I have been following this curious incident for the past 72 hours, it is… quite fascinating. Vshojo was the largest English vtuber company with a stellar reputation and had some of the most famous English-speaking talents (case in point, Ironmouse is probably the most watched female streamer at the moment?) and they essentially imploded in under 72 hours, probably less than 24 if you consider the cutoff point as when all the talents quit. I think the news article only scratched the surface and was probably too generous towards the founder

• Vshojo was a Silicon Valley startup (this gets important later on) founded in 2021. They are/were somewhere between a talent-management company and a typical vtuber “corpo” (think Hololive, where Gawr Gura worked at). They heavily advertised themselves in a way that made them “better than Hololive”, such as talent freedom, generous payment splits, …
• As the article stated, Vshojo gained $11M in series A funding… but no further VC funds. For the longest time, a lot of fans were confused about how they make money since their advertised rates for talents are extremely generous and “too good to be true”. Turns out they were indeed too good to be true
• According to various sources, they employed somewhere around 25-30 ppl… company is private so no one knows their exact financials, but 30 * $100K/yr = $3M/yr, which alone would make the series A last no more than 4 years. And this is not factoring in their advertisement costs and stuff like custom rigged 3D models, performances, … I think someone crunched the numbers that their annual revenue from the talents is probably $200-300K/yr. So they have been hemorrhaging money from the very beginning
• The company has a rather… unprofessional culture that has been exposed by all the talents. Stuff like their lawyer having an expired license, discouraging talents from discussing salary, slandering ex-talents who quit, having a C-suit being a sex predator, influencing opinions on 4chan’s /vt/… yeah. Allegedly these issues have been around since the company’s founding
• The company was in deep financial troubles a year ago (probably series A ran out) and have basically not paid any of their talents or artists/commissions since late 2024, as well as cut their Japan branch manager’s salary by half (they probably did a lot more). This led to a lot of talents already consider quitting. Earlier in 2025 three talents either quit or were dismissed; also two C-suits quit
• Notably about the charity… the talent in question, Ironmouse, has severe CVID so she has been running donation events to the Immune Deficiency Foundation for a long time. Vshojo’s CEO knows this, he even retweeted a lot of the past donation records. Last time Ironmouse received $515K which Vshojo was supposed to donate on her behalf… and the money never got delivered, likely got treated as regular revenue

There’s way more but I think the community is now universally hating the CEO at the moment. Since the CEO also publicly announced embezzling charity funds… I’m wondering if he will be going to jail. Since most of the ppl involved have heavy YouTube/Twitter presence there are lots of primary evidence around if anyone is interested in more details

Northwestern’s president sent an official email at 9 pm last night on this topic while being as sarcastic as ever

On the other R site there have been researchers at Cornell stating that they received stop-work orders

Shit is hitting the fan

Without being sarcastic…

I think Project 2025’s goal is less about “cost cutting” and more about reducing bureaucracy & consolidating power… I genuinely don’t think they have real plans for where to spend the money besides some vague goals like lowering income tax or something

And in practice, they are cutting a bunch of important governmental endeavors that have very good ROI (NIH has always bipartisan for a reason), so they are literally wasting everyone’s money, not saving

Sadly, not quite: several countries want to, but they all have their own funding difficulties. They are trying to though, since these days American scientists might be seen as being offered at a steep discount

The HHS official announcement link if anyone is interested.

Yes, the double speak is quite strong. Also quite obvious who wrote this based on the URL.

I was actually pointed to this by two posts from Mekka on Mastodon:

• https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/112468474131649004
• https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/114135119202956481

Very bad precedent being set here.

I was at one of the local rallies. I think the organizers also know that this event alone won’t be effective & is only the beginning; there will be more to come. A lot more if (and most likely, when) the administration doesn’t comply with the demands.

Fun fact… My local rally literally featured a startup founder who scaled their company & attracted investors using NIH funding as seed money, and a community college student from a nearby red state. I would imagine that even the most die-hard traditional conservatives would find such stories inspiring/good use of tax payer money… Science support has traditionally been bipartisan too.

Again, if they don’t comply, more actions would come

The thing that annoys me is… even if they genuinely want to save money (and that’s a big if), this is barely even “saving” much money. NIH has historically been a very good return on investment for the US government despite running on a shoestring budget, and that is probably not even accounting for the various downstream applications (like all the pharma industry) that relies on NIH-funded research.

Part of the issue with indirect costs are due to the NIH never getting much of a budget raise and the ballooning bureaucracy… Yes, there are people wanting change for the better, but the current administration decided to wake up to violence by dealing with this in the worst way possible