“Sports Illustrated published a startling expose five years ago on the financial health of retired athletes. The magazine found that 78% of former NFL players were in financial distress within two years of retirement. NBA players, who have the highest average annual salary in sports at $5 million, were not much better with an estimated 60% broke within five years of hanging up their high tops. But for a certain cluster of athletes, the millions have continued to pile up after their playing days are over” — Kurt Badenhausen. Read The Highest-Paid Retired Athletes
Want to catch up on Chairman Camp’s proposal for tax reform? Read Anthony Nitti’s two-part story here.
“The collapse of Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox is already being described as Bitcoin’s ‘Lehman Brothers moment,’ with the phrase “too big to fail” following close behind. Only this time, no politician is going to call for a bailout” — Jasper Hamill. Read Too Big To Fail? Crypto-Community Calls For Mt. Gox Bitcoin Bailout
“The latest of the Snowden leaks may be the most salacious. The Guardian reports that Britain’s surveillance agency GCHQ ran a program called Optic Nerve that intercepted millions of Yahoo YHOO +2.17% users’ video chats. It wasn’t targeted surveillance; GCHQ put out a digital net on via its Internet cable taps to capture everything it could. The Guardian doesn’t report on whether the image capture, which was experimentally combined with facial recognition, ever netted a terrorist” — Kashmir Hill. Yahoo Users’ Sexy Video Chats Intercepted By Intelligence Agency
“Like a man on fire, Aubrey McClendon is working feverishly to orchestrate a comeback for the ages. In the past six months McClendon, through his American Energy Partners, has raised nearly $3.6 billion in investor capital and gobbled up hundreds of thousands of acres of land in Ohio and Oklahoma” — Christopher Helman. Read Man On Fire: Aubrey McClendon Raises Billions To Finance His Redemption
“If you’re one of the 1.14 million followers of the @HistoryInPics Twitter account, which posts delightfully obscure pictures of historical subjects and events, you may have asked yourself, ‘Are they making any money off this?’ The answer is yes. Quite a bit of money” — J.J. Colao. Read The $1M-A-Month Business Behind Your Favorite Twitter Accounts
“This year, a record 76 countries submitted films in the Oscar foreign language category, and of course only five received nominations. One of the five is the previously under-the-radar film Omar, written and directed by Hany Abu-Assad, whose Oscar nominated film Paradise Now won the Golden Globe in 2005 for Best Foreign Language Film” — Dina Gachman. Read The Path To Financing Foreign Language Film Oscar Nominee ‘Omar’