He also told Sue and Crew he's sorry the Queen of England is having some problems with former family members, which is nice. (He cares. And keeps up on his Royals gossip!)
Back in May 2010, a Wells Fargo employee named Waldyr Da Silva Prado Neto got a hot tip that Burger King was going to be bought by private equity firm 3G Capital Partners. Realizing he was in possession of some valuable information, Da Silva Prado Neto did what any rational person with an elastic view of securities laws would, and shared the material non-public information with some clients and friends, making about $175,000 and also putting himself in the good graces of pal he tipped off, who probably promised to return the favor. DSPN used Portuguese to communicate the message that he had information that might be of interest ("If you are around call me at the hotel," he emailed one customer. "I have some info…you have to hear this"), which seems pretty standard, given that he's Brazilian, though at least one person at the SEC is pretty sure it was an attempt to throw regulators off the trail, not realizing the lengths the Commission will go to to fight crime. "Prado's emails and other communications may have been sent from Brazil and written in Portuguese, but our commitment to prosecute illegal insider trading on U.S. markets knows no geographic or language barrier," said Sanjay Wadhwa, deputy chief of the SEC enforcement division's market abuse unit. Will they pony up the money for Rosetta Stone tapes? Probably not. But they sure as hell will take the time to put words into Google Translate and then nail you to the wall. SEC sues ex-broker for insider trading ahead of Burger King deal [Reuters]
On November 6, 2012, as the results of the presidential election rolled in, a member of the Harvard Business School Class of 2010 considered ending it all. "The thought crossed my mind to jump off my penthouse apartment balcony," he wrote his fellow classmates yesterday. Sure, he had a lot to live for: friends, family, the earthly delights afforded to him by living in Southern California ("surfing, mountains, 78 degree sunshine, and hot babes everywhere"), as well as a new company and all that came with it (relationships with celebrities that straddle the line between "friend and service provider," as well as invites to "the VMAs and private concerts in Vegas"). But he also had a lot of reasons to be good and angry at the world, including but not limited to: the state of California being "filled with so many hippie liberals" he just might snap and in doing so "choke out a street bum," people who "sit around with their hand out and expect to be fed," and, most vexingly, the reelection of Barack Obama. And while he did not in fact end up leaping from his penthouse balcony apartment that night, make no mistake, he was and is exceedingly pissed about the direction this country is going, which is south on the Pacific Coast Highway right straight to hell. And whereas the endless stream of bums and hobos and hippies he encounters each and every day the second he steps out of his penthouse apartment probably would take the easy way out, because that's what they do, he's better than that. So instead, he went to bed, got up, sat down at his computer and channeled his anger into something productive: a list of suggestions for how we can get America back on track and in four years, rest it from the hands of the commie holding it hostage, like forcing candidates to use bullet points and telling people who don't believe in capitalism to pack their shit because in 20 minutes a van is coming to ship their non-contributing zero asses off to a country where it's not actually a "privilege" to live. First, though, some life updates, because it really has been too long.