🏈 America Just Isn’t That Excited For This Year’s Super Bowl Judging By Plummeting Ticket Prices

In today’s newsletter we discuss how America just isn’t that excited for this year’s Super Bowl judging by plummeting ticket prices, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway buys 35% of SiriusXM, Spotify records first profit in their 17 year history, the new trailer for The Fantastic Four: First Steps just dropped and I have some thoughts on it, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman just started a healthcare AI startup.

Scroll on!

WHAT WE’RE READING

💰 What’s Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway doing with all that loot?

A lot has been written about the war chest that Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway has been building up, which at the most recent count added up to $325 billion dollars. Berkshire Hathaway has been on a selling streak lately, which is very unusual for Warren Buffett who’s known for buying-and-holding. Recently he’s been selling off large chunks of Berkshire Hathaway’s holdings of Apple and Bank of America.

So what explains stacking up all this bank? Either Warren Buffett thinks the U.S. economy is about to go into the dumper (he might not be wrong), or he thinks stocks are overvalued after a huge bull run in recent years. The other explanation could be he’s looking to make a big acquisition.

On Tuesday news dropped that Berkshire Hathaway has boosted their stake in the satellite music service SiriusXM, increasing their stake to 35% of the company.

SiriusXM currently has a market valuation of $8.49 billion dollars, which is practically chump change when you’re sitting on $325 billion dollars.

So even if they buy up the remaining 65% of the company they don’t own, that still doesn’t add up to why Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway is sitting on so much cash, but I have a theory that I’ve written about and made a YouTube video about: I think Warren Buffett has been saving up to buy Disney.

Hear me out.

Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway has a philosophy of buying well run companies that have long-term economic potential and trustworthy management. That’s Disney in a nutshell.

Disney currently has a market valuation of $201.79 billion dollars, but you’d have to put a premium of say 25% on top of that if you were looking to buy the company, so you’d be looking at an offer of $252.24 billion dollars. With Berkshire Hathaway cash pile they can afford that, retire all of Disney’s $48.74 billion dollars in debt, and pay cash for all of the company’s investments in parks, cruise ships, and movies for the next 10 years.

That’s my bet of what Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway is planning to do with their stockpile of cash.

🎧 Business

𝗟𝗲𝘁 𝗠𝗲 𝗧𝗲𝗹𝗹 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝗦𝗽𝗼𝘁𝗶𝗳𝘆 𝗜𝘀 #1

Spotify just recorded its first year of profitability in its 17 years of streaming music.

Read that again.

Turns out streaming is hard!

The company brought in $16.26 billion dollars, and made a profit of $1.495 billion dollars in 2024.

Impressive:

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 𝟲𝟳𝟱 𝗺𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝘂𝘀𝗲𝗿𝘀 (𝗠𝗔𝗨𝘀) 𝗶𝗻 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟰

💰 𝟮𝟲𝟯 𝗺𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝐩𝐚𝐲𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝘀𝘂𝗯𝘀𝗰𝗿𝗶𝗯𝗲𝗿𝘀

🤝 𝐒𝐩𝐨𝐭𝐢𝐟𝐲'𝐬 𝐦𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐢-𝐲𝐞𝐚𝐫 𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐛𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐝𝐞𝐚𝐥 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐔𝐧𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐚𝐥 𝐌𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐜 𝐆𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐩

📈 𝐒𝐩𝐨𝐭𝐢𝐟𝐲'𝐬 𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐜𝐤 𝐢𝐬 𝐮𝐩 +55.56 𝐨𝐫 (10.12%) 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐭 $604.64

The real question is “Why aren’t you a diehard Spotify user?”

🍿 Entertainment

The new trailer for The Fantastic Four: First Steps just dropped, and how do I put this - it’s a LOT different from the 2015 Fantastic Four version, which itself was a lot different than the 2005 version of Fantastic Four with Jessica Alba as Sue Storm (but that’s probably just because I’m a Jessica Alba fanboy).

The movie comes out on July 25, 2025 and will surely be a Summer blockbuster, but I have some thoughts:

🩷 I love how they’ve set this new Fantastic Four in a 1960s-inspired, retro-futuristic world. The colors are vibrant while still having that dated washed out color.
🩷 I love the casting of Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards / Mister Fantastic, and Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm / Invisible Woman.
🖤 I think they missed an opportunity to not make Julia Garner’s character Shalla-Bal / Silver Surfer a bigger part of the main story. Julia Garner is a national treasure ppl!
🖤 The trailer makes the movie look a little too wholesome for me. This is a Marvel movie ppl! I liked how the 2015 version of the Fantastic Four was grittier and had a darker plot.

What was your favorite version of the Fantastic Four movie franchise?

🤖 AI

Another billionaire has thrown their hat in the world of healthcare, but this time with a twist of AI. Reid Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn, has launched a drug development startup called Manas AI, with his co-founder oncologist Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee. The venture has raised $24.6 million in funding from General Catalyst and Reid Hoffman himself.

🚀 Space

The hits just keep coming for Boeing. If their airplanes aren’t falling apart mid flight, then their spacecraft are malfunctioning everytime they launch. All that is starting to add up to the tune of $2 billion dollars in losses for their Starliner spacecraft that most recently left two astronauts stranded on the International Space Station.

At this point it’s just a matter of time until Boeing either sells off their buggy Starliner, or they shut the unit down completely and take the big L.

🏡 Sports

Well this isn’t how Super Bowl ticket prices usually work - they’re actually going down. As in big time plummeting!

The cheapest tickets are selling for $2,835 a piece for an endzone adjacent view, which could be a great seat if you like watching the Kansas City Chiefs score.

Let’s do some simple math, big thanks to Gemini of course.

For last year’s Super Bowl the cheapest tickets were selling for $8,188. With this year’s cheapest tickets selling for $2,835, that’s a 65.38% drop in price.

Could it be that America just isn’t that into watching the Chiefs versus the Eagles in the Super Bowl again? Or could it be more specifically that football fans are sick of all the attention the Kansas City Chiefs have gotten the last couple of years in large part due to Travis Kelce’s relationship with Taylor Swift?

(HINT: that’s not a trivial part of the math that is going into people being sick of the Chiefs, if I’m being honest).

The other part of this story is most of America was hoping for a very different outcome of the NFL playoffs. I’ll admit, being a New Yorkers I’m slightly biased. Since my NY Giants didn’t bother to even show up this year, and made the worst mistake in NFL history of picking Daniel Jones (who they’ve benched, then released) instead of paying an extra $5 million dollars to keep Saquon Barkley.

During the playoffs there was this great meme going around that pretty much summed up what most of America was thinking.

What’s interesting about the plummeting price of Super Bowl tickets, is you can’t place the blame solely on the Chiefs being so dominant the last few years. If you look back to Tom Brady’s Super Bowl career wins with the  New England Patriots from 2000 to 2019, and then with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers from 2020 to 2022, then as much as I didn’t like it the rest of America wasn’t sick of Tom Brady or either of the teams he played for.

So is it just the Chief’s constant winning, or perhaps the media is so over QB Patrick Mahomes and the whole Travis Kelce/Taylor Swift saga.

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irl Media NEWSLETTER is written, edited, and published by Chris Thompson.