By LARRY NEUMEISTER

NEW YORK (AP) — The founder and former CEO of the cryptocurrency lending platform Celsius Network was sentenced Thursday to 12 years in prison after a prosecutor labeled him a predator who “preyed on hope” by enticing vulnerable customers to risk their life savings for a supposedly safe investment.

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Alexander Mashinsky, 59, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge John G. Koeltl, who said a substantial term in prison was necessary for someone who engaged in “extremely serious” crimes that enabled him to pocket over $45 million while some of his customers lost everything and suffered severe psychological harm.

Celsius declared bankruptcy in 2022, exposing risky financial bets Mashinsky had made with some of the $20 billion that thousands of customers poured into the company. He had promised that their money would be safe and secure at Celsius, which pitched itself as a modern-day bank where crypto assets could earn interest.

The defense blamed the collapse of Celsius on a “cataclysmic downturn” of cryptocurrency markets in May and June of 2022 and said in court papers that Mashinsky’s “actions were never predatory, exploitative or venal. He never acted with the intent to hurt anyone.”

But Assistant U.S. Attorney Allison Nichols cast him as a financial predator, telling the judge Thursday that Mashinsky had deceived customers from the start by exaggerating Celsius’ ability to build momentum.

“He preyed on hope,” she said. “Mashinsky knew exactly what he was doing — selling these people hope.”

She said the customers were not going to be made financially whole regardless of money that can be recovered through bankruptcy proceedings.

Before he was sentenced, Mashinsky sobbed several times as he apologized to customers and referenced his difficult past as his family was able to leave a small Ukrainian town in the former Soviet Union with help from the United States when he was 7.

The family moved to Israel, where Mashinsky served three years in the Israeli Defense Forces as a fighter pilot before coming to America.

Mashinsky said he “never meant to hurt anybody here after all this country has done for me.”

“I’m truly sorry,” he said, describing himself as someone “who came from nothing.”

When he pleaded guilty in December, Mashinsky admitted to misleading customers between 2018 and 2022 by promising their investments were safe even as he fabricated Celsius’ profitability and put customers’ funds at the mercy of uncollateralized loans and undisclosed risky market bets.

His attorney, Marc Mukasey, said victim impact statements submitted to the court were “rather brutal” toward his client.

“We hear the intensity of their pain,” he said. “Our sympathies are with everyone.”

Several victims spoke at the sentencing hearing.

Cameron Crewes, who serves on a victims’ committee, called for a “harsh sentence,” saying nearly 250 victims died before they could see justice served or get adequately compensated for losses.

“Many people have been wiped out,” he said.

In a statement, U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton said Mashinsky “made tens of millions of dollars while his customers lost billions.”

He added: “America’s investors deserve better. The case for tokenization and the use of digital assets is strong, but it is not a license to deceive. The rules against fraud still apply.”

Reports that the White House may propose nearly a 50% cut to NASA’s Science Mission Directorate are both mind-boggling and, if true, nothing short of disastrous.

To make those cuts happen — a total of $3.6 billion — NASA would have to close the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, and cancel the mission that will bring back samples of Mars, a mission to Venus and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is nearly ready to launch.

Every space telescope besides the Hubble and the James Webb would be shut down. According to the American Astronomical Society, some cuts would include projects that help us understand the sun’s effects on global communications, a potential national security threat.

Casey Dreier, the policy advocate for the Pasadena-based Planetary Society, says, “This is an extinction-level event for the Earth- and space-science communities, upending decades of work and tens of billions in taxpayers’ investment.”

In addition, NASA as a whole would see a 20% cut — just as we are moving forward with the Artemis program. Artemis is NASA’s step-by-step “Moon to Mars” human spaceflight campaign. Artemis II is set to launch sometime next year and will send four astronauts on a lunar fly-by, the first time humans have been in close proximity to another celestial body in more than 50 years. While it seems likely that Artemis will continue in some fashion, a 20% overall agency budget cut won’t leave any part of NASA unaffected.

The president promised a “golden age of America”; his nominee to head NASA promised a “golden age of science and discovery.” This would be a return to the Dark Ages.

Taking a blowtorch to space science would also have little effect on the federal budget while setting back American leadership in space — and the inspiration it provides across political divides — by generations.

The Astronomical Society warns that our cutbacks will outsource talent “to other countries that are increasing their investments in facilities and workforce development.” And, as Dreier points out, spacecraft would be “left to tumble aimlessly in space” and billions wasted that have already been spent. “Thousands of bright students across the country,” he wrote recently, “would be denied careers in science and engineering absent the fellowships and research funds to support them.”

Here’s the dollars-and-cents context. NASA’s budget since the 1970s “hovers” between 1% and 0.4% of the federal discretionary spending, according to the Planetary Society’s analysis, yet for every dollar spent, NASA generates $3 in the national economy. NASA’s giveback was worth nearly $76 billion in economic impact in 2023, supporting more than 300,000 jobs. NASA’s bang-for-the-buck is astronomical, pun intended.

Cutting waste is one thing. Evisceration is another. When it comes to science — from public health to climate change — the current administration is doing the latter, not the former.

Meanwhile, China continues its space ambitions, with plans for a human lunar campaign and its own “sample return” mission to the Red Planet. For now, fortunately, the bipartisan support for NASA seems to be holding. Democrats and Republicans in Congress, led by the Planetary Science Caucus, have spoken out against this attack on NASA. And the Planetary Society has engaged thousands of passionate activists to fight this battle.

Humans yearn for connection to the universe — so we watch launches on social media, we follow the tracks of rovers on Mars and we marvel at creation in pictures transmitted from the James Webb Space Telescope. We borrow telescopes from the public library and look to the heavens.

Bending metal — the actual process of making rovers and spaceships and telescopes — drives economic activity. Fascinating results — the data from space science missions — fire the imagination.

We choose to go to space — sending humans and probes — and we pursue knowledge because curiosity is our evolutionary heritage. We explore other worlds to know them and, in doing so, we discover more about ourselves.

If you agree, let Congress know. That may be the only backstop against dumbly going where no budget has gone before.

Christopher Cokinos is a nature-and science writer whose most recent book is “Still as Bright: An Illuminating History of the Moon from Antiquity to Tomorrow.” Los Angeles Times.

 

Warren Buffett is stepping down as chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., the company he built alongside his late partner Charlie Munger for the past six decades. It’s a final show of humility by a man many consider the greatest investor of all time.

Operating in an era replete with purported Wall Street soothsayers, the 94-year-old Buffett always rejected the idea that anyone — even him — could predict the future. Nicknamed the Oracle of Omaha (a misnomer perhaps), he credited his success to patience and insisting on only buying the businesses he understood. From the early years of Berkshire, those included a textile business, insurance company GEICO, the Buffalo News and See’s Candies. After delivering a 20% annual compounded annual gain between 1964 and 2024, about double that of the S&P 500 Index, the business is now a behemoth valued at more than $1.16 trillion, more than 390,000 employees and a cash hoard totaling $347.7 billion.

Buffett gave credit to the people around him, including vice chairman for non-insurance operations Greg Abel — his chosen successor — and of course Munger, a lawyer by training and poker player. With the influence of Munger, Buffett slowly moved from a philosophy of buying “cigar butt” investments — as he’d learned from his mentor Ben Graham — to a style of investing that might best be characterized today as “quality”: buying great companies at the right price. The key example of that worldview in Berkshire’s portfolio became Apple Inc. “I am embarrassed to say that Tim Cook made more money for Berkshire than I ever did, so credit should be given to him,” Buffett said Saturday, with Apple CEO Cook in the audience.

Buffett’s legend grew during the 2008 global financial crisis when he opportunistically scooped up investments in Goldman Sachs Group Inc., General Electric Co. and Dow Chemical Co. He managed to do so because he had stockpiled cash in the runup to the crisis — much as he’s done in recent years. Yet he always dismissed the notion that he had any great foresight or that anyone in the investing business had such capacity — a theme that he returned to Saturday when asked about the current state of financial markets and the economic risks of the moment. In Buffett’s telling, he always just waited for the right opportunities to present themselves, and passed on anything less.

In a way, humility was Buffett’s brand. Though he worked briefly in New York early in his career, Buffett ultimately returned to build Berkshire in Omaha, Nebraska, where he was born and has lived in the home he bought in 1958 for $31,500. He always insisted on treating Berkshire’s shareholders as co-owners in the company, an ethos that was always on display at his sprawling annual shareholder meeting in Omaha, dubbed the Woodstock of Capitalism, in which Buffett would sit for hours taking questions from the audience.

Despite Berkshire’s incredible run, Buffett’s conservative tendencies may have also contributed to the company’s lagging performance in recent years — an era in which cheap and easy money often pushed valuations to extraordinary levels. Since the financial crisis, Berkshire is only keeping pace with the S&P 500, a benchmark that any investor can mimic through shares of an exchange-traded fund. Some of that may underscore the ways in which the investing industry has changed and become more democratized — but also harder to outperform even for the most gifted investors. Others would say that the equity market values are too high relative to historical levels and are set for a correction, and that cash-rich Berkshire may ultimately come out on top.

As for Buffett’s personal fortune of $168.6 billion, he owes at least some of it to his long career and life and the magic of compound investing, as he’s frequently admitted. Although Buffett’s announcement Saturday was unexpected, Abel, 62, has long been groomed as the Oracle’s successor. Buffett, starting to sound every one of his 94 years, said he would recommend to the board of directors that Abel become the new chief executive.

Earlier in the day, Buffett — with his signature folksy humor — dismissed the idea that Berkshire’s sizeable cash stockpile was somehow a gift to Abel to make him look good. “I wouldn’t do anything nearly so noble as to withhold investing myself just so Greg could look good,” he said. He wasn’t totally joking. As much as Buffett valued relationships, his first allegiance in business was always to Berkshire’s shareholders, something that he demonstrated once again when he laid the groundwork for his succession to begin.

Jonathan Levin is a columnist focused on US markets and economics. Previously, he worked as a Bloomberg journalist in the US, Brazil and Mexico. He is a CFA charterholder.

 

DALLAS — If Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were your electrician, you’d get a shock every time you touched a light switch. As U.S. Health and Human Services secretary, he is dangerously steering us away from one of the greatest public health victories in human history.

His disregard of facts about infectious disease is unacceptable as measles spreads. In North Texas, residents could soon witness firsthand the needless suffering caused by rejecting safe, effective vaccines.

Kennedy visited a farm outside Hillsboro last week, and during a brief session with reporters, he claimed that a Gaines County child whose funeral he attended didn’t die of measles (she did) and that Europe had 127,000 cases of measles last year (sort of). He also said news media organizations focus too much on measles and not enough on autism and chronic disease.

Where do we start? Yes, the child died because she had contracted measles. About 1 in 20 children with measles develop pneumonia, and 1 to 3 of every 1,000 infected children die of respiratory or neurological complications of the viral disease.

Kennedy’s statement about measles in Europe was — perhaps unintentionally — misleading. The 27 member countries of the European Union had 35,212 measles cases in 2024. That is tens of thousands fewer than he said, but almost 10 times more than in 2023. The number he cited probably came from a World Health Organization report. It included measles cases in countries like Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, which are usually considered part of central Asia rather than Europe.

We also dispute the notion that chronic diseases don’t receive much news coverage or publicity. Talk shows, newspapers, magazines, podcasts, social media and websites constantly push out health information and advice — good, bad and insane — about diet, exercise and chronic conditions.

In contrast, when was the last time you saw a television ad or heard a snappy jingle for the MMR vaccine? Probably never. Before this outbreak, how often did talk show hosts discuss measles or news sites post stories about it? Infectious diseases that were eliminated in this country, as measles was in 2000, only make news when they reappear.

Toward the end of the Q&A in Hillsboro, Kennedy said his agency is developing a new worksheet to instruct doctors how to treat measles. That’s like suggesting alternative firefighting techniques when a simple burn ban could prevent the wildfire.

The traditional approach to measles — two doses of the MMR vaccine for young children — works. Before the South Plains outbreak, the last U.S. death from measles was in 2015.

Since the Gaines County measles outbreak began, it has grown to 702 cases, with 91 patients sick enough to need hospitalization and two deaths. We’ve exported the disease to New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas and Mexico. Kennedy’s approach to the ongoing outbreak, and to infectious disease in general, is indefensible. It just makes Americans get measles again.

— The Dallas Morning News