NEW YORK, NEW YORK - DECEMBER 04: Police gather outside of a Hilton Hotel in Midtown Manhattan where United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was fatally shot on December 04, 2024 in New York City. Brian Thompson was shot and killed before 7:00 AM this morning outside the Hilton Hotel, just before he was set to attend the company's annual investors' meeting. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Police in Altoona arrested a “strong person of interest” Monday in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last week in New York after finding him in a fast-food restaurant with an illegal weapon and false identification, authorities announced.

New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch identified the man arrested as Luigi Mangione, 26, with ties to Philadelphia and whose last known address was in Honolulu. Mangione was in possession of what New York police described as a “ghost gun” made with a 3D printer and a “handwritten document that speaks to his motivation and mindset,” Tisch said.

“The suspect was in a McDonald’s and was recognized by an employee who then called local police,” Tisch said. The New York Police Department has published images showing the shooter’s face culled from surveillance camera footage before and after Thompson was shot.

Tisch said Mangione was also carrying a U.S. passport and multiple false IDs including a fraudulent New Jersey ID matching the one the person police believe to be the shooter used to check into his New York City hostel before the shooting incident.

Police also recovered clothing including a mask Tisch said was consistent with those worn by the person sought in connection with Thompson’s killing.

NYPD Chief of Detectives Joe Kenny said Mangione had no prior criminal record and that NYPD detectives traveled to Altoona on Monday to question Mangione.

Kenny said the document Mangione had when he was arrested is in the possession of Altoona police. They did not believe there were specific threats to other people mentioned in the document, “but it does seem that he has some ill will toward corporate America,” Kenny said.

Thompson, 50, was shot several times by a person who authorities believe was lying in wait early Wednesday morning outside the Manhattan hotel where United HealthCare was holding an investors meeting.

Thompson had been CEO of UnitedHealthcare, one of the nation’s largest for-profit health insurance providers, for nearly three years. His killing has prompted an outpouring of criticism of the company and the United States’ health care system generally for denying or unnecessarily complicating medical treatment.

Mangione was arraigned Monday evening at the Blair County Courthouse in Hollidaysburg on charges of carrying a firearm without a license, forgery, records or identification tampering, possession of instruments of crime and presenting false identification to law enforcement.

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro said in a news conference Monday evening after the arraignment that attention generated by the investigation helped Pennsylvania police capture the person sought in connection to Thompson’s killing.

“But some attention in this case, especially online, has been deeply disturbing, as some have looked to celebrate instead of condemning this killer,” Shapiro said, noting that Thompson, who was laid to rest Monday in Minnesota, was a father to two, a husband and a friend to many. “And yes, he was the CEO of a health insurance company. In America, we do not kill people in cold blood to resolve policy differences or express a viewpoint.”

“This killer is being hailed as a hero,” Shapiro said. “Hear me on this. He is no hero. The real hero in this story is the person who called 911 at McDonald’s this morning.”

According to a criminal complaint against Mangione: Altoona police were called to the McDonald’s on Plank Road for a suspicious person who resembled the person wanted in connection with Thompson’s shooting. Officers located Mangione sitting at the rear of the restaurant wearing a blue medical mask and looking at a laptop computer on the table.

Officers asked Mangione to pull down the mask to show his face and recognized him as the person in the pictures released by New York police of the person wanted for the shooting. When asked for identification, Mangione provided a New Jersey driver’s license with the name Mark Rosario and a July 1998 birthdate, according to the complaint. Police were unable to find any information with the identity Mangione provided and advised him that he would be arrested for lying about his identity.

Mangione then identified himself. When asked why he had lied, Mangione replied “I clearly shouldn’t have.” He was then handcuffed, searched and taken to the police station. Inside Mangione’s backpack, police said they found the 3D-printed pistol loaded with nine rounds of 9 mm ammunition and a loose hollow-point round. The gun was with a silencer that had also been 3D printed, police said.

A spokesperson for the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia confirmed that Mangione is a 2020 graduate of the university’s undergraduate and graduate degree programs, where he studied computer science. A LinkedIn profile in Mangione’s name says he has worked as a data engineer for a Santa Monica, California, online auto sales marketplace.

Mangione comes from a large and high-profile family in the Baltimore area, with branches of the family that own the Turf Valley and Hayfields country clubs in Ellicott City and WCBM Radio, among other businesses, the Capital-Star’s sibling publication Maryland Matters reported.

WBAL-TV in Baltimore reported that Luigi Mangione was valedictorian of the Class of 2016 at the Gilman School and later graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. The office of Del. Nino Mangione (R-Baltimore County) confirmed to the TV station that the lawmaker is a cousin.

Nino Mangione, a radio host at WCBM who was elected to the General Assembly in 2018, did not immediately respond to calls and an email from Maryland Matters seeking comment Monday. The Gilman School did not immediately respond to a request to confirm that Luigi Mangione was a student there.

The arrest Monday was the result of “tireless work of the greatest detectives in the world,” Tisch said, who reviewed thousands of hours of video, followed up on hundreds of tips and processed forensic evidence. The NYPD also deployed assets including scuba divers, drones and electronic surveillance systems.

“This combination of old school detective work and new age technology is what led to this result today,” Tisch said, adding that the media and the public played a crucial role. “We should never underestimate the power of the public to be our eyes and our ears in these investigations.”

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Pennsylvania Capital-Star is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Pennsylvania Capital-Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kim Lyons for questions: info@penncapital-star.com. Follow Pennsylvania Capital-Star on Facebook and X.

Tesla owner Elon Musk, right, was hardly alone in the tech sector in supporting the reelection efforts by Donald Trump, left. Many Silicon Valley investors and innovators were hoping for a lighter regulatory hand than they have seen under President Joe Biden. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

Some venture capital investors, who have funded the tech boom in Silicon Valley and beyond, say they are excited by the prospect of a lighter regulatory environment under a new Trump Administration than they saw under President Joe Biden.

But they warn that Trump policies that will benefit many technology companies may come at a cost to other pro-Trump voters.

The Bay Area bubble of Silicon Valley, which is home to institutional tech giants like Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe, had been previously seen as a left-leaning region, like many other California communities. But the 2024 election was a unique one, venture capitalists and founders say.

“There’s been a significant shift in the valley rightward since the last election,” said Joe Endoso, a Silicon Valley investor.  “And you’ve seen that in the financial flows — in the level of dollars — that were directed towards supporting President Trump’s campaign from the technology sector.”

Endoso, president of financial tech platform Linqto, said some tech industry people who previously voted for progressive issues and candidates this time cast their ballot for Trump. He said he’s heard more concern about potential regulations in the tech industry and negative economic effects under continued Democratic leadership.

This turn toward Trump wasn’t universal in the Valley. The majority of donations from employees at companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft went toward Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, Reuters reported in September. But tech billionaires like Elon Musk and venture capital investors, like Andreessen Horowitz co-founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, poured millions into his campaign.

While Trump didn’t receive unanimous support from the tech sector, many American tech giants and investors are excited about the light-handed approach to tech regulation that’s likely to come in the next four years. Congress has struggled to pass any federal laws around emerging technology like AI, though states have done so on their own on issues like data privacy, transparency, discrimination, and on how AI-generated images can be used.

The Biden administration, however, on its own issued a number of “best practice” guides for emerging technologies and aggressively pursued antitrust cases against some tech giants, including an ongoing case against Google that could force the company to spin off its popular Chrome web browser.

It appears unlikely that Trump will continue the Biden era regulatory and enforcement drives.

Those working in emerging technologies like AI are making advancements so quickly that regulators are unlikely to be able to keep up anyway, Endoso said. The tech industry mindset — move fast and break things, first coined by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg — will likely continue under Trump’s administration.

“You’re running through walls and hoping that when the regulations come about, they’re not going to be so, you know, restrictive,” Endoso said. “But you’re not going to sit and wait for the regulators. You can’t afford to.”

Why care about the VC market?

Venture capitalists pour money into many promising startups in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, looking for the ones that will create lucrative new technologies or “disrupt” existing ones. Silicon Valley successes include Uber, which received its first round of venture capital investment for just about $1.3 million in 2010, and Airbnb, which started with just a $20,000 investment in 2008. Today, the companies are worth $146 billion and $84 billion, respectively.

Many more, however, fail. High-visibility startups that folded after raising very large sums include streaming platform Quibi, which raised $1.75 billion and ChaCha, the SMS text-based search platform that had raised $108 million.

The high-risk, high-reward nature of the industry makes for a rarified business, and there’s a high barrier to entry. To become an accredited venture capital investor, one must have an income of at least $200,000 a year, or be worth $1 million. The handful of firms pouring the most money into the United States technology market are usually worth billions.

Yet, the technology being developed and funded by wealthy investors today will shape the next decade of everyone’s lives. Some of the most influential technology in the global economy has been released under President Joe Biden’s administration in the last three and a half years.

Advancements in generative AI and machine learning technology, rapid development of augmented and virtual reality, further adoption of cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, such as internet connected appliances and home devices, along with automation of many industries have already shifted much of American life. ChatGPT, one of the most recognizable examples of generative AI that the public can use, was only released two years ago, but the sector of generative AI is already threatening many American jobs.

Those with writing-focused careers like copywriters and social media marketers, are already feeling the disruption, and experts believe STEM professionals, educators and workforce trainers and others in creative and arts fields are going to see much of their job responsibilities automated by AI by 2030. 

The venture capital market has been a volatile one over the last four years. Though many of Trump’s attacks on Democrats during his campaign cycle centered on the healthy economy under his first term, the COVID-19 pandemic was the single-biggest economic factor to disrupt the venture capital market and others.

The U.S. saw its biggest year for venture capital investments in 2021, but supply-chain issues and the continuing reliance on remote work changed the trajectory of many companies’ plans to go public on the stock market. High inflation and interest rates have kept many investors from deploying capital and many companies from completing mergers and acquisitions since then, although the second half of 2024 is looking up.

The economy quickly became the number one issue for Americans in the presidential election cycle. And though thriving venture capital markets usually benefit those that are already wealthy enough to invest, we’ll likely see a positive correlation in the general markets too, said Scott Nissenbaum, president and CEO of Ben Franklin Technology Partners, an innovation-centered fund in Pennsylvania.

“A thriving, efficient market is good for venture capital. And the flip side is also true,” he said. “We feed into and create the innovations and the efficiencies and the next generation … that create the robust and the boom.”

How investors and founders are preparing for Trump 

Nissenbaum predicts that Trump may remove regulations for technology used by U.S. transportation and military systems, allowing for more tech integration than previously permitted without human safeguards in place. That might look like more flight optimization technology, or more drone usage by military branches. Nissenbaum also thinks Trump will attempt to open up space travel, especially with big backing by Musk, who runs SpaceX.

Health care also has been implementing technology rapidly, and Nissenbaum believes could see some major changes under Trump.

That is of note for healthtech founder Sipra Laddha, an Atlanta-based psychiatrist and cofounder of LunaJoy, which provides in-person and virtual wellness visits for women. The three-year-old company raised venture capital in 2022 and 2023, despite a more challenging fundraising market. Women’s health care companies saw a surge of VC investment in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade in June 2022, an exception to the generally slower investment market at the time.

But she is uncertain about how Trump’s potential cabinet appointees, like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was appointed to head the Department of Health and Human Services, will affect LunaJoy’s operation. Kennedy has made health a key issue in his public advocacy and political activity, but he has also espoused eccentric and even false views on issues such as vaccines and pharmaceuticals.

“When women don’t have choices, mental health is significantly worse, and that’s something that goes on, often, for the entire time of that family’s trajectory,”  Laddha said. “So I’m not quite sure what’s going to happen, but you know, those are certainly things that, as a women’s mental health company, we are looking at and watching closely to see what sort of legislation, rules and laws come out.”

When it comes to fundraising early next year, Laddha is optimistic. She’s focused on how fragmented the healthcare industry is right now, and plans to showcase how companies like hers will aim to integrate with larger health systems.

“Our role is to be really as disruptive as possible, and to bring to the forefront the most innovative solutions that we can do while still working within the current framework of healthcare that exists today,” she said.

Some sectors worry about Trump economic policy

While software and cloud-based technologists seem excited by the effects of deregulation, startup founders that make physical products, especially using microchip technology, are wary of Trump’s plan to impose tariffs on imported goods.

Samyr Laine, a managing partner at Los Angeles-based Freedom Trail Capital, specializes in consumer tech and consumer packaged goods. Laine said he feels a sense of relief in ending the “uncertainty” around who will take the presidency the next four years, but he predicts many founders will feel the costly effects of Trump’s planned tariffs, and pass those additional costs to consumers.

Though the existing companies in his portfolio won’t be hit too hard, it’s a factor they’ll be forced to review when considering investments in companies in the future. Those that will incur the additional costs of imported goods will have to adjust their profit margins and might not be as attractive to investors.

“As a consumer and someone who isn’t in the space, not to be like a fear monger, but expect that some of the things you typically pay for, the price will go up,” Laine said.

The effect on work

Although Trump was successful in picking up a significant amount of tech industry elite support this election season, much of his voter base is working class people who will not feel the positive effects of tech industry deregulation.

Endoso, the Silicon Valley investor and founder, says the Trump coalition of tech entrepreneurs and working-class voters represents “a division between the haves and the have-nots.” The usual basis on which people pick their electoral preferences, like race, geography, income and proximity to city life, were “shattered” this time around.

“It was a revolt of the working class, at least in my view,” he said.

The advancements of AI and machine learning, which will enrich the investor class, will have large implications on employment for those working class voters. The vast majority of Americans who are not college educated, and work physical jobs, might struggle to thrive, he said. We’ll likely see overhauls of industries as robots replace and automate a majority of physical labor in warehouses, and self-driving vehicles take over jobs like long-haul trucking and ride services such as Uber and Lyft.

“I think those are important questions to be asking from a policy standpoint, and I think that the intelligent answers shouldn’t be ‘let’s shut the innovation down.’” Endoso said. “That didn’t work in 19th century England. It won’t work here today, right? But it does require our rethinking the definition of work, and the definition of how you … organize a society along lines where you don’t need to have the same level of maybe direct labor input as we had in the past.”

Nissenbaum agreed, saying that AI has already begun to leak into every field and industry, and will only continue to disrupt how we work. As revolutionary as the internet and internet companies were in the late 1990s, the web has become the infrastructure for artificial intelligence to become more efficient and effective at everything it does.

With lighter regulation under a new Trump administration, we’re likely to see AI develop at unpredictable rates, he said. And laborers will definitely be feeling the effects over the next four years.

“You’re not going to lose your job to AI,” Nissenbaum said. “You’re going to lose your job to someone who understands how to do your job with AI.”

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A U.S. Senate panel examined issues in private student lending Tuesday. (Photo illustration via Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — As private student loan companies take heat over accusations of predatory behavior and deception, members of a U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs panel and student advocates voiced concerns over the industry at a hearing Tuesday.

The Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Protection hearing came as the broader student debt crisis impacts millions, with more than $1.74 trillion in outstanding student loans as of the second quarter of 2024, according to the U.S. Federal Reserve.

Subcommittee Chairman Raphael Warnock said he and his staff analyzed some of the myriad complaints the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau received related to private student loans and federal student loan servicing in roughly the last year and were “struck by the sheer scope and magnitude of the problem.”

“Private lenders and servicers routinely misled or deceived borrowers, and the stories are frustrating and heartbreaking,” the Georgia Democrat said.

Some borrowers have found loans offered by private lenders to be extraordinary burdens, Aissa Canchola Bañez, policy director at the Student Borrower Protection Center, an advocacy group, told the panel.

“Student loans were supposed to grant all families — regardless of race and economic status — the chance to unlock the promise of a higher education,” she said.

“But for too many, student debt has become a life sentence, holding borrowers back from buying a home, starting a small business and even starting or growing a family,” Canchola Bañez said.

Canchola Bañez said “the absence of comprehensive data in the private student loan space has too often left borrowers, policymakers and advocates in the dark” and that “this has allowed for significant gaps in protections for the millions of Americans forced to take on private student loan debt and has made it harder for policymakers and law enforcement officials to protect borrowers.”

Dalié Jiménez, a law professor and director of the Student Loan Law Initiative at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, said the private student loan industry had transformed in the last decade.

“New financial products have emerged, offering alternatives to traditional loans, but they’ve come with added risks that we’re only beginning to understand,” Jiménez said, adding that “many are offered by schools that provide dubious value in return for costly credit.”

Troubled industry

Major student loan servicers, such as Navient, have been at the center of legal issues and scrutiny in recent years. Last week, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau reached a $120 million settlement with Navient that bans the company from federal student loan servicing.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat and member of the subcommittee, has led investigations into Navient for nearly a decade.

Warren said Tuesday that “Republican extremists want to return to the days where borrowers were just at the mercy of predatory servicers like Navient” and that “the Biden-Harris administration has a different vision.”

Warren added that it’s “long past time for Navient to do the right thing by their countless defrauded borrowers and cancel out these loans for the private student loan borrowers as well.”

On the other side of the aisle, GOP Sen. Cynthia Lummis defended the industry’s basic mission.

“While individual cases of malfeasance certainly exist in the private loan market — as they do in any market — private lenders fill a crucial gap in higher education financing and equip borrowers with the tools to meet the barriers to education in place today,” Lummis said.

Lummis, a Wyoming Republican, also noted that the private student loan market only accounts for 8% of outstanding loans and that the vast majority of loans are federal loans.

Beth Akers, senior fellow at the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute, pointed out that while “private student loan origination and servicing, both for federal and private loans, hasn’t been perfect” and “lending institutions and those that service loans are fallible,” these private entities supporting student lending “don’t deserve the ire of lawmakers looking for a quick fix or even a scapegoat for what is happening more broadly in student lending.”

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