10 Weekend Reads

The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of  coffee, grab a seat by the fire, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:

• He Loves Speed, Hates Bureaucracy and Told Ferrari: Go Faster: A tech executive with a new management strategy took the wheel of the luxury carmaker. Then it was off to the races. (Wall Street Journal)

• Boeing’s problems were as bad as you thought: Experts and whistleblowers testified before Congress today. The upshot? “It was all about money.” (Vox)

• 15 Ideas from Seth Klarman’s Margin of Safety (Part 1): Risk-Averse Value Investing Strategies for the Thoughtful Investor. Klarman wrote that he “endeavoured to make the book timeless – more about how to think about investing than about what one should buy or sell at any given moment.” (Investment Talk) see also 15 More Ideas from Seth Klarman’s Margin of Safety (Part 2): Risk-Averse Value Investing Strategies for the Thoughtful Investor.  “Investors should understand not only what value investing is but also why it is a successful investment philosophy. At the very core of its success is the recurrent mispricing of securities in the marketplace. (Investment Talk)

• How Amazon Became the Largest Private EV Charging Operator in the US: To install 17,000 delivery van chargers at 120 warehouses, the company had to be flexible, patient and spend a lot of money. (Bloomberg)

• Viruses Finally Reveal Their Complex Social Life: New research has uncovered a social world of viruses full of cheating, cooperation and other intrigues, suggesting that viruses make sense only as members of a community. (Quanta Magazine)

• Meta’s battle with ChatGPT begins now: Meta’s AI assistant is being put everywhere across Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook. Meanwhile, the company’s next major AI model, Llama 3, has arrived. (The Verge)

• New York’s Rich Get Creative to Flee State Taxes. Auditors Are On to Them: High earners need to log their days and prove the location of everything from pets to Pelotons to show they’ve truly changed residency. (Bloomberg) but see Florida Is Not So Cheap Compared With New York These Days: Surge in Sunbelt real estate prices erodes financial benefits for those attempting to relocate away from Manhattan. (Bloomberg)

• To make sure grandmas like his don’t get conned, he scams the scammers. Kitboga, also called Kit, is a millennial with a knack for improvisation. He’s among the most popular of so-called scam baiters, a term used to describe those who aim to waste scammers’ time otherwise spent ripping off innocent victims. It’s a lucrative gig for some of the biggest creators in the genre who, like Kit, have quit their jobs to scam bait full-time, often broadcasting their humorous schemes on YouTube and Twitch. (NPR)

• How to Die in Good Health: The average American celebrates just one healthy birthday after the age of sixty-five. Peter Attia argues that it doesn’t have to be this way. (New Yorker)

• The Joys and Challenges of Caring for Terrance the Octopus: The Clifford family of Edmond, Okla., tracked down an octopus for their son Cal, 9, who has been infatuated with the sea animals for years. What they didn’t expect were the 50 hatchlings. (New York Times)

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business next week with Ashish Shah, Co-Head and CIO of Public Investing at Goldman Sachs Asset Management: He joined GS as a partner in 2018, and previously served as global co-head and CIO of Fixed Income + Liquidity Solutions. His group manages $2.3 trillion in client assets.

Homicides Are Plummeting in American Cities

Source: Wall Street Journal