In today’s edition we discuss Quentin Tarantino’s Pam’s Coffy, Berkshire Hathaway’s record bank account, I’m going to keep calling it Twitter, LVMH is now a content creator, and F1 returns for the 2024 season 

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Brad Pitt Swaps His $33M Home For A $8.3M Home!

Business

Imagine logging into your bank account and seeing you have more money than you thought. Now imagine your balance just keeps going up Up UP while you just keep doing you.

That’s what Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate run by “Oracle Of Omaha” Warren Buffett is experiencing right now as their bank account has swelled to a record $167.6 billion dollars in cash for Q4! In fact that’s an increase of $10.4 billion dollars in cash more than only 3 months ago when they reported their Q3 results.

Think about that for a minute.

Berkshire Hathaway is throwing off $10 billion dollars a quarter in free cash flow, and for some reason they aren’t spending it.

Some have speculated that Berkshire Hathaway has been saving up for a big acquisition, but quarter-after-quarter Warren Buffett continues to struggle to find many of the big-ticket deals that would be a fit for his Berkshire Hathaway.

Instead he’s focused on returning some capital to shareholders in the form of quarterly dividends, which is nice and all, but it isn’t why investors have clamored into his company’s stock.

Speaking of which, Berkshire Hathaway’s Class B stock is up 14% in the last year, so investors are clearly happy with the company’s performance.

All of this growth and free cash flow has led Berkshire Hathaway’s valuation to soar to a nearly $1 trillion dollar market cap. As it stands right now, Berkshire Hathaway is worth $901.08 billion dollars and growing.

Berkshire Hathaway may be happy to just sit on all their cash instead of running out and acquiring a company. With interest rates at 5.4% right now, Berkshire Hathaway could earn an estimated $8.5 billion per year from its cash in the bank.

I’m just going to throw it out there and suggest Berkshire Hathaway should and could acquire Disney, which has a market cap of $199.02 billion dollars; which with $167.6 billion dollars in the bank Berkshire Hathaway could nearly afford to acquire in an all cash offer.

I think Disney aligns with Warren Buffett investment thesis, and with all the struggles Disney has been facing taking the company private right now would allow them to strategically realign the company and its many divisions. I think that could give them the cover they need to spin off ESPN and ABC freeing up cash flow to further invest in their streaming platforms Hulu and Disney+.

Again, that’s my thoughts for what it’s worth, but if Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway does acquire Disney just remember where you heard it first!

Berkshire Hathaway cash pile surges to record 

Tech

Do you catch yourself still saying Twitter, even though it’s been over a year since Elon Musk bought the company and renamed it X?

I know I still call it Twitter, and probably always will. Here’s why.

Bottom line: Twitter is a better name for a company that X is, and to “tweet” is much more fun to say than sending an “X”.

Branding is important people, and for all his genius and rocket science experience Elon Musk just doesn’t get brand strategy.

There’s also been a lot of confusion in the marketplace following Elon Musk’s catotic acquisition, and subsequent firing of 75% of the company.

Here are 3 examples of the confusion X/Twitter has caused for themselves:

1) If you go to the platform’s website it still shows up at twitter.com even if you type in x.com it will redirect you to twitter.com.
2) If you subscribe to any of X’s premium features (which I’m guilty of) the billing email you receive says “Your X (formerly Twitter) subscription will renew soon.”
3) You can’t just rebrand a company with a new name and not really change how the product looks or feels, and expect people to instantly adopt the new name.

People have continued to call their activity “tweeting” or “tweets” despite Elon Musk preferring people just call them “posts” which is so generic and has led to confusion in not only terminology but also undoes all the good will that Twitter built up by defining their micro blogging social media platform.

According to Marty Neumeier, author, brand instructor and Director of Transformation at Liquid Agency, he said:

““You have to remember what a brand is. It’s the customer’s gut feeling about a product, service or company. So the brand is what they say it is… it’s not that customers can’t stop calling it Twitter, it’s that they won’t.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Why is X still called Twitter?

Entertainment

The fashion-and-luxury conglomerate LVMH has created a new entertainment division called “22 Montaigne” to create content for their 70 brands, including Louis Vuitton, Fendi, Tiffany & Co., Dior, and Marc Jacobs to name a few.

Their new content creation division has partnered with Superconnector Studios, who most famously has worked with Nike’s in-house entertainment division called Waffle Iron Entertainment.

Their content creation thesis is “brands can create better content that is entertaining and that people actually want to see.”

I love this!

As someone passionate about branding, I think brands are best positioned to create compelling and entertaining content for themselves, because no one else can capture the authenticity of their story better than they can.

Executing on LVMH’s new content creation strategy with Superconnector Studios is easier said than done. Each of LVMH’s 70+ brands are distinct and run as separate companies, so a centralized approach will never work. LVMH’s new 22 Montaigne will operate using “a ranking and filtering system based on a series of objective criteria.” according to Jae Goodman, one of the co-founders of Superconnector Studios.

According to Hello Sunshine CEO Sarah Harden “Given that the overwhelming majority of luxury consumers are women, and that the worlds of fashion and luxury have long been driven by iconic women, it’s only natural that many of the stories within LVMH’s Maisons will have women at the center.”

With more consumers' attention drifting to short form and episodic content, partnering with Hollywood production studios is a natural fit for the icon LVMH’s 70+ brands to help tell their stories in a way their fan’s consume media.

Why LVMH’s new entertainment division is the future of brand content

Real Estate

And the award for the least likely Hollywood celebrity to open a coffee shop goes to Quentin Tarantino.

As with everything Quentin Tarantino, the backstory is complicated. We can't just go back to the beginning in order to tell the story accurately. We have to tell it like a Christopher Nolan movie, by starting somewhere in the middle, then have a cinematic flashback, then fast-forward to modern times.

In 2021 Quentin Tarantino purchased the 100-year-old Vista Theater in the Los Feliz neighborhood off Los Angeles, California. Attached to the theater was an empty space he renovated, and it is here that he recently opened Pam’s Coffy - coffee shop designed by the man himself with all his idiosyncrasies included.

Coffy is an interesting play on the spelling of the word coffee, you're probably thinking, and you're not wrong. Coffy was named after the 1973 film “Coffy”, starring Pam Grier, the leading actor in Quentin Tarantino’s movie Jackie Brown.

I remember how I mentioned the coffee shop was designed by Quentin Tarantino himself, who is known for being just a tad eccentric? Well he's overseeing the interior design, and included oversized vintage posters from movies like “Coffy” and “Goliath”, and old-school TVs playing VCRs tapes from the ‘70s.

Pam’s Coffy will feature coffee roasted by Jones Coffee Roasters, who’s claim-to-fame is their custom blend they created for Pam’s Coffy called Bold Black Mamba - a reference to the name of Uma Thurman’s character in Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill” movies. Snacks and pastries are being supplied by LA’s Cake Monkey bakery complete with cereal bowls costing just $5 a bowl in homage to Quentin Tarantino’s love of cereal obviously.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the parallels between Quentin Tarantino opening a coffee shop, and the role coffee often plays in his movies. One only needs to remember the open scene of Quentin Tarantino’s 1992 hit “Reservoir Dogs” where a group of men sit around a table in a diner chit-chatting about pop culture before what would be most of their last day on God’s green earth. Or take for example the opening of Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 “Pulp Fiction” that features John Travolta’s character Vincent Vega and Samuel L. Jackson’s character Jules Winnfield drinking coffee while covered in blood.

It all boils down to Quentin Tarantino’s use of the simple act of enjoying a cup of coffee before, during, or after a horrific and oftentimes blood event in his movies.

With that I’ll bid you adieu with the hope that if you’re ever in LA you’ll visit Quentin Tarantino’s coffee shop Pam’s Coffy.

Quentin Tarantino Opened A Coffee Shop In Los Angeles

Sports

Formula 1 is back this week, and I couldn’t be happier.

The first race of the 2024 season kicks off on Saturday, March 2, 2024 with the Formula 1 Gulf Air Bahrain Grand Prix 2024.

Just last week Season 6 of Netflix’s “Drive to Survive” series came out, and I binged the entire series over the weekend. Now I’m pumped for the season’s 1st race!

This season brings an unusual amount of excitement if you ask me!

Here are 3 of the biggest stories I’m following for the season:

1) Will Max Verstappen continue to absolutely dominate the rest of the field, and be able to win his 4th consecutive world championship in 2024?

2) Will Lewis Hamilton, in his last year with Mercedes, be able to win his 8th world championship after being denied by Red Bull’s Max Verstappen’s insane speed and driving skills?

3) Will the Ferraris, driven by Carlos Sainz and Charles Leclerc continue to be plagued with devastating DNFs, and will Carlos Sainz with the knowledge he is being replaced by Lewis Hamilton in 2025 still have the drive to fight for wins with his limited time left with the team.

There are countless more storylines I could go on-and-on with, and I probably will in future editions of this newsletter, so I hope you’ll join me in kicking off this 2024 Formula 1 season.

Formula 1 returns in 2024 after an action-packed offseason set to change the sport

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

— Chris