Supply Chains are Drunk
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Vibe Check
🚗 Tesla moving to ATX
🚢 Supply Chain Tangled Up
⛽ Pain at the Pump
🤑 Rich Guy/Gal Of the Week: Twitch Streamers
Elon and Tesla “fucked off” to Austin
What Happened: Tesla is officially moving headquarters from Palo Alto, California to Austin, Texas. Tesla is currently building its next GigaFactory in Austin Texas. The California plant is still planning to expand production by 50%.
My Take: This might be the least surprising headline when it comes to Elon and Tesla. Elon seems to be having “Cali fatigue” because of high taxes and housing costs and he’s doing what many tech companies and workers are doing, moving to Austin. It also helps that his other company SpaceX does much of its work in south Texas. Btw, Elon’s been an ATX resident since 2020. Texas might not have perfect weather but it does have low taxes (Texas resident of 15+ years here).
Oh, and he also got told to “fuck off” by a California State Representative in May 2020. I guess he didn’t forget.
On a side note: Is Austin low-key overrated?
Learn More: “There’s limits on how big you can scale in the Bay Area” - Elon Musk
Supply Chains are Drunk
What Happened: The global supply chain is jammed up. There are dozens of cargo ships, containing everything from furniture to iPhones, just chilling off the coast waiting to be unloaded. Labor shortages, COVID, and other factors are causing massive delays at ports. The longer it takes for these ships to get unloaded, the longer it will take for products to show up at our door. That rando impulse buy from AliExpress is about to take way longer to arrive.
My Take: This is going to be a shit show that lasts for a while. I don’t think I fully realized how connected the entire global economy was until researching this. The entire world relies on these cargo ships to deliver our products. If one or multiple things slow it down, it can cause a massive ripple effect.
There is a good chance a lot of Christmas presents are going to be stuck on a cargo ship outside a port waiting to be unloaded. In fact, Walmart is already chartering its own cargo ships to get around the traffic jam at these ports.
This holiday season is going to be WILD.
Learn More: My buddy Gannon (who actually works on a ship) did an amazing Twitter thread about this issue
Energy Prices Are Too Damn High
What Happened: The cost of energy (oil, natural gas, coal, literally freaking everything else) has been skyrocketing all over the world.
My Take: This is a classic supply and demand problem. We need more energy, and we don’t have enough being produced.
Why do we have more energy demands? Factories and manfucturing are trying to meet the demands of consumers (you and me) and are already falling behind. They need more energy to ramp up production
Why do we have supply issues? Oil exporting companies (shoutout OPEC) aren’t increasing their supply fast enough.
This sucks, but it’s the crazy world we live in right now. This might drag on for a while.
Learn More: “For consumers, it’s like a tax” - WSJ
Rich Guy/Gal of the Week: Twitch Streamers (kinda)
If you missed it, Twitch got hacked this week, and one of the big things to come out of that was how much money Twitch streamers make.
Some of these streamers make a FUCK TON of money.
After seeing these numbers, my first reaction was “Damn, I need to start streaming on Twitch” but I realized that very few streamers are making a decent living on Twitch. According to a deep dive by the WSJ, only 5% of Twitch streamers make more than $1,000 a month.
Props to these big-time streamers for raking in that cash. I know it can be easy to hate someone that makes millions of dollars “for playing games on the internet” but being able to entertain people on the internet is hard AF. If you “make it big” you’ll be in the higher tax bracket
Thanks for reading! I don’t have a Twitch (yet), but I do have Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Twitter. And if you like this, please consider subbing to my newsletter.
Tesla also filed to be an electricity provider in Texas.