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Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt sailed off with the superyacht abandoned in the Caribbean by its Russian oligarch owner after the invasion of Ukraine with a winning $67.6 million bid during an auction Friday.

Schmidt bought the 267-foot Alfa Nero yacht after it was left moored in Antigua by Andrey Guryev, the Russian billionaire who was slapped with sanctions by the US Treasury last year, according to Bloomberg News.

The Treasury Department claimed that Guryev, who made his fortune in the fertilizer industry and is thought to be close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, initially bought the yacht for $120 million in 2014, but the Russian oligarch has denied the claim.

The former Google boss, whose net worth was valued by Bloomberg Billionaires Index at $25 billion as of Friday, “won the auction this morning in a fully transparent process,” according to Sir Ronald Sanders, Antigua’s ambassador to the US.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt placed a winning bid for $67.6 million at an auction on Friday for a superyacht.

The vessel, which has been described by its manufacturer Oceanco as “one of the world’s most iconic and highly awarded yachts,” includes amenities such as a baby grand piano and a swimming pool that converts into a helipad, Bloomberg News reported.

Antigua and Barbuda was eager to sell the vessel due to mounting maintenance costs totaling some $112,000 per month that accumulated while it sat in Falmouth Harbor.

Schmidt served as Google’s CEO from 2001 to 2011, a time of rapid growth for the California-based technology company.

Andrey Guryev is the Russian billionaire who was slapped with sanctions by the US Treasury last year.

He later became executive chairman for Google, and in 2015, for its new parent company, Alphabet, before resigning as chairman in 2018.

The US and other Western countries sanctioned several Russian oligarchs following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine last year.

An Antiguan port official told Bloomberg News that Guryev’s daughter filed a last-minute injunction claiming ownership of the yacht.

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Former Google CEO Schmidt pays $67 million for Russian's superyacht

The alfa nero, acquired by ex-google ceo eric schmidt, is only one of many yachts seized around the world after russia's invasion of ukraine.

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Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt won an auction in Antigua to acquire the seized Superyacht Alfa Nero for $67.6 million, as first reported by Bloomberg.

The superyacht Alfa Nero is seen docked in Falmouth Harbour in Saint Paul Parish, Antigua, on April 20, 2023. (Bing Guan/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)

The Alfa Nero was built by the same shipbuilding company, Oceanco, that built the Koru, the world's tallest sailing yacht, which Lauren Sanchez and Jeff Bezos are currently enjoying.

Jeff Bezos with Lauren Sanchez in a bikini aboard their yacht

Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez appear on the superyacht Koru while at anchor in Portofino, Italy, on June 12, 2023. (Oliver Palombi / MEGA / Mega)

BEZOS AND SANCHEZ'S ENGAGEMENT CRUISE IN PHOTOS

Eric Schmidt, former chairman and CEO of Google, visits FOX Business Network Studios in New York City on April 16, 2019. (John Lamparski/Getty Images / Getty Images)

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Oceanco called the Alfa Nero "one of the world's most iconic and highly awarded yachts."

The Alfa Nero had an original price tag of $120 million. (Bing Guan/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)

The yacht features the first-ever "statement pool," which converts to a helipad or dance floor, depending on the owner's mood.

An office on the superyacht Alfa Nero. (Bing Guan/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)

The yacht previously belonged to Andrey Guryev, a Russian oligarch who was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury last year after Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

SEIZED SUPERYACHT OWNED BY RUSSIAN OLIGARCH ARRIVES IN HAWAII FLYING AMERICAN FLAG

A bedroom on the superyacht Alfa Nero. (Bing Guan/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)

Schmidt is worth an estimated $25 billion after running Google during a period of high growth as CEO between 2001 and 2011 and executive chairman from 2011 to 2015.

Schmidt declined to comment to FOX Business.

A chair on the bridge of the superyacht Alfa Nero. (Bing Guan/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)

The Alfa Nero had an original price tag of $120 million. While the $67.6 million price tag may come across as a steal, the rule of thumb for the cost to run and maintain a superyacht annually is one tenth the purchase price. Schmidt will likely pay upwards of $12 million per year to crew, fuel and maintain the 267-foot behemoth.

A pool on the back of the superyacht Alfa Nero

An infinity pool, which converts via hydraulics into a helipad, on the Alfa Nero. (Bing Guan/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)

PUTIN'S ALLEGED $700M SUPERYACHT SEIZED IN ITALY

Stowed chairs on the deck of the superyacht Alfa Nero. (Bing Guan/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX BUSINESS APP

An outside light control panel on the superyacht Alfa Nero. (Bing Guan/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)

RUSSIAN ENERGY OLIGARCH IGOR SECHIN'S SUPER YACHT SEIZED IN FRANCE

The bridge of the superyacht Alfa Nero. (Bing Guan/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)

RUSSIAN OLIGARCH ALISHER USMANOV’S $600M YACHT SEIZED IN GERMANY: REPORTS

Covered deck furniture on the superyacht Alfa Nero. (Bing Guan/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)

Billionaire Eric Schmidt just paid $68 million for a Russian oligarch’s sanctioned superyacht that features a helipad and baby grand piano

The superyacht Alfa Nero docked in Falmouth Harbour in Saint Paul Parish, Antigua.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt bought the Alfa Nero superyacht that was ditched in Antigua in March 2022 after Russian troops invaded Ukraine.

The billionaire “won the auction this morning in a fully transparent process,” buying the vessel for $67.6 million, according to Sir Ronald Sanders, Antigua’s ambassador to the US.

The 267-foot vessel, complete with a baby grand piano and a swimming pool that turns into a helipad, was abandoned in Antigua’s Falmouth Harbour after the US Treasury sanctioned Russian fertilizer billionaire Andrey Guryev. The department last year said he bought the Alfa Nero in 2014 for $120 million — which he denies.

Schmidt’s foundation didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The Alfa Nero was auctioned Friday even after Guryev’s daughter filed a last-minute injunction claiming the yacht was hers, Antigua Port Manager Darwin Telemaque said in an interview.

Some of the proceeds will cover maintenance and other bills that the Alfa Nero has piled up while in the harbor, with crew expenses alone running $112,000 a month. Telemaque said the sale price would cover “all liabilities.”

Since Russia’s invasion in February 2022, the US and its allies have imposed sanctions on many of the country’s wealthiest people, causing more than two dozen superyachts worth about $4 billion to be frozen in ports around the world.

Schmidt, who served as Google’s chief executive for about a decade, has an estimated net worth of $25 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Two years ago he was named chair of the Broad Institute, a research organization based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt wins Russian oligarch’s superyacht for $67.6M at auction

F ormer Google CEO Eric Schmidt sailed off with the superyacht abandoned in the Caribbean by its Russian oligarch owner after the invasion of Ukraine with a winning $67.6 million bid during an auction Friday.

Antigua and Barbuda was eager to sell the vessel due to mounting maintenance costs totaling some $112,000 per month that accumulated while it sat in Falmouth Harbor.

Schmidt served as Google’s CEO from 2001 to 2011, a time of rapid growth for the California-based technology company.

He later became executive chairman for Google, and in 2015, for its new parent company, Alphabet, before resigning as chairman in 2018.

The US and other Western countries sanctioned several Russian oligarchs following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine last year.

An Antiguan port official told Bloomberg News that Guryev’s daughter filed a last-minute injunction claiming ownership of the yacht.

Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt wins Russian oligarch’s superyacht for $67.6M at auction

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Ex-Google CEO buys superyacht abandoned by Russian oligarch Guryev

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Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt purchased the Alfa Nero superyacht, which was abandoned in Antigua in March 2022 following the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine , the Bloomberg news agency reported on June 16.

According to Antigua's ambassador to the United States, Sir Ronald Sanders, the billionaire "won the auction in a fully transparent process" and acquired the vessel for $67.6 million.

Eric Schmidt served as Google's CEO from 2001 to 2011 and later chaired Google's board of directors. In 2015, he became the chairman of Alphabet, the new parent company of Google.

The 267-foot yacht, featuring 26 cabins, a baby grand piano and a swimming pool that can be transformed into a helipad, was abandoned in Antigua's Falmouth Harbour after Russian fertilizer billionaire Andrey Guryev was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department. The department had previously stated that Guryev purchased the Alfa Nero in 2014 for $120 million, a claim he denies.

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The superyachts owned by tech moguls

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is set to join the exclusive club of yacht-owning tech tycoons as the rumoured owner of Oceanco's mighty 127m sailing yacht . Though it should come as no surprise - other big names in tech such as the late Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison and Paul Allen have been responsible for some of the biggest and most ground-breaking superyachts in the world...

The 127-metre Oceanco sailing yacht Koru, formerly Y721, was launched and reportedly delivered to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in April 2023. This three-masted schooner, meaning “new beginnings” in Maori, with an expected 33000 GT and a steel hull and aluminium superstructure, is the largest in the world and the longest built in the Netherlands at Oceanco. Knocking Lürssen's Eos , owned by Biller and Diane von Furstenburg, off the top spot, Koru harnesses design similarities with her black hull, white superstructure and classic lines. However, the intricate gold paintwork, scarlet bootstrap and elaborate figurehead on the bow particularly set her apart.

Larry Ellison

American business magnate Larry Ellison is the co-founder of the billion-dollar computer tech corporation Oracle. In 2004, he commissioned the 138-metre Lürssen superyacht Rising Sun (pictured), which stands today as the 15th largest yacht in the world. It was also the last yacht that ever came from the drawing boards of legendary designed Jon Bannenberg, sporting a military-esque profile with a lean destroyer-type hull and extensive use of structural glass . Rising Sun boasts 8,000m² of living space including a wine cellar and basketball court, with a crew of 45. One of her tenders, a catamaran, even carries the yacht’s 4x4 vehicle ashore.

Ellison later sold the yacht to media mogul David Geffen and has since hosted a parade of Hollywood's glitterati on board including Leonardo DiCaprio, Steven Spielberg, Bruce Springsteen and Oprah Winfrey – to name a few.

In 2011, Ellison appeared to downsize and took delivery of the 88-metre Feadship Musashi . Not unlike Rising Sun in its appearance, structural glass features heavily throughout with a central glass lift, surrounded by a stainless steel and glass staircase that passes through every deck.

More about this yacht

The late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen is responsible for two of the most iconic superyachts in the world. At 126-metres in length, Octopus is perhaps his most famous. Built by Lürssen in 2003, this ice-classed superyacht was designed for extended cruising to the most remote locations on earth with a range of 12,500 nautical miles. Home to a helicopter garage, drive-in tender garage, six tenders, and a submarine, she packs a serious punch within her 9,932GT – not to mention the cinema, swimming pool, recording studio, basketball court and spa. At the end of 2019, she joined the market for the very first time , having completed an eight-month refit at Blohm+Voss, and remains the benchmark for exploration yachting.

Tatoosh is another honourable mention and was built by German shipyard Nobiskrug in 2000, three years prior to the delivery of Octopus . At 92-metres, she's smaller than her successor, but to describe Tatoosh as "small" would be a severe understatement. Highlights include a six-foot-deep swimming pool, a pair of helipads, a crew of 30, and a custom 12-metre Hinckley powerboat that she carries on her top deck. Tatoosh is also listed for sale following a refit earlier this year.

Yachts for charter

The 78-metre Feadship Venus was built for the late Apple boss and founder Steve Jobs. Built under the codename Project Aqua, Venus was launched to international fanfare in 2012, heralded for its extensive use of glass and pared-back design courtesy of Philippe Starck . Innovative features include a false top deck that conceals the communication and television receivers from view and a passarelle that, when opened, looks like the charging port of an iPhone. Venus ’s interior details have been closely guarded since its launch. Sadly, Jobs died a year before the yacht was delivered.

Charles Simonyi

Charles Simonyi led the team that built the first edition of the Microsoft Office software suite and was rumoured to have previously owned Lürssen’s iconic 71-metre SKAT . Nearly two decades after her launch in 2002, she joined the market for the first time and now Simonyi is thought to have upgraded to the 89-metre Lürssen Norn . Both yachts, penned by Espen Onion, share similar design features. Standout features include an alfresco cinema and adapted depth pool floor with dance floor. Norn was delivered in May 2023.

Sergey Brin

Google co-founder Sergey Brin reportedly owns the high-speed SilverYachts superyacht named Dragonfly , after Google’s once-secret project to launch a censored search engine in China. Delivered in 2009, the 73.3-metre Dragonfly was hailed as the fastest, most fuel-efficient long-range cruising superyacht on the water with a transatlantic range at 22 knots and a fuel consumption of only 360 litres per hour at 18 knots, extending her range to 4,500 nautical miles. Dragonfly is said to have a dance floor and open-air movie theatre on board. The vessel was applauded for its contribution to the disaster relief effort in Vanuatu after Hurricane Pam devastated the island in 2015. The crew reportedly moved 62 metric tons of freshwater ashore, treated over 250 patients, facilitated three medical evacuations, and built shelters in multiple villages and cleared numerous helicopter landing zones for ongoing support.

Google’s billionaire co-founder Larry Page purchased the 60-metre explorer yacht conversion Senses from a New Zealand businessman Sir Douglas Myers back in 2011. The globe-trotting superyacht features interiors by Philippe Starck and can accommodate a total of 12 guests on board, with primary guests reaping the benefits of the master suite's gyro-stabilised bed. Senses also houses an exceptional toy box with three high-speed tenders, six wave runners, a jet board and a JetLev. According to the New Zealand Herald, Senses is currently undergoing a refit in Whangārei, New Zealand, after being sold to an unknown buyer in 2020.

Barry Diller

The world’s largest three-masted schooner – also the third largest sailing yacht in the world – is owned by fashion designer Diane von Fürstenberg and her husband Barry Diller, chairman and senior executive of IAC/InterActiveCorp and Expedia Group. The 92.92-metre sailing yacht, named Eos , was built in Germany by Lürssen and delivered in 2006 with a trio of masts that stand 61-metres tall. The sailing yacht has hosted the couple's star-studded group of friends including Andy Cohen, Gayle King, Bradley Cooper, Harry Styles and Karlie Kloss. The interiors were designed by Francois Catroux, who Vanity Fair named as “the super-rich's favourite interior designer" in 2016.

Mark Zuckerburg

The 107-metre Kleven superyacht Andromeda was built for serial superyacht owner Graeme Hart and delivered under the name Ulysses . In 2017, a year after its launch, rumours began circulating that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg had purchased the rugged, six-deck explorer (although a Facebook spokesperson was quick to stamp out the rumours and released a statement denying the claims). Andromeda can carry 36 guests and is equipped with an impressive inventory of toys and tenders, including six motorbikes, two ATVs, a helicopter and an amphibious rib. Five years after her launch, Andromeda still ranks among the largest explorer yachts in the world .

Eric Schmidt

The former Google ceo Eric Schmidt backed out of the purchase of the abandoned 81.3-metre Oceanco Alfa Nero but has been said to have moved onto become the new owner of a 95-metre Lürssen. Kismet was sold in September 2023 to the billionaire as part of one of the biggest brokerage deal of the year. With the details shrouded in secrecy the yacht is now aptly known as Whisper . Espen Onio was responsible for her iconic exterior while inside was thanks to Reymond Langton , achieving the original brief from the previous commissioning owner Shahid Khan of “caviar and champagne.” Standout details include the hi-tech, art deco saloon, a private observation platform and the Persian-inspired spa area.

The co-founder and former ceo of WhatsApp, Jan Koum, has been rumoured to own the 99.9-metre Feadship , Moonrise. The yacht’s clean and strong lines, penned by Chris Bottoms from Studio de Voogt , won the highly competitive class of best displacement motor yachts above 3,000 GT in the World Superyacht Awards 2021. Features include the helicopter landing deck and modern interiors by Remi Tessier . Accommodation is for up to 16 guests, and there are 32 crew members onboard Moonrise to attend to the guests' every need. The Ukrainian-American mogul is also said to own the accompanying support vessel Nebula.

Evan Speigel

The Silicone Valley ceo, Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel has been reportedly said to own the 94.8-metre Feadship Bliss. Delivered in 2021 the motor yacht penned by Feadship's Studio De Voogt Naval Architects has most recently been spotted cruising Auckland in September 2023. Spiegel is rumoured to be Feadship's younger client. Bliss can accommodate up to 18 guests across nine staterooms; however little else is known about the 2983 GT yacht.

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Alix Tichelman, nicknamed by national media as the "Call Girl Killer" and "Harbor Hooker" of Santa Cruz, is finally telling her side of the story.

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Mike Blake/Reuters

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt may ditch his $67.5 million bid for a Russian oligarch’s suspected superyacht, according to the government of the small Caribbean nation where the boat is currently docked. Schmidt won a bidding war for the 267-foot-long Alfa Nero in June, after it was abandoned in Antigua and Barbuda following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. (The United States claims the boat is the property of Russian billionaire Andrey Guryev, though he has denied this.) Guryev’s daughter contested the sale in court that month, claiming the boat was rightfully hers. On Friday, a spokesperson for the government of Antigua and Barbuda said they would not be able to grant Schmidt free title, or a guarantee that no one else could claim ownership of the boat—an issue the spokesperson said could cause Schmidt to abandon his bid. If that is the case, the boat will go to the next highest bidder, who pledged $66 million for the superyacht. Either way, it will be a relief to the government of Antigua and Barbuda, which is reportedly paying $28,000 a week just to keep it afloat.

Watch CBS News

Kiss of Death and the Google Exec

May 26, 2015 / 11:23 PM EDT / CBS News

Produced by Allen Alter and Patti Aronofsky

[This story first aired on Jan. 24, 2015. It was updated on May 26.]

When he's not out looking for the big wave, there's a big story that has consumed Stephen Baxter, a reporter for the Santa Cruz Sentinel and a "48 Hours" consultant: the mysterious death of Google executive Forrest Hayes at the city's sprawling marina.

"Forrest Hayes was ... 51 years old. He lived in a pretty upper crust neighborhood," Baxter told "48 Hours." "He was a pretty high powered guy and ... obviously had a lot of assets; he lives in a $3 million house in Santa Cruz."

In 2013, one of the boats docked in Santa Cruz Harbor was the majestic 46-foot-long yacht called "Escape." It belonged to Hayes. Not surprisingly, the tech exec outfitted his boat with some of the most expensive tech gear out there -- about $200,000 worth, including a sophisticated security system complete with high-def cameras.

Inside, Hayes spared no expense on creature comforts, including a leather ceiling and a $8,000 captain's chair.

The Google executive's death caught the attention of Michael Daly. He's an investigative reporter for The Daily Beast , in New York, and also a "48 Hours" consultant.

"I think ... he was practical and imaginative at the same time," Daly said. "Forrest Hayes started in his native Michigan ... at the Ford Motor Company as a manager, he went to California for Sun Microsystems and he went on to Apple..."

Hayes then went on to Google for a high-paying job at their top-secret location, where impossible dreams are transformed into reality.

"He was hired ... to work in Google X, which they call their 'moonshot factory.' As in, you know, the most extreme, wildest, imaginative, farthest reaching ideas they could have. You know, like Google glasses, self-driving cars," Daly explained. "He was the guy who was actually gonna make some of these things happen."

It's a place so secretive, colleagues from Google X refused to divulge exactly what Hayes did there. To get away from the pressures at work, Forrest Hayes would head to the marina, and onto his prized possession.

"One of the larger boats in the harbor, I think that's fair to say," said Baxter.

What police would eventually discover was that the married father of five had a secret liaison. She was a young and exotic dark haired woman covered with very distinctive tattoos. And she would be the last person to see Forrest Hayes alive.

"On the night of November 22, 2013 ... Forrest Hayes was on his yacht ... and he didn't come home that night. And his wife became concerned. She called the captain they retained for this yacht and he went and he got on the boat," said Daly.

Hayes' body was found lying in the main cabin. The captain immediately called 911, but surprisingly, it would take months before the Google executive's death made headlines.

"There was -- really no report of his death," Baxter said. "Obviously, the police in this case were trying to keep that under wraps as they investigated."

Santa Cruz Deputy Police Chief Steve Clark has been on this case since day one.

"The media's gonna want to know right off the bat.'Who is it?' 'Who's responsible?' 'Is this a homicide?' 'Is this a murder?' We didn't have enough to really even put that out. We were busy building the case," Clark told "48 Hours" correspondent Maureen Maher.

Building the case wasn't easy -- despite some initial crime scene clues.

"There were two wine glasses there, both which appeared to have been used," said Clark

Investigators zeroed in on Hayes' cell phone, launching an exhaustive digital search. They made a stunning discovery. Hayes had a profile page on a dating website, called SeekingArrangement.com. It would be a critical clue in learning the identity of that mystery tattooed woman.

It was just a few days before Thanksgiving 2013. What happened that night was recorded by the boat's video cameras. One camera in particular caught the very last moments of Hayes' life in chilling detail.

"Initially, we were told that the video wasn't available from that particular camera -- that actually showed the cabin of the boat. ...there was indeed video that was uploaded to a cloud server. And the video from that camera was indeed available," Clark explained. "That was one of those moments where you feel like, you know, it was 4th and 1. And you got a first down.

Actually, it took three months and a court order for detectives to get their hands on that video. When they did, it was explosive.

"That video was shocking to me," said Clark.

"What do you see on this video?" Maher asked.

"Well, the video's everything. The video is the case," Clark replied.

Police have yet to release the video, but described in detail to "48 Hours" exactly what they say happened that night between the couple: essentially, it was a party for two -- drugs included.

"They greet each other -- a quick hug-- just a quick embrace. You can see that they're engaged in conversation. But there's no audio," Clark said. "...then, eventually, she -- gets to the point where she starts to prepare drugs ... for injection. We see her very clearly. She brought all of the equipment with her. She brought the drugs with her."

As police would learn, the drug of choice that night was heroin.

"We see her prepare the syringe. We see her -- it looks like she's injecting herself, but her back's to the camera," Clark explained. "He watches this happen. And then she eventually injects him."

"Do you feel like, at any point when you're watching the video, that this is a guy who is afraid and doesn't want to do this?" Maher asked.

"I get the impression ... he's nervous. He's uncertain. But he's going along with it," said Clark.

"And what happens then?" Maher asked.

"Almost immediately, he starts to go into distress," Clark explained. "At some point, she comes to him. It looks like she tries to revive him a bit ... by patting him on the face and talking to him, holding his head as he slumped forward on the chair.

"And you or I, if we found ourselves in that situation, would've been on the phone to 911, sayin', 'Oh, my gosh. Something terrible's happened. We need help.' And she does none of that," Clark continued.

Instead, Clark says the video shows the woman trying to remove any evidence that she was ever there -- wiping fingerprints and cleaning up her drug paraphernalia.

"While he's slumped over on the floor?" Maker asked.

"While he's on the floor," Clark replied.

"She's stepping over him?" Maher asked.

"She is literally walking around the cabin of the boat ... stepping over him, grabbing her glass of wine, carrying it around the boat cabin with her," said Clark.

Clark says that portion of the video with Hayes on the floor of the cabin goes on for seven minutes.

"And that's seven minutes that emergency medical personnel could've been there could have done something and could have reacted to this situation to save Mr. Hayes' life. But instead, she does nothing, nothing to call for help or to fix this. You know, and that's the crux of the case," Clark told Maher.

Armed with that video, police hit pay dirt. They were able to match the woman with those distinctive tattoos to a profile on the dating website Hayes had used. She was a 26-year-old aspiring model. Her name? Alix Tichelman.

WEB OF SECRETS

The wealthy Google executive found the exotic model in a somewhat secret world, where real names are rarely used.

Technically, Alix Tichelman and Forrest Hayes met in Las Vegas -- not at an upscale casino or one of the fancy hotel lobby bars -- but through an online website which is headquartered just a stone's throw from the strip. But as "48 Hours" discovered, it's not your typical dating website.

"What year did you start SeekingArrangement?" Maher asked the site's CEO, Brandon Wade.

"It was started in 2006 from a bedroom in San Francisco, actually," he replied.

It may have the look and feel of a start-up, but with nearly four million members worldwide, this is big business.

"SeekingArrangement.com is -- a Sugar Daddy dating website, so we match wealthy guys and girls looking to pamper and spoil. And, of course, younger men and women looking to meet those wealthy people," Wade explained.

Wade, a boyish 43-year old, says he's become a multi-millionaire from all the "arranging" he's been doing.

"Is SeekingArrangement about arranging sexual relationships for money?" Maher asked.

"It is about finding romance and passion," Wade replied. "I'm unapologetic about the fact that sex is involved in a romantic relationship. And money is involved in a romantic relationship. But that doesn't make the romantic relationship prostitution."

Deputy Police Chief Steve Clark, the point man in the Hayes death case, strongly disagrees.

"It doesn't take a Sherlock Holmes to take a look at that website and figure out exactly what was going on there," he told Maher. "The titles of the individuals are Sugar Babies and Sugar Daddies. You know, that's -- there's no innocent connotation there behind any of that."

"What is 'Budget'? That's what he's willing to spend?" Maher asked Wade as they looked at the website.

"That's his sort of lifestyle. So it could be going out for dinners, paying for that. Going on trips," he explained.

"OK. So does a woman think you're gonna spend $3,000 on me? A Sugar Baby thinks, 'You're gonna spend -- $3,000 on me,'" Maher asked.

"Yeah, on the relationship," Wade replied.

Wade is proud that his membership ranks include employees of leading Fortune 500 companies, including, he says, from Google.

"Is Forrest Hayes a typical client?" Maher asked Wade.

"I would say -- he is-- an average client of ours," he replied.

"Married tech executive looking for some sort of arrangement," Maher commented.

"Yep. Forty percent of the guys are married," said Wade.

It's unknown if Hayes was fulfilling the "expectations" of any Sugar Babies' lifestyle requests, which range from a $1,000 to over $10,000 in monthly Sugar Daddy "gifts."

"Can you tell us anything about Alix Tichelman's profile on SeekingArrangement?" Maher asked Wade.

"Well, the only thing I can say is that it looked like any other normal profile, so it was approved. And -- there was no indication that she was soliciting money for sex. At least not with that profile," he replied.

After Hayes'death, investigators began tracking Alix Tichelman on social media. Fearing she might leave town, they hatched a plan to catch her using SeekingArrangement.com.

"When she posted on Facebook something to the effect of -- I plan to go back to Georgia -- that's when they decided to really go in and pursue her on the same website, just the way Forrest had, and pose as a john and lure her back to Santa Cruz," reporter Stephen Baxter explained.

"We started seeing chatter from her that indicated she was either gonna move out of the country or out of the state," said Clark.

"There's now a clock on this 'cause she's about to head South," reporter Michael Daly explained. "So, they do kind of a classic sting."

"We sold out our detective and made him set up a profile -- under a different identity and made up a whole story about him. We then posted that out there and we reached out to Alix Tichelman through SeekingArrangements," said Clark.

Code-named "Sebastian," that detective began emailing and texting with Tichelman, hoping for a rendezvous.

"Eventually, we convinced her to come down and meet with us for an agreed-upon ... arrangement for sex, for prostitution, and for a sum of money," said Clark.

"Police said ... they deposited some money -- several hundred dollars into her bank account with a promise of ... at least $1,000 upon arrival and everything else," Baxter explained.

"This did not appear to you that this was the first time she had negotiated such a situation?" Maher asked Clark.

"No. In fact ... she kinda called us out, called us a cheapskate. Told us that, you know, many of her clients pay twice that," he replied.

Eight months after the death of Forrest Hayes, Alix Tichelman once again showed up in Santa Cruz County, this time at a secluded resort. Once again, she came with heroin in her bag expecting to hook up with the Sugar Daddy from SeekingArrangement. And once again, it did not go as planned.

"When you said, 'We're the cops. And we're the ones you've been communicating with,' what was her reaction?" Maher asked Clark.

"Oh, she -- she cried," he replied. "...that's when we saw panic."

Alix Tichelman, 26, was stunned. Police arrested her for prostitution and charged her in the death of Forrest Hayes.

"...this was a crime. This wasn't just some accident gone awry," Clark said.

Or was it? What happened that night, says Tichelman's defenders, is a lot more complicated.

WHO IS ALIX TICHELMAN?

Perhaps no one was more surprised by the arrest of AlixTichelman than Chad Cornell. The construction worker with a passion for writing and playing music was in love with her.

"For me, I mean, she was somebody completely different," Cornell told Maureen Maher. "When I first saw her, I couldn't help but to say something ... She has a very darker style. And I always thought she was really beautiful. And almost like, you know, the Angelina Jolie kinda look."

Cornell had no idea how dark her life really was.

"Did you believe she was falling in love with you?" Maher asked Cornell.

"I did," he replied.

Cornell thought his girlfriend was a model -- there were countless images, a swimsuit commercial, and a makeup tutorial she did online.

And as far as he could tell, she was always answering modeling calls.

"She'd get all dolled up and go to a photo shoot," Cornell said. "...she'd usually make about $1,000 or so when she'd go out to these modeling shoots."

So imagine how he felt to learn months later that his beloved girlfriend was now being accused of doing something altogether different for all that money.

"I got a text with the news link on it ... and kind just fell over on the couch in shock," Cornell said.

The woman he once thought he'd spend the rest of his life with was now not only charged with prostitution -- but also in the death of Google executive Forrest Hayes.

"What are you thinking? This is a woman you were in love with," Maher commented.

"Yeah, I mean obviously, I was devastated you know. I turned white," said Cornell.

As the news sank in, to his complete amazement, Cornell realized that just hours before Alix Tichelman met up with Forrest Hayes on that fateful night, she was with him.

"We were hanging out that day actually. She told me that some of her long-time high school friends were in Santa Cruz, and had a boat and she had planned to go hang out with them," he explained. "Later that night, she actually woke me outta bed with a phone call. She's you know really frantic on the phone. She sounded very upset."

"What was she talking about?" Maher asked.

"She talked about how her friends had started doing heroin and a bunch of hardcore drugs on the boat and made her uncomfortable. And that she had to leave," Cornell replied.

"But you believed on that call that she sounded genuinely upset?" Maher asked.

"Crying, sniffling. I mean upset upset," said Cornell.

Photos: Who is Alix Tichelman?

Because the truth, he now knows, was much worse. And it's left him wondering whether he ever really knew who Alix was.

"Who is Alix Tichelman, right? Who is she?" said reporter Michael Daly.

Daly did what police investigators did, and using the tools of Hayes' employer, he 'Googled' her.

"This, the police discovered, was Alix Tichelman's Twitter account," he explained, navigating through the profile AKKennedyxx.

"One x short of triple x," Daly said of her Twitter handle. 'Baddest bitch, model, stylist, hustler, exotic dancer.' Those are her words. These are the pictures to go with the words."

"This has the charming inscription, 'To death do us part," Daly said of a photo Tichelman showing off a tattoo on her arm that was posted to the account. "You might start believing less in coincidence on seeing that."

But to Daly, Tichelman's postings looked more like someone trying to create an image rather than someone obsessed with killing. That's because he came across this post:

"My beautiful mother and I out for lunch. *no makeup face*"

"I mean this is a young woman who wants to be with mom," Daly commented of the tweet, which included a photo of Tichelman and her mother smiling.

Tichelman posted it just months before her arrest for Forrest's death

"It makes you think there's a fuller story," said Daly.

So how did it come to this? Childhood pictures show a cute blonde tomboy who appeared to have all the advantages in life growing up with her sister, Monica, who would become an investment counselor, her mother, Leslie Ann, and her father, Bart, a CEO for a technology company and a pretty good poker player.

"And he at one point found himself playing with some of the best poker players in the world and he won like $400,000," said Daly.

Alix Tichelman spent her early teens in an Atlanta suburb where she played sports and won writing awards.

"Her friends say that she's very smart, very deep," said Daly.

But also very troubled.

"Her experiences with boys were not always happy ones," Daly explained. "She had eating disorders ... she was taking drugs."

Desperate, her parents went looking for help and located a school that they thought would give her special attention.

"So they found this place called the Hyde School in Maine," Daly continued.

Megan was also a student at the Hyde School, where Tichelman spent a few months.

"I can feel, like, pressure in my chest. It's nerve-wracking," she said driving to the school.

Megan asked "48 Hours" not to use her last name, but agreed to travel back to the Hyde School campus.

"I want people to see this very pivotal part of her life, that I feel, probably affected her at a very ... huge point in her development ... and why she is who she is," she said.

"Do you remember when you first met Alix, do you happen to remember the very first time you saw her?" Maher asked.

"One-hundred percent," Megan said. "She was gorgeous and she was very awkward."

The cute blonde girl next door was long gone.

"She barely ate. She was very skinny. She was rail-thin," Megan said. "She was emotionally kind of closed off."

"I think the big question then is why? What had happened to her?" Maher asked.

"I don't know the truth to that. She never told me there was a specific catalyst," Megan replied.

But Megan says Alix Tichelman did hint at some traumatic events.

"We talked about ... the fact that we had issues trusting men," she said. "We had become numb to a lot of things."

Tichelman had started cutting herself. A photo of Alix in her then-bunkmate's scrapbook reads "psycho roomie" and "look at the cuts on her arm."

"Alix Tichelman was actually the first person that I met who did that," said Ashley Kent, who lived in Tichelman's dorm. "She came to the school with the scars. She had already etched things into her arm, and she had already made this ... image of herself as this like devil person ... that's how she dressed, kind of like a devil worshipper."

But was that really who Alix was?

"She was actually a really nice girl. It was very much like a front that she putting on, an image," said Kent.

Megan noticed it, too.

"Once you bypass those walls, she was just a normal girl who was scared," she noted.

"And what was she scared of?" Maher asked.

"I think herself, honestly. I mean we didn't know who we were. We had resorted to things that not every person chooses. We had been in trouble.

And at Hyde, it seemed like Tichelman was always in trouble. Megan says they punished her.

"You're forced to do manual labor, physical labor. They basically tell you what you can and can't do," Megan explained.

Megan says she and Alix were forced to build a road.

"We hoed it, each person, and we weeded it. And then they made us cart like wheelbarrows -- like huge wheelbarrows full of rocks up and spread 'em, so we basically built a dirt road on campus," she said.

Ashley Kent remembers one night waking up to Alix screaming. What happened sounds like a scene out of a Stephen King movie.

"She like kinda walked down the halls and like was cutting herself really late at night," she said.

"She began just to hurt herself because she felt that's what she deserved," said Megan.

When it didn't work out at Hyde, Tichelman's parents tried other schools. But the worse was still to come.

"Well, she talked about taking heroin when she was in her teens," said Daly.

And by her early 20s, Tichelman was living in San Francisco, working strip clubs like Larry Flint's Hustler, and then a place called the Condor. Eventually, she found her way back home to Atlanta, where her life would take a dramatic turn.

"This kinda great thing happens. She meets a guy named Dean," said Daly.

Dean Riopelle was much older but so in love with Alix Tichelman he wanted to marry her.

"So maybe there's gonna be a happy ending anyway," Daly commented.

Then, in September of 2013, two months before Forrest Hayes died, Tichelman's fiancé, Dean Riopelle, died with heroin in his system:

911 Call: Um, I don't know I think my boyfriend overdosed or something like he ... he won't respond, and he's just laying on the ground. Oh no.

Was it an unfortunate coincidence? Or something more sinister?

ANOTHER HEROIN DEATH

The Masquerade -- it's one of the hottest concert venues in Atlanta, Georgia, and it all belonged to 53-year-old Dean Riopelle, a former cross dressing singer for the rock band the "Impotent Sea Snakes."

In September of 2013, Riopelle died of a heroin overdose. His girlfriend at the time: Alix Tichelman.

Tichelman called 911 after she says she discovered Riopelle unconscious in his North Atlanta home. That was just two months before she was with Google exec Forrest Hayes when he died.

"We were surprised the similarities in their case to our case," said Santa Cruz Deputy Police Chief Steve Clark.

Based on Tichelman's arrest in Santa Cruz for the death of Forrest Hayes, police in Milton, Georgia, are now taking a second look at Riopelle's death. What was first ruled an accidental overdose might very well become a criminal matter.

One person who believes Tichelman should be held responsible for Riopelle's death is his former employee, Khristina Brucker.

"I think she had something to do with his death, I really do," said Brucker.

For a few months in 2012, Brucker, an aspiring model, lived in Riopelle's house, taking care of his children from his previous marriage and his pet hobby: raising dozens of monkeys.

"He said he had a dream about monkeys one day and he just started collecting them. He had the money. So why not?" Brucker told Maureen Maher.

Riopelle told an Atlanta TV station he had hopes of turning his property into a zoo.

"Anybody would spend 20 minutes or an hour with one would see they have a little bit more personality than most other animals," he said.

But Brucker says his real passion was the woman also featured in that news story, Riopelle's live-in girlfriend, Alix Tichelman.

"Oh, he loved her. He absolutely loved her. He wanted to marry her and she wanted to marry him, too," said Brucker.

Dean Riopelle loved everything about Alix Tichelman -- except the drugs. By the time Tichelman hooked up with Riopelle, she was a full blown heroin addict. Brucker says Riopelle didn't share Tichelman's bad habits.

"Did you ever see him drink?" Maher asked.

"Never," Brucker replied.

"Do drugs?" Maher pressed.

"Not once," said Brucker.

Brucker stopped working for Riopelle almost a year before he died. Still, she's sure he would never inject himself with heroin. But she wonders if Alix Tichelman might have.

"Do you think that's what happened?" Maher asked Brucker.

"I think it's possible, especially with the case in Santa Cruz where she actually did that," she replied.

"The idea that she's going around randomly sticking people with heroin needles is preposterous. These are grown men. They know exactly what they're doing," said Todd, an Atlanta businessman.

Todd asked "48 Hours" not to use his last name, but says, as a close friend of Alix Tichelman, he could no longer keep quiet about what he knows about the couple.

"She was devastated after Dean passed away," he said.

Todd says, not only did Riopelle drink -- he drank a lot.

"But she loved him and he loved her. If he were alive today, he would be the first one to bail her out of jail," he said. "And he would be absolutely mortified at how the people around him ... have treated her."

And Todd says Riopelle was determined to get Tichelman off heroin. He sent her to rehab and even bought her an engagement ring. He texted Todd.

"This is August 30th of 2013 ... he was getting Alix a wedding ring. They were going to get married," Todd said of the text.

That's just three weeks before Dean Riopelle would overdose.

"She gets her ring, she picked it out today. We drug test every week. If she can stay clean for 14 months we will get married Halloween night 2014..." Todd said, reading aloud one of the text messages that have never been made public. He showed them exclusively to "48 Hours."

"Alix says this is the first time in 10 years she has gotten out of detox or rehab and lasted a whole week before shooting up again," Todd said, reading another text.

But Tichelman didn't stay clean for long. On Sept. 7, 2013, just 10 days before his fatal overdose, Dean Riopelle made a shocking discovery: Alix was online, advertising herself to men.

"She hated that she was compelled to do it because she had this addiction," Todd said. "There were guys who wanted to rent her penthouse apartments ... men with a lot of power and a lot of status. ...But she wasn't interested in anything except getting the money to support her habit. She loved Dean, she wanted to be with Dean, but she had this deep dark secret."

And, Todd says, when Riopelle found out, he flipped out.

"He said, 'Can I move all of the prostitute's s--- into your place tomorrow ... She is better over there and I would like to bring her stuff to you today so I don't have to see the whore again,'" Todd said, reading Riopelle's text.

But Riopelle didn't kick Tichelman out. Instead, Todd says, he hit the bottle -- hard.

"Once he discovered the ad things began to fall apart. Dean desperately loved her. Dean wanted to keep her. But he couldn't figure out how to reconcile all of this," said Todd.

So, Todd believes, Riopelle tried something new.

Tichelman would later tell police she was in the bathroom when she heard what sounded like a crash. She went to the bedroom and found Riopelle on the floor.

An autopsy would show he had a fatal mix of heroin, pain killers and alcohol in his system.

"I'm convinced that what happened was Dean was trying to reach a connection with Alix on a deeper level. And he thought that if they could share this thing, this thing she was so attached to, that she couldn't let go of no matter what, that they could actually be together. And that's what he wanted more than anything in life," said Todd.

Following Riopelle's death, Tichelman sent text messages to Todd: "Gd why did dean have to die?"

In the texts she writes that her mother is coming and will move her to California to the family's new home two hours outside San Francisco. But Tichelman is trying to detox and tells Todd she is worried:

"I know that city well, like the Tenderloin where I used to live is the third biggest open drug market in the U.S. It takes two minutes to score and you don't have to know anyone. You can see why I'm worried," Todd said, reading the text aloud.

Around Oct. 30, 2013, Alix Tichelman arrived in California. She immediately went back online and started advertising herself. Texting Todd: "Guys out here got mad money."

And within days she had a prospect. She was about to come into serious cash.

"This is on the second of November and she says an 'amazing guy' found her...'He is the real deal.' Tomorrow she's going on his boat and for a few hours he's giving her $400 to $500 cash. Then a check for $2,000," Todd said of another text. "Now, I'm relatively certain that the guy on the boat she's referring to was Forrest."

Three weeks later, on Nov. 22, Alix Tichelman was definitely with Forrest Hayes on his boat, where Todd believes she was simply making money to feed her addiction.

"Tell me one thing that happened on that yacht that was not absolutely consensual between two adults," Todd said. "Nothing."

STUNNING DEVELOPMENTS

On Tuesday, May 19, just one week ago, Alix Tichelman is back in court to have a date set for her trial.

She's been in jail for almost a year - her past modeling life a distant memory. Tichelman faces almost 20 years behind bars, charged in the killing of Forrest Hayes, along with drug possession and prostitution.

Her public defenders, Jerry Christensen and Larry Biggam, have insisted she is not a cold-blooded killer.

"Alix Tichelman did nothing that Mr. Hayes didn't want her to do. Two adults engaged in mutual and cooperative drug usage. And it went wrong. But it was an accident," Biggam told reporters.

Defense lawyers say Hayes was an eager participant that night, even using his own cell phone light to show Tichelman where to inject him. And they are adamant she then simply panicked.

"This video will show that it's an accident. Everything about this video indicates accident and panic, everything about it," Christensen told reporters.

Who's to blame in Google exec's OD death?

For months they've investigated Forrest Hayes' past, asking prosecutors to hand over video from the "Escape's" cameras as far back as six months before he died.

"We have some indications from other material that there may have been previous encounters on the boat. It would be highly relevant in regard to whether or not there is-- drug usage along with sex," Christensen told reporters.

But at Tuesday's hearing comes a bombshell. With her parents watching, Alix Tichelman pleads guilty to involuntary manslaughte r, as well as the lesser charges.

Judge : Do you understand that when you plead no contest or guilty you're getting two felonies and five misdemeanors? Alix Tichelman : Yes

Alix Tichelman in court on May 19, 2015.

And through her lawyer, she apologizes to the Hayes family: "It was accident and panic and she's so, so sorry for it."

Tichelman was sentenced to six years in a local jail, but with credit for her time served and a reduction by the judge, she'll likely serve just a little over two years.

After the hearing, there was another stunning development. Prosecutor Rafael Vasquez says the family of Forrest Hayes told him they never wanted Alix Tichelman charged.

"The family did not want this case to be filed, they would have been very happy if this case had been dismissed," Vasquez explained. "They were terrified about the prospect of this case going to trial."

The family, he said, did not want that video from Hayes' boat to ever be made public.

"I can only imagine what further pain, what further humiliation they would endure if that video was released out into the public," said Vasquez.

What's more, he says Alix was never a cold-blooded killer, as described by law enforcement.

"That was never depicted in that surveillance video," said Vasquez.

In fact, the prosecutor agrees with the defense attorneys that Alix was anything but callous when Forrest collapsed.

"And the fact that she made some effort to wake him up, hit him in the chest, smack him in the face, holding him up trying to lift him up, then holding him, hugging him at one point, and then you can see her crying in one instance, and then yelling for him to wake up in one instance -- that clearly showed somebody who appeared concerned at that time. And that is certainly inconsistent with somebody who acted with an obvious intent to kill," he explained.

But, the prosecutor says, what she is guilty of is not doing enough.

"She was the only one who could have rendered help and she neglected to do so, she failed to do so and instead took liberties to destroy evidence and to make her getaway while leaving the man there to die," said Vasquez.

In the end, one of Tichelman's attorneys, Athena Reis, says her time in jail has been helping turn Alix's life around.

"You know, she's clean and sober. She's closer with her family than ever, and I think she's really used this time to reflect," said Reis.

But for Forrest Hayes' family , there is no turning around. And they'll try to put the scars of his actions behind them.

"From this point on, the family no longer has to worry about the concern associated with all the scrutiny, all the ridicule and all the scorn generated by all the media attention in this case," Vasquez said. "This family has been through a lot."

Alix Tichelman is expected to be released July 1, 2017. She will be 29 years old.

Produced by Allen Alter and Patti Aronofsky, Elena Difiore, Greg Fisher, Michelle Feuer, Douglas Longhini, Michelle Fanucci and Michael McHugh

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In a country rarely known to promote social mobility, Capton-esque career trajectories are scarce. A self-made entrepreneur born into a middle-class Normandy family, Capton began his professional life as a teen with an entry-level internship, eschewing elite universities, making the exec a rare bird among France’s top media execs. For all that, Capton remains more humble than flamboyant, letting his track record speak for itself.

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Following its recent acquisition of German production-distribution powerhouse Leonine (“The Lives of Others”), Mediawan is now worth more than €2 billion ($2.1 billion) and boasts an estimated annual revenue of $1.3 billion, encompassing more than 80 production labels around the world, including Brad Pitt’s Plan B, France’s On Entertainment (“Miraculous”), Chi-Fou-Mi (“Beating Hearts”) and Chapter 2 (“Limonov: The Ballad of Eddie”), Italy’s Palomar (“The Count of Monte Cristo”) and, more recently, the U.K.’s Misfits Entertainment (“Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story”).

While taking a hands-on approach and engineering high-profile acquisitions at Mediawan, Capton continues to lead Troisième Œil Prods., the vehicle he launched out of a modest office located in a parking lot back in 2001, that now produces some of France’s highest-rated talk shows, such as “C à vous.”

“I’ve always been guided and passionate about content, and that focus has set Mediawan and my production companies apart. We’re not guided by finance nor investor-dictated strategies,” he tells Variety . Instead, the company is driven by “our taste for production,” he adds, wearing a black Celine sweater and his staple dark-framed glasses, sitting next to a white marble desk lined with souvenirs. Large bay windows reveal the Eiffel Tower, among other Paris landmarks, peaking in from the outside, while within.

Capton also surrounds himself with strong women. He works closely with Elisabeth d’Arvieu, who joined the company almost four years ago after working at Lagardere and StudioCanal, and now runs Mediawan Pictures, overseeing all the film, animation and international labels.

A hard-core indie TV producer, Capton says he “didn’t know much about finance and didn’t yet speak English” when Pigasse and Niel approached him to co-create and lead Mediawan in 2015. Yet, under his leadership, the group raised an initial $321 million by listing shares on the Euronext Paris stock exchange, and got U.S. investment firm KKR on board as its major backer four years later, during the pandemic.

2015 marked a turning point for the French film and TV industry, with Netflix having just launched and Amazon’s Prime Video preparing to roll out. “As streamers were arriving in France, we had to seize the opportunity to produce high-quality content for our amazing producers, creators and auteurs,” says Capton, citing Florian Zeller as an inspiration. “When I was producing his plays, Florian shared his wish to direct his first film, and I realized that such a film from a French auteur would be complicated to finance within an international scope, even if that auteur was already the most celebrated playwright of his generation.” Both Zeller and star Anthony Hopkins would win Oscars for their work on 2020’s “The Father,” something that only fueled Capton’s hunger to “develop more grand international projects from Europe.”

Capton’s tastes when it comes to spotting projects certainly manage to capture the zeitgeist. He says he owes this skill to his grandmother, who “raised him during an important part of [his] childhood.”

“We’d watch American sitcoms and all sorts of shows. I learned to count with a show called ‘Des chiffres et des lettres.’ I traveled thanks to documentaries. I educated myself with television, with cinema and series,” he shares.

No single program left a bigger impact than “Friends.” Adolescent obsession for the sitcom soon gave way to early-career intuition, when, as an 18-year-old intern decades before the binge-watching model, Capton thought to program a full season in a back-to-back, 24-episode bloc. “Some thought the idea bizarre, but it worked, and that’s how I got my first job at Canal+,” he says, pointing out the nice bit of symmetry that he now works with Plan B, an outfit co-created by “Friends” star Jennifer Aniston.

In some French circles, Capton’s “TV culture” has been perceived as not highbrow enough. But it’s something he says he’s “proud of,” asserting that his background and TV knowledge has led him “to build [his] company and meet wonderful people, and create Mediawan.” He also praises d’Arvieu for her “excellent taste.” But don’t expect Mediawan to start making trashy reality TV. “We don’t want to make anything we’d be ashamed of,” Capton says.

D’Arvieu says the common thread among all the companies under the Mediawan umbrella is a drive to be talent-centric. “All the producers we work with have this culture; they’re extraordinarily close to screenwriters and directors,” she says. “They work like artisans and artists.”

Traveling to Los Angeles and across Europe on a monthly basis for the last few years, Capton has made powerful allies, including CAA’s CEO and co-chairman Bryan Lourd. Lourd appreciates the fact that Capton is not only a businessman, he also “loves creators and storytellers.”

“It’s an unusual skill set in today’s world — that understanding of an artist’s temperament,” says Lourd, who also argues Capton stands out because he “didn’t come from a family, or money or any of that stuff.”

“It’s the most validating thing to know that someone is actually there because they want to be there, and they care, and they recognize other people and companies, too, that are scrappy, and like the self-made part of it,” he adds. CAA has worked with Mediawan in repping U.S. rights on Bille August’s series “The Count of Monte Cristo” as well as representing Plan B. Buying Plan B “really speaks to their tastes and [Capton’s] vision,” and a sign that they’re “playing the long game,” Lourd says.

“We knew from our first Zoom call that we wanted to tell stories together. We have common passions, values and aspirations,” he says, citing Plan B’s prestige pedigree with socially minded movies like “She Said,” recent box office hit “Bob Marley: One Love” and series “3 Body Problem,” as well as their love for auteurs such as Bong Joon-ho and Tim Burton whose latest films, “Mickey 17” and “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” respectively, were teased at CinemaCon.

Over at Plan B, longtime leaders Jeremy Kleiner and Dede Gardner claim both companies “have complementary taste and sensibility” and “both love finding the intersection of commercial and quality work.” The pair also say that Capton’s “background as an indie producer is invaluable,” because he has created an “ecosystem” that is “very focused on empowering and supporting independent producers — people who develop and make things in a particular way.”

Indeed, if there were any doubt over his valuing independence, Capton points to the fact he “refused to sell [his] company Troisieme Oeil Prods. three times.”

Maxime Saada, Canal+ Group’s chair and CEO, says that when Capton took the reins of Mediawan there was skepticism, with some assuming he’d be the “straw man” for Pigasse and Niel. “But what he’s achieved in very little time is impressive,” he says. “He’s the only French person in the world of media, TV and film that people abroad talk to me about. Even in Korea where I just traveled, they only know Mediawan.” Saada adds that Capton has “taken many daring bets on talents, has maneuvered complex personalities and egos, and has been able to get them to build lineups.”

While the company will undoubtedly grow further in Europe and has plans to expand its footprint in Africa, the U.S. remains a key market. But Capton is determined to avoid pitfalls that derailed previous efforts by French outfits, such as EuropaCorp, that never gained a foothold in Hollywood. “Before we did anything, people said to me, ‘You’re going to fail, they’ll strip you off, look at all the French businesses that failed there!’ But honestly, we have the same frank discussions with U.S. studio bosses and agents as we do with our European partners, and we’ve yet to be stripped down and we haven’t lost money,” Capton says. “We don’t go there with [guns-blazing], and we don’t have a Mediawan office in L.A. yet. We just do our job the best we can.”

It’s also through sports that Capton says he’s met “players who are going to become partners in Mediawan,” teasing what should become yet another milestone partnership for the company.

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Google DeepMind CEO: ‘This Is the Next $100 Billion AI Business’

May 17, 2024 — 04:12 pm EDT

Written by Luke Lango for InvestorPlace ->

InvestorPlace - Stock Market News, Stock Advice & Trading Tips

These days, AI stocks are all the rage – and with good reason. We believe that as its underlying technology progresses, artificial intelligence will truly change the world over the next few years. And that will lead AI stocks to soar – and mint small fortunes for prescient investors.

Though, if you’re following the mainstream media’s lead, you may be considering the wrong stocks to buy to prepare for this boom.

See; most of the current AI hype has been centered around chipmakers like Nvidia ( NVDA ) and software companies like Microsoft ( MSFT ). Those are the AI stocks that CNBC and Bloomberg are writing about. They’re the ones making all the headlines and grabbing most investors’ attention…

But those AI stocks are not the ones that have the real experts in the industry – like the CEO of DeepMind, Google’s AI Business – most excited. And they are certainly not the AI stocks with the most explosive upside potential as the AI Boom rages on.

Rather, that title belongs to a different type of AI stock – in a subsector where a perfect storm is brewing to potentially fuel staggering gains in a short amount of time.

I’m talking about biotech stocks.

Seriously, biotech stocks are on fire right now.

One tiny biotech firm named Corbus Pharmaceuticals ( CRBP ) is up more than 600% this year already – and we’re not even halfway through the year. Another named JanOne ( JANX ) is up more than 365%, while Skye Bioscience ( SKYE ) is up about 320% year-to-date.

Certain biotech stocks are soaring right now. And we think many will only keep rising.

Why? It’s all thanks to the convergence of AI and biotechnology.

AI Meets Biotech: Unlocking Enormous Economic Value

The application of AI in the field of biology could prove to be massively profitable.

We aren’t alone in that thinking. Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis agrees. In fact, he recently said that AI applied to biotechnology has the potential to unlock “enormous economic value.”

What’s driving all this bullishness? Data.

After all, when it comes to the human body, there is no dearth of quality data. In fact, there is more high-quality data than anywhere else on Earth.

That’s because, like computers, humans are really nothing more than a bunch of data strung together.

At their core, computers are just a bunch of 1s and 0s coded in sequence, with each number corresponding to a certain action for the computer to perform. Humans, similarly, are a bunch of As, Gs, Cs, and Ts strung together – or the four base types found in human DNA molecules – with each determining a person’s characteristics, traits, and even actions.

In that sense, the connecting element between humans and computers is data.

That means AI can have an especially profound impact on the human body.

Quality Data Leads to Powerful Results

Of course, what is AI at the end of day? It’s just a machine-learning algorithm using data analysis to learn how to perform certain tasks. That means that ultimately, the quantity and quality of data an AI model has access to determines the quality of that model itself.

And when it comes to the human body, there is no dearth of quality data.

Apply AI to all that data, and you will change the world.

Consider this: It takes about $900 million and 13.5 years to develop a new successful drug.

The drug development process is so expensive and time-consuming that firms cannot afford to push that many drugs forward. This creates a huge shortage in drug candidates and programs relative to what is possible given all the permutations of human biological data.

But AI can significantly shorten and cheapen this process.

It can map out genetic data, identify mutations, and run simulations to find the right compounds and combat those mutations – all almost instantly.

Essentially, researchers can use AI to find new drug candidates much faster than is currently possible.

And this is already happening.

Last year, Japanese pharma giant Takeda Pharmaceutical ( TAK ) bought an experimental psoriasis drug for $4 billion – a drug that was created in only six months by using AI.

It isn’t alone.

Other pharma giants like Bayer , Roche , Sanofi ( SNY ) and AstraZeneca ( AZN ) are actively using AI technology for drug discovery purposes.

Even Nvidia is in this game, partnering with AI biotech startups to develop foundational models for AI-powered drug discovery and development.

The future of medicine starts now. And it’s big business.

The Final Word on AI in Biotech

Research firm Deep Pharma Intelligence estimates that investments in the field of AI-powered drug discovery have tripled over the past four years to nearly $25 billion.

Morgan Stanley believes this tech will lead to an additional 50 novel therapies being brought to market over the next decade, with annual sales in excess of $50 billion!

But according to DeepMind’s CEO, even those estimates are conservative

DeepMind is considered one of the leaders in AI-powered drug discovery. Its foundational tool, AlphaFold, leverages AI to predict protein structures. And the firm just launched a new version that can model a range of molecular structures – including DNA and RNA – to predict how they interact with one another. This represents a huge step toward scalable AI-powered drug discovery.

And DeepMind’s CEO hopes to create a multi-hundred-billion-dollar business from AlphaFold.

We think that’s entirely possible.

Global drug sales represent a market that’s running north of $1.5 trillion per year.

We believe that AI-powered drug discovery should disrupt that entire industry. From that perspective, AI-powered drug discovery could one day be a trillion-dollar market.

The time to invest in this emerging, hidden corner of this boom is now.

Per our research, there are two firms outside of DeepMind who are leading the AI Biotech Revolution.

They are world-class firms led by the smartest people in the industry and with the best technology in the game. They are each attacking massive opportunities with very promising development pipelines. And perhaps most importantly, they are backed by the biggest AI companies in the world – Microsoft and Nvidia.

Trust me. These are two stocks you want to know about right now. We’re confident each could soar more than 1,000% over the next few years.

Learn all about these potential biotech behemoths.

On the date of publication, Luke Lango did not have (either directly or indirectly) any positions in the securities mentioned in this article.

P.S. You can stay up to speed with Luke’s latest market analysis by reading our Daily Notes! Check out the latest issue on your Innovation Investor or Early Stage Investor subscriber site.

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"Whenever someone starts telling me they know the future, I hear a warning buzzer in my head", says Farley

Jim Farley, president and CEO of Ford , has just qualified 13th.

It’s 2pm and we’re at the 81st Goodwood Members’ Meeting, where the Ford Mustang 289 V8 that Farley is sharing with Britain’s Steve Soper, the former BTCC ace, has finished in the top half of a stellar 30-car field in qualifying for the inaugural Ken Miles Cup.

It’s a special one-make event staged to mark the 60th anniversary of the Mustang’s launch.

Farley’s lap times are a second or so behind Soper’s and he isn’t pleased, despite the fact that this is actually prodigious performance. At 62, Farley is driving an unfamiliar and very potent car on a very fast track that he has tackled only once before. And although he loves racing, Farley really doesn’t have much time for it, given that his day job is to steer a £180 billion Detroit-based company whose 177,000 employees build 4.4 million cars a year.

The following day, in a 50-minute, two-driver race, the Farley/Soper car will cross the line in 13th place in a congested and action-packed contest full of current and former greats, without a single mark on its gleaming blue bodywork, even though most of the notchback Mustangs around it have had some kind of ‘tap’. Again, it’s a creditable performance.

Today, however, sitting behind the pits in a folding chair, comfortable in his driving gear, Farley’s mind is very much on the Mustang’s commercial aspects and especially its future.

He is deeply proud of the fact that the model has been such a backbone of Ford progress (“not many things in this industry last 60 years”) and especially of the fact that a risky decision to globalise Mustang sales, made around 2015 at the start of Farley’s own two-year stint as president of Ford of Europe, has resulted in much more prominence and success for the traditionally American pony car.

Despite the fact that Ford has many big-volume electric car programmes under way, ranging from the massive American F-150 Lightning pick-up truck to Europe’s compact Explorer crossover , which will soon be launched, Farley wants to stress the importance of the Mustang, which in future will appear in a variety of new iterations – potentially including a four-door model – but all of them with the same “performance and attitude” of existing versions.

Farley notes that Ford now makes the best-selling coupé in the world and says it’s protective of that: “[Other firms] haven’t had anything like the same consistency: they get in and then they get out again. They don’t sell many, but they still think periodically ‘let’s do another one’ and launch something else. Those models are like a tax on the company.”

Farley’s eye is on Mustang expansion. The recently launched, Nürburgring-honed, £240,000, 800bhp GTD is a “down payment” on the model’s new direction, he explains, although the game plan is firmly to keep making enticing cars that are attainable. Ford will never make “a Mustang that’s not a Mustang”.

That means V8 production will continue far into the future. And, emphatically, it rules out an electric model (although the Mustang badge has already been used for the Mach-E electric SUV).

Even if someone else at Ford wanted to make a Mustang without the correct credentials, Farley is certain the company’s executive chairman, Bill Ford, Henry Ford’s great-grandson, wouldn’t let it happen. “He’s a Mustang fanatic,” explains Farley.

“He owns the 1964½ Mustang that paced Jim Clark at the start of the 1964 Indianapolis 500; he was a little kid sitting in the back with his father driving. If I were to tell him we were looking at an all-electric Mustang coupé, he’d tell me he was looking at a new CEO…”

That’s all very well, I say, but how does that square with the 2035 date much of the world says it’s working towards for the wholesale adoption of EVs? Doesn’t that mean ICE Mustangs, and especially V8s, will have disappeared by then?

“Are you sure?” Farley shoots back. “I don’t think we know. When you need a Transit for your work, or you’re a rancher with a pick-up in the US, electric power is a terrible solution – and even the most radical, decarbonising politician can’t afford to be on the wrong side of the customers.

“Maybe the solution will be hydrogen. Or the sustainable fuels thing is coming along. Whenever someone starts telling me they know the future, I hear a warning buzzer in my head. There are no certainties in our industry. I’ve heard this stuff a thousand times: every car’s going electric, every car’s going hydrogen, every car’s going diesel. There have been a lot of blind alleys.”

While we’re finding out which alternatives for future propulsion will prevail, Farley says Ford will do as much as it can to preserve special ICE engines, such as Mustang V8s: “Most of our lowered emissions standards are achieved by fleets, so I believe we can still sell some special cars if the fleet business is strong.”

Farley’s European connection remains strong – with his wife and three children, he lived in north London during his two-year tenure as boss of Ford in Europe – and he’s well aware of what is now dubbed ‘the Richard Parry-Jones era’, when the late, great product development chief led Ford to a market-leading role in all aspects of driving quality, especially driving dynamics. I ask Farley if he is aware that in some cases the halo has recently slipped.

“Richard Parry-Jones is still very much in the company, in my eyes, and when I read that our team didn’t get it right, that’s very upsetting for me,” replies Farley. “We owe it to those great engineers that their work continues and gets perfected. I always want us to major on stuff we do very well, like suspension damping, steering feel, brake feel and so on. And we have got to get our cars lighter – and that includes our Mustang versions.

“Just because [the] Fiesta and Focus didn’t work globally doesn’t mean we should turn away from how those cars feel when you drive them.”

Farley agrees Ford’s number-one goal shouldn’t be just mechanical durability or software reliability: driving quality must make its cars different. “That excellence needs to be as obvious in a Raptor as any other Ford,” he says.

As the ground shakes while a field of classic Can-Am sports cars thunders past us, bound for a hectic practice session, Farley changes the subject to Ford’s latest aspirations in racing. Led by the Mustang, a new approach to racing is spreading across the world.

“We’ve stretched our racing to make a sustainable business,” he explains. “In the past, we’ve sponsored people to help them become successful, but now we’ve launched a customer business. We are making race cars to sell in numbers; I want to make it sustainable so the next CEO can’t take it apart. If it makes money, it’s less likely they will want to dismantle it and go yacht racing or something…”

This change of emphasis will have implications for Farley’s own racing career: this year, he will do the Mustang-based Dark Horse series – four 90-minute IMSA races driving a Mustang on his own – plus several other longer-distance events partnering other drivers. Sure, he enjoys it, but he also sees a business benefit: “How can I support the team if I don’t know what customers are saying about our cars? I want to know what they are whispering to their mechanics.”

Ford sees prospects in four or five different varieties of US racing, including IMSA and all levels of Nascar, and it’s involved at a high level in places like South Africa and Australia.

“A Mustang GT4 won its first race in Australia just yesterday,” says Farley proudly. “I don’t think there’s any brand more active in racing across the world.”

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All signs point to Mark Zuckerberg celebrating his 40th birthday on what many speculate is his brand-new superyacht Launchpad .

The boating world has been buzzing about Launchpad — a 118-meter yacht built by the Dutch shipyard Feadship — for months, with rumors swirling that her owner is none other than the Meta CEO. But in the yachting world, where privacy is paramount , no party would confirm her owner.

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Main content

Cruise founder Kyle Vogt is back with a robot startup

Kyle Vogt, the former founder and CEO of self-driving car company Cruise, has a new VC-backed robotics startup focused on household chores.

Vogt announced Monday that the new startup, called the Bot Company, has raised $150 million from former GitHub CEO and investor Nat Friedman, Pioneer founder and investor Daniel Gross, Spark Capital general partner Nabeel Hyatt, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison, Stripe co-founder John Collison and Quiet Capital.

Vogt founded the startup with Paril Jain, who led the AI tech team at Tesla, and former Cruise software engineer Luke Holoubek.

“We’re building bots that do chores so you don’t have to. Everyone is busy. Bots can help,” Vogt wrote on social media X . “So many things compete for our time — commutes, longer working hours, and the complexities of modern life. Our team has spent years building robots (including the self-driving kind) that give people some of that time back, and we’re taking that a step further with this company.”

Vogt did not respond to a request for comment.

The new endeavor comes five months after Vogt resigned as CEO of Cruise , the autonomous vehicle startup that he founded in 2013 and was later acquired by General Motors. His resignation followed an October 2 incident that saw a Cruise vehicle run over and drag a pedestrian 20 feet, after the pedestrian had been hit by a human-driven car. The event, coupled with the company’s response, prompted California regulators to suspend Cruise’s deployment and driverless testing permits, effectively ending its robotaxi operations in the state where the bulk of its operations were located.

Since his resignation, Vogt has maintained a relatively low public profile. His return, however, shouldn’t surprise those who have followed his career. Prior to Cruise, Vogt had co-founded Justin.tv, a website that allowed anyone to broadcast video online; it later morphed into Twitch, a live-streaming platform acquired by Amazon in 2014 for $970 million. He also founded Socialcam, which was acquired by Autodesk for $60 million in 2012.

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IMAGES

Google founder Larry Page buys 193-foot yacht for $45m second-hand
Google Billionaire Larry Page Buys $45 Million Superyacht with Starck
Google’s ex-CEO Eric Schmidt paid a gigantic 72.3 million USD for his
Jeff Bezos' $400 Million Flying Fox Yacht
Former Google CEO Larry Page has sold his $45 million superyacht
Google Billionaire Larry Paige’s Former Yacht Got the Biggest, Most

COMMENTS

Ex-Google CEO Paid $67 Million for Oligarch's Abandoned Superyacht
Billionaire and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt won an auction Friday for the 267-foot Alfa Nero, paying $67.6 million for the superyacht that had been "abandoned" in Antigua Bay by a sanctioned ...
Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt wins auction for $67.6M superyacht
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt placed a winning bid for $67.6 million at an auction for a superyacht that was abandoned by its Russian oligarch owner. Schmidt bought the 267ft-Alfa Nero yacht that ...
Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt Scraps $67.6 Million Purchase of Abandoned
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has backed out of purchasing a superyacht that's been abandoned in Antigua for over a year, after the sale became mired in lawsuits.. Schmidt withdrew his $67.6 ...
Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt Docks Purchase of Superyacht Over ...
Former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt is changing course on his purchase of a superyacht abandoned by a Russian heiress after she launched a legal battle over the vessel. Schmidt, who won the ...
Inside Google Founder Sergey Brin's Luxury Yacht Collection: the Fly Fleet
Jan 6, 2023, 2:04 AM PST. The Google founder Sergey Brin has spent the past few years building up his "Fly Fleet," including the 40-meter Butterfly. Insider; Marianne Ayala/Insider. In a quiet ...
Eric Schmidt Buys Abandoned Alfa Nero Superyacht for $67.6 Million
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt bought the Alfa Nero superyacht that was ditched in Antigua in March 2022 after Russian troops invaded Ukraine.. The billionaire "won the auction this morning in a ...
Former Google CEO Schmidt pays $67 million for Russian's superyacht
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt won an auction in Antigua to acquire the seized Superyacht Alfa Nero for $67.6 million, as first reported by Bloomberg. The superyacht Alfa Nero is seen docked in ...
Schmidt just bought a Russian oligarch's superyacht
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt bought the Alfa Nero superyacht that was ditched in Antigua in March 2022 after Russian troops invaded Ukraine. The billionaire "won the auction this morning in a ...
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt Buys $67.6 Million Superyacht Alfa Nero
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt Buys $67.6 Million Superyacht Alfa Nero; It Belonged To a Russian Oligarch. ... His acquisition of the yacht in 2014 raised eyebrows, and subsequent sanctions ...
Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt wins Russian oligarch's superyacht ...
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt placed a winning bid for $67.6 million at an auction on Friday for a superyacht.REUTERS Schmidt bought the 267ft-Alfa Nero yacht that was abandoned in Antigua by ...
Ex-Google CEO buys $98m superyacht abandoned by Russian oligarch
Jun 17, 2023 - 3.58pm. Former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt bought the Alfa Nero superyacht that was ditched in Antigua in March 2022 after Russian troops invaded Ukraine. The billionaire ...
Eric Schmidt backs out of $67.6M Alfa Nero purchase
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt backs out of $67M Alfa Nero purchase. The completion of the sale of abandoned superyacht Alfa Nero has reached another roadblock as former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is reported to have backed out of the deal amid "legal wrangling". The 81.3-metre Alfa Nero was sold at auction on 16 June for $67,000,677 having been ...
Former Google CEO Larry Page Sells His $45 Million Superyacht, Senses
The Google cofounder Larry Page purchased Senses in 2011 for $45 million. The sale was confirmed by a general manager overseeing refit work on the vessel in New Zealand. Page has since downsized ...
Ex-Google CEO buys superyacht abandoned by Russian oligarch Guryev
June 19, 2023 · 1 min read. ALFA NERO yacht. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt purchased the Alfa Nero superyacht, which was abandoned in Antigua in March 2022 following the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Bloomberg news agency reported on June 16. According to Antigua's ambassador to the United States, Sir Ronald Sanders, the ...
Tech billionaires and their yachts
Google's billionaire co-founder Larry Page purchased the 60-metre explorer yacht conversion Senses from a New Zealand businessman Sir Douglas Myers back in 2011. The globe-trotting superyacht features interiors by Philippe Starck and can accommodate a total of 12 guests on board, with primary guests reaping the benefits of the master suite's ...
SERGEY BRIN: The Remarkable Story of The Google Co-founder
Brin is the owner of the yacht Dragonfly.. The Dragonfly yacht, originally known as Silver Zwei, was constructed by Silver Yachts and later purchased by Sergey Brin. The yacht is a luxury haven for 14 guests and a crew of 16, showcasing the exceptional design work of Espen Oeino. The yacht demonstrates remarkable speed capabilities with a top speed of 27 knots and a cruising speed of 18 knots ...
Alix Tichelman reveals her story after Google executive's death
Alix Tichelman interviewing with KSBW Friday. When police questioned her, they told her that she was going to be charged with murder for the death of a 51-year-old Forrest Timothy Hayes. He was a ...
Escort convicted in Google exec's OD death ordered deported
SANTA CRUZ, Calif. -- A California prostitute convicted in the heroin overdose death of a Google executive aboard his yacht has been ordered deported to her native Canada, reports CBS affiliate ...
Ex-Google CEO May Ditch Bid For Yacht Linked to Russian Oligarch
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt may ditch his $67.5 million bid for a Russian oligarch's suspected superyacht, according to the government of the small Caribbean nation where the boat is ...
Alix Tichelman case: Escort describes death of Google executive
Alix Tichelman was known as the "Call Girl Killer," and convicted in the heroin overdose death of Google executive Forrest Hayes, CBS San Francisco reports. He died aboard his yacht 'The Escape ...
Eric Schmidt
Eric Emerson Schmidt (born April 27, 1955) is an American businessman and former software engineer who served as the CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011 and the company's executive chairman from 2011 to 2015. He also served as the executive chairman of parent company Alphabet Inc. from 2015 to 2017, and Technical Advisor at Alphabet from 2017 to 2020. In April 2022, the Bloomberg Billionaires ...
The Biggest Yachts Owned by Tech Billionaires From Jeff Bezos ...
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt made waves last year when he agreed to buy the Alfa Nero, the yacht of a sanctioned Russian oligarch, for $67 million in an auction conducted by Antigua and Barbuda ...
Kiss of Death and the Google Exec
A look inside Forrest Hayes' "Escape" 01:56 The Google executive's death caught the attention of Michael Daly. He's an investigative reporter for The Daily Beast, in New York, and also a "48 Hours ...
Mediawan Boss Pierre-Antoine Capton on Breaking Barriers
Mediawan CEO Pierre-Antoine Capton, who is Variety's International Visionary Award winner, reflects on studio's success.
Google DeepMind CEO: 'This Is the Next $100 Billion AI Business'
And DeepMind's CEO hopes to create a multi-hundred-billion-dollar business from AlphaFold. We think that's entirely possible. Global drug sales represent a market that's running north of $1. ...
Sports Commission CEO on which big events Seattle will target after
Seattle Sports Commission President and CEO Beth Knox waits at Pier 66 on Elliott Bay where boats prepare to depart for the seventh leg of the Clipper Round the World Yacht Race.
Ford CEO: We won't make "a Mustang that's not a Mustang"
Jim Farley, president and CEO of Ford, has just qualified 13th.. It's 2pm and we're at the 81st Goodwood Members' Meeting, where the Ford Mustang 289 V8 that Farley is sharing with Britain's Steve Soper, the former BTCC ace, has finished in the top half of a stellar 30-car field in qualifying for the inaugural Ken Miles Cup.. It's a special one-make event staged to mark the 60th ...
It Looks Like Mark Zuckerberg Is Celebrating His 40th Birthday on a New
The boating world has been buzzing about Launchpad — a 118-meter yacht built by the Dutch shipyard Feadship — for months, with rumors swirling that her owner is none other than the Meta CEO.
Cruise founder Kyle Vogt is back with a robot startup
Kyle Vogt, the former founder and CEO of self-driving car company Cruise, has a new VC-backed robotics startup focused on household chores. Vogt announced Monday that the new startup, called the ...

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Former Google CEO Schmidt pays $67 million for Russian's superyacht

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Billionaire Eric Schmidt just paid $68 million for a Russian oligarch’s sanctioned superyacht that features a helipad and baby grand piano

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