Goldman's Crypto Move | The 'Buy Now, Pay Later' Billionaires | Churchill’s Most Expensive Painting

Plus: Birkenstock Billionaires Unveiled After German Sandal Maker Agrees To Sell In A $4.7 Billion Deal

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The Birkenstock shoe is often seen as fashion’s ugly duckling—but no one is twisting their nose now that the German brothers whose family funded the brand have become billionaires. Europe can also count two other new billionaires, minted from Klarna’s most recent funding round. Finally, we report on the painting of a statesman with an artistic flair that went under the hammer for $12 million.

In The News Today

Banking powerhouse Goldman Sachs is setting up a cryptocurrency trading desk.

Calls for New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to resign intensify after a third woman come forward with allegations of sexual harassment.

Top Take-Aways

Buy now, pay later fintech company Klarna has raised $1 billion in new funding at a $31 billion valuation in yet another sign of the red-hot, frothy fintech market that has now minted two new billionaires.

Elastic CEO Shay Banon may have become a billionaire due to the company’s recent stock performance, but he is willing to risk it all in a dispute with Amazon’s cloud unit that started with the launch of a product built on Elastic’s own open-source software in 2015.

Chargepoint says it has become the world’s first publicly traded global EV charging network after floating on the NYSE on Monday following a SPAC merger with Switchbank Energy Acquisition Corp., which generated $480 million for the California-based company.

Swedish truckmaker Volvo is readying battery-electric models–but is also upbeat on a fuel choice Tesla's Elon Musk has knocked for years: hydrogen.

Real estate brokerage Compass filed its IPO prospectus with the SEC. The filing showed revenue jumped 56%, to $3.7 billion in 2020, but also a $270 million annual loss—an improvement from the previous year, when it posted a net loss of $388 million.

Autonomous forklift maker Seegrid is searching for acquisitions, the latest sign of the increasingly hot market for industrial robots that can improve efficiency and speed at factories and warehouses.

Winston Churchill is more well known as the victorious wartime British prime minister than for his painting skills, but he was a prolific artist. One of the more than 500 paintings he created in his lifetime, owned by Angelina Jolie, fetched a record $12 million at an auction. 

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