couple oxygen farms and expand chlorine with oxy. I make about 1bn a day with a few hours work.”
But the most lucrative ore in the face of Activated Indium’s decline appears to be gold. At least until the next nerf. It’s currently worth about 350 units each, which is breaking some players’ brains because unlike Indium, which requires a “blue star” solar system, gold can be found anywhere. “They nerfed indium farms so now everybody will have the unfun job of rebuilding their farms as gold farms since these are the best ones,” Redditor Lenat complained. “They should at least make AI better than gold so people don’t have to rebuild. But looks like this update is all about starting over from scratch.”
Read More:Right Now Is A Great Time To Jump Into No Man’s Sky
Among its many changes and additions, the Waypoint update introduced a new Relaxed mode players can turn on to adventure with minimal danger and grinding. You can even drop the price of every item in the game to zero. While those who want a challenge can ramp the difficulty up for a more survival-oriented experience, this “create mode” backdrop has left some No Man’s Sky capitalists soul searching for a new reason to play.
“Your insanely hard work can be replicated in minutes by anyone now; for balancing reasons I am told,” wrote LastPint508. “Idk, the patch made one of my spare ships worth half a billion, I sold the thing, money is meaningless now.”
Jeff Bezos has dropped to third place in the race for riches.
The Amazon founder is now the world’s third-richest person, after Indian business tycoon Gautam Adani leapfrogged Bezos in the latest Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index.
Adani has amassed an estimated $146.8 billion fortune that only trails Elon Musk’s $263.9 billion, according to Bloomberg News.
It’s the first time a person from Asia has ranked so highly on the Bloomberg’s list, which has long been dominated by white billionaires.
Bezos trails Adani by just $19 million. Shares of e-commerce goliath Amazon are down 26% this year.
Meanwhile, shares of Adani Enterprises Ltd. have surged the past week, and some of his group of companies climbed more than 1,000% since 2020, according to reports.
Adani’s rise to No. 2 coincides with a tech selloff that has chopped more than $45 billion from Bezos’s fortune since January. Bezos — once the world’s richest person — also saw his net worth significantly drop after his 2019 divorce from ex-wife MacKenzie Scott, who received 4% of Amazon.
The jostling among the world’s richest humans intensified Friday as three men rotated through the No. 2 spot in the span of 24 hours, highlighting the volatility of the markets and meteoric rise of Indian billionaire Gautam Adani on a list long dominated by tech titans.
On Friday morning, Adani edged out French business magnate Bernard Arnault and pushed Amazon founder Jeff Bezos down to the No. 4 spot on Forbes’s real-time billionaire rankings. The shake-up didn’t end there, however, Adani fell to No. 3, ahead of Bezos, by the afternoon.
By 5 p.m. Friday, Arnault was worth $154.7 billion, Adani $152.2 billion, and Bezos $146.9 billion. Staggering numbers by any measure, but well behind the $273.2 billion fortune of Elon Musk.
As chair of the Adani Group, a multinational conglomerate, Adani’s portfolio of companies and investments spans coal mining, data centers, airports and renewable energy. And his wealth has soared over the past year, just as the value of the largest American tech companies has slipped alongside much of Wall Street’s biggest names.
Eliza ‘Liza’ Fletcher, a Tennessee-based teacher whose grandfather, Joseph Orgill III, co-ran the Memphis-based hardware distributor Orgill Inc., was abducted in the early hours of Friday morning while jogging near the University of Memphis campus, The Sun reports. The Daily Beast reached out to the University of Memphis for comment.
While Fletcher’s total net worth is unclear, she is the heiress to the Orgill Inc. fortune; as of 2020, the business is worth over $3.2 billion and ranks at 143 on the Forbes list of America’s largest private companies. The Daily Beast reached out to Orgill Inc. for comment.
Fletcher, who teachers pre-kindergarten, was reportedly exercising around 4:30 in the morning on Friday in purple jogging shorts and a pink top when assailants in a dark SUV pulled up and violently forced her into the car. She was reported missing at around 7 a.m., and upon examining the scene, police officers discovered Fletcher’s shattered cell phone and abandoned water bottle.
Her family is offering a $50,000 reward any information that can be provided as to her whereabouts. Fletcher is described as a white, married mother of two, five foot six inches tall, weighs 137lbs, with brown hair, and green eyes.
Her Instagram account is a wall-to-wall showcase of her husband of eight years, Richard ‘Richie’ Fletcher III and two sons.
Memphis police were seen towing Fletcher’s family car, a white Jeep Wagoneer, from her home Friday afternoon. On Friday night, deputies with the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office spent several hours searching a wooded area of Overton Park, a park about 1.5 miles from where Fletcher was abducted.
The Fletchers are members of the Second Presbyterian Church in Tennessee, which released a statement regarding the abduction via Facebook: “Please join us in praying for Liza’s safety, and that she will be found soon. Please also pray for her family. The Sanctuary is open for prayer through this afternoon.”
According to public safety data, at least 100 kidnapping incidents have been reported in Memphis in 2022 alone.
Fletcher’s pastor at the Second Presbyterian Church said the parish was grieving with her family.
“She and her husband Ritchie are both very active and great leaders in our congregation,” Pastor George Robertson said. “They have two little boys who have come up to me every week and give me a hug.”
“Someday we’ll eliminate this kind of tragedy,” he told Commercial Appeal. “We also grieve the abduction that occurred a couple of days ago near Wolfchase. We grieve all of this kind of violence and evil in our city. It just makes us grieve. We grieve for ourselves, we grieve for the Fletchers and we also grieve for our city. Our whole city is hurting.”
Fletcher graduated from the Hutchinson School in Memphis in 2006, according to the Commercial Appeal. And graduated from Belmont University with a graduate degree in teaching. She is an avid runner and has previously qualified for the Boston Marathon.
Hutchinson high school posted to their Facebook messages of love and an “urgent call to prayer” and stated Fletcher was a “beloved alumna, and we pray for her safety and for her family.”
Her friend Hart Robinson told WREG that anyone with information should call police.
“We want to find her, we don’t know what’s going on,” he said. “If you know anything or saw anything, we just ask for you to come forward.”
Mets owner Steve Cohen isn’t just trading players this summer.
The hedge fund billionaire may also be making a trade on the home front, where his West Village fortress is unofficially on the market for “well over” $150 million, sources tell Gimme Shelter exclusively.
Cohen’s spokesperson declined to comment.
The mighty 30,000-square-foot residence, at 703-711 Washington St., is a newly built townhouse — something rare for the historic neighborhood.
Cohen bought 145 Perry St., on the corner of Washington, for $28.8 million in 2012.
He also bought 703 Washington St. for $38.8 million the same year.
Billionaire Mets owner Steve Cohen is secretly looking to find a new owner for his downtown megamansion.Stefano Giovannini / APThe residence spans multiple addresses along Washington Street and 30,000 square feet of prime space.Stefano GiovanniniIf you want it, you’ll need to cough up more than $150 million.Stefano Giovannini
Then he spent years — and tens of millions of dollars — to create a single-family megamansion.
The lot — a former two-story parking garage — is so big that at one point it was slated to become a seven-story, 93-room hotel. It was also pitched as two $20 million, six-story townhouses.
But the plan morphed into a mansion designed by Leroy Street Studio, with Robert Silman Associates Structural Engineers.
This time, Cohen’s plans to sell his castle are more, well, discreet. The last time he put his personal residence on the market, he was in for a crushing reality.
In 2013, Cohen listed his Midtown duplex penthouse at One Beacon Court — also known as Bloomberg Tower — for $115 million.
But the 9,000-square-foot residence, designed by late architect Charles Gwathmey, was ultimately subject to a 75% price chop.
It finally sold for $30.5 million eight years later. (It resold in April for $33 million, according to property records.)
Cohen’s bronze, terracotta and wood mansion boasts a curving staircase, an elevator, multiple fireplaces, a home theater, a chef’s kitchen, a landscaped roof deck and a rear garden.
It had been the object of curiosity for years until the scaffolding was removed last year.
Rihanna is now the youngest self-made billionaire woman in the US — knocking Kim Kardashian to second place.
The 34-year-old singer recently made Forbes’ annual list of America’s richest self-made women for the third year in a row, ranking 21st overall. She’s the only billionaire under 40 on the list.
The next-youngest billionaire on the Forbes list is Kardashian, 41, who has a net worth of $1.8 billion.
Rihanna’s net worth is now $1.4 billion, which is only partly from her successful music career. Most of it comes from her entrepreneurial endeavors, including Fenty Beauty, Fenty Skin and Savage X Fenty.
In March, Bloomberg reported Savage X Fenty lingerie company was working with advisors on an initial public offering that could value the company at $3 billion or more. Rihanna owns 30 percent of that company.
The nine-time Grammy Award winner also owns 50 percent of Fenty Beauty, which launched in 2017 and brought in $550 million in revenue in 2020. French luxury fashion conglomerate LVMH owns the other half of the company.
Rihanna celebrates her beauty brands Fenty Beauty and Fenty Skin at Goya Studios on February 11, 2022, in Los Angeles, California.Mike Coppola/Getty Images
In 2012, the “Love On The Brain” singer started a philanthropy fund called the Clara Lionel Foundation (CLF), aiming to “support and fund groundbreaking education and climate resilience initiatives,” according to the website.
A year after the foundation was launched, the Fenty Beauty CEO held two lipstick campaigns with MAC Cosmetics, raising $60 million to benefit women and children affected by HIV/AIDS. In February 2020, CLF was named one of the world’s most innovative not-for-profit companies by Fast Company.
But Rihanna’s main focus isn’t the money — she’s all about the “work, work, work, work, work, work.”
In 2019, she told The New York Times, “I never thought I’d make this much money, so a number is not going to stop me from working.”
