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Skift
11-07-2025
- Business
- Skift
Brad Gerstner on 'Trump Accounts' and the Travel Leaders He Still Calls First
Brad Gerstner's Invest America, which turned into Trump Accounts, could be a game-changer for tens of millions of American kids. Altimeter Capital CEO and travel industry veteran Brad Gerstner opened custodial investment accounts for his two sons at birth — but it was his son Lincoln's question at the kitchen table that led to a national policy. "Well this doesn't seem fair," Lincoln said. "Why do we get these and what about the other kids?" Gerstner said that was the spark for the Invest America initiative and the creation of "Trump Accounts." Under the new law, every American under age 18 will be eligible to open a tax-deferred investment account starting around July 4, 2026, and those born after December 31, 2024 will get $1,000 in government seed funding. Several corporations, including Uber, Zillow, T-Mobile, Nvidia, Salesforce, and iHeartMedia, have committed to giving $2,500 to employees' kids as a tax-free benefit. "Of course, less than 5% of kids in America currently have [investment] accounts," Gerstner told Skift. "And not surprisingly, the kids who do have the accounts are kids whose parents are pretty affluent. And so I grew up poor in Indiana, in a poor town. I have a really strong belief that there's a massive unlocked potential in the country." The Travel Industry Created Ties That Bind Early in his career, Gerstner was co-CEO of National Leisure Group, which was a major cruise seller; he led a General Catalyst investment into Orbitz; was a prominent travel angel investor, and founded Room77. These days, with his Altimeter Capital investing billions of dollars in tech companies like Nvidia, Meta, Uber and Microsoft, Gerstner is a frequent CNBC guest and co-hosts the BG2Pod with Bill Gurley. Gerstner has been interviewed on stage at past Skift Global Forums. Although the travel industry isn't currently his focus, Gerstner still has deep ties, particularly with Zillow co-founder and Expedia founder Rich Barton, and Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, who is also a former Expedia CEO. "I've worked on a lot of things over the years, and my first two calls are generally to Rich Barton and Dara," Gerstner said. "You forge friendships in the travel business 25 years ago, and we support each other. No questions asked. And because we trust one another, and if we're passionate about it, then we know, we've done the work. And those guys' early support [for Invest America] was monumental." Why Silicon Valley Gets Along With Trump Gerstner said that Silicon Valley's relatively warm relationship with President Trump has little to do with politics. "I think part of the reason that Silicon Valley has had some success with this president versus [former President] Biden isn't really about the political agenda as much as it is he's a business guy, and he kind of moves at an entrepreneurial speed," Gerstner said. "And there's not a bunch of layers." A case in point: A couple of months ago, Gerstner said he told Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell – a member of the Invest America CEO Council – that "we need to get the president on board." Dell texted Trump, who texted right back and invited them to the White House to pitch it. The White House also held an Invest America Roundtable with Gerstner and prominent supporters in early June. The Trump Accounts Name The original idea was to call them Invest America Accounts, but the name "Trump Accounts" helped the legislation ultimately become law. And the idea received bipartisan support, Gerstner said, who added that several CEO supporters of Invest America are Democrats. He had previously tried to get then-President Biden to go for the idea but it didn't get traction. Gerstner said Congress would need to "re-up" the $1,000 per child government funding in 2028, which he doesn't think will be much of an issue. "We'll see what people call them after he's [Trump's] out of office," he said. 65 Million Kids The original plan was to include children up to age 10, but Gerstner said it expanded to include all Americans under age 18 – around 65 million will be eligible, he said. Newborns born as of January 1, 2025 get automatically enrolled and funded, but older kids have to sign up. Invest America, Gerstner said, will be working to ensure that as many kids sign up as possible. For those children who have accounts, but were born before January 1, 2025, anyone — parents, family, friends, and corporations — can contribute a maximum of $5,000 annually per child. Education Secretary Linda McMahon, he said, is an enthusiastic supporter and Gerstner would like to see sign-up materials included with other documents on the first day of school. "I absolutely believe this most important thing I've done in my career," he said. "But it's like when you start business, and moment that we just got funded. All right, so now we've got to go execute our asses off and make sure it lives up to its promise." Gerstner said he's committed to making the accounts as equitable and powerful as they can be. The investment accounts are "making every kid a capitalist, making every kid a true owner in the upside of America. We need to evolve the social contract to include the 70% who currently feel left out and left behind. And I think this is a powerful way to do it."
CNBC
11-07-2025
- Business
- CNBC
ChatGPT's growth has been unassailed and looks set to continue: Altimeter's Apoorv Agrawal
Apoorv Agrawal, partner at Altimeter Capital, outlines what he sees coming next for OpenAI, as well as Nvidia's dominance of the AI supercycle.
CNBC
08-07-2025
- Business
- CNBC
'Free money' from Trump accounts is a 'no-brainer,' says expert—but other options may be better
Some young American families will soon be getting a gift from Uncle Sam. The sweeping budget bill that President Donald Trump signed into law on Friday included a provision for the creation of investment accounts that parents can open on behalf of children under 18. And for U.S. citizens born from 2025 through 2028, the government will seed the accounts with an initial contribution of $1,000. Republican lawmakers have nicknamed these vehicles "Trump accounts," but the idea of creating so-called baby bonds has been around for a while. Hillary Clinton brought up the idea during her 2007 campaign, for example, and Democratic Senator Corey Booker proposed legislation offering up to $50,000 for newborns in 2021. Depending on your goals, these new accounts don't offer some of the tax advantages available through existing accounts, such as 529 accounts for college savers or Roth IRAs for retirement investors. But there's no reason a Trump account shouldn't be part of your portfolio if your child qualifies, says Jaime Eckels, a partner at Plante Moran Financial Advisors. "Someone is giving me $1,000 for my kid? That's a no-brainer. Who turns away free money?" she says. "From there you'll have to decide what additional savings you'll have for your child." Here's what she and other financial pros say you should know about Trump Accounts. Once the government seeds the account, parents can contribute up to $5,000 per year, post-tax, to a portfolio that must be invested in a diversified fund that tracks a U.S. stock index. Employers can contribute to employees' children's accounts as well — up to $2,500 a year, an amount that won't count as income to the worker. Account holders can't touch the money until they turn 18, after which the accounts are treated much like a traditional IRA. While the money grows tax-deferred, withdrawals are taxed as regular income, plus a 10% penalty if you take the money out before age 59½, with some exceptions. Money can be taken out penalty-free for higher education expenses, or for those that come as a result of disability, domestic abuse or a natural disaster. There's a $10,000 exception for new home purchases, and $5,000 can go toward a baby of their own. The accounts' selling point for investors, advocates say, is the opportunity to begin investing early. That was the same message people like Brad Gerstner, founder and CEO of private investing firm Altimeter Capital, promoted while working with lawmakers in recent years on a project called Invest America. Gerstner, who spoke alongside other CEOS at a White House roundtable in June, basically got what he asked for — a long-term account seeded with $1,000 from the government plus incentives for corporations to contribute more. "Think of 401(k)s from birth, where corporations like Uber or United will then match those grants to those kids at birth, where parents now who were afraid [or] didn't know how to open up an account can now save 50 bucks a week or 100 bucks every couple of weeks," Gerstner said at the CNBC Delivering Alpha Summit that year. After three decades, "a 30-year-old today would have over $270,000 in their Invest America account." His example isn't unfeasible. An account with a $1,000 initial deposit and $200 monthly contributions growing at a 7% annual rate over 30 years would yield a balance of about $254,000, according to Make It's compounding interest calculator. Increase the rate of return to 8%, and the balance jumps to about $311,000. "There's a forced saving component when you put $1,000 into an account. It's not going to make or break most people, but sometimes it gets people interested in saving and investing," says Eckels. "Those things are great." If you're already in the habit of saving and investing money, however, existing accounts may offer more attractive tax benefits, depending on your goals, experts say. If you're hoping to set aside cash for your child's education, for instance, a 529 plan is likely the stronger option. Like Trump accounts, these vehicles are funded with after-tax dollars, but withdrawals are exempt from federal taxes (many states offer an income tax break on 529s as well) as long as the money is put toward a qualified education expense. These include not only college tuition but also trade school and apprenticeship expenses, and up to $10,000 for K-12 tuition and student loan payments. These accounts are designed to save for education, but you're not totally pigeonholed if you invest in one and your kid's education costs less than you thought. For 529 accounts that have been open at least 15 years, you can roll over up to $35,000 in unused funds to a Roth IRA. You can also change the beneficiary of the account from one child to another. If you want to use the Trump account to invest for long-term goals, such as retirement, brokerage accounts and Roth IRAs may come with more favorable tax treatment or flexibility. A so-called custodial brokerage account, which you can open on a child's behalf, allows you to manage the portfolio until they come of age to take it over themselves. These are regular, taxable accounts, so gains on any investment held for more than a year are taxed at the capital gains rate — generally lower than the income rate you'll owe on Trump account withdrawals. Plus, these accounts allow you to hold virtually any investment, including stocks, bonds and cryptocurrency, as opposed to the U.S. stock index fund you must hold in a Trump account. Parents of children who have earned income could also consider opening a Roth IRA on the child's behalf. Roths are funded with after-tax dollars as well, but investments held in these accounts grow tax-free. And provided that your child is 59½ when they begin withdrawing from the accounts, they won't owe a dime in tax to the U.S. government on the money. You can always withdraw up to what you've contributed to a Roth tax- and penalty-free. You can even withdraw earnings, too, without owing anything, for qualified purchases, including up to $10,000 for buying your first home. Contribution limits may play into your calculus around which accounts to fund as well. Roth IRAs clock in slightly above Trump accounts, with a $7,000 annual maximum for those under age 50. Single filers can contribute up to $19,000 per beneficiary per year to a 529 account without incurring gift tax, while married couples filing jointly can put in $38,000. There's no limit on taxable brokerage accounts. Still, if you're in the position to take advantage of free money and compounding growth, you have very little to lose, and plenty to gain, with a Trump account, says Eckels. While other accounts may be more appealing for your particular goals, "Trump accounts can be a great complement," she says.
Time of India
26-06-2025
- Business
- Time of India
AI tool Xbow is one of America's best hackers
A hacker named Xbow has topped a prestigious security industry US leaderboard that tracks who has found and reported the most vulnerabilities in software from large companies. Xbow isn't a person — it's an artificial intelligence tool developed by a company of the same is the first time a company's AI product has topped HackerOne's US leaderboard by reputation, which measures how many vulnerabilities have been found and the importance of each one, according to HackerOne cofounder Michiel Prins. Now, the year-old startup has raised $75 million in a new funding round led by Altimeter Capital, with participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital and NFDG. It declined to share its researchers and hackers have long automated parts of their work and AI has shown up as a key tool in the past two years, Prins said. Nearly all human hackers now augment their efforts with AI and there are a handful of firms trying to do what Xbow does — Prins calls them hackbot founded in January 2024 by GitHub veteran Oege de Moor, automates penetration testing, where hackers try to find security flaws and break into corporate networks. Companies often hire or employ people to do that, called red teams, as a way of improving and protecting their network and software. But red teaming and penetration testing is costly — $18,000 on average and few weeks of work for a test on a single system, says de Moor — and so it often doesn't get done frequently enough. De Moor wants to sell his product to enable customers to go through the process continuously or at least more often, and before new products and systems go live.'By automating this we can completely change the equation,' said de Moor, who formerly oversaw Microsoft Corp.-owned GitHub's Copilot for AI challenge is that well-financed hackers are also using AI algorithms to automate attacks and increase their frequency at a lower cost. Xbow has 'something that works now and it's exciting, but also somewhat terrifying because we are now in the era of machines hacking machines,' said Nat Friedman of NFDG, and a former GitHub chief executive Moor, who also spent two decades as a computer science professor at Oxford University, expects the balance of power to eventually favor defenders, using tools like Xbow. 'There might be a period of chaos where not everybody gets ready for these AI-powered attacks,' he said. Now, 'we can, for the first time, have a good hope that defenders can find and fix all the vulnerabilities before a system goes out.'De Moor founded Semmle, a startup for finding security flaws in code that was acquired by GitHub in 2019. Microsoft had bought GitHub the previous year and named Friedman CEO. He wanted to make a series of acquisitions to add new products and entrepreneurial and Altimeter Capital partner Apoorv Agrawal said they were looking at ways AI could boost cybersecurity when de Moor began Xbow. 'Cybersecurity is going through a credibility crisis. There are a lot of alerts,' Agrawal said. What chief information security officers 'want is less, not more, they want simplicity and less alerts,' he added. 'How do you make this work? AI can help.'HackerOne offers a security platform where companies who want their software vetted can offer bounties for finding bugs. There are open programs and ones that are invitation-only. Xbow is active in both. When an AI like Xbow's finds a vulnerability, HackerOne requires a human at the company to vet it to filter out AI hallucinations. Then Xbow goes to the company whose product contains the supposed flaw. If it confirms the issue, Xbow earns reputation points — hackers get more points the more severe the part of that work, the Xbow product successfully found and reported security bugs to more than a dozen well-known companies, according to de Moor. The list includes Inc., Walt Disney Co., PayPal Holdings Inc. and Sony Group Corp. De Moor declined to name Xbow's current customers except to say they are large financial services and technology team includes GitHub veterans like Nico Waisman, who served as chief information security officer at Lyft Inc., and is now Xbow head of security, and Albert Ziegler, Xbow's head of AI, who worked at GitHub and Xbow's algorithm does well in finding things like common coding errors and security issues, it does poorly at realizing when a flaw results from product design logic. For example, it needs to be explicitly told when looking at a medical web site that prescriptions should be kept private, de Moor said. And it won't understand that while a doctor or a pharmacist needs to be able to access the prescriptions of multiple patients, it's a security problem if one patient can see another's the future, Xbow also wants to add the ability to tell customers how to correct the security flaws and make coding suggestions for those adoption will also require getting customers to change how they work, Altimeter's Agrawal said.'Whenever there's a sufficiently advanced technology, the last-mile adoption requires a change of workflows,' Agrawal said. 'It requires a change of people's behaviors that they've been doing for years, sometimes decades."
The Star
26-06-2025
- Business
- The Star
One of the best hackers in the US is an AI bot
A hacker named Xbow has topped a prestigious security industry US leaderboard that tracks who has found and reported the most vulnerabilities in software from large companies. Xbow isn't a person – it's an artificial intelligence tool developed by a company of the same name. This is the first time a company's AI product has topped HackerOne's US leaderboard by reputation, which measures how many vulnerabilities have been found and the importance of each one, according to HackerOne co-founder Michiel Prins. Now, the year-old startup has raised US$75mil (RM317.88mil) in a new funding round led by Altimeter Capital, with participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital and NFDG. It declined to share its valuation. Security researchers and hackers have long automated parts of their work and AI has shown up as a key tool in the past two years, Prins said. Nearly all human hackers now augment their efforts with AI and there are a handful of firms trying to do what Xbow does – Prins calls them hackbot companies. Xbow, founded in January 2024 by GitHub veteran Oege de Moor, automates penetration testing, where hackers try to find security flaws and break into corporate networks. Companies often hire or employ people to do that, called red teams, as a way of improving and protecting their network and software. But red teaming and penetration testing is costly – US$18,000 (RM76,292) on average and few weeks of work for a test on a single system, says de Moor – and so it often doesn't get done frequently enough. De Moor wants to sell his product to enable customers to go through the process continuously or at least more often, and before new products and systems go live. "By automating this we can completely change the equation,' said de Moor, who formerly oversaw Microsoft Corp-owned GitHub's Copilot for AI code-generation. The challenge is that well-financed hackers are also using AI algorithms to automate attacks and increase their frequency at a lower cost. Xbow has "something that works now and it's exciting, but also somewhat terrifying because we are now in the era of machines hacking machines,' said Nat Friedman of NFDG, and a former GitHub chief executive officer. De Moor, who also spent two decades as a computer science professor at Oxford University, expects the balance of power to eventually favor defenders, using tools like Xbow. "There might be a period of chaos where not everybody gets ready for these AI-powered attacks,' he said. Now, "we can, for the first time, have a good hope that defenders can find and fix all the vulnerabilities before a system goes out.' De Moor founded Semmle, a startup for finding security flaws in code that was acquired by GitHub in 2019. Microsoft had bought GitHub the previous year and named Friedman CEO. He wanted to make a series of acquisitions to add new products and entrepreneurial talent. Friedman and Altimeter Capital partner Apoorv Agrawal said they were looking at ways AI could boost cybersecurity when de Moor began Xbow. "Cybersecurity is going through a credibility crisis. There are a lot of alerts,' Agrawal said. What chief information security officers "want is less, not more, they want simplicity and less alerts,' he added. "How do you make this work? AI can help.' HackerOne offers a security platform where companies who want their software vetted can offer bounties for finding bugs. There are open programs and ones that are invitation-only. Xbow is active in both. When an AI like Xbow's finds a vulnerability, HackerOne requires a human at the company to vet it to filter out AI hallucinations. Then Xbow goes to the company whose product contains the supposed flaw. If it confirms the issue, Xbow earns reputation points – hackers get more points the more severe the issue. As part of that work, the Xbow product successfully found and reported security bugs to more than a dozen well-known companies, according to de Moor. The list includes Inc, Walt Disney Co, PayPal Holdings Inc and Sony Group Corp. De Moor declined to name Xbow's current customers except to say they are large financial services and technology companies. Xbow's team includes GitHub veterans like Nico Waisman, who served as chief information security officer at Lyft Inc, and is now Xbow head of security, and Albert Ziegler, Xbow's head of AI, who worked at GitHub and Semmle. While Xbow's algorithm does well in finding things like common coding errors and security issues, it does poorly at realising when a flaw results from product design logic. For example, it needs to be explicitly told when looking at a medical web site that prescriptions should be kept private, de Moor said. And it won't understand that while a doctor or a pharmacist needs to be able to access the prescriptions of multiple patients, it's a security problem if one patient can see another's meds. In the future, Xbow also wants to add the ability to tell customers how to correct the security flaws and make coding suggestions for those fixes. Widespread adoption will also require getting customers to change how they work, Altimeter's Agrawal said. "Whenever there's a sufficiently advanced technology, the last-mile adoption requires a change of workflows,' Agrawal said. "It requires a change of people's behaviors that they've been doing for years, sometimes decades." – Bloomberg
