Rameen, partner since 2023 (Toronto, Ontario)
This week in charts
Large caps vs. small caps
Billionaire Divorces Spur Crackdown by China’s Market Regulator
A rising number of divorces among China’s wealthy tycoons is stoking investor concerns about the market impact of big stake sales and spurring a crackdown by the nation’s securities regulator.
At least eight major holders of the country’s listed companies split shares worth $3.9 billion so far this year after ending their marriages, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
While the specific reasons for the divorces are unclear, repeated warnings from the China Securities Regulatory Commission hint at concerns that tycoons are using divorces to bypass rules on selling stock that have helped to prop up the market as the economy sags.
Company executives and shareholders with a stake above 5% can only sell as much as 2% of the float within a 90-day period in the open market. After divorcing, ex-partners until recently were able to sell at least double that amount.
Legal experts expect more eye-catching divorces in the near future as a law effective Jan. 1 — intended to protect women — will force both sides to disclose their assets in divorce proceedings. That could help uncover more assets — namely salaries, investments, inheritances and real estate — that tycoons would prefer to keep quiet.
Most of China’s wealthy have not yet adopted prenuptial agreements, as many marriages were sealed before couples got rich. China’s wealth boom began when it started to embrace the market economy in the late 1970s.
The new rule on disclosure could push Chinese executives to take more precautions like signing prenups before marriage, said Jeremy Morley, a lawyer specializing in international family law. Some local courts in China have already begun adopting asset disclosure this year, he said.
The Man Who Trapped Us in Databases
One acquaintance called it “the Hank show.” [Hank] Asher was its star, but his performance had, over time, widened to friends and colleagues and customers and accomplices and, ultimately, to everyone, everywhere. He was one of the first and best data miners of the digital age: a person who built his own reality, then sucked the rest of the world in. He had made his first fortune painting South Florida’s growing forest of condo towers, and his second as a drug runner. He spent years in the cross hairs of the D.E.A. and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, and yet a decade after his death, his data and database products still course through the computer systems of the F.B.I., the I.R.S. and ICE; through 80 percent of the companies in the Fortune 500; through nine of the world’s 10 biggest banks; and through a good part of America’s roughly 18,000 law-enforcement agencies. Our world — and my world, as a reporter seeking data — runs on what he built, even if, a decade on, the man himself has largely been forgotten. He’s the ghost in our machines.
One of Asher’s innovations — or more precisely one of his companies’ innovations — was what is now known as the LexID. My LexID, I learned, is 000874529875. This unique string of digits is a kind of shadow Social Security number, one of many such “persistent identifiers,” as they are called, that have been issued not by the government but by data companies like Acxiom, Oracle, Thomson Reuters, TransUnion — or, in this case, LexisNexis.
My LexID was created sometime in the early 2000s in Asher’s computer room in South Florida, as many still are, and without my consent it began quietly stalking me. One early data point on me would have been my name; another, my parents’ address in Oregon. From my birth certificate or my driver’s license or my teenage fishing license — and from the fact that the three confirmed one another — it could get my sex and my date of birth. At the time, it would have been able to collect the address of the college I attended, Swarthmore, which was small and expensive, and it would have found my first full-time employer, the National Geographic Society, quickly amassing more than enough data to let someone — back then, a human someone — infer quite a bit more about me and my future prospects.
Persistent identifiers let algorithms map in milliseconds a network of people I’ve met, lived near or interacted with online or off, and they show the trajectory of my life — up, down and sideways. They help health systems assess my living conditions, impacting what kind of care I get from my doctor. They affect how much I pay for car insurance. They help determine what kind of credit cards I have. They influence what ads I see and how long I wait on hold when I call a customer-service line. They allow computers inside police departments, intelligence agencies, hospitals, banks, insurance companies, political parties and marketing firms to understand personal behavior and, increasingly, as artificial intelligence and machine learning expand into every corner of society, to predict and exploit it.
Remembered by industry insiders as the “father of data fusion,” Asher reigned over a vast shift in privacy norms. He shifted them himself, scooping up data sets no one else had wanted, monetizing information no one had ever thought valuable, collecting details others had thought too intimate, testing boundaries that more established companies — with their brand names and boards and reputational risks and publicly traded stocks — had yet to ever dare test.
Why him? One answer is that Asher had a mind for this stuff. He scanned volumes of information too enormous for most humans to take in, finding secrets in the data that most humans would never recognize. A computer scientist who helped build Matrix told me that his former boss could look at a mass of numbers on a whiteboard and see immediately what others could not, picking out patterns in seconds. Artificial intelligence hadn’t really been part of Matrix, the executive said, not back then: “That was still Hank. Hank was the algorithm.” But that’s only one answer as to why him.
Another answer, the better one, is that Hank Asher never cared about norms.
This week’s fun finds
Buon appetito! Connor’s moai (our version of bringing EdgePointers together for a meal) was a build-your-own Italian sandwiches and fish balls made by his nonna. Thankfully, summer’s almost over and we can enjoy our carbs.
Bears raid a Krispy Kreme doughnut van making deliveries on an Alaska military base
Two bears on an Alaska military base raided a Krispy Kreme doughnut van that was stopped outside a convenience store during its delivery route.
The driver usually left his doors open when he stopped at the store but this time a sow and one of her cubs that loiter nearby sauntered inside, where they stayed for probably 20 minutes Tuesday morning, said Shelly Deano, the store manager for Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson JMM Express. The bears chomped on doughnut holes and other pastries, ignoring the banging on the side of the van that was aimed at shooing them away, Deano said.
The bears eventually came out and wandered in front of the convenience store and gas station a bit before heading into the woods.
