Edition 14
Raining Trillionaires, Space Race, $HOOD Case
Góðan daginn (hu-vam-dayin) or good morning as they say in Icelandic! Welcome back to another edition of Business News for Kids (BNFK for short; genius isn’t it? 🤯). What is the world coming to, we wonder. Trillionaires 💰💰💰 is what it’s coming to. Wait, what’s a Trillionaire?! 🙂 Checkout “Wait, what” 👇.
About BNFK
Knowledge is at the heart of being. To be more, you must know more.
With this weekly we distill the latest, most interesting, Business News 📰 .. to an emoji filled, ultra informative, Newsletter for Kids. A dad 👽 & son 👾 experiment, delivered every Sunday.
Catch our previous editions here > Edition #0 , Edition #1, Edition #2, Edition #3, Edition #4, Edition #5, Edition #6, Edition #7, Edition #8, Edition #9, Edition #10, Edition #11, Edition #12, Edition #13 👻.
If you’re forwarding this to someone, they can hit this 👇 to subscribe for Free.
Busy business this week 💼
As if Microsoft hitting $2 Trillion last week wasn’t enough, Facebook became the fifth company to reach a $1 trillion market capitalisation 😱. The social networking app hit $355.64 per share rising 4% when a Federal court denied the FTC’s request to reverse Instagram’s acquisition by Facebook 🚀.
Gap has decided to close ALL their 81 stores across the UK and Ireland 😞. The company said that they were going to go online-only from now on. It is estimated that more than 1,000 jobs have been lost ☹️ ☹️. Gap’s worldwide sales reduced by 16%, bringing in $16.4 billion. That seems like a lot of money to be able to run retail stores 😡!!
Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Galactic, announced that he would be flying to space on the 11th of July, beating Jeff Bezos to it by 9 days. That is the plan at least 🤷♂️. So much for the first space tourism flight race 🚀.
Remember the world wide web 🌐 source code NFT up for sale? Well, inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, ultimately sold it for $5.4 million 🤯🤯. Guess what? There was an error in the code 🧐. Can you spot it?!
Binance, the world's biggest cryptocurrency exchange, has been banned from the UK. The Financial Conduct Authority said that the firm will not be allowed to conduct any activity in the UK, stemming from concerns of money laundering 🕵️♀️.
Wait, what is..
Trillionaire: A person or company worth 1 trillion aka 1,000,000,000,000 🤯
or 1000 BILLIONS 🤯🤯
or 1 million, MILLIONS 🤯🤯🤯 (we kid you not 🥸).
No person in the world is a Trillionaire, but 5 companies are - Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook. By when do you think the world will have it’s first person Trillionaire? Discuss with Mom or a big person at home.
Worth or Net Worth: The total value of all assets. you own e.g. the value of your homes, your stocks and investments.
FTC: Federal Trade Commision is a body responsible of ensuring a fair and competitive market in the USA.
Exit 🚪: Exit in the startup and business world means an event when a company is able to give back money to it’s investors and shareholders. So, say you invested $100 in company A and it went on to IPO; and you sold your shares for a cool $1000 🚀 - you could then say I got an Exit from company A 🚀🚀.
Money Laundering: Process of sending money illegally 🏴☠️🏴☠️ from one place to another. Often across countries.
Bootstrapped: When you build a company without taking any money from investors. 🙇♂️🙇♂️🙇♂️
SaaS: Software as a Service. Digital products or software 💻 that we use by paying a monthly or annual subscription 💲 are called SaaS products. For e.g. Microsoft Word, Gmail for work, Slack and many other products are SaaS products.
Woah 😱 Weird 🥴
While billionaires fight it out to get to Space 🛸, we’ll have to settle for a different race. Israel based Eviation Aircraft released the production variant of its 9-seater, 600 mile range electric plane 🛩 Alice. Tests begin 2021, in service by 2024. Its rather sweet 👇
Whats sweeter still is ‘flying’ right here on the surface of Earth👇. British motorcycle company White Motorcycle Concepts has built a prototype 🏍 that it says will beat the fastest electric bike Voxan Wattman’s 366.94 km/hr speed. What’s so unique about the design? It’s got an aerodynamic hole right through the middle of it 😱.
Inspiring business people to know 🙏
Meet Mark Zuckerberg, our inspiring business persons of this week.
Mark is the founder & CEO of Facebook. He started the company out of his dormitory at Harvard in 2004 with his room mates (and co-founders). In just 3 years, by 2007, he became the world’s youngest self-made 🙇 billionaire. His current net worth is a cool $123 billion 🚀🚀🚀. He has built facebook into the world’s largest social media company owning over 80% market share of the space with products like Instagram (bought for $1 bn) and Whatsapp ($19 billion) that Facebook acquired along the way.
Stocks, stonks and.. ⚡️
US stock trading app Robinhood ($HOOD) formally filed for an IPO and seems to be making the case for a $40 billion valuation 😱. Revenue zoomed 3x 🚀🚀🚀 to $959 million from $278 million in 2019, eking in a tiny profit of $7 million.
Indian word-gaming 🎮 startup PlaySimple was acquired by Swedish gaming co MTG for $360 million, making it one of the largest cash 💵 exits for an Indian startup. It had raised only $4.5 million, making it all the more a great feat.
And even greater feat 🤯 >> Bootstrapped SaaS company Articulate raised $1.5bn at a $3.75 billion valuation, 20 years after starting up 😱. This was the first time ever it raised any funding.
Mental models.. whaaaat! 🤯
My dad insisted we put this section in here, even though I protested saying its going to be a while before kids need to apply mental models. Mental models are nothing but ways of thinking, you can use as a framework, to take decisions or solve problems. Who knows, they might just be useful!
Probabilistic Thinking 😱 - Remember First Principles Thinking and Second Order Thinking? Well say hello to Pro-ba-bi-lis-tic Thinking 🤯🤯.
In essence what it says is that if you are faced with an uncertain situation that could result in many different outcomes 👯♂️👯♂️👯♂️, don't just put your finger in the air 👆 and pick one random course of action. Instead, define the probability of likely outcomes!
You will find that putting in some thought on what can be more likely or less likely will help you arrive at a better decision. Giving you much peace of mind 💆♂️💆♂️💆♂️. Geek out here.Tech, products, toys ++ 🤖
PUBG is back 💂👮♀️🥷! In India 🇮🇳 that is. Krafton, South Korean 🇰🇷 maker of the game, launched the India special edition Mobile Battlegrounds India on Friday, getting in 10 million installs in just one day. Over 40 million users signed up for the pre-launch.
Car maker Honda released the name of its first EV SUV, called the Prologue - it’s rather neat and should be ready to hit the streets by 2024.
Pro Tip: The magic of learning is in curiosity. Don’t shy away from clicking those hyperlinked texts to read and learn more. We mostly hyperlink to text we have read ourselves to make sure it is safe, but please be aware that comments and ads shown on these pages are beyond our control. We recommend using a kids friendly browser to view the links.
Disclaimers: Please preview, review, and make sure to pass on only that content which you feel is appropriate for your kids. Images are copyrights of respective owners, we place image sources in caption or link the source website in related texts. Stocks or cryptocurrencies covered are in no way a recommendation and shared only for news / information purposes. We have near zero expertise on investing, and it’s always good to know that Cryptocurrencies are a highly risky, and even illegal, investment in many markets :)
Thank you so much for reading - Arv 👾 & Dad 👽 - Pls hit share to make someone’s day. And please take care. 🙏