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Mukesh Ambani
Billionaire Mukesh Ambanis’ conglomerate is streaming Indian Premier League cricket games for free, sources said, using its exclusive rights to one of the world’s most-watched sporting events to challenge Walt Disney and Amazon in India’s booming media market.
Viacom18 Media, a joint venture between Paramount Global and the Ambanis’ group Reliance Industries, last year licensed the IPL streaming rights for $2.7 billion, fending off rivals Disney and Sony Group.
Disney previously owned those rights and used them to attract subscribers to its streaming service Disney+ Hotstar.
Viacom18 is taking a different approach, offering games to as many people as possible to generate ad sales, the sources said.
Best IPL Salaries 2023 in Pictures
England all-rounder Sam Curran is the highest paid player in IPL 2023 with a salary of Rs 185 crore ($2.26 million) for Punjab Kings. P.A
Free media services like Google and Facebook generate billions of dollars in ad sales in the country and have far outpaced paid premium products like Netflix.
Viacom18 executives have estimated that more than 550 million viewers watch the weeks-long IPL games, boosting the conglomerates’ technology and Internet ambitions from e-commerce to entertainment.
This year’s series of matches, which last a relatively short three hours, will begin on March 31 and last for about eight weeks.
Viacom18 allows users to watch any number of games for any length of time on any connected device.
It’s a familiar playbook for Reliance, which offered mobile services at significantly lower prices than rivals, acquired hundreds of millions of customers and shut out competitors.
The Mr. Ambanis conglomerate owns Reliance Jio, the country’s largest telecom operator by market share with 500 million subscribers.
The five-year IPL deal allows it to capitalize on the Super Bowl of cricket.
The price of cricket rights skyrocketed last year as several media companies sought them to add to their nascent streaming business.
Internet adoption is growing at a tremendous rate in India, and global and domestic media companies see the country as a catalyst to grow their subscriber base.
Disney, which previously held the IPL streaming rights, lost the auction but won the TV rights after beating Sony. Another competitor, Amazon, pulled out of bidding in the last hour after the initial auction paperwork was completed.
Mr. Ambani, the world’s 11th-richest person with a net worth of $81.2 billion, won by paying nearly three times what Disney had paid in the previous deal. Disney, on the other hand, paid even more, about $3 billion, for a traditional TV package.
Mr Ambani bid for the IPL rights along with Paramount, billionaire James Murdoch and former Hotstar chief Uday Shankar.
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Bernard Arnault
Billionaire Bernard Arnaults LVMH has lost the latest round of his legal battle against French tax authorities who raided the luxury goods company’s Paris headquarters to gather evidence in the case.
On Wednesday, France’s Supreme Court overturned an earlier ruling that found the 2019 inspections unfounded.
The Court of Cassation ordered the Paris Court of Appeal to review the appeal filed by LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton.
The decision reignites an investigation into suspicions that the company controlled by the world’s richest man may have tried to lower its tax bill by pretending to be a finance ministry operating in Belgium instead of France.
See: Who is Bernard Arnault, the man who replaced Elon Musk as the world’s richest person?
It is a boost to the French authorities and hints at a low level when justifying the implementation of tax boxes.
The court ruled that under French law, the authorization of a raid requires mere presumptions of tax evasion.
Contrary to what the appeals court said in its 2020 ruling, the judges said there was no need for the tax authorities to show that the Belgian unit does not have enough staff to run the treasury.
LVMH said the group strictly complies with the rules and laws that apply in all countries where it operates.
At the 2020 hearing of the case, the company’s lawyer described the collection of evidence as shockingly disproportionate.
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Son of Masayoshi
Masayoshi Son, the billionaire founder of SoftBank Group, has increased the number of shares pledged by financial institutions to 175.25 million shares, or about 35 percent of his total stake in the Japanese conglomerate.
Mr. Son, 65, announced an increase of about 4.3 million shares on Feb. 13, worth about 24.5 billion yen ($183 million) at current prices.
This affects collateral and shares held by Mr. Son’s affiliated entities, such as Son Asset Management.
With mounting losses at SoftBanks’ core Vision Fund investment business, Mr. Son is personally on the hook for about $5.1 billion in side deals he made in the past to boost his fee.
Earlier this month, SoftBank posted a $5.9 billion net loss in the December quarter, with the Vision Fund segment contributing most of the decline to falling startup values.
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George Soros
The family office of billionaire George Soros revealed a bet against Silvergate Capital, a bank facing increasing scrutiny for its ties to the bankrupt business empire of Sam Bankman-Frieds and the wider cryptocurrency industry.
Soros Fund Management had put options on 100,000 Silvergate shares with a market value of $1.74 million as of Dec. 31, according to a regulatory filing.
The trade would generate a profit if the shares fell below a certain level, which was not stated in the application. No expiration date was given for the options.
New York-based Soros Fund Management did not immediately respond to a request for comment. California-based Silvergate declined to comment.
Although Soros’s position is small, it is the latest sign that investors have become disillusioned with Silvergate.
About 67 percent of the bank’s traded shares are sold short, making it one of the most shorted stocks among publicly traded companies of its size in the U.S., data compiled by Bloomberg show.
Shares have fallen by around 90 percent since the beginning of 2022 and by 11 percent this year.
Silvergate is facing a criminal investigation as prosecutors in the US Justice Department’s fraud unit look into its dealings with Mr Bankman-Frieds’ collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX and its sister hedge fund Alameda Research.
Separately, a bipartisan group of senators last month asked Silvergate to answer questions about what information it had about FTXs’ alleged misappropriation of customer funds, saying past responses on the subject were evasive and incomplete.
The 92-year-old Soros became a household name after he famously took a hit betting against the British pound in 1992, helping to dislodge the currency from the pre-euro exchange rate system.
He made $1 billion from his huge short positions when the currency collapsed in the so-called on Black Wednesday, a disaster from which the government at the time was unable to recover.
With a net worth of $8.5 billion, Mr. Soros is the 247th richest person in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Updated: February 27, 2023, 5:00 am
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