Wires Crossed #84 – May 5

Facebook Co-Founder Renounces US Citizenship
Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin is renouncing his US citizenship. It’s not due to a sudden dislike for his adopted homeland, it seems the Brazilian-born Harvard graduate has decided to up sticks for  economic reasons. Once Facebook goes public with its IPO, he will owe a huge amount of capital gains tax if he decides to sell his shares. He moved to Singapore just over two years ago, where there is no such tax. Sounds like a shrewd move on his part.

Microsoft Backs Russian Pirates To Go After Hackers
Microsoft has invested in the aptly named Pirate Pay start up, which goes after – and disrupts – pirate downloads. There are a couple of pieces of irony here in that the company is a play on words for one of the biggest and infamous bit torrent sites, Pirate Bay. Also, the company is based in Russia, one of the top territories where malware, netbots etc are generated– and we won’t even go into the country’s almost non-existent policing of such activities. It will be interesting to see if the company lives up to its own self-aggrandising hype.

Sexist Rant At Dell Summit Gets Apology – Kind Of
A moderator at a recent Dell summit on technology decided it was a great time to bring out all his sexist jokes while acting as MC. The aptly named Mads Christensen told his jokes to a mixed audience thinking they were funny. However, some people listening in were not that impressed at his attempt at stand up, the upshot being that Dell decided to apologise….three weeks later and in a fashion that seemed a little less than sincere as it spruiked itself as an equal-opportunity employer as opposed to saying sorry for Christensen’s rant.

Yahoo CEO Falls Short On Qualifications
Yahoo’s CEO Scott Thompson has caused a minor storm after it was found out that the qualifications listed in his official biography were wrong. The biography stated that he had degrees in accounting and computer science, when it was found that he only had the accounting degree. To add to the confusion, Thompson has indicated that he never said he had a computer science degree in the first place, nor did he offer up his resume when interviewed for the job. To had fuel to the fire, Daniel Loeb from Third Point, a hedge fund that has shares in the company and therefore is demanding four seats on the Yahoo board, allegedly wants Thompson fired. We don’t think Loeb has a case if Thompson has been forthright all along.