When four people were arrested and charged with a conspiracy to illegally export Nvidia chips to China, there was an interesting side note. One of the arrestees, Alabama resident Brian Raymond, was the chief technology officer of an AI company called Corvex.
Or was he? Corvex certainly seemed to think that Raymond was its CTO in the days before his indictment. Corvex named Raymond as its CTO in a press release and filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which detailed plans for a merger with Movano Health.
But once Raymond was arrested, Corvex told media outlets that it had never completed the process of hiring him as an employee. While someone could technically be a CTO as a contractor and not a regular employee, a company spokesperson subsequently claimed to Ars that Raymond had never been the CTO.
The company spokesperson asked Ars for a “correction” to our story, which accurately reported that Corvex itself described Raymond as its CTO and as part of its leadership team.
“Raymond was not CTO of Corvex—so the statement above is inaccurate,” Corvex spokesperson Christopher Buscombe, who is apparently with a third-party firm doing media relations for Corvex, told Ars Monday in an email seeking a correction. “The headline is also misleading as a result, as taken together it suggests Ramyond [sic] was CTO of Corvex. Raymond was CEO of Bitworks, a completely different company.”
Our article quoted both Corvex’s press release describing Raymond as the CTO and Corvex’s subsequent statement saying that he had never been hired. Buscombe asked for a correction to our article, saying it “has caused quite a lot of confusion,” though it seems more likely that any confusion was caused by Corvex’s conflicting statements about Raymond’s position at the company.