Liberty

That was quick. A new shareholder Q&A: http://www.csisoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/QA-Oct-4-2018-Final.pdf

18 mins. May 2018. (sorry if repost, hadn't seen it posted before)

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how-china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies Amazon chief security officer response to Businessweek article: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/setting-the-record-straight-on-bloomberg-businessweeks-erroneous-article/

2018 Q3 letter is out. David Poppe is retiring, they added a bit to FB position and trimmed a few other things: https://www.sequoiafund.com/Download.aspx?ID=b8a058d0-8cb2-4663-ab6c-c8e1652174e0&Name=Q3_2018_-_Investor_Letter

Another one: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/constellation-real-estate-group-acquires-baynet-world-inc-1027581705

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/02/trumps-dairy-fight-with-canada-gets-only-70-million-more-than-tpp.html

https://stratechery.com/2018/data-factories/ Piece mostly about FB and GOOG.

Just randomly stumbled on their Japanese website, no doubt part of the JV that they announced a couple years ago. It's actually fancier than their main website: http://www.csi-japan.co.jp/

Another new one at TSS in Europe: https://www.totalspecificsolutions.com/about-us/transaction-updates?tid=32 h/t @Pearnick again

That's my read too. Nothing above CSI $50m press release threshold recently. Hard to know how many small ones are being done or if some medium ones have gone through but haven't been PR'ed by an operating group, since they don't appear to have a uniform policy on that and they can hold things back for competitive reasons. I also probably don't catch all the ones that are announced. So the probability distribution is always pretty wide until it collapses when the Q comes out.

New acquisition by Vela: https://www.coreworx.com/coreworx-announces-acquisition-by-vela/ h/t @Pearnick

Amazon might get into the ad-supported TV space: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/01/amazon-planning-new-free-video-service-compete-tv-dollars.html Also getting into the Mattress business, undercutting Casper/Purple/etc: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-selling-mattress-low-price-2018-10

Musk has talked about them not having enough delivery trucks recently. Looks like their delivery infrastructure can't keep up with the rate of change in production (something else that both sides will interpret their own way: "Oh, they're so incompetent they can't even deliver the things" vs "Well, who else is growing car deliveries around the continent at 50-100% CAGR and not getting any problems?").

https://electrek.co/2018/10/01/tesla-production-record-q3-deliveries-crazier/

Yeah, doesn't look like in practice much will change. Cars will be a bit more expensive, cheese won't really get cheaper up North because of a low-single digit change in quotas. At a glance, looks like there are more restrictions on trade overall, not fewer.

Finally got around to reading it this week. Excellent book about fascinating people and important ideas. I find it always worth it to refresh my memory about these biases and heuristics, and I learned new things about T and K's lives. It's still worth reading the primary sources, though, but it's a nice addition.

Musk settled: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/29/sec-settles-charges-with-teslas-elon-musk-will-remain-as-ceo.html

https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/09/security-update/

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/28/teslas-musk-pulled-plug-on-settlement-with-sec-at-last-minute.html

Here's the court filing: https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.501755/gov.uscourts.nysd.501755.1.0.pdf

It's my impression too that they pulled forward a lot of future investments because it was politically convenient to take a bath now and re-set expectations. If the stock is getting crushed, margins are going down, and they're investing so much in security that it's hurting, it feels like the company has been punished and is doing all that they can. If margins are going up Q after Q, profits go up even faster, etc, then it attracts the political spotlight and it doesn't feel like they're doing enough (even if they're so profitable that they could've increased security a lot and not crushed margins this much with all this extra capex).

New one at Jonas: https://www.jonassoftware.com/About_Us/Latest_News/Jonas_Software_Announces_the_Acquisition_of_Chamel Interesting, because the release is dated August 8, but according to someone who tracks these things (@pearnick on Twitter), it was only posted now. Possibly for competitive reasons...

https://www.fastcompany.com/90241372/how-i-went-from-google-intern-to-the-head-of-google-maps Interview with head of geo/maps.

http://www.joelstevens.net/ (or was that smiley supposed to be a wink and you already knew that and were being ironic?)

Good read, thanks for writing and posting, Joel!