Hey Snackers,
45 million. That's how many times All I Want For Christmas Is You was streamed last week.
While Mariah Carey's hit turned 25, stocks rose on a Hanukkah gift from China: Lower tariffs on 850 US-made goods, from frozen pork to microchips. It's a positive step towards the "complete-phase-1-of-the-trade-deal" New Year's resolution.
“Cute Tesla”... (new bumper sticker for Rivian drivers). The electric pickup truck startup snagged $1.3B in fresh money from T. Rowe Price and existing investors like Ford and Amazon. That cash will facelift an old Mitsubishi plant in Normal, Illinois (great name) to start mass-ish producing e-pickups in 2021. Here's America's State of the Car (and their value by market capitalization):
Cars cost more than coders... App-based tech startups raise tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to hire programers and install kombucha taps. But Rivian raises money in the billions to build factories, fill them with high-tech robots, and hire engineers. All those costs are why fundraising for hardware cars is bigger than for software tech.
You want traction? I’ll show you truction... Venture capitalists, Ford, and Amazon had invested a huge $2.2B in Rivian already. To get this extra $1.3B, Rivian probably had to show them some traction — evidence that it's worth investing more into. How about this truction:
Who ya got?... Sports betting phenom DraftKings announced it's dropping out of college to join a publicly-traded company that will be worth $3.3B total. The daily fantasy sports app lets you bet real money — and claims it dominates 60% of the fantasy market.
The Flying V, the Hail Mary... Now add Triple Reverse Merger to the list of all-time great plays. Instead of IPO'ing like most private companies do to bring their stocks to public markets, DraftKings will take a different route to the pros: Merge with an already-public company. Here's the new team:
2 critical moments shaped DraftKings into the player it is today... and both were focused on American consumers:
Disclosure: Authors of this Snacks own shares of Tesla, Amazon, Google, and Apple
ID: 1044377