Ambani vs Musk

Having just lost a battle with Elon Musk over how India’s satellite spectrum is awarded, Asia’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, could face a bigger challenge if Musk’s Starlink launches services in India and the two go head-to-head on price. India’s government has said it will allocate spectrum for satellite broadband administratively and not via auction, hours after Musk criticised the auction route being sought by rival billionaire Ambani as “unprecedented.” Musk’s Starlink, a unit of SpaceX which has 6,400 active satellites orbiting earth to provide low-latency broadband to 4m customers, has publicly expressed interest in launching in India, but its plans faced repeated regulatory roadblocks. Ambani, who runs India’s biggest telecom company, Reliance Jio, had tried since last year to seek a “balanced competitive landscape” and wanted to keep Musk at bay. Reliance is now concerned that after spending $19bn in airwave auctions it risks losing customers to Musk.

(Adapted from “Musk’s Win On India Satellite Spectrum Raises Prospect Of Price War With Ambani,” by Munsif Vengattil, Aditya Kalra and Aditi Shah, published on October 17, by Reuters)

Extinction of accountants

For most of his youth, Bryan wanted to be an astrophysicist. So when he told his parents he was going to be majoring in accounting, they gave him “a look.” “Why would you want to be an accountant?” his mother said. Certified public accountants have long been cast as penny-pinching list checkers with vanilla personalities and a zeal for taxes, but that stereotype seems to turn off Gen Z more than any previous generation. The number of graduating accountants has decreased in the last decade, and even longtime accountants’ ranks are dwindling fast: Three-quarters of CPAs in the US were thought to be at or near retirement in 2019. Accountants have become an endangered species, and that’s endangering the financial ecosystem. But bolstering their ranks is no easy feat: “The pay is crappy, the hours are long, and the work is drudgery,” said Richard Rampell, a retired accountant in South Florida.

(Adapted from “America’s Most Boring Job Is On The Brink of Extinction,” by Aki Ito, published on September 24, 2024, by Business Insider)

The truth about promotions

How do you choose the right people to be in charge? It’s a question that businesses have wrestled with for as long as corporate hierarchies have existed. The days of blatant nepotism have been replaced, for the most part, by a system that strives for meritocracy: a deliberative process involving search committees, job descriptions, performance ratings, and reference checks that gets more complicated by the year. But what if we’re still going about it all wrong? That’s the conclusion of a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Self-promotion is one of the primary ways companies select managers. However, the study found that the groups in which managers were selected by self-preference performed worse than managers chosen by lottery.

(Adapted from “The Truth About Promotions,” by Aki Ito, published on September 24, 2024, by Business Insider)

Teen hackers

At 11, he was on cybercrime forums. At 17, he was arrested after hacks into Nvidia and “Grand Theft Auto” — and doxxing from his online rivals. Arion Kurtaj, now 19 years old, is the most notorious name that has emerged from a sprawling set of online communities called the Com. They are gamers and hackers and online con artists who are native English speakers, able to talk their way into sensitive networks — social engineers in cybersecurity parlance. They have become one of the top cybersecurity threats in the world, and they are mostly boys and young men. Their youthful inventiveness and tenacity, as well as their status as minors that make prosecution more complicated, have made the Com especially dangerous, according to law-enforcement officials and cybersecurity investigators. Some kids, they say, are recruited from popular online spaces like Minecraft or Roblox.

(Adapted from “This Teenage Hacker Became A Legend Attacking Companies. Then His Rivals Attacked Him,” by Robert McMillan and Jenny Strasburg, published on October 3, 2024, by the Wall Street Journal)

Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, October 21th, 2024