Tech Stocks Climb While Broader Market Slides

Catch Up Quick

• Zoom shares soar over 20% post market close, after revenue crushes expectations

• Democrats fear the looting and violence in cities could help President Trump

• GM adds its Corvette engineering team to its electric and autonomous vehicle efforts

• Apple terminates the App Store profile of Fortnite maker Epic Games

• The FDA shows willingness to expedite coronavirus vaccines before phase III trials end

• The next Prime Minister of Japan will likely be appointed in the 3rd week of September

• Data shows Trump didn’t boost appeal to voters during the RNC but he did hurt Biden

• American Airlines ends service to 15 U.S. Cities and will drop flying capacity by 55%

• Despite finishing the day lower, the Dow notched its best August since 1984

• A CDC director warns of highly limited initial supply of coronavirus vaccines

• Amazon gains FAA approval for its drone delivery fleet Prime Air

Monday Insight

• Few are discussing the fact that the coronavirus pandemic has triggered a wave of early retirements, as nearly 3M laborers between the ages of 55 and 70 have exited the workforce since March— this will induce a big impact on lifetime earnings, lifetime expenditures, and the U.S. labor supply, all of which lend large macroeconomic consequences

Thought of the Day

• This past Friday, Elon Musk gave a public update on Neuralink, his brain-machine interface startup

• The company boasts a computerized neural implant in the form of a special biological lace

• In this recent presentation, he showcased the technology reading and transmitting neural activities of a pig in real-time

• Taking a step back, between his career efforts (having ran Zip2 and X.com/Paypal, currently in charge of The Boring Company, SpaceX, Tesla, SolarCity, and Neuralink) one can very reasonably make the bold argument that Elon Musk is the greatest entrepreneur of all time

• While incredibly intelligent and driven to the bone, there is something about Musk that fascinates me more than these evident attributes

• After making a solid sum from the sale of Zip2 in 1999, Musk invested a huge amount of the proceeds into X.com (the first version of PayPal)

• With his PayPal exit proceeds, he invested all of it in a private NASA (SpaceX) and a private electric automobile maker (Tesla) both of which sounded insane at the time

• Furthermore, while these efforts gained traction, during the financial crisis of 2008, multiple financial advisors warned him that he only had enough cash to potentially keep only one of these companies afloat

• He ended up splitting his final budget between both anyway, barely keeping them alive through the trough of the recession

The Bottom Line

• As an investment banker experienced in working closely with executives, a concrete takeaway I’ve had over my career is that the main driver of success for certain founders is often not intelligence, connections, technical aptitude, or even work ethic, but sheer risk appetite

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