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😐 Elon Musk sues OpenAI... Snowflake tanks after CEO leaves

PLUS: Disney is merging with India's biggest company

AuthorAuthor

Steven Van & Jacob Goldschein
March 03, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes

This week’s market performance 👀 

S&P 500: +0.87% 📈
Nasdaq: +1.63% 📈
Dow 30: -0.10% 📉
Russell 2000: +3.15% 📈

TOP STORY
👨‍⚖️ This is why Elon Musk is suing Sam Altman, OpenAI

Before we get into it, here’s a brief timeline of Elon Musk’s relationship with OpenAI:

1️⃣ You can read the full lawsuit here.

2️⃣ Elon Musk invested an estimated $57.4M into Open AI.

3️⃣ Microsoft now owns a 49% stake in OpenAI after an aditional $10B investment last year.

Musk has played a significant role in OpenAI and is reportedly fed up with Altman and others, who are no longer interested in upholding the company’s intended mission.

Elon claims that OpenAI has instead shifted its focus to maximizing profits for its parent company, Microsoft, rather than making a tool that benefits the world.

Musk has consistently been a major advocate for minimizing and addressing the risks posed by advanced AI, which involves regulating the companies most responsible for its development, A.K.A OpenAI.

We'll see how far this lawsuit actually goes, but regardless of the outcome, Musk will have succeeded in shining a light on the potential dangers of AI.

4️⃣ Microsoft ($MSFT) is up 62.76% in the past year.

🤑 We asked our new subscribers for their #1 stock pick…

Vote for which stock will outperform this week:

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We’ll share the results next week!

ENTERTAINMENT
🤝 Disney and Reliance, India’s largest conglomerate, are joining forces.

Earlier this week, Disney ($DIS) and Reliance decided to merge their Indian TV and media assets to create an $8.5B media powerhouse. 

1️⃣ Reliance will own 63% of this merged entity, with Disney owning 37%.

2️⃣ Disney previously acquired Indian streaming service, Hotstar, as apart of a deal $71B deal with 21st Century Fox in 2019.

Why the merger?

Disney has struggled mightily to break into the Indian media market, particularly due to competition in cricket streaming rights, as well as their lack of understanding of local cultural differences.

Despite these challenges, Disney still sees India as a crucial market and aims to capitalize on Reliance's market understanding and Disney's own magnificent content portfolio to serve Indian audiences.

3️⃣ Disney ($DIS) was up 4.24% this week.

This week’s sector performance 🏆️

Semiconductors ($SOXX): +5.77% 📈 
Bonds ($TLT): +0.51% 📈
Technology ($QQQ): +1.82% 📈
Dividends ($SCHD): +0.33% 📈 
Emerging Markets ($EEM): +0.25% 📈 
Energy ($XLE): +1.49% 📈 
Financials ($XLF): +0.10% 📈
Gold ($GLD): +2.70% 📈 
Industrials ($VPU): +0.22% 📈 

CLOUD COMPUTING
📉 Snowflake ($SNOW) Loses Billions in Market Cap as CEO Departs

via CNBC

Snowflake ($SNOW) shares were down over 18.5% this week after its CEO, Frank Slootman, abruptly left the company. The company did not give an explicit reason for his departure, but investors and onlookers are clearly scared for the company.

And deservedly so.

1️⃣ Frank Slootman had sold $223M~ worth of shares in the past 3 months leading up to his departure.

2️⃣ Despite stepping down, Slootman will serve as chariman on Snowflake’s Board of Directors.

Before joining Snowflake, Slootman ran two big tech companies, ServiceNow ($NOW) and Data Domain ($DDUP), both of which were publicly traded at the time.

Under Slootman, Snowflake scaled from $4B to $75B in 5 years, went public, and the company has secured a very rare investment from Warren Buffett.

But now, they’ll have to navigate the extremely difficult cloud computing space, already dominated by tech giants like Amazon ($AMZN), Google ($GOOG), and Microsoft ($MSFT), without big Sloot.

Meaning, Snowflake investors are in for a rough ride ahead.

3️⃣ Sridhar Ramaswamy has been appointed has the new CEO of Snowflake. Sridhar previously held the position of SVP of AI at the company.

Here’s what else you may have missed…

🏋️ Weight Watchers ($WW) loses Oprah as a board member after 9 years.

🚗 Apple ($AAPL) halts their $10B EV initiative, “Project Titan.”

🤑 Reddit ($RDDT) is seeking a $6.5B valuation for their IPO.

🤯 Lawyers who blocked Elon Musk's $55B pay package are seeking over $5B in Tesla ($TSLA) stock.

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