In today’s issue we discuss Disney buying rest of Hulu they didn’t own, Ford buys an EV startup, Ripple co-founder Jed McCaleb buys $500M worth of Nvidia AI chips for his non-profit to level the AI playing field, Cher to perform at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, and WeWork to file for bankruptcy.
 

Business

The Mouse is stacking up the cheese with its latest acquisition of the one-third of Hulu it didn’t already own. Comcast came to an agreement with Disney to sell their stake for an expected $8.6 billion. Good deal for Comcast, but how’s it looking for Disney. Sure, now they have a streaming destination for all of their content from ABC that they can sell against subscriptions on Hulu, and Disney+ can be their family and child-safe streaming service.

The big questions now are:

1.  How is Disney going to pay for the acquisition?

2. What are they going to do with ESPN (spin it off as it’s own company, then IPO it would be my recommendation)

3. And will they double-down on their parks, resorts, and cruise line?

Disney to acquire remaining stake in Hulu for expected $8.6 billion

Tech

Ford is sending mixed signals lately. The other day we wrote about how Ford is “pausing” their investments in EV against slowing consumer demand for electric vehicles. Then news today that Ford has purchased a startup called “Auto Motive Power, or “AMP” for short, to bolster its charging, battery management and power conversion tech.”

This was a small acquisition, with AMP only having raised $26.5 million and had about 149 employees, but it was the tech Ford was after. 

Ford snaps up EV power startup to boost its charging tech

AI

Who says nothing good has ever come from crypto? (I mean, not me, but I’ve heard some people say that). Jed McCaleb, the co-founder of both Ripple/XRP, Stellar/XLM, and the notorious and defunct Mt Gox, has started a nonprofit that has brought up $500 million dollars of Nvidia 24,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs to build data centers that’ll lease capacity to AI projects to ensure a level playing field for new AI startups.

New nonprofit backed by crypto billionaire scores AI chips worth $500M

Entertainment

It’s just been announced that Cher will be coming out of retirement to sing at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. I’ve been watching the parade on Thanksgiving morning since I was a kid, and absolutely love their guest appearance (not to mention when Santa comes on at the end).

They say timing is everything in showbiz, and Cher must have some of the best timing around. Cher just released her first new album in five years called “Christmas”, and she’s expected to drop a 25th anniversary edition of her 1998 mega hit “Believe” today.

I thought it’d be interesting to do a deeper dive into Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade with some mind blowing stats of how they pull it off each year:

• Annual costs for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade exceed $13 Million. 

• Annual costs for the parade’s float supplies, decorations, property taxes, and staff salaries typically total $2.7 million to $4.5 million.

• The parade generates an estimated $12 million from food, transit and spending on local retail along the route. 

• The parade also has sponsors who generate around $5 million in direct activities via expenditures on marketing. 

• Visitors and sponsors combined generate an estimate of $6 million dollars and roughly $1million from city tax revenues.

• The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade makes an estimated range of $20 million to $24.1 million from advertising and their deal with NBC.

• The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade has on average more than 50 million viewers and 3.5 million individuals attending the event in person.

• In 2019, NBC generated an estimated $49.2 million in ad revenue from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, while The National Dog Show (which comes on TV right after coverage of the parade ends) brought in $11.7 million and the prime-time NFL game … yielded $72.1 million. That’s close to $133 million in ad revenue for the three events that day alone.

Cher to headline 2023 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade

Real Estate

Remember WeWork? I’ll pause while you think way back to when they were popular, and not just the punchline of a joke or the topic of a popular TV mini-series. There’s been a  rumor going around that they are insolvent (again), and may be heading toward bankruptcy.

On Wednesday the company’s stock sank 50% when news hit the street that they may be filing for bankruptcy in the next few weeks. This is a company that had raised roughly $7 billion dollars in funding, almost went public at a valuation of $47 billion dollars, their co-founder and CEO Adam Neumann was fired (but not before leaving with a $1 billion dollar severance/stock/buyout/bribe or whatever you call it), then they eventually went public at a $9.5 billion valuation.

How bad have things gotten at WeWork? Well it turns out the “company had net long-term debt of $2.9 billion as of June end and more than $13 billion in long-term leases” against $844 million in revenue for their June 2023 quarter with a loss of $397 million. So yea, not a lesson in how to run a profitable public company.

WeWork plans to file for bankruptcy as early as next week, source says

So much news, so little time. Until tomorrow we’re signing out.

— Chris