Liberty

Based on the ANH monthly filling, looks like CHTR is buying back shares at a good clip (1.1% O/S, if ANH is maintaining its ratio) : https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/914545/000089924318017558/xslF345X03/doc4.xml

Nice way to go through the article archive on your phone in your free time. Can mark articles as read as you go: https://www.mrmoneymustacheapp.com Reading through this whole archive chronologically is probably the best way to learn all the most important things about personal finance in a way that actually makes a difference to your life and not just the usual BS that achieves only the bare minimum ("save 5%, etc"). Good overview/intro to the concepts is this video:

New Fire TV Cube product: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/21/amazon-fire-tv-cube-review-so-good-i-want-one-for-every-tv.html

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/06/report-world-trending-to-hit-50-renewables-11-coal-by-2050/

Instagram hit 1billion users: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/20/instagram-is-taking-on-youtube-with-long-form-video.html They hit 800m MAU on September 25, 2017. That’s 25% growth in about 9 months… https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/25/instagram-now-has-800-million-monthly-and-500-million-daily-active-users/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-20/tesla-sues-former-employee-for-allegedly-hacking-trade-secrets

Looks like you've read more than I have in the business field, unless my memory's failing me right now. Have you read The Halo Effect, which is kind of a meta-level look at some of this? Let me know what you think of Billion Dollar Lessons. Most of the "mistakes" or "things gone horribly wrong" books I've read have probably been about other things (history, military, memoirs, etc).

Morgan Housel on some lessons form Theranos: http://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/theranos-lessons/

20 minute interview with Jeff Ubben from the end of April 2018 (I just finally got around to watching it): https://www.cnbc.com/video/2018/04/27/full-interview-with-valueact-ceo-jeffrey-ubben.html

Theranos is the fault of the media?! Get the outta here man! The investors who kept giving it money had nothing to do with it? Give me a break. And old-power apparatchiks? Mad dog is the current secretary of defense. I don't know who you're talking to, but not to me or to the person I quoted. Theranos was a media darling, with Holmes on lots of magazine covers, being compared to Steve Jobs, with breathless features about her brilliance and personal life and such. The media certainly helped a lot to legitimize the company to the wider world, no doubt about it. Most startups never get that kind of coverage. Holmes was just a good story, and the media latched to it and ran with it. And "old power" doesn't mean "not in power anymore". I think it can mean a few things: Old as opposed to new, just look at their board, it's a bunch of old military and diplomats/politicians, old media moguls, etc. It wasn't backed by the SV tech guys, or Google and Sequoia and Elon Musk or whatever. Also, old power can just mean they've been in power for a long time, again, just look at the board.

It isn't. And the only reason they're doing what they're doing now, years later, is because of Tesla. Otherwise they'd be doing it even slower, and their traditional dealers network would still be incentivized to sell gasoline over EV because they make a lot more on maintenance and it's what they know. The idea isn't that they'll somehow suppress the technology and won't invest in it at all, it's that they'll drag their feet as long as possible (as they have been doing for 20+ years) and make the transition as unthreatening to their cash cows with heavy sunk costs as possible (that's why hybrids and EVs have tended to look weird or be in segments that are less profitable, etc. Another thing that Tesla has changed) and do things half-assed (take gasoline car platforms and shoehorn EV drivetrains into them, reducing a lot of the benefits of ground-up EV designs, so making EVs less compelling VS ICE, etc). They also love to get all the PR and halo benefits without actually doing the work. So many times there's been big announcements at car shows and fancy concepts cars that never become anything, or that are made in small numbers and only sold in select markets and then disappear or are never refreshed. I've been a closely watcher of this for a long time, it's obviously not bunk. Thankfully it's finally starting to change, but even all the cars that people say are coming are mostly not here yet, and when they start appearing we'll see how fast they ramp up and what kind of push there is for them from the companies. I understand all of this and I agree that the change will be slower than it could be. But - as you accept - it is still change. Legacy OEMs (at least where I live) are seeing their customers come in and demand electric versions every day, and they are responding, as evidenced by two cars I looked at this weekend, the Passat and Outlander hybrids (neither of which look weird or are in unprofitable segments, and neither of which are being made in low volumes). The legacy OEMs aren't stupid. They are starting to see that, if consumer preferences keep heading this way (big if) they either change or die. In the long run they won't sacrifice the mother ships (which make money off finance) to save the dealers (which make money off repairs). The real disrupter will be the guy who mass-produces a cheap fleet vehicle for Uber, which once automated will destroy the personalisation and finance profit pools for the OEMs. This is a dead industry if ever there was one! Still quite fancy that Tesla though. Ok, but if the whole problem with burning oil (and with hundreds of millions of people around the world joining the global middle class and starting to drive or be driven around more) is that there's a time pressure, then slowing things down matters a lot. If there was not time pressure and it was just like going from spinning hard drives to SSDs (a nice upgrade but who cares how fast it happens), then I wouldn't mind the feet dragging as much and someone like Musk wouldn't have been as important to catalyze and speed things up.

https://overcast.fm/+JCDbMlqZ8 Haven't listened yet, but saw that Jim Grant had a new podcast on Canadian housing. Update: Had a chance to listen. Good overview, some updated stats, nothing too new.

That's not the only problem with this approach... Book? Who cares about the book value of these companies? It's not like they're financials (I know they have lots of cash on the balance sheet, but still)... Would you value Microsoft or Adobe on book value too? And not looking at growth and growth runway and ROIC ex-excess cash and things like that... BRK's great, but it has a pretty different profile from, say, Facebook. I think focusing on easily quantifiable metrics without analyzing the actual businesses is exactly the kind of myopia that Buffett warns against.

Bryson is fantastic. He's probably my favorite author. I'd like to add One Summer, which is a collection of important historical stories that all happened in the U.S. in 1927. 'A Walk in the Woods' was also quite fun.

From a manufacturing guy that I follow: But the book will definitely be interesting: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/18/elon-musk-email-employee-conducted-extensive-and-damaging-sabotage.html

It isn't. And the only reason they're doing what they're doing now, years later, is because of Tesla. Otherwise they'd be doing it even slower, and their traditional dealers network would still be incentivized to sell gasoline over EV because they make a lot more on maintenance and it's what they know. The idea isn't that they'll somehow suppress the technology and won't invest in it at all, it's that they'll drag their feet as long as possible (as they have been doing for 20+ years) and make the transition as unthreatening to their cash cows with heavy sunk costs as possible (that's why hybrids and EVs have tended to look weird or be in segments that are less profitable, etc. Another thing that Tesla has changed) and do things half-assed (take gasoline car platforms and shoehorn EV drivetrains into them, reducing a lot of the benefits of ground-up EV designs, so making EVs less compelling VS ICE, etc). They also love to get all the PR and halo benefits without actually doing the work. So many times there's been big announcements at car shows and fancy concepts cars that never become anything, or that are made in small numbers and only sold in select markets and then disappear or are never refreshed. I've been a closely watcher of this for a long time, it's obviously not bunk. Thankfully it's finally starting to change, but even all the cars that people say are coming are mostly not here yet, and when they start appearing we'll see how fast they ramp up and what kind of push there is for them from the companies.

Finally: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/15/theranos-chief-elizabeth-holmes-arrested-on-federal-criminal-charges-.html

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/06/apple-announces-multi-year-partnership-with-oprah-winfrey/

You're just moving the goalposts around, since I never mentioned my thoughts about anyone other than BMW in response to your post comparing the two companies' market caps. But I agree that Musk deserves credit for achieving this and it was his stated goal from the start, to catalyze the industry and to make the transition happen faster than it would have had otherwise, which needs the help of other automakers to do. He's never said Tesla would do it alone or have a monopoly on EVs, that would be crazy. I just think they can carve a nice niche and have outsized influence on everybody else by focusing on the right things.

Just to show how biased you are. Opinions vary: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/06/forget-about-that-tesla-the-jaguar-i-pace-is-the-most-compelling-ev-yet/2/ Market is severly underestimating competition and risks in Tesla. I'm not saying Tesla is toast but some people need to get their head out of their ass. Wrong car. We were taking about the i3, this is the I-Pace, which is an exciting EV that I like and that seems no compromise. Of course it's 6 years after the Model S, so not exactly early, but good to finally see. Hopefully they make lots of them and have a good fast charging infrastructure.

John Malone: https://www.wsj.com/articles/media-mogul-john-malone-questions-mergers-of-apples-and-oranges-1529017642

New Brooklyn Investor about JPM letter, among other things: http://brooklyninvestor.blogspot.com/2018/06/jpm-2017-annual-report-jpm.html

I never said Tesla was a good investment, and I never invested in it. I'd certainly not short it either, for reasons I mentioned a while ago. As for comparing the market caps of the two companies, we can agree to disagree and leave it at that.

Why is its ICE business not relevant when comparing market caps, which is what you were doing? I've said that the risk profiles are obviously different, BMW does have its legacy business (which in the longer term is a melting ice cube, though), but that's still what it's business is and what the market will value it on, including its growth profile and however easy or hard it might be to transition all those legacy sales to electric sales at some point in the future after all its ICE expertise stops being relevant at some point in the future. Musk is always late and always over-promises. But what he ends up delivering is still ahead of everybody else and comes out years before them. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Can't make everybody happy, I guess. If he wasn't that optimistic, he wouldn't have gotten into the car and rocket businesses, clearly. When was BMW founded? When was the last successful car startup founded in the US? Tesla appeared yesterday in term of car companies, and since their first car came out in 2008 but was only made by the few hundreds, and its first real car came out in 2012, that's not exactly eons ago when you look at the progress that has been made since.