When Iron Man came out in 2008, Robert Downey Jr. was *not* a marquee star.
He was rebuilding his career and paid a below market rate of $500k.
But the deal terms set him up for one of the great acting comebacks ever (while earnings $450m+ as Tony Stark).
Here’s the story 🧵
The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) we know today was a long shot in the early 2000s.
Marvel was a public co. coming off bankruptcy in 1996 and had sold rights to its best IP (Spiderman, X-Men, Fantastic 4)
From 2000-07, films based on the IP minted cash but Marvel made little:
In the early-90s, Downey Jr. was one of the brightest young stars in Hollywood, receiving a Best Actor nomination for "Charlie Chaplin" in 1992 (@ 27yrs old).
In the 2nd half of the decade, though, he dealt with drug addiction, arrests and jail stints before going clean in 2003.
Masayoshi Son does the craziest investment swings:
▫️In mid-90s: invested $1.7B into 100+ internet firms (including a ~30% stake in Yahoo! for $100m)
▫️In 2000: was worth $78B at peak Dotcom and was the richest person in the world for 3 days (ahead of Gates)
▫️The bubble burst and he lost 99% of wealth
▫️In 2000, puts $20m into Alibaba for a 34% stake (sold out almost entirely by 2023 and made ~$72B)
▫️Lost $14B on WeWork
▫️Once owned ~5% of Nvidia but sold it all for $3.6B in 2019 (that stake would now be worth $90B)
▫️In 2016, Softbank bought Arm Holdings for $32B (still owns 90% and the stake is $114B, a gain of $82B)
Based on his ownership in Softbank and other investment vehicles, his personal wealth is currently ~$15B.
Nearly 100% of intercontinental internet traffic goes through submarine cables.
It is a robust system with many redundancies.
There are 500+ subsea cables and a fleet of 60 repair shops on stand-by but Big Tech isn’t taking chances:
▫️GOOGLE invested in 25 cables (and owns 12 outright). Per The Economist, the search giant started its sea cable program in 2008.
◽META invested in 15 cables (owns 1 outright).
◽MICROSOFT partly owns 4 cable.
One of the 500+ cable gets cut every 3 days (most common reasons are shark bites, anchor drops and deep-sea fish trawlers).
Remote areas are still very at risk.
Example: In 2022, a volcano erupted near Tonga and a mudslide took out the only cable nearby. Starlink provided some free internet coverage while it took 5 weeks for the cable to be fixed (5 weeks!!).
Robert Metcalfe (inventor, ethernet cable) famously predicted internet would flame out. He thought cables couldn’t handle traffic and not enough investment in them.
Dyson created the first bagless vacuum and used the cyclone tech for related products: air purifier, hand dryer, fans and hair dryer.
It took a big swing on EVs and missed ($500m+ on R&D). There was also a washing machine flop.
But the most random product line? A strawberry farm that grows off-season so the UK can have local access to the fruit year round.
Dyson Farming was established in 2012 and — with 36,000 acres — is one of the largest farms in the country.
The semi-automated strawberry farm has 700,000 plants and will produce 750 tonnes of strawberry a year.
My wife made me buy 4 of the aforementioned Dyson products. You can probably guess which ones.
They all have cyclone technology, which James Dyson borrowed from the sawmill industry…and it is my favourite cross-industry innovation: readtrung.com/p/11-types-of-…
Dubbed “Pokémon With Guns”, the game has sold 6m+ copies in past 4 days (making its developer Pocket Pair over $100m on a ~$7m budget).
Some details on the game development process:
◻️ CEO Takuro Mizobe worked at JPMorgan Securities before launching a crypto exhange in 2014.
◻️He made some dough in crypto and used funds to launch indie game developer Pocket Pair in 2015.
◻️The original Palworld team was 4 people and started with $10,000.
◻️The main model developer is a high-schooler who the team met because he worked part-time at a convenience store they frequented.
◻️They added guns because to be a global success, it had to do well in America and the CEO said “Americans like to shoot things”.
◻️Asked about Nintendo, the CEO says they make innovative games whereas he is fine to chase trends (“I don’t [have a creative vision]. I just want to make a game people like.”)
◻️ There was no version control. The team saved files in a “bucket of USBs” and merged them to the main build when done.
◻️Switched from Unity to Unreal Engine late into the development process.
◻️ There are rumours that the game assets were mostly created by AI (but they deny it and there is little evidence).
Palworld’s early success is astounding when you consider triple AAA game titles easily break 9-figure development costs (eg. Cyberpunk 2077 has run $400m+)
Earlier today, Palworld peaked at 1.8m concurrent players. That’s the 2nd highest ever for Steam’s platform (ahead of CounterStrike 2 and behind only PUBG).
The next stat to watch: Nintendo released “Pokémon Scarlet and Violet” in 2022 and it has sold 23m+ copies.