Fake account and $8 blue checkmark wipe $20B off Eli Lilly's market cap
fortune.com
fortune.com
https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/JNJ
https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/MRK
https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/AMGN
https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/BMY
https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/GSK
except https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/ABT probably they were doing something which others weren't
https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/%5ESP500-352020 S&P 500 Pharmaceuticals
I think this much evidence is enough to deduce that, "No, fake account didn't wipe out $20B in market cap, rather it was a broad market trend"
You see, back in October, they decided that inflation is too high so it's time to tweak the formula so it doesn't look so bad. Energy would be too obvious, but health insurance is the perfect component to tweak![1].
So what happened in this week's CPI print? Well inflation still went up - a crushing 0.4% Month over Month, or 7.7% Year over Year, but because inflation has been so bad, this rate of inflation is an improvement[2]. The market was quite pleased.
But what about healthcare inflation? Well it made a 50 year record by reporting -0.6%. That's right, according to the BLS, healthcare costs went down 0.6% MoM. To anyone with healthcare insurance or medical costs, they know this is an absolutely fake number. Even among analysts that work the sector, they knew the number was going to be suppressed, but not by this much.
But what would a not-very-savvy investor do when he sees the CPI print 0.4% this month, and their healthcare sector investments print -0.6%? Why - and this is the technical term - shit your pants of course. I mean the sector is losing 1% per month to inflation. Sell, sell, sell! I need that money in sectors that are keeping up, like literally everything else.
So let's give it up for the US government, tweaking the CPI calculation once more, to under-report real inflation and screw over everyone else. It's a time-longed tradition going as far back as fiat currencies. And kudos to the mainstream media apparatus for using the event to smear their ideological enemies instead of broaching the subject with a modicum of thinking.
And if you're curious, here's the best an army of government academics can get you when you need healthcare CPI to drop: https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/medical-care.htm Scroll down to "Health Insurance".
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[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-03/why-healt...
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Prior to April 2021, part of the retained earnings calculation included premiums and benefits data from a national nonprofit health insurance carrier. This data was replaced by National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC).
In October 2022, the retained earnings calculation began including premium and benefit expenditures for Medicare Part D. Previously, these Medicare Part D expenditures were not included.
"""
I have health insurance and medical costs, but my healthcare costs definitely haven't increased MoM in the last year or so. In real terms my medical costs have decreased; in nominal terms they're about the same.
Mine didn’t increase, but if it had increased by a point or two I wouldn’t have considered that meaningful.
Prices went up. Inflation is the rate of increase in prices. So slower increase means lower inflation. No increase is 0% inflation, decrease is deflation / negative inflation.
I think we should blame Elon Musk.
Spoiler alert: it had absolutely nothing to do with a fake tweet
Or who knows, just effective parody of the drug price grift could make the value of all of them go down if they think they could be the next target of ridicule, even if they aren't involved with insulin they probably have something at a crazy marked up price that drives lots of their profits.
But - no checkmark so probably fake!
You’re conflating correlation with an unknown externality.
Instead, we have a very public (fake) event that would have been major news if it were true.
It would be quite the coincidence if LLY stock started to drop due to an external report at the exact same time as a fake report of Lilly making insulin free. If that were to happen, of course other pharma companies stocks would also start shifting, either through automated trading or in response to a big market move from Lilly (which was false).
I see more than enough evidence to think that the entire shift was due to the fake Tweet. At the very least, that’s a reasonable conclusion.
We’ll never know for sure, because now with more scrutiny/publicity on the insulin market, that alone could keep pushing LLY stock down.
The only thing for certain is that this is bad news for the new Twitter.
But I was also struck by how insanely overvalued Eli Lilly has become. PE of 53, and the PE multiple has expanded 3x over the last two years, while the underlying business has been mostly flat
But it’s already a 330B company, hard to imagine a single drug moving them that much
I mean, the writing's on the wall. I don't think this was Elon Musk being a mega brain, I think Elon Musk and his friend Calacanis which, btw, how could he take his advice after those desperate texts he had been sending, think they know better. It's simple as that, they think they know better, they think they have the answers. But they don't, and it's showing.
Twitter needs to be run responsibly, and believe it or not, the constraints of being a public company were restricting the company reasonably. It was not the most profitable, it had problems with bots, it definitely had problems with driving engagement through hatred (though, arguably, this might have been a good thing for the business)... but it was relatively stable. Now those constraints are gone but instead of improving the perverse incentives that plagued the platform Musk is trying to monetize the company in irresponsible ways.
One funny thing is that Musk keeps tweeting about how twitter is as active as it has ever been, and I'm not sure if he knows this but chaos is not always desirable. If you drop a bee's colony you will for sure see the most activity in the colony right before the bee's sting you to death and either die or move to a new colony.
The mistake was not changing the checkmark visual to something else. And clearly some brand verification is necessary as a secondary measure.
A second paid tier for actual identity verification makes sense
Why would anyone pay for a "verification that you can pay for" if it was anything other than the verification everyone knows of.
no it doesn't
It's clear the influence of the platform is reasonably big and I will quote spider-man here: "with big power, comes big responsibility".
No, we didn't. We saw a company lose $20B in valuation for unrelated reasons after (but not because) someone posted a silly Tweet.
Actually, we saw many healthcare companies lose value, but no one obsessed with the Twitterdrama noticed.
If Candice Owens had said something detestable, at least I knew that I was being triggered by the actual troll.
Not Eli specifically but intentionally causing chaos.
"Both Musk and Calacanis agreed that Twitter Blue is “an insane piece of shit” and its features should be razed and rethought outright. “These dipshits spent a year on Twitter Blue to give people exactly… Nothing they want!” Calacanis texted." [0]
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/29/elon-musk-texts-discovery-...
I think Musk has a new hobby.
Source:
> this message was posted in the Twitter Slack to clarify: "An update on what we did tonight: hid the entry point to Twitter Blue, added the 'official' label for ONLY advertisers."
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/11/twitter-quietly-...
Emphasis not added.
So maybe it is extended to anyone that advertised in the recent past?
@McDanaids still shows up the same level of veracity as @McDonalds and @McDonaldsCorp:
https://www.twitter.com/McDanaIds/status/1590934953457782784
https://www.twitter.com/McDonalds
https://www.twitter.com/McDonaldsCorp
Other major companies seem to not have it either, I'm not sure if they are an advertiser:
Seriously.. who the hell listens solely to twitter posts as authoritative, blue tick or not?!?
They can then add purely cosmetic tiers - silver and gold for 20 & 50 bucks.
Essentially keep the meaning of ticks the same, but make people pay for using it.
Another simple solution would be to just not allow people to change their name once verified. Name change should require a paid reverification.
There are so many ways they can monetize the ticks.bor salvage the current situation with small tweaks.
If celebrities, sweatshop clothing brands, fast food companies, sugar water makers, SUV manufacturers, big pharma, cosmetics companies, oil companies, columnists, enterprise software comapnies, and politicians fear to tread there, I'd say that sounds like somewhere with some actual growth ahead of it.
WTF is wrong with the world that TWITTER is a place you make majore knee jerk financial decisions from...
Step 1. Buy stock options betting the price will go down.
Step 2. Engage in fraud to damage the company, legitimizing it through Twitter Blue.
Step 3. Profit.
Totally morally bankrupt, unethical, and sleazy disgusting , though.
For reference, see "Unusual_Whales".
https://twitter.com/unusual_whales
Reality sure does suck for non-elites.
Hint: Ensure your "friend" does not reside in the USA or an otherwise extradition-friendly country. The credit system is global, especially for $8.
C'mon, you only live once! Best make it interesting and worthwhile.
Not sure how reducing the value of your asset gives you more leverage. That's not how leverage works.