NOT a Billionaire 🙄
Auto industry sinking, historic space mission, and domestic cases continue to spike.
Hi 👋, Tanvi here.
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Drive-in theaters are coming 🎭
People have come up with various ways to circumvent the restrictions. As a result, drive in movie theaters are making a comeback.
Drive in theaters have always been around in Europe and the US. These places allow people to attend concerts and watch plays by sitting behind wheels.
Although their popularity had been declining, the pandemic has reversed the trend and people who want to be outdoors and abide by social distancing norms are embracing the model.
For example, in the drive-in theater in a farmer’s market somewhere in Czech Republic, people watched a play this weekend with their cars parked side to side. In a similar event held in Florida USA, visitors attended a live music concert.
In one of our previous newsletters we have also talked about how cars are helping people to be quarantined and still have fun. Apart from watching concerts, people are also celebrating birthdays, attending weddings and graduation ceremonies while sitting in a car.
Experts think the drive in experience is here to stay and will extend to countries beyond the Western world to places even like India. Well at-least until there is a vaccine or treatment for the virus it sure sounds believable. 💉
NOT a billionaire🙄
Forbes is accusing Kylie Jenner of fraudulently claiming to be a billionaire. The world famous business magazine had included Kylie in their annual billionaire’s list on the back of her entrepreneurial success with the multiple brands she owns.
A leading cosmetics company called Coty invested and took majority ownership of Kylie Cosmetics last year, a makeup brand that Kylie Jenner had started.
Coty had invested nearly $600 million, taking 51% ownership while Kylie would own the rest of the business. On the back of that deal, Kylie was included in Forbes magazine’s billionaire list, and even called the youngest billionaire ever at 22.
Since Coty is a publicly traded company, it had to disclose its financial statements to investors, which it did in March 2020 as usual. In that process, Coty also had to disclose Kylie Cosmetics’ revenue and cost numbers, which for the first time gave Forbes a clear idea of the brand's value. Turns out, Kylie had not been honest about how much money the business makes.
Forbes promptly posted a rebuttal reprimanding Kylie’s actions and issued a statement eliminating the celebrity from its list of wealthiest people.
While it can generally be hard to determine the value of private companies accurately, the discrepancies found here are too large to ignore which gives everyone the impression that something fishy had been planned intentionally. It remains to be seen how Ms. Jenner manages to come out of the crisis.
Auto industry struggle continues 📉
The pandemic has slowed down the global automotive markets worldwide. After countless other companies, Nissan has now decided to cut production capacity by 20% and even shut down a plant in Spain.
To reduce costs, Nissan is laying off 14,600 workers. Around 4600 positions will be emptied in France and 10,000 more in other markets. The company is also planning to reduce car production from 4 million to 3.3 million by 2024.
This comes on the back of poor performance in the march quarter. Nissan posted an operating loss of $376 million as compared to $2.9 billion in earnings a year ago.
Auto makers are helping each other get through the times though. Nissan, Renault and Mitsubishi are set to deepen their alliance. The companies have thought of making fewer models, share facilities and try to cut costs in a bid to ride out the pandemic.
Innovation in farming is very aggressive🚜
One of the Musk’s is taking man to space, while another is disrupting food on earth.
Elon Musk’s younger brother Kimball Musk owns an indoor farming company called Square Roots and its main goal is to produce fresh local food and urge younger generations to participate in urban farming. Since it began, Square Roots has produced 120 varieties of crops, which includes vegetables and fruits.
Eco friendly farms are the future of farming and vertical farms seem to be capitalizing on the idea. Vertical farming is done indoors and is a type of eco- friendly farming in which crops are grown in layers stacked on one another. The precipice is gaining popularity as vertical farming tends to use 95% less water than traditional methods of farming and produces sustainable products.
People are becoming more and more conscious about what they eat and have lost hope in industry supplied food which has a high calorie count and low nutrients. With the world population growing and very little farmland space available millions of traditional farmers will be out of business but vertical farming will flourish as it depends on artificial lights and temperature control systems for crop growth.
Vertical farming does not use pesticides and fungicides. If the crop fails the farmer gets the advantage of starting again within a few weeks unlike traditional farming where the farmer has to wait for one whole year for the climate conditions to be right for crop growth.🌱
What else are we Snackin’🍿
🚀 America has launched - in a brave mission last Saturday, NASA and Space X put two men in the International Space Station. This is the first time a private space company has successfully performed a manned space mission. This opens doors for man’s quest of exploring the vast space, and to America’s lead in the space race.
🗽 NYC is planning to start reopening process - as one of the worst hit cities in the pandemic, NYC was prompt in shutting businesses down. This has crippled the city’s economy. In a bid to stop damage, the city has now come out with guidelines to accelerate reopening of business and start its journey back to normal.
☹️ Highest single day spike in cases in India with 8,380 cases and 5,164 deaths - cases in India continue to rise as the migrant crisis worsen and asymptomatic carriers take the virus back with them to remote parts of the nation as cities become inhabitable. We fear that the worst is yet to come.
💉 Sinovac vaccine efficacy at 99% while Moderna at second stage of clinical trial - last week US pharma company announced second phase of trials which gave the world a ton of hope of finally having a vaccine ready. The progress has been assuring.
Tweet of the day -
For space nerds, Saturday was a great day. A flamboyant and border-line crazy self-made Billionaire built rockets and sent two astronauts to the international space station. His story and the story of what the SpaceX team accomplished is the true testament of what men can achieve when they embrace entrepreneurial drive and refuse to see hurdles.
We feel grateful to be living in a time when history is being written. Well, with the pandemic - quite literally.
Hope you took a thing or two away from today’s edition. 😀
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