Jon Sarlin
@jonsarlin
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@CNN covering tech and money. New Yorker in LA
Los Angeles
Joined November 2009
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NEW: TikTok released an AI video generator. We found it recited “Mein Kampf" and Osama Bin Laden on command with no watermarks. It pulled access after CNN asked them about it.
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NEW: We tracked down the source of the “unified Reich” phrase in the now deleted Trump video. All signs point to it's inclusion being an oversight, not a fascist dog whistle.
It comes from a 30 year-old Turkish graphic designer who in 2023 randomly copy and pasted it as
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SVB isn't the first time Peter Thiel got his billions out before the bottom collapsed w/
@Acosta
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I spent months talking with people on Wallstreetbets. Then this week happened
Millions are discovering WallStreetBets for the first time, but this chaotic, meme-filled Reddit forum has been building momentum throughout the pandemic. Here's how it grew into an unprecedented force, capable of beating Wall Street at its own game.
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Talking to Yang's supporters about what they would do would a $1,000 a month got some interesting responses.
Here's one from Russell Peterson who used to be a Trump supporter until he heard Yang talk about automation
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Enes Şimşek lives outside Istanbul, has never been to America, and told me he doesn’t follow either American or Turkish politics.
He makes money selling motion graphics templates online. The one that ended up in the Trump video sells for $21. He told me he’s sold 16 of them.
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I somehow got CNN to put on
@ThrowingFits
to talk about the new J.Crew
Is J.Crew cool again? These trend-watchers tell “Nightcap’s”
@jonsarlin
they aren't so sure.
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Another Yang supporter, Fred King, told us he recently lost his job as a cameraman once the studio he was working at started using robotic cameras and laid off most of the camera operators. He said that $1,000 a month "wouldn't sustain me, but it wouldn't let me fall down"
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Şimşek was flummoxed to find text he randomly placed into his work a year ago somehow creating a firestorm of controversy in American politics.
“It's really the most unthinkable thing that's ever happened to me”
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In an attempt to correct the record, Şimşek emailed support
@truthsocial
.com
He didn't receive a reply
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He made the template to mimic a vintage newsreel and copy and pasted random phrases that he assumed people would replace. "United Reich" appeared in the Wikipedia entry on WW1.
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Biden blasted the video after it was posted saying "that's Hitler's language."
His campaign isn't backing down.
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New with
@GannonCNN
and
@merica
: I talked with Andrew Yang and some of his supporters about how his Freedom Dividend plan propelled him beyond "longer than long shot" candidate
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SCOOP: On the day his company was hacked for $625 million dollars I tracked down
@Jihoz_Axie
at an Axie Infinity party in LA.
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While the
@AndrewYang
UBI plan has gotten attention, it's worth noting that the history of the UBI in the US includes Richard Nixon, whose UBI plan was bizarrely killed because of a misleading 150+ year study
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The most charitable interpretation of one of these posts is a millionaire celebrity publicly announcing they've joined an exclusive club that costs $200,000+ to enter.
The less charitable is shilling a pyramid scheme to your own fans.
Both not great.
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There are undeniable signs of gambling addiction all over WSB.
Looking at post histories, you can see people losing their life savings, walking away from WSB, and then months later returning talking about new positions.
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This week has made a lot of WSBers rich, but the site didn’t start this week, and many people have gotten wrecked trying to chase the crazy gains that make it to r/all
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Here's the full video of my
@AndrewYang
interview on his Freedom Dividend plan
Andrew Yang went from a "longer than long shot" to standing on stage at the Democratic debates. CNN's
@JonSarlin
talks with Yang about how a tech founder who has never run for anything managed to make it this far. It starts with $1,000 a month.
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Here's Yang's full answer on the skepticism around Silicon Valley's support for a UBI
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My favorite was Min, 22 y/o born in Bangladesh and training to become a pharmacist in NYC.
In July, he flipped just his stimulus check into $280k within 2 weeks. He couldn’t sleep thinking about cars he wanted to buy, and passed out midday.
When he woke up, it was down to 8k
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YOLOing (putting everything into a trade) is a key part of WSB.
If you YOLO and hit a hot streak (see
#GME
), it can make you rich. But if you keep doubling down and never cash out...eventually the house wins
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One thing that struck me talking with WSBers who won and lost was the FOMO.
With each crazy bull run, there’s a sense that there’s life changing money out there and you just missed it. Even if you won, it wasn’t just enough.
Walking away from that is very, very hard.
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Reporting on this story, it is clear that the 2008 financial crisis — no one going to jail for breaking the global economy, the rich getting richer — has been the defining event in shaping young people's cynicism about the financial world
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I was curious how
@ben_mckenzie
aka Ryan from 'the OC' become one of the most prominent crypto critics so he let me come shoot an interview in his home.
While A-list celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Matt Damon are being paid to promote crypto, one actor is publicly bucking the trend. CNN's Jon Sarlin talks with Ben McKenzie about his journey from TV star to crypto critic.
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AJ Vanover makes around 35k a year as a retail worked in Missouri. After getting in on $GME, he (and a friend he convinced to invest) are now millionaires.
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Yang raises $10 million, almost double Sen. Cory Booker’s haul
He’s not going away anytime soon
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I asked
@Jihoz_Axie
to respond to what
@smdiehl
calls "digital serfdom," and he refused to comment saying it "requires a 20 to 30 minute response.”
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Omar is a young guy, who’s the children of immigrant working class parents. He stumbled onto WSB after seeing it on Reddit, and got into a early whole selling options. Then he bet his student loans.
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One thing we didn't mention in the piece was the obvious potential for market manipulation.
WSB says that it bans mentioning small cap stocks, which can be pumped and dumped easily, but they do a very, very bad job of stopping it.
WSB still says that it bans posts on stocks w/ "Less than $1BN Market Cap" but here are posts from the last 24 hours on NAKD, a company with a $300 million dollar cap that almost doubled in value overnight
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I asked
@profgalloway
why Elon Musk (unlike all those other times) is actually going to face the consequences of his actions
Professor Scott Galloway explains to “Nightcap’s”
@jonsarlin
why Elon Musk is not off the hook for his $44B deal with Twitter.
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This year I bought a June 25th 1965 issue of Time Magazine at a thrift store for $2.
There is a finite supply of June 25th 1965 issues of Time Magazine and it will never be printed again.
It was $2.
A foundational misconceptions of crypto is that scarcity is per se valuable. You see this in funny ways with NFTs (rare attribute obsession), dumb ways with Bitcoin (halving) And disastrous ways, with algostables where it’s assumed you can create value merely by shrinking float.
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A bailout of Silicon Valley's bank of choice could be used as a political cudgel against the Biden administration from both the left and the right w/
@Acosta
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I talked with Managers who own lots of Axies and employ thousands of Filipino gamers. They told me their gamers play 6-7 days a week and they've had to fire some for not playing enough.
Now with the hack, all the money is locked up.
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Axie's business model was already controversial. Axie takes in money from people buying Axies and pays out to players who are almost entirely in The Philippines
"Managers" who own Axies can rent them out to "Scholars" in the Phillippines who pay them out 50% of their take.
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My family has spent the last week desperately trying to get my dad the help he needs.
He’s a large guy who is paralyzed from a stroke 8 years ago and requires specialized care. We have no good options.
This is my dad, Bob Sarlin.
He lives in a NY nursing home where 200+ residents across 5 facilities have
#COVID
ー19.
Staff get 1 N-95 mask a week, 1 gown a shift. They can't isolate the sick.
"I feel like I'm spreading the virus," an aide said.
Read:
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NBA Top Shot users have been complaining that they can't get their money out for months.
We looked into why.
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"I'm really actually in my soul...I'm sad, because this is just for the text."
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There is a very simple narrative out there about the People vs The Man.
We don't know who is posting on WallStreetBets, and a lot of people have turned off their well-honed skepticism around anons and the internet
There’s some real absurdity in taking WSB posts about non-financial motives at face value. If your goal is to pump a stock value up and sell high, the value of convincing a bunch of rubes that there’s some kind of moral calling in buying and holding all the way down is obvious.
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The vibes at the party were oddly upbeat. Most people I talked to weren't worried about the hack and thought it was a bump in the road.
@Jihoz_Axie
was not upbeat. He couldn't say when users could swap their Axies again or guarantee that users won't be affected.
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Since Matt Damon is too busy these days filming ads,
@ben_mckenzie
should be the new Bourne
Today I found out that Ryan Atwood is extremely anti-crypto. All hail the real king of The OC.
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I'm hosting a new digital show for CNN! We'll talk about crypto, tech, business and anything else involving people losing hundreds of millions of dollars.
CNN Business'
@jonsarlin
hosts “Nightcap," a new digital show on CNN Business. He'll talk with the best minds about the biggest stories in business and tech.
New episodes land every Thursday at 4pm at .
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One practical tip for families in the same situation of having family members in a nursing home with no outside access.
It your relative has an Alexa, you can enable “drop in” calls where you can call them without having them to answer.
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The CEO of Zoom is an immigrant, blocked from the US 8 times. He became a billionaire selling Zoom to businesses and never expected a pandemic to get your grandparents to use it.
Now he can’t sleep at night
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It is a fun narrative that wallstreetbets is beating hedge fund, but this isn't the first time that this has happened.
Massive and outlier gains attract noobs to invest in leveraged and highly volatile options trades and many lose everything
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It's reductive to think of this as a Wall Street vs Little Guy war.
Hedge funds are on both sides of this, and there will many, many little guys who lose money they can't afford to lose
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I talked with one 20 year old on wallstreetbets who bet his stimulus check on options trades and turned it into $200,000. He lost it all in an afternoon.
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I spent this Father’s Day weekend with LoLisa, Roz and Vallorie Miller. The daughters of Arthur Miller.
Arthur Miller was killed by the NYPD in a chokehold in 1978 on Nostrand Avenue in Crown Heights
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Since the
@kashhill
expose on Clearview, there have been proposed facial recognition laws in NY and now Washington
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Parler was trying to sell itself before Ye showed up and was asking for a "wildly inflated" asking price according to
@kellymakena
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I logged into my dad’s Alexa account on my iPhone and gave each of my family members drop in access.
As of the last few days, that’s been the only way we’ve been able to contact him.
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"The Senate makes enduring laws... it shouldn't be there saying GPT-5 is different than GPT-4. It should be building an agency."
@GaryMarcus
on the growing calls for an AI federal agency and how to avoid its regulatory capture
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“We are not China. The government does not control our App Store. Private companies do.”
@TaylorLorenz
on the full-scale TikTok ban that has passed Montana’s legislature.
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@NYTLiz
@laurashin
@shiringhaffary
"The Merge" slashed Ethereum's energy usage by 99.95%. I asked
@laurashin
why Bitcoin — which currently uses more electricity than all of the Philippines — won't be making the shift anytime soon
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Reddit CEO Steve Huffman defends WallStreetBets in front of Congress
"They are just as quick to support a fellow member after a big loss as they are to celebrate a big gain"
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@WilliamCohan
If Coinbase, Binance or Tether go down, it would be "apocalyptic" for the crypto industry says
@SilvermanJacob
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Fascinating
@jaycaspiankang
essay on Andrew Yang and Asian representation that mentions my interview with Russell Peterson, the former Trump supporting "Yangocrat"
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"Chris Smalls has proven that unionization is a possibility with Amazon workers...this could have a massive cascade effect for the company"
@edzitron
on the looming Amazon walkouts
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If you don’t know about options, they’re more leveraged and volatile than shares. If it goes down, you literally have nothing, not even a lower valued share.
If you had come to WSB yesterday, bought options, you probably just lost 100% your money, not 20%
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The only reason I found out about the party is because
@paulWOMBO
randomly introduced himself outside NFT LA and invited me.
I believed him when he told me he was the founder of WOMBO because he pulled down his pants and had a tattoo of WOMBO on his butt.
SCOOP: On the day his company was hacked for $625 million dollars I tracked down
@Jihoz_Axie
at an Axie Infinity party in LA.
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We don’t know what’s going to happen with our dad, but we have the luxury of at least trying to get him out.
The many residents who don’t have that luxury are now trapped in a place where COVID is running rampant, the staff don’t have PPE, and their relatives can’t reach them.
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It's impossible to imagine an internet without Section 230 at this point because there's no way to design a perfect algorithm that will hide all dangerous content says
@mjs_DC
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The staff and doctors at his home, Mary Manning, have been incredible in the face of horrific circumstances, but they’re fighting the battle with barely any resources.
Staff are wearing trash bags. They get one N-95 per week.
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I talked with
@gaywonk
about YouTube's decision to keep Steven Crowder's videos attacking him up
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NEW: We spoke with Nijeer Parks, who was facing years in jail for a crime he didn't commit.
The only evidence police, prosecutors, and a judge needed to sign off on his arrest was a false facial recognition "match."
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Zuckerberg testimony goes off the rails as Rep. Posey goes on a bizarre anti-vaxx rant
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How many people have borrowed on margin, put money on credit cards, transferred student loans to get in after the gold rush
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WSB is flooded with posts about penny stocks —which the site says is against its rules — that can be easily manipulated in pump and dump schemes. That's literally what Wolf of Wall Street was about
There is now an entire subreddit devoted to the $NAKD, a penny stock being pumped up by redditors
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Many people who had made insane profits today will inevitably lose them if they continue to gamble on weekly options
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"When we roll out a new drug we have Phase 1, Phase 2 trials, Phase 3 trials. We don't even know the equivalent is here."
Interesting analogy from
@GaryMarcus
who signed the "AI Pause" letter.
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Mortgage rates have doubled since last year but
@FairweatherPhD
explains why she thinks they'll taper off.
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I talked with
@chrisriotta
about fully automated weapons and the current state of the global AI arms race
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Expected "completely tech illiterate" questions, but not..."are you 100% confident that vaccines pose no injury to any person on this planet?"
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I talked with
@ben_mckenzie
about his journey going from starring in The OC to…exposing cryptocurrency scams with
@SilvermanJacob
While A-list celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Matt Damon are being paid to promote crypto, one actor is publicly bucking the trend. CNN's Jon Sarlin talks with Ben McKenzie about his journey from TV star to crypto critic.
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The damage these segments have on the credibility of the media at large for the average news consumer who sees this is just incalculable
NEW: Here’s 11 local news stations just straight up running an Amazon scripted segment ahead of their shareholders meeting
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NEW NIGHTCAP
@karaswisher
on an Elon Musk led Twitter
@ben_mckenzie
on Kim K's crypto fine
@mjs_DC
on the Supreme Court taking on Section 230
Full ep:
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In last night's
@brianstelter
newsletter, I talked with Sen. Josh Hawley about Republican criticism of his bill that would force FB/Twitter/YT to submit to an "external audit" from the FTC to prove they're acting in a nonpartisan way.
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Also shoutout to Ben who was unfazed when Moss and I told him we were both "Seth guys"
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Crypto just lost its two biggest banks.
@SilvermanJacob
on why he doesn't think crypto can sustain itself completely isolated from the traditional banking system.
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We don’t know who the posters on WSB making Braveheart memes about holding $GME are, and we definitely do not know what their actual financial positions are.
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Great deep dive from
@bigblackjacobin
that gets into the bizarre details of Axie’s manager/scholar relationship.
Interesting quote from a manager in Venezuela.
You have to wonder how many scholars have invested in becoming managers…and now with the hack can’t cash out.
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LoLisa was 8 years old when her father was killed by the NYPD. She told me she feels a deep connection to Gianna Floyd
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We’ve been trying to somehow get him care at an apartment but need to ensure he’s COVID negative.
We managed to get dad tested but because of the long window to get the results back, the results are fairly meaningless. Every day he’s at his home, he could be exposed.
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His daughters have been living with their father’s death for years, and each time another Black man is killed by the police, it’s gutting
LoLisa: "Every time it happens, I just revert back to that 8 y.o. girl. I see all of the police cars and the lights… I see it all"
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"If the government comes in and starts guaranteeing that it's going to buy Bitcoin of a certain amount every day for years, that will pump the market, that will make some rich people much richer." -
@SilvermanJacob
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New: Pro-crypto politicians want the US gov to get directly into the bitcoin business.
Trump has called for a "stockpile" while RFK Jr. and Sen. Lummis (R-WY) have gone further, proposing the US gov spend billions on a "bitcoin reserve."
I talked with
@SilvermanJacob
and
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Like Theranos, FTX used its connection with powerful people — like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair — to give itself credibility and hide fraud.
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