🛍 Square's big (after)payment

Insert Twitter side-eye… Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey just treated his other company Square to a massive shopping spree. Mobile payments company Square is Jack Dorsey's more valuable (and favorite) child. You might've seen Square's sleek payment tablets at craft coffee shops, or swiped your card through its little white reader at food trucks. Now, Square is buying “buy now, pay later” (BNPL) firm Afterpay for a whopping $29B — its largest acquisition yet.

• BNPL: Afterpay lets you pay for things after you've purchased them (makes sense). Like Klarna and Affirm, Afterpay spreads out payments as interest-free monthly installments.
• The deal will give Square merchants the ability to offer BNPL services at checkout. Square also gets instant access to 100K merchants who use Affirm, and its 16M+ customers.

Good time to BNPL... Square stock jumped 10% on the news, while Afterpay soared 35%. Square shares have doubled in the past year, as people ditched cash during the pandemic. Now, it'll have a BNPL service to add to its digital payment offerings. And BNPL has been #trending.

• Gen Zillennial momentum: As Gen Z and Millennial consumers reject credit cards in favor of alt-payment options, BNPL is becoming a big businesses.
• Receipts: This summer, Klarna hit a $46B valuation to become Europe's most valuable fintech. Meanwhile, Apple and Goldman Sachs are collabing on their own BNPL product.

Elle Woods got a Harvard JD... And Reese Witherspoon got a Blackstone-backed acquisition. The actress and entrepreneur is selling her media company, Hello Sunshine, to a media venture that's backed by famous investment firm Blackstone. The deal values Hello Sunshine at $900M, according to WSJ's people familiar with the matter (#PFWTM). The almost-unicorn will be profitable this year — more than most startups can say.

• The creds: Witherspoon has co-produced TV and movie hits like Big Little Lies, Little Fires Everywhere, and Gone Girl.
• The cats: The new media venture that's snatching up HS will be run by former Disney execs, including ex-TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer.

Toss out the old script... Witherspoon started Hello Sunshine in 2016 in response to a lack of complex female roles in Hollywood. She noticed that even top actresses had to compete for one-dimensional characters. While male writers and directors still make up three-fourths of Hollywood, Hello Sunshine focuses on female creators and stories with strong female leads.

• The Hello Sunshine deal is an endorsement of Witherspoon's bet that Hollywood needs more stories told by and for women.
• The acquiring firm will be able to license Hello Sunshine productions to any streamer or network (think: Hulu, HBO) — an edge over studios that only feed their own streaming services.

• Goals: The US has hit a 70% adult vax rate one month after Biden's target, but more cities are re-masking on Delta concerns.
• WFO: Disney, Facebook, Google, and Walmart tightened their Covid-19 restrictions for employees going back to the office.
• Crashed: Zoom is paying $85M to settle a “Zoomboming” suit, raising questions about its privacy practices.
• Sneaky: Foot Locker bought two rival retailers for $1.1B, in a bid to move past the mall and into the closets of e-shopping sneakerheads.
• Screened: Biel Crystal, the world's biggest smartphone screenmaker, filed to go public after pausing its IPO plans during the US-China trade war.
• Whoops: The US could default on its debt for the first time after Congress missed its deadline to raise the debt ceiling (how much money the Treasury can borrow).

• Motor vehicle sales drop
• Earnings expected from Activision Blizzard, Alibaba, Clorox, Coursera, Eli Lilly, Lyft, Marriott, Public Storage, and Warner Music

Authors of this Snacks own shares of: Square, Apple, Disney, Google, and Walmart

ID: 1746065