whatok

Elon took out loans with over 100% annual rates?

I'm not making an argument one way or the other beyond that the OP conflating deliveries with packages is inaccurate and misleading. People are acting like drivers are expected to make 400 individual deliveries a day which doesn't remotely pass any sort of sniff test.

I should clarify that comment with if you made a naïve assumption of 3-4 packages per delivery then it's a similar workload. I don't doubt that Amazon workers are treated worse than UPS workers but comparing packages to deliveries without normalizing somehow is not productive.

The 400 package number from the article is also specifically cited from this company and we have no idea whether that is a nationwide figure while the UPS comment implies that it is.

Comparing packages to deliveries is apples to oranges. I don't disagree that these jobs are rough but 120 deliveries with an average of 3-4 packages per delivery paints a similar picture.

You have a small taste of that in this with the second largest holding PRNT.

https://ark-funds.com/3d-printing-etf

> I don't follow your point? Private companies can take a loan just as easily as public. If they were unable to attain the financing they wanted, they'd still have plenty of their own content, just not as much.

Private companies face a higher cost of capital than equivalent public companies and are unable to borrow as much money as public companies are able to. This is basic finance 101 stuff. Without debt financing, they would not have been able to begin their pivot when they needed to. Netflix is able to borrow at much lower rates than a company with the same financials solely because they are a large public company. Google "equity cushion" if you're unfamiliar with the term.

> I'd suggest you do the same. Their cash balance increased from $5 billion to $8 billion last year. They took out "debt" to finance their movies because money is cheap right now. Nothing they've done required them being a public company, and nothing you've shown makes me believe they couldn't be in exactly the same position they currently are as a private company.

Yes, Netflix is doing much better financially over the past few years and especially in the past year given the pandemic. I don't see how their cash balance is relevant in the face of content spend 2-3x that much. The initial contention was over content spend and a misleading gross profit number.

>They didn't even start borrowing money of significance until 2012, I still don't believe for a second they'd be "bankrupt" as a a private company.

They started borrowing when they needed to pivot to their own content, had to do so at pretty high rates, and luckily succeeded in their pivot.

Throughout this, I don't see any acknowledgement of where streaming was back then and how competitive the space has become since then. Netflix needs to spend on content or it will get left behind. A smaller Netflix offers no competitive edge right now and a smaller Netflix years ago would have been held hostage by content owners while being unable to have any real control over sub pricing; see poorly handled rate increases years ago.

Netflix would not remotely resemble its current form and likely would have been acquired years ago if they did not pivot to their own content. Switching to their own content required and still requires huge amounts of money; est. 17bn last year[0]. Additionally, the gross profit number is a flawed number for many reasons; try looking at operating or net income or anything farther down the income statement from basic revenue. Netflix has no option but to finance content spend with debt as they do not generate enough FCF to cover content spend and will quickly fall behind competitors if they don't.

[0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/netflix-will-probably-spend-19-bi...

Amazon has been paying significantly above minimum wage for several years now:

https://www.npr.org/2018/10/02/653597466/amazon-sets-15-mini...

> Initial Disclosure: This report represents our opinion, and we encourage every reader to do their own due diligence. Please see our full disclaimer at the bottom of the report. We have no position (short or long) in Clover Health because we think in this moment for public markets, it is more important for people to understand the role short sellers play in exposing fraud and corporate malfeasance. For more on that discussion, see our conclusion. For members of the media who wish to independently corroborate our work, please contact us for information on sources on condition that their anonymity is maintained unless they explicitly agree to go on-record.

Relevant text: Oracle is implementing a more flexible employee work location policy and has changed its Corporate Headquarters from Redwood City, California to Austin, Texas. We believe these moves best position Oracle for growth and provide our personnel with more flexibility about where and how they work. Depending on their role, this means that many of our employees can choose their office location as well as continue to work from home part time or all of the time. In addition, we will continue to support major hubs for Oracle around the world, including those in the United States such as Redwood City, Austin, Santa Monica, Seattle, Denver, Orlando and Burlington, among others, and we expect to add other locations over time. By implementing a more modern approach to work, we expect to further improve our employees’ quality of life and quality of output.

From Bloomberg (not on the web yet):

Amazon.com Inc., American Express Co., Daimler AG and Stripe Inc. are among those joining a new GitHub program that will let companies directly fund open-source projects and software developers that are key to their businesses.

Edit: would probably update with this link: https://siliconangle.com/2020/12/08/github-universe-2020-bri...

it doesn’t have anything to do with developing an app and everything to do with HBO insisting on how their content is distributed. they recently reached a deal with amazon and i believe part of the deal was pulling the legacy HBO Now app and only allowing HBO Max. they want Max to be the front facing brand

https://www.vox.com/recode/21686514/hbo-max-roku-amazon-peac...

In a lot of cases, reporters do not have access to AUM or want to extrapolate from potentially misleading sources in order to construct a percentage return that does not exist publicly. You don't see reporters attempt to extrapolate dollar returns from percentage ones when percentage ones are all that are available; even if dollar returns might make a better headline like you claim. A headline with an extrapolated percentage return would have to be phrased in an awkward manner like "could be down as much as" and an editor is not going to greenlight that. This isn't even broaching the subject of gross vs net percentage returns which isn't possible to succinctly address in a mere headline.

Liquidity doesn't begin to explain the valuation question. SoftBank's market cap was once 110bn vs their stake in Ali Baba at 150bn [0] . Even if you marked all the Vision Fund nonsense to 0, SoftBank is still a real company that does stuff outside of being a bad PE/VC/HF firm.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-softbank-group-alibaba/a-...

Your underwriting standards are going to be different depending on how much skin in the game you have.

The timing makes sense if it is in response to his recent remarks but the regulation is extremely punitive vs potential outcome if this IPO gets botched.

There's a regulatory draft that requires small business lenders like Ant to warehouse 30% of the loans they originate vs the 2% that they currently have on balance sheet. This draft was disclosed after regulators met with Jack Ma and other Ant executives. No clue why this was only done now but this significantly changes valuations.

I mean, I guess that's something that you can do but it's likely to get you laughed out of the room and greatly encourage them to reverse engineer whatever you were trying to sell.

What you're saying is correct but also puts a non-sophisticated seller in a poor negotiating position. They do not know what existing data the buyer uses or how their data can be complementary to anything.

And even if you're somehow able to figure out a trading strategy on this with no expertise, there are extremely few data sources that are actually proprietary so alpha decay is a very real thing.

> -Matt's ability to understand and synthesize topics reflects incredibly highly on his intellect. I don't know anyone on Wall Street... is his level of intellect common among investment bankers and such there?

Intelligence is 100% absolutely not a prerequisite but anyone who rises above a certain level in finance has to be talented at something. At a bank that's likely to be either sales or politics.

Where are you getting "losing a quarter of their value overnight" from? The stock is still up from its initial listing price. If you're talking relative to peak private value, virtually nothing has gone public anywhere near private valuations and Palantir's public valuation is a bit more than a quarter lower. This has nothing to do with the "middle class" or "ethical options" and everything to do with public markets actually scrutinizing things vs private.

Really funny/sad that these guys as well as others have historically downplayed rap and other black music, felt the need to placeholder some in recent years, and now have the audacity to act like Kanye's MBDTF is the 17th greatest album of all-time. Meanwhile, Sketches of Spain no longer even ranks in the top 500.

Most buyside joints don't have anything resembling a security engineer. If they actually need one, it's closer to a front office role than not. You also don't want some random jabroni in charge of something mission critical like that.

Casual gym-goers are likely more familiar with random dumbbell routines than a myriad of bodyweight exercises. If you've been out of the gym for months and are out of shape, you're likely going to go with something that's familiar to you with proven benefits regardless of whether there are superior alternatives out there.

Summer is traditionally quieter since people are on vacation; still kinda holds true now. With S-1s out this week, you have more than enough time for the grunt work to be done before people are back in the office after Labor Day. I'm sure bankers have advised clients to get their ducks in a row because there's going to be a lot of supply and you really don't want to be the last out the door.

What's your point? This isn't a mortgage. Mortgages are much more standardized and don't involve as many parties. Everyone involved with a corporate loan is going to want to have a discussion if there are unscheduled prepayments made. Even more so given that this is a distressed situation.

Yes, they are independent events involving different parties but that does not matter for Brigade's purpose. By making the incorrect payment, there is a non-zero chance that Brigade will have 175mm that previously did not exist. If they are able to keep that money, all else equal, their position as a creditor is unaffected but they've effectively cashed out a portion of their position ahead of other creditors. I don't think it's likely that they will be able to keep the money but their returns change quite a bit if they're able to.

There's a lot of comments in here saying that it was the amount Brigade was owed so they probably just thought it was prepayment. There is no chance on earth prepayment of a loan was made without any sort of communication beforehand. Brigade very well knows that they weren't supposed to receive the $ (at this point in time) but it's a cheaper option to take this to court and potentially keep the money (low probability event) than give it back and see a potentially much smaller sum in restructuring (high probability event).

Anyone familiar with distressed situations knows that these things are knife fights so this kind of behavior is not surprising. Brigade is big enough that banks aren't going to refuse to do business with them because of something like this.