The Daily Ten – Robinhood Raises Another $2.4 Billion From Shareholders, Tesla’s dirty little secret: Its net profit doesn’t come from selling cars…
The Daily Ten
1. Robinhood Raises Another $2.4 Billion From Shareholders | WSJ
The $3.4 billion raised since last Thursday is more than it has raised in its entire prior existence
Robinhood Markets Inc. raised another $2.4 billion from shareholders, days after investors agreed to pump $1 billion into the online brokerage to help it ride out a trading frenzy in talked-up stocks like GameStop Inc.
The big infusion—the $3.4 billion brought in since last Thursday is more than the company had previously raised in the eight years since its launch—gives Robinhood a cushion to cover a surge in collateral requirements stemming from the trading boom. The cash should also allow the company to remove many of the trading restrictions that angered customers of the popular brokerage, people familiar with the matter said.
The fundraising caps off the most tumultuous period since Robinhood’s founding. The brokerage, with its free trades, easy-to-use app and digital confetti, soared in popularity when Americans stuck at home during the pandemic rediscovered the stock market.
2. Government auction includes old missile site, land with ocean views | The Real Deal
Company agreed to be taken over by real-estate services firm Newmark Group
Wanna buy a missile site?
The former Cold War facility, dormant since 1974, is among a dozen U.S. properties that the federal government hopes to auction off for a combined $500 million to $750 million.
Others include a Monterey County parcel with ocean views and 17 acres in Silicon Valley.
The properties, many of them vacant, could go up for sale to developers early this year, according to a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
The unloading of the sites was recommended by the Public Buildings Reform Board, which stemmed from the Obama administration’s Federal Assets Sale and Transfer Act of 2016.
Historically, government agencies had little incentive to sell their real estate and the process moved at a glacial pace. The 2016 law was designed to help speed it up.
3. UiPath and Databricks set the stage for direct listings with huge funding rounds | CNBC
UiPath and Databricks became two of the most valuable privately held tech companies in the U.S. on Monday, with massive new funding rounds that give them a combined valuation of more than $60 billion. The cash haul gives them the option to take a non-traditional — but increasingly popular — route to the public markets.
UiPath, which makes software for automating office work, raised $750 million at a $35 billion valuation on Monday. Databricks, whose software helps companies process large amounts of data in the cloud, reeled in $1 billion at a $28 billion valuation.
They’re among the most hotly anticipated tech public offerings of 2021, and have now padded their balance sheets in a way that allows them to avoid an IPO in favor of a direct listing. UiPath expects to go public via that route, according to people familiar with the company, who asked not to be named because its plans are confidential. In December, UiPath submitted a draft registration with the SEC, disclosing its intent to go public.
4. Nashville Developers Vie for Price Record With $25 Million Four Seasons Penthouse | WSJ
If it sells for close to its asking price, the 9,300-square-foot apartment would be the most expensive ever sold in the Tennessee capital
A few weeks after a Four Seasons penthouse sold in New Orleans, La., for a record-breaking $13 million, another Four Seasons penthouse—this time in Nashville, Tenn.—is coming on the market for $25 million.
The price represents a massive leap. Marie-Laure Frère, sales director for the Four Seasons Private Residences in Nashville, said condo prices in the area typically top out at around $5 million. The sale of a penthouse at a nearby tower closed for $5.5 million in 2018.
The developers of the Nashville property, Congress Group and AECOM Capital, aren’t involved with the New Orleans project, but both sets of developers have partnered with the Four Seasons brand.
In both places, builders are betting on the brand name to draw luxury buyers into downtowns and convince them to pay record prices, despite the pandemic. “We are absolutely redefining the Nashville market,” Ms. Frère said of the price tag. “We are setting a bar that hasn’t been seen before.
5. To Get on This SpaceX Flight, You Don’t Have to Be Rich, Just Lucky | The New York Times
Jared Isaacman, 37-year-old founder of Shift4 Payments, is chartering a trip to orbit and raffling a seat to a random winner to raise money for childhood cancer research.
A new era is opening in spaceflight, a future where anyone — at least anyone with tens of millions of dollars — can buy a rocket ride to see Earth from a couple of hundred miles up.
Jared Isaacman, a 37-year-old billionaire, announced on Monday that he was essentially chartering a rocket and spacecraft from SpaceX, the company started by Elon Musk, for a three- or four-day trip to space.
Scheduled to launch in October, it is to be the first mission to orbit where none of the people aboard is a professional astronaut from NASA or another government space agency.
Mr. Isaacman’s announcement follows last week’s report of a private mission, also on a SpaceX vessel, to the International Space Station. Three customers are paying $55 million each for an eight-day stay, which would occur as soon as next January.
6. Homes as Small as 60 Square Feet Worsen Hong Kong’s Covid Crisis | Bloomberg
The warnings that Hong Kong’s notorious subdivided apartments posed a virus risk had been swirling for months.
Stuffy, poorly designed and sometimes no bigger than a single bed, the units were a ticking time bomb, according to non-profit organizations like Concerning Grassroots’ Housing Rights Alliance and Kwun Tong Methodist Social Service. That bomb just exploded, sending the city into its first lockdown since Covid was initially detected there in January 2020.
On Jan. 23, the government restricted about 10,000 residents to their homes in the Yau Ma Tei and Jordan areas of Kowloon to carry out mandatory Covid testing. In the first three weeks of the year, 162 infections were confirmed in 56 buildings there — a small number by the standards of many large urban centers, but still 17% of all cases in the city of 7.5 million. Days later, a second lockdown was imposed nearby.
7. 5 Black business leaders you need to know | Fox Business Network
Only 3.2% of the senior leadership at large companies in the U.S are Black
Corporate America has often been fraught with roadblocks to people of color and other minorities. To acknowledge Black History Month we look at some Black Americans who have successfully become top business leaders.
8. Tesla’s dirty little secret: Its net profit doesn’t come from selling cars | CNN Business
New York (CNN Business)Tesla posted its first full year of net income in 2020 — but not because of sales to its customers.
Eleven states require automakers sell a certain percentage of zero-emissions vehicles by 2025. If they can’t, the automakers have to buy regulatory credits from another automaker that meets those requirements — such as Tesla, which exclusively sells electric cars.
It’s a lucrative business for Tesla — bringing in $3.3 billion over the course of the last five years, nearly half of that in 2020 alone. The $1.6 billion in regulatory credits it received last year far outweighed Tesla’s net income of $721 million — meaning Tesla would have otherwise posted a net loss in 2020.
“These guys are losing money selling cars. They’re making money selling credits. And the credits are going away,” said Gordon Johnson of GLJ Research and one of the biggest bears on Tesla (TSLA) shares.
9. Finnish Proptech CHAOS Raises €1.5 Million Through New Investment Round Led By Swedish Investment Firm Nidoco | Crowdfundinsider
CHAOS, a Finland-based proptech startup, recently raised €1.5 million through its latest investment round. According to CHAOS, the round was led by Swedish investment firm Nidoco, with participation from Kai Keituri, Tapio Heikkilä, and Stefan Lindberg (林渤方).
Founded in 2017, CHAOS describes itself as an urban forecasting company for real estate investors and city developers. The company claims its solution provides a better understanding of cities’ complexity in the form of an easy and intuitive map-based dashboard
10. Is Google a Real Estate Company? | Motley Fool
Although real estate probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Google, there’s no question that it is, in fact, a real estate company. Alphabet (GOOG: NASDAQ), Google’s parent company, invested $13 billion in real estate across the country in 2019 and is reportedly the third-largest landowner in the Bay Area.
Google even owns Chelsea Market in New York, which it purchased for $2.4 billion in 2018.
According to its most recent 10K, Google has nearly $40 billion in land and buildings on its balance sheet, along with over $21 billion of construction in progress. In fact, Google made the two largest real estate deals in the U.S. in 2018. That’s a real estate company for you, folks!