Content Style: Thought Starters

Vice has reviewed some recently filed patents from the US Navy, giving us all an insight into some of the strange, cutting-edge technologies the US Military is working on.

With Jeff Bezos announcing that he would be stepping down as Amazon CEO to focus on his space efforts with Blue Origin and his charitable work with the Day One Fund, there has been a lot written about the greatest businessman of our age. As he steps down from the $1.7 trillion dollar company he started in Seattle, he finishes as the second wealthiest person in the world making $149,000 every minute from the retail and web services giant.

eSports leagues around the world are starting to take the shape of more traditional sporting leagues. Much like the global market for footballers and basketball players, the best Call of Duty, League of Legends and Starcraft players from around the world are being offered millions of dollars to sign with professional teams. These professional gamers, much like their sporting counterparts, put in gruelling training hours to be the best - with some training 18 hours a day to hone their craft.

Elon Musk may be the CEO and face of Tesla, but he was not a founder. That fact is often overlooked as the enigmatic CEO has certainly made the company his own over the past decade and a half. However, the world’s richest person was actually Tesla’s 4th CEO when he took over in October 2008.

Snowflake was one of the best IPOs of 2020. The data warehousing company was led by veteran CEO, Frank Slootman, that is developing a reputation as a ‘CEO-for-hire’ (a label that doesn’t really mean anything, isn’t any CEO a CEO-for-hire?). When Slootman took over, Snowflake was valued at $4 billion. Today, it is valued at $85 billion.

Earlier this year, WhatsApp, the secure messaging app owned by Facebook, announced it was updating its terms of service. The change, allowing Facebook and other businesses to store messages, created a lot of alarm and set off a search for more securing messaging services. One of the biggest beneficiaries has been Signal. The encrypted messaging app saw an additional 2 million users in a 12 hour period after Facebook first announced these policy changes. Since then, the messaging app jumped to #1 in the App Store in 70 countries and reports are that they have doubled their user base since these WhatsApp policy changes.

If you’ve heard about the constant struggle between “growth” and “value” stocks, you’re probably aware that lately, it hasn’t been much of a contest. Over the past 13 years, growth has easily outperformed value. In Howard Marks' latest memo, he discusses this contest and offers a different way to look at this decades-old debate.

There’s an ongoing battle amongst hedge funds, private equity and venture capital firms to get a piece of some of the fastest growing technology businesses. However, at the other end of the spectrum, there is a whole different breed of investment firm looking for bargains amongst the unloved. In the massive number of family businesses, side hustles and unloved apps, there is some real opportunity. The Micro PE firm has been created to find these needles in the haystack.

In this post we’re featuring two stories that add more colour to the story. The first, tells the story of one Pennsylvania mother that was radicalised by far-right media, came to be involved in the Capital riots and is now a fugitive from the FBI. The second, covers the Boogaloo Boys, a loosely organised far-right extremist group in the US that were involved in the Capital riots. Together, they help explain the interrelated nature of the right-wing ecosystem.

Two trends are intersecting that are causing humans to doubt their intelligence. Firstly, the increasing application of mathematical techniques to a growing number of fields traditionally outside the reach of maths departments. Secondly, the increasing ability of artificial intelligence to solve mathematical challenges. Together, they are increasing concern that, at some point in the future, artificial intelligence will be able to make better decisions and understand the world better than human brains ever could.

ARK Invest, led by perhaps the world’s most famous Tesla bull Cathy Wood, has had an incredible few years. They have created some of the world’s most popular ETFs and positioned themselves as on the forefront of the biggest innovations the world will see over the coming decades. In this Big Ideas report, the ARK Invest team drill down into some of these technology mega trends that they think will lead to big investment opportunities in the coming decades.

Palantir may be one of the most controversial companies in the world today. The software company has made a name for itself by taking incredibly complex data sets and making them usable for companies and governments around the world. Famously, Palantir has been embedded with the US Military in operations across both Iraq and Afghanistan and worked for years with the CIA to help make sense of complex data coming from intelligence reports and soldiers in the field.

A battle over the future direction of the internet is being waged in the boardrooms of two of the internet’s biggest companies. In the ring are Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, and Tim Cook, CEO of Apple. For years, the internet business model has been simple - gather as much data as possible about users and sell that data to third parties, mainly advertisers. Apple, led by Tim Cook, are looking to change that.

If you’ve been following the financial news this week, you’ve heard about GameStop. The struggling game retailer, owner of Australia’s EB Games, has been on the decline for years as more and more gamers have moved to buying games digitally rather than in bricks and mortar stores.

When we look back on the 2010’s, we’ll lament the lost time. The opportunity cost of the time wasted as climate denialists held up the policy process and stopped governments around the world from tackling the underlying causes of climate change head on. However as we enter the 2020’s, there is some good news.

$600,000 per minute. That is how much revenue Amazon makes. Over the past ten years it has grown its revenue from $27 billion to $347 billion. Not only is it the #1 player in eCommerce but it is the world’s largest cloud service provider. This article makes the case that this is just the beginning. Amazon may be well on its way to becoming a multi-trillion dollar conglomerate.

Chances are you haven’t heard of him. YouTube’s highest paid earner in 2020, Jimmy Donaldson (aka MrBeast), made $24 million from YouTube last year. This is the story of how he cracked the YouTube algorithm and amassed almost 52 million subscribers.

President Obama was often told he should spend more time with Congress and have a drink with Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell. “Why don’t YOU get a drink with Mitch McConnell” was his joking response. The lack of a personal relationship between the two leaders made it difficult for Obama to break through the Congressional gridlock and get things done in his second term.