🎥 Hollywood’s new heavyweight
Hey Snackers,
Call it the old Musk and switch: after revealing a majority stake in Twitter last week, Elon has abandoned plans to join the social-media company’s board of directors — leaving him free to keep buying up shares.
Stocks sank to start the week, with the techy Nasdaq now down 17% from its record high. Meanwhile, oil is back to trading at prewar levels as China’s Covid lockdowns dampen demand.
Warner Bros. Discovery is Hollywood’s new heavyweight, but it faces an upstream battle
Bugs Bunny and Guy Fieri just moved in together… They’re Warner Brothers now. Yesterday, WarnerMedia and Discovery finally completed their $43B merger, creating a new Hollywood heavyweight for the streaming era. Longtime Discovery CEO David Zaslav — aka Zaz — will run the new biz, Warner Bros. Discovery.
- Upside: WBD combines classic IP, streaming hits, and cable catnip under one roof (think: “Batman” and “Game of Thrones” and “Shark Week”). It also has 94M subscribers between HBO Max and Discovery+, putting it closer to Disney (130M) and Netflix (222M).
- Downside: WBD has $55B of debt, which could lead to “synergies” (aka layoffs). Several high-profile execs have already been shown the door.
Back to (show) business… WBD is going full Hollywood. Zaz has spent months meeting with Tinseltown’s biggest names to talk strategy. The goal: distance WBD from WarnerMedia’s former parent, AT&T.
- Flashback: AT&T bought WarnerMedia in 2016 and planned to run it like a tech biz. But development stalled during the 20 months it took for the deal to be approved — and all the while Netflix and Amazon poached top talent and churned out content.
- Odd couples: Corporate giants have bought unrelated media businesses before: Coke once owned Columbia Pictures and, more recently, GE owned NBC. Both were eventually offloaded.
The key to streaming may be streamlining… WBD is more streamlined than AT&T, which was always a telecom biz at heart. But it’s still clunkier than its streaming-centric rivals because its top content straddles cable TV and streaming services. WBD has enough hot IP to compete with Netflix and Disney in the streaming wars. But added expenses related to cable programming and debt repayment may leave a narrow path to streaming profitability, and a big incentive to streamline even further.
GM’s self-driving-car unit gets its first viral moment — a sign of things to come as robo-taxis hit city streets
Cruising past the cops… ICYMI: a recent viral video showed one of GM’s Cruise robo-taxis being pulled over by San Francisco police, before it briefly drove off, leaving the officers looking confused. The stop appeared to be for missing headlights. Cruise said the car yielded to police and then drove to the nearest safe location “as intended.” How we got here:
- In February: Cruise rolled out its driverless robo-taxi service to the public in San Francisco. Up until then only employees could use it.
- Last month: Google’s Waymo robo-taxis joined Cruise in SF and Phoenix by offering driverless rides for its employees.
The (driverless) future has arrived... While you weren’t looking — and after years of hype — fully self-driving cars became a reality in the first US cities. Nearly 30 US states have now passed legislation on autonomous driving, with California issuing the first commercial-use permits in 2018. Still, the road ahead for mass public acceptance is long. Voters remain skeptical, with nearly half of Americans saying they’re uncomfortable sharing the road with self-driving cars, and two-thirds saying they wouldn’t get in one.
With great virality comes great responsibility… The Cruise traffic stop was a relatively harmless incident: no one was hurt and the car apparently did what it was programmed to do. But like air travel once was, self-driving tech is dependent on the public believing it’s safe. Uber once had high-flying autonomous ambitions that came to a halt after one of its partially self-driving cars struck and killed a pedestrian (the car’s “safety driver” was charged with negligent homicide). Now that fully driverless cars are on the road, videos showing them interacting with the real world could become make or break for companies like Cruise and Waymo as they expand.
What else we’re Snackin’
- MetaKidz: Sony and the family behind Lego are investing $2B in Epic Games, valuing the Fortnite maker at $31B. The metaverse isn’t a reality yet, but Lego and Epic are already collabing on a kid-friendly version.
- Dorm: DoorDash launched a cheaper subscription for college kids: “DashPass for Students” (missed opportunity: DormDash). The $5/month plan could give it an edge over Grubhub and Uber in the delivery race.
- Crafty: Etsy was a pandemic darling but has lost steam since you stopped ordering custom coasters for virtual b-days. Now 15K+ Etsy sellers are striking against the platform’s move to hike commissions.
- IPGo: It’s been a dry spell for IPOs, but Indonesia-based GoTo just had one of the year's biggest debuts. The owner of superapp Gojek (think: rides, food, house cleaning) raised $1B and notched a $30B market cap.
- Chop: Shopify is the unseen platform powering ecomm sales for 1M+ businesses, from Allbirds to Chubbies. Shares are down over 50% this year. Now it’s planning a 10-to-1 stock split to make them "more accessible."
Tuesday
- March inflation data. Earnings expected from Albertsons and CarMax
Authors of this Snacks own: shares of GM, Amazon, Shopify, AT&T, Netflix, Twitter, Disney, Uber, and Google
ID: 2121986