November 20, 2024

The Appetizer

“I hope they never mature. I just want to hold them forever.”

• Buffalo Bills fan Bill Fitzgibbons on the Erie County municipal bonds he bought that helped the county pay for its share of the Bills’ new stadium.

Now, on to the numbers. Drum roll, please …

• $46 billion: The approximate value of the nearly 4 million Rolex Submariner and Sea Dweller diving watches made between 1953 and 2020.
• 20,000: The max amount of daily visitors that the Pompeii Archaeological Park is now imposing in order to prevent overcrowding and protect the ruins.
• $2,500: How much CableTV.com is paying its Chief of Cheer for watching 25 holiday movies this December.
• 50: The number of seconds a social media influencer played in a first division Argentine soccer league match for Deportivo Riestra before being subbed out.
• $17.7 billion: The estimated amount Americans spent on out-of-home cold coffee (iced coffee, cold brew, and frozen coffee drinks) in 2023, double the 2016 figure.

Dig In
The Creator Boom

Sports execs are pushing the envelope to grab younger audiences. Famous YouTuber Jake Paul fought boxing legend Mike Tyson on a live Netflix broadcast that drew in 60 million households. Meanwhile, a streamer with zero soccer experience played a minute in Argentina’s first division, touching the ball zero times before being subbed off.

While fans debate the merits of these stunts, they undeniably draw attention. Enter the booming “creator economy” of TikTokers, YouTubers, streamers, and Instagrammers. These influencers create videos, vlogs, and snippets of their lives, often promoting products they love (or got for free).

Their paychecks? Mostly from views or companies wanting their products to be seen. The top 50 creators made an estimated $720 million in the last year, and experts predict the creator economy as a whole could nearly double to $480 billion by 2027.

No wonder why almost 30% of children ages 8 to 12 want to be “YouTubers” when they want to grow up.

Weekly Specials

Companies are pitching AI as your new best friend. Who needs human buddies when you have a chatbot? They’re available 24/7 and never argue! Only Google’s Gemini admits it can’t feel emotions – hard to bond with code and no heart.

The Pentagon’s latest UFO report is in, and it’s packed with hundreds of new sightings. But don’t get too excited – there’s no sign of green aliens. Most of these reports turned out to be misidentified balloons, birds, and satellites.

Italian police recently busted a criminal network involved in creating and selling forged works of art, including fake Warhols and Picassos. Over 2,100 forgeries were seized, with a potential sale value of $213 million dollars. They must have been pretty good artists themselves to pull off so many convincing fakes!

Corporate Lunch

e.l.f. Beauty posted huge earnings. This was not a demur “soft beat” like your makeup tutorials. This was a full glam 40% beat and raise.

Amazon is making smart glasses for delivery drivers for turn-by-turn navigation. This is the biggest development in truck efficiency since the discovery of three rights being faster than one left.

Zara owner Inditex SA is considering weaving radio-emitting threads into clothing to prevent theft. Imagine the conspiracies this would drum up.

Eleven secrets have leaked out, as KFC is alleging Church’s Texas Chicken has copied its “Original Recipe.” Nobody owns the exclusive rights to oregano or paprika, but that’s bad sportsmanship.

Manufactured homes are becoming very popular as home prices remain high. A reasonable $52,000 can get you 2,200 square feet off Amazon or Facebook. Land sold separately.

Waymo announced a huge expansion of its driverless taxi turf spanning an 80-square-mile area of Los Angeles.

Lunchables have been removed from the National School Lunch Program for having too much salt. Here I was thinking the pepperoni pizza kit was a vegetable!

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The S&P 500 Index is a capitalization-weighted index that is generally considered representative of the U.S. large capitalization market.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is an index that shows how 30 large, publicly owned companies based in the United States have traded during a standard trading session in the stock market.

Past performance is not indicative of future results.