@MLE_online Oof. That's probably not going to work out too well for her. For the last decade or two, start-up financing was basically at 0%, so it was easy/cheap to start a new thing. Now it's much, much more expensive to borrow and thus much, much harder to make a go of a new start-up (or to buy a major corporation). They need to find marks who are willing to invest in the hype, because outside/bank financing is too hard/expensive to get. I suspect your friend is one of those marks, which is truly unfortunate, of course.