Bill Ackman is a very interesting person in the world of investing. Below is a great interview with Bill that talks about everything Pershing Square, hedge funds and learning from your mistakes. There are a lot of great quotes inside this interview.
The world class Xiaomi Lamp is finally available to purchase on Amazon.
Xiaomi has won many design awards with this lamp and I read that is by far and away their most popular product. It provides a sleek and simple design that can fit into pretty much any office design.
Now the music business sees TikTok as its tool. After being caught flat-footed by the success of “Old Town Road,” and then bringing it in-house at Sony, the labels decided they wanted some of that action. If TikTok could build the unknown Lil Nas X, imagine what it could do with a known quantity, a star?
The music business used to be first, but now it’s last. Because it is controlled by old people who did not get the memo, who believe they are indispensable and that no one can resist their money.
But isn’t it funny that not a single musical star has captured the zeitgeist of the Minneapolis/Black Lives Matter explosion in a song we all know. Illustrating that reflecting life, and opening up an audience’s eyes as to the way of life, are not part of the equation. In the music business, it’s all about collecting fans and milking them dry. When one of the biggest acts in the business, Justin Bieber, tries to manipulate the system to make his record number one, who in the hell is gonna listen to the words of a pop star?
via Bob Lefsetz
The quote above is from the most recent newsletter / article from Bob Lefsetz. Bob has been a long time music industry journalist and I thought that the above section is by far the best thing I have read about the music industry in the past 12 months.
Lefsetz is right!
The music industry has long been run by 60 year old businessman who don’t under the generations they are targeting. It’s no longer about the music and the industry runs more like buying and selling real estate than an art form at the top.
Pop music struggles to tell stories and really drive emotions. This is exactly why tracks from John Lennon, Elton John, Rolling Stones, Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash, are still getting very large numbers of plays even with the youngest audiences.
I found myself stumble across this video and this is one of the best speeches I have heard in a while.
It made me step back and ponder.
I hope it does the same for you. Enjoy!
Very interesting video about SpaceX and how they purchased a very small village called Boca Chica for their original space port.
This has to be the best factory tour of Tesla I have ever seen. Best of all its very information and runs through a lot of different parts of the factory.
Well worth a watch.
Waymo at present has a private valuation that is twice as high as Tesla.
How can this be?
Margins! Tesla is focused on the full production of the car where Waymo is focused purely on the underlying technology with self driving cars. Thus, Waymo will have a Gross Margin that is extremely high in comparison to Tesla.
Eric Schmidt talked about this a lot. How Google and its products always wanted to be focused on providing the technology sub stack instead of the full product as it keeps margins at a high level and thus maximising value.
Elon Musk isn’t the best public speaker in the world and sometime he finds it very difficult to get the words from his head and out of his mouth before he his thinking about the next thing to say (which actually is exactly what I have a problem with).
However, in this video Elon explains rocket science in such a simple way that even the average person can start to understand some basics.
Rocket Science 101!
Warner Music Group is going live on the NASDAQ today. Warner are offering 77 million class A shares at $25 a share. If Warner opens up at $25 per share that means they will have a $12.8 billion valuation.
It’s going to be very interesting to see if investors have an appetite for music companies again.
Underwriters for the new offering include Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, and Goldman Sachs. Ticker symbol will be WMG.
Warner Music Group has an amazing catalogue, but I’m very keen to learn more about their recent investments and what other industries they think they can enter, because doing the old record label model just isn’t going to gain enough growth over the next 20 years.
Uber have no COO, CTO or CPO as their executive team keep leaving the company.
These changes happen quite frequently at very large companies, but it seems strange they all these positions are now empty and executives keep leaving.
I think Uber has one of the best CEO’s in the world right now and the right person to lead the company in difficult times.
But WHY??? Why so many leavers? Are they not backing the new vision of the company? Do they think there are too many large issues within the company?
Time will tell I guess.
Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-is-now-lacking-a-coo-a-cto-and-a-cpo-2020-4