Hey Snackers,
It's Day 2 of the TBOY Awards. Last night, Apple went home with the TBOY Trophy for Best Product in a Supporting Role thanks to AirPods. Join us on Twitter today @RobinhoodSnacks to vote on our next category:
It's been a year of CEO departures. We picked the ones who really left with a bang (not in a good way). Here are the nominees for Best CEO in a Leaving Role:
Join us @RobinhoodSnacks to vote for the best (worst?) C-Exit.
Seriously getting out of hand... Tesla. It's now the world's 2nd most valuable carmaker (behind Toyota), despite never having made an annual profit. The stock's almost quadrupled in value since October. It's almost boring to even bring it up anymore... But the rally also has half your coworkers beginning every meeting asking: when will it end?
Tesla is like a young avocado tree... Hot, in-demand on plenty of toast, and primed for growth. OG carmakers like GM and Ford are like mature orange trees. OJ used to be on every breakfast table, but now its demand is slowing. And investors care most about future profit/growth potential, and they're not convinced it's there for the Detroit-based orange growers.
The rally could also be an effect of FOMO hype... Investors hopping on the soaring Tesla bandwagon drive the stock higher, rinse, repeat. It could also partly be a "short squeeze." When you invest "long," you hope to buy low and eventually sell higher. "Short" sellers are the opposite — they're betting a stock will go down.
Meeting the $5 dollar credit card minimum... You added extra oat milk to your cold brew, swiped your card, and walked out of the store with your caffeine. But what went on behind the spending scenes is way more complex. Merchants like your bodega and coffee shop pay $100B+ a year in interchange fees (aka "Swipe Tax") for your credit card usage. Now Visa's changing its fee structure for stores. Some background:
Now, Visa wants to raise fees for some merchants... and cut them for others.
Visa's optimizing, not disrupting itself... It's milking more money out of your credit card purchases. That's why it's raising fees for no-brainer "I'll use credit" purchases, and lowering them where you don't typically swipe (like rent payments). Visa is the world's largest payments processor, but that doesn't mean merchants won't complain. Kroger even banned Visa cards in 2018 because of fees, before reversing the ban the next year.
Took Netflix 10 years... to reach the 68M US subscribers it has today. After just 2 months, Disney's almost halfway there with 28.6M. That's the headline from Disney's 4th quarter earnings report. It sounds good, but Disney+ actually hurt Disney's profits badly — those new subscribers drove revenues up 36% overall for Disney, but sank profits by 23%.
Remember Walt's character ecosystem... He drew it on a napkin back in 1957. Unlike HBO, Netflix, Quibi, and NBC's new Peacock streaming service , Disney+ doesn't need to make profits. It can set a low price to maximize the number of people who fall in love with Baby Yoda, then cash in on its other divisions:
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