Near the end of March, President Trump sent a tweet asking Ford and General Motors to start manufacturing ventilators amidst the coronavirus. Yaron Oren-Pines, an electrical engineer in Silicon Valley, responded and claimed that his company had ventilators that he could sell. Three days later, New York state had paid him $69.1 million in exchange for 1,450 of the much-needed ventilators. However, they never received any of them. A month later New York cancelled the contract and is working to recover their money and find a new distributor. Oren-Pines has been reached by phone, but his only words were “neither me nor my company is providing any comment on this.”

Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech. https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/