Liberty

Good interview with the founder of Cruise (who also co-founded Twitch): https://overcast.fm/+OcVfXZr6o

Video by one of the authors:

Musk interview on the MIT AI podcast talking about Autopilot: https://overcast.fm/+OcVc-RrM8

https://www.fastcompany.com/90325624/yes-amazon-has-an-hr-chief-meet-beth-galetti

Feel free to throw me and everyone else under the bus, but you jackasses should probably remove FFH from that list...Prem's given you nearly 35 years of outperformance. Yeah there have been periods where he has under performed...even long stretches...but he's walked the walk and talked the talk better than anyone else other than Buffett. Even Buffett had a tough time the last few years, and he's as close to perfect in the industry as anyone has ever seen! So if your bar is Buffett and only Buffett, then that is a statistical population of one! If your bar is ethical, honest investment company CEO's that you can trust your money with and have a good chance of outperforming for the long-term with interest aligned, it may be nominally higher and Prem would be in that group. Cheers! "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

The "e" in front of them means estimate. The official numbers don't come out before the quarter is announced. This is the analyst's estimate.

What makes a stock move over time isn't increased revenues, it's value creation. The question is, what have they traded in exchange for those revenues, how durable are these revenues, and can they re-invest the cashflow that comes back at high ROIC to compound? You need to answer all these questions to know how much value is being created (or not).

Falcon Heavy launched! First time all three boosters landed:

Time is your friend when you have a business that is getting a high return on capital/equity, and can reinvest the capital generated at incremental high returns. ALS is trading like a business that isn't making much more than its cost of capital, sideways (which is actually worse than it seems since the rest of the market has gone up a lot in this time, so the differential is widening). They rode a huge commodity boom in their early years, and built something impressive from a tiny base. But it's not the same doing this in a non-boom time and from a larger base.

Back to fluff, eh?

And there's that distressed asset that they basically got for free that isn't showing there, but that is likely to provide nice returns too since it seemed decently big.

Bezos 2018 letter: https://ir.aboutamazon.com/static-files/4f64d0cd-12f2-4d6c-952e-bbed15ab1082

Acquisition at Jonas: https://www.jonassoftware.com/About_Us/Latest_News/Jonas_Software_Announces_the_Acquisition_of_mJobTi h/t @pearnick

Good posts. Given the usual fluffer/fan-spam content the average COBF tech thread consists of, your informed and objective analysis is beyond necessary. What's good about the post, apart from it being negative, which I presume is aligned with your view? I don't see any substance, it's fluff, just a different kind. The company earned 62bn of FCF TTM and hundreds of billions in cash on a shrinking number of shares, with high ROE and ROIC, it's increasingly monetizing its almost 1bn device installed base, and its dominance in premium (aka profitable) smartphones and computers is more established than it was a few years ago (when everybody thought Samsung or Google was going to take the lead any day now). I don't own Apple, because I see better opportunities elsewhere, and they don't do everything right, and they aren't culturally set up to be the best in the world at everything (nobody is, business is about trade-offs), but to claim that they're somehow in disarray and that they don't know what they're doing is superficial BS. They've had issues, especially with the Mac, in good part because Intel can't meet its own roadmap. I'm sure that when Apple switches to ARM CPUs things will run a lot smoother on that front. As for the rest, of course there are problems. There always were, even with Jobs (he's deified now, but back then Apple was an underdog that got a lot of criticism and had failures). It's just a much different company that is much more mature than it used to be, but they're in a good position to do pretty well for a while. Most of the businesses that got killed were specialized hardware businesses that got supplanted by general computing devices running software that subsumed their capabilities (RIM, Nokia, etc), and by companies that could design UX that could be adopted by the masses, not just early adopters or the enterprise. Apple is one of those general computing device makers, and one of those UX-focused companies. There's no level up once you get to a Turing machine, and I'm not seeing many other companies that have the capabilities required to severely attack Apple (table stakes are controlling your own OS and hardware, having an App store with millions of developers, being good at making consumer products (design, UX, brand, ecosystem, etc)), having worldwide distribution, etc. They're not as exciting as they were when the categories were brand new and rapidly changing (everything matures after a while, Porsche keeps iterating on its cars, but they still look like Porsches.. iPhones are maturing too), but they've got a franchise that throws off a tremendous amount of cash. Companies mature (especially when they're so successful that they basically saturate their markets), grow slows, but that doesn't mean they can't be good investments. Lots of consumer product companies grow the top line at basically GDP+ and yet have quite satisfactory stock returns (usually through some buybacks, some leverage, some margin expansion, increasing dividends, etc). Some appear disappointed at them because they don't come out with new iPhone-sized products every few years, but that's not a reasonable expectation. The iPhone is the most successful consumer product of all time bar none, and is unlikely to be ever equalled again. Many of their other franchises would be quite large companies near the top of the SP500 on their own (the Mac, the iPad. Even the Airpods are a pretty big hit and must have nice margins, and the Apple Watch has grown into one over time with iteration. The App Store and other services almost have revenues the size of Facebook...). But yeah, they screwed up on the Airpower charging mat and miscalculated GPU use cases and Intel roadmaps with the low-volume Mac Pro, and they've made a big mistake with their butterfly keyboards, etc. Put that list of problems against the mistakes and errors of their competitors, and see how nobody's perfect.

Proxy has proposal to increase max size of the board from 10 to 15, to give flexibility to add directors over time. It'll be interesting who they find over time..

https://www.geekwire.com/2019/interview-google-cloud-ceo-thomas-kurian-open-source-aws-working-military/ Short interview with Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian

Another TSS acquisition: https://www.totalspecificsolutions.com/about-us/transaction-updates?tid=41 h/t @pearnick

I don't know about his specific comment, but if you go back to the president's letters where they calculate ROIC, they use average invested capital and adjusted net income (which is basically Cash EPS, with amortization added back, very very close to FCF), so that's after tax.

New acquisition by TSS in Sweden: https://www.totalspecificsolutions.com/about-us/transaction-updates?tid=40 h/t @pearnick

https://www.pcmag.com/news/367659/heres-the-real-truth-about-verizons-5g-network

Area under the curve much higher, and people under-estimate the size of the change. Oh, just 20 extra years? What have you been doing in the past 20 years personally? Healthspan matters a lot too. Living long and healthy is the goal.

Cherry-picking members of the aristocracy, eh? I doubt you'd love going back to a period before antibiotics and anesthesia and vaccines and insulin and heart stents and pacemakers and epipens and EKGs and MRIs and Xrays and modern dentistry and optometry and cataract operations and chemotherapy/immunotherapy/radiation treatments and such...

Don't worry, nobody will force you to get the rejuvenation procedures. Human lifespans have already been increasing rapidly since the industrial revolution, and I'll stay that's been a very good thing and few people are in favor of going back (or those that do because of romantic ideas probably wouldn't like that reality if they could actually live it).

New interview of Michael Lewis by Barry Ritholtz: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2019-04-05/michael-lewis-discusses-the-culture-of-finance-podcast