My mid-week morning train WFH reads:
• How Elon Musk Damaged Twitter and Left It Worse Off Mr. Musk swooped in and exposed Twitter’s lack of business and financial prospects. After criticizing the company’s weaknesses, he now wants to back out of buying it. (New York Times)
• Some Companies Are Going Remote—and Upgrading to New Offices Companies embracing remote and hybrid work are still betting that employee collaboration would benefit from regular office use. (Wall Street Journal)
• The People Who Are Finding God Through, and in, Bitcoin: As the price of Bitcoin has crashed more than $40,000 in the past year, at times down more than 70% from its peak, some have prophesied the death of crypto. Perhaps there is no better rebuttal to these predictions of cryptocalypse than this sect of Christian Bitcoiners, whose crypto-conviction echoes a more familiar, unshakeable religious faith. (Slate)
• TikTok is full of shady secret advertisements: Influencers are supposed to disclose their ads, but nothing happens when they don’t. (Vox)
• The Deal Is Off: Home Sales Are Getting Canceled at the Highest Rate Since the Start of the Pandemic: Some homebuyers are backing out of deals as a slowing housing market gives them more room to negotiate. Others are being forced to renege on contracts because higher mortgage rates mean some homes are no longer affordable. (Redfin) see also Nearly 1 in 5 Sellers is Dropping Their Price, the Highest Rate Since October 2019. Measures of homebuying competition are plateauing as early-stage demand posts its biggest annual decline since April 2020. However, mortgage rates may have leveled off, which could prevent demand from dropping even further. (Redfin)
• How mercenary hackers sway litigation battles: A trove of thousands of email records uncovered by Reuters reveals Indian cyber mercenaries hacking parties involved in lawsuits around the world – showing how hired spies have become the secret weapon of litigants seeking an edge. (Reuters)
• Americans are generally richer than Europeans: But being rich isn’t the only thing that matters: By almost any economic statistic we can find, Americans tend to enjoy higher material standards of living than their European counterparts. But when it comes to quality-of-life measures that aren’t included in GDP, Europe tends to come out ahead. (Noahpinion)
• To catch a rare-book thief From high-tech heists to antiquarian crime rings, this literary underworld would make a novel of its own. (Financial Times)
• Why optimists live longer than the rest of us Do you tend to see the glass as half full, rather than half empty? Are you always looking on the bright side of life? If so, you might be surprised to learn that this tendency could actually be good for your health. (Washington Post)
• NASA’s James Webb telescope captures groundbreaking images of distant galaxies. The universe’s splendor and breadth are on display like never before, thanks to a new batch of images that NASA released from the James Webb Space Telescope on Tuesday. The images from the new telescope are “really gorgeous,” said NASA’s Jane Rigby, the operations project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope. (NPR)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview last weekend with Spencer Jakab, editor of Heard on the Street column at the Wall Street Journal, and author of the Ahead of the Tape column. He began his career as an analyst at Credit Suisse, where he eventually became Director of Emerging Markets Equity Research. He is the author of “The Revolution That Wasn’t: GameStop, Reddit and the Fleecing of Small Investors.”
The hottest electric cars in the US market aren’t Teslas, but Hyundai’s Ioniq 5 and the Kia EV6
Source: Bloomberg
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