Honestly, we should be relieved if thats all that was stolen. A more sophisticated attack would involve OTM puts on TSLA and a tweet along the lines of: "finding major defects in Ys and 3s. shutting down all lines to reconfigure for a week"
He was an investor of ours, and among the most useful. There was rarely a founder/investor issue he hadn't run into, or knew someone who had. That sort of help is invaluable to founders, especially given his experience and everything he knows about both raising, and building a company. He's really solid.
In case anybody else had no idea who this "naval" is:
Naval Ravikant (@naval) is the CEO and co-founder of AngelList. He’s invested in more than 100 companies, including Uber, Twitter, Yammer, and many others.
Here are a few I just invented to mimic these pseudo philosophers (modern day VC charlatans):
Tomorrow is a mist. Today's the sunshine.
Make the world better by building something anything today.
Build shit. Ship shit. That's all there is to success.
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I almost feel like these Twitter personalities like Balaji, Naval, Chamath are the VC equivalent of Shia Lebouf. They became popular by shouting out loud. I have no idea why they matter at all in the computer science industry.
>>I have no idea why they matter at all in the computer science industry.
What is the computer science "industry"? To the extent that such a thing exists, I suppose you are talking about people who have directly made money by creating software (Chamath), or invested in companies which made money (Naval and Balaji). How can any industry exist if no money is ever made?
And whom do you propose people follow instead? :-)
With Balaji Srinivasan it is even worse. He is open supporter of Modi current prime minister of India(BJP party) and supports caste system. My advice is if you are not from upper caste(brahmins) do not waste your time with him.
I'd wager the list of folks who:
-hold a meaningful enough short position for a potential attack to be worth, say $500k or more (not a rando robinhood trader with a $200 put)
-are not an existing bank or long term day trader
is already quite small, and could be quickly prioritized based on how anomalous the trade was, other flags (foreign national, software engineering babckground). I suspect the SEC could get to a workable list of 50 prime suspects reasonably easily.
There are people on /r/wallstreetbets who are blowing up 100k accounts on TSLA puts on Robinhood. On the front page of /r/wsb right now the 3rd highest post is someone who has lost 30k gambling on TSLA.
Even betting 20k would have probably netted you more than what was gained via BTC and you would still be indistinguishable from RH day traders.
I'd imagine picking a highly volatile stock with a lot of wallstreetbet bros in it, like TSLA, would serve to helpfully obfuscate your trades and their relationship to the hack.
How would it be harder to launder? You bet on a Tesla stock drop. That's perfectly legal. Musk tweets some bad news, and says he was hacked, but that doesn't mean you hacked him.
Market surveillance is much better than most people realize. The accounts making money on a scam like this would be identified, filtered for anomalous activity, and the people at the other end investigated.
I can't find the tweet now, but Tavis Ormandy once talked about companies share prices often rebounding after a breach, so he was buying stock in companies that got hacked. Equifax was an example, I think.
Yeah, buying out-of-the-money options is a dumb way of insider trading in general, but on TSLA specifically you might could get away with it. Just don’t make your first trade right before you post to Elon’s account.
Not that it changes your point, but hacking Musk's account to tweet wrong info about TSLA would be fraud, not insider trading, since they're not actually an insider. Either way, OTM options is a dumb way to profit on fraud or insider trading.
The hacker could have puts on Twitter as well. The Bitcoin scam might be just a cover / distraction so it looks like an unsophisticated hacker while the real money might be made with options contracts.
Yeah.. seeing twitter's drop thats definitely possible and pretty imaginative. but, twitter's drop wasn't that sharp. also, running this after hours means the options markets are closed and putting on a big short position can be super risky since there may not be a huge amount of liquidity to cover your position, then you'd have to sit on it overnight.
This is the route I would have taken, but not with OTM puts. It’s far easier to let the stock tank, then buy up calls knowing that the reason is bullshit, and wait for the price to recover and sell.
You will blend in perfectly because you have an alibi for why you are buying so many TSLA calls.
And when you buy an OTM put, it’s hard to predict what a good price would be exactly. How far do you think the stock would drop? With a call you could be fairly more confident it will return to a previous level.
That said, this kind of attack requires you to have a good amount of capital on hand, so you need to be a fairly independently wealthy hacker.
If this rocks Twitter to its foundation as a trustworthy platform, it's the end of Twitter as far as prominent figures being willing to utilize it. If Twitter loses its prominent figures edge, it's all coming down. Twitter has nothing else, it's mostly a broadcast platform for elite people in terms of where the extreme majority of all of its value is produced.
That said, that outcome is far-fetched. The content that was Tweeted appears to be far too benign to accomplish that outcome. The attackers seem to have intentionally avoided Tweeting anything particularly dangerous. If they were trying to ruin Twitter, they would have used the accounts to do something far worse, that would terrify prominent figures away from using the service.
I think they had one target in mind, to go after their DMs, and hit lots of accounts as a cover to hide which one was the primary target.
I would argue it's kinda the opposite. With some trades, the SEC knows who you are but there's no direct connection from your transaction to the hacking, so you're free to do whatever with the money and if your trade is this small it'll probably blend right in.
With Bitcoin, sure nobody knows who owns this account, but the blockchain will store every transaction this account and future accounts make, so trying to actually use the Bitcoin is a fair amount harder.
That could have netted the attackers millions.