Daily Digest: Musk and Branson Battle in Space, Investing in Student Futures, Target Pays Up

“A Space Race with Lawyers” Congrats to CNBC for that headline, describing a clash between the titans that are Elon Musk and Richard Branson, both of whom want to ring the planet with satellites providing Internet to we mere mortal earthlings. Trouble is, they aren’t working together. And, so far, really, really don’t want to. “It’s getting ugly up there,” Jane Wells observes.

Both billionaires see billions in the heavens, and apparently don’t think space is big enough for both Musk and Branson (insert joke here).

Whoever wins, we all win. And while it’s true that lawyers can probably make even space boring, “There's nothing boring … about the battle to win the race to dominate global Internet access,” Wells says.

***

Bringing a Lawyer to a Gun Fight: Gaston Glock is under fire. The legendary inventor of the iconic, eponymous handgun is battling ex-wife Helga for control of the Glock firearm empire.

The legal battle is extremely ugly — she’s invoking the RICO statute that’s applied to people accused of engaging in organized crime.

But in her pursuit of what she alleges are hundreds of millions of dollars he has concealed from her, a US federal appeals court ruled she can use as evidence in her lawsuit what were thought to be confidential documents she obtained in her Austrian divorce proceedings — some 500,000 pages of documents she had been unable to legally share even with her attorney in the present case.

The stakes are high and the characters extreme, but it’s the same old story: Gaston, 86, dumped Helga, 79, after 49 years of marriage and “married a much younger woman,” as Paul Barrett observes on BloombergBusiness. An excellent reason for a three-day waiting period.

***

Follow the Kids: Comcast’s NBCUniversal is pumping $200 million into BuzzFeed to reach the young demographic on “the fast-growing digital media site,” writes Matthew Ingram at Fortune. The investment values BuzzFeed $1.5 billion — that’s 6 times what Jeff Bezos paid for The Washington Post, and 70% of the market cap of The New York Times.

But Comcast is hoping it’s buying a video service of record for Millennials, who tend to be cord cutters. And it's Comcast’s second big bet on a “fast-growing digital media site” in as many weeks: NBCUniversal put another $200 million in Vox media, which values that company at $1 billion.

***

Student Futures: Purdue, in an intriguing effort to eliminate the enormous and growing up-front cost of higher education, is pushing the idea of taxing the income of graduates on a sliding scale instead.

The so-called Income Share Agreement not an original notion, “But Purdue would be a pioneer among major public universities if it actively offers ISAs as an option, which it’s aiming to do starting with students who matriculate in the spring of 2016,” writes Max Nisen at Quartz.

The idea is not only to defer payment until when, presumably, one is in a better position to afford it, but to also align the cost of education with earning power — “if students earn more than expected after university, they pay back more; if they earn less, they pay less.” It also puts into sharper focus the value prop for an expense of any university or college which is in no position to guarantee results.

#Stat

89%

The rise in earnings a humanities undergraduate can expect if s/he goes on to get an MBA — nearly double. If you majored in engineering or computer science, the boost is only about 50%.

#Chart

***

Charge It! Target has agreed to reimburse Visa $67 million for the massive 2013 data breach and is “working on a similar pact” with MasterCard, Robin Sidel reports in The Wall Street Journal. 

That figure is the maximum under Visa’s agreement with vendors, but likely doesn’t represent actual losses. Card holders have zero liability but issuers generally try to cover their losses by negotiating with the companies where the breach occurred. The Target hack exposed 40 million debit and credit cards.

The exact amount of the losses from fraud isn’t known. Trade groups have said their bank and credit union members have spent more than $350 million to deal with the Target and subsequent Home Depot breaches alone.

*****

• Missed the last update? Then check out Isabelle Roughol's American Apparel Out of Cash, Brazil at a Standstill, Return of the Pumpkin Spice Latte
• Twice a day we share the news professionals need to know. Never miss one again: Download the brand new Pulse app.

Cover Art: A composite of Elon Musk and Richard Branson (Photos by Scott Olsen/Getty (Musk) and Aaron Davidson (WireImage)