Business
Amazon Wants You to Pay With Your Palm. It’s a Sneak Attack on Apple and Google. Amazon One could be a lucrative business in the future for Amazon in my opinion. To make it happen, the best thing that Amazon can do right now is to focus on being a privacy-first organization and invest in building that image. It’s unrealistic to ask the company to get rid of the eCommerce business or the nascent ads segment. Even Apple does that. The difference is that Apple has spent almost its entire corporate life talking about privacy and so far walking the walk. Amazon has not done that.
Adam Mead – Copart: The Car Undertaker. A good Business Breakdowns episode on Copart. If you are intererested in this well-managed firm, I am confident that you’ll learn a thing or two. I wrote about Junk To Gold, a book on the company and its founder Willis Johnson, as well.
Apple TV+ Is on a Scripted-Series Hot Streak. Are People Paying Attention? The emphasis on making quality products pays huge dividends for Apple. The company is using the same playbook on Apple TV+ and willing to play a long game here. Granted, the streamer is at disadvantage now because it doesn’t have a big catalogue, but over time, such disadvantage will be mitigated.
This Tomato Sauce Is Delicious. It’s Also Worth Billions of Dollars. “Rao’s had less than $100 million in annual revenue when the brand was purchased by Sovos. Last year, it reported $580 million in sales. The goal: $1 billion. In fact, the paperwork that Sovos filed before its initial public offering included a sentence you don’t see every day in financial documents: “Our sauces have no tomato blends, no paste, no water, no starch, no fillers and no added sugar.” Meanwhile, its competitors use tomato purées, canola and soybean oils, dehydrated vegetables and unspecified spices, and the results are as different as the process.”
A Rare Look Into the Finances of Elon Musk’s Secretive SpaceX. SpaceX generated $1.5 billion in revenue in the first quarter of 2023. If the company made $6 billion in revenue a year and traded at 11x that annualized revenue, it would be even more valuable than PayPal as of today.
Amazon Restarts Shipping Unit That Competes With UPS and FedEx. To qualify for this service, merchants have to sell on Amazon as well. Not only can Amazon monetize its infrastructure even more efficiently with additional packages, but it can benefit from these products sold on the platform.
Other stuff I find interesting
Teens Are Taking Over Gyms. The Adults Aren’t Pumped. If gym operators bank on the summer promotion to keep teen customers long in the future, I’d serious consider running a test where they put time restrictions in a few markets. Time restrictions would limit the impact on older regular customers while incentivizing teenagers to pay to get full access.
A Few Stories About Big Decisions. I literally just read about Morris Chang’s story a few days ago and it was so insane that I still can hardly believe it. Had Morris Chang gone to work at Ford, who knows where the human race would have been today, given that he founded the influential TSMC
Inside a Georgia Prosecutor’s Investigation of a Former President. A local small county prosecutor brought indictments onto powerful men and their allies in a politically contentious and high-profile case is simply remarkable.
China’s Nickel Plants in Indonesia Created Needed Jobs, and Pollution. “Here is the crux of the deal that Indonesian officials have cut with deep-pocketed Chinese companies now dominating the nickel industry: pollution and social strife in exchange for upward mobility. At the heart of the trade-off are Indonesia’s unrivaled stocks of nickel.”
Stats
Walton County in Florida saw the biggest growth in income between 2020 and 2021 due to migration
49,500 people took their own lives last year in the U.S
Prices for cereal and bakery products were 7% higher than a year ago
Callers spent on average 4 mins on a call with IRS in 2023, down from almost 30 mins
32% of Americans have a tattoo
Minh Quang Duong 
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