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Forget about the endless drama, the bots, the abrupt reversals, the spectacle, the alleged risk to the Republic and all we hold dear. Here is the most important thing about Elon Musk’s buying Twitter: The moguls have been unleashed.

In the old days, when a tech tycoon wanted to buy something big, he needed a company to do it. Steve Case used AOL to buy Time Warner. Jeff Bezos bought Whole Foods for Amazon. Mark Zuckerberg used Facebook to buy Instagram and WhatsApp and Oculus and on and on. These were corporate deals done for the bottom line, even if they might never have happened without a famous and forceful proprietor.

Mr. Musk’s $44 billion takeover of Twitter, which finally became a reality on Thursday, six months after he agreed to the deal, is different. It is an individual buying something for himself that 240 million people around the world use regularly. While he has other investors, Mr. Musk will have absolute control over the fate of the short-message social media platform.

It’s a difficult deal to evaluate even in an industry built on deals, because this one is so unusual. It came about whimsically, impulsively. But, even by the standards of Silicon Valley, where billions are casually offered for fledging operations — and even by the wallet of Mr. Musk, on most days the richest man in the world — $44 billion is quite a chunk of change.

the midterm elections’ most prominent campaign contributor, pumping tens of millions of dollars into right-wing congressional candidates. Two of his former employees are the Republican nominees for senator in Ohio and Arizona.

Richard Walker, a professor emeritus of economic geography at the University of California, Berkeley and a historian of Silicon Valley, sees a shift in the locus of power.

“In this new Gilded Age, we’re being battered by billionaires rather than the corporations that were the face of the 20th century,” he said. “And the tech titans are leading the way.”

bought The Washington Post for $250 million. Marc Benioff of Salesforce owns Time magazine. Pierre Omidyar of eBay developed a homegrown media empire.

Deals have been a feature of Silicon Valley as long as there has been a Silicon Valley. Often they fail, especially when the acquisition was made for technology that either quickly grew outdated or never really worked at all. At least one venerable company, Hewlett-Packard, followed that strategy and has practically faded away.

From new titles to collectable finds, the board game industry has skyrocketed in popularity over the past couple years.

Gen Con is the country’s largest annual gathering of fans and developers of tabletop games.

From family classics like Settlers of Catan to new games from indie companies, the convention held in Indianapolis showcases some of the biggest players in the $3 billion board game industry as well as their most dedicated fans.

Peter Fenlon knows his way around the long roads of board games.

“We brought the idea of modern board gaming to America,” Fenlon said. “It’s been sort of the beginning of a renaissance.”

He’s the CEO of Catan Studios — the company behind Settlers of Catan, which has sold more than 40 million copies worldwide.

“Gaming has been growing since the 70s, but it’s exploded in the last 10 years,” Fenlon said. “You’re seeing a lot of people looking for a richer sort of storytelling experience, where they can immerse themselves in a story with some friends and just casually have some fun.”

Board games in the U.S. have been around since before Catan’s debut in 1995, with Monopoly debuting in 1935 and Scrabble in 1938. But the industry has skyrocketed over the past couple years thanks to nostalgia, growing online communities and the emergence of indie developers.

Today, classic board games are now major collectibles on online marketplaces like eBay, and new titles from emerging companies are fundraised through grassroots campaigns on platforms like Kickstarter.

Tabletop games make up around one third of Kickstarter’s total annual revenue, and last year, more than 100 games more than half a million dollars each on the platform.

Chris Solis, the creator of games like “Pocket Paragons,” is one of the many indie developers on the platform.

“Kickstarter basically allowed me to start this company, to put the idea out,” Solis said.

Beyond the growing gamer communities and marketplaces online, new players are drawn to board games because of how they connect people in real life.

“It gives you a lot of human connection,” Solis said.

The board games market grew by 20% during the beginning of the pandemic because it was a form of entertainment that didn’t involve staring at a screen.

“What a tabletop game continues to do and did during the pandemic as well is that it creates this opportunity where we can sit at the table together, we connect in a very different way,” said Deirdre Cross, general manager of Funko Games.

As more players began socializing face-to-face again, board games became an easy way to reconnect.

“I think the board game industry is very resilient,” Cross said.

“The business is exploding,” said Bob Means, director of trading cards at eBay. “Tabletop trading card — it’s just getting bigger every single day.”

: newsy.com

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The Mantle baseball card dates from 1952 and is widely regarded as one of just a handful of the baseball legend in near-perfect condition.

A mint condition Mickey Mantle baseball card sold for $12.6 million Sunday, blasting into the record books as the most ever paid for sports memorabilia in a market that has grown exponentially more lucrative in recent years.

The rare Mantle card eclipsed the record just posted a few months ago — $9.3 million for the jersey worn by Diego Maradona when he scored the contentious “Hand of God” goal in soccer’s 1986 World Cup.

It easily surpassed the $7.25 million for a century-old Honus Wagner baseball card recently sold in a private sale.

And just last month, the heavyweight boxing belt reclaimed by Muhammad Ali during 1974’s “Rumble in the Jungle” sold for nearly $6.2 million.

All are part of a booming market for sports collectibles.

Prices have risen not just for the rarest items, but also for pieces that might have been collecting dust in garages and attics. Many of those items make it onto consumer auction sites like eBay, while others are put up for bidding by auction houses.

Because of its near-perfect condition and its legendary subject, the Mantle card was destined to be a top seller, said Chris Ivy, the director of sports auctions at Heritage Auctions, which ran the bidding.

Some saw collectibles as a hedge against inflation over the past couple years, he said, while others rekindled childhood passions.

Ivy said savvy investors saw inflation coming down the road — as it has. As a result, sports memorabilia became an alternative to traditional Wall Street investments or real estate — particularly among members of Generation X and older millennials.

“There’s only so much Netflix and ‘Tiger King’ people could watch (during the pandemic). So, you know, they were getting back into hobbies, and clearly sports collecting was a part of that,” said Ivy, who noted an uptick in calls among potential sellers.

Add to that interest from wealthy overseas collectors and you have a confluence of factors that made sports collectibles especially attractive, Ivy said.

“We’ve kind of started seeing some growth and some rise in the prices that led to some media coverage. And I think it all it all just kind of built upon itself,” he said. “I would say the beginning of the pandemic really added gasoline to that fire.”

Before the pandemic, the sports memorabilia market was estimated at more than $5.4 billion, according to a 2018 Forbes interview with David Yoken, the founder of Collectable.com.

By 2021, that market had grown to $26 billion, according to the research firm Market Decipher, which predicts the market will grow astronomically to $227 billion within a decade — partly fueled by the rise of so-called NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, which are digital collectibles with unique data-encrypted fingerprints.

Sports cards have been especially in demand, as people spent more time at home and an opportunity arose to rummage through potential treasure troves of childhood memories, including old comic books and small stacks of bubble gum cards featuring marquee sports stars.

That lure of making money on something that might be sitting in one’s childhood basement has been irresistible, according to Stephen Fishler, founder of ComicConnect, who has watched the growing rise — and profitability — of collectibles being traded across auction houses.

“In a nutshell, the world of modern sports cards has been going bonkers,” he said.

The Mantle baseball card dates from 1952 and is widely regarded as one of just a handful of the baseball legend in near-perfect condition.

The auction netted a handsome profit for Anthony Giordano, a New Jersey waste management entrepreneur who bought it for $50,000 at a New York City show in 1991.

“As soon as it hit 10 million I just turned in. I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore,” Giordano, 75, said Sunday morning. His sons monitored the auction for him. “They stayed up and called me this morning bright and early to tell me that it reached where it reached.”

The card was one of dozens of sports collectibles up for auction. In all, the items raked in some $28 million, according to Derek Grady, the executive vice president of sports auctions for Heritage Auctions.

“Sports collectibles are finally getting their due as an investment,” Grady said. “The best sports items are now starting to rival artwork, rare coins and rare artifacts as a great investment vehicle.”

The switch-hitting Mantle was a Triple Crown winner in 1956, a three-time American League MVP and a seven-time World Series champion. The Hall of Famer died in 1995.

“Some people might say it’s just a baseball card. Who cares? It’s just a Picasso. It’s just a Rembrandt to other people. It’s a thing of art for some people,” said John Holden, a professor in sports management law at Oklahoma State and amateur sports card collector.

Like pieces of art that have no intrinsic value, he said, when it comes to sports cards, the worth is in the eye of the beholder — or the pocketbook of the potential bidder.

“The value,” Holden said, “is whatever the market’s willing to support.”

Additional reporting by The Associated Press.

: newsy.com

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SAN FRANCISCO — No one wanted to miss out on the cryptocurrency mania.

Over the last two years, as the prices of Bitcoin and other virtual currencies surged, crypto start-ups proliferated. Companies that market digital coins to investors flooded the airwaves with TV commercials, newfangled lending operations offered sky-high interest rates on crypto deposits and exchanges like Coinbase that allow investors to trade digital assets went on hiring sprees.

A global industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars rose up practically overnight. Now it is crashing down.

After weeks of plummeting cryptocurrency prices, Coinbase said on Tuesday that it was cutting 18 percent of its employees, after layoffs at other crypto companies like Gemini, BlockFi and Crypto.com. High-profile start-ups like Terraform Labs have imploded, wiping away years of investments. On Sunday, an experimental crypto bank, Celsius, abruptly halted withdrawals.

dropped by about 65 percent since autumn, and analysts predict the sell-off will continue. Stock prices of crypto companies have cratered, retail traders are fleeing and industry executives are predicting a prolonged slump that could put more companies in jeopardy.

stocks crashing, interest rates soaring and inflation high, cryptocurrency prices are also collapsing, showing they have become tied to the overall market. And as people pull back from crypto investments, the outflow is exposing the unstable foundations of many of the industry’s most popular companies.

The anonymity reflects yet another instance in which criminals stymied by rules in the physical world can operate freely on the internet — an issue that has surfaced in problems involving misinformation, questionable advertisements and merchandise glorifying crimes.

Pawnshops, for example, are regulated in almost every state, said Richard Rossman, a sergeant with the Broward County Sheriff’s Office in Florida who is also part of the Coalition of Law Enforcement and Retail.

“If you’re going to sell an item to a pawnshop, the seller has to pledge that property is his or hers, it is not stolen, and the pawnshop documents the item appropriately on a state-regulated form and we can hold the seller accountable and the pawnshop accountable,” Sergeant Rossman said. “There’s no mechanism in place right now that requires the collection of that data on the online marketplaces.”

The coalition has gotten support from industry groups and retailers, including pharmacy chains, Home Depot and Ulta Beauty, on bipartisan legislation known as the INFORM Consumers Act. The bill would require online marketplaces to authenticate the identity of “high-volume third-party sellers,” including their bank account information and tax identification, and allow consumers to see basic identification and contact information for those sellers. The rule would apply to vendors who made 200 or more discrete sales in a year amounting to $5,000 or more.

Etsy, OfferUp and eBay said they supported the legislation after opposing a draft that raised privacy and safety concerns for sellers, especially people selling small-scale items like a couch or people with craft businesses at home. Etsy noted that mass-produced items were not usually allowed on its marketplace, even if they were being sold legitimately. Meta, which owns Facebook Marketplace, and the RealReal, which sells high-end secondhand goods, declined to comment on the legislation.

Meta said that Facebook Marketplace users could report items they thought were stolen and that law enforcement could contact the company regarding suspicious items.

Amazon said in a statement that “we regularly request invoices, purchase orders or other proofs of sourcing when we have concerns about how a seller may have obtained particular products that they want to sell.” It added that it employed 10,000 people working to prevent fraud and abuse on its site, and supported the INFORM Consumers Act.

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