Charlie Javice, the founder of student loan application startup Frank that was purchased by JPMorgan for $175 million, was found guilty on Friday of defrauding the bank by greatly inflating the customer count.
After a five-week trial, the jury found Javice guilty, agreeing with prosecutors’ claims that she fabricated the vast majority of Frank’s customer list to deceive JPMorgan into acquiring her startup.
When JPMorgan bought Frank in 2021, the bank thought the startup had 4 million customers. The bank found out that the actual customer count was only 300,000 when it later sent test marketing emails to alleged Frank users and approximately 70% of those messages bounced back.
Javice allegedly hired a math professor to create fake customer data, which she submitted to JPMorgan when the bank was considering buying her company.
Defense attorneys argued that the suit was a result of buyer’s remorse due to a government change in the way financial aid forms are filled out. Javice pleaded not guilty and didn’t take the stand during the trial.
Javice, who is now 32, could be sentenced up to decades in prison. The sentencing is expected to take place in August, according to a CNBC report.
Javice founded Frank in 2017 when she was in her mid-20s. In 2019, she was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.
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‘Tesla Takedown’ organizers have promised their biggest day of global action this weekend, encouraging thousands to protest outside Tesla showrooms, dealerships, and even charging stations to peacefully object to Elon Musk’s role in slashing government spending.
As Tesla protests have spread, so has the backlash. Activists holding up signs are being conflated with masked vandals throwing Molotov cocktails. On social media, and in Washington, the distinction is fading fast.
President Donald Trump has called attacks on Tesla “domestic terrorism” and threatened to send “terrorist thugs” to prisons in El Salvador. U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi has pledged to prosecute “those operating behind the scenes to coordinate and fund these crimes,” even though evidence suggests the attacks were carried out by “lone offenders.” And Musk’s decision to accuse at least one peaceful protester of “committing crimes” on X has fueled a public discourse that equates protest with vandalism, and vandalism with terrorism.
If the government or law enforcement starts treating all anti-Tesla actions as criminal, peaceful protesters could find themselves facing consequences meant for extremists.
“Terrorism is a problematic concept in law enforcement because it is by definition differentiated from other violence by its political nature,” Mike German, a former FBI special agent and fellow at the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, told TechCrunch. “That’s why we’ve seen counter terrorism measures so often result in problematic outcomes targeting the civil rights of people engaged in First Amendment-protected activity, rather than the people who are committing acts of violence.”
The Tesla Takedown protesters have consistently preached nonviolence at rallies and on their website. The movement’s stated goal is not to physically harm Tesla or Musk, but rather to encourage people to sell their Teslas, sell their stock, and stop buying new Teslas.
“The reason that [Musk] is in the position that he is in is because of his wealth, and we feel that if we can continue to drive that Tesla stock price down, we will hit him in the spot that it matters,” Natasha Purdum, a New Jersey-based organizer, told TechCrunch. “Ultimately, we see that as a key to taking down some of the major destruction that is happening in our federal government, courtesy of DOGE and Elon Musk.”
Musk is the world’s richest person in large part due to his Tesla stock. He owns roughly 13% of the company, which today is valued at around $829 billion, making Musk’s share worth around $107.8 billion. That wealth has allowed Musk to spend $44 billion to buy Twitter, the primary platform he uses to communicate to his 219 million followers. Musk has also dipped into his own funds to donate more than $260 million to the America PAC that helped Trump clinch the election.
As someone who spent 16 years as an FBI special agent focused on domestic terrorism, German says he wouldn’t be surprised to see local police working hand in glove with terrorism taskforces – like the one the FBI just formed – to monitor Tesla Takedown protests. Per the Attorney General’s Guidelines, the FBI doesn’t require a factual basis for a suspicion of terrorism to begin conducting physical surveillance, which includes taking photos of people, cars, and license plates, deploying informants to infiltrate a group, accessing private databases, and more.
“It’s also important to understand that law enforcement in the United States is primarily intended to protect the property of the wealthy,” German said. “Corporations in the United States are politically powerful and have access to elected officials and top law enforcement officials. And when their interests are challenged, particularly by protest, they want to present that as a law enforcement issue, rather than as legitimate public concerns about their corporate activities.”
The FBI declined to comment on TechCrunch’s question about whether the agency is taking any special action this weekend.
Musk and the Trump administration have ramped up their rhetoric in the lead up to March 29, when at least 213 Tesla Takedown protests are scheduled around the world, from Colorado and Kentucky to Germany, Minnesota, France, and Texas.
On Thursday, Musk appeared on Fox News’s “Special Report” to say that he and Trump are going to “go after…the ones providing the money, the ones pushing the lies and propaganda.”
Trump has suggested that the attacks on Tesla property were coordinated to intimidate Musk, despite internal assessments finding otherwise. Musk has also claimed, without showing proof, that certain Tesla Takedown organizers were funded by ActBlue, a nonprofit that funds progressive causes and Democratic candidates.
And Bondi has accused Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) of “calling for further insurrection” after Crockett said that Musk needed to be “taken down” at a virtual Tesla Takedown rally last week. Crockett couched that statement with calls for nonviolence and peaceful demonstrations, but regardless, Bondi said she needs to “tread very carefully.”
German says this rhetoric, too, is an old government trick to try to discredit and suppress protest movements by claiming “a handful of acts of violence are the result of the spread of bad ideas, radical ideas.”
Purdum, one of the Tesla organizers, advised protesters to put their wellbeing first. Leave if you feel unsafe, adhere to your local protest regulations, don’t trespass, follow police orders, and have a lawyer’s number in your back pocket just in case, she said.
“Authoritarian regimes have a long history of equating peaceful protest with violence,” Stephanie Frizzell, a Tesla Takedown organizer from Dallas, said. “The Tesla Takedown movement has always been and will remain nonviolent. Their goal is to intimidate us into silence as we stand against Musk’s destructive actions – but defending free speech is fundamental to democracy. We will not be deterred.”
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Elon Musk’s AI startup, xAI, has acquired his social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, in an all-stock deal, he announced in a post on X Friday.
“xAI has acquired X in an all-stock transaction,” Musk said. “The combination values xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion ($45B less $12B debt).”
He went on to describe the two companies’ futures as “intertwined,” adding, “Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent.”
The acquisition places X — the highly influential social media platform Musk purchased in 2022 under its former name, Twitter — firmly under the umbrella of Musk’s AI startup, which he founded in 2023 to compete with OpenAI. While xAI’s products, including its AI chatbot Grok, were tightly integrated into the X platform before this deal, Friday’s acquisition further combines two of Musk’s most influential companies.
Musk notes in his post that this deal values X at $33 billion (lowered from an enterprise valuation of $45 billion due to the company’s $12 billion in debt). Musk originally purchased X for $44 billion in October 2022, however, the valuation has swung dramatically in recent years. At one point, Fidelity valued X at less than $10 billion.
In the months since the inauguration of President Donald Trump, for whom Musk campaigned for aggressively, X’s valuation has risen, largely because investors believe it’s more influential now. Musk said in his post on Friday that X has more than 600 million active users.
Meanwhile, xAI’s valuation has skyrocketed in recent years. In just the two years since it was founded, Musk has successfully beefed up xAI to be a frontier AI lab, frequently releasing AI models and products that compete with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
In February, xAI was reportedly in talks to secure another $10 billion in funding at a $75 billion valuation. However, Musk now says his AI startup’s valuation is now $80 billion.
One of the major advantages that xAI has over other startups is its access to X’s data. The large body of posts that X has accumulated over the years gives xAI a significant advantage in the race for AI training data. Further, Musk previously gave the Grok chatbot access to real-time news updates from posts on the X platform. It seems likely that the two products, X and Grok, will only get more tightly integrated following this acquisition.
This is a developing story… Check back for updates.
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Prolific fintech investor and QED Investors co-founder Frank Rotman said Friday that he will transition to a partner emeritus role by year’s end to focus on founding his own startups.
But those startups won’t necessarily be financial technology companies. In a post on X, Rotman — who helped start QED in 2007 — declared that “the first business” that he plans “on getting out of the ground is in the music industry.”
He wrote: “It’s easy to call me crazy for all the obvious reasons, but it’s worth reserving judgment until you learn more about the business that’s evolved in my head and sat on the shelf for years. It will be fun to build and could actually make a huge difference to an industry that none of us could imagine living without.”
Rotman started Alexandria, Virginia-based QED, which today has $4 billion in assets under management, nearly two decades ago with Nigel Morris and Caribou Honig. He led the firm’s investment in Credit Karma and played a role in QED’s investments in unicorns such as GreenSky, Flywire, and SoFi. (In fact, QED was the first institutional money into Credit Karma.) Other companies that the firm has backed include Creditas, Nubank, AvidXchange, and Bitso.
QED exclusively invests in companies building financial technology at the pre-seed to Series A stages.
Rotman, who goes by the handle “The Fintech Junkie” on X, said he will transition to his new role on January 1, 2026. He will continue to serve in a part-time advisory role to QED over the coming years.
Besides founding music startups, Rotman said he likely plans to write a book centered around his “observations and frameworks for the startup and VC worlds.”
He wrote in the X post: “This shouldn’t surprise anyone who knows me – writing is my oxygen. I can’t imagine a life without it even though ChatGPT and Claude are better writers than I am.”
In a statement, QED Managing Partner Nigel Morris noted that he and Rotman had worked together for over 30 years — previously also at Capital One.
“Frank, at his core, is an entrepreneur and I have no doubt he will excel in his next chapter,” he said.
QED Investors’ partner Amias Gerety will be promoted to lead QED’s U.S. investment team.
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Imagine making a big mess, only to realize it was for naught. A judge has dismissed Samsung’s attempt at striking before the iron’s hot. Last summer, before Samsung had even released the Galaxy Ring to the public, the company filed a lawsuit asking a judge to proclaim its business didn’t infringe on any patents, specifically, patents related to the Oura Ring. This week, the judge ruled this as malarkey (not a direct quote), and Samsung has until late April to appeal the decision with an amended complaint.
What does all this legal back-and-forth mean? Samsung struck before Oura, the company behind the Oura Ring, could sniff through its patents and get litigious. Samsung figured that since Oura is known for going after its competition on standard wellness patents—it’s gone after lower-cost brands like Ringconn and Circular—it would come after Samsung, too. Considering Oura’s business is squarely the smart ring and the accompanying ecosystem, it makes sense.
Samsung had asked the judge to file a declaratory judgment lawsuit in the Northern District of California court, where it filed the suit. This “judgment” would indicate that Samsung had not copied any of Oura’s patents, like one for “assessing a readiness score of a user” and a “method for manufacturing thereof.” Samsung claims that Oura had a “pattern of indiscriminate assertion of patent infringement against any and all competitors in the smart ring market” as the reason for its lawsuit. Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguínp ultimately threw out the lawsuit.
Samsung was trying to strike against Oura before Oura could strike against it. It’s lawsuit ping-pong, with Samsung starting it out in Northern California, where Oura is headquartered, to get a declaration filed before Oura attempts to bring the fight to Samsung’s turf in Texas, where it has slightly more reign.
Ultimately, the power these companies have is inherently related to how much money they have to throw at lawsuits, even before they materialize. Oura may not have as much manufacturing prowess as Samsung, but it’s not doing too badly in securing the funding it needs to continue. It helps, too, that Oura is a good product. It’s good enough that Samsung is afraid it’ll come for its business, even if it is relatively minor.
Nintendo announced on Friday that its live-action “The Legend of Zelda” movie will premiere on March 26, 2027.
It’s a little weird to announce this the day after a Nintendo Direct livestream, where the gaming company usually unloads all of its recent news. But that was intentional. The company wants fans to download its new app, Nintendo Today! — yes, that exclamation is their own doing — to learn the latest news.
During Thursday’s Nintendo Direct event, Nintendo game director Shigeru Miyamoto closed out the presentation by announcing the Nintendo Today! news app. Those who swiftly downloaded it were rewarded since Nintendo used this channel exclusively to announce the release date of its “Zelda” movie.
The app aims to deliver daily news about various Nintendo games, and users can customize the app to prioritize their favorite franchises.
Across the entertainment industry, there are so many new movies and TV shows based on existing IP that this reminder about the “Zelda” movie may fall flat.
For Nintendo, investing in existing IP has proven a financially sound strategy. Its “Super Mario Bros.” movie grossed $1.3 billion at the box office with a $100 million production budget, making it the 18th-highest grossing global release of all time.
While “Zelda” might not have quite the same universal recognition as “Mario,” keep in mind that the “Breath of the Wild” game sold more than 34 million copies, more than the Pokémon Gold, Silver, and Crystal games.
As Nintendo prepares to unveil more information about its highly anticipated Nintendo Switch 2 system next week, perhaps we should keep a closer eye on the Nintendo Today! app for early details.
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