‘Forbes Curse’ Strikes Again – Financial Institutions Rated ‘Excellent’ by Failing Magazine Collapse Days Later – zoohousenews.com

(Natural News) Just weeks before regulators took control of Silicon Valley Bank for failing to meet payout demands, the bank proudly made Forbes’ annual list of America’s Best Banks. In a Twitter post last week, the bank celebrated the success and highlighted its five straight years on the list.

But Forbes’ prestigious lists have been criticized in the past for including people and companies that ultimately failed, particularly over the past decade, Britain’s Daily Mail reported. Forbes’ prestigious lists include public figures later involved in inappropriate failures, such as FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried, WeWork’s Adam Neumann, and Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes.

“Proud to be in @Forbes’ annual ranking of America’s Best Banks for the fifth straight year and also to have been included in the publication’s first Financial All-Stars list,” the bank tweeted last Monday, before it collapsed on Friday to be taken over by the Federal Reserve.

After being unable to honor withdrawal requests, Silicon Valley Bank has since deleted its Twitter account and shut down its website. Following SVB’s bankruptcy, an editorial note was added to the “America’s Best Banks 2023” page on the Forbes website, the UK outlet noted.

It said: “[Editor’s Note: After this list was published on February 16, 2023, SVB Financial Group’s Silicon Valley Bank collapsed and was placed under FDIC control on March 10 due to a bank run prompted by fears about its interest rate exposure.]

Recent events like the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX and its subsidiary Alameda Research have also hit those once hailed by the renowned American business magazine.

Bankman-Fried was featured on the cover of Forbes magazine’s 40th annual Forbes 400 list, which ranks the 400 wealthiest Americans, in October 2021. The accompanying article described the disgraced “crypto king” as someone who aimed to make as much money as possible to put to good use.

“He’s an ‘effective altruist,’ a kind of Silicon Valley philanthropy that relies on reason and data to do the best in the world,” the story reads.

Over the past year, FTX saw a spike in attempts to withdraw funds and eventually collapsed due to lack of liquidity. Bankman-Fried, who had FTX based in the Bahamas, was extradited to the US to face criminal charges in a Manhattan court. He has since been released on bail and is awaiting a fraud trial scheduled for October 2, the Daily Mail further noted.

Once heralded as one of the world’s most promising young business leaders, Adam Neumann, a former Israeli-American co-founder of WeWork, made the cover of Forbes in October 2017. Neumann’s goal was to disrupt the commercial real estate sector, but like some of his Forbes-acclaimed peers, his ambition led him to go too far. WeWork’s unsustainable expansion and a failed IPO in 2019 led to his resignation as CEO.

The rise and fall of WeWork was so dramatic that it was even documented in the television series WeCrashed, starring Jared Leto as the eccentric Neumann. Neumann was known for going barefoot, smoking weed and drinking tequila, the report said.

Elizabeth Holmes was listed by Forbes as one of the richest women in the world in 2014 and graced the cover of the magazine’s September 2015 issue. She was the founder of Theranos, a startup with ambitious plans to revolutionize blood testing. However, the technology soon came under scrutiny, and in 2015 a damning investigation by the Wall Street Journal marked the beginning of Holmes’ downfall.

The report revealed that the vast majority of his tests were performed using traditional vials of blood drawn from the arm, rather than the “few drops” collected through a finger prick as originally claimed. In November 2022, Holmes was sentenced to 11 years and three months in prison for wire fraud and defrauding investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Sources include:

DailyMail.co.uk

zoohousenews.com