Rapid Coverage of a World Gone Full Cyberpunk
Amazon announced today that it will shutdown the entire Quidsi division, which it purchased for $545 million in 2010, citing lack of profitability. The Quidsi division included various retailers, replete with “category killing domain names” like diapers.com and soap.com.
CNBC reported Friday that Tesla will be laying off up to half of it’s sales and delivery staff, this comes on the heels of other layoffs reported earlier in the week. Salaried employees are looking at pay cuts of 10% to 30%. In other news, Elon’s brother Kimball appears to have pulled a switcheroo on his employees “emergency fund” for his Nextdoor Restaurant chain, pulling the plug on the fund right before he laid off…
For some reason the investing public seems to be giving the WeWork IPO a suboptimal reception. After multiple reductions in the IPO sticker price, from 40B down to 20B and now perhaps even less, the lead investor Softbank is recommending that the IPO be shelved. For some reason when the CEO cashes out 700 million ahead of the IPO in a company whose losses exceed total revenues people aren’t overly eager to put in more money….
I had all but mothballed this project because, frankly, I was neglecting it. But lately I’ve been feeling like some kind of inflection point has been reached. When multiple unicorns are underwater or in danger of going underwater on their IPOs ($TLRY, $SNAP, $UBER, that other one…. ) or at least looking like they should be under water ($BYND) and then WeWork looking like it may not even make it to the gate…. combined with yield curve…