From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, these are the top stories that moved markets and had investors, business leaders, and entrepreneurs talking this week on Cheddar.
NEW PODCAST KING
Listen up: Spotify has some big news to share in its earnings report this week. It announced that it has surpassed Apple's App Store to become the biggest podcast platform in the U.S. which drove additional ad spending. It's planning to double down even further by introducing podcasts with video. (Although you can already check out our Need2Know podcast with video on YouTube any time!) The company also reported nearly all of it's most important KPI grew last quarter, including a 27 percent jump in revenue since Q3 of 2020 and 19 percent rise in monthly active users (with even more interacting with podcasts). Spotify stock ended the week up almost 15 percent.
META MORPH
After all the speculation, Mark Zuckerberg finally announced on Thursday that the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Oculus, etc. would now go by the buzzy new name of Meta, short for metaverse. And the metaverse, or a web of interconnected virtual reality spaces, is what the company is banking on by touting the future of virtual and augmented reality tech wizardry. While critics have alleged that the branding change comes suspiciously amid the company's recent scandals, the social media giant insists the name swap was a long time coming. The stock was up this week by 1 percent. Meanwhile, in another big tech change, Microsoft once again overtook Apple as the world's most valuable publicly-traded company. The dethroning was largely attributed to the chip shortage and supply chain constraints hitting Apple harder.
TESLA HERTZ SO GOOD
Rental car company Hertz made a huge splash this week when it announced it would be ordering 100,000 Tesla Model 3s, one of the largest single orders of electric vehicles to date. The mega-deal launched the electric carmaker's stock ever higher bringing Tesla's market cap to more than $1 trillion for the first time. The world's richest person in history, Elon Musk, got to watch his company's stock continue to surge through the week with the price ending up more than 17 percent. While Tesla hummed along, GM dropped this week despite its earnings beat due to a murky outlook from chip shortages, and Ford's stock took off on a more optimistic forecast.
MEME COIN WARS
Crypto's for the dogs right now as dogecoin fell back in the pack after its spinoff, Shiba Inu, cracked the top 10 cryptocurrencies with the highest market caps and kept climbing. As they both started as jokes — doge based on a meme and Shiba Inu based on doge's mascot — it looks like there is a reason for budding blockchain builders to lean into these larfs. Enter: Squid Game coin, based on the Netflix hit of the same name. Its value skyrocketed more than 33,000 percent in just three days this week, although there are serious concerns about whether it's actually legit. Despite these big wins for emerging crypto, trading app Robinhood announced in its earnings this week that trading in digital currencies slowed significantly on the platform last quarter, along with a broader ease in trading, which drove its stock price down 12 percent for the week.
IPO PARADE CONTINUES
Businesses continued to avail themselves of the public markets this week, with some mixed results. Rent the Runway started out of the gate with its Nasdaq debut in pretty good shape despite the pandemic substantially impacting the fashion rental business, but the price dropped precipitously as the week wore on, dropping almost 27 percent. Meanwhile, cloud data software company Informatica actually entered the public markets for a second time, this time with an emphasis on a subscription model and a stock price up almost 6 percent for the week. Finally, Solo Brands, producer of outdoor products like steel wood-burning stoves and kayaks, went public also soaring at the start but dropping swiftly by the end of the week.
