Small investors turn on James Watt after BrewDog co-founder admits ‘many mistakes’
The co-founder of BrewDog, James Watt, met with short shrift from small investors who have been left empty-handed by the company’s sale for just £33m, after he admitted to “many mistakes”.Watt issued a mea culpa via the professional social networking site LinkedIn, a platform he has regularly used to espouse political views, including complaints about the level of tax he is asked to pay.The multimillionaire and self-styled punk apologised to more than 200,000 “equity punks”, who invested £75m in the business through multiple crowdfunding rounds but received nothing from its sale to the US cannabis and drinks company Tilray Brands.They lost out partly owing to the terms of an earlier 22% investment by the private equity group TSG, which involved Watt and his co-founder Martin Dickie cashing out to the tune of £100m but left crowdfunding investors with little chance of a return.Watt also said he was “heartbroken” for the 484 staff who lost their jobs in the deal, after Tilray opted to buy only 11 of BrewDog’s bars, leaving 38 having to close their doors.
“During my 17 years in charge there were highs, lows, successes, failures, huge gambles and many mistakes along the way,” said Watt,“Ultimately, the mistakes hurt far more than the successes console,” he added,“I would have loved to save every single job and every single equity punk investment,Ultimately, I couldn’t,That will stay with me.
”Unite, the trade union, has already criticised the “national disgrace” of the sale, conducted via a pre-pack administration that involved the administrators, Alix Partners, agreeing a sale to Tilray before declaring insolvency, at a cost of nearly 500 jobs.On Wednesday, one LinkedIn user, Fraser Campbell, said Watt had “walked away with £50m from the TSG deal, while everyone who gave you their money is now left with nothing but the taste of sour beer in their mouths”.Another, John Allison wrote: “Are you ‘heartbroken’ you gave the institutional investor preference over the equity punks, James?”Another LinkedIn user, Cathal Morrow, questioned Watt’s description of himself, in his LinkedIn profile, as a “punk”.“Genuine comment – do you think it’s still appropriate to have the word ‘punk’ in your bio,” he said.“Rather insulting at this point I’d say”Others were kinder.
“As one of the early equity punks, I never bought shares expecting to get rich,” said Fraser Reid.“I bought them because I loved the beer, the attitude, and what BrewDog represented at the time.Building something from a garage to a global brand is no small feat.”The £33m sale, a fraction of the £2bn value that BrewDog once targeted when it hoped to float on the stock market, comes less than a month after the firm put itself up for sale.BrewDog’s decline from its all-conquering peak was cemented by five years of losses and a string of brand-damaging controversies relating to the company’s culture and treatment of staff, particularly under Watt’s tenure.
Watt later apologised for what some staff described as a “culture of fear”,Watt also hired private investigators to look into people who took part in a BBC documentary about the allegations,
Europe’s next-generation fighter jet project may collapse if row continues, says warplane maker
France and Germany’s next-generation fighter jet project could soon be “dead”, one of the two companies tasked with delivering it has warned, amid a worsening corporate rift over who gets to build the aircraft.Dassault Aviation, France’s leading warplane maker, said Airbus’s defence arm – which represents Germany and Spain – needed to cooperate on the €100bn programme otherwise it would collapse.“Airbus doesn’t want to work with Dassault, full stop. I take note. I never said I didn’t want to work with Airbus or with the Germans,” said Éric Trappier, Dassault’s chief executive, via an interpreter while presenting the company’s financial results on Wednesday
Google faces lawsuit after Gemini chatbot allegedly instructed man to kill himself
Last August, Jonathan Gavalas became entirely consumed with his Google Gemini chatbot. The 36-year-old Florida resident had started casually using the artificial intelligence tool earlier that month to help with writing and shopping. Then Google introduced its Gemini Live AI assistant, which included voice-based chats that had the capability to detect people’s emotions and respond in a more human-like way.“Holy shit, this is kind of creepy,” Gavalas told the chatbot the night the feature debuted, according to court documents. “You’re way too real
X to ban users from earning revenue if they post unlabelled AI-generated war videos
Elon Musk’s X will ban users from making money on the platform if they repeatedly post unlabelled AI-generated war videos, after social media feeds were flooded with fake battle scenes from the Iran conflict.The social media platform, which has about half a billion monthly active users, will suspend people from earning revenue from posts for 90 days if they put up AI-generated videos of an armed conflict without adding a disclosure that it was made with AI. A second infraction wouldlead to a permanent ban, it said on Tuesday night, after the first days of the conflict in Iran were marked by a torrent of bogus online footage.Timelines on X, as well as Instagram and Facebook, which are run by Meta, have carried numerous faked battle scenes, including Iranian rockets pursuing and shooting down a US jet – which was viewed 70m times, according to checks by BBC Verify – and another clip that used AI to replace smoke rising from the site of a real missile strike with a fake fireball several times bigger.Users can make hundreds of dollars a month on X as part of the platform’s advertising model if they build substantial followings approaching 100,000 people, which incentivises the production of shocking viral posts
Nvidia and UK Wealth Fund invest in British autonomous driving startup Oxa
Nvidia is investing in the British autonomous driving startup Oxa, alongside backing from the UK’s National Wealth Fund, in a boost to the country’s technology sector.The Oxford-based company, which has developed software for self-driving industrial vehicles, said it had raised $103m (£77m) from investors to focus on commercial solutions for that software, as well as its physical AI and robotics technology, and to push on with its global expansion plans.The fundraising includes $50m from the National Wealth Fund, owned by the Treasury, and backing from the US tech company Nvidia’s venture capital arm, NVentures.Founded in 2014, Oxa now focuses on the automation of repetitive industrial driving tasks, such as the towing and carrying of goods in ports, airports and factories.The latest investor round also includes capital from existing shareholders the London-listed IP Group, which invests in British tech companies, the Australian superannuation (pension) fund Hostplus and BP Ventures, the UK oil company’s arm that backs innovative technologies
What was really behind Jack Dorsey laying off nearly half of Block’s staff?
Jack Dorsey cited AI as the driving force behind cutting 40% of his company’s employees, but other factors such as a weak crypto market, overstaffing and a declining stock price may also have motivated the move.Last week, the financial technology company Block announced that it would lay off 4,000 of its 10,000 workers. Dorsey, Block’s CEO, said in a letter to shareholders that advances in AI “have changed what it means to build and run a company”.“We’re already seeing it internally. A significantly smaller team, using the tools we’re building, can do more and do it better
OpenAI amends Pentagon deal as Sam Altman admits it looks ‘sloppy’
OpenAI is amending its hastily arranged deal to supply artificial intelligence to the US Department of War (DoW) after the ChatGPT owner’s chief executive admitted it looked “opportunistic and sloppy”.The contract prompted fears the San Francisco startup’s AI could be used for domestic mass surveillance but its boss, Sam Altman, said on Monday night the startup would explicitly bar its technology from being used for that purpose or being deployed by defence department intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency (NSA).OpenAI, which has more than 900 million users of ChatGPT, made the deal almost immediately after the Pentagon’s existing AI contractor, Anthropic, was dropped.Anthropic had insisted “using these systems for mass domestic surveillance is incompatible with democratic values”, leading the US president, Donald Trump, to call Anthropic “leftwing nut jobs” and directing the federal government to stop using its technology.Despite denials from OpenAI that the agreement allowed for surveillance use, commentators raised the spectre of the Snowden scandal, which broke in 2013, when it emerged the NSA was engaged in mass harvesting of phone and internet communications
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