Good Morning!

Happy Thursday 🌞 

Today’s article is brought to you by: 100% human and 0% AI 

Market Update

📉 Markets were mostly down Wednesday as investors flocked to save-haven government bonds.

The yield on the 10-year bond has fallen from almost 4% last week to below 3.5% today, reflecting higher demand driven by the stress in the banking sector.

🟢 🏦 Charles Schwab rose another 5% as it looks to pare back its losses stemming from the SVB collapse.

🔴 First Republic Bank fell 21% after its credit rating was downgraded on concerns of rapidly declining customer deposits. The stock is down 70% in the last week.

Banger Tweet of the Day

Change the 5 to a 3 and send it out.

US Has Fighting Words for TikTok

The White House is now threatening a countrywide ban of TikTok if the Chinese owner’s don’t sell their stake in the app.

It’s Gettin’ Serious: This is the most explicit the Biden Administration has been about a potential TikTok ban. Many informed onlookers had assumed a ban would be seriously unlikely due to the unpopular political ramifications, I think this changes those assumptions.

TikTok commented that a sale wouldn’t solve the security risk that the US government is claiming, and pointed to their commitment to spending over a billion dollars on building data centers in the US to store user data.

Owner Splits: Execs at TikTok shared that ownership of ByteDance (TikTok parent co) is split: 60% global investors, 20% founders, 20% employees.

Bullish for Whom: Snapchat ($SNAP) is up 5.7% on the news, while Facebook ($META) is up almost 3%. I would pose that TikTok might actually be a bigger threat to Youtube ($GOOG), which is up only 0.25% on the news.

Business Bytes

🤑 Ryan Reynolds Sells Mint Mobile to T-Mobile for $1.35 Billion (CNN)

• Mint Mobile is a budget-friendly wireless provider that actually already exists on the T-Mobile network.

• Reynolds owns ~25% of Mint Mobile and is essentially their pitchman. Anyways, aside from being way too handsome, he’s an incredible deal-maker.

📉 Stripe Slashed Valuation to $50 Billion in New $6.5 Billion Funding Round (CNBC)

• Stripe successfully raised a $6.5 billion round primarily to provide liquidity to employees with expiring equity compensation.

• The payment processing giant was valued as high as $95 billion during the tech bubble.

• They also famously missed the biggest IPO bubble in the last 20+ years. Maybe next time!

🇷🇺 NASDAQ tells Yandex, other Russian firms of plans to delist stock (Reuters)

✂️ Klaviyo conducts companywide layoffs (Techcrunch) 

• The move is expected to impact ~140 employees

• The e-commerce marketing platform has raised hundreds of millions of dollars (including from Shopify) and likely grew too big too fast.

🤞 Fingers crossed we are reaching the end of the road for mass tech layoffs.

More Cool AI Stuff Is Happenin’

This stranger is using OpenAI’s new LLM to create an affiliate-marketing website. He is asking the AI to do everything from name & logo generation, article writing, & web design. Follow his journey:

And this stranger had OpenAI write him a nifty app that recommends new movies to watch:

The Big Idea: AI Language Models will replace the need for app stores, and apps in general. At some point, you will be able to describe what you want software to do and how you want it to look, and the AI Will make it all for you right then and there.

To be honest, witnessing the advancements being made in AI makes (almost) everything else (aside from zero-cost energy) seem very, very minor.

Today’s Challenge: Do something positive for someone else.

Thanks for reading, go out and make today a great one! 🫡 

Much Love,

Andrew (and AI)