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This is Scott Becker with the Becker Private Equity and the Becker Business podcast. We're going to quickly walk you through about 15 stories this morning. Hopefully you enjoy this. I know it's a longer episode than normal and hopefully it's of interest. First, the government shutdown marches on. But it does seem like it's very close to a solution. With several Democratic senators crossing the aisle to vote with the Republicans to end the shutdown. I think this is largely really good news for the country. We're getting close to the Thanksgiving holiday and so much stress on senators and congressmen and the Republicans to end the shutdown, to make sure air travel returns to normal and also some of the benefits that people are missing and returning to normal. Plus so many federal employees really struggling. So a lot of pressure to get this closed. It seems like we're getting closer to ending the shutdown. Second, the Tesla pay package for Elon Musk has got a lot of headlines. The thing that people have to realize is that currently Tesla has a market cap of 1.43 trillion and a ton of his targets and wins in the pay package don't kick in until he gets to a market cap or Tesla gets to market cap of 8.5 trillion. So at the end of the day it reminds me the old Ross Perot SNL skit. I save the country. This was money. I get that much money and I'm old enough to remember that many people are not. But that the amount of chess sizing the pay package, it is driven on some incredible goals. Wherever he hits them, a lot of Tesla shareholders will get wealthy. Third, Price Waterhouse cuts business services jobs. Not that huge a number of jobs, but still a big impact for those people. Fourth, Wendy's is closing several hundred stores. This is going to have a big impact and also negatively impacts a lot of low income jobs which are much needed jobs. Fifth, UPS cuts 48,000 jobs in management and operations. UPS is down about 24% year to date. Tesla, just go back to. Tesla is back up 7/ percent year to date after being down a lot of the year. Sixth, October saw massive layoffs in the country. That's a bad sign. That's scary. Nearly 155,000 people were laid off in October. 7th Expedia Group jumped 17 and a half percent Friday again they had a great quarter and improved the revenue outlook. Simply remarkable quite frankly, given all the trouble that's out there in the travel world. The stock's up 38% year to date. 8th Wayfair also jumped 8.3% Friday and is up 140% year to date. Did not see that coming. 9th Carvana is up nearly 50% year to date. CarMax is down nearly 50%, nearly 60% year to date and just got rid of their CEO. 10th we're working on finishing the book by Kel Newport on Deep Work. I love his book. I think terrific are the books that are coming out by authors on the nonfiction side that we're fans of. Morgan Housel has a new book that came out called the Art of Spending. Scott Galway also has a book coming out, Notes on Being a Man that talks about how much trouble you're seeing in so much of the world around young men, 20s, 30s and lost and so forth. 11th we're thrilled this week to interview several great guests on the Becker Private Equity and Business podcast. These good Jake Weird, Ranil Herath, Paula Avenheim, David Rajakovich, Scott Bauer and so many more. A great week on this side. Matt litz as well. 12th Restoration Hardware is having another awful year. It's down around 51% year to date. 13th. Nvidia is still up about 40% year to date, market cap around 4.6 trillion. 14th Amazon has rebounded tremendously. It's now up 11 and a half percent year to date and pointing up today. 15th A great piece at Becker's Healthcare on 14 trends that the C Suite is watching heading into 2026. This was written by Laura Deirda and available at Beckers Healthcare. We're also busy working on next year's annual meeting, so we'll see how that goes. 16th student debt and medical debt have become a huge burden in our nation. It seems that when the government starts to subsidize huge industries, it feels good at first but leads to huge inflation and huge debt. Great intentions, horrible outcomes. 17th I love a tweet from Alex Hormozi. The biggest risk to your business are your second and third best ideas that you keep on working on but you shouldn't. The concept being the this loss of focus, this loss of single minded focus causes trouble for your other businesses. It causes trouble because you're not really focused on the one key business. 19th There's a narrative out there and it's going to be another unpopular concept that the wealthy don't pay taxes. I believe that this is largely a false and political narrative. There may be some super wealthy that this is true for, but for most of us it's not true. Most of us do pay taxes in a pretty high rate. Intuitive Surgical is rising again while other device companies are falling. Smith and Nephew and Zimmer Biomed each had tough weeks. Intuitive is up 7.24%. They're doing great year to date and really the leader in the robotics, the surgical robotics area. Thank you so much for listening to the Becker business and the Becker private equity podcast. We hope you enjoy this episode. Thank you.
