Barbenheimer, Billionaire Sumer Camp, & Taylor Swift Gives the US Economy a Boost
This episode of This Week In Money has everything: Kenergy, Reddit conspiracy theories, sweating through our shirts, and the hottest headlines -- including Barbenheimer, SAG-WGA strike, Twitter losing ad revenue, NASDAQ rebalancing, and more in biz, culture, and investing.
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00:00 hotter than hell. It is. Humidity is kicking.
00:04 Now I understand why people are getting out of this city during the summer. I sweat through my shirt so
00:07 much I just see my nipples right when I walk outside the house. So, it probably
00:10 turns you on. Exactly. Yeah. I got to find a mirror to jerk off to.
00:15 Welcome back to another episode. Welcome back. Of This Week in Money. For our first story,
00:26 billionaire summer camp kicks off. Hundreds of the world's most powerful
00:30 people in tech, media, and markets have once again touched down in their private
00:34 jets to Sun Valley, Idaho. The reason? An exclusive conference organized by the
00:39 investment bank Allen & Company filled with outdoor activities and plenty of
00:43 deal-making. Among the list of invited guests include Ukrainian President
00:47 Volodymyr Zelensky, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Sam Altman, Warren Buffett, Jeff
00:53 Bezos, Bob Iger, and Activision CEO Bobby Kotick. What's going on in Sun Valley
00:59 this week? You know, Allen & Co. is a very secretive bank. Very good in media, also
01:04 surprisingly good in health care services, which not a lot of people know.
01:07 Did a lot of the insurer mergers that went on a few years ago, but they host
01:10 this media summit where the global elites of the world go. I find it
01:15 interesting that there haven't been many press articles on Zelensky being an
01:19 attendee, but actually this is a topic near and dear to my heart, Brian. A few
01:24 years ago I was on a flight and I got really bored because I didn't have any
01:27 Wi-Fi, so I decided to make up a rumor in the conspiracies thread of Reddit, and
01:32 that was promptly banned, and then that led to my account, which was Allen & Co.
01:37 69, to also get banned. But let me just read this real quick, because it
01:43 just makes you wonder. It's very thought-provoking. Makes you wonder. So
01:46 Allen & Co., the key to this all. "Someone please look into the connection that the
01:52 highly secretive investment bank Allen & Co. plays into all of this. A simple
01:56 Google result will show many individuals discussed in this forum attended their
02:00 yearly Sun Valley conference, e.g. the Wayfair CEO, which if you haven't heard
02:04 of the Wayfair conspiracy, I highly encourage you to look it up, Murdoch Kids,
02:08 etc. Further analysis will shed light into this and the connections that many
02:13 are attempting to make here, but unfortunately this is all that I can
02:16 offer. Best of luck." And that got me banned. I was just having a little fun.
02:19 You're just cooking. Just cooking. Cooking up ideas and just letting the people run
02:24 with it. I was like bent over my phone for 45 minutes. "What the fuck's wrong
02:28 with you?" He was like, "No, no, let me cook. Let me cook on this conspiracy." All right.
02:31 It could be the key to all of this, so we encourage our fans out there to look
02:35 into this and help us get to the bottom of it.
02:39 We're feeling the Kennergy this week, Brian. Barbenheimer is finally here and
02:44 moviegoers have never been more prepared. Over 20,000 AMC members have already
02:50 bought tickets to see both Barbie and Oppenheimer on the same day. The demand
02:56 has increased by 33% since July 7th. Are you gonna be going to see Oppenheimer?
03:00 We're going as a group. Let's do it. Let's do it. Back to back it. Do a little review.
03:05 Yeah. Next Week in Money, we'll review Barbenheimer. Love it. All right. See you
03:09 next week. Have you seen that you can rent a Barbie-themed house that they've been using
03:13 in Maldives? Yeah. I checked. All the dates were out, unfortunately. Man, bummer. Yeah, there
03:17 has been a lot of Barbie marketing recently. Yeah. What is the marketing
03:21 budget for this? Because it is everywhere. It's everywhere. Mattel stock is going
03:25 through the roof because of it. It's a big, big jolt from a long-time
03:30 brand. Yeah. Did you have a Barbie growing up? My sister did. Well, then like the American
03:38 Dolls kind of took over a bit and then like the whole that kind of went there.
03:42 But hey, I mean, we gotta... What is Gary, our advisor, like the GI Joe
03:48 Ken doll? You're the melted Ken doll. I'm a melted Ken doll dipshit, actually.
03:53 I'm the GI Joe that's defending him. The Hollywood strike is getting ugly.
03:58 Actors are joining writers on the picket line after negotiations between the SAG
04:03 Union and Motion Picture Studios collapsed. This is the first time that
04:07 two major Hollywood unions have been on strike at the same time since 1960, while
04:12 none other than Ronald Reagan was the Actors Guild president. The Hollywood
04:17 strike is focused on the controversial use of AI in movies and the impact of
04:21 streaming services on actors' residual pay. An unidentified studio executive
04:27 told Deadline, "The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members
04:31 start losing their apartments and losing their houses." Not good. Not good.
04:36 That's a quote. That is the fucking playbook you expect these execs to take.
04:41 You know, back in the 80s, the CEO to low-level film production employee ratio
04:46 is about 30 to 1. Now it's about 400 to 1, and then you have Bob Iger who's
04:50 saying, "Oh, this is not good for the industry. These guys need to get over
04:54 themselves while he's jetting off to Alan and Co.'s retreat. Who knows what
04:58 he's doing there? I don't want to ask any questions." But like I've said before,
05:02 this is very much a pro-SAG Actors Guild episode of This Week in Money. I support
05:09 them. Hold the line. Hold the line, guys. Keep it up. Now, Twitter has lost nearly
05:16 half of their advertising revenue since Musk took over. In some overnight tweets,
05:21 Musk also admitted that advertising revenue did not provide the increase
05:26 expected in June, although July has been a bit more promising. The revenue news
05:31 comes as Twitter faces competition from Meta's new app, Threads. What do we think
05:36 about this? Which we're hearing a lot of the Threads usage fall off. I mean, it's
05:40 just boring. Is it now? Like we said last week, I don't even look into it.
05:43 Yesterday, didn't go on it at all. You can't delete your Threads account, though,
05:47 without it actually deleting your Instagram, so I still keep it up there.
05:50 Otherwise, I would have deleted it last week. That's it. But hey, ad revenue is
05:54 down. I think a lot of advertisers are still sitting on the sidelines
05:58 waiting to understand a little bit more about what Elon's got planned. But for
06:02 now, it's gonna be a lot of wacky ads for random drop-shipped products from... I
06:07 just get a lot of Bluetooth ads. Bluetooth ads. I've seen a lot of those. I've seen a
06:11 lot of weird boomerangs that you could throw, and then it comes back to
06:14 you and lights up. Oh, the little plane one, too? Yeah, I see. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You just get all these things. So while all the big brands are sitting on the
06:20 sidelines, all the bottom feeder drop shippers are gobbling up all of the
06:24 cheap ads on the platform right now. Really big opportunity for OnlyFans to
06:29 start pushing advertising, as they actually got a new CEO today. Yeah, that
06:33 is. The CEO did step down. She's, yeah, big news there. But yeah, we'll see what
06:38 happens with Twitter. We shall see. We shall see.
06:42 Miss Americana herself is helping boost the US economy. The Federal Reserve
06:50 is crediting Taylor Swift with boosting the national tourism industry, thanks to
06:54 her Eris tour. The Philadelphia Federal Reserve also reported that the hotel
06:59 bookings came to pre-pandemic levels, thanks to Swift's show dates. Her
07:03 current tour is on track to do about a billion dollars in sales, making it the
07:06 highest-grossing tour ever. Mm-hmm. Wow. She is just an icon, you know? This tour
07:13 hurts nobody, benefits the economy. I love it. I love it. It's doing wonders for
07:17 the hospitality and tourism industry, and people are having a blast. So, look at
07:21 Taylor Swift at it again. People are back out. COVID's over. Let's get back out. We should
07:26 make her president, honestly, at this point. That would solve a lot of problems
07:30 we have going on. It would, honestly. That would be a move.
07:33 NASDAQ announces it will conduct a special rebalance of its NASDAQ 100
07:38 index. The NASDAQ hopes the move to rebalance will offset the degree to
07:44 which the NASDAQ's top 100 performing stock index is disproportionately moved
07:51 by the magnificent seven, which include Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia,
07:58 Tesla, and Meta. The seven top holdings of the NASDAQ 100 account for 62.6%
08:05 of the index as of July 11th. While this over-reliance is a problem, it has
08:12 helped the index to boom this year. What do we think about this special
08:15 rebalancing? You got to spread it out. You got to spread it out. I mean, the fact that like
08:19 seven stocks represent almost 60... Not quite of an index, right? Not an index.
08:25 That's the point of an index. So, you know, you got to spread out the love, but it's emblematic
08:29 of all these big tech companies that are really just absolutely crushing it right
08:32 now, from the chips to Tesla to, you know, Amazon. So, I think the hope is that
08:37 all of the people investing in the NASDAQ index funds are going to be
08:40 spread out a little more. Expect those returns to be a little bit lower.
08:44 A little bit lower, but more diversified. We're entering earnings season this week.
08:48 Diversity is our strength, as we like to say here. Totally. And I think the move
08:52 from NASDAQ was particularly interesting because they rushed this out the door
08:56 ahead of earnings, because the worry is that if any of these big tech
09:00 companies report less than ideal earnings and they drop 5%, the whole
09:04 index will just absolutely tank. So, they kind of, from my sources, they rushed
09:09 this decision a little bit and are hoping that this is a good
09:15 move to keep the index a bit higher. Maybe your sources have a little inside
09:18 information about some earnings that could be upcoming. I don't know about
09:21 that, I wish, but not here. No NMPI around here. Never. Never.
09:27 Hudson Yards is still empty. The related companies, the developer who promoted the
09:32 Hudson Yards as the new Park Avenue, is now struggling to unload its most
09:36 expensive units. The developer is now offering deep discounts, with listing
09:40 prices currently dropping 30% to even 50% from their original price. What do you
09:45 think, as a resident of Hudson Yards? What's going on over there?
09:49 One of the interesting things is about 50% of these luxury apartments are
09:53 unsold. So, they're lowering all these prices. I mean, I'm starting to actually
09:56 get Zillow notifications for it, where it's like, "Hey, we lowered this
10:01 five-bedroom from $15 million to $9 million." It's like, "All right, a little out of my
10:04 price range still." But you're starting to see the dramatic, dramatic decline of
10:10 demand there. So, you know, I know they have plans to build another platform on
10:14 top of the portion of the railway that's still exposed, and then to build even a
10:19 casino. Got a license over there. So, we'll see if that actually happens. But, there's
10:23 no outdoor space for these high-end luxury apartments. There's really no
10:27 nothing close to transportation. So, you know, I think it was just a lot of
10:31 misplaced demand that they thought would happen. But also, you don't have a lot of
10:35 Chinese buyers stepping in, paying all cash like they used to. Overall, it's just
10:39 a mess for them. How are they gonna keep up the interest payments? I heard they
10:42 ran out of money, and they're not able to build the affordable housing that they
10:45 promised. Oh, I'm sure. Yeah. Shocker. Yeah, no one saw that coming. Well, we'll see. I mean,
10:52 hopefully you get a nice little reduction on your rent in the next
10:55 renewal. I know, I know. And also, you know, I think the big thing that really hit them
10:58 on the commercial side was that CNN Plus had a plan to expand over there. That
11:03 obviously didn't go according to plan. So, I think that really dented a lot of the
11:07 commercial demand as well. We did sniff at real estate over there, and it was wild.
11:10 Yeah, even last year. Yeah, it was nutty. Yeah, maybe we should look again. Yeah, keep an eye out.
11:16 Go in for a lower bid. Thank you for joining us. Thank you. Please subscribe to
11:21 the Bullish Studio YouTube. Follow us on all your famous podcast apps. And make
11:26 sure to leave a comment. This is on podcast apps? This is on podcast apps. We just launched it there.
11:31 But thank you for tuning in for another episode of This Week in Money. Tune in
11:34 for next week.
11:37 Sorry. There we go. All right. I was getting emotional. I'm very passionate
11:48 about the Nasdaq index.