For drugmaker Pfizer, a fortune amassed in the COVID pandemic is now paving the path to pharma nirvana: a weight loss pill worth billions.

The company has reaped nearly $100 billion from selling COVID-19 vaccines and treatments to U.S. taxpayers and foreign governments. With that windfall, it plans to get richer, sinking the cash into developing and marketing potential blockbusters for conditions like migraines, ulcerative colitis, prostate cancer, sickle cell disease, and obesity.

It just announced it will triple or even quadruple the price of its COVID vaccine once it goes on the commercial market next year. Meanwhile, the company is inundating doctors and pharmacistsand consumerswith advertising touting its COVID drug Paxlovid.

Pfizer is a remarkable marketing machine. They have an incredible ability to make the most of molecules and get them adopted, said Timothy Calkins, a professor of marketing at Northwestern Universitys Kellogg School of Management.

The federal government is helping Pfizer with its marketing, urging people to get boosters targeting the omicron variants, although early data has been mixed on whether the shots work better than the earlier version. But even with a 66% drop in COVID vaccine sales in the past quarter, the company made about $4.4 billion in those three months. Pfizer has a deep stream of cash to finance its future. COVID has been very good for business.

The company appears most excitedjudging from its messages to investorsabout two experimental diabetes pills, me too drugs in the class known as GLP-1 agonists. As Pfizer competitors have already discovered, they double as weight-loss drugs. In one trial, more than half of obese patients on a high-dose Eli Lilly and Co. injectable lost a fifth of their body weightresults that have raised the drugs cachet as a diet aid in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and other social niches where cost is no issue and being thin is always in.

Wall Street analysts are predicting such massive demand for these drugs that Pfizer can find a place there with marketing if its version works, though it is at least two years from licensure, said Mohit Bansal, a Wells Fargo analyst. By 2035, the Lilly drug alone could earn $100 billion a year for its formulation, according to one Bank of America analysis.

Pfizer still sees COVID as a multibillion-dollar franchise long term, Chief Financial Officer David Denton told a Nov. 1 earnings call, since COVID is going to be somewhat like a flu, sustained flu, but actually more deadly than the flu.

The company announced Oct. 20 that it would charge $110 to $130 a shot once government contracts run out next year, more than double what investors were expecting. The U.S. government paid $30.50 per shot in its latest contract with Pfizer, according to Zaid Rizvi, a researcher for the advocacy group Public Citizen.

Pfizer was a good citizen in keeping prices down during the worst of the pandemic, CEO Albert Bourla told investors. Now payers will pick up the added cost, while consumers wouldnt see the difference because theres generally no copay for vaccines.

Still, unless new mutations are dangerous enough to scare enough people, Wall Street analysts expect sales to lag, as the public loses interest, Republican politicians discourage booster shots, and concerns continue about rare heart damage in young people getting the shots. Pfizer said in July it had taken a $450 million write-off of inventory related to COVID-19 products that exceeded approved shelf-lives. And Moderna on Nov. 3 lowered sales predictions for its COVID vaccine.

Not many people are going to go out and get their fourth, fifth, and sixth boosters if theres no major new variant, said Geoff Meacham, an analyst at Bank of America. If youve had the two mRNAs and a booster, you are pretty well protected. Do you need it annually?

That lagging interest in COVID products has investors pushing Pfizer to show where it can make up revenue for three bestsellersthe breast cancer drug Ibrance, the rheumatoid arthritis drug Xeljanz, and Eliquis, a blood thinnerwhose patents run out this decade.

While conducting its own research, Pfizer fattened its development portfolio in the past two years by buying companies that already had developed promising drugs. The company hopes these purchases, and its own work, will give it $25 billion in new annual revenue by 2030.

Meanwhile, the company has treated investors to $25 billion in dividends over the past three years and spent $9 billion jacking up share prices with stock buybacks.

All this is due to the huge profit bulge from its COVID products, which has enabled Pfizer to outpace Johnson & Johnson as the biggest industry revenue earner so far in 2022. From late 2020 through September, Pfizer earned about $80 billion from sales of 3.8 billion COVID vaccines and Paxlovid, and the company expects an additional $15 billion in the remainder of this year. Until recently, investors had been predicting that number would fall to around $11 billion annually by 2026, but Pfizers recent commercial pricing announcement increased that figure, potentially, by up to $3 billion, according to a Wells Fargo analysis.

Still, from the investors point of view, the focus is not on COVID as much at this point. The focus is, what do they do with this money and expertise? Bansal said, and how to use it to grow their core business.

To grow that core, Pfizer since last year has acquired several midsize companies with promising or licensed drugs. It spent $11.6 billion for Biohaven, whose migraine drug Nurtec ODT brought in $324 million in the first half of 2022. Pfizer predicts up to $6 billion in annual revenue from the drug.

Its hopes are also high for Oxbryta, a sickle cell anemia drug produced by Global Blood Therapeutics, which Pfizer bought for $5.4 billion. Priced at $125,000 a year, the drug, which raises oxygen levels in patients, earned $100 million in the first two quarters of the year but might be worth $2.5 billion annually with a powerful marketing engine behind it, according to Wall Street analysts.

Pfizer is strengthening its franchise in respiratory vaccines and treatments, Dr. Mikael Dolsten, the chief scientific officer, said on the Nov. 1 call. Its racing against GSK and Moderna to be first to license a vaccine that protects older adults as well as pregnant women and their newborns against RSV, a respiratory virus that has overwhelmed childrens hospitals this fall. The company also has released an updated version of its bacterial pneumonia vaccine, which brought in $5.3 billion in 2021.

The other mRNA vaccine companies are also rolling in cash but have narrower strategies. Moderna is testing 32 infectious-disease vaccines and developing a long-shot individualized cancer vaccine. Pfizers German partner, BioNTech, which did most of the original development of their COVID vaccine, has a similar focus.

Pfizer and Moderna both began advanced clinical trials this year for their first non-COVID mRNA vaccinesagainst influenza. If flu season is widespread enough, the tests could show whether the vaccines are any better than standard flu shots, and whether one works better than the other.

Investors expect a lot from Pfizer, with its 80,000 employees and $81 billion in 2021 revenue. And they are likely to get it.

Nurtec, the migraine drug it acquired with Biohaven, will be a good test case. Pfizer and giants like it each have at least 2,000 sales reps marketing to primary care physicians in the United States, Calkins said. An operation like that probably costs $400 million a year, he said, far more than a company like Biohaven could afford.

Pfizer will use its marketing prowess, particularly among primary care physicians, to build the worlds leading migraine franchise, CEO Bourla said on the Nov. 1 call. Pfizer has the resources to flood the media with direct-to-consumer ads and negotiate with insurers and pharmacy benefit managers to make sure patients can get this and other drugs, said Bansal, the Wells Fargo analyst.

Sickle cell patients are harder to reach, but Pfizer has relationships in the hospital setting, the heft of their investment in commercialization to increase sales of Oxbryta, said Evan Seigerman, a research analyst at BMO Capital Markets.

Pfizer also plans to make a blockbuster of etrasimod, an experimental drug against ulcerative colitis that it acquired with its $6.7 billion purchase of Arena Pharmaceuticals.

Pfizers GLP-1 formulation is key to its goals. The GLP-1 drugs are similar to a gut peptide, or small protein, that stimulates biochemical pathways that help release insulin, diminish appetite, and lower certain immune responses. While the drugs were invented and licensed to fight Type 2 diabetes, the FDA has approved one of them for obesity treatment as well, and companies are testing GLP-1 formulations against fatty liver disease, sleep apnea, kidney disease, congestive heart failure, and even Alzheimers and Parkinsons.

Pfizer executives said they hope to decide by 2024 which of two candidate drugs to take into large clinical trials. The company sees itself finding a niche with a pill that can be taken with or without food, according to Dolsten. Most of the current products are injectables, which turn off many people.

Assuming one of the drugs gets licensed, marketing will do the rest.

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family/ Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

Adidas does not tolerate antisemitism and any other sort of hate speech the company has taken the decision to terminate the partnership with Ye immediately, according to its Oct. 25 news release. That statement conveyed a principled and admirable stance against the antisemitism shown by the rapper formerly known as Kanye Westa full two weeks after his extremely antisemitic tweet on Oct.10.

Yet Adidas waited much, much longer than other companies that cut ties with Ye. Even Yes own talent agency dropped him before Adidas. In fact, Adidas delayed so long that Ye taunted them on his Oct. 16 appearance on the Drink Champs podcast, saying I can say antisemitic things, and Adidas cant drop me. Now what? Now what?

A German company founded by a former member of the Nazi party, Adidas had an especially strong reason to drop Ye earlier than other companies. Adidas faced mounting pressure from the Anti-Defamation League and other organizations to drop Ye given its Nazi past. A Change.org petition set up by the Campaign Against Antisemitism urging Adidas to sever ties with Ye had gathered 169,100 signatures by Oct. 25.

As a result, Adidas seriously damaged its brand: it appeared Adidas dropped Ye due to the pressure, rather than Yes antisemitism.

The ostrich effect

What explains the poor decision-making by the Adidas leadership? Its a classic case of the ostrich effect: a dangerous judgment error where our minds refuse to acknowledge negative information about reality. Its named after the mythical notion that ostriches bury their heads in the sand at a sign of danger.

The ostrich effect is a type of cognitive bias, one of many mental blindspots that impact decision-making in all life areas, ranging from the future of work to mental fitness.

The Adidas leadership buried its head in the sand. It refused to acknowledge the growing damage to its brand from Yes antisemitism, as well as his prior bad behavior, such as having models wear White Lives Matter T-shirts in early October.

Such denialism in professional settings happens more often than you might think. A four-year study of 286 organizations that had forced out their CEOs found that 23% were fired for denying reality, meaning refusing to recognize negative facts about their organization. Other research shows that professionals at all levels suffer from the tendency to deny uncomfortable facts.

Adidas denialism likely stems from the cognitive bias known as the sunk costs fallacy. According to Adidas statement, the termination of the contract is expected to have a short-term negative impact of up to 250 million on the companys net income in 2022 given the high seasonality of the fourth quarter. Presumably, the impact will be much higher in 2023, over half a billion at least.

The partnership with Ye had a long history since 2013, when the company signed the rappers brand away from rival Nike. In 2016, Adidas further expanded its relationship with the rapper, calling it the most significant partnership ever created between a non-athlete and an athletic brand.

In other words, Adidas invested a great deal of money and reputation into its relationship with Ye. That kind of investment causes our minds to feel strongly attached to whatever we put those resources intoand throw good money after bad.

Sunken costs

Youll see this happen often in major projects that are working out poorly, such as Metas Metaverse project. Several high-profile industry figures recently criticized Mark Zuckerbergs efforts. That includes Palmer Luckey, the founder of VR headset startup Oculus, which Meta acquired in 2014 for $2 billion.

Luckey said I dont think its a good product about Horizon Worlds, Metas core metaverse product. He called it a project car, a fancy automobile that the owner spends a lot of money on as a hobby. So far, Facebooks shift to building the metaverse has been costly, with the company last year losing $10 billion on it, and Wall Street analysts expect it to lose more than $10 billion again this year.

Another example of these cognitive biases playing out is Elon Musks acquisition of Twitter. Musk himself said hes obviously overpaying for the social media company, given its $44 billion price tag: external valuations put a fair value closer to $25 billion.

Only a week after closing the deal, Musk has laid off half of the Twitter workforce: certainly not nearly enough time to make well-considered decisions on talent, which is the most important commodity of a tech company. And with the burst of hate speech on the platform after Musk took over, many brands are pausing advertising on Twitter, causing the platform to lose even more money. The future does not look bright for Musks Twitter takeover. Musk said he bought Twitter to help humanity but it might end up being another project car, like Zuckerbergs Metaverse.

Youll see sunken costs in all major relationshipsfrom marriages that lasted much longer than they should have to brand partnerships like the one between Adidas and Ye.

The final cognitive bias relevant here is called hyperbolic discounting. This term describes our brains focus on short-term, highly visible outcomes over much more important and less visible long-term ones. Adidas didnt want to take the short-term financial hit to its bottom line by cutting ties with Ye. However, Adidas failed to give sufficient weight to the long-term damage to its brand from failing to do so.

Short-term financial damage is highly visible and painful, while the long-term brand damage is much less visible and less painful. Yet realistically, such brand damage is much more important to the long-term success of Adidas.

In my consulting, Ive seen many executives struggling with the same three mental blindspots when they face top performers engaging in bad behaviors, ranging from incivility to sexual harassment and discrimination. Leaders deny it happened because they have so much invested in the top performer, whether a star salesperson or top data scientist and they dont consider the long-term consequences to the organizations culture and employee morale.

Its easy for anyone to fall for these three cognitive biasesbut you can watch out for these blind spots in your own professional and personal life.

Gleb Tsipursky, P.h.D, is the CEO of the boutique future-of-work consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts. He is the best-selling author of seven books, including Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters and Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams: A Manual on Benchmarking to Best Practices for Competitive Advantage. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting for Fortune 500 companies from Aflac to Xerox and over 15 years in academia as a behavioral scientist at UNC-Chapel Hill and Ohio State.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

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In August Jack Dorsey was struck with a pang of remorse. The greatest sorrow he had about co-founding Twitter was commercializing the microblogging service rather than turning it into a non-profit decentralized platform. 

The biggest issue and my biggest regret is that it became a company, he tweeted.

Now that Elon Musk has taken over his creation, disbanded its board of directors, fired half the workforce and eliminated entire teams tasked with everything from human rights to artificial intelligence ethics, users are rattled.

Fearing it will become the hell scape Musk promises it wont be, a number are actively shopping around for an alternative and one has emerged that neatly fits with Dorseys utopian visionMastodon.

Whereas Twitter is a perfect example of the world wide web in its second generation, when corporations took control of virtual Internet monopolies, Mastodonthe decentralized platform created by Eugen Rochkoincorporates many of the anti-statist ideals of Web3 and the metaverse.

The basics

First off, its free to join, there are no ads and no one is harvesting your data to sell to the highest bidder. 

The network is maintained by a series of independently operatingyet linkedservers often grouped by interest or geography. While certain hosts may have more users, like Mastodon Social, posts can be shared and read by all. Switching servers is also optional.

Nevertheless, it offers many of the same features as Twitter.

Posts are called tootslike the trumpeting sound its animated elephant mascot might make only quieterand can be even longer with 500 characters rather than limiting them to 280. Reposting is called a boost and likes are stars instead of hearts. 

Ever since Musk took over Twitter on October 27th, Mastodon has doubled in size.

Weve hit 1,028,362 monthly active users across the network today, the 29-year-old Rochko posted on Monday. Thats pretty cool.

How does it work

Although its perhaps the best known, Mastodon is just one of a number of open-source social media platforms. Theres also a streaming competitor to YouTube called PeerTube, as well as Pixelfed, an Instagram-like app, and of course a Facebook equivalent known as Friendica.

Since they all share the same basic software protocol called ActivityPub, users can communicate with each other not just between Mastadon servers but indeed across the various platforms themselves, creating a broader ecosystem known as the federated universe.

For those familiar with blockchain technology, there are a number of similarities due to the distributed nature of this fediverse. 

Much like anyone can choose to help collectively maintain the integrity of Bitcoin by validating transactions, anyone can offer to host their own server on Mastodon and act as another node in the network. 

Similar to a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), these serversor instances as they are calledcan feature their own peculiar governance as to what behavior is permissible and what is not.

Unlike validator nodes in blockchain networks, however, such hosts do not receive monetary rewards for their efforts. Instead, they are largely crowdfunded. 

Rochko himself began working on the project in 2016 mainly as a hobby before Patreon donations allowed him to focus on it full-time.

What about free speech?

Since Mastodons various servers act independently with their own unique terms of service, in theory, users can post whatever they want. But in practice the collective regulates itself.

And if a server pops up that exhibits the type of free-for-all found on alt-right forums like 4Chan and 8Kun, they can soon find themselves isolated. Other hosts can decide they no longer wish to receive any messages from that party and block it on their end.

I guess you could call it the democratic process, Rochko told Time in an interview this week. The hateful server can get ostracized. 

This approach reflects his German nationality. He said the American concept of saying anything you want without limits is foreign to the countrys mindset following the holocaust. Rochko himself is of Jewish heritage. 

In our constitution, our number one priority is maintaining human dignity. And so hate speech is not part of the German concept of free speech, he said.

A growing rivalry

Meanwhile, Musk is busy putting out the very fires he set in an attempt to amplify what he perceived were marginalized conservative voices on Twitter. 

Alarmed by his increasingly erratic behavior, including spreading conspiracy theories regarding Nancy Pelosis husband, advocacy groups including those supporting minorities like the NAACP have called for a boycott. 

Ad agencies representing consumer brands voiced their disappointment of his actions after meetings with his teams, and corporate giants like General Mills, Mondolez and Pfizer have paused spending on the platform. 

Twitter suffered a massive drop in revenue, Musk complained on Friday, exactly one week after he entered its headquarters lugging a porcelain sink as a gag. Yet rather than introspection, he blamed opponents bent on destroying free speech despite doing everything we could to appease the activists.

Mastodons growing base has consequently not gone unnoticed by Twitters new owner. Musk, who is not above reaching for teenage locker room jokes, posted on Monday a pun targeting the rival upstart. 

If you dont like Twitter anymore, there is [an] awesome site called Masterbatedone, the 51-year old Tesla CEO wrote. Hours later Musk deleted the tweet.

Does it have a future?

How likely is it then that Mastodon can succeed in presenting a true alternative to Twitter?

While there is no algorithm that can amplify certain posts over others and no ads to distract users, there are drawbacks. 

For one the experience is less immediately intuitive to a centralized platform due to its federated nature. As a result, trying to sign up can be confusing and even a bit daunting at first: new users must be prepared to overcome an initial hurdle. 

Secondly, even with doubling to 1 million monthly active users, its user base is still a fraction of the 238 million or so that open Twitter every day. Growth even hit a new peak thanks to Musk, reported The Verge on Monday, citing an internal document.

Since it is unlikely many will abandon their Twitter account wholesale, that gives Musk the opportunity to improve his platform. He will no doubt will have his team working day and night to come up with new features he hopes will offer better value.

One advantage going for Mastodon that may soon disappear is that Twitter thus far has not rewarded its top accounts with a portion of its revenue. Individuals like Musk himself, with his 100 million-plus followers, were driving traffic to the site but were never compensated for their time and effort. 

For example, YouTube offers content creators a 55% share of the ad revenue generated from their posts and TikTok has similar policies that split their profits to encourage more posts. 

Musk has already signaled he will draw up a detailed plan for how to better incentivize users to remain on Twitter. Should they prove effective, some of the top users and creators may be tempted to concentrate their efforts on Twitter rather than spend their valuable time on Mastodon.

The financial technology company Fordefi today announced an $18 million seed round, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and joined by major crypto investors including the FTX-affiliated Alameda Research, Jump Capital, and Castle Island. 

Fordefi (pronounced Fortify), which emerged from stealth last week, is led by a founding team with serious crypto pedigree, including CEO Josh Schwartz, who previously ran global sales at BitGo and was COO at Curv. Fordefis first product is a DeFi-focused wallet built for institutional investors and crypto-native funds working with decentralized applications.

In an interview, Schwartz said the main use cases for crypto have evolved during his time in the industry. While buying and HODLing previously was the primary focus for many, the emergence of smart contracts and dapps has presented new opportunities for investors, such as decentralized access to liquidity and yield.

The challenge is, its a very different set of risks that are involved, Schwartz told Fortune.

Smart contracts are at the heart of DeFi, but Schwartz said many people are interacting with dapps and signing transactions without reading the fine print, which leads to security issues, especially when it comes to custody of private keys and wallet management.  

For institutional investors looking to get into the DeFi space, retail offerings such as MetaMask are not feasible from a security perspective for protecting users private keys. Institutional wallets are more focused on the management of private keys but arent optimized for interacting with DeFi.

Were this category creator in the middle, Schwartz told Fortune. 

Dima Kogan, Fordefis CTO, said there are two key aspects to custodial solutions. The first is protecting private keys. Fordefis wallet is MPC, or multiparty computation, meaning it distributes a users private keys while still allowing users to easily connect with dapps. The second is making sure that every time a private key is used, its used correctlyespecially important in DeFi because users cant always trust the origin of transactions.

Our solution protects the private keys, but then it also provides all the necessary context for the user to make a meaningful decision every time theyre signing a transaction, Kogan said. 

According to Schwartz, Fordefis clients are mainly trading firms and DeFi-focused funds, as well as custodians.

An example is Alameda Research, the crypto-focused trading firm founded by FTXs Sam Bankman-Fried with which Fordefi has a close relationship, Schwartz added.

As security issues around DeFi perpetuate questions around its sustainabilityand harmful impacts to the crypto industry as a wholeSchwartz said Fordefi will add confidence for institutional players operating in the space.

We dont protect against people actually deploying a malicious contract, he told Fortune, but we provide tools to help people manage their risk and exposure before theyre actually going to interact with these contracts.

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The New Zealand governments plan for a fart tax or charging farms for agricultural methane emissionssent a wave of fear through the countrys sheep farmers when the government proposed it in October. One farm lobbyist raged that it would rip the guts out of small-town New Zealand. The government had been talking about taxing emissions to reach its carbon goals for yearsagriculture does, after all, account for over half the countrys emissions. But the announcement of a start date2025made the idea terrifyingly real.  

The countrys sheep farmers, however, may have a leg up on other businesses that are just as stunned by the pending regulation. Farmers who work with the New Zealand Merino Company (NZM), a grower-founded and publicly traded wool marketing and innovation company thats certified more than 700 growers on its ZQ ethical wool standard, will have access to software developed by Silicon Valley startup Actual that gamifies decarbonization; its like SimCity but instead of buzzing metropolises there are sheep farms; instead of coal plants there are belching ewes.

The startup, founded in late 2018, has modeled the carbon footprint of over 600 New Zealand farms that cover 3.5 million acres. Its software allows farmers to quickly model their carbon footprinta baseline need in the age of climate commitmentsand simulate the effects and return on investment of decarbonization efforts. The visual modeling helps farmers decide which emissions-lowering actions, such as forest plantation, to implement to avoid the pain of the fart tax. The information also allows the brands that buy farms woolSmartwool, Allbirds, icebreaker, and Redato track the suppliers emissions as the brands pursue their own decarbonization goals.

Beyond New Zealand, this kind of decarbonization utility is in demand as companies strategize how to meet their newly published net zero goals, says Karthik Balakrishnan, Actual president and co-founder. Youre starting to see pressure from the financial sector, from regulators, from consumers starting to say, Okay, you said youre going to be net zero in the next 10 or 20 years. Youve made a pledge. Now, what are you going to do about it?

Including a $5 million seed round in February, 12-employee Actual has raised $5.65 million from funds that include Buckley Ventures and Sequoia Scout, which invested in a 2019 pre-seed round.

Decarbonization is almost always cost-cutting and it has a great ROI for corporations, but there were no good tools to model the ROI of decarbonization until Actual, says Sarah Cone, whose investment firm Social Impact Capital participated in Actuals pre-seed round. Fifteen minutes with the Actual tool and its easy to get buy-in from senior management for cost-cutting decarbonization projects.

Net zero explosion

Since 2020, the number of companies and governments committing to net zero emissions has skyrocketed. According to Net Zero Tracker, more than a third of the worlds largest public companies702now have net zero targets, up from 417 in 2020, and 91% of global GDP is now covered by national government net zero targets, up from 68% in December 2020.

Courtesy of Actual

At the same time, 65% of the 702 corporate targets do not yet meet minimum procedural reporting standards, according to Net Zero Tracker.

Enter carbon accounting or sustainability management software, a sector thats expected to grow by $9.6 billion by 2026, according to market research firm Technavio.

Giants like Salesforce, with its Net Zero Cloud, compete with well-financed startups like Persefoni, which raised $101 million in October 2021, to help businesses calculate their supply chain emissions and meet disclosure requirements by crunching data like accounting transactions.

Ive helped small organizations figure out their carbon footprint, says Stephanie Balaouras, VP and group director at market research firm Forrester. You have to track down electrical bills, all purchased goods, how many people are commuting, whether they are commuting on train or in carIf youre a complex organization with locations around the world, thats incredibly complex.

Next step

Balakrishnan and his two cofounders approached the carbon footprint challenge from a different angle by focusing on helping companies choose which emissions-cutting actions to take.

When they launched Actual in 2018, the trio brought different backgrounds to the table. Balakrishnan, a Stanford Ph.D., previously worked at Airbus and founded the smart payment device company Coin, which was bought by FitBit in 2016. CTO Derek Lyons is an expert in A.I., machine learning, and cognitive developmental psychology. Chief executive Rajesh Chandran previously founded Heighten, a sales software company that sold to LinkedIn in 2017. The three bonded over the challenge of inciting transformational change when armed with only imperfect data. Data-driven decision-making is the business worlds gold-standard, but the impulse to gather data can run you straight into this really sticky morass of analysis paralysis, Lyon says, because the data doesnt exist if Im trying to remake agriculture or some similar problems of that scope.

Courtesy of Actual

The three also shared an affinity for SimCity, the 1990s-era urban-planning computer game in which players act as a mayor. As the city grows, players spend their budgets to add services and infrastructurerailways, power plants, etc.by trial and error to keep the population happy and healthy.

Initially, the co-founders joked about gamifying decarbonization in a SimCity manner. Wouldnt it be great if we could just make like a SimCity version of these problems so that you could pick up your factory and move it over a couple of miles and drop it down and just see how the system changes? Lyons recalls the co-founders saying. But the more the trio talked to business owners facing new net zero deadlines, the more they realized such a tool would actually be incredibly powerful, Lyons says. It fits the grooves in our brain.

So the co-founders developed game-like software that let companies test ways to decarbonize their business through a model first process. Firms construct models from modular building blocks that are based on the underlying science and imperfect data at handa solar power block, a forest regrowth block, a grey-water recycling blockto estimate cost, benefit, and ROI over time.

Courtesy of Actual

In New Zealand, Actuals base model collects data on farmsthe number of animals, forest size, fuel usagefrom farmers, government sources, and satellites to calculate net emissions. Farmers can adjust these variables to model how increasing or decreasing their flock, for example, would change their overall emissions. Another module shows the location, quantity, and ROI of land each farm can use for native plant and forest regrowth, which will increase carbon sequestration.

Actuals software ostensibly is aimed at decarbonization, but at a more profound level it attacks the broader problem of making high-stakes decisions in an uncharted fields. Actual has also worked with Giga, a UNICEF and the International Telecommunication Union initiative that aims to connect every school in the world to the internet by 2030. In that case, Actuals gamified modeling software is used to help decide where and how to employ capital to extend the grid to schools.

Courtesy of Actual

Amy Cravens, an analyst at the market research firm IDC, says Actual is different from existing software because it makes it easier to visualize how changes would impact a business in the future and thus offers a forward-looking vision instead of just that backward looking vision of reporting.

Wayne Kacheche believed in Dogecoin because Elon Musk did. The Tesla founder and billionaire kept talking up the popular meme token on Twitter, and in May 2021 even joked about Dogecoin during a Saturday Night Live segment. Shortly after the episode aired, Dogecoin plunged 40%.

Kacheche, then a 19-year-old university student living in South Africa, decided to check out Dogecoin. He started watching YouTube videos and came to share a widespread sentiment in the crypto world that Dogecoin had peaked. He began to search for altcoins, going down an algorithmic rabbit hole that brought him to a crypto influencer named Crypto Pablo. After two months of investing, Kacheche believed the channel mostly pushed scams.

I was still a newborn to the crypto space, Kacheche said. I stopped following his shilling and also unsubscribed from his channel.

A week or two later, the YouTube algorithm spat out Lark Davisthe Crypto Lark. 

Today, Davis is a prominent crypto influencer with about 1 million followers on both Twitter and Instagram, and nearly 500,000 on YouTube. Davis has a cherubic countenance and earnest demeanor, speaking directly to his viewers in the videos he posts often multiple times a day with titles like This Coin Made Millionaires. He comes across as a baby-faced Jim Cramer, if the CNBC host was the nextdoor neighbors grandson shilling shitcoinscrypto slang for tokens of dubious valueinstead of stocks.

In late September, the pseudonymous Twitter sleuth ZachXBT posted a long tweet thread laying out evidence that Davis had promoted new altcoins to his massive audience while at the same time receiving early access to the tokens as a pre-sale investor, and then selling them right around the time he was promoting them to his followers. Davis acolytes were left holding the proverbial bag when the coins invariably crashed.

Fortune independently verified the findings by examining the blockchain. Elliptic and Chainalysis, two blockchain analysis firms that work with top crypto companies and government agencies, likewise confirmed ZachXBTs analysis.

The assessment appears correct and aligns with what was revealed on the Twitter investigation, researchers at Elliptic told Fortune.

After a request for comment from Fortune, Davis initially pointed to a Tweet thread he posted in response to ZachXBT, telling Fortune, I dont have anything else to add about these BS allegations.

After subsequent e-mails from Fortune, Davis said that the analysis was correct, although it only tells part of the story. He admitted to being an early investor in many of the projects, and that it was entirely possible he did not always disclose so to his followers, contrary to what he claimed in his Tweet thread.

Investors need to secure profits when they have them, he told Fortune, Which is what I do and did.

Anatomy of a YouTube hustle

The crypto downturn has reduced the prevalence of influencer schemes, but the recent antics of Lark Davis reveal how dodgy promotions remain very much entrenched in the world of cryptocurrency. 

A lot of people just always think that other people have their best intentions in mind when thats not the case, ZachXBT told Fortune. This space is very cutthroat.

When Kacheche discovered Davis, the YouTube promoter had only about 200,000 subscribers, but that figure was impressive enough to lead Kacheche to believe he must be on the up-and-up.

I was captivated by the energy he exudes in his videos, which made him seem very charismatic, knowledgeable, and trustworthy, Kacheche said. 

Davis frames his videos as if he is giving sober analysis of new trends in the crypto landscape. In one from March 2021, he dedicated a segment to NFTs. A lot of people are still stuck on, I cant believe a JPEG can sell for $1 million, Davis said. I know, I know, the NFT mania is getting a bit crazy, but thats the early phase of learning about this technology.

After explaining how trusted businesspeople like Mark Cuban plan to use NFTs for real-world use cases like selling sports tickets, Davis begins to list different projects that he plans to invest in. You know me, Im the pick-and-shovel guy, he said. More than chasing the single NFTs, I want to chase the projects that are building the NFT infrastructure. As the space exploded, it was a sensible propositionexcept for what was happening in the background.

In a video, Davis highlights a cartoon NFT project called Polkamon as a very interesting play. He compares it to CryptoPunks, whose pixelated avatars have sold for millions of dollars. Getting in now is getting in on the ground floor, Davis said. The sale of the token was happening the next day, March 31.

Kacheche was captivated by the Polkamon project. He saw another popular YouTuber posting about it as well and decided to invest. He said he was going through a rough patch financially and thought the crypto investments would make him a millionaire.

The NFT project promoted by Davis, called $PMON, is one highlighted by ZachXBT and confirmed by Fortune.

On March 31, the day of the launch, Lark Daviss wallet received a deposit of 10,000 tokenswhich can be seen on the blockchain explorer Etherscanvia a private distribution contract, rather than buying them on the open market through a decentralized exchange like Uniswap.

Over the next few hours, he swapped all of the $PMON tokens on Uniswap for over $310,000 worth of the U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin USDC and a token known as wrapped Ether, exiting his position. After hitting a high of almost $60, the $PMON token dropped to under $30 by mid-April and under $5 by mid-June. Today, it is hovering around $1.20.

Etherscan

Screenshot from Etherscan

Kacheche was not as savvy.

I kept pumping in my allowances regularly for about four months as the price of the coin kept going down, he said.

Meanwhile, Kacheches personal life began to spiralhe started failing classes and ultimately was kicked out of school.

These scam-Tubers target noobs who are very high on the hopium and are hoping to make a quick buck, he said. I lost a lot of money thinking they were legit and looking out for the smaller fish.

The $PMON token is just one of eight cryptocurrencies that have received the pump-and-dump treatment from Davis.

As ZachXBT told Fortune, he was easily able to identify Daviss personal wallet by finding a donation address listed in an old YouTube video from November 2017, as well as by tracing the purchase of an NFT that Davis tweeted he owned.

Most people are smart enough to have multiple wallets, ZachXBT said, but he literally has used the same wallet since 2017. 

There is a clear pattern of behavior in Daviss actions, which ZachXBT estimated at earning the influencer some $1.2 milliona figure that can be calculated through Etherscan, as Davis generally would swap the tokens into USDC using Uniswap.

Davis chooses tokens with a specific tokenomicsthe word the crypto world uses to describe the distribution and economic incentives associated with any particular token.

Many of the projects he promotes are designed in a way that a large percentage of the initial tokens are distributed to insiders and just a small percentage to the public. Insiders can dump the tokens at launchthere is no vesting period, like with some salesaffording them much higher prices than everyday investors see later. It puts retail already at a disadvantage, ZachXBT said.

Enough suckers

Popular influencers often receive access to tokens or cash to promote projects, said Molly White, a software engineer and crypto critic. A recent example is Kim Kardashian, who was paid $250,000 to post about a crypto called ethereumMax, a project with similarly questionable tokenomics that hurt normal investors. Anyone who bought the token after Kardashian promoted it would have lost 95% of their money. The U.S. Security and Exchange Commission fined Kardashian $1.26 million in early October for failing to disclose the payment. 

Another example is the ill-fated Lets Go Brandon token, which was pushed by far-right agitators like then-Representative Madison Cawthorn, who ownedand subsequently solda sizable chunk of the cryptocurrency. The trades triggered an investigation in May from the U.S. House Ethics Committee, although it never publicly disclosed its findings.

Cawthorns team did not respond to a request for comment from Fortune.

If the person has sufficient reach, that can really pump the price of the token, said White. The only way that people actually make money off of a pump-and-dump scheme is getting enough suckers to buy into it.

During cryptos latest bull run, many followers may have understood the Ponzi nature of some projects, but nonetheless hoped they could get in early and sell their tokens before the inevitable crash. In March 2021, as crypto prices soared and Daviss videos reached millions, a Twitter user with the handle Dr Rookiemamba shared strategies with other hopefuls. DYOR [do your own research] and watch Lark Davis on YouTube, he told another user when trading tips on different tokens. 

Meanwhile, Dr Rookiemamba, a Nigerian doctor then doing his masters in the U.K. who asked to be identified by his Twitter handle, told Fortune that he ended up investing around $6,000 in one altcoin based on the advice of crypto social media influencers. He only sold when it bottomed out at $1,000. 

They tell you when to buy, but they never tell you when to sell, he said.

In his initial Twitter response to ZachXBT, Davis suggested hes on the same footing as his followers, writing that I always disclose on [YouTube] when I am invested in a token sale, and that I also shared these opportunities with my followers and subscribers well before the launch.

As Fortunes analysis shows, Davis received early token access as an investor in many of the projects. While he promoted the tokens to his followers, he dumped them on Uniswap at or near the top of their value.

There is evidence of the protocols sending Lark some coins directly, researchers at Elliptic said.

Researchers at Chainalysis agreed, telling Fortune, Most of these cases indicate that he is not a standard buyer of the tokens.

An example is the $SHOPX project. Etherscan shows that Davis received 120,000 tokens via the Disperse app, a tool used to distribute tokens, rather than buying them on the open market on the launch day in March 2021. He then tweeted about the project while selling all of his holdings on Uniswap. The token price fell almost 70% within a month, and over 99% to date.

When presented with evidence, Davis said he was a pre-sale investor in several of the cases. That is how it works, he wrote to Fortune. I take the risk of backing an early-stage project by investing my own money.

Contrary to Daviss initial claims, Fortune could not find evidence that he always disclosed investments to his followers. When pressed, Davis admitted that he may not have.

One thing I can agree on with all of this is that I can definitely do a better job on disclosures and be more consistent with that, he said. It wont fix the past but hopefully will provide better transparency moving forward.

Lark Davis is just the tip of the iceberg. ZachXBT points to other influencers with similarly predatory behavior, including MoonCarl, who has 1.2 million followers on Twitter and has been accused by Twitter users of faking lavish trading behavior by using a demo account. Another is CryptoBanter, with over 250,000 followers on Twitter, who was the subject of a different ZachXBT investigation on token pump-and-dump schemes. 

MoonCarl and CryptoBanter did not respond to requests for comment from Fortune, nor did Twitter. After asking for examples of Daviss videos, a YouTube representative said they had nothing to share.

No meaningful action

Academics say social media platforms dont police predatory financial behavior for a simple reason: Its lucrative.

The fundamental reason is profit, said Dr. Timothy Graham, an associate professor at the Queensland University of Technology who studies digital media. For both YouTube and Twitter, the business model boils down to ad revenue, and more concretely in Twitters case what are known as mDAUs, or monetizable daily active users.

The dynamic is exacerbated by the fact that crypto is largely unregulated. Theres no legal disincentive to allow crypto scams to take place at scale on the platform, Graham told Fortune.

He pointed to the platforms financial scam policy, which does not mention crypto.

If you read the details of this policy, what Twitter views as a violation is a narrow, consumerist construction of financial scam and abuse, he said.

The fundamental reason is profit.

Dr. Timothy Graham, an associate professor at the Queensland University of Technology

Dr. Lana Swartz, an associate professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, agreed with the assessment. Social media platforms have erred on the side of being hands off when it comes to comes to moderation, particularly when it doesnt carry a direct legal or reputational liability, she told Fortune.

As a result, Graham said that moderation of harmful financial activity is unlikely to come from companies like Twitter and YouTube.

Platforms are always lagging behind civil society when it comes to preventing and stopping harmful and/or illegal activity, he said. They will delay taking meaningful action as long as they can, as a rule.

Given the recent SEC fine against Kim Kardashian for similar behavior, there is the question of why regulatory agencies have not acted. 

I wasnt super surprised that they went after Kim Kardashianit was more of a publicity thing than anything, the crypto critic Molly White said. If the SEC cracks down on Lark, youre not going to be reading a Washington Post article about it.

The SEC did not respond to a request for comment.

Social media-driven pump-and-dump schemes have receded during Crypto Winter, as overall retail investment declines and headlines about people becoming millionaires from obscure shitcoins are few and far between.

Regardless, influencers like Davis are still active. In a recent video, he detailed how an NFT investor turned $88 into $5 million by minting CryptoPunks in 2017 and holding them until 2021.

NFTs are cool, NFTs make money, and NFTs are only going to get bigger, Davis said. 

Kacheche, for his part, stopped investing in altcoins, but he hasnt left crypto altogether. He sticks with the top 100 projects, still doing his own research as he prepares to reapply to college.

There are too many innocent people drawn in by these scammers hoping for a better tomorrow, he told Fortune.

One of the inevitable troubles of being a person with immense wealth and power is that you often find yourself surrounded by people who wont call you out on a bad idea.

Venture capitalist and early Twitter investor Chris Sacca warned Elon Musk that he is completely alone and is surrounding himself with people who wont challenge his nonconformist ideas to transform Twitter into his vision of a free-speech social media haven.

One of the biggest risks of wealth/power is no longer having anyone around you who can push back, give candid feedback, suggest alternatives, or just simply let you know youre wrong, Sacca, founder of Lowercase Capital and a friend of Elon Musk, wrote in a Twitter thread on Monday evening.

Musk needs people around him who are willing to speak some truth to power and complement his bold and ambitious instincts with desperately needed nuance, Sacca argues, because many of Twitters problems are too complex to solve on his own.

Sacca concludes that Musk is straight-up alone right now and winging this.

A social media company is harder to manage than a car company

Musk has excelled in the areas of batteries, motors, rockets, tunnels, and solar panels, Sacca writes, because his ability to note and question the assumptions implicit in the rest of our thinking is a rare type of genius Ive only seen in the greatest minds. But Sacca notes these industries have definitively right and wrong answers where success can be objectively measured, unlike a social media company which has a lot more nuance.

Humans arent math and physics problems. We are f**king messy, Sacca says. He argues that Twitter wont get better for users, advertisers wont come back at scale, and Musks huge investment wont pay off unless there is genuine dialogue leading to thoughtful progress and stability.

However, this is not what is happening at Twitter. Over time, Sacca has watched those around Musk become increasingly sycophantic and opportunistic: Simply put, agreeing with him is easier, and there is more financial & social upside.

I cant sit by and watch a guy Ive looked up to for over a decade fumble this opportunity, stoke more insanity, and likely hurt a bunch of folks in the process, Sacca says.

Other founders in the same trap

This is a problem for many founder-led companies. Sacca points to Travis Kalanick, the founder of Uber, which Sacca also invested in at an early stage. Sacca says Travis is objectively brilliant but as he became powerful only the suck-ups remained. He had no real friends left.

Throughout his tenure as CEO, Kalanick had extremely tight control over the companys board of directors, once telling Apple CEO Tim Cook that he had intentionally structured the board and hand-picked its members to allow him to do what I want, Mike Isaac wrote in his book Super Pumped: the Battle for Uber.

In the end, Travis had a board seat to fill, and there was almost no one he could put in it because he was alone, Sacca says.

But one person who hasnt fallen into this trap is Mark Zuckerberg, Sacca says. Never been a fan, but at least that guy keeps some smart people around and sometimes listens. I hate most of their decisions, but they are free to suggest to Zuck that hes full of sh*t.

No one on Earth is good enough to get it all done on their own, Sacca asserts.

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