Remember Eynat Guez? Back in January, Guez, the CEO and Co-Founder of Papaya Global, a billion-dollar Israeli software company, announced that she was withdrawing all her company’s funds from Israeli banks in response to the judicial reform, explaining: “This is a painful but necessary business step.”
Guez and many other Israeli hi-techs all took this painful but necessary business step, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy loop whereby they issued warnings about how the judicial reform would ruin the economy and they, then, went about trying the ruin the economy.
These days, Guez is trying to get the Saudi government interested in her company’s cloud-based system for employee management, and calculations of salaries, benefits, and payments for global companies and corporations.
Guez is scheduled to be a keynote speaker at the World Fintech Show in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in early December, the first Israeli woman entrepreneur ever to be so honored. invited to speak at a tech event in the Kingdom. Papaya Global expects to become the first Israeli company to attain a money transfer license in Saudi Arabia, sometime in 2024.
But Guez overlooked one factor: some folks in Israel hate her guts and are prepared to go a long way to hurt her business.
And so, in the spirit of revenge being a dish that is best served nine months after it starts cooking, Channel 14 political reporter Tamir Morag tagged the Saudi crown Prince, the Saudi Foreign Ministry, several other Saudi key players, and several other interested parties in this tweet:
“Hello my Saudi friends! Eynat Guez, who called Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman a murderer, is now asking for your money and plans to attend the World Fintech Show in Riyadh. Just wanted to let you know, so you can arrange a proper welcome for her.”
And he attached this blast from the past:
And what, you might ask, happened to that great money transfer designed to become a self-fulfilling prophecy? One should be very careful going into the business of prophecy because there can be dire consequences. For Guez and her warrior hi-tech moguls on the left, Karma knocked on the door on March 10, when Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), where an estimated 500 Israeli companies kept their money, failed. The bank, which was riding high, offering fantastic loans when the Fed was maintaining a zero interest rates policy (with 85% of its deposits uninsured), suddenly was facing an existential problem when those companies were late paying back, to the point where SVB tried to raise $1.8 billion to beef up its holdings and started a bank run on those deposits. The state regulatory agency revoked SVB’s charter and transferred the business into receivership in the second-largest bank failure in US history.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a calming statement, saying that he closely monitored the fall of SVB, saying: “I held talks with Israeli hi-tech seniors. When I return to Israel, I will discuss with the ministers of finance and the economy, and the governor of the Bank of Israel the extent of the crisis. If necessary, out of responsibility for hi-tech companies and employees, we will take steps to help the Israeli companies.”
So, what happened to Eynat Guez? She tweeted in March: “Discount Bank and Bank Hapoalim are taking amazing steps in supporting Israeli companies – immediate loans to companies alongside bridging loans to employees whose wages will be delayed by companies due to the collapse of SVB. This is what real leadership looks like. Thank you for the example and the lead!”
Yes, nice banks, the same banks Guez was bravely predicting “they will collapse” because it was “my right and even my duty” to ruin them and Israel’s economy.
Let’s hope the Saudis read her old tweet with great interest.
