Good Morning!

Today’s article is brought to you by: 95% human and 5% AI

Market Update

📈 Stocks fell Tuesday on worries that the Federal Reserve is actually going to do what they said they would - keep rates higher for longer.

The tech-heavy NASDAQ fell 2.4%, dropping its YTD gains to just north of 10%.

🟢 CPG company General Mills was up 4.4% after reporting strong Q4 results

🔴 Home Depot fell 7% after providing disappointing 2023 guidance, blaming inflation, spend shifting towards services from goods, and higher rates.

Banger Tweet of the Day

10% tithings makes for a Banger Portfolio

Mormon Church Charged by SEC for Tax-Dodging

High-Level: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been fined $5 million by the SEC for failing to properly disclose its investment holdings. “That was God’s money” - someone, somewhere, probably.

Takeaways:

• For over 20 years (1997-2019), the Church had been hiding its investments behind a myriad of shell companies.

• The Church was worried that showing the size of their portfolio, might, ummm, raise questions about the size of their portfolio!

• The SEC accused the church of going to "great lengths" to avoid disclosing its investments.

Whole Lotta Money: According to a 2020 WSJ report, the church’s holdings were sitting at $100 billion.

“For more than half a century, the Mormon Church quietly built one of the world’s largest investment funds, almost no one outside the church knew about it.”

In the Church’s Defense:

• The church had received and relied upon legal counsel regarding how to comply with its reporting obligations, while maintaining privacy on the size of the portfolio.

• In 2019 the church adjusted its approach and began filing a single aggregated report following an inquiry from the SEC.

Business Bytes

🧑‍🏭 🛑 Amazon employees created an internal petition & Slack channel to push back against the return-to-office mandate (CNBC)

• Just yesterday we did a write-up on Amazon’s 3 days-a-week-minimum return to office mandate, today employees are revolting.

• Roughly 14,000 people have already joined the Slack channel

• I can’t wait for Bezos to come back.

🌏️ Tencent in Talks to Sell Meta’s Quest 2 VR Headset in China (WSJ)

• Tencent put a proposal in front of Meta to become the exclusive Quest seller in China.

• The move could be a significant step forward for Meta, who has been banned from China since 2009.

☁️ AWS is joining the AI-in-the-Cloud race (Reuters)

• Amazon Web Services is partnering with startup “Hugging Face” to provide AI developer tools on their cloud platform.

• Microsoft has OpenAI, Google has DeepMind, and Amazon has … Hugging Face

📉 Microsoft signed pacts with Nintendo and Nvidia to access Call of Duty games for a decade if their deal to buy Activision goes through (WSJ)

• Microsoft is looking to buy Call of Duty maker Activision for $75 billion, but the deal is still under strict government review.

• The pact is meant to ease authority’s concerns over Microsoft’s potential cornering of popular games by making them exclusive to Xbox.

4 Day Work Weeks are 4 Real

The results are in on one of the largest four-day workweek studies ever - 61 businesses and 2,900 workers ran a 6-month trial where their employees worked the same schedules but for only 4 days a week.

The Results

1. More than 90% said they would continue testing the shorter week, while 18 businesses planned to make it permanent.

2. A midpoint survey revealed that 46% said business productivity remained about the same, 34% reported a slight improvement, and 15% a significant improvement.

3. Most companies saw a notable decrease in employee turnover while still remaining mostly productive.

4. Most employees in the trial did not work more intensively but instead sought to make work days more efficient.

Counter arguments

1. Most companies testing the 4-day workweek were smaller local businesses.

2. At some companies, workers reported struggling to get everything done in the 4-day work week.

I think it’s likely that moving to a 4-day workweek increases people’s sense of urgency, making it easier to eliminate wasteful or non-productive work that otherwise remains in a normal 5-day setting. Constraints breed creativity.

That doesn’t mean I’m pro-4-day workweek. I’m pro-find-meaningful-work-and-get-good-at-it. Finding and participating in fulfilling work will lift your overall energy in ways that even a 2-day workweek can’t solve. Easier said than done.

Today’s Challenge: Build a billion-dollar business by 5pm. Kidding, give someone you love a phone call and catch up with ‘em.

Thank you so much for reading, go out and make today a great one.

Much Love,

Andrew (and AI)