fortune--2020-10-29--Wisconsin Republican Party says hackers stole $2.3 million

Hackers have stolen $2.3 million from the Wisconsin Republican Party’s account that was being used to help reelect President Donald Trump in the key battleground state, the party’s chairman told The Associated Press on Thursday.
The party noticed the suspicious activity on Oct. 22 and contacted the FBI on Friday, said Republican Party Chairman Andrew Hitt.
Hitt said the FBI is investigating. FBI spokesman Leonard Peace did not immediately return a message seeking comment.
The attack was discovered less than two weeks before Election Day, as both Trump and Democratic rival Joe Biden made their final push to win Wisconsin and its 10 electoral votes. Trump won the state by fewer than 23,000 votes in 2016 and planned his third visit in seven days on Friday. Biden also planned to campaign in Wisconsin on Friday. Polls have consistently shown a tight race in the state, usually with Biden ahead by single digits and within the margin of error.
Hitt said he was not aware of any other state GOP being targeted for a similar hack, but state parties were warned at the Republican National Convention this summer to be on the lookout for cyber attacks.
“We have been in contact with the state party and are assisting them through this process,” said Republican National Committee spokesman Michael Ahrens. “The RNC never left Wisconsin after 2016, and we are confident that our ground game and the millions we are spending on TV and digital will deliver us another win there in 2020.”
There have been more than 800 attempted phishing attacks for financial gain targeting the Wisconsin Democratic Party this campaign cycle, but none has been successful, said party spokeswoman Courtney Beyer.
Hitt said the hackers manipulated invoices from four vendors who were being paid for direct mail for Trump’s reelection efforts as well as for pro-Trump material such as hats to be handed out to supporters. Invoices and other documents were altered so when the party paid them for the services rendered, the money went to the hackers instead of the vendors, Hitt said.
The hack was discovered after someone noticed that an invoice was generated that should not have been, he said.
Hitt said it appears the attack began as a phishing attempt and no data appears to have been stolen, said party spokesman Alec Zimmerman.
The money was stolen from the state party’s federal account, which currently contains about $1.1 million, but that number fluctuates daily because of quick moving resources late in the campaign, Zimmerman said.
Campaign finance reports filed this week in Wisconsin show Democrats have raised far more money than Republicans. The state Democratic Party raised nearly $59 million over the past two years compared with just $23.7 million for Republicans.
Early voting is in full swing in Wisconsin, with more than 1.6 million ballots returned as of Thursday morning. That is nearly 55% of the total vote cast in 2016.
___


fortune--2020-10-29--Neither Trump nor Biden can save Big Oil from its biggest problem: Too much oil

When Congress is likely to make a deal to send more stimulus checks

From Pennsylvania fracking country to the deserts of Saudi Arabia, 2020 has been a brutal year for the world’s oil and gas producers.
Next week’s presidential elections won’t change that fact.
At first glance, that doesn’t seem to make sense. After all, the two candidates represent starkly different visions of the future when it comes to oil and gas, and climate change. President Trump has put fracking at the centerpiece of his reelection campaign and wants to expand drilling on federal land. Joe Biden vows the U.S. will rejoin the Paris Agreement if he wins. He also says he’ll lift sanctions on Iran and invest heavily in renewables.
In the short term, none of that will save the oil majors. Oil on Thursday hit a four-month low with Brent at $37.55/barrel, and WTI at $35.93/barrel.
“The U.S. election is across the corner, but, even though the outcome will indeed affect markets, on the short term no significant changes are expected,” wrote Bjørnar Tonhaugen, head of oil markets at Rystad Energy, this morning from Oslo. The effect on prices is “muted,” he said. The market is focused on other factors: whether Europe, for example, is headed back into lockdown—France is the latest—while U.S. stockpiles, which are at their highest level since July, aren’t helping support the price, either. Other analysts have also flagged a cease-fire in Libya, a conflict-ridden producer, which has put its production back on track.
All of these global forces point to a big headache for Big Oil: There’s simply too much oil on the market. Whoever wins the election next week won’t change that.
A COVID-19 energy economy
Oil’s biggest nemesis right now isn’t the political winds. It’s the pandemic.
In April, spiking COVID-19 infections and lockdowns plunged the world’s economies into historic recessions, crushing oil demand. The International Energy Agency dubbed the month “black April.” Meanwhile, a shortage of storage space for oil that people no longer wanted produced a financial panic that resulted in oil briefly dropping to around negative $40/barrel—a bizarre event that upturned most of the orthodoxy about how oil markets work.
The price drop produced high-profile bankruptcies and consolidations, particularly in the highly indebted U.S. shale sector, which was pushing the U.S. to record production highs before the pandemic. Going into the winter, global oil demand for 2020 is still expected to be 8.4 million barrels per day lower than last year. The scale of the global pandemic, and how it has reshaped our relationship with energy use, is beyond the scope of even the U.S. election.
But it’s not as if U.S. politics is powerless to make things worse. Traders have been flagging the future of Iranian sanctions as one of those events that could turn the energy markets upside down. The imposition of those sanctions removed an estimated 2.7 million a day from global markets. Some expect that Biden would remove those sanctions—but that would only return more oil back to global markets.
Oil markets are, at the end of the day, an extremely inaccurate, even outright misleading, tool for looking at the future of the oil and gas sector, or our global use of fossil fuels as a whole. A Trump-style, full-throated backing of the U.S. oil sector, for example, if successful, would in theory push up production—pushing prices down. That’s cheaper for the American consumer, but not better for the oil and gas sector.
On the other hand, a Biden-style push for clean and renewable energy and limits on drilling on U.S. land (the presidential candidate has been mixed on his support or lack thereof for fracking) could in theory limit the amount of oil production while renewables are still struggling to make up the gap—pushing oil prices up.
Both are also false comparisons. Trump’s support for oil and gas has not bailed out a struggling sector, nor did it breathe new life into shale—a boom that began under the Bush administration and continued under Obama with production taking flight from 2010 onwards. Even under the most ambitious political pledges, oil and gas production will not cease under a Biden administration—America is simply still too dependent. Meanwhile, renewable companies, including homegrown ones like NextEra, have gained momentum under the Trump administration, as has the stateside expansion of European giants like Iberdrola, which is turning its vast utility networks across the country low-carbon, and phasing out coal.
That’s not to downplay the impact governments, and leaders, can have on our energy systems depending on their vision for the future. Even as renewables like solar and onshore wind have become more affordable compared with conventional fuels, other potential breakthrough energy sources—like green hydrogen—remain expensive and out of reach without active government support. Vast infrastructure projects, of the kind pledged by the European Union’s green recovery plan, are of a scale that require clear government backing. The Paris Agreement, for example, requires extensive coordination among governments, which are increasingly pledging to hit net zero by 2050 (Japan and South Korea are the latest).
For the future of U.S. energy—and for the entire world—it’s difficult to overstate how much could be at stake in next week’s election. Just don’t expect to see that reflected in the price of oil.


fortune--2020-10-29--Can Democrats turn Texas blue? Early voting surge fuels hopes as local GOP is ‘almost in crisis mode

Can Democrats turn Texas blue? Early voting surge fuels hopes as local GOP is ‘almost in crisis mode’

Explore Fortune‘s full coverage of the 2020 election.
A dramatic surge in early voting across Texas cities is infusing fresh hope in Democrats’ dream of shaking Republicans’ once-solid grip on the state.
From Austin to Houston, and in their sprawling suburbs, voter turnout is shattering records in Texas, which hasn’t gone for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1976. Polls show the party’s nominee, Joe Biden, within striking distance of President Donald Trump, and the Cook Political Report on Wednesday moved Texas to a “toss up” from “leans Republican.” Biden’s running mate, Kamala Harris, will visit Houston, Fort Worth and McAllen this week.
Almost 8.5 million Texans had cast ballots by Wednesday, representing about 95% of the entire vote in 2016. Rapidly growing and increasingly diverse suburbs are the sites of some of the biggest upticks in early voting, and Democrats point to a surge in female voters as cause for optimism. Unmarried women make up a third of the Texans voting in this election who didn’t cast a ballot in 2016, the party’s state headquarters said earlier this week.
“We as Democrats are voting like our lives depend on it,” said Cynthia Ginyard, chair of the Democratic Party in Fort Bend, a fast-growing county that encompasses Houston suburbs such as Sugar Land and Katy and has come to embody the demographic shifts that Democrats are seeking to capture.
By Wednesday, 61% of all registered voters in Fort Bend had cast their ballots, either in person or by mail, making it one of nine counties that had surpassed their total vote counts for the entire 2016 election. The county went for Hillary Clinton by a margin of 6.6 percentage points in 2016.
Travis County, which includes Austin and its rapidly expanding suburbs, has also seen early voting exceed the total of all 2016 ballots. Dallas County, another solidly blue one, is on track to reach the same milestone. In Harris County — the state’s largest and home to Houston — almost 1.3 million people have voted early.
For more than a quarter-century, Texas was firmly conservative, producing gun-toting, church-going politicians like President George W. Bush and Rick Perry, a former governor and U.S. energy secretary. Dallas, Austin, Houston and San Antonio were liberal blips on an expansive red radar. But a population boom driven by immigrants and newcomers has put the state’s politics up for grabs.
Corporations like Apple Inc. and Toyota Motor Corp. have expanded, bringing employees who also pack their politics. As the cost of living rises within city limits, young people are putting down roots in places like Katy and Round Rock, in Williamson County.
And since 2011, Texas has been one of five majority-minority states. Its suburbs, like many other parts of the country, are no longer predominantly white enclaves. In Harris County, 8,800 early voters have the Vietnamese last name Nguyen, according to a Houston Chronicle reporter’s tweet.
Most common surnames of in-person Harris County (#Houston) voters so far (994k total)
– Nguyen 8.8k
– Smith 8.0k
– Williams 7.6k
– Johnson 7.4k
– Jones 6.0k
– Garcia 5.7k
– Rodriguez 5.7k
– Martinez 5.1k
– Brown 5.0k
– Davis 4.8k
🗳☑🇺🇸
(We can tell you how many with your name!) — Zach Despart🖊 (@zachdespart) October 28, 2020
National Democrats contend that turnout like that puts the state within reach. Michael Bloomberg, founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP, has said he’s spending $15 million to support Biden in Texas and Ohio. In Texas, his Independence USA PAC will air TV ads in both English and Spanish that will focus on the coronavirus.
Even if Biden falls short, cinching competitive races for the state House of Representatives could give Democrats a strong hand in redistricting after the census.
Caution signs
For all the gawking at early vote counts and narrowing polls, experts caution that it’s difficult to draw conclusions.
“You have to be impressed by the volume,” said Jim Henson, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin who heads the Texas Politics Project. “But at the same time, I think until we see what the actual Election Day numbers look like, it’s not clear whether or how much this is going to carry through.”
The surge is likely influenced by a lack of options. Unlike in other battleground states, Texas voters are unable to cite fear of Covid-19 as a reason for mail-in voting. That means virus-wary residents may be going to the polls early to avoid long lines on Election Day.
Red counties have also seen a spike in early voting, with Denton, in North Texas, reaching 60% turnout as of Wednesday. In suburban Dallas, closely watched Collin County, which has emerged as a battleground even though Trump won it by double digits in 2016, saw turnout of 62%.
After converging to show Trump and Biden as even over the weekend, an updated average of 2020 polls by FiveThirtyEight widened slightly this week, with Trump holding a 1-point lead as of Thursday. And the state’s senior U.S. senator, Republican John Cornyn, is running well ahead of his Democratic challenger, former U.S. Air Force helicopter pilot MJ Hegar.
Still, Texas is historically lightly polled, and residents don’t align themselves with a party when they register to vote, making it difficult to see who’s showing up to cast their ballot early.
Statewide, voters who most recently participated in a Republican primary have about a 350,000-vote advantage over those who did so in a Democratic primary, according to Derek Ryan, a Republican voter-data expert in Austin. But about 3.5 million early voters didn’t participate in either party’s primary. “That leaves a huge chunk of the early voters that I just don’t know about,” he said.
Hispanics Crucial
Key to a Biden upset in Texas is the Hispanic vote, with Latinos making up 30% of all eligible voters. Nationally, Latino participation in early voting is more than double what it was in 2016. Like the rest of the country, the vast majority of Hispanic votes in Texas is expected to go to Biden, and Harris’s visit to McAllen will take her to the heart of the four-county Rio Grand Valley border region. But polling has been all over the place, leaving room for a stronger-than-expected showing of conservative Latino voters.
“In Texas, the Latino vote has tended to lean Democratic, but that’s exactly it: It leans Democratic,” said Renée Cross, senior director at the Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston. “I don’t think there’s any doubt that the majority of Hispanics will vote for Biden, but the question is how many of the ones who vote Republican will vote for Trump.”
Uncertainty aside, the early voting and closer-than-usual polls are a wake-up call for Republicans who thought they had time before the party’s grip on the state was in real jeopardy, said Brendan Steinhauser, a GOP strategist who’s worked on campaigns for Republicans including Cornyn and Representative Dan Crenshaw.
“We’re almost in crisis mode,” he said. “The party’s base is very white, it’s very old, it’s rural in a state that’s getting younger, more diverse and more urban. Everything is working against Republicans right now.”


fortune--2020-10-29--The U.S. economy just grew at its fastest quarterly pace ever—but doubts loom about the rest of the

The U.S. economy just grew at its fastest quarterly pace ever—but doubts loom about the rest of the year

The economy just experienced its fastest three months of growth in U.S. history.
In the third quarter, from July to September, GDP climbed 33.1% on an annualized basis, according to data released Thursday by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.
This historic climb follows the U.S. record 31.4% annualized GDP decline in the second quarter and the 5% annualized decline in the first quarter. During that period economists around the world were in a panic and questioning if the United States—as well as the rest of the world—was on the cusp of an economic depression. But once states began to ease lockdown restrictions in the summer, the U.S. economy sprung from deep contraction to high growth.
It’s the last major piece of economic data before Election Day, and President Trump was quick to celebrate the numbers.
GDP number just announced. Biggest and Best in the History of our Country, and not even close. Next year will be FANTASTIC!!! However, Sleepy Joe Biden and his proposed record setting tax increase, would kill it all. So glad this great GDP number came out before November 3rd. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 29, 2020
But we’re still in the hole. Over the course of the first two quarters, annualized U.S. GDP fell from $21.8 trillion to $19.5 trillion. In the third quarter that swung back up to about $21.2 trillion.
And the easy economic gains are over. When states reopened this summer, jobs at places of business without mass crowds, like dental offices and barber shops, came back quickly. In all, 11.4 million jobs have returned since May. But with the pandemic still raging across the nation, businesses like hotels and event venues are far from pre-pandemic employment levels. Indeed, the economy is still down 10.7 million jobs, including 3.8 million in leisure and hospitality.
“The fourth-quarter numbers may tell a less robust story, exposing the tenuous nature of this recovery. The lagged effects of fiscal support provided through the CARES Act are fading at a time when COVID cases are surging,” wrote Madhavi Bokil, vice president of Moody’s Investors Service, following the GDP release.
But while GDP is seeing something closer to a V-shaped recovery—bouncing back nearly as fast as it fell—that isn’t the case for U.S. employment. The U.S. added 661,000 jobs in September. If that pace were to continue, it would take over 16 months—into 2022—to recover all the jobs lost during the COVID-19 recession. The issue? That pace of hiring is expected to slow further, meaning a full employment recovery could take until 2023 or longer.
It’s often said that the stock market isn’t the economy. But it’s also true that the economy—or at least the GDP—isn’t us.


fortune--2020-10-29--The second most important executive at Airbnb?

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Airbnb is a marvel of a company in many ways: It has faced a trustworthiness crisis in recent years, with controversies including the proliferation of a scam spanning eight cities and another involving a deadly shooting at an Orinda, Calif. rental. Now, an ever-prevalent coronavirus has upended the travel market. Yet after a fall off early in the pandemic, consumers have returned to the home-sharing business, with CEO Brian Chesky saying U.S. bookings between the end of March and early June exceeded the same period in 2019.
That image, of a company on the mend, is perhaps in no small part thanks to Chris Lehane—a long-time Democratic strategist who worked through many scandals in the Clinton White House and now leads Airbnb’s policy and public communications efforts.
He is arguably the second most important executive after Chesky himself, according to this thoroughly fascinating Information profile on the senior vice president for Global Policy and Communications, and he remains the longest-surviving executive on the team aside from Chesky and his co-founders.
The self-described “Master of Disaster” fought stricter enforcement of zoning laws that could’ve sidelined (and potentially still can) Airbnb’s business and more recently, laid out a four-point coronavirus response gameplan that so far, appears to be working. The Airbnb headlines largely have been dominated by how the company, surprisingly, has made a comeback even amid travel restrictions. Heck, we even wrote about it.
Still, beyond his ability to cast the company in a positive light, his policy wins have been checkered—and that is the ultimate challenge the company will have to face. In November, a Jersey City ballot measure placing new restrictions on the platform was approved after Airbnb spent millions fighting against it. And while stateside, Airbnb is framing the pandemic as a way to reset the business, some cities in Europe are seizing the opportunity to propose restrictions on short-term housing that regulators say has driven up rents for local residents. Meanwhile Airbnb, per the Information, does expect urban travel to return after the pandemic ends.
As the pandemic wears on, Airbnb may have to consider even more outreach as city residents move in droves to local, smaller towns. A friend of mine who works in tech recently moved to the Lake Tahoe area to escape San Francisco. Among the first questions his neighbors asked was if he planned to rent out his home as an Airbnb. The relief, when he said no, was a story all on its own.
A NEW CHALLENGER: There’s a new fintech on the scene. Jiko, a Berkeley, Calif.-based challenger bank, raised $40 million in funding led by Upfront Ventures and investment firm Wafra. Its play? Slow and steady. The company focused on getting the banking charter first—acquiring a 63-year-old bank—ahead of scaling up. Read more.
Lucinda Shen
Twitter: @shenlucinda
Email: lucinda.shen@fortune.com
This article has been updated to reflect that 2019 bookings were in reference to U.S. numbers.
VENTURE DEALS
- Scopely, a Los Angeles-based mobile games company, raised $340 million in Series E funding. Investors included Wellington Management, NewView Capital, TSG Consumer Partners, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, funds managed by BlackRock, D1, Battery Ventures, Eldridge, Declaration Partners, Moore Strategic Ventures, Greycroft, Baillie Gifford, Sands Capital, Revolution Growth, and Highland Capital Partners.
- Benson Hill, a St. Louis, Mo.-based agricultural breeding startup for sustainable foods, raised $150 million in Series D funding. Wheatsheaf Group and GV (formerly Google Ventures) led the round.
- GetYourGuide, a Berlin-based booking platform, raised €114 million ($134 million) in convertible note financing led by Searchlight Capital. Investors also included the SoftBank Vision Fund, KKR, Battery Ventures, Highland Europe, Spark Capital, Lakestar, Heartcore Capital and NGP Capital.
- Outrider, a Golden, Colo.-based autonomous yard operations, raised $65 million in Series B funding. Koch Disruptive Technologies led the round.
- Q32 Bio, a Cambridge, Mass.-based biotechnology company developing biologic therapeutics to restore healthy immune regulation, raised $60 million in Series B funding. OrbiMed Advisors and Acorn Bioventures led the round.
- Pulumi, a Seattle-based cloud engineering business, raised $37.5 million in Series B funding. NEA led the round and was joined by investors including Madrona Venture Group and Tola Capital.
- Tomo Networks, a Stamford, Conn.-based mortgage and transaction company, raised $40 million in seed funding. Ribbit Capital, NFX and Zigg Capital led the round.
- Arable, a San Francisco-based maker of data solutions for agriculture, raised $20 million in Series B funding. Prelude Ventures led the round and was joined by investors including M2O, Nassau Street Ventures, and Tridon.
- Voltus, a San Francisco-based platform for electricity reduction among industrial customers, raised $25 million in a Series B funding. NGP Energy Technology Partners III led the round and was joined by investors including Prelude Ventures and Ajax Strategies.
- Lunchbox, a New York-based online ordering engine for restaurants, raised $20 million in Series A funding. Coatue led the round.
- Fabric, a New York-based life insurance startup, raised $18 million in Series B funding. CNO Financial Group led the round and was joined by investors including Guardian Life, Nippon Life, Samsung Ventures, Securian Ventures, and Bessemer Venture Partners.
- Homethrive, a Chicago-based startup aimed at helping care for older adults, raised $18 million in Series A funding. 7wireVentures and Pitango HealthTech led the round.
- Slingshot Aerospace, an Austin and Los Angeles analytics and computer vision company, raised $8 million in Series A funding. ATX Venture Partners led the round and was joined by investors including Revolution’s Rise of the RestSeed Fund, Techstars Ventures, and Okapi Venture Capital.
- Twingate, a Redwood City, Calif.-based provider of a VPN alternative, raised $17 million in Series A funding. Investors included 8VC and Signalfire.
- Forethought, a San Francisco-based A.I. platform for enterprises, raised $17 million in Series B funding. NEA led the round and was joined by investors including Sound Ventures, Neo, Geodesic Capital, and Operator Collective.
- LabGenius, a London-based protein therapeutics business, raised $15 million in an extension round, led by Atomico.
- Robust.AI, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based cognitive engine for robots, raised $15 million in Series A funding. JAZZ Venture Partners led the round and was joined by investors including Playground Global, Liquid2, Fontinalis, Jaan Tallinn and Mark Leslie.
- Donut, a maker of a Slack app for connecting remote teams, raised $12 million in funding led by Accel, and was joined by investors including Bloomberg Beta, FirstMark, and Slack Fund.
- Wise, a San Mateo-based fintech, raised $12 million in Series A funding. E.ventures led the round and was joined by investors including Grishin Robotics, Base10 Partners and Techstars.
- Capacity, a St. Louis-based maker of a helpdesk powered by A.I., raised $11 million in Series C funding. Rice Park Capital Management led the round.
- Vibenomics, an Indianapolis-based audio advertising company, raised $4.5 million in Series A2 funding. Investors included BIP Capital and Elevate Ventures.
- Tilt Five, a San Francisco-based maker of augmented reality glasses, a game board, and a wand controller, raised $7.5 million in Series A funding. SIP Global Partners led the round and was joined by investors including BITKRAFT Ventures, Galaxy Interactive, Logitech, and Ken Birdwell.
- Priori Legal, a New York-based startup for finding and hiring outside legal counsel, raised $6.3 million in Series A funding. Investors include Hearst Corporation, Great Oaks Venture Capital, Jambhala, Tim Steinert (former general counsel of Alibaba Group), Mindset Ventures, Bridge Venture Fund, and Orrick’s Legal Technology Fund.
- The Naked Market, a San Francisco-based healthy food market, raised $6 million in seed funding. Investors included Holtzbrinck Ventures, BEB Capital, Rick Rieder (BlackRock's Global Chief Investment Officer of Fixed Income), Integrated Capital, Sequoia Capital’s Scout Fund, NFQ Capital, Yves Potvin (founder of Garden Protein), and Liberty Ventures.
- Enso Security, a Tel Aviv-based cybersecurity startup, raised $6 million in seed funding. YL Ventures led the round and was joined by investors including Jump Capital.
- Hip eCommerce, a Raleigh, N.C.-based collectibles specific marketplace, raised $5.3 million in Series A funding. Next Coast Ventures led the round.
- MachEye, a San Jose-based business intelligence platform, raised $4.6 million in seed funding. Canaan Partners led the round and was joined by WestWave Capital.
- Stairwell, a San Francisco-based cybersecurity, raised $4.5 million in seed funding. Accel led the round and was joined by investors including Sequoia Capital, Gradient Ventures, and Allen & Company.
- Keyrock, a Brussels-based digital asset market, raised €4.3 million in funding. Investors included SIX Fintech Ventures, MiddleGame Ventures, Volta Ventures, Seeder Fund and TNN Patrimony.
- Funding U, an Atlanta-based financial technology company for underrepresented college students, raised $4 million. Investors included Deciens Capital, Valor Ventures, MacKenzie Scott, Next Act Fund, and The JumpFund.
- Steadily, an insurer for landlords using IoT devices for preventative maintenance, raised $3.8 million in seed funding in a round led by Matrix Partners.
- Edlyft, a San Francisco-based maker of a tutoring platform for STEM majors, raised $1.4 million in funding from investors including Kleiner Perkins, Y Combinator, Kapor Capital, Village Global VC, January Ventures, and Backstage Capital.
- SUMA Wealth, a Los Angeles-based financial education platform for millennial Latinos, raised over $1 million in pre-seed funding. Samara Hernández, Founding Partner at Chingona Ventures, led the round.
PRIVATE EQUITY
- A group led by Tiger Global Management agreed to invest $350 million in DoubleVerify, a digital media analytics company. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Redwire, a portfolio company of AE Industrial Partners, acquired Roccor, a Longmont, Colo.-based. military and commercial hardware supplier in the small satellite market. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Celero Commerce, backed by LLR Partners, acquired TransNational Payments, a Rosemont, Ill.-based provider of electronic payments technology. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Colorado Boxed Beef, a portfolio company of Altamont Capital Partners, merged with Quirch Foods, a Miami-based distributor and exporter of protein goods. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Definitive Healthcare, backed by 22C Capital, acquired Monocl, a subscription-based provider of medical and scientific data and insights. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- MLM Medical Labs, backed by Great Point Partners, acquired MD Biosciences, a Oakdale, Minn.-based provider of contract research services for developing pharmaceuticals. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Providence Strategic Growth made a majority investment in Signaturit, a Barcelona-based secure cloud provider. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Rock Mountain Capital invested in GeoLinks, a Camarillo, Calif.-based telecoms business.
EXITS
- Nordic Capital is weighing a sale of Itivi Group, a Stockholm-based electronic trading platform, in a deal that could raise $1 billion, per Bloomberg. Read more.
OTHERS
- Marvell Technology Group is nearing a deal to acquire Inphi, a San Jose, Calif.-based chip company, for about $10 billion, per the Wall Street Journal. Read more.
- Northrop Grumman, the U.S.-based defense business, is considering a sale of its technology services business for around $3 billion, per Bloomberg. Read more.
- EQT agreed to buy Chevron Corp.’s Appalachian shale assets for $735 million. Read more.
- Tiffany & Co.’s board agreed to sell to LVMH for about $430 million lower than the duo previously agreed to pre-pandemic. Read more.
IPO
- New Oriental Education & Technology Group, a Chinese tutoring and private school operator, plans to raise as much as HK$11.9 billion ($1.5 billion) in a second listing in Hong Kong.
- Leslie's, a pool and spa care provider, raised $680 million in an IPO of 40 million shares (10 million insider sold) for $17.00 apiece. L Catterton and GIC back the firm.
- Allegro MicroSystems, a fabless chip maker spun out of Sanken, raised $350 million in an offering of 25 million shares priced at $14 apiece.
- AmeriHome, a California-based residential mortgage company, posted its IPO to raise $250 million.
- Mavenir, a Texas-based cloud company, postponed its IPO to raise $275 million.
SPAC
- Mallard Acquisition Corp, a blank check company formed by Mallard Capital, raised $110 million.
- Elite Model World, a model management network, plans to go public via merger with Galileo Acquisition Corp., a SPAC, Bloomberg reports. Read more.
PEOPLE
- Underscore VC named Chris Gardner as an investing partner.
- Hyde Park Venture Partners promoted Jackie DiMonte to principal.
- Lux Capital promoted Brandon Reeves to partner and Alex Nguyen to principal.


fortune--2020-10-29--America Ferrera: Latinas are essential members of society—and deserve equal pay

Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Senators grill tech CEOs, women strike in Poland, and America Ferrera has a call to action on Latina Equal Pay Day. Have a powerful Thursday.
Today’s guest essay comes to us from actor and activist America Ferrera, which you can also read and share here.
– Pay us. Nearly 60 years after the Equal Pay Act became law, Latina workers, on average, are still paid only 55¢ on the dollar compared to white men. That’s regardless of industry, age, location, career length, or education level—55¢ on the dollar. Which means Latinas had to work all of 2019 and right through 2020 until today just to earn what white men in the same field earned in 2019 alone.
This pervasive Latina pay gap tells the story that our work, our families, and our lives are valued less. So let’s be clear: Our value and our worth isn’t determined by our employers. Our value comes from the countless contributions we make in society, from our drive and our commitment, our passions and experiences, and the fact that we are human—no more and no less than anyone else. The failure to recognize and fairly compensate our contributions to society does not diminish our value, but it does diminish the resources and opportunities we have to provide for our families and to thrive.
The irony of this disparity couldn’t be more apparent than it is today. We may be valued less, but Latinas are among the pandemic’s most essential workers. When most Americans were told to stay safe at home, many Latinas didn’t have the luxury of protecting themselves and their families first. They were called to the frontlines to protect other Americans; to do the work of caring for sick Americans in hospitals, working the fields to keep Americans fed, or supporting other families through domestic work. Even though the Latinx community makes up less than 20% of the U.S. population, we make up over 40% of workers in both the meatpacking and farming industries.
The Latinx community is essential at all times, but the COVID-19 pandemic has only amplified the struggle for economic security in the Latinx community. And Latinas are still paid only 55¢ on the dollar.
It’s time for a new story.
Latinas are more than the paltry representation and tired stereotypes we see reflected in American culture. We are powerful and essential from fields to frontline hospitals, classrooms to boardrooms. We are contributing across business, technology, entertainment, government, and beyond. We are more than deserving of fair pay for the great and essential value we add to our country’s economy and wellbeing. It’s high time that others acknowledge that accordingly. Latinas deserve to have our power reflected in the culture and in our paychecks.
—actor and activist America Ferrera
Today’s Broadsheet was curated by Emma Hinchliffe.
ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
- U.S. vs. WTO. The United States has moved to block the appointment of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala as the next head of the World Trade Organization. The former finance minister of Nigeria has broad support among member states. It's not clear what the U.S.'s motivation is in opposing the appointment. Guardian
- Senate hot seat. Tech CEOs faced questioning in the Senate yesterday, including from Sens. Tammy Duckworth, Amy Klobuchar, and Marsha Blackburn. Blackburn at one point criticized Google CEO Sundar Pichai for employing a worker who "said unkind things" about her. Washington Post
- Building trust in Twitter. Speaking of those tech CEOs, Twitter has recently made bold moves to improve its platform's handling of disinformation. Vijaya Gadde, Twitter's head of legal, policy and trust (and also an #Angels cofounder) has been behind many of those decisions. Politico
- Notable elector. Hillary Clinton will be one of New York's 538 electors for the presidential election, she said yesterday. "I'm sure I'll get to vote for [Biden and Harris] in New York," she said. CNN
MOVERS AND SHAKERS: Keystone Strategy COO Gabrielle Toledano joins ServiceNow as chief talent officer, succeeding Pat Wadors. Alicia Syrett joins the board of Digimarc. Thumbtack hired Dionna Smith as global head of diversity, equity, and inclusion. The Association for Digital Asset Markets named Michelle Bond CEO.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
-Legal lawsuit. A new lawsuit against Goldman Sachs claimed that the bank "covered up allegations of sexual misconduct against its most senior litigator," Darrell Cafasso, and fired lawyer Marla Crawford when she raised concerns. Goldman has said the claims are "without merit." Cafasso didn't respond to requests for comment. Financial Times
- Writing things. Ty Haney stepped down as CEO of Outdoor Voices amid troubles at the athletic apparel brand but came back as a board member and creative leader months later. Here, she writes about a few problems she dealt with, including a "poisonous" dynamic with her board of directors and raising too much venture capital funding too quickly. Inc.
- Sizes matter. Speaking of athletic apparel, Lululemon unveiled a wide-ranging corporate citizenship initiative yesterday that includes more sizes. The Vancouver-based brand introduced sizes 0 to 20 in its six most popular women's items, and CEO Calvin McDonald told Fortune's Phil Wahba exclusively that the company is assessing whether to go even higher. Fortune
- Poland's protests. Protests continued to roil Poland over a court ruling that effectively banned abortion in nearly all circumstances. Women across the country participated in a nationwide strike. New York Times
ON MY RADAR
Why Cori Bush still has hope Jezebel
Cecilia Chiang, who brought authentic Chinese food to America, dies at 100 New York Times
Anna Kaiser sold her fitness brand. Now she wants it back New York Times
PARTING WORDS
"There was a lack of understanding that one size doesn't fit all, that not every woman wants a wig with straight hair."
-Dianne Austin, founder of Coils to Locs, which makes wigs in the style of Black hair for cancer patients


fortune--2020-10-29--Facebook’s fight against outside oversight

This is the web version of Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily newsletter on the top tech news. To get it delivered daily to your in-box, sign up here.
A group of academics, civil rights experts, and activist have spent a month pressuring Facebook to do more to fight misinformation, voter suppression, and hate speech ahead of the U.S. election. And with the end of voting now less than a week away, the group, called the Real Facebook Oversight Board, is more vocal than ever.
“One of our main strategic goals is to be a complete pain in the ass to Facebook,” Carole Cadwalladr, the board’s spokeswoman, told me.
The group quickly cobbled itself together last month as an “emergency response to an emergency situation,” Cadwalladr said, referring to how, in the board’s view, Facebook had failed to police its service ahead of the election. Since then, the board has demanded that Facebook try harder by deleting posts that prematurely claim one of the candidates has won and better enforcing its prohibition against hate groups and inciting violence.
The unofficial board has hosted virtual events, including live commentary during Wednesday’s Senate hearing at which Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified to a committee rife with skeptical legislators. This week, the board also hosted a virtual talk with a current Facebook content moderator and two former ones who spoke about the difficulty of ensuring that more than 2 billion Facebook users behave.
Allison Trebacz, who worked as a Facebook moderator in 2017 and 2018, worried during the event about the company’s election game plan. Trebacz hasn’t worked as moderator during a U.S. presidential election and isn’t privy to current internal conversations at Facebook. But she has first-hand knowledge of what it’s like to be on the frontlines. She said policy gaps and unanswered questions often make content moderators’ jobs “outrageously difficult.” “I think it’s going to be chaos,” she said.
Facebook, however, is trying to reassure the public that it’s doing everything it can to protect the election’s integrity. The company regularly releases reports about bad actors it has booted off its service for coordinating to mislead people about their intentions. The company has also tightened some of its rules on political ads and announced plans to crack down on candidates who claim premature victory.
Facebook hasn’t taken kindly to the unofficial board’s public attacks. Instead, its leaders brag about the company’s official and totally separate Facebook Oversight Board, a sort of court of appeals for Facebook users who think their posts have been unfairly deleted for running afoul of the service’s rules. “Those on the fake board already have large mouthpieces to criticize Facebook – the real board will do the actual work,” Andy Stone, a Facebook spokesman, tweeted last month.
The official board, created at a glacial pace over the past two years, announced last week that it would begin hearing appeals immediately. In theory, the board could soon give Facebook recommendations about how to better control harmful content. However, Facebook ultimately gets to decide whether to implement any recommendations.
Critics, including Cadwalladr, a Brit whose full-time job is investigative reporter, argue that Facebook’s crackdowns are usually too little, too late. Often, she said, they come only “after the damage has already been done.”
***
This week, Fortune’s Brainstorm podcast explores the impact of big tech platforms on democracy and the economy. According to our guests, Google and other major platform companies may be hurting democracy and stifling the economy. Michal Lev-Ram and Brian O’Keefe speak with Gabriel Weinberg, the CEO of search engine DuckDuckGo; Maurice Stucke, law professor at the University of Tennessee and co-author of Competition Overdose; and Fortune senior writer, Aaron Pressman.
Listen to the episode here.
Danielle Abril
@DanielleDigest
danielle.abril@fortune.com
NEWSWORTHY
To regulate or not to regulate? The CEOs of Google, Facebook, and Twitter spent three hours answering senators’ questions at a hearing about Section 230, the law that protects Internet companies from being held liable for what their users post. And while many lawmakers zeroed in on their issues with Facebook and Twitter, including misinformation and the suppression of conservative voices, potential changes to the law would also affect a host of relatively smaller companies like Reddit.
The conspiracy continues. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube in recent months have cracked down on QAnon, the far-right conspiracy theory. But the content continues to thrive on services that moderate less, like messaging app Telegram and social media network Parler. Meanwhile, QAnon-related products are making their way to customers via Amazon. And despite Twitter's latest efforts, the social network is still struggling to remove all of the accounts touting QAnon.
Big bucks on the ballot. According to The Wall Street Journal, Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and other gig-economy companies have spent almost $200 million rallying support for Prop 22, a California ballot measure that, if passed, would allow the companies to keep their workers classified as contractors. As one of the most heavily financed California ballot initiatives ever, Prop 22 could have big repercussions on the companies’ business models if it fails. It also could set a precedent for other states that think gig workers should be classified as employees.
More chip mergers. Amid a wave of semiconductor company deals, Marvell Technology Group is buying Inphi for $10 billion in a cash and stock deal to create a bigger player in the market for data center networking and storage chip sets.
Google’s antitrust woes. The Italian antitrust authority has joined a growing list of regulators across the world concerned about whether Google has violated antitrust laws. The authority is investigating whether Google used data collected from its various services to grow its advertising business and gain an unfair advantage over rivals. The investigation follows a lawsuit filed by the U.S. Department of Justice against Google earlier this month and an antitrust fine from the European Commission last year.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Political campaigns and special interest groups have increasingly turned to text messaging to reach potential voters and raise funds. The MIT Tech Review reports that by next week these groups will have sent nearly 3 billion text messages to people across the nation. But the article, which cites research from the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin, gives us a little context to this new form of outreach.
“Though it's easy to assume the texts are annoying and fairly useless, new research … paints a much darker and meaningful picture of the trend. The nature of peer-to-peer (P2P) messages make them ‘poised to bring political messaging to even higher levels of intimacy and efficacy, and, disturbingly, render them factually impossible to audit by outsiders,’ the study claims.”
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Finance has usurped tech among the 100 Fastest-Growing Companies By Brian O'Keefe and Nicolas Rapp
The best smartwatches of 2020 By Aaron Pressman
Uber’s former CTO is mapping out growth and delivery routes in his new gig By Lucinda Shen
Coinbase launches crypto debit card in U.S. with 1% Bitcoin reward By Jeff John Roberts
This startup is using robots and A.I. to design new drugs By Jeremy Kahn
Who is Ryan Smith, new owner of the Utah Jazz? By David Z. Morris
Domino effect: Google antitrust case could spell trouble for other tech giants By Brett Haensel
BEFORE YOU GO
A recent New York Times article explored how the San Francisco Symphony has begun creating performances for a virtual environment. It recently commissioned a piece aimed at giving people the musical experience remotely.
Let’s be clear, it won’t be the same as watching in person. Esa-Pekka Salonen, the symphony's music director, even refrained from using the word “symphony” to describe the recorded performance. But the innovation could help arts groups reach their audiences—and expand them—at a time when everyone’s staying home.
It reminded me of a recent virtual dance festival I attended, complete with live-streamed classes and recorded performances. The festival felt vastly different than the live event. But amid the monotony that is the pandemic life, it was a welcome bit of joy.
So innovate on, artists! We need you more than ever.


fortune--2020-10-30--Why is President Trump trying to kill off diversity training programs?

This data scientist ’ s model shows Biden is still a 3-to-1 favorite to win—but he ’ s fading in @ @ @

Last month, President Trump passed an executive order seeking to prevent government agencies and federal contractors from providing certain types of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training to their employees. In the weeks since the order was issued, several companies, universities, and government agencies suspended diversity-related training, programs, activities, and events.
These actions are a worrying signal that Trump’s order is having its intended effect: to recast DEI training as inherently racist and sexist, breeding confusion and stalling action among organizations that want to build more diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplaces.
Trump’s order is powerful in its deception, mischaracterizing what DEI training teaches in order to tap into white Americans’ worst fears about diversity in general, and diversity training in particular: that its objective is to make white people and men feel guilty for who they are, or worse, deprive them of their rights.
Specifically, the order bans the federal government and federal contractors from teaching an enumerated list of what the order terms “divisive concepts.” Quoting Lincoln and other American heroes to support its propagandist aims, the order bans the teaching of concepts that are clearly abhorrent and would never be part of responsible DEI training—like that one race or sex is inherently superior to another—alongside others that are well researched and accurate, like that the U.S. was built on foundations of racism.
In mid-October, more than 150 businesses and chambers of commerce signed a letter in opposition to the order, saying it “will create confusion and uncertainty, lead to non-meritorious investigations, and hinder the ability of employers to implement critical programs to promote diversity and combat discrimination in the workplace.”
But the confusion is likely the point. Confusion breeds questions that stall action. To avoid violating a vague, misleading, and potentially unconstitutional executive order, federal agencies and government contractors face a difficult decision: abandon DEI commitments they made to employees, shareholders, and customers, or grapple with complex DEI challenges and charged internal conversations without the support of experts during a particularly fraught time.
The order comes at a moment of national crisis. As our country struggles to respond to the coronavirus pandemic, Black and Latinx Americans are being hit hardest, contracting the disease at nearly three times the rate of white people. The pandemic has also exacerbated already existing wealth disparities due to rising unemployment. And we’re seeing troubling trends for women in the workforce: Working mothers are more than three times as likely as fathers to be managing most family housework and caregiving during the pandemic, one in four women are considering downshifting their jobs or giving up careers altogether, and these changes will disproportionately impact Black women. All of this is happening against the backdrop of communities around the country experiencing an ongoing cultural reckoning due to the unjust murders of Black people and the absence of accountability or justice.
When we come to work, we don’t leave these realities at the door. To navigate this unprecedented time, organizations must build the capacity to have important, if uncomfortable, conversations. This is the role DEI training plays: It provides a common language to discuss the root causes of structural and interpersonal inequity, and teaches people how to work together to create more inclusive and equitable outcomes.
The preamble to Trump’s executive order warns that DEI trainings promote divisiveness and distract from the pursuit of excellence. What we see in our daily work and in the data is the opposite: Taking away this type of education doesn’t make conversations about diversity, equity, and inclusion disappear; it makes them more divisive and less productive.
The consequences of this order are particularly grave. A trove of research indicates that creating more diverse, equitable, and inclusive outcomes requires structural change. It requires examining our systems and institutions to consider how they may be leaving some people behind, and redesigning those systems to build a better future for everyone. What does it mean when the very institutions responsible for shaping the future of this country are deprived of the opportunity for learning and understanding?
Conversations about diversity, equity, and inclusion are hard, and they are necessary. Research shows that these conversations can help bridge perceptions, not prompt division. At a time when our President issues racist dog whistles for white supremacist groups to “stand by,” it’s more critical than ever to give people a shared vocabulary for calling out inequality and injustice.
Joelle Emerson is founder and CEO of Paradigm.
Evelyn Carter is managing director at Paradigm.
Y-Vonne Hutchinson is founder and CEO of ReadySet.


fortune--2020-10-30--China’s new five-year plan has an ambitious aim: to become a self-sufficient, global tech superpower

China’s political leaders have endorsed a five-year growth plan focused on reducing the economy’s reliance on foreign investment and technology.
A communiqué released Thursday, following a four-day meeting of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, sketched the broad contours of that plan, the 14th since the establishment of the People’s Republic, and outlined a grand “vision” for the economy as far off as 2035. Party leaders are expected to issue more detailed proposals in weeks to come, but the measures described so far share a common objective: lessening China’s dependence on technology developed by other nations, especially the United States, to achieve economic growth.
“It is the first time ever in the history of our party’s five-year plans…that [China] is placing the plans on science, technology, and innovation before all other sectors,” Wang Zhigang, China’s minister of science and technology, said at a press conference on Friday. “We need to improve our ability to create things independently because we cannot ask for or buy the core technologies from elsewhere.”
The communiqué does not mention the U.S., but China’s drive for technological autonomy comes as the Trump administration has ratcheted up pressure against Chinese tech giants such as Huawei Technologies, the nation’s largest telecommunications equipment manufacturer, and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., China’s largest semiconductor maker. Now, with the U.S. election just days away, China is steeling itself for future conflict with America no matter who becomes the next President.
Chips are on the table
Semiconductors are likely one area where China will want to reduce reliance on foreign tech.
Earlier this year, the Trump administration issued an executive order against Huawei, saying that foreign chip manufacturers would have to apply for a license to continue suppling the company with semiconductors.
The order threatened to become a “death sentence” for Huawei, as the chips form the backbone of Huawei’s tech capabilities in making telecom equipment, smartphones, and smart cities.
Huawei’s vulnerability to U.S. technology restrictions highlighted China’s long-standing inability to build a globally competitive semiconductor manufacturer.
But even with the Chinese government squarely focused on building up China’s technological might, true self-reliance may remain a difficult goal to achieve.
“China [is facing] a real uphill battle” in making advanced semiconductor chips, Paul Triolo, geotechnology practice head at the political risk consultancy Eurasia Group, told Fortune in September. “These are tough technologies to master. It’s not really a function so much of funding as it is of talent and technology know-how. That’s going to take time.”
U.S.-China relations
China’s long-term focus on reducing the country’s reliance on foreign technology suggests China does not expect an end to U.S. attacks against its tech companies under a new administration.
At the Friday press conference, government ministers explained that China’s moves to increase its technological self-reliance and to promote more domestic consumption are related to an international “backlash against globalization.”
“Given new changes in the domestic and international environment…We need technological solutions more than ever, and we need to strengthen innovation more than ever before,” said Wang, the government minister, at the press conference.
Experts and analysts in China and elsewhere share that pessimistic assessment.
“As far as I can tell, the Democrats and Republicans in Congress are very united on holding China to account,” Dan Wang, analyst at Gavekal Research, told Fortune. “At least in Congress, there is a united sense that China is now a strategic adversary.”
Wang argues that, should Trump’s Democratic rival, Joe Biden, prevail next Tuesday, his administration may be more calculated in its approach to dealing with China. Biden’s advisers have said that, unlike Trump, Biden would consult with U.S. allies before taking further actions in regard to China.
On Friday, Chinese government ministers also stressed that amid China’s moves toward self-reliance, China hopes to continue cooperating with the U.S. and other countries.
“China increasingly needs the world, and the world increasingly needs China,” Wang, the government minister, said at Friday’s press conference of why countries across the world should work with China.
But the new five-year plan makes clear China hopes it will need the world less than it does now.


fortune--2020-10-30--What Fortune’s Fastest Growing Companies list says about the economy

This is the web version of CEO Daily. To get it delivered to your inbox, sign up here.
Good morning.
David made a nod to Fortune’s Fastest Growing Companies list yesterday, but I want to return to it today, because I think it illustrates a couple of important points about today’s economy.
First, while a tech company—AppFolio—topped the list this year, tech no longer dominates. There were only 20 from the technology sector on this year’s 100, down from 32 both last year and the year before. There were more from finance (24) and industrials (21) than tech.
But don’t misread that. Tech’s effect on business continues to grow at exponential rates. It’s just that “tech” has moved from being an industry to being a competency… of pretty much any successful business today. Most of the companies on the list rely heavily on technology as a differentiator.
Second, but related, while the San Francisco Bay Area continues to lead the way in blitz-scaling, only 17 of the fastest growing companies this year were based there—and that includes only one of the top ten: Netflix (#5). The companies hailed from 24 different states of the U.S., and six countries outside the U.S. That includes companies like Brooklyn-based Etsy (#8) and Illinois-based Paylocity (#9). Alibaba (#14), based in Hangzhou, China, was the top-ranked company outside the U.S.
This year’s endurance record goes to a company you may never have heard of: Patrick Industries, which was founded in 1959 and is headquartered in Elkhart, Ind. The company makes products and materials for manufactured housing and recreational vehicles and has been on the list for seven straight years. It expanded its sales at an annual average of 25% over the last three years.
The biggest company on the list is Amazon. It’s not easy to grow so fast when you are as big as Amazon. But the company averaged 28% revenue growth for the past three years, and has made the list for four years. It will undoubtedly do so again next year, given yesterday’s earnings report, which showed revenues up 37% and profits tripled.
A word about methodology: You have to be traded on a U.S. stock exchange to make this list, and the ranking is based on three years of revenue and earnings growth in the quarters ended on or before April 30, 2020. So largely pre-pandemic.
More news below.
Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com
TOP NEWS
Futures down
U.S. futures are down after Apple and Amazon's shares fell. Apple's quarterly iPhone sales were down 16% (note: just before the release of new models) and, more worryingly, it wouldn't give guidance for the current quarter. So down went Apple's share price in extended trading, by 4%. Meanwhile Amazon's share price fell 1.87% despite stellar results for its Q3. Asian markets were all red today, and Europe is flat at best. CNBC
Safe flying
U.S. transportation officials and airlines would like to establish safe-travel corridors with countries like the U.K., and to that end they would like to see a system of pre-departure testing and contact tracing that obviates the need for quarantining on arrival in the U.S. But the CDC still wants arriving passengers to go into quarantine for five days to a week, then take another test. The two sides are trying to come to some sort of compromise. Wall Street Journal
Act faster
German Chancellor Angela Merkel thinks Europe's leaders (presumably including herself) need to move to lockdown more quickly in future, when numbers start to go up. Germany, France and some other EU countries are only now moving to lockdown some weeks after an exponential rise became apparent. Merkel reportedly said this was because of political realities, and next time round leaders need to learn from their current mistakes. Bloomberg
German economy
The German economy grew by 8.2% in Q3. That's a record, and better than the 7.3% economists expected—but obviously it follows a record 10% drop the preceding quarter. The growth in Q3 was largely driven by private consumption, strong exports, and rebounding investments in equipment. Reuters
AROUND THE WATER COOLER
Unrest fears
Walmart is so worried about election-related unrest that it pulled all guns and ammo from its U.S. sales floors. Customers can still buy the items on request but, said a spokesman: "We have seen some isolated civil unrest and as we have done on several occasions over the last few years, we have moved our firearms and ammunition off the sales floor as a precaution for the safety of our associates and customers." WSJ
Netflix news
1) Netflix has raised its prices, by a buck for the standard plan and $2 for the premium plan. The change affects only U.S. subscribers, who haven't seen a price rise since the start of 2019. 2) Netflix is testing a new feature that would let users listen to videos without watching them, in order to save on battery or data. That could mean people are tempted to continue using Netflix rather than switching to a rival service that offers podcasts, if their eyes are needed elsewhere.
Trump hopes
President Trump will need to carry both Pennsylvania and Arizona if he has any hope of reelection, experts say. As Fortune's Shawn Tully writes: "Closing the substantial gap with Joe Biden in either the Keystone or Grand Canyon state poses a big challenge in itself. More than any other factor, it’s the heroics needed to score a twofer that’s holding Trump’s odds for victory as low as one in five." Fortune
Hey BER
Berlin's new international airport will open tomorrow, a mere eight years behind schedule. The delays and their causes have become the stuff of legend—Non-functioning fire-prevention systems! Electricity that isn't there, or can't be turned off! Trees planted in the wrong place!—but now the planned hub is ready for business. Only problem is, there's a pandemic—and therefore not many passengers around. Financial Times
This edition of CEO Daily was edited by David Meyer.


fortune--2020-10-30--6 things to know about presidential election polls

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Three days before the 2016 election, the Princeton Election Consortium website declared that Hillary Clinton had a “more than 99% chance” of winning. Princeton neuroscientist Sam Wang, who runs the website, had called 49 states correctly in 2012 and said he’d “eat a bug” if Donald Trump won.
A man of his word, he later ate a cricket on CNN.
Such stories give Trump supporters hope and Biden supporters jitters. The parallels this year are eerie. The Economist’s prediction model, which is recalculated every day, recently gave Biden a more than 99% chance of winning, for example. Could today’s data-rich, computer-powered, Ph.D.-filled prediction industry blow it again?
The only honest answer is maybe. In evaluating this year’s polls and predictions as the campaign nears its end, it pays to remember a few basic facts that can be surprising but aren’t often mentioned in reports of the latest numbers.
The national polls in 2016 were actually quite accurate
Their average error in the campaign’s final 21 days was 3.1%. That’s much better than the average error in all presidential elections since 1972, which is 4.1%. In some years, the polls were much worse. The pollsters’ worst performance by far in that 44-year period—and neither you nor anyone you know will guess it —was in 1980, when the average error was 8.9%. No one remembers it because the error grossly underestimated Ronald Reagan’s margin of victory; the polls showed him ahead by just 0.8%, but he won by a landslide 9.7% margin. Because the polls correctly predicted the winner, the public didn’t care about getting the margin wrong. But pollsters are just the opposite: To them, errors in either direction are bad. So in the public’s mind, an error of 3.1% in 2016 was a debacle while a far worse error in 1980 is forgotten.
But the polls weren’t as accurate—and have never been as accurate—as most people seem to think they are
That average polling error of 4.1% would strike most of us as quite large. After all, the popular-vote margin was less than that in four of the past five elections. The lesson is that polling is hard, and we should regard all election polls warily. Is the sample properly weighted to reflect the people who will actually vote? What’s the best way to reach them: random-dialed phone, email, text? Do they tell the truth about themselves (age, income, voter registration status) and about which candidate they favor?
But wait, you’re saying, who cares about national preference polls? That’s not how we elect Presidents. So don’t forget…
National polls don’t count—and state polls aren’t as accurate
In the electoral college system, you don’t know much if you don’t know which states are leaning which way, and that was a problem in 2016. While the national polls were more accurate than their long-term average, the state polls were less accurate—off by 5.2% vs. a long-term average error of 4.8%.
The largest lesson that pollsters learned from 2016 is that they were overweighting college graduates in state polls, apparently because graduates are more likely to respond to phone polling than nongraduates are. That’s one reason pollsters overestimated Clinton’s prospects. This year many pollsters are making sure they get the balance right—which is good, but they’re fighting the last war. Whether they’re committing new, unimagined errors this year remains to be seen.
Polling isn’t the same as predicting—and the predictions vary more widely than the polls do
Well-known prediction models from FiveThirtyEight, The Economist, and the Princeton Election Consortium use sophisticated mathematical equations to transform polling data and sometimes additional data into predictions. All those organizations have access to the same data, yet they produce widely varying forecasts. In 2016, when the Princeton Election Consortium was giving Clinton a 99% chance to win, FiveThirtyEight pegged it at only 71%. The Economist wasn’t running its own model then; the New York Times (which isn’t running its own model this year) said 85%.
Exactly how those numbers are produced is incomprehensible to the average citizen. The Economist, for example, loads polling and economic data into equations and then simulates the election 20,000 times using different scenarios. FiveThirtyEight runs 40,000 simulations. The predictions reflect the number of simulations in which each candidate wins, though this description vastly oversimplifies the process.
The result is that these prediction engines are black boxes for most of us. For what it’s worth, as of this writing, FiveThirtyEight gives Biden an 89% chance of winning; The Economist, 95%. The Princeton Election Consortium no longer publicizes candidates’ percent chances of winning. Instead it calculates a “meta-margin,” which is the change in national popularity necessary to produce an electoral-vote tie; it shows that Biden’s lead in the national polls would have to plunge by 5.9% for that to happen. Such a hefty margin is a reminder of something else to keep in mind…
2020 is different
The simplest and strongest reason to believe this year’s predictions is that the polling differences between the two candidates nationally and in key states is far greater than it was in 2016. The polls are guaranteed to be wrong—they never get each number exactly right—but this year they’d have to be very, very wrong in order to miss a Trump victory. As Fortune’s Lance Lambert showed, if the errors in this year’s state polling numbers were the same as in 2016, Biden would win easily.
And finally, please remember that…
Predictions are probabilities, not certainties
If a model says Candidate X has a 94% chance of winning, and Candidate Y wins, it doesn’t follow that the model got it wrong. If you flip a coin four times, there’s a 6% chance it will come up heads every time—unlikely, but it happens.
The larger point is that, especially today, we all crave certainty. But it’s the uncertainty—the possibility of an unbelievable outcome, whether you dread it or yearn for it—that makes Super Bowls, World Series, the Oscars, and above all, presidential elections so irresistibly compelling.


fortune--2020-10-30--Tech giants disappoint, rocking global stocks and U.S. futures

This is the web version of the Bull Sheet, Fortune’s no-BS daily newsletter on the markets. Sign up to receive it in your inbox here.
Happy Friday, Bull Sheeters. Big Tech’s big four—Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Alphabet’s Google—reported on Thursday a combined $38 billion in profits, and yet Nasdaq futures are bombing this morning on the murky outlooks they provided.
Meanwhile, COVID cases hit fresh records across much of Europe and the U.S. in the past 24 hours. It’s entirely possible that Americans will see numbers topping 100,000 cases per day shortly after Election Day.
Let’s check in on the action.
Markets update
Asia
The major Asia indexes are solidly in the red in afternoon trading with Japan’s Nikkei down 1.5% .
are solidly in the red in afternoon trading with down . Demand for Ant Group shares is feverish on the eve of its record-breaking IPO, forcing its underwriters to boost the fund-raising effort to a whopping $37 billion .
shares is feverish on the eve of its record-breaking IPO, forcing its underwriters to boost the fund-raising effort to a whopping . China’s latest five-year plan was released yesterday. Out is the practice of GDP targeting; in is an emphasis on “quality growth.”
Europe
The European bourses were sharply lower at the open, adding pain to a brutal week for European equities. Germany’s DAX was off 0.7% an hour into trading.
were sharply lower at the open, adding pain to a brutal week for European equities. was off an hour into trading. The French economy grew by a better than expected 18.2% last quarter, but nobody’s cheering as the country deals with a devastating second wave of COVID that will significantly dent GDP in the weeks and months to come.
grew by a better than expected last quarter, but nobody’s cheering as the country deals with a devastating that will significantly dent GDP in the weeks and months to come. Shares in Total were down 0.7% as the French energy giant issued a big bottom-line beat on Friday, and shrugged off concerns of oil prices hovering around $40.
U.S.
U.S. futures point to a rough open with Nasdaq futures sinking by as much as 230 points as investors weren’t pleased with the outlooks provided by Facebook, Apple and Amazon.
point to a rough open with Nasdaq futures sinking by as much as as investors weren’t pleased with the outlooks provided by Facebook, Apple and Amazon. Shares in Apple are down 5% in pre-market trading as iPhone sales slumped.
in pre-market trading as iPhone sales slumped. Investors cheered Netflix’s first subscription price increase since January 2019, pushing shares up 3.7%. It comes after Netflix disappointed last week on subscriber numbers.
Elsewhere
Gold is up, trading above $1,870/ounce .
is up, trading above . The dollar is down.
is down. Crude is falling again with Brent now trading around $37.50/barrel . Sorry, oil bulls. No matter who wins the White House, it won’t ease Big Oil’s biggest problem: too much oil on the market.
is falling again with now trading around . Sorry, oil bulls. No matter who wins the White House, it won’t ease Big Oil’s biggest problem: too much oil on the market. Bitcoin is up 1.3%, trading above $13,300.
***
By the numbers
-1,135
Let’s start in Germany. The DAX in Frankfurt is down again this morning, and is now off 1,135 points (-9%) over the past five trading sessions. There were high hopes for European stocks going into Q4, but the second wave of coronavirus has squelched that trade. In fact, European stocks are on pace for their worst week since March. A reminder: March was not a good month for stocks.
100
Yesterday, Fortune released its annual fastest-growing companies list, charting the 100 companies who’ve grown their top-line, profits and shareholder return at the strongest pace over the past year. This is indeed an impressive cohort. On average, Fortune‘s Fastest Growing Companies delivered a 19% return to shareholders over the past three years, easily outperforming the S&P 500 index (11%). Four China-based companies made the list; and California is the top state in the union with 20 representatives from the Golden State. Yes, tech companies are well represented, but it’s not the top sector. That honor goes to finance. Yes, finance.
T-minus 4
We’re just four days away from Election Day, so we’re going to take another look at the prediction markets for the White House and Congress. Wall Street has been handicapping the odds for months, and Goldman Sachs, among others, still believes a so-called “blue sweep” is a distinct possibility, even if the odds are slipping. They see the Democrats’ chances of gaining control of the Senate as a much tighter race all of a sudden. Why is this important? “Under a Democratic sweep, we think Democrats would likely pass a ~$2.5tn COVID-19 relief package,” Goldman analysts write, and that could provide a healthy lift to Q1 GDP. For my readers who are political junkies, check out Fortune‘s Shawn Tully’s piece on why these two states—Florida and Pennsylvania—are the ones to watch next week.
***
Have a nice weekend, everyone. I’ll see you here on Monday.
Bernhard Warner
@BernhardWarner
Bernhard.Warner@Fortune.com
As always, you can write to bullsheet@fortune.com or reply to this email with suggestions and feedback.
Today's reads
The Garden State. New Jersey is poised to become "the biggest state on the East Coast to legalize recreational marijuana," Bloomberg reports. After the state legislator failed to pass a law, it's turning the question to the voters. And it's very likely to pass as it could raise some $100 million annually in tax revenues.
Another beat on labor. For the second straight week, U.S. jobless claims, reported yesterday, fell to a seven-month low. After reporting 751,000 unemployment claims in the previous week, that's further evidence the U.S. labor market is sustaining momentum heading into Election Day.
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Market candy
Quiz Time
The S&P 500 roared back on Thursday with tech, cruise ships and hospitality leading the surge. Which stock on the benchmark index gained the most?
A) Twitter
B) CBRE Group
C) Norwegian Cruise Line
D) MGM Resorts International
The answer is B, real estate specialists CBRE Group, which outperformed all shares yesterday, gaining 16.8% after reporting a modest improvement in its loans servicing business. The others mentioned above were all solidly in the green. The worst performer on the day, incidentally, was eBay.


fortune--2020-10-30--A $200 debit card won’t put a dent in seniors’ drug costs

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If they’ve been listening to President Donald Trump, seniors may be expecting a $200 debit card in the mail any day now to help them pay for prescription drugs.
He promised as much this month, saying his administration soon will mail the drug cards to more than 35 million Medicare beneficiaries.
But the cards—if they are ever sent—would be of little help. Policy experts say that what Medicare beneficiaries really need, as well as younger Americans, are sweeping federal changes to close the gap between what their health insurance pays and what drugs cost them.
The nation’s 46.5 million enrollees in Medicare’s Part D prescription drug program—except for those who qualify for low-income subsidies—face unlimited out-of-pocket exposure to drug costs even though the Affordable Care Act finally closed the infamous “doughnut hole.” After Part D enrollees have spent $6,550 and reached the catastrophic threshold in a given year, they still must pay 5% coinsurance on the list price of their drugs.
Congress was considering legislation to lower drug prices and cap out-of-pocket costs until early this year, when the COVID-19 pandemic took center stage. But partisan disagreement, federal budget concerns and opposition from drug manufacturers and other health care industry groups hampered the efforts.
Many observers question the value, timing and legality of Trump’s drug card plan, with the promise coming just ahead of an election in which the president wants to shore up the support of older voters.
“A $200 card is better than a sharp stick in the eye, but it won’t be that meaningful,” said Tom Scully, the Medicare chief under President George W. Bush who in 2004 implemented a two-year, $1,200 drug card program passed by Congress as part of the law creating the Part D prescription drug benefit.
Two hundred dollars won’t go very far. One million Part D plan enrollees have out-of-pocket drug spending way above the program’s catastrophic coverage threshold, with average annual costs exceeding $3,200, according to KFF. Last year, Part D enrollees’ average out-of-pocket cost for 11 orally administered cancer drugs was $10,470, according to a 2019 JAMA study.
“A lot of people don’t have $2,000 or $3,000 to pay out-of-pocket when they go to the pharmacy,” said Stacie Dusetzina, a drug policy expert at Vanderbilt University.
Steven Hadfield, 68, of Charlotte, North Carolina, has a rare blood cancer requiring treatment with Imbruvica, with a list price of $132,000 a year. He also needs two different medications for Type 2 diabetes, including insulin at $300 a bottle, a blood pressure drug and a muscle relaxer to relieve leg cramps.
He continues to work at Walmart and holds three part-time jobs. He pays more than $4,000 a year for his drugs, out of his $12-an-hour wages and monthly $1,100 Social Security check. The only way he can afford Imbruvica is through the manufacturer’s copay cards.
If he left his Walmart health plan and signed up for Medicare Part D drug coverage, he would have to pay thousands of dollars more because, under Medicare rules, he would no longer be able to use copay cards. “My whole Social Security check would go to drugs, and I’d have nothing left for my car or anything,” he said.
Asked about Trump’s $200 drug card, Hadfield said, “I’d be happy to get anything, but they need to do more. Our representatives need to create some kind of program to lower prices.”
The Republican-controlled Senate refused to consider a sweeping drug cost bill passed by House Democrats a year ago that would have capped Part D out-of-pocket costs at $2,000 a year, penalized drugmakers for raising prices above inflation rates and let Medicare negotiate drug prices. Trump threatened to veto it.
In addition, Senate Republican leaders wouldn’t take up a bipartisan bill backed by the White House capping Part D out-of-pocket costs at $3,100 and also imposing penalties for price hikes above inflation.
The lack of action hasn’t stopped Trump from claiming, mostly inaccurately, that he has implemented policies that have reduced drug prices and saved seniors lots of money.
“Day after day I’m fighting to defend seniors from Big Pharma,” Trump said Oct. 16 in a Florida speech promising drug price cuts of 50% to 80%. “We have this terrible system that’s taken years and years to rig.”
The president’s centerpiece proposal is to index the drug prices paid by Medicare to lower prices paid by foreign countries. But his administration has not yet issued a rule to carry that out, and any such rule would face a strong legal challenge from drugmakers.
Joe Biden’s drug cost platform includes allowing Medicare to negotiate prices with drug manufacturers, limiting launch prices for new drugs, capping price increases at the inflation rate and letting consumers buy cheaper medicines from other countries. His plan would also likely spark opposition from drug companies.
Trump’s $200 drug card appears to be in trouble within his own administration. White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said last week that details will be finalized shortly and that the cards will be mailed to seniors in November or December.
But the general counsel of the Department of Health and Human Services warned in an internal memo the plan could violate election law. Congressional Democrats have called for an investigation, saying Trump is “attempting to buy votes.”
In a draft document obtained by Politico, the White House set the cost of the drug card plan at nearly $8 billion. To avoid having to seek congressional approval for the expenditure, Trump’s advisers want to call it a demonstration project, testing whether lowering Medicare patients’ out-of-pocket drug costs boosts their compliance in taking medications.
It’s also unclear whether the Office of Management and Budget will approve the plan because Medicare demonstrations must be designed so they do not increase the federal budget deficit. Yet the money would have to come from the government’s general revenues or Medicare payroll taxes or premiums, likely causing a negative budget impact.
“It will be difficult to learn anything from this demonstration project that we do not already know from other studies,” Dusetzina said.
“It’s a whole lot of money that would be more effectively focused on people with cancer and serious chronic illnesses who are struggling with high out-of-pockets,” said Daniel Klein, CEO of the Patient Access Network Foundation, which provides grants to help patients with drug costs.
Maureen Allen, 80, a retired marketing specialist who lives in Talking Rock, Georgia, said she could apply the $200 card to her annual cost of more than $2,000 for the anti-blood clot drug Eliquis and other medicines.
“It would help me with one month of Eliquis,” she said. “We’ll take the card because we need the money. But don’t think for a moment it will have the slightest impact on my vote.”
This article is part of a series on the impact of high prescription drug costs on consumers made possible through the 2020 West Health and Families USA Media Fellowship.
KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a nonprofit news service covering health issues. It is an editorially independent program of KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation) that is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.


fortune--2020-10-30--Twitter and a Supercell billionaire are backing a new A.I.-focused venture capital fund

Twitter and top executives from Google and video game company Supercell are among those backing a London venture capitalist’s new fund dedicated to investing in early stage startups with artificial intelligence at the heart of their business models.
Air Street Capital, a boutique venture capital company founded and run by Nathan Benaich, said Friday that it had closed a new $17 million fund.
Benaich, Air Street’s founder and sole general partner, is a veteran early-stage investor who has previously worked for venture firm Playfair, in London, and Berlin’s Point Nine Capital. He was a seed investor in Mapillary, a Swedish company that collected street-level imagery to build highly detailed digital maps, which was acquired by Facebook in June for an undisclosed amount.
Benaich has a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in using advanced computational methods, including machine learning, in cancer research. He is well known in U.S. and European technology circles for cofounding two annual conferences that bring together academic machine learning researchers with those applying the technology in commercial settings: the Research and Applied Artificial Intelligence Summit (RAAIS) and London.AI. He also coauthors an annual “State of A.I.” report that many consider an important barometer of the technology’s adoption and impact.
In addition to Twitter, which is investing in Air Street Capital directly from its own balance sheet, investors in the new fund include, among others: Ilkka Paananen, the billionaire founder and chief executive of Finnish video game company Supercell, maker of the popular game Clash of Clans; Jeff Dean, a senior vice president at Google’s research and health divisions; and Shakil Khan, a London investor known for his early backing of Spotify. The European private equity firm Vitruvian Partners is also investing in the new fund.
Air Street invests primarily in what is known in venture capital as the “seed stage,” when startups are first getting up and running. The new fund will make between 20 and 25 investments, each averaging about $700,000, Benaich said. The investments will be split about 50/50 between startups in the biomedical industry and those using A.I. in other industry niches.
Benaich told Fortune that the thesis behind his new fund is that more generalist venture capital firms cannot properly assess very early stage artificial intelligence companies, because the business models and metrics for success are new. “The playbook for what ‘great’ looks like in this category of companies is still being written as we speak,” he said.
He also said that many venture capital firms, which invested in a wide range of different sorts of technology companies, did not fully understand the cutting edge of A.I. technology and what kinds of businesses these new methods enable. “Generalism for technical fields like machine learning is dead,” he said.
He described Air Street’s job as finding A.I. startups—in some cases talking to academic researchers when they are just beginning to think about becoming entrepreneurs—and nurturing these very young startups until they are mature enough to start to resemble a traditional software as a service (SaaS) or enterprise software or biotech company. These companies will then “graduate” on to larger venture capital investors who specialize in those kinds of business models.
Although Benaich is Air Street’s sole general partner, he has recruited several entrepreneurs who have previously built successful A.I.-enabled businesses to serve as “operational partners,” or advisers to the fund’s startups. These include Luc Vincent, an executive vice president at ride-hailing company Lyft who leads its self-driving initiatives, and Phil Keslin, a Google alum who is a cofounder and chief technology officer at Niantic, the company that created Pokémon Go.
Ryan McDermott, the managing partner of San Francisco–based Resolute Partners Group, an asset manager that invests money for several prominent entrepreneurs in the computer gaming industry, told Fortune he had put money into Air Street Capital’s new fund because he concurred with Benaich’s views on the impact A.I. will have on certain industries, particularly in life sciences.
“We are seeing the complete re-creation of how we see therapies coming to market and the speed and the novelty of those drugs,” McDermott said.
But he also praised Benaich’s connections among A.I. company founders and his sharp eye for spotting emerging trends in the field. “He has got this amazing network, and he is going to be the go-to guy for a lot of people,” McDermott said.
Air Street Capital has already made eight investments from the new fund, Benaich said. These include LabGenius, a London company using robotics and machine learning to discover new drugs; Mission Barns, a San Francisco company that, similar to Memphis Meats, is growing meat in cell cultures; and Allcyte, an Austrian startup that is using machine learning to predict how blood cancer patients will respond to certain therapies based on analysis of images of their cells. It also has a stake in Graphcore, a U.K. company creating computer chips that are specifically designed for artificial intelligence.
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fortune--2020-10-30--Twitter clears the N.Y. Post to tweet again after policy change

Twitter will no longer restrict the New York Post’s account on its platform after changing its practice of not retroactively overturning past enforcement actions.
The New York Post was locked out of its Twitter account earlier this month following the publication of a story on Oct. 14 that contained allegations about Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. The company had also initially blocked users from sharing the link to the article but reversed its decision two weeks ago.
“Decisions made under policies that are subsequently changed & published can now be appealed if the account at issue is a driver of that change,” Twitter said on Friday. “We believe this is fair and appropriate.”
Our policies are living documents. We're willing to update and adjust them when we encounter new scenarios or receive important feedback from the public. One such example is the recent change to our Hacked Materials Policy and its impact on accounts like the New York Post. — Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) October 30, 2020
The New York Post took to the social network shortly after the announcement, tweeting a cover image with a headline that read “Free Bird!”