IPO Update: Square and Airbnb, the Rich Are Different & Other Must-Reads

Adult Supervision: Airbnb is “in talks” to hire a high-profile CFO, fueling speculation that one of the sharing economy’s marquee unicorns intends to go public sooner than later.

Laurence A. Tosi has been CFO of Blackstone Group since 2008, presiding over a flush period during which the investment firm’s assets have more than tripled, from $102 billion to #330 billion. Now, report Landon Thomas Jr. and Mike Isaac of The New York Times, Tosi might become one of the few Blackstone executives to leave — and one of the most key.

“Mr. Tosi is among a core of influential young executives (47) at the investment firm that have played a crucial role in transforming the firm from a deal-driven private equity shop to a diversified asset management company,” the authors write. “In addition to handling Blackstone’s complex finances, Mr. Tosi is a valuable point man for Blackstone in terms of communicating with outside investors.”

Airbnb is seeking a new $1 billion round that would value the company at $24 billion, (well) behind #1 Uber ($41 billion).

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Speaking of IPOs … Square has filed confidentially for an initial public offering, those fabulous “people with knowledge of the matter” have told the BloombergBusiness writing team of Emily Chang, Leslie Picker and Spencer Soper.

Square was founded and is run by Jack Dorsey, whom you may recall divides his time these days with another one of his marginally successful startups: Twitter.

Square, with its distinctive (square, of course) smartphone/tablet dongle, kickstarted the pay-by-app craze which permeates the small business space, supplanting traditional credit card terminals at hipster coffee houses to the kind of mom-and-pop operations you’ll find at farmer’s markets.

Square processed $30 billion last year but because their piece of the action was less than $1 billion they qualify under the JOBS Act to formally begin the public offering process without revealing their finances and projections this early in the process. It’s all the rage in Silicon Valley — Twitter did it this way back in 2013.

Anyway, this is one of those open-secret things (like Airbnb above); Forbes’s Ryan Mac reported last month that Square was preparing to go public this year.

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How Big Is Big? The FCC approved the merger of AT&T and DirecTV, creating “a telecom behemoth,” as CNBC’s Jacob Pramuk puts it. The Justice Department had already OK’d the deal, so it’s full speed ahead now.

There are a couple of conditions: The new company will have to “expand high-speed fiber optic broadband access to 12.5 million customer locations and offer discounts to low income consumers.” And it has to be a good net neutrality citizen by not punishing customers based on how much data they use.

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Unsafe at Any Speed: A few days ago we shared Wired correspondent Andy Greenberg’s decidedly not excellent adventure as a digital crash test dummy for two researchers who wanted to terrorize a human to make their point that hackers remotely taking over a car at highway speeds was possible, and scary (the latter of which, thinking about it, probably could have gone without saying).

Now, in from the department of truth is stranger than … truth: Chrysler is recalling about 1.4 million cars and trucks “because of the risk that they could be hijacked remotely by hackers.”

The recall includes 2014 and 2015 Jeep Cherokees — Greenberg’s not-so-sweet ride — as well as Chrysler sedans, and Dodge Challengers, Chargers, Durangos, Rams, and Vipers — “all equipped with radio systems and touchscreens that could potentially be accessed and manipulated remotely,” Svati Kirsten Narula reports for Quartz.

Chrysler says there is no defect and probably no real reason to worry, since the kind of attack involved is extremely sophisticated. But they are acting “out of an abundance of caution.”

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Going, Going … It’s a problem few of us can relate to, but inheriting wealth can be a burden if you don’t know how to handle it. Big banks with investment divisions and relationships going back decades are still there for you as much as they were for your grandparents. But in recent years young heirs have been been walking away from these family ties and possibly walking straight into traps only savvy old money management can help you avoid.

Bad for the next-gen wealthy, bad for business. So here’s how Citigroup is trying to kill these two birds with one stone: Pranking the next wave of one-percenters.

In one scenario, reported by Margaret Collins in BloombergBusiness, the bank staged an art auction for a group of 20-something heirs who were assured of value and provenance and given 100,000 of funny money to see how well they’d do in a setting where, even for small stakes, bidding can get emotionally out of hand.

When the smoke cleared, someone had nabbed a Chuck Close original for $95,000. Then the assembled were told that it really wasn’t worth that much. That the work, in fact, had failed to sell at a real auction. That if this hadn’t been a drill, they’d be out a lot of hard-earned — well a lot of money.

Call it being scared straight for super rich. Someone has to do it.

#Quote

“It’s easier to retain a client than to get a new one.”

— Money Kanagasabapathy, the aptly-named Citi Private Bank executive who directs such events for clients’ children.

#Stat

$36 trillion

The estimated wealth transfer to US heirs between 2007 to 2061

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A memorial with 149 steel rods commemorates the 149 victims of Germanwings flight 4U9525 that crashed on March 24, killing all 150 people on board, on the same day that a burial ceremony for the last victims of the crash is scheduled to take place at nearby Le Vernet on July 24, 2015 near Prads, France. (Sean Gallup/Getty Images)