.@elonmusk is now, on paper at least, the richest person in the world, gaining more wealth in 2021 than Berkshire Hathaway made in revenue trib.al/ju1uIo0
@elonmusk In fact, although Berkshire Hathaway delivers America’s best profits, Tesla’s market cap is way bigger than Berkshire’s. Make sense?
Maybe not in a traditional sense, but this is Elon Musk’s financial market now trib.al/ju1uIo0
@elonmusk To be fair to Tesla, it’s having a good year:
🚗It’s become consistently profitable
🔋Delivered decent gross margins
🔌Its Q3 earnings were described as “normcore” trib.al/ju1uIo0
@elonmusk Tesla has even coped mostly pretty well with the supply-chain issues that have tripped up other manufacturers.
It’s only now that the company is having issues getting hold of raw materials to manufacture EV batteries in the U.S. trib.al/ju1uIo0
@elonmusk Meanwhile, SpaceX has dominated commercial space launches this year. The cost per seat is an absolute bargain:
🚀Apollo program: $390 million (when adjusted for inflation)
🚀Space Shuttle: $170 million
🚀SpaceX Crew Dragon: $55 million trib.al/ju1uIo0
@elonmusk If there’s one thing that Musk is destined to be known for, it’s his tweets – he’s sent about 3,000 this year.
🚽He says half are written on the toilet. It sort of checks out: All but 15 were sent from an iPhone, and when else would a busy CEO get time? trib.al/ju1uIo0
@elonmusk Many of Musk’s tweets are random musings, memes or updates on his companies. But sometimes they control the market.
For example, he only had to tweet about getting Floki, a Shiba Inu puppy, for $SHIB to soar in value trib.al/ju1uIo0
@elonmusk He even used Twitter this year to make a financial decision, asking whether he should sell 10% of his Tesla stock.
It was weird, but he did tell everyone what he’d do in advance even though he didn’t have to. Maybe other CEOs should follow his lead trib.al/ju1uIo0
@elonmusk There are some things happening at Tesla that might need some attention:
Six women are suing over sexual harassment at a Tesla’s Fremont factory and an employee has been arrested for the murder of another employee in the parking lot of that same factory trib.al/ju1uIo0
@elonmusk As Musk closes out the year, it’s nice to look back on what could have been, and how sad he’d be if he’d taken Tesla private in 2018.
Public markets have been extremely generous to Tesla and without them, he wouldn’t be the richest man in the world trib.al/ju1uIo0
@elonmusk We spent a lot of time this year pondering the existence of Elon Musk, his Twitter account and his influence over markets.
But why is it upshifting during what should be the slowest time of the year? One answer is rising prices in the rental market trib.al/EJ4bwO9
Leases that are coming up for renewal now were signed at the end of 2020, before rents exploded higher.
That's renewing interest in home buying, which is essentially pulling the 2022 spring home buying season forward by several months trib.al/svEWcoh
If there's a silver lining for renters, it's that the cycle might relieve some of the upward pressure on rents that we've seen for most of 2021 trib.al/svEWcoh
The enduring debate in the crypto community is whether Bitcoin will outperform “altcoins,” which are generally defined as digital currencies other than Bitcoin, such as:
It’s true that Bitcoin is perfectly decentralized and the number of coins that can be in existence is limited.
But the real question is whether crypto investors necessarily need a true store of value, or whether there is space for multiple blockchains trib.al/Lm8n25y
Consider that 2,000 years ago the financial system consisted mainly of gold.
🚫There were no stocks
🚫Bonds didn’t exist
🚫Loans were informal trib.al/Lm8n25y
Researchers at Harvard Medical School now say the omicron variant, not delta, is likely fueling the current surge in Covid-19 cases in the northeastern U.S. trib.al/O49sJhb
That’s cause for alarm, because researchers still don’t know much about the variant, and it’s unclear how well vaccines will protect people.
Harvard’s labs are optimized for speed but omicron is spreading faster than they can track it trib.al/O49sJhb
“I think we are in the omicron surge,” Bronwyn MacInnis, director of pathogen genomic surveillance at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard said.
“There’s no system on the planet that could keep up with the pace of this doubling time” trib.al/O49sJhb
The outmoded licensing regime in India needs to be brought up to date with digitization trends in the broader economy, writes @andymukherjee70trib.al/BchfEYF
No deposit-taking institution in the world is trusted more by savers and enjoys a bigger cachet with investors than HDFC Bank.
This has made India’s most valuable lender so lethargic that it had to be banned from issuing new credit cards for eight months trib.al/PNtzgBM
Bank licenses are permits to make money out of thin air.
The prospect of sharing the privilege with a new breed of digital rivals will be more effective at keeping HDFC Bank and other traditional financiers on their toes trib.al/PNtzgBM
If you’re a smoker who wants to indulge your habit while gazing over the mountains of the South Pacific, you’d do well to move fast.
New Zealand announced plans to become the first nation in the world to ban tobacco trib.al/SI0pMMR
Prohibition won’t happen overnight. New Zealand will raise the legal smoking age each year, so that people born after 2008 will never be allowed to puff.
That will eventually mean that tobacco smoking may start disappearing from one corner of the planet trib.al/eeRy24P
The tobacco ban in New Zealand may be a taste of things to come.
🇳🇱 The Netherlands will ban supermarket sales of tobacco starting in 2024
🇺🇸 One in four Americans supported a total smoking ban in a 2018 survey trib.al/eeRy24P