Aside from his business career, Hofstedter is an educational leader in the Orthodox Jewish community. In 1997, he founded Dirshu, a non-profit company that offers structured programs and testing for Torah study. The programs have helped thousands of global participants build sustainable study habits.

What is the primary inspiration and goal behind Dirshu?

David Hofstedter: I founded Dirshu to help people build structured daily Torah study habits. Good intentions are common, but without a set routine, daily commitments can be difficult to keep up with. We aim to provide specific study tracks, realistic schedules, and regular testing. This framework helps participants stay consistent, measure their progress, and retain what they learn. When people have clear goals to meet every morning, the likelihood of success increases significantly. A set system removes daily hesitation about when or how much to learn.

How does Dirshu support long-term learning?

David Hofstedter: The system relies on clear structure and accountability. Participants follow specific daily schedules and take periodic written exams. Regular testing turns occasional reading into active engagement. Knowing a test is coming encourages thorough review, which builds confidence and helps learners stay committed to their daily study. Repetition creates a lasting foundation of knowledge that participants carry with them forever.

How has Dirshu grown since its founding?

David Hofstedter: It started as a small local project and eventually became an international community. Dirshu currently operates in Canada, America, Israel, Europe, and South America. We publish dedicated study materials, coordinate global testing centres, and hold major events. Digital tools also make our study schedules accessible to anyone with Wi-Fi. This expansion supports thousands of dedicated students in every region. Seeing learners from different backgrounds take the same exam on the same day shows the strength of this shared mission.

How do you manage your work at Davpart with your commitment to Dirshu?

David Hofstedter: Real estate projects and educational non-profits require careful planning and organization. At Davpart, developing properties involves setting timelines, managing resources, and keeping teams focused on long-term goals. Dirshu operates similarly in terms of scheduling and execution. Managing both requires strict personal discipline and effective delegation. Maintaining high standards in commercial developments and international educational programs depends on structured operational execution.

Why are accountability and testing so important for building long-term retention in learning?

David Hofstedter: Accountability transforms motivation into concrete daily action. Without testing, it is easy to mistake passive reading for true knowledge. When learners prepare for a formal exam, they engage with the text more thoroughly and quickly find gaps in their comprehension. That immediate feedback loop drives mastery. Regular testing builds genuine confidence, ensuring that the knowledge gained is clear, precise, and permanent.

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Bradley built the technology behind the Nasdaq-listed company. He founded Data Vault Holdings in 2021, holds more than 70 patents, and previously founded AudioEye. WiSA Technologies acquired the Data Vault Holdings assets in December 2024 and became Datavault AI. Now he is suing the board he still sits on. The company says he remains a director even after removing him as chief executive.

The weekend a founder lost his company

The complaint lays out a five-day sequence. On October 28, Bradley asked the board to consider removing Moyer as chief financial officer. Two days later, on October 30, Moyer suspended Bradley on his own perceived authority, according to the complaint. The complaint says the board held no meeting and circulated no written consent, even though Datavault’s own bylaws give only the full board the power to remove officers. Bradley lost access to his email. A Sunday meeting followed, which the complaint calls defective.

Bradley put his position plainly in a statement released with the lawsuit. “I strongly dispute the legal validity of the Board’s decision to remove me as President and Chief Executive Officer,” he said. His lead counsel, Jacob Frenkel, a former SEC enforcement lawyer and federal prosecutor, went further. “When you’re out building and innovating and those you think you can trust decide to stage a corporate coup, the only place for relief is in court,” Frenkel said.

The $90-100 million offer nobody showed the board

The complaint alleges Bradley brought the company a $90-100 million funding offer one day before Moyer shut him out, and that Moyer “suppressed, withheld and concealed” it from the company’s independent directors. That figure is an alleged offer Bradley says he brought to the company. It is not confirmed funding, and no independent reporting has verified the offer or who saw it.

The allegation is the heart of the case. If the board’s independent directors never saw a nine-figure lifeline, they voted on a leadership change without the most important fact in front of them. If the offer was real and reachable, the lockout looks less like governance and more like a move to keep the founder away from his own rescue. Either way, the court will care about the paper trail: who received the offer, when, and what they did with it.

What the board says happened

The company’s side of the story arrived hours before the lawsuit, in a Business Wire announcement on the morning of November 6. The board appointed Moyer as chief executive and president. Kimberly Briskey became chair of the board. Sri Peruvemba became vice chair and Teri Gallo became chief operating officer. Stanley Mbugua became chief financial officer and Christopher R. Hardt became chair of the audit committee. All the appointments took effect immediately. The announcement states that Moyer succeeds Bradley, “who was removed as Chief Executive Officer and President on November 1, 2026. Mr. Bradley remains a member of the Board.”

A Form 8-K filed November 5 disclosed the removal and said the company terminated Bradley’s employment, effective November 1. The company also said former executive Sonia Choi is no longer with Datavault and cannot act on its behalf.

Briskey said the board acted “to strengthen Datavault’s leadership and governance, sharpen accountability and focus the Company’s resources on the opportunities that offer the clearest path to value for stockholders.” Moyer said the new leadership team “will be transparent about our progress, accountable for our results and committed to earning the confidence of our stockholders.”

The dates do not line up

Note the date gap, because it matters. Bradley alleges Moyer suspended him on October 30. The company says it removed him on November 1. Those two dates describe different events, and the gap between them is where the court will look. The board’s announcement also does not answer Bradley’s specific allegations. It says nothing about a board vote, an email cutoff, a Sunday meeting, or the financing offer. Presenting a new leadership slate is not the same as rebutting a complaint.

The company said it will report third-quarter 2026 results and share a business update. It has not announced a date yet.

Why the money matters

The financing offer matters because Datavault AI is short on room to maneuver. On October 26, the company told investors in a Form 8-K that four sets of financial statements should no longer be relied on, after concluding that bitcoin that Scilex Holding credited under a $150 million September 2025 stock deal never qualified as its own digital asset. Expected asset cuts run up to $92.2 million, and the shares fell by roughly half on October 27. A company restating its balance sheet and reassessing whether it can keep going needs cash, which is exactly what a $90-100 million offer would have been.

What the Datavault AI founder sues board case means for founders

Delaware’s Court of Chancery cares about process, not personalities. The complaint turns on a simple question: did the full board vote? If it did not, the bylaws may do Bradley’s work for him. If it did, his case gets much harder. That is the first lesson. Founder status is not protection. Paperwork is.

The second lesson is about roles. One person held the chairman’s seat and the chief financial officer’s job at the same time. That concentration let a single officer act, or appear to act, for the whole board. Founders should separate the chair and the chief financial officer, and write down who can suspend whom, before the fight starts.

The third lesson is about money. A financing offer that only the founder and the chief financial officer know about is a rumor, not a rescue. Get every offer to the independent directors in writing the same day it arrives, and keep the receipt.

The weekend lesson

The fourth lesson is about weekends. Boards move fast when nobody is watching. Bradley asked the board to consider removing Moyer on a Wednesday. By Sunday, the complaint says, Moyer had locked him out. Know your board’s meeting rules, know who can call an emergency session, and know what counts as a valid vote, because the weekend is when the rules get tested.

Governance adviser Erika Eliasson-Norris has spent her career inside boardroom fights, including forced CEO and chair removals. Activist funds watch for exactly this kind of opening. Anson Funds builds positions and pushes for board or executive change when it sees a gap between a story and the substance. More chief executive stories are in the CEOs archive.

Bradley wants his job back, and a Delaware judge will decide whether the process that removed him was valid. Whatever the court decides, the warning is already clear. If you founded the company, built the technology, and hold the patents, someone can still lock you out of your own boardroom in a weekend. Check who holds the keys before you need them.

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That is the story. Not the shutdown itself, but the sentence inside it. On November 4, founders Omer Har and Or Tamir announced that Explorium is ceasing operations. They said the company kept growing over the past year, even as the market went through real turmoil. Growth was not the problem. The business was.

What Explorium actually built

Explorium was founded in 2017 by Omer Har, Or Tamir and Maor Shlomo. It began as a data enrichment platform, connecting organisations to thousands of external data sources and signals so they could supplement their own datasets. The point was to help data professionals make better predictions and better decisions: predicting customer churn, assessing credit risk, finding new business opportunities. The founding belief, in the founders’ own words, was that AI is only as good as the data behind it.

The money followed the idea. A $3.6 million seed round came first, then a $15.5 million Series A in September 2019 led by Zeev Ventures, a $31 million Series B in July 2020, and a $75 million Series C in May 2021 led by Insight Partners. Total funding passed $127 million. The backers included Insight Partners, Zeev Ventures, Emerge, F2 Capital and 01 Advisors. For a time, that looked like the normal arc of a serious Israeli data company.

The pivot to AI agents

Then the market moved. Machine learning became a commodity, and capabilities that once belonged to specialised providers became widely available. After Har took over as chief executive in July 2023, Explorium decided to pivot early toward generative AI. The premise was that AI agents would emerge as a new class of business user, needing broad access to high quality data.

Building on its existing infrastructure and partnerships, the company launched AgentSource in early 2025, describing it as the first B2B data platform designed for go to market agents. It followed with what it called the first B2B data enrichment product built on the Model Context Protocol, which evolved into Vibe Prospecting, an in chat prospecting application. The founders said Vibe Prospecting drew more than 350,000 registered users.

The founders were candid about what happened next. “Today we are sharing hard news. After almost nine years, Explorium is ceasing operations,” Har and Tamir wrote in their farewell post. “Thanks to an extraordinary team, we moved rapidly in a market undergoing real turmoil and kept growing this past year. In the end, it saddens us to say it all just wasn’t enough.” They thanked customers, users, partners, investors and employees, and called building Explorium “the privilege of our careers.”

The Explorium shutdown AI pivot startup failure, in numbers

The numbers tell the story in one paragraph. More than $127 million raised across four rounds. More than 350,000 registered users for the newest product. Growth through the final year, by the founders’ own account. And a shutdown anyway. AgentSource will be discontinued on Wednesday, December 2, 2026, according to a notice on Explorium’s own site. The platform stays fully available until then, automated billing stopped on November 3, unused credits will be refunded within 30 days to the original payment method, and data exports remain available until December 2. All user data and account information will be deleted no later than December 31, 2026.

One number is deliberately missing here. Coverage at the time of the 2021 round put the company at roughly 130 employees, and that figure has been repeated since. It describes the company five years ago, not the team at closure, so it is not used here. What matters is not the headcount. It is that a company can do the hard things, raise the money, ship the products, grow the user count, and still not have a business that pays for itself.

The other co-founder’s second act

There is a second story inside this one, and it is worth telling plainly. Maor Shlomo, the third co-founder, left Explorium and built Base44, an AI app builder he developed largely alone. Wix bought the bootstrapped startup for about $80 million in cash plus earn-outs in June 2025. Base44 has since crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue around March 2026 and passed $200 million in late August, according to Shlomo, as reported by Dealroom.

That is not a taunt, and it should not be read as one. It is evidence about where the demand went. One company spent nine years and $127 million turning data into a product for AI agents. The other built a tool that lets people build apps with AI and sold it to a clear buyer. The market rewarded the second one faster. Founders should sit with that contrast, because it is the same market, the same AI wave, and two very different answers to the question of who pays.

What founders should steal

Write down the one revenue line your pivot changes. That is the lesson, and it has three lines.

First, name the paying customer the new product creates, not the user it attracts. Explorium’s Vibe Prospecting drew more than 350,000 registered users, and the company still closed. Registered users are not paying customers, and a pivot that only grows the first number is marketing, not strategy. Second, ask what exactly gets profitable that was not profitable before. If the pivot changes the product description but not who pays, how much they pay, or why they stay, it buys a faster way to burn the same money. Third, say the hard thing early, while there is still cash to change course. The founders kept growing and still ran out of road. Growth is a fact. A business is a verdict.

None of this makes Explorium a failure of effort or ideas. The team saw the AI wave early, rebuilt for it, and shipped real products into a market that moved faster than their business model. That deserves respect, and the founders’ farewell post earns it. But respect and a business are different things, and founders who confuse them will learn the difference the same way.

Explorium’s customers have a practical deadline: export what they need from AgentSource before December 2, when the platform goes dark and the data is deleted by the end of the year. Everyone else gets the lesson for free. An AI pivot is a product decision. Until it changes the business, it is not a strategy. Nine years, $127 million, a real product, and a market that moved faster than the business model. That is the AI era’s real failure mode, and it will not be the last example.

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For example, the market reaction tells you how seriously investors took the story. Shares fell as much as 20% to 52.11 rupees, the day’s lower circuit. However, they recovered to close at 57.17 rupees, down 12.2%. The fall came on a day the bank reported its highest ever quarterly profit. That profit was 218 crore rupees (2.18 billion rupees, about $22.9 million). In addition, total business crossed 1 lakh crore rupees (1 trillion rupees) in the September quarter. A record quarter did not save the CEO. Instead, a story did what numbers could not.

The market reaction and the perceived conflict

Vasudevan led Equitas since it began as a microfinance institution in 2007. In addition, he oversaw its conversion to a small finance bank in 2016. In other words, a small finance bank is a lender that serves people and small businesses underserved by mainstream banks. He spent two decades at the lender, after two decades at Cholamandalam, and built it from microloans into a listed bank.

The perceived conflict, stated fairly, is this. His daughter, Varshini Vasudevan Pathangi, co-founded Unico Housing Finance, an unlisted non-bank lender, in 2023. In fact, a non-bank lender, or NBFC, lends money but does not hold a banking licence. Vasudevan says the arrangement was disclosed to the bank’s board and to the Reserve Bank of India, India’s central bank. Furthermore, he says the bank had no dealings with Unico beyond one short-term deposit. That deposit was made about two and a half years ago and repaid at maturity. Moreover, he maintains there was no real conflict, and that the arrangement sits within the Banking Regulation Act.

In investor meetings over the past three years, he was repeatedly asked about the perceived conflict. He explained the disclosure, the single deposit, the regulatory position. However, the perception persisted. In his resignation letter he wrote: “Sometimes perceptions are stronger than reality.” In addition, investors had told him the “overhang” was causing the shares to underperform. Per media reports, the Reserve Bank had earlier this year asked the bank’s board about the relationship. This happened when his tenure was being extended. However, Vasudevan himself told BusinessLine that “the regulator is not in the picture at all.”

What the Equitas CEO resignation teaches founders

Founders treat disclosure as the fix for a conflict. It is not. In fact, disclosure tells people the facts. However, it does nothing about what they believe. Once a narrative attaches to a leader, every explanation sounds like a defence. As a result, the cost of staying eventually exceeds the cost of leaving. For example, Vasudevan chose exit, and that choice is the warning. Therefore, if you wait until investors tell you the overhang is hurting the stock, you have already lost the argument.

The board has asked Vasudevan to stay until a successor is found. In addition, it has asked its nomination and remuneration committee to identify internal and external candidates. Furthermore, any appointment will require Reserve Bank approval. This is not his first attempted exit. In 2022 he planned to step down to pursue philanthropy. However, the board talked him out of it. The difference between the two exits is the lesson. The first time he wanted to go. The second time the market wanted him gone.

What founders should do

Map every family, friendship and side venture overlap before investors do. Build real separation instead of relying on transparency alone: recusal from related decisions, independent oversight, or a clean break. If an overlap survives three investor meetings, treat it as a governance problem, not a communications problem. Transparency tells the truth. However, structure changes what people can believe.

Vasudevan built a bank over nearly two decades and left it at a record profit. He left not because he did something wrong, but because he could not kill a story. That is the part founders should remember. You do not lose your company the day you do something wrong. Instead, you lose it the day people stop believing the explanation.

Sources and further reading: Reuters: India’s Equitas Bank tanks after CEO steps down over conflict of interest. Hindu BusinessLine: Equitas SFB MD & CEO P N Vasudevan resigns citing perception of conflict of interest. Market data: EQUITASBNK.NS. More from CEO Medium: CEOs, Leadership & Management. Bausch + Lomb’s CEO Is Out, Nobody Will Say Why, and Forecasts Just Went Up. Lindt Fired Its CEO and Called Back the Old One. The Board Should Be Next.

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That is a 44 point gap. It comes from Boston Consulting Group, not from one company’s HR blog. BCG surveyed 645 CEOs at companies with at least $100 million in revenue, plus 500 nonexecutive employees, for the second edition of its CEO Insomnia Index, released on October 14, 2026. The report is back in leadership feeds this weekend, and the reason is simple. Every founder is now running an AI transition, and this survey measures what that transition feels like from below.

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The CEO employee trust gap, in plain numbers

First, look at the AI numbers, because they are the sharpest part of the story. Four in ten employees say their CEO has not been transparent enough about how AI will affect their roles and careers. Yet only 15% of CEOs worry that their approach to AI could erode trust. One side is anxious. The other side does not know it should be.

Second, the gap is wider than AI alone. Nearly 70% of CEOs are confident employees trust them to prioritize employee well-being when they fund critical business priorities. Only 36% of employees agree. That is a gap of more than 30 points on a question that should be easy to get right: do you put people first when money gets tight?

Third, most CEOs do not seem worried at all. In fact, 58% say they are not concerned about rising employee disgruntlement, and many point to efforts they already have in place. Meanwhile, 60% say near-term pressures consume a disproportionate share of their time, up 3 points from the previous survey. In other words, leaders have less time to build trust at the exact moment trust matters most.

Trust is not soft. It is effort.

Here is the number that should change how founders talk about trust. Among employees whose trust in their CEO’s handling of AI grew, 50% are more willing to go above and beyond at work than they were three months ago. Among employees whose trust eroded, fewer than 10% say the same. That is a difference of more than 40 points.

So trust is not a vibe. It is discretionary effort, and discretionary effort is output. A team that believes its leader will tell the truth works harder on a hard change. A team that does not believe it conserves energy, waits, and watches.

Be careful with what this survey does and does not prove. BCG reports what CEOs and employees said about themselves. It does not prove that AI causes distrust, or that trust alone causes extra effort. However, the association is stark, and it points in one direction: people give more when they feel honestly led through change, and they give less when they feel managed around it.

This is not one survey

The BCG numbers do not stand alone. Glassdoor’s Worklife Trends 2026 finds senior leadership ratings down sharply since their pandemic peak, with only a slight recovery in 2025. In employee reviews, mentions of misalignment rose 149% and mentions of distrust rose 26%. That language matters. Misalignment means people no longer believe the plan. Distrust means they no longer believe the person explaining it.

Businessolver tells a similar story from the other side of the desk. In its 2026 State of Workplace Empathy research, 33% of CEOs now describe their own workplace culture as toxic, up 25 points in a year. Among employees, 40% say the same. Even more telling, workers in cultures they call toxic report far less AI training than workers in cultures they call empathetic: 33% versus 87%. So the trust problem and the AI readiness problem may be the same problem, wearing two labels.

Add one more BCG finding, because it explains why the gap persists. About a third of CEOs, 34%, say they have considered stepping down in the past six months. At the largest companies in the study, that figure rises to more than 40%. Leaders are tired, pressed for time, and still expected to narrate a transformation they have not finished deciding. Silence then feels easier than honesty. Unfortunately, silence reads as a plan the team is not supposed to see.

What teams actually need to hear

Most AI announcements fail in the same way. A CEO announces a transformation as if the announcement were the strategy. The team hears a transformation with no role map, no timeline, and no honest answer about headcount. Then everyone does the math in private, and the private math is always worse than the real plan.

What teams actually need is three sentences. First, what changes. Second, who it affects. Third, when they will hear more. For example: “We are testing AI tools in customer support this quarter. No support roles change before March, and we will share the results with the team before we decide anything.” That is not a promise you cannot keep. It is a timetable people can hold you to.

And when you genuinely have not decided, say so, with a date attached. BCG’s own advice makes the same point: when answers are uncertain, communicate more, not less, rather than leaving employees to fill the silence with their own assumptions. “We have not decided yet, and here is when you will know” builds more trust than silence, because it treats the team like adults.

What founders should do this week

Do not launch another engagement survey and call it a trust check. Instead, try a smaller, sharper exercise.

First, ask the team directly what would make them trust the direction more. Ask in writing, anonymously if needed, and ask about AI specifically: which roles, which timelines, which decisions feel unclear?

Second, publish what you heard. Not a summary that smooths the edges, but the actual themes, including the uncomfortable ones. People trust a leader who repeats back hard feedback far more than one who thanks them and moves on.

Third, name one AI decision you will explain before you make it. Pick something real, like how AI will change one workflow, or how you will judge whether a pilot worked. Then explain it before the decision lands, not after.

Finally, measure again in 30 days. Ask the same question, in the same words, and compare the answers. Trust grows when people see their feedback change something. It dies when feedback disappears into a deck.

For more on building a culture that can survive hard change, read Creating Brave Cultures Through Transformational Leadership (link above). For the brain science behind why uncertainty drains performance, see How to create a brain-friendly workplace culture (link above). Both point to the same lesson: people do their best work when they understand the change and believe the person leading it.

The bottom line for founders

The CEOs who close this gap will not be the ones with the best AI tools. Tools are now easy to buy. Instead, the winners will be the leaders whose teams believe them when they say what comes next.

That belief is earned in small, repeatable acts: a clear role map, a real timeline, an honest “we have not decided yet” with a date for the answer. Do those things, and the 44 point gap starts to close. Skip them, and no AI rollout will save you, because the people who must make it work have already stopped believing the plan.

Photo by Tran Nhu Tuan on Pexels

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On Wednesday, a New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion to the state, the largest penalty the company has ever faced over the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The number is enormous. The reasoning is worse. Judge Francis Mathew did not describe a rogue team or a policy slip. He described a plan.

What the Meta $25 billion fine actually says

A jury found in September that Meta violated New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act more than 43 million times. The violations misled users about how Meta handled their data. Each violation can carry a penalty of up to $5,000, which put the theoretical ceiling near $219 billion. Mathew set the figure at $25 billion.

The case reaches back to 2018. That year, Facebook disclosed that a personality quiz app had harvested data from as many as 87 million users. It fed the data to Cambridge Analytica, the political consultancy that built voter profiles for the 2016 Trump campaign. New Mexico sued in 2021. While 48 other states chose to settle their claims, New Mexico went to trial alone. It sat through two weeks of evidence, and won.

The judge also found that the misrepresentations went far beyond a marketing page or a help centre. They reached the most senior levels of the company. That includes chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and former chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg.

Deception at the core of the business model

One sentence in the ruling is why this story belongs on a leadership page and not just a legal wire. Mathew wrote that Facebook’s misrepresentations about users’ control of their data “were not isolated incidents, but rather a systematic pattern of deception at the core of Facebook’s business model,” part of “a coherent strategy designed to mislead the public.”

Read that as a founder. Courts fine companies for broken rules all the time, and companies pay and move on. This ruling says something different: that the gap between the promise and the practice was the product strategy. The promise was control. The practice was collection. The company told users they held the keys while it monetised what walked through the door.

That is the version of the story that should worry every operator. After all, most companies do a milder version of it. The privacy page says one thing. The growth dashboard rewards another. Nobody writes the deception down as strategy, which is exactly how it becomes one.

The trust gap has a market price

Every chief executive claims trust is the company’s most valuable asset. The claim is cheap. Trust is not a value on a wall. It is the distance between what you say and what you do. And the people who measure it cannot see inside your building.

Meta’s fine is simply the market price of a wide gap, calculated by a jury at $5,000 a violation. Attorney General Raúl Torrez, who brought the case, joked that the state may have “paid for the construction of schools for the next 100 years,” and state officials say the money is dedicated to an education fund. Founders should hear the other side of the joke. The tuition is real. Whoever holds the company when the gap is finally measured pays it.

There is a practical discipline buried in this. Write the policies you could defend in a courtroom, not the ones that read well in a press release. Audit the distance between your public story and your data practices before a regulator does it for you. New Mexico has now published the playbook, and attorneys general in the other 49 states know how to read.

The appeal does not end the lesson

Meta says it will appeal, and the number may well shrink. Chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney called the ruling one that “makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico.” He argued that the lawsuit “seeks to impose a tax on speech.” The company may be right about the law. It is probably wrong about the lesson.

A penalty that a company can price in is not a deterrent; it is a licence fee. Meta has paid licence fees before, including a $5 billion federal settlement in 2019 over the same scandal. The uncomfortable question this verdict asks is whether $25 billion is finally large enough to change the internal maths. Or Meta absorbs it too, as the cost of doing business the way the business has always been done.

That question is not really about Meta. Every founder reading this runs a smaller version of the same calculation. How much daylight can exist between the story and the operation before someone with subpoena power measures it? New Mexico just showed the measuring instrument. The companies that survive it will be the ones that closed the gap while it was still cheap.

Photo: Anthony Quintano, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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Within hours, the interview stopped being about the tax code. It became about the man. Kirby collected $32.3 million in total compensation last year, 334 times what the airline paid its median employee. Every critic reached for the same two numbers, and in a credibility fight, numbers like that end the argument before it starts.

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The number that follows him into every room

The proxy statement is the document that haunts this story. United paid Kirby $32.28 million in total compensation for fiscal 2025. The package held a $1.2 million base salary and $22.6 million in stock awards. It also included $8 million in non-equity incentive pay and roughly $500,000 in other compensation. The same filing put the median United employee’s total compensation at $96,670. That is how the 334-to-1 ratio became the headline inside the headline.

Kirby did not build that ratio alone. United’s board set it, and shareholders approved the framework. Most of the package is stock that rises and falls with the share price. That is standard practice at any large airline. Nevertheless, it is beside the point once the chief executive starts using the word danger. FOX Business and Fortune both asked United how Kirby squares the package with his warning. They also asked whether he plans to reduce his own pay. The airline did not respond to either.

The Scott Kirby wealth tax argument, in his own words

Strip away the noise and the position is genuinely radical for a sitting Fortune 500 chief executive. Kirby argued that a wealth tax has to be national, because a state version would simply push rich residents across state lines. On inherited wealth he went further, backing inheritance taxes close to total confiscation above some level he did not define. He named no threshold and no rate, and he was not endorsing a specific bill. He was stating a principle.

On Wednesday, he returned to the subject on CNBC with a narrower frame: fairness. Workers pay income tax on every paycheck, he argued. Passive wealth, by contrast, can grow for a lifetime and never realize a taxable gain. It can then pass to heirs with a stepped-up cost basis that erases the tax bill. “That doesn’t feel fair to me,” he said. “It’s just a matter of fairness.” He also distanced himself from advocacy, noting that the Times had asked for a non-consensus view: “I’m not a politician, I’m not ever going to be in politics, nor am I a policy advocate for this or other programs.”

The backdrop is stark. Federal Reserve figures give the top 1 per cent of households 32.5 per cent of the nation’s net worth. That is up from 31.1 per cent a year earlier. The bottom half holds 2.3 per cent. Today’s federal estate tax tops out at 40 per cent above a $15 million per person exemption. An inheritance tax close to 100 per cent is a different system, not an adjustment. Kirby joins a short list of wealthy executives, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and Salesforce’s Marc Benioff among them, who have backed higher taxes on people like themselves. None of them put a number like 100 per cent on the table.

The pile-on was instant, and it was not really about tax policy

Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry supplied the line the whole backlash now runs on. “How audacious from a guy that didn’t even build @united and makes $32 million a year,” he wrote on X. “If he feels that strongly he could simply cut a check.” He linked to the Treasury’s public donation account for the national debt, and closed with: “Let’s see you step up and place your money where your mouth is!”

Harmeet K. Dhillon, the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, skipped the policy and went for the product: “The WiFi didn’t work on my last two flights.” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board dubbed it “Flying the Socialist Skies at United” and suggested more legroom instead. Some users, meanwhile, threatened to stop flying the airline.

The other side of the ledger is real too. The Guardian’s US Instagram post on the backlash drew about 11,000 likes and 350 comments. It was a sign that breaking ranks buys a constituency advertising cannot. His defenders add that he aimed the argument at a tax treatment, the stepped-up basis, that even many tax specialists find hard to defend.

The messenger is the argument

Kirby’s fairness point is arguable on the merits, and on CNBC he argued it well. But the debate never reached the merits, because a 334-to-1 pay ratio is a rebuttal the public can hold in one hand. A chief executive calls the wealth gap a danger to society while collecting $32.3 million a year. He is asking people to separate the message from the pay stub. They will not. They never do.

There is also a quieter point about boards. United’s directors approved every dollar of that package, knowing that blunt public positions are part of how Kirby leads. We made a version of this argument about the Lindt board this week. Directors own the consequences of the people and the packages they choose. If a board wants a populist chief executive, it should price the populism into the pay decision. And if Kirby believes concentrated wealth is the danger he describes, a remedy exists that needs no act of Congress. He can ask his board to restructure his own package tomorrow. Until he does, the lecture reads, fairly or not, as a prescription for a sacrifice he has not volunteered to make first.

What founders should take from this

Most founders will never be asked about tax policy on television, but the exposure is identical at every scale. The moment you take a public moral position, your own numbers become public evidence, and your critics will audit them faster and more gleefully than your supporters will. Pay, perks, layoffs: all of it gets read as the real text, with your statement as the footnote.

So pressure-test the stance against the spreadsheet before you publish either one. We have written before about how much a founder should pay themselves in year one. The discipline is the same at $32 million as at $120,000. Defend the number in the same breath as the principle. If the two cannot survive in the same sentence, one of them has to change.

Kirby, to his credit, did not retreat. He went on CNBC, restated the fairness case, and shrugged the whole episode off as one man’s view. And the attention only compounds: every angry post repeats his name, his airline and his argument. That is why the final judgement sits with United’s board. If bookings hold, this week becomes a case study in candor. If they do not, it becomes one in something else. For more on how we think about leading in public, see our Leadership & Management hub.

Photo: United Airlines, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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Elon Musk did not unveil a product in McGregor. He staged a piece of theater at SpaceX’s rocket test facility, in front of an invited crowd, streamed live to millions. Before the show, he told the audience they were there “to prove that it’s not AI”. He understood the assignment better than anyone: in 2026, the scarcest resource is not engineering talent or capital. It is belief. And belief, it turns out, can be manufactured one backflip at a time.

What Tesla claims the Roadster can do

Start with the numbers, because Tesla wants you to repeat them. The company claims the Roadster hits 60 mph in 0.81 seconds, tops 230 mph, and runs more than 300 miles on a charge. The thruster hardware, developed with SpaceX, is ten cold-gas nozzles fed by carbon-wrapped tanks holding roughly 600 liters of ultra-high-pressure air. Tesla says the rear thrusters alone push with more than 80 kilonewtons of force, comparable to a fighter jet engine. None of this has been independently tested or timed.

Some of Tesla’s own claims do not line up neatly. Musk suggested the car recharges its own air supply on the go. Lars Moravy, Tesla’s engineering chief, described a system needing externally supplied nitrogen and up to six hours to refill, though Tesla hopes to cut that to about thirty minutes. The demo car ran its entire routine with nobody inside. And the version that actually jumps, the single-seat Rocket, is not approved for public roads.

So no, the Roadster does not fly. Not the way the word means. It hops, briefly, under computer control, on a closed course, and then it needs hours before it can hop again. Roger Connor, the Smithsonian’s curator for vertical flight, put it plainly: “We’re not talking about sustained flight.”

The reservation ladder is a velvet rope

Then there is the pricing, which tells its own story. Tesla is taking $50,000 reservations for the Performance version and $250,000 for the Thrust version with rear thrusters. The Rocket, the one with the full flight system, is invite-only. No public price has been announced at all.

Read that again. A $50K tier, a $250K tier, and a tier you cannot buy your way into. That is not a product lineup. That is a membership list with wheels. Musk is selling proximity to the spectacle, priced by how close you get to stand.

What the Tesla Roadster flying car reveal was really selling

Here is the part most coverage missed. Barron’s called the Roadster a halo vehicle, but not the usual kind. The Mustang GTD sells Fords. The Roadster, Barron’s argued, is an advertisement aimed at engineers. Come to Tesla and SpaceX and build the unthinkable. Tesla says it received 6.12 million job applications in 2025. After Thursday night, expect more.

It is also an advertisement aimed at investors. The thrusters are SpaceX hardware. The venue was a SpaceX facility. The engineering team spans both companies. Analyst Gene Munster read the event as Musk rehearsing the Tesla-SpaceX merger he keeps floating, calling the reveal an engineering flex with no commercial value beyond traditional car makers. That is speculation, not an announcement. But it is informed speculation, and the staging did nothing to discourage it. Silicon Valley’s tech CEOs keep turning rivalry into theater: Musk just built the biggest stage.

This is the actual product Tesla shipped on Thursday: a story. One livestream bought more earned media than a year of advertising could, timed days before third-quarter results. Musk called the Roadster “the best of the last of the human-driven cars” and a farewell performance for the era when a founder could still thrill people with something you steer. Tesla’s future is robotaxis and robots. The Roadster is the closing act.

The part founders should not copy

A warning belongs here, because the wrong lesson is tempting. Nobody else can run this play. Munster’s “no commercial value” line is the tell: the spectacle works because Musk has spent fifteen years building an earned-media machine that turns every stunt into global coverage.

What founders can steal is the smaller, harder version. One public, undeniable proof of engineering beats ten press releases. It is the same muscle behind every great startup launch story. Pick the single demo that makes your category look backward, stage it tight, film it like a movie, and let the work speak. The Roadster drove upside down on a wall. Your version does not need thrusters. It needs to be true.

Musk built a flying Tesla, sort of. The car is not the point. The point is that he still knows how to make the whole world watch, and he does it by building things that should not be possible and then doing them live. Everything else, the reservations, the merger talk, the talent pipeline, follows the cameras.

The post Musk Built a Flying Tesla. The Car Is Not the Point. appeared first on CEO Medium.

Start with what is actually known. The Journal reports Amazon is in talks to acquire Decart for around $7 billion, citing people familiar with the matter, and adds the only sentence that matters right now: a deal could come together soon, “assuming talks don’t fall apart or another suitor doesn’t emerge.” This is not a done deal. It is a negotiation with a headline number.

What Decart actually sells

Decart was founded in 2023 by three Israeli engineers, brothers Dean and Orian Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev. It makes two things. The flashy one is real-time AI video: models like Lucy and Oasis that generate and edit video live and simulate 3D worlds for training robots. The boring one is the valuable one: software that makes it easier for developers to switch between different AI chips.

That second product is the whole story. If your code runs the same on Nvidia, Google, and Amazon silicon, then chips become a commodity and Nvidia’s pricing power cracks. Decart has raised more than $400 million from Sequoia, Benchmark, and Radical Ventures, and was valued at nearly $4 billion in May. Amazon is not paying $7 billion for video filters. It is paying for the crowbar that pries developers off Nvidia.

The $6 billion no that matters more than the $7 billion yes

Here is the data point everyone is underweighting. Bloomberg reported on September 7 that Anthropic had considered paying about $6 billion for Decart, completed due diligence, and chose not to proceed. Both companies declined to comment. Nobody outside those rooms knows why Anthropic passed, and anyone who tells you they do is inventing it.

But think about what a completed diligence pass means. Anthropic runs some of the deepest technical diligence in the industry. Its team saw the code, the benchmarks, the customer contracts, and the roadmap. Then it said no at $6 billion. A month later Amazon is circling at $7 billion. Either Anthropic missed something, or Amazon is buying something Anthropic was never shopping for.

My money is on the second one.

Why the Amazon Decart acquisition is about chips, not video

The Journal adds the detail that explains everything: Amazon Web Services gave Decart early access to its Trainium3 chip in 2025 after meeting the company and coming away impressed by its founders. CTech separately reported that Amazon has since become one of Decart’s strategic customers. Read that again. The buyer was already the power user.

Now the logic clicks. Amazon has spent years building custom silicon to escape Nvidia’s margin tax, but custom chips are useless if developers will not port their code. Decart’s chip-switching software is the missing adapter: it makes Trainium a credible alternative instead of a science project. Amazon is not acquiring a video startup. It is acquiring distribution for its silicon.

And a note on the headline’s question. Jeff Bezos is executive chairman; he is not in the diligence room. He does not need secret knowledge here. What Amazon “knows” is simply the value of this asset inside its own war, a number Anthropic could never see from the outside.

Two buyers, two games

This is the part founders should tattoo on their forearms. Anthropic and Amazon looked at the same company and played two different games. Anthropic was pricing an asset: what is Decart worth to us as a business, on its own merits? Amazon is pricing optionality: what is it worth to own the adapter that makes our nine-figure chip bet work?

The billion-dollar gap is not a math error. It is the difference between standalone value and strategic value, and in acquisitions that gap is where deals die or get wildly overpriced. Anthropic’s no was disciplined. Amazon’s maybe is strategic. Both can be right at the same time because they are answering different questions.

The founder lesson: a passed deal is not a ceiling

Most founders treat a passed deal as a verdict. A serious buyer looked, passed, and therefore the company is worth less than the ask. Decart just proved the opposite. One month after Anthropic walked at $6 billion, Amazon is talking $7 billion. The asset did not change in thirty days. The buyer did.

The lesson is to know which buyer you are talking to before you set your price. A peer acquirer pays for what you are. A strategic giant pays for what you unlock. Those are different numbers, sometimes a billion dollars apart. When Liang Wenfeng rewrote his own fundraising rules as DeepSeek’s facts changed, he was playing the same game: price the company you are becoming, not the one you were.

The bottom line

Watch the trajectory of the number, not just the number. Four billion in May. A $6 billion pass in September. Seven billion in talks in October. That slope tells you where AI infrastructure value is pooling: anything that loosens Nvidia’s grip.

And remember the deal is still just talks. If it falls apart, that tells its own story: two elite buyers passing in two months would raise real questions about what diligence keeps finding. If it closes, it confirms the new rule of the AI buildout. The hyperscalers are no longer just renting compute. They are buying the picks and shovels at whatever price keeps them out of Nvidia’s toll booth.

Read more in our Leadership & Management hub.

Sources: The Wall Street Journal, PYMNTS (via Bloomberg), Daily Caller

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Bloomberg reports that DeepSeek is close to securing at least 80 billion yuan, about $11.93 billion, in a new round that could approach $15 billion once signed term sheets are counted. The reported DeepSeek $12 billion funding round started with a $7.5 billion target at a roughly $75 billion valuation, then ballooned on investor demand, with battery giant CATL and Tencent writing the biggest checks. Nothing has closed yet, and Reuters notes it could not independently verify the report. But the direction is unmistakable: after the round, DeepSeek plans to restructure for an IPO in early 2027.

For anyone who has followed Liang Wenfeng, the interesting number is not $12 billion. It is zero. That is how many outside investors DeepSeek had for the first three years of its life.

The Man Who Did Not Want Your Money

Liang is the quant-finance founder who built DeepSeek inside his hedge fund High-Flyer with his own money and his own computing power. He studied engineering at Zhejiang University, co-founded High-Flyer in 2015, and started DeepSeek in 2023. When its R1 model matched top Western models in early 2025 at a fraction of the training cost, he became the most famous founder in Chinese tech without taking a single outside check.

He was explicit about why. Asked in a 2024 interview whether DeepSeek had fundraising plans, Liang said the company had no short-term plans to raise, adding that the real bottleneck had never been funding but the embargo on high-end chips. Industry watchers summed up his stance as three iron rules: no fundraising, no IPO, no commercialization. And it worked. The purity bought him elite talent, total focus, and a mystique no marketing budget could buy. He owned 84 percent of the company before outside money arrived, according to a TechCrunch analysis of corporate records, and he still put about $3 billion of his own assets into the June round.

Why the Math Changed

Then scale sent the bill. DeepSeek is reportedly building a data center in Inner Mongolia with at least 160,000 Huawei AI chips, developing its own inference chip to cut dependence on Nvidia and Huawei alike, and chasing AGI while every rival lab arms for the same prize. The investor frenzy follows the V4-Flash model, which set new benchmarks for cost and performance against Anthropic and OpenAI. A research skunkworks funded by a trading firm’s profits can do a lot. It cannot do all of that.

The business changed too. The Information reported in September that DeepSeek’s annualized revenue run rate had hit $1 billion, more than doubling in a few months after API price hikes of 2.3 to 4.5 times. Liang told investors the company devotes more than 70 percent of its computing capacity to training new models. A company with a billion-dollar revenue run rate, 160,000 chips on order, and an IPO on the calendar is not a side project anymore. It is a company, and companies need capital structures.

The IPO machinery is already moving. Reuters reported in September that DeepSeek hired CITIC Securities to prepare for a possible listing on Shanghai’s STAR Market, and that the company hired its first CFO, GL Ventures partner Yan Wentao. The June round, about $7.4 billion at a valuation above $50 billion, was the first crack in the wall. This round knocks the wall down. And DeepSeek is not alone in the stampede: rival Moonshot AI has filed confidentially for a Hong Kong listing, while Zhipu and MiniMax are already listed there.

What the DeepSeek $12 Billion Funding Round Teaches Founders

Here is the uncomfortable part for founders who admired Liang’s purity: he was right then, and he is right now. No fundraising was brilliant strategy when DeepSeek was a research lab and High-Flyer’s trading profits covered the bills. It is fiction when you need a 160,000-chip data center. Principles are strategy, and strategy changes when the facts change.

Founders fetishize consistency. They cling to old rules to protect their image while the company starves. Liang is doing the harder thing: rewriting the rules in public and taking the heat. He even paused this same round in July after his private remarks at an investor meeting leaked and went viral, then came back when the terms were right. That is not selling out. That is negotiating from strength, in the same compute arms race every AI founder is now fighting.

The real test is control. What made DeepSeek work was a founder with majority ownership answering to nobody. The question now is whether the Tencent and CATL money comes with the kind of influence Liang spent a decade refusing. The reported terms suggest he knows this: in a May meeting with prospective backers he demanded no poaching of his people and no encouragement of spinouts. Keep watching the governance, not the valuation.

What to Watch Next

First, whether the round actually closes at $12 billion or pushes toward $15 billion, and at what valuation. Second, the IPO timeline: early 2027 is the reported plan, and a STAR Market listing needs Chinese regulatory clearance, so the calendar can slip. Third, whether the research culture survives the money. DeepSeek has already lost key researchers to Xiaomi and ByteDance, and nothing kills a talent-dense lab faster than becoming a normal company with normal politics, in an industry where even OpenAI is shedding researchers.

In two years we will remember this as either the day DeepSeek became a company or the day the money broke it. Bet on the founder who changed his mind in public rather than in secret. And write your own rules for the company you are, while staying ready to rewrite them for the company you want to become.

Read more in our Entrepreneurship & Startups hub.

Sources: Reuters, The Decoder, Reuters, PYMNTS, Wikipedia

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