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THE HEADLINES
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SHOW ME THE MONEY
If 21st Century Fox is Kelly Kapowski, Disney and Comcast are Zack Morris and A.C. Slater. The two media power players are facing off for Fox’s assets.
Disney, whose original offer was one-upped by Comcast’s $65B straight cash (homie) offer, just went all in with their latest pitch, a half stock, and half cash bid worth $71.3B.
While Fox did announce that they believe Disney’s offer is far superior to the prior proposal, it is expected that Comcast will counteroffer, as the merger agreement allows Fox to evaluate other proposals before signing.
Water Cooler Talking Point: “This back and forth between Comcast and Disney is more exciting than an episode of Storage Wars.”
WE’RE NOT SAVING LIVES HERE
Actually, Dr. Atul Gawande is. The practicing surgeon, author, and researcher is set to become the CEO of Amazon, JPMorgan, and Berkshire Hathaway’s partnership to combat rising health care costs.
Gawande may well be the only man on earth whose LinkedIn endorsements put Jamie Dimon, Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos to shame. When he isn’t practicing endocrine surgery at Bringham and Women’s Hospital or teaching at Harvard Medical school he’s running Ariadne Labs and writing for the New Yorker. Try-hard.
But alas, nobody is the perfect candidate. The CEO dream team settled for a candidate with little operational experience and even less know-how in the benefits space.
Water Cooler Talking Point: “Everything seems to be falling into place for the new venture, except for one thing: a name. JP Organ or Berkshire Healthaway have to be in contention.”
UP NEXT ON IGTV
Instagram is rolling out a long-form video to its 1B active users.
On Wednesday the Facebook-owned property announced not only that it boasts 1B active users, but those users will be able to record up to 10 minutes of video, while accounts with larger followings will be able to record up to 60 minutes.
The new feature will live next to Skinny Tea hawkers on the Discover tab and will feature web celebrities rather than larger, well-established networks. Instagram wants to hand the reins over to users familiar with what works on the platform, before launching straight into hour-long reruns of Law & Order SVU.
Water Cooler Talking Point: “I don’t even watch good TV shows on my TV anymore, what makes you think I want to hear a Dubai-funded Instagram model say “hey guysssss” for an hour?”
IN OTHER NEWS
- Cushman and Wakefield, one of the world’s largest commercial real estate companies is going public. Real estate is always a good investment, sometimes.
- AMC is creating its own rival service to MoviePass that will allow subscribers to see up to 3 movies per week for $20/month. Popcorn and soda not included.
- Tesla filed a lawsuit against its alleged saboteur who stole confidential data and trade secrets.
- Microsoft acquired artificial intelligence platform, Bonsai, to bolster its AI development.
- Deutsche Bank settled a forex probe for $205M. The market leader in forex was part of a network that was sharing confidential information via trading chat platforms. How did the “masters of the universe” not for a second realize their messages may have been logged?
- US indices were mixed yesterday:
- DOW: -0.17%
- S&P 500: +0.17%
- NASDAQ: +0.72%