🍋 Musk Inspiring Ruthlessness

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Good Morning! Hope y'all had a wonderful Thanksgiving break. It was a record-breaking Black Friday, even though Mr. Jerome probably won’t like that. Despite experts predicting a consumer spending slowdown, online sales topped $9 billion last Friday.

Walmart overtook Amazon for the website where most Americans looked for discounts. But don’t expect any concessions if you’re in the market for a sports team - the sale of Manchester United is expected to top a record $6 billion.

More Americans are renting single-family homes as mortgage rates increase. And a statue of Elon Musk will be revealed in Austin, Texas this week.

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1. Story of the Day: Musk Inspiring Ruthlessness

Safe to say, you’re probably glad Elon Musk isn’t your boss (unless you work for Moelis). So far Chief Twit has fired half his workplace, banned remote work, and told his employees to either embrace ‘hardcore work’ or leave. But your boss might think Musk’s doing great.

Musk’s post-Covid vision for work sounds intense. But many employers say they agree with him. They think the working force has gone soft - they just don’t want to say the quiet part out loud.

An employees' job market and the Covid-19 pandemic made corporate jobs more flexible than ever. But some employers wonder if we went too far. Millennials and Gen-Zers are often stereotyped as unwilling to work long hours or come into the office.

But some employers agree with Musk that we went too far. Many are skeptical of remote workers and underperformers. While most companies haven’t had layoffs to the extent Twitter has, a looming recession could change that.

Takeaway: Experts are calling Musk an ‘anger-translator’ for American employers. Many bosses think employees have gotten too soft and unproductive. Employees favor leaner, harder-working teams but most are unwilling to bear the layoffs and low morale it would take to get there. But 2023 could be a rough year for the economy, so here's to hoping your boss doesn't start acting on Musk's advice!

2. Markets Rundown

If you want access to Wall Street insider interviews, industry deep-dives, and investment ideas, check out our Insiders newsletter.

Stocks closed slightly lower on Friday as investors anticipate a reality-check from the Fed this week.

Movers & Shakers

• (+) Coupa Software ($COUP) +6% as Vista Equity Partners weighs a take-private bid.

• (–) Apple ($AAPL) -2% after fears over supplier issues in China.

• (–) Grindr ($GRND) -5% following its IPO surge earlier this month.

Private Dealmaking

• Taktile, a German automated business decisions platform, raised $20 million

• Validic, a remote work startup, raised $12 million

• Wesper, an in-home sleep lab developer, raised $9.6 million

• Carlyle may buy California’s Heritage Provider Network for $10 billion

• Astorg and Epiris bought Euromoney for $1.7 billion 

• Juvena Therapeutics, a protein drug developer, raisded $41 million

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Top Reads

• If the price ended in 99, you probably overpaid (WSJ)

• From Trinity to liquidity (Substack)

• How many people should Elon Musk fire? (YF)

• Why didn’t Twitter go down? (Substack)

• Apple has a huge problem with an iPhone supplier in China (CNN)

• Traits you can change, and traits you can’t (Stay)

• Rest isn’t the opposite of work (RWP)

• Disney’s tale of Two Bobs (CNN)

• Was this $100 billion deal the worst merger ever? (NYT)

• What the office stuck-up can teach us (WSJ)

• Wall Street stuck with more leveraged debt (BB)

• How a fake Tweet almost tanked a pharma giant (YT)

• The S&P 500 is not the economy (CS)

4. Book of the Day: The Master Algorithm

In the world's top research labs and universities, the race is on to invent the ultimate learning algorithm: one capable of discovering any knowledge from data, and doing anything we want, before we even ask.

In The Master Algorithm, Pedro Domingos lifts the veil to give us a peek inside the learning machines that power Google, Amazon, and your smartphone.

He assembles a blueprint for the future universal learner--the Master Algorithm--and discusses what it will mean for business, science, and society.

If data-ism is today's philosophy, this book is its bible.

“If you’re a lazy and not-too-bright computer scientist, machine learning is the ideal occupation, because learning algorithms do all the work but let you take all the credit.”

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6. Daily Visual: Largest Streaming Companies

(number of subscribers as of Q3 '22)

Source: StatsPanda

7. Daily Acumen: Speed Matters

"Part of the activation energy required to start any task comes from the picture you get in your head when you imagine doing it.

It may not be that going for a run is actually costly; but if it feels costly, if the picture in your head looks like a slog, then you will need a bigger expenditure of will to lace up.

Slowness seems to make a special contribution to this picture in our heads.

Time is especially valuable.

So, as we learn that a task is slow, a special cost accrues to it.

Whenever we think of doing the task again, we see how expensive it is, and bail.

That’s why speed matters."

Source: James Somers

8. Crypto Corner

• Miami nightclubs mourn the loss of high-rolling crypto entrepreneurs

• Why crypto’s final price could be zero

• FTX’s collapse upends SBF’s Washington play

• Congress is starting to question this whole crypto thing

• Bill Ackman thinks crypto needs to self-regulate

• Idle crypto is the devil’s workshop

9. Memes of the Day

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