Monday Mar.18, 2019

Facebook Gets Poked (Badly)

How The Zuck must be feeling right about now

Keep that Guinness tap flowing a wee bit longer.

The S&P 500 hit a 4-month high last week as investors look ahead to the Fed's upcoming policy meeting Wednesday.

Who's having fun...

Don't touch the couch... (it's technically not ours). Williams-Sonoma's West Elm brand partnered with Rent The Runway so you can rent a 2-year Chaise instead of buy one and awkwardly sell it on craigslist. RTR's showing West Elm the ropes on leasing out its mid-century mod chairs for your post-college 1-bedroom.

Hold the condiments... Fresh after announcing an embarrassing billion-dollar accounting error, Kraft Heinz is getting itself together. To start, it's putting its sour cream and cottage cheese biz on the market, and investors approve of the down-sizing of its old school food.

Define The Relationship... Germany's two biggest banks, Deutsche and Commerzbank, confirmed they're "in talks" about merging. But with the country's powerful labor unions and the Volk's concerns of merging #1 with #2, they're taking it slow.

Down

...And who's having less fun

The California Walnut's expensive... The $33M that Lumber Liquidators has to pay in penalties is expensive-r. The wood-seller was fined heavily for buying Chinese floorboards that were treated with Formaldehyde, a known carcinogen (and CBS cracked the case Scooby Doo style with a simple factory visit).

S-3-X-Y... The team's now complete after Tesla unveiled its 4th eDriving option: Model Y. With more Americans splurging on bigger cars, the Y's size sits snugly between its Model X (SUV) and 3 (sedan). But investors weren't impressed with Elon's "underwhelming" infomercial-style unveil.

Bring in das lawyers... Just after revealing it's going carbon neutral by 2050, Volkswagen got sued by the USA. The guys and gals at the SEC claim VW execs knew as far back as 2007 that they its emissions readings were lies. And since V-dub leaders didn't tell investors, that's fraud.

Click

More bad Facebook PR. Lots more.

Mom's upset you don't post on Facebook anymore?... Add that to the list of drama. Facebook shares fell 3% last week on bad news all up in its feed.

FB got swept in 4 games... by life. The social network's now more intertwined with society than the phone services it's made obsolete. That's why these problems have huge impact:

People: One of the OG FB-ers not named Zuck is Chris Cox, and he was leading product there until stepping down Thursday. So did Chris Daniels, the head of WhatsApp.
Technical: #FacebookDown happened Wednesday, as “Server" issues caused Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to unapologetically stop working.
Legal: Federal prosecutors sent out criminal investigators to see if Facebook broke laws by sharing user information inappropriately with over 150 tech companies.
Societal: The mass murderer in New Zealand used Facebook to live broadcast his terrible acts.

The Situation Room's empty... Zuck's deputies aren't there anymore to help him fix all this. Cox led everything ("Product" is a catch-all word in tech referring to all the stuff a company does for customers). The WhatsApp founders were already gone, but now their sub's done, too. And the Insta guys are #Out.

What else we’re Snackin’

Work: $6 buys you 30 minutes in NYC's first coworking spa
Life: The new rules on how to recycle
Money: 9 ways to get free tax help from a human
Venture: The first-time founder's ultimate guide to pitching a VC
Crypto: The trailer for the "CRYPTO" movie just dropped

This Week

Monday: Earnings from Overstock.com, Tilray
Tuesday: Earnings from FedEx. 2-Day Fed policy meeting kicks off
Wednesday: Earnings from General Mills, Guess
Thursday: Earnings from Darden Restaurants (that's the Olive Garden owner) and Nike
Friday: Earnings from Tiffany's

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Tangential remarks

Nicolai Tangen, the CEO who holds the purse strings of Norway’s $1.6 trillion sovereign wealth fund, thinks that his fellow Europeans don’t quite stack up to US employees when it comes to pure hustle, telling the Financial Times in a recent interview that there is a difference in “the general level of ambition” and that “the Americans just work harder”.

Tangen has clearly been putting his money — or more specifically Norway’s — where his mouth is: the sprawling Norwegian oil fund, now one of the largest investors on the planet, has been pumping more capital into its US holdings in the past decade, while decreasing its investment into European entities.

The troublesome news for our European readers? Tangen might be onto something. According to data from the OECD, American workers are putting in almost 60 hours a year more than the weighted average for OECD nations… a benchmark that workers from countries in the European Union are already ~180 hours shy of.

Europeans ‘less hard-working’ than Americans | FT

$2T is the new $1T

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Friday, Apr 26th

What’s happening

Pop Quiz!

Sales of what are up 136% since 2019?

Don't be a sucka

$70B

Alphabet shares are soaring in the after-market session, with a initial jump of more than 10% implying a gain of upwards of about $200B in market value when the stock opens tomorrow morning.

Google’s parent company crushed earnings expectations, initiated a cash dividend for the first time, and authorized a fresh $70B in share repurchases for good measure. The market likes it very much.

What’s up doc?

21h

HOP TO IT

Joshua Topolsky

We get results!

22h

This earnings season is fully operational

Balancing Act

23h

Acrobatic Accounting

So, you want to join the circus?

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Rani Molla

4/25/24

No, Apple hasn’t cut its Vision Pro production estimates in half

Quite a few news outlets are reporting that Apple thinks it’s only going to sell 400,000 to 450,000 Vision Pros in 2024, compared a “market consensus” of 700,000 to 800,000. They’re all citing a note from Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo.

Obviously there’s no question that Apple’s $3,500 face computer will have a limited audience and could be a huge flop, but this also doesn’t seem like accurate news.

The issue is that 1) this 400,000 number isn’t new. Back in July of 2023, the Financial Times reported that Apple planned to make fewer than 400,000 units in 2024, reducing its initial projections of 1M units, citing two people close to Apple and, the Chinese contract manufacturer assembling the device. 2) It's unclear who was estimating 700,000-800,000 Vision Pros in the first place, but it appears that it was Ming-Chi Kuo himself?