Retired FBI agent Ray Carr outlines the red flags associated with the investigation into Brian Walshe and the disappearance of his wife on ‘Fox & Friends.’
COHASSET, Mass. – The seaside enclave of Cohasset, Massachusetts, has made headlines in recent weeks as police continue to investigate the disappearance of real estate executive Ana Walshe.
Walshe, 39, is believed to have last been seen in the early morning hours of Jan. 1, at her family’s rental home on Chief Justice Cushing Highway in Cohasset. The Cohasset Police Department, working in conjunction with state law enforcement and the Norfolk County District Attorney’s Office, has since arrested Walshe’s husband, 47-year-old Brian Walshe, for misleading investigators.
But two weeks later, the missing mom of three has still not been found.
MISSING ANA WALSHE: ROMANCE WITH BRIAN WALSHE WAS ‘LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT’
Brian Walshe is escorted outside of Quincy District Court in connection to his wife, Ana Walshe’s, disappearance. (Credit: WBZ)
Ana Walshe pictured in a November 2022 Instagram post. (Ana Walshe/Instagram / Fox News)
General view of the home at 516 Chief Justice Cushing Hwy in Cohasset, MA on Friday, January 6, 2023. The home belongs to Ana Walshe who has been reported missing, last seen on New Year’s Day. (David McGlynn for Fox News Digital / Fox News)
TIMELINE OF ANA WALSHE’S DISAPPEARANCE AND BRIAN WALSHE’S ARREST
On Thursday, the Town of Cohasset hosted an Interfaith Prayer Vigil in the Cohasset Town Common. About 100 people attended the evening event, which Cohasset Select Board Chair Jack Creighton said was meant to “celebrate life, expressing compassion for those affected,” the Cohasset Anchor reported.
WHO IS BRIAN WALSHE, HUSBAND OF MISSING COHASSET WOMAN ANA WALSHE?
Cohasset, MA – January 12: People gathered on Cohasset Common for a Community Interfaith Prayer Vigil held for missing woman Ana Walshe. (Photo by Barry Chin/The Boston Globe via Getty Images / Getty Images)
The Walshe family has lived in Cohasset for several years, and previously called home a modern-style house on the tree-lined Jerusalem Road. Just this month, firefighters battled a blaze at the home, though officials have said the fire was accidental and unrelated to the missing persons investigation.
MISSING MASSACHUSETTS MOTHER ANA WALSHE’S HUSBAND ARRESTED FOR ALLEGEDLY ‘MISLEADING A POLICE INVESTIGATION’
Firefighters battle a blaze at 725 Jerusalem Road in Cohasset, MA on Friday, January 7, 2023. The home once belonged to Ana Walshe who has been reported missing, last seen on New Year’s Day. (David McGlynn for Fox News Digital / Fox News)
The couple sold the home, located on Jerusalem Road near Howe Road, for nearly $1.4 million in March of last year, according to Zillow.
Cohasset boasted a population of 8,373 as of July 2021, with a median household income that year of $156,689.
Cohasset, Massachusetts on Jan. 13, 2023. (Chris Eberhart/Fox News Digital / Fox News)
Members of a State Police K-9 unit search on Chief Justice Cushing Highway in Cohasset, Mass., Jan. 7, 2022. (Craig F. Walker/The Boston Globe via AP)
As of March 2022, Cohasset’s median listing price was $1.3 million, and the median sale price was $1.2 million, according to Realtor.com.
Masslive.com reported in February 2022 that Cohasset ranked No. 13 out of 20 in a list of the Boston metro towns and cities with the most expensive homes. The “typical home value” of home values is around $1,143,781, according to the report.
Cohasset, MA – January 6: Cohasset Police Chief William Quigley spoke at a morning press conference on the disappearance of Ana Walshe, a Cohasset resident. (Photo by Jonathan Wiggs/The Boston Globe via Getty Images / Getty Images)
Cohasset Police Station in Cohasset, Massachusetts, on Jan. 13, 2023. (Chris Eberhart/Fox News Digital / Fox News)
Photo shows the Cohasset Station in Cohasset, Massachusetts, on Jan. 13, 2023. (Chris Eberhart/Fox News Digital / Fox News)
And in 2014, Quincy, Massachusetts-based newspaper The Patriot Ledger reported that Cohasset ranked as one of the country’s “most expensive places for buyers looking for a four-bedroom, two-bathroom home.”
Law enforcement and investigators returning to Walshe home in Cohasset, MA. Law enforcement appears to have moved family out of house to investigate contents. (David McGlynn for Fox News Digital / Fox News)
The sleepy town has been in the spotlight before and was the setting of the 1987 film, “The Witches of Eastwick,” starring Cher, Jack Nicholson, Michelle Pfeiffer and Susan Sarandon.
Photo from The Witches of Eastwick, US 1987 (Photo by RDB/ullstein bild via Getty Images / Getty Images)
The flick, based on a 1984 John Updike novel, tells the story of three friends, played by Cher, Pfieffer and Sarandon, who are unsatisfied in their lives. Their small town is abuzz with a visitor named Daryl Van Horne, who captures the hearts of each of the women and reveals that they are witches.
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COHASSET, MA – AUGUST 6: Part of the set for “The Witches of Eastwick” in Cohasset, Mass. on Aug. 6, 1986. (Photo by Joe Runci/The Boston Globe via Getty Images / Getty Images)
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The story portrays the women as they explore their newfound powers and begin to confront their own questions and concerns about Van Horne.
A fresh round of explosions rocked Kyiv less than an hour into 2023, after Russia had attacked Ukraine with missiles targeting the capital and other cities ahead of New Year’s Eve celebrations.
The first blasts of the new year began roughly 30 minutes after midnight, hitting two districts, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said on Telegram, adding there were no immediate reports of casualties.
Earlier in the evening, President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukrainians would fight until victorious.
“We fight and will continue to fight. For the sake of the main word: ‘victory’,” he said in an address, as his country saw the old year out hours after the new wave of strikes.
“I want to say to all of you: Ukrainians, you are incredible! See what we have done and what we are doing!” Zelensky said in the emotional speech.
“We fight as one team — the whole country, all our regions. I admire you all. I want to thank every invincible region of Ukraine,” he continued.
As Russian regions in the Far East rang in 2023, Russian leader Vladimir Putin delivered his midnight address — usually set against the backdrop of the Kremlin — standing among servicemen and women who fought in Ukraine.
He told them that “historical rightness” was on their side.
At around the same time, explosions shook the Ukrainian capital where AFP journalists heard at least 11 loud blasts in the early afternoon.
Klitschko said on social media that at least one person died as a result of the attacks on Saturday while city authorities said 22 others were injured.
One explosion tore open one corner of the four-star Hotel Alfavito in Kyiv, spilling rubble into the street, an AFP reporter saw.
Nearby sidewalks were covered in glass from blown-out windows in the area, including from Kyiv’s National Palace of Arts.
Filmmaker Yaroslav Mutenko, 23, lives in a nearby apartment complex and said he was in the shower preparing to go to a New Year’s Eve party when he heard a boom.
He said there had been similar explosions in the area during a previous attack in October, but nothing as loud as Saturday’s explosion.
As he watched rescue workers cordon off the street in front of the hotel, he told AFP he still planned to go to the party at a friend’s house.
“Our enemies the Russians can destroy our calm but they cannot destroy our spirit,” he said.
“Why do I go celebrate with friends? Because this year I understand that it is important to have people near.”
The attacks come as Putin’s invasion of Ukraine enters its 11th month, with Russian strikes systematically targeting energy infrastructure, leaving millions in the cold and dark in the middle of winter.
Strikes were also reported in the southern city of Mykolaiv where a local official said seven people were injured.
Mykolaiv Mayor Oleksandr Sienkievych had said earlier that a fire broke out in one of the city’s districts and several residential buildings sustained damage as a result of the strikes.
As Ukraine continues to rely on military support and aid from Europe and the U.S. to repel Russia’s attacks, French president Emmanuel Macron promised Saturday to help Ukrainians “without fail… until victory.”
Putin celebrates New Year
In Ukraine’s west, at least four people were wounded in the Khmelnytskyi region, Governor Serhiy Gamaliy said, adding that part of the city of Khmelnytskyi was left without power.
Ukraine’s chief of general staff Valerii Zaluzhnyi said Russia launched 20 cruise missiles on Saturday, with 12 shot down.
According to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, Putin delivered his New Year’s speech from the headquarters of Russia’s southern military district, where he was on a visit earlier on Saturday and presented awards to servicemen.
Among the recipients of the awards was Russia’s commander in Ukraine, General Sergei Surovikin, Russian news agencies said.
Footage released by Russian state TV showed Putin raising a glass of champagne with soldiers dressed in military uniform, some with awards pinned to their chest.
In his traditional New Year’s Eve address, broadcast by channels just before midnight, Putin told Russians that “moral, historical rightness is on our side.”
Putin said that this year was marked by “truly pivotal, fateful events” which became “the frontier that lays the foundation for our common future, for our true independence.”
“Today we are fighting for this, protecting our people in our own historical territories, in the new constituent entities of the Russian Federation,” he added, referring to four Ukrainian regions that Russia claimed to have annexed.
Earlier in the day, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said in a message to his servicemen that Russia’s victory in Ukraine was “inevitable.”
The Defense Ministry also announced the capture of the village of Dorozhnyanka in the southern Zaporizhzhia region — a rare gain claimed as Russia suffered a string of defeats on the ground in Ukraine.
The ministry also said that 82 Russian servicemen were freed as part of a prisoner exchange with Ukraine, while Kyiv said that it returned 140 people.
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.
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“[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.”
It should have been simple for Magnus Carlsen, or at least as simple as a top-tier chess game can be. When the world chess champion sat down across from 19-year-old American Hans Niemann at the Sinquefield Cup earlier this month, he had the benefit of playing with the white pieces, he was on a 53-game unbeaten streak, and was facing someone who entered the tournament as the lowest-rated player.
Few were expecting an upset, but that’s just what happened.
Carlsen’s loss to Niemann in that game was unusual, but what followed was even more so. The next day, the world’s number one chess star withdrew from the tournament without explanation; only a short statement posted to Twitter and a meme.
“I’ve withdrawn from the tournament. I’ve always enjoyed playing in the @STLChessClub, and hope to be back in the future,” he wrote in a tweet, which was accompanied by a video clip of José Mourinho, saying, “I prefer really not to speak. If I speak, I am in big trouble.”
Carlsen didn’t say so explicitly himself, but his withdrawal and the cryptic video were interpreted as a veiled accusation of cheating against Niemann.
Niemann has vehemently denied the accusations against him, but the world of chess — which is its own ecosystem of players and teachers, YouTubers, streamers and fans — has been consumed by the drama ever since.
“Basically it seems like Magnus Carlsen thinks something’s not quite right with Hans Niemann,” said Levy Rozman, an international master and host of a popular chess-based YouTube channel, in a video. He described it as “likely the biggest chess scandal in history.”
Cheating in chess is as old as the game itself. But the rise of online play, coupled with the invention of chess engines powered by artificial intelligence that can calculate millions of possible moves in seconds, has led to an explosion in cheating in recent years. Chess.com, the most popular chess platform on the internet, calls cheating “the dirty not-so-secret of chess,” one that has “plagued online chess websites.” The site says it suspends around 500 accounts a day for cheating.
So, how was Niemann, who played Carlsen in person, supposed to have cheated? This is where things get weird. A theory reportedly from the depths of Reddit, which suggested Neimann used vibrating anal beads to receive move commands from an outside helper, was discussed as if it were a serious likelihood by grandmaster Eric Hansen on a livestream. Another theory suggested Niemann might be using a “tiny laser” that “draws an ultraviolet line on the board visible only through soecial [sic] contacts.”
Niemann had his own theory, positing in his post-match interview that Carlsen “was just so demoralized because he’s losing to an idiot like me. It must be embarrassing for the world champion to lose to me. I feel bad for him.”
What followed was something akin to a true crime drama. Niemann’s history was fiercely scrutinised online, his past games studied for anomalies and patterns.
Hikaru Nakamura, a chess grandmaster, former world number two and popular chess YouTuber, replayed the game between Carlsen and Niemann to look for moves that didn’t make sense. In other words, he looked for moves that could only have been prompted by artificial intelligence. “I’m really suss actually,” he said.
Greg Keener, a FIDE arbiter and assistant manager at The Marshall Chess Club, wrote in an analysis for the New York Times that Niemann’s Elo rating, which is based on a player’s playing record, rose more than 500 points since January 2021, describing it as “an increase so sharp many people don’t believe it is possible.”
In other words, Niemann’s meteoric rise was an underlying reason for many people’s suspicions.
The scandal only deepened when it emerged that Niemann, in an interview he gave to explain his game against Carlsen and defend himself against the accusations, admitted to cheating in online games when he was younger.
“I cheated on random games on Chess.com. I was confronted. I confessed. And this is the single biggest mistake of my life. And I am completely ashamed. I am telling the world because I don’t want misrepresentations and I don’t want rumours. I have never cheated in an over-the-board game. And other than when I was 12 years old I have never cheated in a tournament with prize money,” he said in an interview with the St Louis Chess Club.
“To give context, I was 16 years old and living alone in New York City at the heart of the pandemic and I was willing to do anything to grow my stream,” he added. “What I want people to know about this is that I am deeply, deeply sorry for my mistake. I know my actions have consequences and I suffered those consequences.”
Niemann went on to say that he would play naked to prove himself innocent against the accusations of him wearing devices on his body.
“If they want me to strip fully naked, I will do it. I don’t care. Because I know I am clean. You want me to play in a closed box with zero electronic transmission, I don’t care. I’m here to win and that is my goal regardless,” he said.
Niemann could not be reached for comment by The Independent.
Two days after that interview, Chess.com said in a statement that it had banned Niemann from the site, without going into further detail.
Still, the drama continued. Niemann and Carlsen met in another game, this time online, in a tournament called the Generation Cup. After one move, Carlsen resigned from the game and turned off his webcam.
“This is a bigger statement than the tweet, I think,” said the commentator.
The furor has threatened to derail the career of a young chess grandmaster before it had even really begun. Yet no one has yet been able to provide any concrete proof of his cheating.
After days of speculation, Chris Bird, the chief arbiter of the Sinquefield Cup, where the scandal began, said there had been no evidence of cheating.
“In response to the recent rumours circulating the chess world, I can confirm that we currently have no indication that any player has been playing unfairly in the 2022 Sinquefield Cup,” Bird said in a statement, according to Reuters.
The New York Times reported that he has been invited back to the next tournament at the club.
Hans Niemann, left, and Magnus Carlsen
(chess24.com/Getty)
Keener, in his analysis for the Times, also pointed to comments from Levon Aronian, an Armenian grandmaster who played in the same tournament and who defended Niemann in a postgame interview.
“Well, I think it quite often happens when young players play very well. There is all these accusations toward them. All of my colleagues are pretty much paranoid, “ he said in the interview.
There was an even more in-depth analysis by professor Ken Regan, described as the “world’s greatest expert on cheating detection in chess” by ChessBase, who analysed all of Niemann’s games from the last two years, online and offline.
“Niemann played well. But not too well,” he said in his verdict, which concluded that he did not cheat.
That might have been the end of the controversy. But Carlsen waded into the subject again this week in an interview.
“Unfortunately I cannot particularly speak on that,” Carlsen said when asked why he resigned from his last game with Niemann. “But, you know, people can draw their own conclusion and they certainly have.”
He then hinted that he may not remain cryptic for much longer.
“I hope to say a little bit more after the tournament,” he said.
As parts of Dallas were slammed with flash flooding Monday morning, restaurants and bars in hard-hit areas such as Deep Ellum, downtown and East Dallas were assessing the damage.
Joel Morales, who runs The Peak Inn in East Dallas as well as Adair’s Saloon in Deep Ellum, said Peak Inn “got rocked,” with 3 inches of water in the building from front to back. Morales hopes not to close at all, “but possibly a day,” he said.
Adair’s was fine, he said, but it was dicey for a while. “If it rains medium hard, it typically comes in the down slope at the back door. But we also have a sump pump and sand bags, so that was covered. A little water started to come in the front door, which I have only seen twice in 20-plus years.”
Tracy Miller, chef-owner at Local restaurant on Elm Street, said the front entrance of the eatery was flooded Monday morning. The water receded quickly, but leaves and dirt still scattered the front dining room hardwood floor.
In Expo Park, Shad Kvetko of bar Las Almas Rotas said he and his business partner were assessing flood damage. Some water got in but not enough to close the restaurant.
But nearby, the dining room at Tarantino’s Cicchetti Bar and Record Lounge on Parry Avenue got about 6 inches of water, but it had all receded by about 10 a.m., said owner Peter Tarantino.
Tarantino said he’ll have to replace all the rugs and carpets in the lounge area and that a few records got damaged, but the furniture might be salvageable. “I’m hoping by Thursday we’ll be able to open up the bar with a few snacks,” he said. “I don’t give up too easily.”
He adds that the infrastructure in the area needs some work and the buildings are old. Tarantino lives in an apartment nearby and said he couldn’t leave by foot initially. “Exposition Avenue turned into a river,” he said. “I couldn’t get out of my apartment. I looked out the window, and it was just a river flowing. Same thing on Parry Avenue.”
Tarantino has been through a “roller coaster” since he signed a lease for the restaurant in 2019, he said. He delayed opening in 2020 because of the pandemic, finally opening in 2021. Then the restaurant was hit by plumbing issues, labor issues, staff members getting ill with COVID-19 and inflation. The restaurant recently had closed temporarily because construction at the Music Hall at Fair Park led to less dinner business.
“I’m trying to get my doors back open, and then this happens. It’s just one monster after another,” Tarantino said. “The restaurant industry needs a break. I’ve seen more mayhem in the last two years than I have in my whole life.”
On Cedar Springs Road, Alexandre’s Bar declared an “inclement weather emergency.” An Instagram post stated: “With entry into Oak Lawn impassable, only local workers are allowed to work today if safe. This means our kitchen will not be open today. We will keep an eye on the ongoing weather situation and keep you updated. Please do not drive unless you have to and never cross moving or even small inches of water on the roadway.”
In Oak Cliff, Xaman Cafe posted a video on Instagram of employees sweeping water off the floor and out the front door and said it would be “closing until further notice” and waiting for the rain to subside.
Freelance writer Amanda Albee contributed to this report.
Mr. Birchall, a straight-laced, 48-year-old wealth manager who rose to become Mr. Musk’s top deputy and the head of his family office, had growing concerns about a new power player in the
Tesla Inc.
TSLA 0.74%
CEO’s orbit.
Mr. Musk was increasingly relying on a new adviser, a 34-year-old, Russian-born ex-professional gambler named
Igor Kurganov.
Mr. Kurganov spent some of the pandemic sleeping in Mr. Musk’s home, where they chatted late into the night about how the world’s richest person might use his fortune to help shape the planet through a giving strategy known as “effective altruism.”
Mr. Kurganov had no experience in finance or security but was suddenly a central figure in both areas for Mr. Musk. He had moved from London to Texas and replaced some of Mr. Musk’s protection detail with new hires of his own. Not long after, the Tesla CEO told Mr. Birchall that he was so taken by the younger man’s ideas that he wanted to leave him in charge of his charitable giving, dispersing funds from Mr. Musk’s vast private fortune, currently around $230 billion, as he saw fit.
“Elon,” Mr. Birchall told his boss, according to three people briefed afterward. “You can’t.”
The clash between the two men, and their dueling efforts to gain the upper hand with Mr. Musk, provides a peek into the often tumultuous private workings of Mr. Musk’s inner circle. As Mr. Musk’s breakneck, $44 billion bid for Twitter shows, the entrepreneur can be prone to quick decisions, ones that he can reverse just as quickly as he makes them. That deal is now in peril, with Mr. Musk trying to walk away and
Twitter
TWTR 4.00%
suing him to complete it.
All the while he is egged on by a rotating crew of investors, underlings and ever-changing friends whose power and personal wealth is closely tied to their proximity to Mr. Musk, according to people who do business with him.
Two men in particular have pulled the Tesla CEO in opposing directions.
Mr. Birchall is an Eagle Scout and practicing Mormon who doesn’t smoke or drink and grew up traveling California as part of a song-and-dance troupe called “The Birchall Family Singers.” He declined to be interviewed through a representative of Mr. Musk’s foundation.
Mr. Kurganov is a high-roller with a reported more than $18 million in poker winnings, with long hair and beard and a peaceful demeanor. He has said in a podcast interview that he dropped out of college because he was smoking too much marijuana. He didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Igor Kurganov, shown playing poker in a tournament in 2016, became a top adviser to Mr. Musk on charitable giving.
Photo:
Joe Giron/World Poker Tour
Last winter, Mr. Musk came to a compromise between the two. He allowed Mr. Kurganov to oversee $5.7 billion in Tesla shares that the CEO pledged late last year to eventually donate to charity. The rest of Mr. Musk’s overall fortune remained under Mr. Birchall’s purview.
That decision wasn’t, however, the end of the fracas.
This account is based on interviews with more than a dozen people close to Messrs. Musk, Birchall and Kurganov, including associates of the Musk Foundation and investors.
Ultimate fixer
For a man of immense resources, Mr. Musk is a minnow in the world of big-dollar philanthropy. Compared with other magnates such as
Microsoft Corp.
co-founder
Bill Gates
and
Amazon.com Inc.
founder
Jeff Bezos,
whose wealth, like Mr. Musk’s, is tied up in shares of their companies, Mr. Musk has said little concrete about his approach to giving. He didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Musk’s personal foundation gave away $23.6 million in fiscal 2020, the most recent year for which data is available, filings show. That represented roughly 0.02% of his net worth as of the end of that year, according to Forbes rankings.
Though Mr. Musk is known to favor his own counsel most of all, the man in charge of his foundation since 2016 has been Mr. Birchall, one of the longest standing in his inner circle.
Jared Birchall is a top deputy to Mr. Musk and head of the firm managing his fortune.
Photo:
Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg News
The alliance reflects Mr. Birchall’s role as the ultimate fixer for Mr. Musk, taking care of matters large and small. In addition to handling billions in assets, Mr. Birchall in 2018 under a pseudonym registered the website www.justballs.com, for example, after Mr. Musk mused online that he might want to own the domain name someday, legal documents show.
Mr. Birchall entered the technology world through finance. After his brief singing stint with his siblings—he is one of 11 children—he attended Brigham Young University.
He then spent a year at Merrill Lynch, where he was discharged for what the firm described in a filing as “sending correspondence to a client without management approval.”
Mr. Birchall eventually moved into private wealth and crossed paths with Mr. Musk about a decade ago while working as a client adviser in
Morgan Stanley’s
southern California offices. There, he impressed Mr. Musk by helping arrange hundreds of millions of dollars of loans from the investment bank at a time when the Tesla co-founder was strapped for cash, a person close to Mr. Musk says. When Mr. Musk started a private firm to manage his own money roughly six years ago, he tapped Mr. Birchall to run it.
Mr. Birchall’s work for Mr. Musk has at times led him into strange public controversies and lawsuits. After a British spelunker criticized Mr. Musk’s offer to help rescue a youth soccer team trapped in a flooded Thailand cave in 2018, Mr. Birchall created a fake email address under the name “James Brickhouse” to hire a private investigator to investigate the man, according to court documents.
Mr. Musk during a Tesla event in Shanghai in January 2020.
Photo:
Aly Song/REUTERS
Mr. Musk subsequently called the man “pedo guy” in a tweet, though he later apologized and said it was a joking taunt. The spelunker unsuccessfully sued Mr. Musk for defamation in a Los Angeles federal court.
In addition to his role helping manage Mr. Musk’s fortune, Mr. Birchall is also a director of his tunneling startup, Boring Co., and chief executive officer of Mr. Musk’s Neuralink, which aims to make a brain implant that could be used by quadriplegic patients to control a computer or other devices.
When Mr. Musk announced in 2020 he would move from California to Texas, Mr. Birchall moved his family there, too. He has since become the closest thing Mr. Musk has to a public face in the Texas capital, handling business and attending events on Mr. Musk’s behalf.
“No one else you reach out to who is close to Elon is going to return your calls,” says Tyson Tuttle, former chief executive of Austin semiconductor manufacturer Silicon Valley Labs.
‘Make big moves’
Mr. Kurganov first became friendly with Mr. Musk socially.
Born in Russia but raised in Germany from age 4 by parents who were engineers by trade, Mr. Kurganov grew up in a working class, immigrant household, according to an interview he gave to the Paul Phua Poker podcast.
In his 20s, he gained a level of fame as a professional poker player. Beginning around a decade ago, he began playing high-stakes tournaments in Las Vegas and racking up wins, fellow poker players say. He earned particular renown in 2012 when he won a €1,080,000 purse in Monte Carlo.
He was known as an aggressive player, and had the respect of his fellow pros, the players say. “Igor had a willingness to play a lot of hands and make big moves,” says one of them, Dan Smith.
Though he was spending much of his time in Las Vegas, his personality didn’t match the city’s loud stereotypes. One person who knows him says he was often drawn into long, philosophical conversations on topics such as the rise of artificial intelligence in poker. Mr. Kurganov was concerned that a computer program could be built that could beat even the most talented human player.
Ging Masinda, a Las Vegas marketer and acquaintance of Mr. Kurganov, says the flashiest thing about him is that he sometimes wears eyeliner. “There’s a kid in him,” she says.
In a 2015 interview on the Poker Life Podcast, he said he was developing an accounting app for poker players. He also co-founded the organization Raising for Effective Giving, designed to help poker players, as well as fantasy-sports players and finance professionals, find the right charities to which to donate their winnings, according to archived webpages.
REG was focused on effective altruism, an approach to giving that suggests that inherently subjective qualities such as relative charitable need can be quantified. It’s still a niche approach, because many charitable experts say it can encourage an impersonal, utilitarian approach to complicated moral issues.
Mr. Kurganov and Liv Boeree at an event in San Francisco in 2016.
Photo:
Kelly Sullivan/Getty Images for The Ocean Gala
Mr. Kurganov’s social life, the fellow poker players say, revolved around his longtime partner, fellow professional poker player Liv Boeree. Ms. Boeree has long been friends with the recording artist Grimes, who was first romantically linked to Mr. Musk in 2018. Around the same time, Mr. Musk made Ms. Boeree one of the handful of people he follows on Twitter.
“She was elated” about the follow, according to Joe Stapleton, a poker commentator who spoke to her about it.
The two couples began spending time together. Messrs. Musk and Kurganov bonded over a shared love of Burning Man, the free-spirited desert festival that both regularly attend. Ms. Boeree, meanwhile, stayed close with Grimes; the two women posted photos together on social media. Ms. Boeree didn’t respond to requests for comment, and Grimes, whose legal name is Claire Boucher, couldn’t be reached.
The introduction to Mr. Musk came as Mr. Kurganov was soon to retire from professional poker with millions in personal winnings. Yet his poker accounting app had never gotten off the ground, and REG remained small-fry in terms of the amount of money it directed.
REG said on its website that it directed $3.1 million in charitable giving in 2019, the most recent year mentioned, which the organization said “reflects all donations that have been significantly influenced by us.” The amount couldn’t be independently verified. REG didn’t respond to requests for comment.
When the pandemic hit, Messrs. Kurganov and Musk became closer. Mr. Kurganov laid out a vision in which he might be able to help Mr. Musk combine his interest in science and his vast fortune, for the greater good.
Mr. Musk, known to be open to new ideas, was intrigued by the prospect of an approach to giving that no other major donor had yet tried, according to people familiar with the matter. He gave Mr. Kurganov a job vetting grant requests from his foundation.
When Mr. Musk moved to Texas, Mr. Kurganov and Ms. Boeree soon followed.
A launch facility under construction in Brownsville, Texas, in February for SpaceX, one of Mr. Musk’s companies.
Photo:
Mark Felix/Bloomberg News
‘Donation decisions’
By last August, two years after retiring from poker, Mr. Kurganov had an official email address at the Musk Foundation and was heavily involved in the charity. That month, he corresponded with Chris Carberry, CEO of the nonprofit Explore Mars Inc. The group was looking to raise $600,000 to spirit an Afghan girls robotics team out of the war-torn country.
Mr. Kurganov was skeptical about the cost. “Regarding the price breakdown, what I’m trying to find out is what the expenses will be specifically—I imagine there are additional costs to simply the flight costs, but am still surprised that the total cost scales linearly with the number of people,” he wrote in an email reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Mr. Carberry, who didn’t respond to requests for comment, was disappointed but not dissuaded. In another email, also reviewed by the Journal, he wrote to an associate “We have worked effectively with Igor in the recent past. Igor makes the day-to-day donation decisions.”
To Mr. Birchall, that was an untenable situation. He was legally head of the foundation, and as he saw it, Mr. Kurganov was a newcomer who suddenly had immense influence on what to do with Mr. Musk’s money, he told people.
Mr. Birchall also learned that a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent had begun making preliminary inquiries into Mr. Kurganov as part of his job to watch for foreign interference in U.S. companies, people familiar with the matter say. The FBI agent was concerned that a newcomer had so quickly been welcomed into Mr. Musk’s inner circle, the people say.
Mr. Kurganov hasn’t been accused of wrongdoing. An FBI spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Birchall, alarmed that Mr. Musk could be drawn into a federal investigation, this spring again pressed his internal case against Mr. Kurganov, people familiar with the matter say. It was inappropriate, in Mr. Birchall’s view, for Mr. Kurganov to have a central role in the $5.7 billion in shares that Mr. Musk had promised to donate.
During this period, Mr. Birchall was a constant presence at Mr. Musk’s side as his boss pursued Twitter. He helped line up billions of dollars in financing and spoke to shareholders and investors on Mr. Musk’s behalf about the future of the social-networking service.
By spring, the Tesla CEO’s bid for Twitter required him to put up tens of billions of dollars in personal funding and was consuming much of his attention. Meanwhile, Tesla’s stock was dropping as the broader market pulled back, pinching Mr. Musk’s net worth.
Mr. Birchall in May asked Mr. Musk to remove Mr. Kurganov from his post at the foundation.
Mr. Musk agreed to let Mr. Kurganov go, the representative of the foundation says.
None of Mr. Musk’s money was ultimately spent on projects related to effective altruism, the representative says, and Mr. Kurganov’s Musk Foundation email was switched off roughly six weeks ago.
—Elisa Cho and Rebecca Elliott contributed to this article.
One of the strikes hit a fuel storage facility, causing it to catch fire, and a later strike caused “significant damage” to the city’s infrastructure facilities, according to the city’s mayor, Andriy Sadovyi.
Three powerful blasts were heard in the center of the city earlier, and plumes of thick black smoke could be seen rising in the distance. Air raid sirens rang out prior to the explosions.Maksym Kozytsky, the head of the Lviv regional military administration, later on his Telegram account reported three more explosions following the strike on the fuel depot, saying, “The air alarm remains.”
Lviv is a strategic Ukrainian city close to the Polish border that has largely been spared from the relentless bombardment seen across much of the country during the Russian invasion. It was a surprising attack, coming just a day after the Russian military said that the first phase of the conflict had ended and that it was shifting its attention to the disputed eastern parts of Ukraine.
The attack came as US President Joe Biden was in Poland Saturday, where he met with his Polish counterpart, Andrzej Duda, as well as Ukrainian officials and refugees. Biden later delivered a speech outside the Royal Castle in the Polish capital of Warsaw, in which he declared forcefully that Russian President Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power.”
The White House afterward said Biden wasn’t calling for regime change: “The President’s point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region,” a White House official said.
Earlier in the speech, Biden told the Ukrainian people: “We stand with you. Period.” Biden was briefed on the strike on Lviv before leaving his hotel for his speech, according to a White House official.
“Now in the perennial struggle for democracy and freedom, Ukraine and its people are on the front lines, fighting to save their nation, and their brave resistance is part of a larger fight for … essential democratic principles that unite all free people,” Biden said.
Sadovyi said on Twitter Saturday that Russian troops had attacked the city but did not provide extensive detail. He urged residents to stay in shelters.
An industrial facility in Lviv used for fuel storage was burned as a result of one of the Russian strikes, according to Sadovyi.
“As a result of the shelling, one of the industrial facilities burns. It is fuel storage,” the mayor said. He did not clarify if this was the cause of the smoke.
The mayor added that “habitable infrastructure was not injured.”
Sadovyi later confirmed that another strike had hit Lviv, causing “significant damage” to the city’s infrastructure. Residential buildings were not damaged, he added.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian authorities said Saturday that bus convoys trying to evacuate civilians were being stopped and held by Russian forces, as part of what they claimed to be a pressure campaign to force some residents to go to Russia.
In a statement, Oleksandr Starukh, the head of the Zaporizhzhia regional administration, said an evacuation convoy of more than 50 buses driving from the besieged Ukrainian port city of Mariupol to Zaporizhzhia was held overnight at a Russian checkpoint in Vasylivka, about 35 miles south of Zaporizhzhia. Starukh said the convoy included two ambulances carrying three children requiring urgent medical care.
Saturday’s strikes were not the first strikes on Lviv. Several Russian missiles hit an aircraft repair plant there on March 18. Work at the facility had stopped before the strikes, and there were no reports of casualties.
Saturday’s attacks come after a top Russian general claimed Friday that the “first stage” of Russia’s military plan was complete, with their primary focus now centered on eastern Ukraine.
It was unclear if the statement implied a shifting of the goalposts for the Russian military or just represents a change in public messaging.
“In general, the main tasks of the first stage of the operation have been completed,” said Col. General Sergei Rudskoy, first deputy chief of Russia’s General Staff, in a briefing. “The combat potential of the armed forces of Ukraine has been significantly reduced, allowing us, I emphasize again, to focus the main efforts on achieving the main goal – the liberation of Donbas.”
After days of Western leaders displaying their united front against Russia, Saturday’s strikes could be seen as a response from Putin and his military to Biden and the West.
The Russian military has claimed it is not targeting civilians or residential areas, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
CNN’s Chandler Thornton, Kaitlan Collins, Kevin Liptak and Maegan Vazquez contributed to this report.
Ukrainian lawmaker and tech executive Kira Rudik repeated her intent to bear arms against Russian troops entering Kyiv during a television interview early Saturday local time, stressing that the country’s leaders should show citizens how to act in support of Ukrainian troops.
“If you would have asked me like three days ago about me bearing arms, I would tell you like definite no, and we would have argument,” she said in an appearance on MSNBC. “And now I have Kalashnikov.”
Her remarks came after she posted a short statement on Friday, showing an image of her holding an automatic rifle.
“I learn to use #Kalashnikov and prepare to bear arms. It sounds surreal as just a few days ago it would never come to mind,” she wrote on Twitter. “Our #women will protect our soil the same way as our #men. Go #Ukraine!” She had earlier said in a CNN interview that nearby explosions were rattling her windows in Kyiv.
Ukraine has been urging its civilians to resist Russian forces in various ways such as manufacturing molotov cocktails, which are generally glass bottles filled with flammable material that function like hand grenades. Around 18,000 weapons have been distributed in the Kyiv region, according to the Ukrainian government.
A year ago, GameStop commanded the attention of everyone. The struggling video game retailer’s shares soared to stratospheric heights, creating paper millionaires out of Redditors, costing hedge funds billions of dollars and prompting many people to wonder if a revolution was coming to the financial world.
That revolution never came. A year later, investment firms still control the ebb and flow of Wall Street, but they’re also more aware of how costly it can be when enough people bet against them.
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The GameStop phenomenon, after all, succeeded in part because of a desire to stick it to the establishment, tapping into the collective anger – and savvy – of thousands of individual investors empowered by low-cost trading app Robinhood and organized on a subreddit called r/WallStreetBets. By driving up shares of GameStop, which hedge funds had bet would only fall, they enriched themselves while dealing a serious blow to Wall Street and raising questions.
This phenomenon is known as a short squeeze. And it worked spectacularly well.
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What does GameStop’s skyrocketing stock have to do with…
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GameStop’s stock price enjoyed gains through most of January 2021, but they exploded late in the month and peaked on Jan. 28, reaching a record high of $483. Shares of GameStop started the year at $19.
The rollercoaster ride, which saw Robinhood controversially shut down trading as GameStop’s stock price whipped back and forth, felt like it would permanently shake up the status quo.
Spoiler: It didn’t.
Here’s what’s really happened to some of the big players since then.
GameStop
Since January 2021, GameStop’s stock price has seesawed. As of the close bell Friday, the share price was at $98.50, which is still more than what financial analysts say the company is worth.
“The share price remains disconnected from the fundamentals,” said Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter. “They are still a destination for hardware and for physical software, but hardware supply constraints have limited their ability to thrive and the ongoing pandemic makes travel to the store more difficult or less convenient for many.”
Pachter added that GameStop sales haven’t grown as much as would be expected in a normal year following the launch of new consoles from Sony and Microsoft (both companies debuted new gaming gadgets in late 2020), and that’s due largely to low available inventory.
In the past year, GameStop has undergone some big changes, including a former Amazon executive taking over as CEO. Matt Furlong took the helm in June. Former CEO George Sherman stepped down with a reported $170 million windfall from his GameStop stocks.
The person who appears to be behind these moves is Ryan Cohen, co-founder of Chewy, a pet products e-tailer. Cohen bought 10% of GameStop in 2020 and became the chairman of the company’s board last year.
Earlier this month, GameStop revealed that it had been working on an NFT marketplace, which has yet to open. Non-fungible tokens are blockchain-created certificates of authenticity for a digital asset or piece of art. They’re also the latest craze in the cryptocurrency realm, with artists, celebrities, companies, athletes and more releasing these digital tokens, and some big money changing hands.
Robinhood
When the GameStop stock frenzy exploded, trading app Robinhood was at the center of the chaos. It was used so much that the company had to stop trading shares of GameStop in order to meet regulatory requirements.
On Jan. 28, when GameStop was hitting its peak, Robinhood advised its users that it would halt the buying of shares of the retailer. It cited the volatility of GameStop stock and of other companies as the reason for this unusual move. The step elicited an immediate backlash from Reddit investors.
Shortly after, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said regulators required Robinhood to have a certain amount of cash on hand to cover all the trades happening for the day. This is a standard requirement. The amount Robinhood was quoted was far more than what the company had available, according to Tenev. So Robinhood made the unprecedented move of halting the buying of GameStop shares when they were at their peak.
Robinhood wasn’t the only company that had to make adjustments on Jan. 28. Banks like TD Ameritrade and other investing apps like WeBull limited certain trades involving GameStop.
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Congress vs. Robinhood and others over GameStop stock
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In the aftermath, Congress held multiple hearings about the ordeal. When asked why his company wasn’t prepared for such volatility, Tenev said the GameStop situation was a “Black Swan event” and had a one in 3.5 million chance of happening. Robinhood came out relatively unscathed following the hearings, but it did have to pay a $70 million fine from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority for misleading info and negligence.
Robinhood says it made changes to how it does business so customers won’t be surprised with trading restrictions again. This includes having $2.8 billion net capital, more than 21 times what the Securities and Exchange Commission requires, and having a larger customer support team.
Robinhood went public on July 26 with shares selling for $38. Though its stock price did rise in the months after, it’s since dropped and was at $12.55 when trading ended Friday.
Posters on WallStreetBets are still upset at Robinhood a year later. They continue to mock the company for its share prices dropping, with some even taking out short sell bets against the stock.
WallStreetBets
On its FAQ page, subreddit r/WallStreetBets describes itself as a “community for making money and being amused while doing it.” Users regularly roast themselves over their big stock market losses and their lack of knowledge. It was where an army of traders, willing to put their money down in hopes of striking it rich, came together to put the short squeeze on GameStop.
By the end of January 2021, the subreddit had just shy of 5 million subscribers – nearly triple the total from a month before – and jumped to more than 9 million in February, according to Subreddit Stats.
WallStreetBets currently has more than 11 million subscribers and is among the most popular subreddits on the site. GameStop is still one of the most talked-about stocks on the subreddit, but posters also discuss highly valued companies like Apple and Tesla, according to TopStonks, an analytics site created in 2020 as a tool for investors, which tracks what stocks WallStreetBets is talking about. Some smaller stocks that members are hoping to see shoot up in price include those of investment service SoFi, e-commerce site Wish, and social media app Nextdoor.
A moderator for WallStreetBets told The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday that there have been attempts to influence stock prices on the subreddit since its rise in popularity. The person said moderators “work pretty hard to keep that at bay.”
WallStreetBets also spawned similar subreddits, such as r/GME, named after the GameStop stock ticker name, and r/SuperStonk, which refers to the word “stonk” that was used in memes referencing the stock market.
Meme stocks
Though GameStop was the star of Wall Street for that short, early stretch, the long-term result of this phenomenon was the birth of a concept known as meme stocks.
Last year, WallStreetBets had its eye on several companies that appeared to be in the same spot as GameStop, with investment firms betting against them.
They consisted of Bed, Bath & Beyond, Nokia, Koss Headphones, Express, Naked Brand, Blackberry and AMC. Stock prices for all these companies jumped in late January along with GameStop’s, but they’ve since returned to where they were at the start of 2021, or they’ve dropped slightly, with the exception being AMC’s.
Unlike some of the other meme stock companies, AMC had its own roller-coaster ride. Its shares started 2021 at just over $2 apiece and rode GameStop’s coattails to bump up to $13 before dropping. At the end of May, the price went up again with the start of the summer blockbuster season and with AMC acknowledging individual traders by giving them free popcorn. AMC shares hit a high of $72 on June 2. They’ve since made their way down to about $15 when the markets closed on Friday.
AMC’s stock price surge in June showed that there’s still power in those everyday stock traders – if they work together. Whether they’ll work together again on another stock as they did with GameStop remains to be seen.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., drilled into President Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda Wednesday night on “Hannity,” saying opposition to the bill “rocked” Washington because Democrats “did not get their way.”
MARSHA BLACKBURN:I think he may be saving some of these moderate Democrats who are desperately looking for a place to land. And what Joe Manchin has done is to say, “Okay, there’s the Joe Manchin wing of the Democrat Party and then there is the Joe Biden, Pelosi, Schumer, AOC, the Squad wing of the party.” But here is what we do know … The “Build Back Broke Blowup,” as I like to call it, is something that has rocked Washington. They did not get their way. The American people have rejected what they’re offering in West Virginia. This is wildly unpopular. So, then, what do the celebrities and the elitists do? They start demeaning and disparaging the people of West Virginia for having an opinion and wanting to protect their freedom and with disagreeing with the leftist socialist wing of the Democrat Party. So I think that all of this together is making a very good environment for the Republican candidates in 2020 too.
I think the problem they have now is the American people realize this is a socialist agenda, and the American people realize the Democrats are trying to take one vote. Take control of your children, their education of your bank account, your small business … force the “Green New Deal” on you. And people are tired of [critical race theory]. They’re tired of federalizing elections. They’re tired of crime in the streets. And what they are looking for is to get their freedom back. And you know what? They’re really tired of inflation and passing the bill back. The bill would make inflation worse.
