A solo media founder like Rogan or Mr Beast can make as much money as a strong tech founder, with significantly less managerial stress.

Tech created this ecosystem but there’s a historical cultural bias in tech towards media as unprofitable. That changed a long time ago.

Time for #PapersThatMakeYouGoHmmm! A weekly summary of new ML papers from arXiv that make me think one or more of:

1. That looks useful!
2. That's an interesting approach!
3. A business could be built around this!
4. How did they do that?!

Integrating prediction in mean-variance portfolio

Corporate Social Responsibility and Corporate Governance: A cognitive

The Gender Pay Gap Revisited with Big Data: Do Methodological Choices

Sustainable and Resilient Systems for Intergenerational

How Amazon makes money?

[ Amazon's business model decoded😃]

@dmuthuk @unseenvalue @FI_InvestIndia @Vivek_Investor @drprashantmish6 @caniravkaria

🧵👇

1/ A person named Jeffery earns 100 dollars per month and has an expenditure of 120 dollars monthly. He has a very good reputation in the society. So, he takes a loan of 1k dollars for a month and this 1k cash is invested in new business ventures.

2/ For the next month, he pays his liability back by taking a loan from another person for 1.5k dollars. The loan of 1k is paid back and the remaining 500 dollars are invested in another business venture.

3/ By the end of the month, he earns 150 dollars through his old and new business ventures but has a total expenditure of 200 dollars. He again is in a deficit of 50 dollars. To pay back his 1.5k dollar loan, he takes a loan for 2k dollars

4/ This cycle goes on and on. Jeffery keeps on taking bigger loans to repay the previous loan and the leftover extra loan is invested in bigger ventures which produce more expense than income.

I just keep being surprised by how many people expect all business to run as usual despite the fact that we're into year two of a worldwide pandemic.

Like.... anyone notice how many people's jobs got a ton harder? Or how many people lost their jobs, or the prospect of even being in the running for employment?

Anyone notice how many people now have massively heavier care responsibilities -- for children, parents, elderly relatives and friends, you name it?

Anyone notice the massive, unceasing level of stress that comes from mixed messages coming from govts, bungled safety policies and vaccination plans, endless lockdowns?

Every now and then I see someone miffed that some inessential thing hasn't gone as quickly or as efficiently as they'd have like, and I have to wonder -- are we living on the same planet?

Red Bull is a weird and fascinating company.

- $7.4 billion in 2020 revenue
- 43% energy drink market
- Makes nothing

Nope, not even the drinks they sell. Instead, they focus 100% on marketing.

Here's what's going on

1/

Before Red Bull there was Krating Daeng (KD).

Founded by pharmaceutical entrepreneur, Chaleo Yoovidhya, KD was created to serve Thailand's country's working class.

Yoovidhya chose the gaur, a member of the bovine family from the region, as the brand's symbol.

2/

Dietrich Mateschitz was a toothpaste marketer. On a business trip to Thailand he discovered KD and fell in love with the drink.

With Yoovidhya, he decided to bring it to Europe. He made changes:

- Name became "Red Bull"
- Added bubbles
- Used a thin can
- Targeted elites

3/

The deal Mateschitz and Yoovidhya struck outsourced production of the drink to the Thai entrepreneur's pharmaceutical company.

That fundamental structure has remained in place today: Red Bull outsources production and focuses on distribution (marketing).

4/

Mateschitz noticed the rise of extreme sports starting in the 1990s. He thought Red Bull should be a part of it.

The years since have seen the company amass an insane empire across sports, media, and apparel.

#irrationalebullience If you want to understand the nature of this asset bubble and the epic capital mis-allocation at it’s heart, look no further than rates. CB’s only tool to push an uber-levered financial system that is highly interconnected through derivatives
(1/N)

away from it’s natural convergence path towards collapse is to create opposing forces to push it towards divergence. Meaning: force, through financial repression, market participants to rely on price continuation, in a way that makes it self-fulfilling.
(2/N)

The tool used is rates as it is the basis off of which all other financial assets are priced. Today any buyer of $UST across the curve up to 30Y is guaranteed a loss given reals are negative throughout. So the only hope of escaping this GUARANTEED loss
(3/N)

is to angle for capital gains, i.e a continuous move downwards in real rates to push for some capital gains in real terms. The longer the financial repression lasts, the further investors are pushed out the maturity and credit risk curves.
(4/N)

Here are examples to understand what exactly is happening. If an investors buys a 5 Y UST he is guaranteed to lose almost 2% in real terms, so making that up in capital gains is much harder given the v short duration.
(5/N)