United States of America eSeries: When Facebook flopped 💸

When Facebook flopped 💸

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I've wrestled the keys to the newsletter back from Dave. Let's get into it.

By Allison Morrow

💸 THE FACEBOOK OF FINANCE?

Stop me if you've heard this one before: A disrupt-y tech company raises billions of dollars to turn the industry on its ear. As it prepares to go public with a sky-high valuation, investors and other concerned parties begin to ask questions like, "Does your business model exploit users' data or damage their wellbeing?"

To which the buzzy tech CEO replies, "whatever," and proceeds to go public. Investors promptly punish the company over the unanswered questions, sending the stock in a tailspin, only to quickly rebound when Wall Street smells a buying opportunity.

Yup, Robinhood's lackluster debut on Wall Street and prompt turnaround is basically Facebook's 2012 IPO repeating itself, my colleague Paul R. La Monica writes.

The similarities don't end there.

Robinhood's already on the hunt for acquisitions. The company on Tuesday announced that it is buying Say Technologies, an online shareholder communications platform, for $140 million in cash. It's significant, though perhaps not as sexy a deal as the one Facebook pulled off when it bought Instagram for $1 billion soon after its IPO.
Both struggled out of the gate. Facebook was an even bigger IPO flop, in fact — shares plunged about 50% below their IPO price in the first few months of trading before bottoming out. Nine years later, Facebook is a trillion-dollar behemoth.
Coincidentally, both debuted at $38 a share. Facebook now trades at more than $360 a share.

Of course, it's hardly a given that Robinhood is on a Zuckerbergian track.

ROBINHOOD'S HEADACHES

The very users who helped codify Robinhood's brand as the go-to for no-fee investing — day traders who congregate on Reddit — are still sour about the app's role in the GameStop saga back in January. Many of them are even shorting the stock now, as payback for what they see as a betrayal from Robinhood when it had to choose between its loyal customers and its Wall Street business partners.

The app is also under intense regulatory scrutiny, and it has plenty of competitors to fend off, too. Facebook arguably had a lot less to worry about on that front back in the wild west of 2012 internet, when regulators were essentially snoozing on social media. Facebook managed to quickly snuff out competition by just, like, buying any company that threatened its dominance. Ah, the good old days...

📈 NUMBER OF THE DAY

$1,000

It sounds a bit like an ad from a personal injury lawyer, but it's true: If you or your property are damaged from a defective product on Amazon sold by a third party, Amazon will compensate you up to $1,000.

🥤 MUCH A DEW

All right, I'm calling it: Hard seltzer has gone too far.

It was one thing to dabble in an occasional fruity-fizzy-malt-liquor-in-a-can back in the summer of 2019, but these days booze shelves are downright overloaded with the stuff. (And while I'm sure devotees will ratio me for this, I'm going to say it anyway: They all taste same. Prove me wrong.)

Even seltzer producers are lamenting all the competition. Shares of Boston Beer plummeted last month when the company, which produces Truly Hard Seltzer, said the profusion of labels is muddying the (sparkling) water and confusing customers.

But that's apparently not putting the company off seltzer for good — sales may have slowed, but they're still up some 200% from two years ago. On Tuesday, Boston Beer announced a partnership with Pepsi to release an alcoholic Mountain Dew called — wait for it — "HARD MTN DEW."

The all-caps branding, which gives a frankly long overdue boot to superfluous vowels, lets customers know that this thing isn't messing around. It knows you long for the days of Four Loko, and it's here for you.

Now, in my day, "hard Mountain Dew" was a simple cocktail of the neon yellow soda and vodka (or whatever you could swipe from mom and dad's liquor cabinet). This canned version seems moderately more refined — we're not a design blog here, but what in Ed Hardy hell is happening with that label? It's sugar-free (healthy!) and 5% alcohol by volume, my colleague Jordan Valinsky writes.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

The hot economy is heating prices more than it is heating wages

—Jason Furman, economics professor at Harvard

Here's where all the seemingly academic handwringing over inflation hits reality: Your paycheck may have gone up, but you're not necessarily better off now than you were before the pandemic. Because prices are going up on just about everything, fatter wages aren't going as far.

WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON?

📱 Twitter suspended Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's account for one week after she tweeted some demonstrably false nonsense about the efficacy of Covid-19 vaccines.

⚖️ A federal judge ruled that Linda Fairstein — a former prosecutor involved in the case against the "Central Park Five" — can sue Netflix for defamation over how she was portrayed the miniseries "When They See Us."

💉 Citigroup is the latest big bank to mandate vaccines for employees returning to the office as the Delta variant of Covid-19 surges.

🔌 Tesla sales dropped nearly 70% in China last month, according to a trade group report, suggesting it is losing ground in the world's largest market for both traditional and electric vehicles.