Business
Musk-Tied Investor Clashes With One of World’s Biggest Asset Managers
A prominent Silicon Valley investor is in a bitter dispute with his former employer, one of the world’s largest asset managers, accusing it of fraud and attempted bribery.
In a lawsuit filed on Thursday in California, Josh Raffaelli, who until late last year was a fund manager at Brookfield Asset Management, said the company had mistreated investors in his funds as it sought to make up for losses in other parts of its business.
The 100-page complaint is notable in part because Mr. Raffaelli has close ties to Elon Musk, the world’s richest man. That relationship enabled Mr. Raffaelli’s funds to put money into Mr. Musk’s private companies, a coveted opportunity in Silicon Valley. But among Mr. Raffaelli’s allegations is that Brookfield improperly limited the amount that he could invest in a Musk company on behalf of Brookfield’s clients.
In December, shortly after Mr. Raffaelli filed a whistle-blower complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Brookfield fired him, according to his lawsuit.
“Brookfield repeatedly betrayed the trust and best interests of its investors, and then fired the employee who challenged its behavior,” said Mark Mermelstein, Mr. Raffaelli’s lawyer.
Brookfield manages more than $1 trillion on behalf of pension plans, government investment funds and financial institutions. Until January, its chairman was Mark Carney, Canada’s new prime minister.
“This suit is absolutely without merit and these baseless claims run counter to how Brookfield manages its business,” said Kerrie McHugh, a spokeswoman for Brookfield. “We will vigorously defend against this meritless suit, which was brought by a disgruntled former employee.”
Mr. Raffaelli, 45, has had a long career in Silicon Valley. In 2004, he became an analyst at what was then called Draper Fisher Jurvetson, a leading venture capital firm. At the time, Mr. Musk was on the ascent in Silicon Valley. He had recently founded the rocket company SpaceX and made an early investment in Tesla, which would become the world’s most valuable car company.
By 2009, Mr. Raffaelli was a board observer at both SpaceX and Tesla, according to his LinkedIn profile. That entitled him to attend the companies’ confidential board meetings. The proximity to Mr. Musk also gave Mr. Raffaelli the opportunity to invest his clients’ money in the billionaire’s private ventures. In Silicon Valley, that access made Mr. Raffaelli a hot commodity in his own right.
In 2017 he joined Brookfield, working out of its San Francisco office. His job was to manage a handful of funds that would invest clients’ money in technology companies. His base salary was $500,000, but his bosses told him that if his funds performed well, his total compensation could ultimately be in the tens of millions of dollars, according to the lawsuit, filed on Thursday in Superior Court in San Mateo, Calif.
In part to attract outside investors, Brookfield agreed to put its own money in Mr. Raffaelli’s funds, meaning the company’s financial interests would be aligned with those of its clients. By 2024, his funds collectively managed more than $1.75 billion, which came from pension funds, other outside investors and Brookfield itself.
Tapping his contacts in Mr. Musk’s orbit, Mr. Raffaelli arranged for his funds to invest in several of Mr. Musk’s private businesses, including SpaceX, the artificial-intelligence company xAI and the tunnel-building venture known as the Boring Company, according to Mr. Raffaelli’s lawsuit and people familiar with the investments.
But Brookfield soon encountered financial problems, according to the lawsuit. The Covid-19 pandemic had hammered the commercial real estate industry, in which Brookfield and its affiliates were major investors. Brookfield Property Partners, the asset management firm’s sister company, lost about $2 billion in 2020.
That set the stage for Brookfield to begin engaging in fraud, Mr. Raffaelli said in the lawsuit.
Short on cash, Brookfield in 2024 backtracked on some of its pledges to put hundreds of millions of dollars into Mr. Raffaelli’s funds alongside outside investors, the lawsuit said.
Around the same time, Brookfield also vetoed a proposal from an unspecified “major foreign conglomerate” that wanted to invest up to $100 million in one of Mr. Raffaelli’s funds, the lawsuit said, describing that decision as “indefensible.”
The combined result was that there was less money than expected for Mr. Raffaelli to invest. That, in turn, limited the potential upside for Brookfield’s outside clients, the lawsuit said.
Already, Mr. Raffaelli said, he had been forced to sharply reduce — from $25 million to $5 million — the amount that one of his funds planned to invest in Mr. Musk’s xAI. (The lawsuit did not identify xAI by name, but people familiar with the investments confirmed it.)
“That is like walking away from the chance to buy Facebook or Apple stock” at a bargain price, the lawsuit said. “The markets expected this investment to go nowhere but up, and that is exactly what has happened.” The estimated value of xAI has more than tripled to $80 billion over the past year.
Last summer, Brookfield informed Mr. Raffaelli that the firm was thinking of merging his funds into a company called Pinegrove Capital Partners, according to his lawsuit.
Ms. McHugh, the Brookfield spokeswoman, said Mr. Raffaelli’s funds were not performing well. Mr. Raffaelli’s lawyer disputed that, saying the funds were among the best-performing at Brookfield.
Mr. Raffaelli started looking into Pinegrove, an asset manager that was mostly owned by Brookfield. He was alarmed by what he found. He said that Pinegrove had exaggerated its capital levels by more than $100 million, making it appear financially stronger than it really was. Hundreds of institutions — including nonprofit organizations and pension funds for police officers and firefighters — had been persuaded under false pretenses to entrust their money to Pinegrove, according to the lawsuit.
Last October, Mr. Raffaelli anonymously reported his findings to Brookfield through the company’s whistle-blower website. A few weeks later, he said, he submitted a complaint to the S.E.C.
Shortly after, Mr. Raffaelli’s boss, Anuj Ranjan, told him that Brookfield’s chief executive had signed off on the decision to fold his funds into Pinegrove. According to the lawsuit, Mr. Ranjan acknowledged to Mr. Raffaelli that the move was not good for his clients but was designed to prop up Pinegrove and save money for Brookfield. Mr. Raffaelli viewed this as a violation of federal securities laws.
Mr. Ranjan did not respond to a request for comment.
The investors in Mr. Raffaelli’s funds needed to approve the Pinegrove merger. Brookfield pushed Mr. Raffaelli to pitch them on it “because his credibility would resonate better with the investors that trusted him,” the lawsuit said.
In exchange for his help, Mr. Raffaelli said, Brookfield offered to pay him an amount “way beyond” what he was currently owed. He said the head of the company’s human resources department then sent him a spreadsheet showing he could eventually be due as much as $46 million under his existing compensation agreement.
Mr. Raffaelli said he viewed that as Brookfield offering him a bribe.
The following week, Mr. Raffaelli sent the general counsel at Brookfield Asset Management the complaint he had previously sent to the S.E.C.
“As uncomfortable as this is for me, I wanted to share with you that I felt I had an obligation to blow the whistle on certain illegal conduct,” he wrote, according to the lawsuit.
Nine days later, Mr. Raffaelli said, he was fired.
Business
Devin Nunes Departs Trump Media After 4 Years as C.E.O.
President Trump’s social media company, which has consistently lost money and struggled with a flagging share price, announced Tuesday that it was replacing Devin Nunes as its chief executive officer.
The announcement offered no reason for the sudden departure of Mr. Nunes, a former Republican congressman from California. Mr. Trump had tapped him to run the company, Trump Media & Technology, in late 2021.
The announcement was made in a news release by the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., who is a company board member and oversees a trust that controls his father’s 115-million-share stake in Trump Media. President Trump is not an officer or director of the company.
Mr. Nunes said in a statement on Truth Social, which is Trump Media’s flagship product, that it was an “appropriate time” for a new leader with experience in media and mergers to “steer Trump Media through its current transition phase.”
Trump Media has incurred hundreds of millions in losses, and its shares have performed poorly since the company went public by completing a merger with a cash-rich special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, in March 2024. The stock, which ended its first day of trading around $58 a share, closed Tuesday at $9.82.
Shares of Trump Media trade under the symbol DJT, which are President Trump’s initials. Truth Social has emerged as the main social media platform for Mr. Trump to communicate his policy decisions and opinions to the world.
Last year, Trump Media took in $3.7 million in revenue and recorded a $712 million net loss.
In December, Trump Media announced a plan to merge with TAE Technologies, a fusion power company. The all-stock deal, which was valued at $6 billion at the time, would create one of the first publicly traded nuclear fusion companies.
Trump Media said in February that it was considering spinning off its Truth Social platform in a merger with another cash-rich SPAC, Texas Ventures Acquisition III Corp.
Mr. Nunes is being replaced on an interim basis by Kevin McGurn, who has been an adviser to Trump Media since the end of 2024. Mr. McGurn, a former executive at Hulu, the streaming service, was listed in a recent regulatory filing as the chief executive of Texas Ventures.
The Trump Media release announcing the management change provided no update on the merger with TAE Technologies or the proposed SPAC deal for Truth Social.
Business
Netflix plans to buy historic Radford Studio Center
Streaming entertainment giant Netflix is in negotiations to buy the historic Radford Studio Center lot in Studio City.
Netflix plans to purchase the Los Angeles studio that has been home to generations of landmark television shows, including “Gunsmoke” and “Seinfeld,” according to two people with knowledge of the pending deal who were not authorized to speak about it publicly.
The studio’s previous operator, Hackman Capital Partners, defaulted on a $1.1-billion mortgage in January. Investment bank Goldman Sachs took over the property and is in talks with Netflix to sell it for between $330 million and $400 million.
Representatives for Hackman and Netflix declined to comment on the planned sale.
Culver City-based Hackman Capital Partners and Square Mile Capital Management teamed up to buy the Radford Avenue property from ViacomCBS in 2021 with a winning bid of $1.85 billion, after a competitive battle for the 55-acre studio beloved by the television industry.
At the time, the staggering price tag underscored the value — and scarcity — of TV soundstages in Los Angeles as content producers scrambled for space to shoot TV shows and movies to stock their streaming services. It was one of the largest-ever real estate transactions for a TV studio complex in Los Angeles.
Since then, production has substantially declined in Southern California. L.A. continues to battle the loss of production to other states and countries, as well as the lingering effects on the industry of the pandemic and the 2023 dual writers’ and actors’ strikes. Cutbacks in spending at the major studios after a surge in streaming-fueled TV production have further damped film activity in the region.
Founded by silent film comedy legend Mack Sennett in 1928, the lot became known as “Hit City” in the decades after World War II as popular TV shows such as “Leave It to Beaver,” “Gilligan’s Island,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “The Bob Newhart Show” and “Will & Grace” were made there. The storied lot gave the Studio City neighborhood its name,
Netflix, which has a market cap of about $455 billion — more than double that of Walt Disney Co. — has maintained its dominance in the global streaming business with more than 325 million subscribers.
The Los Gatos-based company has production offices worldwide, including facilities in Albuquerque, Brooklyn, London, Madrid and Toronto.
Netflix had secured an $82.7-billion deal to buy Warner Bros. studios and streaming services in December, but withdrew from the bidding war in late February after Paramount Skydance offered $31 a share. As part of the switch, Netflix was paid a $2.8-billion termination fee.
Business
Kevin Warsh, Trump’s Pick to Lead Fed, Faces Senate at Tricky Moment
Kevin M. Warsh, President Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Reserve, has spent years refining his pitch for why he should get one of the most powerful economic jobs in the world.
At his confirmation hearing on Tuesday, he will have to convince Senate lawmakers that he is ready to step into the role, which has become politically explosive amid Mr. Trump’s relentless attacks on the institution and its current chair, Jerome H. Powell.
Mr. Warsh, who is scheduled to testify before the Banking Committee at 10 a.m., plans to commit to being “strictly independent” on decisions related to interest rates, according to his prepared remarks. He also plans to tell lawmakers that he is unbothered by Mr. Trump’s incessant calls for substantially lower borrowing costs. And he will use his opening statement to underscore his focus on disrupting the “status quo” at an institution he said just last year was in need of “regime change.”
“In a time that will rank among the most consequential in our nation’s history, I believe a reform-oriented Federal Reserve can make a real difference to the American people,” he plans to tell lawmakers, adding: “The stakes could scarcely be higher.”
Mr. Warsh, 56, faces significant hurdles to winning confirmation. He has broad support among Republicans, who control the Senate and can confirm him along party lines. Yet his candidacy has stalled because of an ongoing investigation by the Justice Department into Mr. Powell and his handling of the Fed’s headquarters renovations.
Mr. Powell’s term as chair ends May 15, but Mr. Warsh looks increasingly unlikely to be in place by then. That’s because Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina — a Republican on the Banking Committee who has expressed support for Mr. Warsh — has vowed to block any attempt to confirm a new Fed chair until the legal threats into Mr. Powell are resolved. For Mr. Tillis, the investigation is a blatant attempt to coerce Mr. Powell into lowering rates, undermining the Fed’s independence and confirming the politicization of the Justice Department.
“I’m not going to condone bad decision-making and bad behavior,” Mr. Tillis told reporters on Monday in reference to the Justice Department’s lack of evidence of any wrongdoing.
The department has vowed to continue its investigation, despite numerous legal setbacks.
“I think ultimately, he will be confirmed,” Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, another Republican on the committee, told reporters on Monday. “I just don’t know what decade.”
Mr. Warsh’s ascent would mark a homecoming for the Wall Street financier, who served as a Fed governor from 2006-11.
Since leaving the Fed, he has amassed assets worth well in excess of $100 million, according to financial disclosures submitted before his hearing. Those have drawn scrutiny because Mr. Warsh repeatedly invoked “pre-existing confidentiality agreements” to avoid disclosing the details behind several of his investments. He has said he would divest a substantial amount of his assets before taking the job.
The global financial crisis dominated Mr. Warsh’s first tenure at the Fed, thrusting him into the middle of discussions about how the central bank should respond to the threat of bank failures, turmoil in financial markets and a painful recession that followed. Mr. Warsh, then the youngest-ever member of the Board of Governors, was initially supportive of the Fed’s efforts to shore up financial markets by buying enormous quantities of government bonds and expanding its balance sheet to ease strains in financial markets and support growth by keeping market-based rates low.
But he soon soured on subsequent efforts to buy more bonds and resigned in protest. That experience has stuck with Mr. Warsh, who has made a smaller balance sheet a pillar of his plans if he takes over as chair.
Mr. Warsh would also be likely to usher in changes to how the Fed communicates its policy views, having expressed misgivings about its strategy of providing so-called forward guidance, or hints about how interest rates may change in the future to guide expectations. He has also suggested that policymakers across the Fed system should speak far less. Mr. Powell held a news conference after each rate decision, or eight a year, and delivered speeches with regularity. Mr. Trump’s pick to join the Fed last year, Stephen I. Miran, often speaks multiple times a week.
“Once policymakers reveal their economic forecast, they can become prisoners of their own words,” Mr. Warsh said in a speech last year. “Fed leaders would be well served to skip opportunities to share their latest musings. The swivel-chair problem, rhetorically waxing and waning with the latest data release, is common and counterproductive.”
What is far less clear is how much Mr. Warsh would heed the president’s demands for lower interest rates. Mr. Trump said he would not pick someone for chair who did not support lower borrowing costs.
Mr. Warsh sought in his opening statement to downplay the costs of a president’s voicing his opinions about rates, saying central bankers must be “strong enough to listen to a diversity of views from all corners, humble enough to be open-minded to new ideas and new economic developments, wise enough to translate imperfect data into meaningful insight and dedicated enough to make judgments faithfully and wisely.”
Earlier this year, many officials at the Fed saw a path to gradually lower rates as the impact of Mr. Trump’s tariffs faded and inflation restarted its slide back toward 2 percent after almost of year of stalling out. The war in Iran — and the energy shock it has unleashed — has upended those forecasts, however, prompting officials to turn wary about lowering rates.
Mr. Warsh will face questions on Tuesday about the economic impact of the war and how it has changed his thinking around the Fed’s ability to lower rates. While at the Fed, he was known as an inflation hawk who often argued against providing policy relief for fear that it could stoke price pressures. He also said the Fed should aspire to engage in rule-based policymaking that stems from formulas that prescribe how officials should set rates based on levels of inflation and employment.
While campaigning to be chair, Mr. Warsh embraced the need for rate cuts, arguing that there was a path for lower borrowing costs because of his plans to shrink the balance sheet, which would lift longer-term rates that then could be offset by lowering short-term ones. He also argued that higher productivity from the boom in artificial intelligence could unleash higher growth without stoking inflation, which could give the Fed more space to lower rates than otherwise would be the case.
In his opening statement, Mr. Warsh made clear, however, that a failure to bring down inflation, which has been stuck above the Fed’s 2 percent target for roughly five years, would strictly be the Fed’s fault, suggesting that he would shoulder the blame if he did not bring it back down during his tenure.
“Inflation is a choice, and the Fed must take responsibility for it,” he will tell lawmakers.
Megan Mineiro contributed reporting.
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