Capital One to acquire Brex for $5.15B

This is called value creation.

So they're getting the employees' shares without compensating the employees?

And there's incentives paid to the people who approved the deal, separate from their shares?

(I've heard of liquidation preferences, but never by the person making a job offer with stock options. Bribery also never came up.)

CapitalOne shareholders will decide if they want to sue the management over buying a company which primarily focuses on AI-bubble-startups.

We're at a very late stage of the AI bubble which might be the last ZIRP-fueled bubble to pop after which VC as an investment vehicle will be dead for years to come. Rising tide lifts all boats and all, but many of the "genious" VCs already have problems returning capital from their older funds.

Capital One management is friends with VCs, VCs want to cash out from their investments without big losses, some parties, some holidays, as easy as that.

They have a different strike price for options that is set via a 409a.

It’s possible that employees got, at the peak, grants with strike prices at a $2bn 409a valuation. We don’t know. What we do know is that no employee ever got grants with a strike price of a $12.5bn valuation. That’s just not how this works.

There's nothing wrong with debit cards being used.

If I can shout one thing back up to your rooftop:

Why on earth do your transactions cost 2 or 3 percent. For what? For basically verifying an RFID chip and adding a single entry to a ledger?

Don't say you're getting it back with points or whatever because we all know that the credit card company won't be going broke so that cut is coming from somewhere. And in the end that's always the consumer

Even better, our small town (pop. 100) gas station upgraded their pumps a while back, and they have NFC! Finally my normal fill-up location is skimmer-resistant. Or is it skimmer-proof?

I've been through it personally and with friends.

My experience was basically yours. I am a relatively highly paid professional with a large amount of assets with my bank. I get pretty good service, even at my giant national retail bank. I call, make a demand, they tend to just do it without too many questions.

My more low income friends have also gone through it, and I've assisted with them since they were panic'ing. Their experience is absolutely nothing like mine. Every single one spent days to weeks being sandbagged by sometimes the same bank I dealt with on my issue.

Your experience will very greatly depending on how "valuable" of a customer your bank feels you are to them.

> U.S. banks largely give debit cards the same protections as credit cards for at least the last 15 years.

On paper, sure. In practice, no. Funds frozen during an "investigation" matter a whole lot more when it's your money vs. a made up credit limit number that wasn't real to begin with.

Slowly over the next three months the charges were slowly reversed. In the end the bank didn't reverse all of them, but my friend did get most of her money back.

It wouldn't be quite the same impact spread out over 5 cards paid out of multiple checking accounts with slightly different billing cycles.

Hence why cash discounts are a thing (and yes they're legal again).

It's not a great system but it's what we have so using debit instead of credit does mean losing out.

This is no longer a thing, there was a settlement with Visa/MC that removed this provision from their merchant contracts. You are now allowed to pass on transaction fees if you feel like it as a merchant.

It was also never illegal. It simply was part of the contract to do accept Visa/MC/Amex and they'd close your merchant account if you got caught doing it.

You just agreed with my premise but that in your case the dollar amount was low enough to be inconsequential. If someone ran up $5k of charges on your card right before you needed to pay rent/mortgage/whatever, this would have been far more annoying.

Also - credit card protects you from this scenario, for free, or in fact pays you money with any of the cash back cards.

1. Scammer clones your credit card with a skimmer and pays for $500 of clothes at the mall. You dispute the charges. The funds are actually not given to the store for a bit given that credit transactions take a while to settle. Upon the dispute, the store now needs to prove that you were there and bought those clothes to get their $500, or else the bank/Visa won't pay them.

2. Scammer clones your debit card with a skimmer and pays for $500 of clothes at the mall. You dispute the charges. The store already got paid though. The bank doesn't want to give you another $500 in case you are actually in on the scam, then they'll be out an additional $500. Eventually assuming they can't prove you actually bought the clothes, I think the store would have the $500 confiscated, but usually you're still liable for $50 if you reported it quickly enough, but could be more if you take too long to report the fraud.

Of course debit cards can easily be converted to even easier-to-launder money substitutes, too.

Since you have such high moral standards I hope you don't invest in any index funds because lots of companies in those would probably not live up to your standards

There is no "moral" quandary. Sellers that have the same price for credit and non credit payment methods are simply betting that people using credit will be more willing to pay higher prices overall and still buy from them compared to their competitors' with lower prices who charge more for credit cards.

Every year, fewer and fewer of my expenses are paid with a credit card because more and more sellers are not betting on this. My kids' gymnastics class/tutoring/daycare charges 3% or more for credit cards. My home wired ISP and mobile network provider charges 5% more for credit cards. My property tax, insurance, water/sewer utility, all charge 3% or more. Even Target charges 5% for credit cards. Basically all tradespeople that come to fix things on my house charge extra and ask for Zelle/Venmo electronic cash payments instead.

So in all these cases, I do not use a credit card to pay. But the point is, it is up to the seller to decide what price they want to charge for credit and non credit, so there is no "moral" quandary for buyers. No one's hand is being forced.

Edit: to respond to comment below due to hitting posting limit, the extra charge does not go to the card issuer, the seller collects the higher price. If I choose to pay with a non credit card payment as a result of the extra charge for credit cards, then the credit card issuer gets nothing.

Whether or not credit card interest rates and terms are usurious or otherwise morally problematic is not a credit card user's moral responsibility. When I use a credit card, I do not ask or enable or incentivize someone else to be taken advantage of.

As for saying that the argument that using credit cards because they have more fraud and security measures is not a good argument because the world should be different is also quite silly and naive since arguments should be made based on how the world currently operates not how you wish it might operate in the future. Life is much easier when you live in reality

Counterpoint, the financially literate are subsidizing the existence of the financially illiterate via taxes and social programs.

Stripe does KYC for their merchants and exactly know that they are a company of certain type from the US.

Stripe facilitates a sale of digital goods between the US-based merchant and EU-based consumer. At this point the US-based merchant is obligated to pay the VAT and create an INVOICE.

Only Stripe knows from which EU country the customer comes from. The US-based merchant does not know which EU country the customer comes from.

Therefore Stripe is obligated to calculate the applicable VAT (based on country of customer) for the transaction and deduct it fromt he payment amount. STRIPE IS NOT DOING THIS.

And once payment is made Stripe does not enforce the merchant to provide an invoice, even though Stripe knows exactly it just facilitated a sale of digital goods between US-based company and EU-based customer. Stripe even enables the merchant to put fantasy information into the receipts and invoices, they don't have valid company name, addresses, or registration numbers.

Stripe also allows their merchants who just did a transaction to EU customer to only offer a "receipt", with no sign of an invoice. This "receipt" can contain a single website url, it can contain total fantasy name, it does not need to contain an address, or even a country of the Stripe merchant. It does not contain a company registration number or jurisdiction of the Stripe merchant. It does not contain company type or legal company name of the Stripe merchant. EVEN THOUGH STRIPE KNOWS ALL OF THIS BECAUSE THEY KYC THEIR MERCHANTS.

This is in total violation of any EU accounting rules which also applied to Ireland where the Stripe EU HQ is.

Luckily Stripe lawyers know exactly that they are systematically aiding and abetting tax fraud against the European Union and once you press the proper regulatory buttons they will cave, and after months of stonewalling suddenly their merchants are forced to provide their FULL COMPANY NAME AND COMPANY REGISTRATION NUMBER AND COUNTRY OF OPERATION, and actually state VAT in the invoice.

But their default mode of operation is "We are located in Ireland, EU law applies to us, we know EU customer buys digital goods from US merchant, we KYD'd the merchant but still we ignore that EU VAT applies to the transaction".

Any accountants and lawyers working for Stripe Ireland should be disbarred just on the fact they are associated with this systematic tax fraud.

There was no systematic remediation of the situation - even though Stripe knows about tax fraud by a merchant, they will only restate the invoices FOR THE SINGLE CUSTOMER THAT COMPLAINS ABOUT IT instead of forcing the merchant to properly create invoices for every single transaction with EU customers of that merchant.

Show me a tax agency in your country which allows you to get away with this. It is highly criminal, systematic behavior, clearly targeted against the European Union.