🚭️ Juul is paying out $300M

PLUS: Perplexity riding the AI wave to an $8B valuation; Target slashes prices on 2,000 items.

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Jacob Goldschein & Steven Van
October 23, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes

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TOP STORY
🚭️ Juul is paying out $300M

📸 Getty Images

Don’t blow smoke up my ass. Earlier this week, vape users nationwide were hit with a surprise.  

No, not lung cancer, at least not yet; it was actually a massive check.

Juul, the second-biggest e-cigarette company in the US, along with tobacco giant Altria, which owns 35% of Juul, is being forced to pay a monster $300M to tens of thousands of its customers.

📈 Altria Group ($MO) stock is up 19.77% this year.

Why? Do they feel bad for running people’s lives? Lol, as if. 

No, it’s because the company was hit with two massive class-action settlements that concluded the companies misled consumers about the “addictiveness and safety of the product.”

They were also charged with unlawfully marketing to minors.

It's definitely not a great look for companies whose public image is already lower than a flat tire on the freeway.

Despite the payout, don’t vape, kids. It's bad for you.

💬 “Juul actually agreed to a settlement in 2022, but the Altria settlement, which was needed to kickstart payouts, was not approved until earlier this year. It was only this month that claims for the approximately 842,000 eligible Juul customers began to be verified.

After deducting for fees, taxes, and contingencies, eligible claimants were entitled to a total of approximately $202,000,000.”

NBC

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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
🏄️ Perplexity riding the AI wave to an $8B valuation

AI ,AI, AI. Everywhere you turn, there seems to be a new company, protocol, or industry raving about how AI will revolutionize their fill-in-the-blank.

In many cases, we have no idea what that'll actually look like, but in search, we already see that AI is changing the game.

And one company, in particular, is cashing TF in.

Johnny Ho, Aravind Srinivas, and Denis Yarats, Co-Founders of Perplexity

Now, I know what you’re thinking: "Gosh, you’re just gonna rant about how great and successful ChatGPT and OpenAI are again, aren’t you?"

No, I’m not. I was actually talking about a different chatbot company, Perplexity.

For those unaware, or should I say perplexed, Perplexity, like ChatGPT, is an AI-powered chatbot.

Both provide responses to users’ questions, but while ChatGPT relies on pre-learned data, Perplexity pulls real-time information from the web for up-to-date answers.

The main difference is that Perplexity pulls info from the web in real time, while ChatGPT relies on its pre-learned data. 

Another difference between the two is that Perplexity is more about quick, straight-to-the-point answers, like a search engine, rather than ChatGPT's longer, chatty (ha) responses.

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas (📸 Getty Images)

And this year, the chatbot company has exploded in valuation:

How have they ballooned so fast? Their rapid user growth and soaring revenue that’s how.

  • Perplexity currently has 50 million active monthly users, and throughout 2023, the AI startup processed more than 500 million search queries.

  • And now, Perplexity gets around 15 million daily questions from users.

  • Perplexity's annualized revenue was just over $10 million in March 2024, and it has now grown to around $50 million in just a few months (per WSJ).

This runaway train isn’t showing any signs of slowing down.

RETAIL
✂️ Target slashes prices on 2,000 items

📸 Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Cut! Earlier this week, Target announced it would slash prices on over 2,000 items.

That’s a whole lotta discount; what gives? It’s the second time the retail giant has slashed prices this year, oh?

But it actually makes a lot of sense.

💬 In May, Target announced it would slash prices on 5,000 items but ended up surpassing that number, cutting prices on 8,000 products. 

This year, the retailer will have discounted more than 10,000 items in total.

CNN

📸 Reuters

The thinking behind it for Target is simple: if you want more customers, especially in a not-so-post-inflationary country, you gotta lower prices.

Target “routinely adjusts its prices to remain competitive in markets across the country” and will continue to do so until December.

  • In the first quarter of 2024, Target's total revenue was $24.5 billion, which represents a 3.1% decrease compared to the same period in 2023.

  • However, in the second quarter of 2024, total revenue improved to $25.5 billion, marking a 2.7% increase compared to the same period in 2023

It seems to be working, too, as sales at stores open for at least one year increased by 2% last quarter, and its profit boomed by 36%.

Target, I never doubted you. 

Don’t tell Walmart, but you’ve always been my favorite retailer.

💬 Consumer spending, which makes up about 70% of the US economy, increased by 0.4% at US retailers in September compared to the previous month.

📈 Target ($TGT) stock is up 37.82% in the past year.

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