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Leonardo DiCaprio Questioned In Wolf Of Wall Street Money Scandal

Leonardo DiCaprio attending the 'Wolf Of Wall Street' premiere in NYC in 2013.
Leonardo DiCaprio attending the 'Wolf Of Wall Street' premiere in NYC in 2013.

Oscar-winning Hollywood hunk Leonardo DiCaprio pulled out of hosting a fundraiser for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton last week, saying there was a problem with the timing.

Well, kind of. The FBI needed to question DiCaprio about his apparent links to two suspects accused of embezzling a sovereign fund in Malaysia, Swiss newspaper Le Temps reports.

One suspect Jho Low, a Malaysian billionaire, is accused of looting $700 million from the fund through the Geneva office of oil company PetroSaudi, says the Swiss daily.

The other, Riza Aziz, the stepson of Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak and a founder of Red Granite Pictures film company, faces allegations that he skimmed $155 million from the fund to help finance hit film The Wolf of Wall Street, a 2013 movie that starred DiCaprio, French weekly L'Express reports.

The two suspects and DiCaprio were spotted together during the 2010 soccer World Cup in South Africa as well as in nightclubs, including one owned by Khadem al-Qubaisi, the former managing director of the International Petroleum Investment Company, who is facing charges in Switzerland about his role in the fund's embezzlement, Le Temps notes.

European media reports say that DiCaprio, Low and Aziz apparently spent $11 million on casinos and authorities are investigating if that money came from the Malaysian fund, which was created in 2009 to modernize the Southeast Asian country.

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Society

Influencer Union? The Next Labor Rights Battle May Be For Social Media Creators

With the end of the Hollywood writers and actors strikes, the creator economy is the next frontier for organized labor.

​photograph of a smartphone on a selfie stick

Smartphone on a selfie stick

Steve Gale/Unsplash
David Craig and Stuart Cunningham

Hollywood writers and actors recently proved that they could go toe-to-toe with powerful media conglomerates. After going on strike in the summer of 2023, they secured better pay, more transparency from streaming services and safeguards from having their work exploited or replaced by artificial intelligence.

But the future of entertainment extends well beyond Hollywood. Social media creators – otherwise known as influencers, YouTubers, TikTokers, vloggers and live streamers – entertain and inform a vast portion of the planet.

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For the past decade, we’ve mapped the contours and dimensions of the global social media entertainment industry. Unlike their Hollywood counterparts, these creators struggle to be seen as entertainers worthy of basic labor protections.

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